…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?
Well, Obamacare is the obvious example. It is supposed to be the answer to people not having insurance, but it so burdensome that it ends up causing people to lose their insurance. It is both a disease and a demon.
Hey Timothy,
I actually did not see that one coming, but it is a very good example. Thanks.
No problem. Glad to help. 🙂
I remember Mark Driscol commenting on this dynamic as being one of the defining characteristics of an idol. He cited Proverbs 23:29-35, highlighting that in this picture of the drunk, he wakes in the morning full of miseries caused by alcohol the night before, which he promptly tries to deal with by getting drunk once again. Idols, according to Driscol, create a problem, and then present themselves as the solution to their own problem.
Speaking into my own life, as affected by my own culture, I would say that America is a people that likes to worship their own power in terms of “productivity” and “efficiency,” etc. Now productivity and efficiency are no evil in and of themselves, but once made into idols, their manifestations create a sort of slavery for those who worship them.
Thus now, I can be much more “productive” with email, and yet now I am asked to answer so many “quick” and “productive” emails for work that it is hard to get away from the computer to do my regular job. I can be far more “efficient” with a “smart” phone, but now I am expected to answer emails even when I do actually step away from my computer, and I look around myself and see people everywhere on the street who are not present, but somewhere else, deeply engaged via their “smart phone.” It is a form of slavery. The technology didn’t mandate it’s use being thus, but our idolatrous approach to it has.
These are obtuse examples, but I think they illustrate the point.
I think they’re good examples. There’s a book called ‘The Tyranny of Email’ by John Freeman that I wrote about a while back that makes points similar to yours. Good observations.