We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals. This illusion helps the individual to remain unaware of his insecurity, but this is all the help such an illusion can give. Basically, the self of the individual is weakened, so that he feels powerless and extremely insecure. He lives in a world in which he has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has become instrumentalized, where he has become a part of the machine that his hands have built. He thinks, feels, and wills what he believes he is supposed to think, feel, and will; in this very process he loses his self upon which all genuine security of a free individual must be built.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
The human being as such has no use.
Conversely, whatever has a use is not, as such, a human being.
Human beings as human beings are altogether useless.
That is the dignity of human beings, a dignity that calls out to be recognized and honored by all, always. People as people are not there to be employed for one purpose or another, whether to produce armaments, provide tasty meals for rich cannibals, or any other end.
To be unemployable is the mark of the human being as such.
Unfortunately, however, in our contemporary global capitalist society to find oneself among the unemployable is precisely to find oneself cast by that society into loss not only of financial income but also of one’s very human honor and dignity.
Put just a bit differently, those who are unemployable in what passes for a world today are treated as though they were refuse. No longer good for anything, they are treated as though they were just hanging around wasting space, waiting till they can be be thrown out with the rest of the garbage.
That includes many of the elderly. Eventually, it includes all of them. If the elderly are not considerate enough to get themselves taken out by heart-attacks, strokes, accidents, or suicide, sooner or later they all become a sheer burden upon such a sorry society as ours today.
* * *
The threshold of the lips, which are strangers to dichotomy and oppositions. Gathered one against the other but without any possible suture, at least of a real kind. They do not absorb the world into or through themselves, provided they are not misused and reduced to a means of consumption or consummation. They offer a shape of welcome but do not assimilate, reduce, or swallow up. A sort of doorway to voluptuousness? They are not useful, except as that which designates a place, the very place of uselessness, at least as it is habitually understood. Strictly speaking, they serve neither conception nor jouissance. Is this the mystery of feminine identity? Of its self-contemplation, of this very strange word of silence? Both the threshold and reception of exchange, the sealed-up secret of wisdom, belief, and faith in all truths?
— Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference
In general, it [l’ecriture feminine, “feminine writing”] is a writing which explores relationships and establishes connections, rather than striving for mastery and dominance.
— From my 1998 Beijing lectures on postmodernism
Though it is not politically correct to say so — at least in the original sense of the phrase politically correct, the sense it had before we were robbed of it — what are called “infertile” women also tend to fall into the category of the no-longer employable and, hence, worthless. That is so regardless of the causes of any given woman’s infertility. In our pseudo-world today, so-called infertile women (which is to say women who either never could or no longer can be used to give birth to babies) are useless, deserving of nothing more than being trashed.
At least that is so unless those “unfertile” women are still useful for something besides giving birth to new workers — useful for such things as housecleaning, sex, childcare, and the like. If they are still capable of being so employed, with or (far more often) without wages, they can still be counted as worth at least a dollop of respect.
Luce Irigaray
* * *
Never treat humanity, whether in the person of oneself or the person of another, as a means only, but always also as an end in itself.
— Immanuel Kant
Human beings as such are unemployable. To treat them as no more than tools to be employed to one’s own purposes is to violate them. It is to deny their humanity and reduce them to the level of mere means for accomplishing purposes other than just being themselves.
Is it permissible to treat human beings both as ends in themselves and as means?
Kant apparently thought so.
In his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant offers three different formulations of what he says is the one and only truly “categorical imperative.” He calls it that, because it is the one and only thing we are all categorically — which is to say absolutely or unconditionally — morally commanded to do. That imperative defines morality itself, and anything that violates that commandment condemns itself irremediably.
That second of Kant’s three formulations of the categorical imperative is the most famous one. I have given it above, as the epigraph for this section. Notice that in that second formulation Kant writes that we should never treat humanity, whether in ourselves or others, as a means only, that is, as no more than a means, something merely to be employed for realizing some purpose or range of purposes.
Insofar as we rely on one another, as we constantly do and must do, we cannot avoid depending on one another to help accomplish individual and communal goals. When there is an electrical problem in my home, I call an electrician; for plumbing problems, I call a plumber; for trouble with my car, I go to a mechanic; and so on. In so doing, I treat other people as means.
None of that necessarily violates Kant’s injunction, however.
What does violate it is when I relate to myself or others solely in such ways, without recognizing and honoring the dignity of the defining humanity that is in each of us alike, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.
Our current global capitalist market system, which dismisses as worthless whatever is unemployable, does not acknowledge it. Indeed, in its very foundations and in its day-to-day actuality, that system violates Kant’s imperative. That system is not possible without the perpetration of such violence to humanity.
That global system thereby condemns itself beyond all possibility of appeal.
Therefore, it goes to hell.
Immanuel Kant