Systems and slaves

Man creates systems but ultimately he becomes the victim, their slave.  
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Years ago, when I was in Delhi, a clerk in the Central Government Secretariat, ended his life, leaving a note that he was tired of being a machine. One can sympathise with him, as the success of a mass society in terms of material gains depends upon man being increasingly mechanised. The problem of man’s mechanical reaction to the outside world has become one of the bogeymen of this century.

Slawomir Mrozek, one of the most eminent Polish playwrights, has dealt with this subject in the most interesting manner. He makes the bogeyman an institution in his play On a journey.

A traveller finds the post-office employees standing erect at certain intervals along a country road, forming a “wireless” telegraph line by shouting telegraphic messages to each other. The puzzled traveller asks his coachman about the efficacy of this system.

He replies: “Sir, this is better than the telegraph with poles and wires. After all, there is a possibility of live men being more intelligent and there is no storm damage to repair and a great saving of timber and timber is in short supply, you know.”

Before he could recover from the shocking reply, the traveller finds “the transmitter work”.

Heard from a distance, it resembles the cry of birds on a moor, but when the nearest telegraph man receives the cry with his hands cupped to his ear, he passes it with a resonant voice, “Fa……. ther…..dea ….d ……fune ral….. Wed…. nes…. day.” Even the message of death takes a sterile, meaninglessness in the mouths of the “transmitting poles” and the coachman’s “May his soul rest in peace” sounds grotesquely irrelevant.

There is another play called A fact, in which, a young wife confesses to the priest that she has just discovered, purely by accident at the breakfast table, that her husband was artificial, made of plasticine.

The husband, a pillar of bureaucracy, noticing his wife’s sudden dismay, asks her about it. She does not tell him about her discovery because of an apprehension that he himself may not know about it and also, if he does but remains oblivious to the situation, she worries how it will affect her. So she decides to reconcile herself to living with a lie for the rest of her life at the side of an artificial man and who is also the artificial father of her children.

At one level, these plays look like fanciful dreams that have little bearing on reality. But at another level, the situations described are the outcome of logical reasoning. What makes the situations unreal is merely the fact that Mrozek has not stopped with his reasoning process at a point at which the sense of reality, or commonsense, would suggest a stop.

Rather, he goes on reasoning, supporting his argument with incontestable evidence, that live men are more intelligent than the poles, they can crouch and protect themselves during a storm, while the pole just stands and remains standing until it breaks. The artificiality of a man’s reactions can strike his mate with the suddenness of a revelation. The way of logically pursuing a line of thought at the expense of a real situation, a delightful tendency in the reasoning of children, is Mrozek’s strongest device. What he reveals in precisely this way in the two plays is how the bureaucratic and social apparatus of a nation integrates people into its process on the higher (the plasticine men) and lower (telegraph transmitters) levels. The apparatus created by man has changed its nature and it has become the master to give orders. Man creates systems but ultimately he becomes the victim, their slave.

The Nobel winner for Physics this year has also this apprehension that AI may take over, man becoming its tool.

parthasarathyindira@gmail.com