Automaton...

Source: StarTrek.com

Due to what appears to have been a virus, the initial steampunk icon and post has been deleted. Blogger has been notified. I recreate the post (with some clarifying edits) below:

"The underlying insecurity resulting from the position of an isolated individual in a hostile world tends to explain the genesis of a character trait which was, as Burckhardt has pointed out (op. cit., p. 139), characteristic of the individual of the Renaissance and not the present, at least in the same intensity, in the members of the medieval social structure: his passionate craving for fame ... if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries , then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgment of others." Escape From Freedom, III Freedom in the Age of the Reformation, Eric Fromm

"The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless the thing which is so typical of the sadomasochistic character explains a great deal of Hitler's and his followers' political actions. While the Republican government thought they could 'appease' the Nazis by treating leniently, they not only failed to appease them but their hatred aroused by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because it was weak and he admired the industrial and military because they had power. He never fought against strong power but always against groups he thought essentially powerless." Escape From Freedom, VI Psychology of Nazism

"It has been the thesis of this book that freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage.

"The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinate or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self." Escape From Freedom, VII Freedom and Democracy - Freedom and Spontaneity

Obviously, I admire all things Eric Fromm.

What is prescient in his prose is the same angst that we're experiencing now, a gnawing, visceral fear that grips us as a society, cultivated opportunistically by those who wish to have or REMAIN in power.

When Fromm wrote Escape From Freedom, the prevalent technology for global connectivity that had been invented by Marconi: the radio. We had the newspaper, telegraph and moving pictures (black and white). We also, then and now, had the nuclear bomb. Add to that global warming, and we - the "intelligent" species on the planet - have the means of wiping out all life on the Earth.

As I relayed on a post earlier this summer:

1979:

150 corporations control television (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, UHF), radio and print media.

2014:

6 corporations : GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS television control (more stations than I can list), radio, print media and the Internet and social media. That is a 25X reduction if you wanted the math.

As the link above in the 2014 paragraph illustrates, we're given the illusion of choice - MSNBC for the left; FOX for the right 'CNN for the middle; the rest in a trance-like somnambulism via Net Flicks, cable channels and repetitive "reality TV." We're being shepherded as cattle or sheep; programmed with junk science like intelligent design; kept ignorant so we do not know the questions we should be demanding our so-called leaders to have some mastery over. The useful, feckless dodge the "I am not a scientist," has never been to my memory been challenged by an erstwhile representative of the news media with the rejoinder: "that is true sir/madam. You are also not a theologian, though you ofttimes blur the line between church and state." I can dream, can't I?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we should phase out fossil fuels by the year 2100, never mind the old fossils in charge of fossil fuel consumption (nor anyone reading this post, including me) will not be around when that occurs. The human species may be absent in that accounting as well.

The Ebola faux scandal is reminiscent of racial dog whistle politics ... because it still is. "The CDC estimates that from the 1976-1977 season to the 2006-2007 flu season, flu-associated deaths ranged from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people." Yet, no alarms hit to alert us to this crisis of influenza. ONE person, Dr. Craig Spencer - is currently in New York affected. Nurses Nina Pham and Amber Ebola Vinson are free. The borders of Sierra Leon and Mexico are being morphed together as one - though thousands of miles and an ocean apart - to the low information voters that want to fear all brown people as the nation slowly, inexorably moves towards that complexion. Because maybe, fear is what we all want to feel. Fear is a very powerful human emotion, and quite useful to the powerful.

"Timendi causa est nescire - Ignorance is the cause of fear." - Seneca, Natural Questions

Automaton

1: a mechanism that is relatively self-operating; especially: the robot

2: a machine or control mechanism designed to follow automatically a predetermined sequence of operations or respond to encoded instructions

3: an individual WHO acts in a mechanical fashion Source: Meridian-Webster

Ultimately we fear becoming what we already are: the bewildered by bamboozle artists; herded by the powerful - psychologically predictable; manipulated by Creel commission advertisements; simultaneously ingesting the manufactured fear of being replaced by the unfeeling, mechanical things and yet becoming the same, not knowing, atomized; ignorant; social media connected, yet separate; apart: we've already lost.

[Smokey James] "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white - ANYTHING." Yaphet Kotto in the movie "Blue Collar" (1978)

"It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable." - Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters