The Human Machine, Part I

By Robert Ringer

I often remind readers that abstract concepts such as universal principles, human nature, and philosophical insights are constants. Those of us who make a living by delving into these topics recognize (or should recognize) that we don’t invent anything. Our job is to try to make sense out of life and communicate our conclusions to others in the simplest possible manner. To accomplish this, I attempt to offer fresh slants on timeless subjects in the hopes of helping others see things they might otherwise miss.

From Plato to Will Durant … from Epictetus to the Dalai Lama … from Montaigne to Eric Hoffer … the rules of life never change. In a world of chaos and madness, it’s nice to know there are certitudes that not even the ACLU can eradicate.

All of this came to mind yet again when I recently read a book written nearly a hundred years ago by Arnold Bennett. The book, The Human Machine, admittedly is not written in a reader-friendly style — but Bennett’s approach to an age-old idea is quite clever.

By the “Human Machine,” Bennett was referring to that part of a person that consists of brain and muscle. The brain intellectualizes, conceptualizes, and gives orders to the muscles. It has the power to override instincts. But the brain and the ego are not the same thing. Bennett believed that “your brain is the servant of the ego.”

In an ongoing effort to strip mankind of any last vestiges of a connection to a Universal Power Source, researchers of late have been frantically trying to show that abstracts such as the ego and the soul are nothing more than physical aspects of the brain. Their objective is to move the ego and soul out from under the umbrella of metaphysics and fit them neatly into the Human Machine.

It was of great interest to me, then, that a hundred years ago Arnold Bennett was addressing many of the same issues I have been writing about over the past three decades. Which is not all that surprising, given that the foundational principles of life never change. For example, Bennett cautioned readers not to base their actions “on the workings of an ideal universe,” and instead to “base them on this universe.”

In my book Looking Out for #1, I discussed this point at length under the moniker of the Is’s versus Ought-to’s Theory, which states: The degree of complications in a person’s life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is.

In other words, reality is what it is, and it’s up to us to discover it. Our perception of reality may or may not have any connection to reality itself. While all this may sound obvious, each and every one of us is guilty, at one time or another, of confusing reality with the perception of reality.

In Part II of this article, we’ll examine how an inaccurate perception of reality can cause massive friction in our Human Machines, and we’ll take a look at how best to prevent this attrition catalyst from gaining a foothold.

Next – The Human Machine, Part II – Transference