Will we reject being reduced to someone else's "function" and ""dog"?

 

car heater options

floor,
floor and cabin,
windshield and floor,
cabin only
All of them tied to a fan and a temperature gauge.
And the driver selects some combination of force of fan, temperature and direction of heat or cool air.
"User friendly" is the operative phrase in an "operative culture". And "operative culture" is the foundational principle in a world where individuals are valued and measured by their "operative contribution" which is again measured and valued on one or both of two options:

1: what have, can, will you do for me?
2: how much have, can, will you "make/charge/invest"?

Of course, this model operates "on" individuals, families, organizations and nations. As "assumed" to be ethically and collectively normal and therefore based on a consensus from the "bottom up", the premise needs to be unpacked.

Does the model, for example, serve the fundamental needs and aspirations of individuals?
Is the competition embedded in the model a healthy one for individual humans and the planet?
Does the model imitate and/or emulate and/or enhance nature?
Is the model sustainable?
Are the thought leaders enmeshed in the rewards and benefits of the model and therefore granite in their resistance to amend or to shift priorities?
Is the global population impaled on the sword of our own design?
Is there a more life-enhancing premise and model that will open opportunity for lives of dignity, respect and honourable work/activity to all?

Some will read the above as a scathing indictment of capitalism and the inevitable endorsement of socialism or, worse, communism.
Their emotional and then intellectual reactivity is in part based on a binary either-or assumption of the limited range of options.
For the purposes of study, Aristotle divided all of nature into phyla and genus. Definitions of everything gave a level of meaning and understanding that could/would be shared, taught, researched and ultimately embedded in the cultural mind-set.
And over centuries, authorities educated in the combined Socratic/Aristotelian model ("I know nothing so I question everything"/these are the names and identifying features of") have propagated both content and method to aspiring students in all disciplines.
Artists experiencing a degree of both constriction from and rebellion against these disciplines. Mathematicians and scientists also stretched their basic learning into their soaring yet disciplined flights into the unknown, the imaginative and the creative.
And then following these expansive equations, manuscripts, canvases and  theories, a whole range of implementers took them and ran with many of them into the development of "operative" models that could affect some "result" in extending or ameliorating living conditions, or in generating profits and investments/dividends.
As the implementers created/designed/built, they merged brings like craft guilds into mass-production factories which continued to refine both their processes and their output.
Ethics, following these developments, imitated the "perfectionism" that became the operative ideal in production, health care, communication, and a new level of employment known as management.
Naturally, trying to merge the perfectionism of highly tuned machines with the ordering of human leadership, management in the new locus for both design and enhanced profit, is and will continue to be a project fraught with the inevitable "irreconcilable differences".
Nevertheless, stubborn as we humans are, we have pressed on with our fixation, a compulsive-addictive pursuit of manipulation and control of each human worker, in orders to demonstrate the absolute unshakeable worthiness of our historic achievements through the deployment of a now industrial-scientificmanagement-
medical-legal
military-informational
cyber-security
inflation of the original model...all of it carrying the weight of ethical case-studies...
based on a hierarchy of the value of human life.
Experts trained in more and more specialized, narrow and "in-depth" analysis, exemplified clearly in cancer diagnosis and treatment, are expected to make decisions that afford treatment to some while denying it to others.
And they are expected to accomplish this feat with a "board" of experts from associated disciplines all of whom have been educated on the highest value been assigned to empirical evidence.
That evidence is then weighed on such scales as projected longevity, will and support to live, attitude to continue living...etc.
There is a real risk in this collision of method of assessment and distribution of resources, not to mention the very act of "ranking" accessibility, that a gestalt of the multiple factors that "come" with each human being, including a full biography, with interests and passions, mentors and supports, spiritual aspirations and life goals will not be incorporated into the decision.
The personal biases of the decsion-makers themselves are also likely to be overlooked, as are the inherently impactful observations of those who are familiar with the subject under consideration.
Ethics and morality are not reduce able to manufacturing tweeking;
they are also not reducible to 140 characters in a tweet;
they are not reducible to the philosophic schools of thought in which the ethicists have been schooled nor the faith communities nor the ecenomic or academic or the political "status" of the individual.
A simple anecdote used in another of these spaces:
An academic ethicist, when informed of a Cambridge study attempting to find a causal link between the 2008 financial crisis and a surge in make testosterone, was totally dismissive even if the thought.
We all need to become intimately acquainted with our life ambitions and purposes, not only our career choices.
And we also must resist any and all incursions into our self-respect that are based on reductionisms to function.
We are so much more than paycheque   and an office, a title and an investment portfolio.
And we must also resist all variety of attempts to reduce us into any of the pejorative roles that so glibly slip off the tonques odour colleagues:
"ally"..."kiss-ass"..."climber"...."indolent" ..."cost"..."revenue"..."policy wonk"..."accountant"..."civil rights advocate"..."school teacher"...."drill sargeant"..."secretary"...."labrat"...
Any of these can be reductions in the eyes and mind of another...and that 'tone' we have all heard.
Dismissals are really colonial.
Differences are no excuse for isolation  or alienation...
Put-down's are emotional abuse inflicted by the neurotic...and each if us have been at different times colonizer and colonized....

It is up to those of us who are, have been and will continue to be silent in the face of attitudes, expressions and actions that demean, insult, alienate and ostracize to take the kind of action which we would prefer not ever to have to take. As Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us,

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Bullies are not going to stop bullying, unless and until the rest of us make them stop. And we are more likely to do that by refusing to tolerate their oppression in all of its many faces and forms.

The racist forms of bullying are grabbing headlines as they must. However, the obscure, unreported incidents that take place every day in each of out lives, with impunity,  dismissively comprise the fabric of a culture seeking a "dog" to kick. We must not allow ourselves to be that “dog”….there will always be someone seeking to “kick”…

And such a culture will witness not only a  pandemic of a virus but an  endless endemic of alienation and the anger and hate it spawns.