Something to Think On

I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano. It’s beautifully written. It was published in 1952 and is Kurt’s farsighted portrait of a society where machines have taken over the jobs of humans, leaving most of the population with nothing to do.

However, in the story, you can’t do “nothing”, so if your intelligence tests don’t define you as one who would be good at managing the machines, you are sentenced to life as a member of the lower caste. The lower caste is given most everything they need, including a TV in every room of their home and all the latest electronic gadgets, and kept busy doing grunt work. The challenge for them is to invent something meaningful to do in their lives. They reminisce about “when work was meaningful”.

Meanwhile the main character, who is among the ruling class, becomes painfully aware of the illusion of his existence and decides he’s not really living at all, just managing ( and not very well) to put up with his artificial existence.

It’s interesting that Kurt could see so far into the future and predict the real internal issues of our time. The book is 341 pages and what really struck me was this tiny part:

The main character is being questioned (with the help of a lie detector) as to his real opinions and motives, there is some question among the judges as to whether the lie detector is working. They ask him to state something false. He does and the detector goes to false. Then they ask him to say something true and he says “The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.” The lie detector agrees he is telling the truth.

I thought wow! A rare gem of truth set in a circle of high quality story telling, and really, something to think on.