People We don't Need

The idea that there's a common good is at the root of many evils. One such evil is to speak of other people in terms of utility. We define two groups of people: one being us, and the other being them. Then we start discussing them as if their purpose for existing is to serve us.

This type of thinking was on full display in a recent TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari the other day. After some back and forth, he concluded that we don't need the vast majority of people. There's a surplus population that we don't know what to do about.

Having talked about people in terms of their utility for politicians and industry owners, we must assume that the common good is whatever serves this class of people the best. Mr. Harari is also part of this protected group. After all, it's thinkers like himself who have to sit down and decide what to do with the surplus population. Harari is one of the important guys.

This illustrates how the word we, when used by politicians and the likes of Mr. Harari, only applies to us when some sacrifice is implied. When they tell us that we have to give up comforts for some reason or other, it's about us. When they say that we must come up with ways to make the world a better place, it's about them thinking and us doing whatever they come up with.

One way to counter this kind of evil is to use the same structure to our own language. We should consistently talk of politicians and their hired intellectuals as they and speak of ourselves as us. When they say that we must make sacrifices, we should ask ourselves what are they up to now? When there's a war, we should never refer to the war as our war. Wars belongs exclusively to them.

The fact that Mr. Harari thinks of us as surplus that needs to be managed should be an eyeopener to us all. If they already think in these terms, why should we trust them with anything? How likely is it that they will act to our advantage when they think of us as useless eaters? Aren't they more likely to come up with ways to cull the surplus?

Yuval Noah Harari

By Daniel Naber - File:Yuval_Noah_Harari.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link