For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an overarching rule for my professional activities: harm none. This is usually pretty simple when working in IT and software – code and file servers don’t generally harm people. Technology is inert (and arguably not defined) until a person uses it causally. Recently, however, a friend of mine asked if I could ever work in national defense with this perspective, which seeded a lively discussion. I determined that I probably could. This article examines that reasoning.
In my introduction to this series of articles, I mentioned that I was firmly lower-middle class in a western-style industrialized democracy. In this article, I discuss the causes and effects of that classification, and of social stratification on the whole. In western-style democratic societies, class is a difficult topic to discuss. Most will recognize the labels and categories, but few can outline a formula to make these classifications. This article investigates the social construction of class, and the effects of those class systems on a person’s standard of living.
Anyone who’s lived in a western-style industrialized environment is familiar with the ubiquitous promises of the modern age. Basic expectations include success through cultivated talent, innate intelligence, and careful planning. More lofty goals include years of exciting travel, financial windfalls, “the great American novel”, raising two and a half unnaturally well-behaved children, getting a record contract, or retiring at age 62 to a farm with plenty of horses and chickens. Modernity promises extraordinary returns from ordinary investments. Reality stands in stark contrast. This rampant idealism stops one step short of promising all-out immortality. Modernity is a religion, which I examine in this article.
It should be assumed that most rational adults posses some internal definition of truth, whether physical, spiritual, mental, or by some combination thereof. Without these innate understandings, no bearing could be had on fundamental social constructs which form and are formed by language, cognition, and interaction between people. I can’t construct this description to encompass all people in all places at all times; in fact I doubt that such an objective summation of the “truth of truth” can be known.