To call someone or something useless is a universal pejorative, but consider how that word came to exist. Also consider how uselessness functions as a descriptor. You have there the working mechanics of current human society and corporate structures.
The idea of “use” is a functional definition. Things have various uses. They’re used for some things and not for others. They have additional uses in adaption to things for which they weren’t originally designed.
Useless things are those with no practical value. They were a luxury in prehistoric cultures. The ancient humans had very little margin for error, particularly with their human resources. Tribal members were useful according to their skills. Useful things were synonymous with survival.
This aptitude-based approach was socially valuable. Skills and talents were directed where they were most useful. In these early societies, very real needs enforced social efficiency and encouraged the search for better ways of doing things.
“Use” is an ideas and knowledge-based expression in the most literal sense. If you have no idea how to use something, it’s actually useless. A limited knowledge base will routinely fail to understand both use and uselessness. This can apply to whole cultures. The standardized, personality-free middle-class culture, for example, is routinely provided with a knowledge base that is created as a result of being a culture of that type.
The idea of what’s useful is therefore predicated by a mindset. The Sitcom Society is based on purely theoretical knowledge of a norm. “Everybody does…” is the epitaph of a society which has got itself lost in uselessness.
Try goosestepping along with this:
Childhood- What’s useful is what everybody else likes, toys, fun, games, friends, pets, etc.
Puberty- What’s useful is fulfilling a media dream of youth usually written by middle-aged alcoholics and market research, often equally out of step. The shopping list is other toys, different fun, different games, and different friends.
Adulthood- The recycling kicks in- Kids, marriage, and success as defined by the norm with shopping list attached. Tack on a compulsory social life, like you had a choice.
Yes, it’s cultural dictatorship which simply translates itself into what it sees as normal. The result is uselessness on a colossal scale.
Consider:
Each stage of life involves social compulsions, whether they’re useful or not.
“Useful” translates into what fits the shopping list.
Career largely translates into “useful to others”, a reasonable position until it’s actually defined.
The definition of useless by this society is therefore anything outside the norm.
The nasty little trick etymology has played on human thinking is that “use” is also a matter of perspective. A word based unambiguously on pure functionality has become a subjective value which can spread like a disease.
The result is that over the years the following things have been described as useless by someone or other by the current society:
- Anything new
- Art
- Children
- Ethics
- Health
- History
- Honesty
- Imagination
- Intelligence
- Marriage
- Metaphysics
- Opinions
- People
- Philosophy
- Science
- Sincerity
- Spiritual experience
- The future
In short, the current mainstream society is quite capable of valuing a rock as more important than any type of possible expression of higher thought. It’s like thinking with your skin. Being hit by a rock is more important than having the brains to avoid the rock. The rock is considered real, therefore valued higher than anything else on a subjective basis.
(Try finding objective values in this mess, and you’ll get chaotic interpretations of objectives, usually defaulting to norms of objectivity. Everything is normal, even the things that kill you, if you grow up in an unthinking society.)
The rise of uselessness
The evolution of uselessness began approximately with the rise of the first civilizations. It was the parasitic result of luxury. The first identifiably insane societies date back to the beginning of recorded history.
The Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese were the first societies to manifest the symptoms of uselessness:
- Megalomania
- Commercial greed
- Disenfranchisement of the public
- Deprivation
- Poverty
- Slums
- Large scale crime to the detriment of societies
- Corruption
- Denial of knowledge
These were “useless” to the older, far more stable societies which produced the basis of modern technologies and social standards.
- Megalomaniacs had a good chance of being ignored or killed. In some Native American societies, you could be a war chief, but you’d be doing it on your own if the warriors decided you were an idiot.
- There was nothing to be greedy with.
- Society members weren’t just enfranchised- They were a real and serious threat, if they decided to do something about unacceptable conditions. The French and Russian revolutions were the macro version of a history of smashed skulls around the planet.
- People weren’t deprived of necessities, simply because they were also the providers of necessities. Try translating that one into context with the modern society.
- Poverty was avoidable, not mandatory for the vast majority of people. If you wanted to avoid poverty, you just got up and left. Now, poverty is everywhere you can go on Earth.
- Slums were unknown for most of human history. They’re a product of civilization. The “primitive” dwellings found by archaeologists show that if not fancy, they were practical, properly built, and could house large numbers of people and animals.
- Crime was punished, severely. Large scale crime never got started until the early civilizations.
- Corruption is best known from the Roman and Chinese civilizations, although the others tried hard. Survival-based societies don’t tolerate it at all, civilized societies apparently think it’s quite normal, however much it costs the entire society.
- The statement “knowledge is power” has a lot to answer for. Give knowledge to an idiot and withhold it from a genius, and what’s likely to happen? This world is a stagnant answer to that question, which I sincerely wish will one day be rhetorical.
The fall of uselessness
With the evolution of uselessness comes the evolution of social entropy.
The idea of social participation, for example, was a cornerstone to older societies, which couldn’t afford useless people. Now, it’s a joke, and a particularly bad one.
The “work ethic” was originally a social character reference to one’s participation in society. Now we have millions of ridiculous self-proclaimed workaholics doing work of no value at all and doing it very badly.
Honesty was the best policy until some moron created the Liar Culture. Honesty is now so rare that if it were a commodity it’d be trading at incredible amounts per word. The social result is a global collection of useless liars with the intellects of underachieving cockroach shit creating endless waste trying to find facts.
Crime, the most truly socially useless of all human activities, is now a way of life for hundreds of millions of people. It’s now socially entrenched, a generational gene marker. Crime is the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, the greatest cost for businesses, and the greatest cost for consumers.
Trust, the most basically useful of all social functions, whereby you and your neighbour trust each other not to kill or rob each other, is now a true luxury. How can you claim to have a society where people simply cannot afford to trust each other at all? It was one of the most useful of all social skills. It created tribes and cultures. Now it can barely survive a trip to the mall.
The huge irony for modern humanity is that the “primitive” societies were in many ways cultures of ideas. The “useless” ideas of the past are the basis of the present.
It always amuses me to see some “here and now” super-realist in a suit, usually a sycophant or self-promoter claiming to know a damn thing about anything.
- They base everything they say on a set of values based on a society which only exists in media storyboards.
- Their social status comes from a cookie cutter derived from the 1950s.
- Their knowledge is based on systematically force-fed information, for which they pay.
- They’re superficial about everything because their knowledge base is so poor. They couldn’t hold an in-depth conversation on any subject for more than 5 minutes outside their own limited experience.
- They conform to every peer group value, mindlessly subordinating themselves to any group.
- They don’t even have the ability to pretend to be individuals. (There are so many bad actors in business that there really should be a corporate Oscar.)
- They worship the “here and now”, and where does “here and now” go? Yet they’ll simultaneously dismiss any consideration of the future as blue sky.
The evolution of uselessness has produced useless societies full of useless people, unable to contribute and doing their meaningless work for no particular reason. You’ll find actual committees spending days changing words to their synonyms, doing things whether they need doing or not. Useful, they can never be.
The other thing to know about civilizations is that they invariably fall. The useless elements in the Egyptian, Roman and Chinese civilizations destroyed them. The useless elements in France and Russia were the catalysts for their own violent ends. They couldn’t undo the damage caused by the useless parasites running them.
Just think- After this slopfest of a civilization finally buries itself under The Last Text Message, another, even more grandiosely useless civilization will arise. Nice to have something to look forward to, isn’t it?