On People and Language and Stuff
Dec. 21st, 2004 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythNo, not the magazine.
Language is a funny thing. It seems like a small thing, which word you use sometimes, but ask any poet or writer, it's not. My particular beef this time is mostly with capitalism, mainly because Communism, whatever the word actually meant, is pretty much dead. At least mostly about capitalism, though it might just be a result of life in a world where you meet more people every day than even lived in most paleolithic tribes.
See, the thing about capitalism, and maybe more than that, is this. I was taking economics, and one of the things I realized that was bugging me was the way it kept treating people as just another resource, "Labor." People aren't the same thing as a rock, or a chunk of land, or even a robot. Yes, more than one person can do the same work, but they're still PEOPLE, not just resources. "Human resources" these days. Whatever happened to "Personel"? That at least had "person" in it. And people who buy things are "Consumers" now, not "customers" or anything else. What's really scary is when government reports talk about "consumers" instead of "people", or "citizens." I mean, fuck, we HIRE the bloody government, we're not just consumers.
That kind of thinking leads to abuses, when you stop thinking of other people as people, first. You end up with corporations whose first cuts come from customer service, who don't care as long as they've got your money. CEOs that fire people just to bump up the bottom line long enough to cash out their stock options. Generals who see casualty lists as just numbers, not the people who died. That's the mindset of aristocracy, and we've been there, done that, and I much prefer the world after the Enlightenment and democracy and all that stuff, thankyouverymuch.
But the thing is, to an extent, it can't be avoided. When you deal with somebody for maybe ten minutes, maximum, like when you're buying something, or riding the subway, or just walking past them, it's hard to make them more than just a face, a bundle of first impressions. To really see somebody as a person, you have to see more than just that, get them fleshed out as a person. But even so, even though you can't see it on the face, you should remember the person there is a person, just like you, at least by all evidence. They have wants, dreams, fears, desires, and that itch that's driving them crazy.
[meta: mindscribbles]
Language is a funny thing. It seems like a small thing, which word you use sometimes, but ask any poet or writer, it's not. My particular beef this time is mostly with capitalism, mainly because Communism, whatever the word actually meant, is pretty much dead. At least mostly about capitalism, though it might just be a result of life in a world where you meet more people every day than even lived in most paleolithic tribes.
See, the thing about capitalism, and maybe more than that, is this. I was taking economics, and one of the things I realized that was bugging me was the way it kept treating people as just another resource, "Labor." People aren't the same thing as a rock, or a chunk of land, or even a robot. Yes, more than one person can do the same work, but they're still PEOPLE, not just resources. "Human resources" these days. Whatever happened to "Personel"? That at least had "person" in it. And people who buy things are "Consumers" now, not "customers" or anything else. What's really scary is when government reports talk about "consumers" instead of "people", or "citizens." I mean, fuck, we HIRE the bloody government, we're not just consumers.
That kind of thinking leads to abuses, when you stop thinking of other people as people, first. You end up with corporations whose first cuts come from customer service, who don't care as long as they've got your money. CEOs that fire people just to bump up the bottom line long enough to cash out their stock options. Generals who see casualty lists as just numbers, not the people who died. That's the mindset of aristocracy, and we've been there, done that, and I much prefer the world after the Enlightenment and democracy and all that stuff, thankyouverymuch.
But the thing is, to an extent, it can't be avoided. When you deal with somebody for maybe ten minutes, maximum, like when you're buying something, or riding the subway, or just walking past them, it's hard to make them more than just a face, a bundle of first impressions. To really see somebody as a person, you have to see more than just that, get them fleshed out as a person. But even so, even though you can't see it on the face, you should remember the person there is a person, just like you, at least by all evidence. They have wants, dreams, fears, desires, and that itch that's driving them crazy.
[meta: mindscribbles]
