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In all societies people complied to some behavioral expectation. In the middle age for instance people felt that they were assigned by God their position in society, and they would comply to the behavior required from a peasant, a knight, a handworker etc with very little social mobility and room for singularity.

Today we might have the feeling that we live in an unprecedented era where people are behaving or expected to behave more and more like a machine. An unprecedented conformism seems to rule behaviors, and singularity seems to be banned and rejected as all behavior trend toward the norm and seems to be programmed to trend towards the norm.

Everyone seems to be called to fit into a job category (software developer, business developer, entrepreneur, science scholar) and comply to the expected speech and behavior expected in this category, with close to no space for identity or singularity.

Is it an impression, that our times see an unprecented conformism and social programming of behaviors ? Are people just more aware than before of the social determinism and social forces which have them comply to some behavior ?

Can we say that people are behaving more and more like machines, and that personnality is deprecated, depreciated and being eradicated ?

kiriloff
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    Maybe, also because machines are behaving more and more like human beings. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Jun 16 '21 at 10:32
  • Street philosophy : listen to a corporate speech (a keynote from say a Google or Amazon executive or a product demonstration by an average product manager) don't you feel they are no more humans but robots ? they are fully predictable, can be replaced by each other, make efforts to adopt the pace, the lexicon and the semantic of the managerial speech, which is the machinic speech. – kiriloff Jun 16 '21 at 10:51
  • Machines behave like humans behaving like machines – kiriloff Jun 16 '21 at 10:52
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    Perhaps because deep results in theory of machines (logic, computation) have indicated that humans, in principle, may not be very different from machines... – Ajax Jun 16 '21 at 10:52
  • Why do I observe (for instance looking at video archives from past decades) a reduction in unpredictability, a conformation to a normed managerial stance, language and behavior ? – kiriloff Jun 16 '21 at 10:55
  • @Ajax isn't your assumption the belief which underlies the trend towards conformation (we believe we are just machines so personality is vanity and must vanish) – kiriloff Jun 16 '21 at 10:59
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    I don't get the question, doesn't your first paragraph invalidate all the rest? If strong conformism was always there in society, why do you see "unprecedented conformism"? I'd say individualism is a lot stronger in our times than in the middle ages that you use as an example for "the past". – kutschkem Jun 16 '21 at 13:42
  • It is an open question : are we just as conformist as in the past, as "robotized" in our social functions, or is it something modern. If I ask the question I am OK to consider different point of views. – kiriloff Jun 16 '21 at 15:11
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    I am definitely behind the "we are just as conformed as in the past", which is completely at odds with the notion that we are any *more* machinelike. But we are more aware of it, and somehow ashamed. What is modern is to question it, and expect it to make sense, then, when it won't, to see it as somehow anomalous and amplify its significance. I won't give an answer here because it would be exactly like one I have already given -- https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/70164/43092 – hide_in_plain_sight Jun 16 '21 at 16:56
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    It's mainly the people advocating, activating, executing, propagating, collaborating, justifying, and maintaining the scientific worldview that behave like the computers they love so much. They are the defenders of a cold reductionistic materialistic view on people and the world, creating the technique to maintain and control, thereby paying little respect to views that are divergent. This shows itself by the dramatic decrease of a once huge variety of colorfull cultures, biodiversity, languages, etc. Not to speak of the increase of Natural disasters. –  Jun 16 '21 at 19:33
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    Luckily, most people are not like that but the world suffers the consequences of a small technocratic, capitalistic (there are people with a capital of a small state!), elite. –  Jun 16 '21 at 19:37
  • @Methadont It seems to me that the managerial behavior, the managerial language, or what you call the technocratic attitude is propagating way beyond a restricted computer-elite : it is pervasive deeper and deeper down the layers of society, apparently subversive individuals or groups, the proponents of alternatives, are relying on the exact same channel of communications and communication attitudes as the managers of technocracy - e.g. start-uper of the green people-friendly revolution. – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 11:07
  • The power of technocracy has become so pervasive that adopting its tools and attitudes, in short embracing its ideology, at least for the time of the show, has become mandatory to survive. – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 11:08
  • The thousands of thousands of white collar workers in techno-structures are forced to adopt the robotic manners althought they are not part of the power, but only its mercenaires. Those who seemingly choose de-growth or other paths rely on inherited sources of income mostly. They can then show a subversive face, but in fact they just live on their piece of land, talk in the void and are totally inoffensive. – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 11:09
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    You can embrace technology though without embracing its worldview. Still stay human so to speak. This can't be said of many leaders and ones in the power of the of countries, corporations, and school systems. –  Jun 17 '21 at 13:30
  • I would say you can't embrace technology without the worldview, and you can't not embrace technology. We all are the worldview. – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 19:38
  • I guess that's why YouTube is so much more successful than broadcast TV of 50 years ago: there are fewer choices now. In my current job as a programmer, I do only 2 things 1. Solve unusual complex problems that require lots of understanding and experience, 2. Create new stuff with almost no guidance or specifications. Maybe you need to find a better job? – Scott Rowe Jul 10 '22 at 13:55

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No.

The pre-Black Death feudal era was incredibly regimented, with extremely limited social or physical mobility for most, & being largely born in to whatever job, & mobility only intergenerationally. We find something similar in many places, serfdom, restrictions on movement. Guild or family control of industries. It lasted longer in Japan. It's still present in Indian culture. And it was resurgent on the fascist corporatist model. This makes humans cogs in a machine, or cells in organs.

Lack of job autonomy is linked to range of negative outcomes. But increasing autonomy has been consistently prioritised - even at the cost of uncertainty and precariousness of employment, and need for retraining across most work lives. But people have consistently chosen that side of the balance, from leaving agricultural labouring jobs & domestic servitude for the mills, to the Gold Rush, to a consistent cultural focus on education once a society has rule-of-law & demographic transition to low birth rates. Coding is giving people unprecedented flexibility of where & when to work, & it's a very creative industry - because if a task can be automated, it will be. Automation has mainly taken working class jobs, but will increasingly take middle class jobs, but, mainly ones of rote drudgery. It doesn’t lead to less jobs, but does require new skills & retraining.

Durkheim the foundational sociologist, identified the key characteristic of religion as binding together, through shared attitudes to what is held sacred - both taboos and what is valued or set beyond beyond questioning. Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations theory links conservative views to a broader moral palette, that includes sanctity/purity, and respect, which left wing people don’t value or prioritise much at all. There is a positive place for some types of valuing tradition, of enforcing boundaries and norms like respect for others, and even some kinds of pressures to conform.

But, conservative views have been linked to threat perception and intolerance of ambiguity, propagating a culture of seeking and hyping up threats, and using that to justify violent oppression of difference, or out-groups. Racism and treating groups or individuals as ‘not human’ is the way to make humans have to be more like machines, and return to the fascist atavism of corporatism where some humans are treated as having no dignity or concerns, only there to serve others. Discussed in more detail here: How would you apply John Rawls "Theory of justice" to everyday decisions?

Glorfindel
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CriglCragl
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  • "return to the fascist atavism of corporatism where some humans are treated as having no dignity or concerns" – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 11:16
  • I could rephrase my question : are we seeing a clear return of fascist corporatism, where some - many - humans are treated as having no dignity or concerns, insofar as they are approched as machines to be programmed, repaired etc. ? Isn't any citizen, any employee, or any user of internet treated with no dignity when he is to comply with expectations of programmatic, rigid behaviors such as when filling online forms or going through standardized processes (recruitment process etc.)? – kiriloff Jun 17 '21 at 11:22
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    @kiriloff: I think my answer is already there - it's a risk, but generally the semblance of that (eg mill work) masks the opposite. I see us as directed towards a more hive-like or gestalt mind, and the tension as between emergence of that, facing the risk of a free-rider problem associated with group selection (group identity oppressing individuals, rather than serving them). See the discussion here for more https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/78788/is-the-tyrannicide-perpetrated-by-william-tell-morally-legitimate/78853#78853 – CriglCragl Jun 17 '21 at 14:02
  • Humans will definitely have to get smarter. If we wait for evolution to do that, it might not have enough material to work with. 99% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. 96% perished in one period about 500 million years ago, if i recall correctly. Anything can happen. – Scott Rowe Jul 10 '22 at 14:13