The operation of the emotional plague has taken armored people’s mechanistic-mystical way of thinking and turned every great human achievement into a social disaster. Here are some examples:
The Industrial Revolution of the 19th harnessed large amounts of mechanical energy for the benefit of mankind. A consequence was the production of enormous amounts of wealth in a few people and of sharp differences in the living standards of the population as a whole. Social scientists came along by declaring that since all humans were no different from each other and in order to eliminate the inequality, the wealth produced by the machines should be divided equally with everyone. The publics mindless acceptance of this type of mechanistic reasoning was how the socialist movement first started to foment social trouble in America.
In the middle of the 20th century, with the development of electronic science on the microscopic scale unheard of advances happened in the technology of communication and in the development of computers for the benefit of everyone. Some computer scientists came along and declared that the mechanical computer could rival and even surpass the reasoning powers of the human mind. This led to the idea of “artificial intelligence” (AI) in computer technology, the mystical belief that eventually, human judgement could be replaced by the operations of robots.
Around the same time, with the advent of psychopharmacology, psychiatrists began turning away from having personal contact with their patients and increasingly began using psychotropic drugs to treat them. They replaced the diagnostic system based on an understanding of the whole patient in favor of one focusing exclusively on symptoms. The upshot was that today psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is almost entirely symptom-based, pharmacological and mechanistic. The patient who has the symptom is ignored.
As mechanistic thinking continues to invade and be dominant in the natural sciences, armored humans are slowly and imperceptibly being adapted to function robotically according to the machines that they are creating. This is an entirely new phenomenon in the emotional plague’s destructive attack on human life. As a result, many armored people are in the process of being transformed into a new, neutered, machine-like breed which is unlike any creature that has existed in the history of civilization. More and more, the “tail” (the mechanistic thinker) is wagging the “dog” (the armored, robot-like human).
Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 