…Until bureaucracy became, to borrow again Karl Kraus’s comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to be the cure…
Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 86
Postman makes this point about the prevalence of bureaucracy in our culture: it exists to support and organize but ends up lording it over those it was to support and itself being a big disorganized mess.
The idea of the cure becoming the disease is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ common refrain that ‘when you make something into a god it becomes a demon’ and Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ point that every institution tends to produce its opposite. But I am interested in how it applies to modern technology.
One point that comes to mind is that internet access should be the cure of all boredom; but, listening to the teenagers I talk to, they sound more bored than I ever remember feeling as a teenager. Another is that the internet gives us access to an enormous amount of information, which, one would think, could help us to become more intelligent. But, instead, it has often serves to make us only more superficial – breadth with no depth.
Do you have any examples of the cure becoming the disease in modern culture?