Warning: This article may contain some offensive ideas. If you feel uncomfortable with this article, I apologize, and feel free to comment below and share your thoughts (if you have github accounts).
Industrial Society and Its Future was written by Ted Kaczynski, a math genius but eventually gave up his academic career and created bomb crimes in universities. He published this article on Washington Post in 1995 before he was caught.
I think Kaczynski's bomb crimes were cruel and should not be referenced, but to some extent, I agree that the United States is falling into the way as what Kaczynski described in the article. Some extreme left wings today remind me of the Cultural Revolution in China. I appreciate those who try to protect their rights, such as gender equality, speech freedom, LGBTQ+ marriage, etc. However, "EQUALITY" is NOT the reason to criticize those who have different opinions or those who don't know about "political correctness". Use "speech freedom" to shut up others' mouth, which against the definition of "speech freedom", can be ironic.
As a Chinese, I do NOT care about "correctness" but "reasonable". Absolute "correctness" barely exists in real life. My ancestors told me to keep up the third option: neither agree or disagree rather than simply divide the answer into "yes" or "no" because the world is not simply divided into "good" or "bad" (I have talked about the difference between the western and eastern's dichotomy in my Chinese blog, which I may translate them one day. If you have translators, feel free to watch that page). Otherwise, there is a word, “物极必反”，means that once you go extreme, you are walking into an opposite direction.
Meanwhile, Industrial Society and Its Future gave me another question: is psychological counselling always ethical? In my first semester of general psychology class, the instructor talked about one flaw of how people defined psychological disorders: they were based on social norms. Many "psychological disorders" come from high working pressure (anxiety), critical parents who forced their children to maintain a high GPA (depression), boring education systems which require students to sit in the classroom (ADHD), etc. Here is the issue: if many companies often ask the employees to work more than 8 hours a day, which made employees anxious and keep going to the counselling center so they can work more than 8 hours a day, and if working more than 8 hours become a social norm as many people can overwork due to counselling services, is psychological counselling ethical?
I am afraid if counselling is used in such a way, as one of the necessities just like cell phones, will company managers think overwork is an acceptable social norm and never improve working conditions?
I am just a human, not a machine or codex.
Last modified on 2023-10-08