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The Cure Becomes the Disease

…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?

Omni-Everything Through Technology

Another post for the ‘technology and modern man’ category:

…With the development of of science and technology, humanity has begun to claim for itself the omniscience and omnipotence it has formerly reserved for divine beings…The telescope extends the power of vision to the very distant; the microscope extends the power of vision to the very small. The telephone extends the range of the voice and the power of hearing; television extends the range of the eye and the ear. With the aid of modern forms of technology, humanity has achieved an undreamt mastery over nature and thus converted itself, as Freud puts it, into a ‘prosthetic God.’

-Lee Hardy, The Fabric of this World, p. 40.

I read recently that some techies are even attempting to upload their memory and consciousness to mega-computers in order to create some form of consciousness that can go on after their bodies die. Eternal life through silicon. Not surprisingly then, Google itself is working on the whole everlasting life thing. It may take them a while, they say, but hopefully death is curable.

As technology increases our reach, and our lifespans, we must be very careful that it does not increase our pride. A prosthetic god is no true god. Like all prosthetics, it is lifeless and powerless, though it may not appear that way to the naked eye when it is covered by articles of clothing. It is a good prop that allows for more activity, but at the end of the day it will be removed. Eternal life through silicon ends when silicon melts.