The Technological Basis of Stupidity

Abstract

A major cultural factor in determining the amount and nature of work performed a society is the level and type of technology applied to the exploitation of its natural resources. Basically, technology is that aspect of culture which encompasses the tools as well as the techniques people use in meeting their material needs. It functions through time in its interrelations to other aspects of society so its significance must be appreciated as means to maladapt a society not only to its natural environment but to itself as well to the point of being tyrannically dehumanizing. Regardless of the level of sophistication of its technology, when a group outstrips the carrying capacity of its environment, starvation, disease and/or war will follow. This is a basic principle of life, and technology cannot alter it. Sophisticated devices and methods may expand the capacity of the environment to sustain a certain way of life, but when these new limits are exceeded, the same predictable result is inevitable but worse. In fact, without some guiding sense of the long-term impact of technoillogical exploitation of natural resources, technology serves only to build up a culture to a bigger, neurotic paradoxically induced crash when it comes.