I watched a documentary about food additives in processed foods. The former CEO of Cheese-Its remarked how his product was completely inedible without its trademarked tasty flavor. A scientist when on to describe how these additives are designed in a lab to isolate key flavors in American food: salt, sweet, and fat. They engineer the additives to hold those flavors on your tongue and induce cravings for more. This is done at the cost of caloric density, wherein the amount of real food is reduced in lieu of cost-effective food additives.
What struck me wasn’t what these companies were doing to the food. Always follow the money. No, I was immediately drawn to this: The lab was bustling with young researchers putting their skills to work. The equipment was new and the department was well-funded. And they were getting paid… well. Because the industry was positively booming… I was watching a recruitment ad for the food industry. The message was clear. If you want a job to put your degree to use, come work for Cheese-Its.
So then where else would you find facilities that big? That well-equipped and funded? Who fights with agribusiness for white coats and beakers during the flash sale at the Science Warehouse? The pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and the tech industry. These are the places that are hiring. This is where the money is going. This is where the research is being conducted. Schools of engineering do not have those numbers. Sociology and psychology departments cannot secure the funding pharmaceutical labs can. As I have heard it said, where attention flows, the energy goes.
At the top of the financial juggernauts sit boardrooms that manage the interests of stakeholders. Who makes this up though? People. Who makes up all of these institutions? People.
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking. -Geroge Carlin
The cabal is inevitable. Is it a good cabal, or an evil cabal? Well, since we made up right and wrong, good and evil, perhaps we can look at it like this. Do the systems, institutions, products, and services make me more or less human?
As our culture moves closer to symbiosis with the machines, I suspect some of the most well-funded minds see this as salvation from the dystopia we find ourselves in now. We may be a lifetime or two away from self-aware AI - isolated to itself - but it is the pursuit therein that creates new problems which need solutions as they all fall back on themselves in that way. I have watched hundreds, probably thousands of people die in so many different ways. Some of them were cathartic and enriching to have been a witness to. Many were hard on the heart. What an inordinate number of them did to me however was claw at what I knew inside of me not to be right. Because it didn’t seem human.
When caregivers watch other humans needlessly attached to equipment that sustains life while the body rots before their eyes it claws at the very humanity of the technician. And we take part in its maintenance and growth as the arbiters of modern medicine. We know what it is capable of. We have been given the technical training to our level of expertise. Yet we see how it is administered, and to whom, and we are left with this gnawing existential question of why? All of these people who gambled for more time, and upon receiving it found that it was nothing of what they expected.
So much pain and turmoil between families fighting over end-of-life decisions. Patients kicking and screaming and convalescing to their deaths. So many emotions and decisions robbing the spontaneity from life in favor of predictability and longevity. And when the decisions have been made and the emotions have taken their course, the impotent question of why sits in all of us (and I’m not just talking about medical providers in this example).
We see how this hardens the older ones, the broken ones. We see how they begin to regard human life, confusing it for the machine that entangles so many people’s final days. We see the families and their refusals to accept that no amount of medical intervention can prolong a life indefinitely. And as the bodies accumulate, we begin to see the money that floods to end-of-life care while people that remain suffer. And we begin to see the position of the disgruntled medic or the battered ER nurse or the doctor who drinks too much after his shift. And before we know it, we are kidnapping hospice patients from their homes to die from their diagnosis in an ER bay, needles and tubes protruding from orifices and veins; all at the behest of legal paperwork and adult children unable to accept the very nature of our humanity… its end.
Those with the means invest heavily in this market in hope that when their time comes, all of the “kinks” will be worked out. Hospitals are filled with research subjects in their oncology wards, ICU beds, and surgical suites; each patient improving the technology keeping them alive a little longer. And they pay for it. And a group with a good idea will go to nearly any lengths to achieve its goals.
We’re so terrified of death that we are willing to pour every penny we have into a few more years, months, or weeks, attuned by our level of financial access. And we do so with little regard for what that does to the fabric of humanity, and to the people we leave behind. And we know that because when we were younger we did it to our old. And just like the burnt-out pantheon of medical professionals, as a society, we cope with what we know to be against our nature by refusing to see ourselves in the dying, or by fooling ourselves to believe we are doing what we would want to be done for ourselves. We push down what we know is wrong and hope that the technology improves when it is our time, secretly hoping their sacrifice will be our reward. But we don’t know because we aren’t there. We spend so little time in the present moment that we often lose track of the “more time” we are already in and the examples before our eyes. So then when there’s no turning back we are bound by our decisions - perhaps in a bed - as time becomes our prison rather than our life’s goal. Perhaps we shouldn’t be asking “What happens if I get to live forever?” Rather, the more ominous question could be “What happens if I HAVE to live forever?”
I can think of one institution that sits atop the rest of these. Its sole purpose stands in direct contradiction to the aforementioned but benefits paradoxically from its exploitation. Where does all of this life-saving technology come from? Who develops and refines all of the consumer products such as drones, GPS, and surveillance equipment before they are released to the private market? The military.