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.A peasant wakesup at sunrise and goes into the fields to perform many different tasks,under the open sky, working together with his animals.And suddenlythis peasant finds himself in a sooty factory building, in front of amachine tool that requires of him just one repetitive operation.In their daily life, people now had to conform to a strict schedule; inthe assembly line environment even their individual movements werepre-determined and controlled.At work, if you thought or dreamed, you risked being injured orfired; you could no longer appear in any way different from the othersand had to wear a uniform.Thus the worker lost his unique personalitytraits.His personal experience, his thoughts and knowledge were nolonger relevant; and yet this is exactly what the vertical outlook is basedon.People's lives were separated from nature; their environment wasurban, almost wholly artificial, that is to say, machine-made.People had no time to talk or think, but this did not appear to be anygreat loss.Working in a thoughtless and artificial industrial environment,they found out all they needed to know from newspapers.Newspaperswere written in a language of clichs.A pre-fabricated and industriallyreproduced part of speech, a clich reduces the range of human feelingsto one, most often negative and destructive, emotion.Yet clichs arevery convenient as they can "fit" every circumstance, thus freeing peoplefrom the need to think.Soon the opinion of one person wasindistinguishable from the opinion of another.Language itself lost its149 Matthew Malysparkle as sentences were assembled out of clichs and were no longerable to transmit feelings adequately.As a result, people becameemotionally detached, more alienated from their own hearts.In the process of production the human being, once a proud creator,became the weakest link.Working with the machine tool, he did notmove fast enough, he daydreamed, and he wanted to talk.How to makehumans work better?A NEW CANDIDATE FOR THE POSITION OF GOD: THEMACHINE TOOLThere once was a God who created the world, and created people in it.Each person had his place and his destiny: the nobles were destined to benobles, and the peasants had to grow crops.But a peasant turned factoryowner did not grow rich because of God, as this was clearly theconsequence of his own ability.What was emerging was a societycreated by people, not by God.Prior to the Industrial Age, human life took place in a setting createdby God, among trees and animals, and under the sun and the stars.Now,returning from work, a man sees the roof of his car.Indeed, people livein a world that is entirely created by machine tools.When was the lasttime you saw a wild animal or walked the earth barefoot? Things werebeing created by the thousands, they were everywhere, and the machinetool was the creator of everything.In a very short time, the Industrial Age created an explosion inproductivity and immeasurably increased human power to influence theEarth.If before only Zeus could blow up a mountain, now, with theinvention of dynamite, humans could easily do it.For thousands of yearsof human history, the only human who could fly was Icarus, but nowhumans can part the seas and make rivers flow backwards though notby themselves, but thanks to the machine tool.Scientific knowledge wasadvancing so fast that people said, We can understand, change, andcontrol everything on Earth. And that meant that God of Raphael andBach was no longer seen as Creator or Master of the Universe.There wasnow a different God.That which was created by the old God, the God ofindividual responsibility, was swiftly retreating before the machine tool:the Earth s surface was being covered up with asphalt.150 Russia As It Is: Transformation of a Lose/Lose SocietyIt was not Man who was the new creator: in fact, the individualproduced nothing.The new creator was the machine tool.And humansserved the machine tool, adapted their lives to the machine tool and livedin the world that the machine tool created.Now we realize that the machine tool not only resembles God, butappears to be even better! God did not make people the masters ofnature.The machine tool accomplished that in an amazingly short time.God created many things, each different from the others.The machinetool produced the greatest miracle since Creation: a whole lot of things,each identical to the next.Some of the things created by God were alive,and thus hard to control.All of the things created by the machine toolwere inanimate, predictable, controllable, and immediately useful.God did not succeed in making people live according to Hiscommandments; indeed, He could hardly get people to pray one hour aweek, but now, for at least ten hours a day, the workers completelysubordinated their lives to the dictates of the machine tool.Religion has God, the Mystery of Creation, and a World created byGod.For the worker, the Collective, assembled for the purpose ofworking with the machine tool, became a substitute for the World
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