The Indian mystic Osho, who left us several thousand books on the art of growing human consciousness, alerted us to the risks of robotic somnambulism, a condition in which people start sleepwalking through life in a robot-like trance.
For example, during our morning commute, upon arriving at our destination, we often have no recollection of how we got there. We were on autopilot. In fact, upon reflection, our entire life feels just like the morning rush-hour commute.
Gareth Morgan, in his book “Images of Organization,” invites us to explore how metaphors guide the design of organizations. With the success of manufacturing in the United States, we have modeled our entire society on the metaphor of the well-oiled machine. This metaphor has inspired the design of our schools, our hospitals; indeed, all our institutions.
The benefits in efficiency and orderliness are impressive. We have engineered system after system to operate like a machine.
But little did we realize we were building the proverbial Frankenstein monster.
There have been several unintended consequences of the machine metaphor as the blueprint for American society. In a utilitarian ethos -- in business and in relationships alike -- we are treated as replaceable parts to be expended when inconvenient.
Let us consider the toll this metaphor has exacted on our military missions, our schools and our health care. In a mechanistic society, we lose the capacity to feel, and we replace empathy with analysis, creativity with efficiency and a balanced life with workaholism.
As Osho says, people cannot relax, as they develop an “internal condemner” that is constantly criticizing them for not doing enough.
Domestically, modeling society on the machine metaphor has eroded the humanistic foundation of our educational system and our healthcare institutions.
From childhood, we are molded into becoming robots. Our schools and universities are modeled after the factory. In manufacturing, high quality is achieved by standardization. In education, it is the precise opposite; high quality is achieved by encouraging everyone to think and feel differently.
In replicating the model of quality from manufacturing, we have created not schools where vitality and curiosity thrive, but sterile factories of curriculum delivery and standardized testing.
Many people are drawn to careers in health care because of caregiving motives. But countless healthcare workers in the U.S. experience an acute tension between caregiving and the pressures for measurable productivity. The healthcare system has morphed into an economic machine with a profit-making agenda of its own, while caregiving becomes secondary.
Internationally, too, we expect other cultures to also operate like well-oiled machines. We floundered in Iraq, blindly believing in our analysis that we can simply change the machine operator (i.e., Saddam Hussein) and that the machine would continue to run smoothly.
In Afghanistan, again we forgot, as we did in Iraq, that a collectivistic and communal culture, based on a tribal ethos, does not fit neatly into our mechanistic projections. We are delusional in thinking that we will win hearts and minds while engaged in so-called precision bombing through drones that inevitably kill civilians.
Collectively, this mechanistic fallacy has destroyed our understanding of cultural complexity and has cost us precious lives and trillions of dollars in failed missions internationally.
In future columns, we will explore in greater depth the awakening of our human consciousness from our robotic somnambulism to building an educational system that enlightens and a healthcare system that heals.