“We live in an era of technocrats. The more we know, the less we understand. Cold numbers replaced emotions, we struggle to keep what defines us as human in our hearts, for the future seems to optimize the humanity and our core values away.”
This text sounds Very Deep, and might have come from the quill of a famous philosopher, except that I have just written it down, being inspired by some more or less anonymous thinkers. So, what is wrong with this text?
The text is talking about “us”, which makes the author sound like he has Awakened from his fairy tale dream he has been sharing with everyone else, so, the “we” he is talking about seems to include just about everyone. This sounds and looks great, except for the fact that it is almost surely wrong. The usage of “us” presented here is actually an accusation, and, if the author was honest, he would replace it with a “you”. Because he is the Enlightened One. He has managed to understand the great self-deception (insert concrete instance of self-deception here) the society has lured itself into and he wants everyone else to withdraw the veil of ignorance. In the end, the text boils down to this: You are dumb. I was dumb too, but I am no more dumb. So, believe me, for I am Enlightened. But since social interaction does not work this way, the core message has to be covered under tons of fake self-humiliation.
The other problem with the text is that it is based on the false assumption that all people in a given society think sufficiently similar to buy into the stated premise. While this may be true for some very basic opinions (like, that being healthy is better than otherwise), the society allows for all kinds of thoughts running in the heads of its members, and generalizations over the contents of people’s heads are rather dangerous. They are even more dangerous if the target audience is non-homogenous by design, and someone might actually have the presence of mind to say “Well, that might apply to you, but not to me, I know more and am less confused than anytime before” and end this rhetoric insult.