The Social Disconnect/Culture

Recognize this?

The Postmodern Economic-Social Principals

of Why Everyone Is Such a F**king A**hole

By Scott “Galanty” Miller

 Myth #1: As a society, we’re closer than ever now because of the Internet and other forms of mass media. We’re all “connected”.

Define “closer”. Define “connected”. Millions of people are “connected” to Kim Kardashian. They follow her on Twitter. They watch her television programs. They wear her clothing line. They read about her personal life. But are they “close” to Kim Kardashian? No. They’re not. I watched Kim Kardashian’s wedding on TV. I didn’t see you there. You weren’t invited. You and Kim Kardashian aren’t close.

The Internet connects us in superficial ways, via the exchange of information. But yet the Internet pulls us farther apart emotionally. It separates us. Why? Because it’s big. It’s vast.

Have you ever had to relay sad news to someone? It’s difficult. It’s an emotional experience. But now let’s say you had to give sad news to fifty people today. It’s difficult the first time… and then the second time… and maybe the third time. But by the time you’ve reached the fiftieth person of the day? Your emotions and compassion and your ability-to-empathize have faded. And your feelings of “I have an emotional connection to this person” shift to “I have a craving for burritos. Is Taco Bell still open?” By the time you’ve reached the fiftieth person of the day, you’re just phoning it in. Hence, we have the expression “phoning it in”, which means, essentially, “lacking emotional interest in whatever activity in which you are engaged”. And the Internet is – figuratively and literally – a big cell phone.

Myth #2: As a society, we’re more compassionate than ever now because of the Internet and other forms of mass media.

A story came out about a dolphin that lost its fin in an accident. So engineers built a prosthetic fin. That’s compassion. A Disney movie was produced, based on this true event. And that’s nice. But this is an individual example of the human spirit, our species’ biological ability to feel and display compassion and kindness. This is not “society”. Society is much more powerful than ‘biology’. Society guides us. It teaches us.  Society is “The Cove”, a 2009 documentary film about the annual, inhumane dolphin slaughter inJapan. Biologically, human beings have the ability to understand – to “feel” – this cruelty. So then why are people such a**holes? Because we’re being guided by a corporate “Internet” society. And this technological economy has no compassion. It can’t. The economy doesn’t have the biological ability to “feel”. Our economic system doesn’t even have a biology.

Compassion requires an emotional connection. All human relationships require an emotional connection of some kind. Otherwise, the relationship is not of humanity. It’s just a “goal”. The direct and indirect interactions we have with other people within the massive global economic system are not relationships. They’re goals. If one purchases a picture frame from Amazon.com, there are several people involved: the customer who wants to buy the frame, the Amazon employee who puts wraps the frame and ships it, the subcontracted worker in some factory in a foreign country who makes the frame. These people are superficially connected, but they don’t really have a “relationship” with each other. Instead, they each have a  goal. One person’s goal is to buy the frame. Another person’s goal is to ship the frame. As it relates to achieving their goals, these people have no emotional connection to each other. They don’t know anything about each other. As it relates to achieving their goals, they don’t really think about one another’s existence. And you can’t show compassion towards someone if you don’t know they exist.

The Hallmark Company employs writers to come up with generic words of sympathy. And they’re nice words. But do these writers actually feel anything when they string together these words? Can you mass-market sympathy for people who may or may not even exist? (I suspect that while Hallmark sells many sympathy cards, many of those same cards never wind up getting bought or used.)

Now, of course, within our own private social media world, we are aware of the people to whom we’re technologically connected. But they’re not so much living, breathing human beings as they are pictures and words on a screen. And so the compassion we show is a façade. If one announces the death of his or her mother on Facebook, hundreds of Facebook “friends” – many of whom the person hasn’t seen in years, if ever – will respond with words of compassion. But can they actually feel compassion here? Perhaps. But how authentic can this sort of compassion possibly be? One of my Facebook friends was the victim of domestic abuse. She updated her status to announce, only minutes after the real event occurred, that her husband had been taken away in police custody. Dozens of her Facebook friends added “like” to her status. “Human compassion” now amounts to the 1.5 seconds required to press the “like” tab.

Myth #3: Corporations can operate with compassion and heart.

No. Corporations don’t have compassion. Corporations don’t know compassion. By definition, any human emotion interferes with the goal of the corporation. A corporation isn’t a human being. And now, a corporation isn’t even a building or a logo or a product. Corporate America – this landscape ruled by technological machinery – is a system whose only goal is to maximize profits.

Think of it this way. How does a calculator work? A calculator is designed to achieve its goals. Any sort of “human emotion” would interfere with this goal. If you input “2+2=” into a calculator, the machine is designed to achieve its goal, which is to find the mathematic answer to the equation. (The answer is “4”, by the way.) The calculator doesn’t think about why you’re inputting this unsolved equation. The calculator doesn’t have the ability – it isn’t designed with the ability – to “think” in this way. And even if it did have the ability to think in this way, it still wouldn’t take time to ponder the “why”. Because that would slow down the process… of achieving its goal. The calculator doesn’t make moral decisions about the equation. Perhaps you want to find the mathematical answer to “2+2=” in order to help you plan out a bank robbery, or a quadruple homicide. It doesn’t matter. The calculator doesn’t care. The calculator doesn’t make moral judgments. The calculator can’t have a “morality”.

Now, human beings have emotions. And human beings are using the calculator. They are operating the calculator. But this makes no difference to the system by which the calculator achieves its goals. Whether a person is nice or mean-spirited, compassionate or heartless, the calculator still operates in the same way. The way by which the calculator solves “2+2=” is the exact same. The speed by which the calculator solves “2+2=” is the exact same. A human being’s emotions are irrelevant to how the calculator functions.

When a driver cuts you off in traffic, he or she is generally not basing this action on emotion. Rather, you are simply in the way of the other driver’s goal – which is to reach their destination as quickly and conveniently as possible. Think of a calculator as that driver. The calculator is a selfish a**hole.

The economy guides society. This is inescapable. Even if you live in isolation, you’re still under the influence of the system by which K-Mart and Burger King and ‘Bed, Bad & Beyond’ operate. The economy guides human beings. And the economy is a giant, global-reaching calculator that controls us.

Group Size vs. The Postmodern Corporate System

Have you ever been the first guest to arrive at a party? (That happened to me once. And, as it turned out, I was also the only guest at the party. This was not a good party.) When you’re the first guest at a party, you converse with the host. And if the host is a good friend, this one-on-one conversation is sometimes very personal, emotional. Maybe your mother has been ill. The host will ask you about your mother. And you’ll spend a few minutes discussing how this illness has affected you personally.

Then a couple more people arrive to the party. If you don’t know them, you’ll introduce yourself. And so now this group of four people – you, the host, and these two new arrivals – is having one united conversation. (“2+2=4”) At this point, you will have stopped talking about your mother’s illness because it’s too “personal” to share within this bigger group, especially since you barely know some of the people in the group. As the group grows, you’re already losing personal, emotional connections.

This group of four people generally engages in conversation in the living room or the kitchen. At parties, guests tend to gravitate towards the kitchen.

Then three more people arrive at the party. Once again, even if you don’t know them, you’ll introduce yourself. And now there are seven people at the party. Yet, the party still consists of a single, united (though larger) group. And the group still engages in one united conversation. And the group still forms a pseudo-circle, with each individual knowingly taking a spot within the perimeter of the circle. And the group remains in the living room or in the kitchen.

After the ninth or tenth person arrives at the party, though, that big group starts to break down, figuratively and literally. The big, united conversation transforms into several different, separate conversations within the group… usually depending on the distance the guests are standing from each other. Partygoers become disconnected with the people in the group that are farther away. Guests begin having individual or smaller conversations with the one or two other people standing next to them. Also, guests start exiting from the original party circle; they leave the living room or kitchen and go to different rooms and areas, where they continue with their individual conversations.

There is a reason for this party dynamic. It’s not coincidental. Rather, it’s impossible to sustain a human connection with ten people at one time. It’s impossible to connect on any sort of real emotion level with ten people at once. Because not only are you talking to nine other people at once. But those other nine people are also talking to nine people at once. And this amounts to thousands of different interactions.

This party dynamic explains the corporate takeover of global society. This party dynamic explains Wal-Mart’s rise to power. And within this corporatization, human compassion has given way to emotionless goals.

Dyads and Triads 

A dyad is a social group between two members. A dyad is, by definition, the smallest possible social group of human beings; it’s the smallest possible “society”. Less than two people is just one person. One person by him or herself is not a society. Rather, it’s social isolation.

A dyad is, by definition, the most emotionally and personally intense and intimate social group that can exist. It’s the most emotional. It’s the most intimate. It’s the most personal social group. But a dyad is almost the most unstable social group. It’s the least stable.

A marriage is a dyad. A marriage consists of two people: a husband and a wife. (Or a ‘husband and a husband’ or a ‘wife and a wife’, depending on which state you live.) A marriage is very personal, emotional, intimate. The kinds of things that you do with your spouse behind closed doors is much more intimate and personal than the kinds of things you do with, say, your co-worker. But yet a marriage is also very unstable. Because if just one person leaves the marriage, the marriage will disintegrate. Hence, the divorce rate is so high. (See? All topics always come back to Kim Kardashian.)   

Two friends together make up a dyad. And two friends together are more intimate, more personal, they’ll share more secrets… than if a group of five friends are together. But a dyad is unstable. For example, if you’re meeting just one friend out to dinner, and that person cancels at the last minute, then there is no dinner. On the other hand, if you’re meeting five friends out for dinner, and one of those friends cancels at the last minute… then you’ll still go out with this group of four other people.

A triad is a social group consisting of three people. In other words, a triad is bigger than a dyad.

A triad is more stable than a dyad. But it’s not as emotionally intense. It’s not as personal.

If a married couple is meeting with a marriage counselor, this is a triad: a husband, a wife, and the marriage counselor. Of course, it’s not as personally intimate as a dyad. A married couple isn’t going to do the same things behind closed doors (or, for that matter, even argue with as much emotional passion) as they would in their counselor’s office.  But a triad is more stable. For example, if one of the spouses gets upset during the marital consultation, and he or she leaves the office, a group still exists: the other spouse and the counselor.

A family of three – a husband, a wife, and a child – make up a triad. The emotional atmosphere is not as intense as if the couple were alone. The couple is not going to do and say the same sort of things in front of their child as if they were alone. But this group of three is more stable. Because if the father walks out on his family, the family still exists: the mother and her child.

The point? As a social group grows bigger, it becomes more stable. But as a social group grows bigger, it becomes less personal. A triad is not as personal as a dyad, but it’s more stable. A group of ten people is not as personal as a triad, but it’s more stable. Thousands of people together are not as personal as a group of ten, but “thousands of people together” is more stable. A corporation is “thousands of people together”. Hence, the biological aspects of human compassion, emotions, are irrelevant within a corporation. Hence, a corporation isn’t really human at all.

This has been the basis for economic change over the past 30 years. Corporations – giant, unfeeling groups – have taken over the economic landscape, leaving smaller businesses irrelevant. Individually-owned, independently operated businesses, “Mom & Pop Stores”, were personal. Everyone working in the store knew each other by their first names. But those small stores and businesses weren’t stable. Wal-Mart isn’t personal. If you work at Wal-Mart, you don’t know the other two-million employees within the corporation. You’re not going to know their names. You can’t know all of their names. But Wal-Mart survives for this very reason; Wal-Mart is big and stable and it is guided, not by individual emotion, but by its system, it’s goal.

Take, for example, a small, individually-owned business: “Joe’s Diner”. The purpose of “Joe’s Diner” is not to grow larger. Rather, Joe, the owner, operates the business with the goal of maintaining a steady, consistent profit margin and keeping the diner afloat. Plus, Joe, a human being, probably has other goals irrelevant of profit. For example, perhaps Joe wants to cook and prepare the food in the way he thinks best. Or maybe he enjoys maintaining the aesthetics of the diner’s interior; he hangs up photographs and wall art that have special meaning to him. And maybe Joe works to keep his business alive because it has a history in the community; all the folks in town have fond memories of eating at Joe’s place, and this is important to Joe. This is human emotion. But today, as a necessity to how corporations fulfill their singular goal – to be as profitable as possible, as efficiently as possible – these goal must take precedence over any real emotional, human connection.

Corporations are becoming more and more automated and impersonal. And as the economy guides society, human lives become more impersonal. The economy – this aspect of society – is, in the bigger picture, changing who we are.

The world of “Joe’s Diners” is fading. McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Pizza Hut have taken over. Take, for example, McDonald’s. McDonald’s is, by definition, a robotic system in which corporate stability comes ahead of people. McDonald’s, in order to maintain itself as a profit-making system, must keep corporate stability ahead of the individual needs and emotional of people… because people are always leaving McDonald’s. Low-level employees are constantly leaving McDonald’s. Middle-managers are constantly leaving McDonald’s. Not even the McDonald’s CEO remains the same. But yet… McDonald’s remains stable.

Conduct a five-year social study. Today, go to a nearby McDonald’s. The restaurant will have a certain “look” about it. The system used within the restaurant, like how you order your food, will be very specific. The food will have a certain taste. Five years from now, go to that same McDonald’s. The staff will be different. In five years, many, if not most, of the employees working there now will be gone. But, yet, five years from now, the restaurant will have the same generic “look”. The system used within that McDonald’s will be the same. The food will still taste the same.

“Joe’s Diner” has a certain look. But if Joe retires and someone takes over the restaurant, it will start to look different. The new owner will add his or her own personal, human touch to the diner. The new owner’s human emotions will play a factor in how the diner operates and changes. (And if the diner, now under new management, doesn’t change, it is will mostly likely be in honor of Joe. But, still, the human element plays a part.) If Joe dies, and someone else takes over the restaurant from him, the food will start to taste different. The new owners, the new cooks, will add their own personal food-preparation touches.

At McDonald’s, all of this is irrelevant. If McDonald’s introduces a new CEO tomorrow, then McDonald’s hamburgers will still taste the same tomorrow. And all corporations – all the goods and services that we use – operate in this way. Corporate stability takes precedence over humanity.

This is not to say that corporations don’t engage in charitable endeavors. But even this charity lacks any sort of human element. Corporations donate money, for example, based on how the donation functions within the corporation’s system of purpose. In other words, corporations aren’t created for the purposes of making donations to charitable foundations.

Here’s another way of putting it…

Corporations don’t give money to charity based on any sort of human element within the corporation. Pizza Hut donates a certain amount of money each year. The Pizza Hut CEO is irrelevant of this aspect of the corporate system. If Pizza Hut introduces a new CEO this year, the charitable aspect of the restaurant chain won’t really change. Pizza Hut will still give essentially the same monetary amounts to essentially the same charities as it did the year before. The new CEO’s emotions, his or her own interests and creativity, doesn’t play a factor. So when Pizza Hut donates to charity, it is reminiscent of people pressing the “like” tab after my Facebook friend’s abusive husband was arrested. It’s fake compassion. There is no real human element to it.

This “like tab” culture is socializing and affecting us – all of us. Regardless of whether you eat at McDonald’s, we’re still unable to escape the corporate element that it represents. We see it. We’re surrounded by it. We’re engulfed within it. And we’re becoming a robotic people numb to new ideas and afraid of change and without any creativity. We’re changing as we’re being guided by this alienating economic system.

“Everyone is a F**king A**hole Now” vs. The Corporate System

Ask anyone if they ever worked in a small, individually-owned store or restaurant or business. If they did, ask them if they knew the name of their boss – not their manager, but their boss, the person who owned the business. Ask them if their boss knew their name.  In all likelihood, the answer to these questions will be “yes”.

Now ask anyone if they ever worked in a big-chain, corporate business, like KFC or Target or Bank of America. If they did, ask them if they knew the name of their boss – not their manager, but their boss, the CEO of the corporation. More times than not, the answer will be “no”. Then ask them if their boss knew their name. The answer will almost always be “no”.

Let’s say you have a job, you work for a business, and you get sick for a month. If you and your boss know each other, if you and your boss know each other’s name, then of course your boss will be more understanding of your situation. That’s humanity. We feel compassion for those to whom we are emotionally connected.  Now, if you get sick and your boss has no idea who you are, and he or she doesn’t know your name, and he or she never even sees you… then he won’t care and he’ll have no problem replacing you. That’s human nature. We don’t care about what we don’t know exists.

Of course, giant corporations generally have some sort of employee health plan. But this health plan works within the structure of the system. It’s a necessary aspect of the goal of the corporation. There is no individual human emotion to any corporate health plan. There is no corporation inAmericatoday whose health plan includes a personal visit from the CEO, just to “see how you’re doing”.

If you’re close to someone – if you’re in a dyad relationship – the person means something to you emotionally. If you’re not close to someone – if you’re living within the system of a corporation, surrounded by millions of coworkers – then the person doesn’t mean anything to you emotionally. This is the nature of human beings and all living creatures.

In order to fulfill this goal, corporations must continue to grow. Corporations must continue to get bigger and to grow more powerful and to multiply their profit margins. The corporation is, by definition, a system of economic growth. The human beings that occupy the corporation are irrelevant. The individuals within the corporation come and go. But the system remains. Only a human being can say, “Our profits are growing at the expense of the environment, so let’s change the system and slow things down.” Only a person can say, “Our Corporation’s goal is causing the social ennui of this community, so we should change our goals.” Without the human element, the system remains.

That corporations have become global enterprises is simply an inevitable product of the corporation’s growth. And every corporation is global now. Every corporation is part of the international community now, if only indirectly. Perhaps there are no Wal-Marts, yet, in third-world nations around the world. But Wal-Mart’s influence is still felt world-wide. Most of the products sold at Wal-Mart are not domestic. Wal-Mart merchandise is made throughout the world, sometimes under hazardous conditions, by people none of us will ever know or see. Do you know the name of the person who made the oven mitt you bought at Wal-Mart? And make no mistake about it – these people do work for Wal-Mart. The foreigners making this merchandise are basically indirect Wal-Mart employees. And these employees are not working under any kind health plan from Wal-Mart. That’s because to offer healthcare coverage to workers, when it’s not legally or socially required, when it doesn’t harm the public relations of the corporation, contradicts the profit-making system set into place. (It’s not entirely impossible that the CEO of Wal-Mart would visit one of the company’s stores in a different state and meet with some of the lower-level employees. But I’d bet Kim Kardashian’s fortune that no CEO of any major American superstore has traveled oversees to visit the workers in the subcontracted factories who are making the stuff that his American stores sell for profit.)

Now let’s say one of these foreign Wal-Mart employees accidentally cuts off his or her hand while operating an unsafe factory machine. Of course, the worker has no healthcare coverage. Do you care? Well, in theory, of course, decent human beings are saddened by suffering. So then why don’t you care? Because you don’t know that this worker exists. You don’t know them. You don’t see them. There is no personal touch, no human element, to the products that they make – that we use. These people don’t have names. And, regardless of how compassionate a person you may be, we still can’t have compassion for what we don’t understand exists. That’s human nature.

* * *

“Why is everyone such a prick?” is not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. Human beings are social creatures. We’re not “biological” creatures. This means that we’re dependent on society, on our social surroundings. And society is teaching us to be unfeeling and uncaring. Society, which is now a vast global corporate system that is virtually impossible to escape, engulfs us. The Wal-Mart worker who cut off his hand and has no healthcare coverage? That happened. This person exists. That suffering is real. And we’re all surrounded by this reality. When you’re surrounded by kindness and compassion, you’ll be kind & compassionate. When you’re surrounded by suffering, it affects you, It affects all of us – subtly, subconsciously, indirectly. You don’t have to know a person’s name, you don’t have to know that suffering is happening, to be affected by that nameless human being’s suffering.

In other words…

If we have no personal connection to people, then we’re not going to care if something bad happens to them. But if bad things are happening to people, and nobody cares, then the world becomes a lesser place. And when we live in a lesser place, we become lesser people. We become, for lack of a better term, a**holes.

The other day, I read an article about high school Internet bullying. We keep hearing about children committing suicide due to the harassment they endure on-line. It’s not that on-line bullying is worse than physical, in-person bullying. It’s that it’s less emotionally-connected.

If a child is bullying a classmate in person, on the playground, in the parking lot, and then the victim takes out a gun and he or she puts it in his mouth, well… I suspect that at that point, most bullies would stop what they were doing, at least at that moment. (It doesn’t matter if the bully feels compassion or not. Rather, the bully is going to stop because they can see the severity of the situation. They don’t want to get into trouble.) But if a teenager is bullying a classmate on-line, on Facebook, and the victim has a gun in his or her mouth… well, the bully doesn’t know that the victim is about to commit suicide. The bully has no emotional connection to his or her victim. So the bully isn’t going to stop the harassment.

Technology and the corporate growth have brought us all together globally. Indirectly, we’re all interacting with each other. But if you don’t know the people with whom you’re interacting, if you have no emotional connection to them, then you’re more likely to take advantage of them. In other words, drivers don’t cut their friends off in traffic. Those a**hole drivers? They cut off strangers, people with whom they have no emotional connection. Indirectly, on a global scale, we’re interacting with people with whom we have no emotional connection, with people we don’t care about.

Now, you might not like your friends. Maybe you can’t stand them. But you’re not going to cut them off in traffic… and you’re not going to leave them dying in the streets. But if a foreign worker loses their hand in a factory accident, or if something bad happens to someone you don’t know… well, we don’t have time to worry about that. We don’t have time to think about that… because we’re too busy watching “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. But of course this is affecting us – subtly, subconsciously, indirectly, gradually, and negatively – because we’re all part of the same society now. And this society is teaching us to live without compassion. And it’s turning us into such f**king a**holes!

Actually, because of technology, Americans aren’t even emotionally connected to each other through the media anymore. In the past, when a popular television program was on, folks would gather around their TV sets at the same time to watch it. This “shared” time helped to unite the country. Now everyone is watching that TV show at different times: on DVR, on Hulu, on DVD, etc. Hence, we’re losing that unifying connection.

It’s rarely noticed that Facebook users post comments, and then respond and react to each other’s comments, at different times. Or, here’s another way of looking at it. Think of the last time you had a deep, emotionally intense, personally intimate conversation with another person. What if that interaction was broken up into different time periods? For example, you said something. Then you went out to the store for an hour. Then you came back and the other person responded to your initial comment. Then that person met another friend for lunch. Then the person came back, and then you replied to their response, etc. The conversation loses its emotional intensity; it loses that “human connection”.

About the author:

Scott “Galanty” Miller teaches sociology at the State University of New York at Cortland. He is also a contributing writer for the award-winning Onion News Network. His website is at www.scottgalantymiller.com.  You can follow him on Twitter at @galantymiller