Downfalls of highly specialised Societies
Series on Arnold Gehlen
Impossibility of Social Balance
In societies that allow or maybe even force individuals into highly specialised fields of work, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a certain social balance. The conservation of this balance requires the skill of moral and mental adaption to multiple surroundings while specialisation forces people into smaller and smaller domains they to adapt to.
Because of this issue, psychologists even start to pathologise such over-adaptions. It doesn’t matter if we talk about personality disorders or something else, over-adaptation is this phenomenon of having skills that only work for very specific situations. Such situations, then, of course, do not represent the whole of society.
With social balances gone, social reality doesn’t give the individual person a sense of reality anymore. My action does not correspond to the consequence anymore. For example, I could lose my job for things that happen on the other side of the world. Additionally, through this, I lose the opportunity to learn from the consequences of my actions. For example, a professor could fail in his teaching duties and stay in his job while a farmer is simply dependent on his success.
It comes as no surprise that sociology emerges as an attempt to understand again this meta-structure outside of over-specialised domains.
Closing the Work Opportunities
Resulting of these over-specialised domains of work and the impossibility of staying open towards other domains of society, the work itself closes off. The constrained experiences we achieve lead to us not being able to really live our work but only do it.
Incomprehensibility
As mentioned, the possibility of putting our experience into a context that gives us a sense of reality become increasingly non-existent. In other words, we live constantly incomprehensible situations. There are three strategies to get along with it:
- Opportunism: surrender to every changing situation by living with them as they come because an undeviating attitude is impossible.
- Playing dead: in a sense, one could stop caring about what happens and just let the situations happen to oneself as they come without any resistance.
- Consumption: through an attitude of consumption, one can achieve a state of passivity. Even modern ways of consuming with a conscience are just another, more luxurious state of consumption. Generally, this leads to a consumer society with a “duty to consume”.
Missing Reference
Finally, this results in a society where no guiding principles in terms of orientation or support for the individual because mental reference systems are constantly changing.
That leaves us in a state where we can only fall back into a humanistic model of social interactions. That means actions need to become emotive conceptually unprecise. The only ethical worldview that comes out of it is the one of pure acceptance.
Of course, this attitude of pure acceptance match perfectly with the aforementioned passivity through trivialisation and easing.
