The Dystopian Tomorrow That We're Building
It was dusk, which comes late in the summer heat of the Eastern United States. A thin, fatigued man got out of his vehicle in front of his residence, still wearing the iconic Amazon vest that he had donned throughout the day. I watched him enter his 1-bedroom apartment, turn on the light, and close the blinds. He is one of about a million Americans who will do the same after a long day working for Amazon.
The mega-corporation that he works for would be an alien concept to prior generations; a company so large that we made chilling terms like “corporate citizen” to evaluate them against each other. Amazon is known for its automated systems that analyze worker efficiency and judge whether employees are meeting “productivity quotas”. Where prior employers had to monitor their staff and interact with them to judge morale and efficiency, Amazon does it automatically. Warnings and even terminations are given entirely by computer. No human element is needed. No conversation must be had. Employee badges contain QR codes. Employees are numbers. No tears are shed if the employee decides to move away, as would have been the case if a several-year employee had left a mom-and-pop business; he’s easily replaced by the next blue vest. I can’t help but think that we have lost something.
The relatively young man who closed the door behind him won’t be awake for much longer, he must enter the machine again early in the morning. He doesn’t have time for a social life or a community. Decades ago, he would have gotten some of that from the family that employed him, but that’s not the modern experience.
After the second year in high school, I took a “Media Studies” class as one of a half-dozen elective options. There was little that was redemptive about the class, except that one day, we took the time to watch an obscure movie called Cypher. We spent weeks analyzing it, for this movie combined the elements of a dystopia in such a way as to provide a case study of what the human heart finds to be unsettling.
It wasn’t a horror movie. We’re not talking monsters — we’re talking monotony: suburban streets that all look exactly alike, some scenes are literally shot with the color saturation lowered, every force of power is a large company, there is an absence of any religion, there are no children, and nothing exists outside the corporate space, to whom the inhabitants owe their loyalty. I’m reminded of this representation of a dystopia due to its similarity to the world that the elitists seem to want to create.
Don’t misunderstand. A business that has become large via natural success is not automatically bad. People need paying jobs and those must come from somewhere. Further, large businesses do usually provide wanted products or services, else they would die (which is one way that they are distinguished from government entities). However, when companies become faceless and dehumanizing, such that they treat their employees exactly as they would treat machines, those people suffer.
People are not machines. They each have unique personhood, dignity, and value. To treat them as anything less is not only wrong, it’s destructive to who they are supposed to be. It erodes their potential. To see the limitlessness with which these companies deprive their employees of their humanity, let us remember that each of these companies now willingly pays the travel costs for women who want to abort their children, for that’s ultimately cheaper and thus a better financial decision, than the cost of birth and maternity leave. That’s a gross reduction of man to money-maker. It’s evil.
When those employees must also work grueling hours such that the dehumanizing job is the focal point of their lives, it’s bad for society too. Everyone suffers when an alienated young man decides to shoot random people in a grocery store, immersed in a nihilistic belief that no meaning is to be found anywhere. Everyone suffers from the simple absence of people that we ought to know, but don’t.
The Amazon employee is not dissimilar from those who work at any of the major corporations in America: Walmart, Fedex, Kroger, the list goes on. It’s becoming the norm. Further, the number of employers is shrinking, placing tremendous power in the hands of very few, such that a handful of corporations will soon be able to prevent a troublesome or outspoken individual from decent employment.
If our new normal is eerily reminiscent of dystopian films from years past, perhaps we ought to pause. That same class of mine spent time considering what happy life looks like, represented in film — our best vision of a utopian experience. It’s the opposite: it involves families, cookouts, kids playing sports, adults playing card games over drinks, the presence of religion, community, spontaneity, differences in clothing between people, the group plotting for the future, and so on.
It’s these things that we need — not simply desire. They give us meaning and purpose. As social beings, isolation leaves people depressed and vulnerable to manipulation, control, and despair. Most of the informed are predicting difficult times ahead. The only preparation for that is the creation of tight-knit communities of faithful people. It’s also the type of environment that we all yearn to live in. It’s ingrained in our psyches.
I don’t have an immediate answer to solve the problem of the millions of people working in the jobs that I described, but we must at least be willing to admit that it’s a problem. Too many shirk at the idea of criticizing our growing unhealthy corporate monstrosity, fearing that they might be labeled as anti-capitalistic or even communistic. Let us not give in to absurdity. Not every job can be a dream job, and that’s okay, but every person does need community. Sacrificing all meaningful interaction for the approval of an automatic work review bot is the trading of the healthy human experience for a dystopia.
Excellent take on things. I recently saw a documentary about the world's blue zones, i.e., those places where most people live much longer lives than average. These places differed in climate, and the people differed in their diets and their races. One thing they all had in common was a strong connection to others who valued them and treated them with dignity. They felt a secure sense of belonging. It's a tragedy that is missing for so many.
I think our society reflects an intellectual interpretation of reality--what philosophers refer to as "philosophical presuppositions" or a "worldview." In the Academy, even when I was in graduate school many years ago, there was a presumption of "naturalistic materialism." That view excluded the transcendent and spiritual. Though many of my professors at that time would have fallen outside this classification, the dominant schools of thought could be described in this way. And in the late twentieth century, post-modern thought has gone beyond dismissing morality to rejecting even science, logic, and mathematics. For example, Dr. Donna Riley, a professor of engineering education at Purdue University, published an article a few years ago arguing that "scientific rigor" and "mathematical precision" were tools of the white patriarchy in science used to suppress minority and marginalized populations. Just one of her papers will tell you what she is about: Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit."
My point is this. Scripture tells us that as a person thinks in his heart, then that is the way that person will be. And that is very logical. If our institutions are becoming increasingly dystopian, then we may find the cause of that in the twisted ways we have to come think as a society. In fact, noted academic voices, such as Dr. Patricia Churchland (an eliminative materialist philosopher) and Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder (a physicist) deny the existence of personal identity and free will. Hossenfelder, for example, calls free will “logically incoherent nonsense,” and Churchland dismisses traditional notions of personal identity and thought as illicit "folk psychology." But these assaults on human personality and dignity have been going on in the Academy for more than a century, and it has now leaked into general society as a set of materialistic assumptions about the nature of reality. These assumptions are rarely questioned by most people. As the Barna Group documents, even self-professed Christians have become more like their secular neighbors in the way they think. That is amazing, but Barna's surveys provide the evidence. If society denies any real basis for the "humanity of man" and dismisses any objective foundation for moral values, then should we be surprised that its commercial and governmental institutions follow suit by becoming more inhuman? And if Christians seem to be embracing the same way of thinking, is there any wonder that Christian opposition to this trend is less than forceful?
In fact, attempting to reform commercial institutions, I would argue, is pointless. As long as society embraces a dehumanizing worldview and places that view at the center of education, such attempted reform must fail. In fact, if it is true that the ideas taught in the school room in one generation become the ideas of that condition society and its institutions in the next, the dystopian trend that you discuss in your article will only grow worse over time. If our intellectual environment does not support the affirmation of human value, save as an empty rhetorical proclamation adorning protest signs and bumper stickers from time to time, then why should Amazon care? The people that this corporation and others are dehumanizing have been taught by academic authorities that they deserve this kind of abuse. In fact, the worldview they have been taught would say that if humankind were destroyed tomorrow by a cosmic disaster, the universe would go on without noticing and without recognizing any moral loss in the disaster. In fact, the universe would not recognize that a disaster had occurred. The universe does not mourn for the dinosaurs, so why should the universe mourn for us? If Christians buy into this way of thinking, then we extinguish our light by putting it under a bushel.
Of course, the biblical Christian worldview opposes this kind of thinking, but society seems to be less inclined today to listen that it was in previous times. Moreover, Christians seem less inclined to be counter-cultural. Perhaps God will bless us with a move of His Spirit that leads us to repentance, but I see little evidence of that. What I see is, perhaps, what Augustine saw as the city of Hippo was deteriorating under siege by barbarians. The entire Western Empire, in his view, was in a similar state. From an "earthly" point of view, he did not see hope. But he did not view events from this perspective. He saw the events of history from the towers of the Heavenly City, so he could have hope. We can join him in that hope, and share that hope with others.