In my early 20s I got a bad traffic citation (my fault) and had to take the train to work for a few months.
The train would pass a strange-looking old stone enclosure, and I would wonder what it was. As I learned later, this was “Duffy’s Cut”: a mass grave for Irish rail workers. Sitting in plain view, just thirty feet off the tracks: 57 bodies. The story goes that the workers were murdered in cold blood to prevent the spread of cholera to nearby towns.
In West Virginia—a state known for its violent labor conflicts—the Hawks Nest Tunnel stands out for its deadliness. While work was underway, 10 to 14 workers a day were overcome by inhalation of silica dust. Within six months, 80% of the workforce had left or were dead.
“Phossy jaw” caused the jaws of workers who handled white phosphorus to literally fall off. It was obvious that exposure caused the disease, yet hundreds of young women were severely disfigured before anything changed.
There are dozens of such stories. The mid-19th through early 20th centuries were years of immense growth and invention in America. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that kind of progress to be bloodless. But the stunning achievements hide a more awful than expected history of treating certain American lives as expendable. And this isn’t even mentioning slavery.
What can explain all this callousness?
I’ve thought about this, and my answer is simple: people don’t generally value the lives of those they consider below them. This is a dark truth of human nature. We’ve tried to suppress this impulse for the better part of a century. But contempt and disgust are far more powerful forces in history than we give them credit for, and the monstrous things they produce are so shameful that we keep them buried in the back pages of history.
For a while, we had a prospering middle class. I think this was partly because our upper classes looked at what we had built and fought for and had some faith in the reliability and virtue of the average American citizen. They agreed not to degrade us, and we agreed to work hard.
I think this détente between the classes broke in 2008. Look at the story that emerged about us after the crash: we were given a chance to own a home, we didn’t pay our mortgages, and we crashed the entire economy. What kind of disgust and contempt does that narrative generate in the people who already see themselves as above us?
So, back to cattle we are. We are addicted to fast food, addicted to social media, poorly dressed, poorly educated, easily amused and even more easily fooled. Our ethics and religion are increasingly performative and misguided. We are like petulant, screaming children. And if everything goes to plan with AI, soon we will be completely uneconomical to employ. What will we be good for, except to amuse ourselves on everyone else’s dime?
What happens to a people who are objects of scorn and disgust? It’s not the economic change I fear most. It’s what might be done with all of us.
What can explain all this callousness? … people don’t generally value the lives of those they consider below them
Maybe that’s a factor. But I would be careful about presuming to understand. At the start of the industrial age, life was cheap and perilous. A third of all children died before the age of five. Imagine the response if that was true in a modern developed society! But born into such a world, an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation would set in quickly. All you can do is pray to God for mercy, and then look on aghast if the person next to you is the unlucky one.
Someone in the field of “progress studies” offers an essay in this spirit, on “How factories were made safe”. The argument is that the new dangers arising from machinery and from the layout of the factory, were at first not understood, in professions that had previously been handicrafts. There was an attitude that each person looks after themselves as best they can. Holistic enterprise-level thinking about organizational safety did not exist. In this narrative, unions and management both helped to improve conditions, in a protracted process.
I’m not saying this is the whole story either. The West Virginia coal wars are pretty wild. It’s just that … states of mind can be very different, across space and time. The person who has constant access to the intricate tapestry of thought and image offered by social media, lives in a very different mental world to people from an age when all they had was word of mouth, the printed word, and their own senses. Live long enough, and you will even forget how it used to be, in your own life, as new thoughts and conditions take hold.
Maybe the really important question is the extent to which today’s elite conform to your hypothesis.
In my early 20s I got a bad traffic citation (my fault) and had to take the train to work for a few months.
The train would pass a strange-looking old stone enclosure, and I would wonder what it was. As I learned later, this was “Duffy’s Cut”: a mass grave for Irish rail workers. Sitting in plain view, just thirty feet off the tracks: 57 bodies. The story goes that the workers were murdered in cold blood to prevent the spread of cholera to nearby towns.
In West Virginia—a state known for its violent labor conflicts—the Hawks Nest Tunnel stands out for its deadliness. While work was underway, 10 to 14 workers a day were overcome by inhalation of silica dust. Within six months, 80% of the workforce had left or were dead.
“Phossy jaw” caused the jaws of workers who handled white phosphorus to literally fall off. It was obvious that exposure caused the disease, yet hundreds of young women were severely disfigured before anything changed.
There are dozens of such stories. The mid-19th through early 20th centuries were years of immense growth and invention in America. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that kind of progress to be bloodless. But the stunning achievements hide a more awful than expected history of treating certain American lives as expendable. And this isn’t even mentioning slavery.
What can explain all this callousness?
I’ve thought about this, and my answer is simple: people don’t generally value the lives of those they consider below them. This is a dark truth of human nature. We’ve tried to suppress this impulse for the better part of a century. But contempt and disgust are far more powerful forces in history than we give them credit for, and the monstrous things they produce are so shameful that we keep them buried in the back pages of history.
For a while, we had a prospering middle class. I think this was partly because our upper classes looked at what we had built and fought for and had some faith in the reliability and virtue of the average American citizen. They agreed not to degrade us, and we agreed to work hard.
I think this détente between the classes broke in 2008. Look at the story that emerged about us after the crash: we were given a chance to own a home, we didn’t pay our mortgages, and we crashed the entire economy. What kind of disgust and contempt does that narrative generate in the people who already see themselves as above us?
So, back to cattle we are. We are addicted to fast food, addicted to social media, poorly dressed, poorly educated, easily amused and even more easily fooled. Our ethics and religion are increasingly performative and misguided. We are like petulant, screaming children. And if everything goes to plan with AI, soon we will be completely uneconomical to employ. What will we be good for, except to amuse ourselves on everyone else’s dime?
What happens to a people who are objects of scorn and disgust? It’s not the economic change I fear most. It’s what might be done with all of us.
Maybe that’s a factor. But I would be careful about presuming to understand. At the start of the industrial age, life was cheap and perilous. A third of all children died before the age of five. Imagine the response if that was true in a modern developed society! But born into such a world, an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation would set in quickly. All you can do is pray to God for mercy, and then look on aghast if the person next to you is the unlucky one.
Someone in the field of “progress studies” offers an essay in this spirit, on “How factories were made safe”. The argument is that the new dangers arising from machinery and from the layout of the factory, were at first not understood, in professions that had previously been handicrafts. There was an attitude that each person looks after themselves as best they can. Holistic enterprise-level thinking about organizational safety did not exist. In this narrative, unions and management both helped to improve conditions, in a protracted process.
I’m not saying this is the whole story either. The West Virginia coal wars are pretty wild. It’s just that … states of mind can be very different, across space and time. The person who has constant access to the intricate tapestry of thought and image offered by social media, lives in a very different mental world to people from an age when all they had was word of mouth, the printed word, and their own senses. Live long enough, and you will even forget how it used to be, in your own life, as new thoughts and conditions take hold.
Maybe the really important question is the extent to which today’s elite conform to your hypothesis.