What clicked and made you have a different mindset? How long did it take to start changing and how long was the transformation? Did it last or is it an ongoing back and forth between your old self? I want to know your transformation and success.
Any kind of change, big or small. Anything from weight loss, world view, personality shift, major life change, single change like stopped smoking or drinking soda to starting exercising or going back to school. I want to hear how people’s life were a bit or a lot better through reading and your progress.
TIA 🙏
Two Vonnegut novels—God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano—fundamentally shifted the way I view the world.
The novels primarily discuss the economy, automation, and human wellfare. When I was young I defaulted to a laissez-faire economic mindset, and basically assumed automation and technology would always make our quality of lives improve. I was very much in the Ayn Rand club on economic and moral issues. These books were ultimately what made me reflect and consider the other “spiritual” (in the sense Vonnegut uses the term) aspects of human wellfare. Vonnegut was my introduction to humanist thought, and I owe the vast majority of my personal moral development to the influence of these two books.
Wow, stunning answer. Huge Vonnegut fan too btw.
I hated every particle of Playor Piano when I read it and still do today. Granted my field is automation and I am an engineer.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
I would love to have the lives of those “workers”. Think of what you could do with a life where your job required nothing out of you. Go have 8 kids, learn conversational French, become the world champion at the knife game. They start life on near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and the author had the gall to heavily handed compare them to chattle slaves. Yeah I am sure people getting sold for sex or getting whipped to harvest cotton all day are really comparable in lifestyle to people who are bored at work.
I spent several years working on manufacturing and logistics automation, and I urge you to reconsider your interpretation of it.
Just from your comment, you totally missed the point of the book. It’s not anti-automation. Your analysis is the exact false binary Vonnegut is interrogating. The book is actually a response to the exact attitude expressed in on your comment.
I’m happy to go into it, but Vonnegut is the master; no one will say it like he does, but you have to be open to it. If you react defensively, you’ll come away thinking he’s just anti technology, and that he must be wrong because technology is good. If you reread it with an open mind, or even reflect upon it again, you might find particularly important insights for the likes of you and me.
Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true. Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making
I don’t fault your interpretation. There is a reason Vonnegut uses the term “spiritual” throughout the book. At least for me, I would describe my understanding of the book to have required a spiritual/moral shift before I could really understand the image being painted.
I also read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater first of the two, so maybe that colored how I interpreted Player Piano. It is a more direct argument that humans need to be cared for, independent of their economic utility.
So when I read Player Piano, it didn’t strike me as an argument against automation (which, being an engineer myself, I am entirely for), but moreso as a warning that freedom from labor doesn’t alone make a perfect life. Especially in the mid-20th century context Vonnegut was writing in, it’s an argument against the “American” style of automation, wherein you displace people from their jobs and discard them entirely. They serve no further purpose to your economy, and since your society is tightly adjoined to the economy, they serve to purpose to society…
So it’s not really a book about automation, if if I said that in my first post. It’s a book about failings of American culture, which happens to be revealed through automation. It’s about the inconsistency of a society where one’s usefulness to others is determined solely by their labor, and where that labor is constantly sought to be devalued and eliminated, and what the end of that process looks like for humans who want to find meaning in their activities.
Wonderfully put. Couldn’t agree more. It looks like you and I took away some very similar things and commented them in parallel.
A. The outcasts of that society weren’t exactly homeless. The utopia Kurt describes is one with the largest welfare state of all time.
B. Maybe people shouldn’t be friends with people who only like them because of what they can do for them at work. I am far from perfect but I don’t think I would divorce my wife if she got laid off.
C. It isn’t the best idea to tie your sense of self worth to one aspect of your life.
As I said they live in a utopia, getting better and better, but still complaining.
Are you saying that reading and interpreting the work of one of the most beloved authors in the English language is “like religion?” If so, you could not be more wrong. Reading, interpreting, and reinterpreting the work of those who came before us is actually the very core of any academic pursuit. It’s the most basic description of what every single academic does with their time.
I did, actually. I could not have addressed it more directly. Let me do it again, but this time greatly expanding it.
It’s been more than ten years since I read the book, but were Vonnegut a less subtle writer, that could be a literal line of dialog from one of the engineers in the book. I could imagine one of them defensively saying exactly that in an argument with the minister (whose name I forget).
You are frustrated that the engineers, through their ingenuity and hard work, have given the population a utopia, but the population is ungrateful. Your attitude is the same as the upper classes in that world. What you overlook is the world’s inherently violent class structure, which is revealed as the book goes on. The lower classes in the books are relegated to meaningless existences in sad, mass-produced housing, physically segregated from the wealthy in Homestead. They are denied an active participation in society, made obsolete by the upper classes (wealthy engineers, which iirc are implied to keep it in the family), who control every aspect of society. Again, it’s been a very long time since I read this so I’m hazy on the details, but in the book, some in the lower classes are trying to actively organize to challenge this class structure. They are brutally repressed. They are infiltrated by secret police, and when they rise up in protest, are met with state violence.
What you describe as utopia is actually a repressive regime that meets the subsistence needs of its lower classes in exchange for their unquestioning acceptance of the oligarchy’s control of society, which they justify to themselves and to the lower classes as a technocratic utopia (“freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work,” as you say), but which is also perfectly willing to subjugate the lower classes using deadly force if they dare to question the existing power structure.
How you describe the world is exactly how the regime chooses to portray itself, and how the upper classes, consisting of people like you and me, view the lower classes. In fact, viewing the lower classes as ungrateful for the upper classes’ generosity is actually a staple of upper class attitudes throughout much of human history. At the beginning of the book, since we’re only given an engineer’s perspective, this is an understandable reading of the world. If you read the entire book and still finished it thinking that same thing, you completely and utterly missed the point.
You and I make technology for companies, which are mostly owned by rich people. Vonnegut is asking us to interrogate what the implied philosophy behind our work is, even if we do not intend it to be so. We try to make people free from tedious work, but if you simply ask the people who we’re supposedly liberating from work, they hate us. This is not necessarily because they like the drudgery of their work, but because the wealthy people who employ us will simply lay them off, increasing corporate profits, but relegating the now-obsolete workers to the margins of society.
If the people you and I are “freeing … from degrading filthy boring work” are actually further degraded by this so-called freedom, are we really freeing them? Maybe we should question how our society is organized if the people you and I work to “free” actually hate us for it, or as they’d put it, hate us for taking away their jobs.
If you made a utopia you would live in it. All those lower tiered workers choose to do so. No where in the book do you see them storming the Canadian border trying to get out, or setting up their own communes. Because why would they? They are at zero risk of starvation, zero risk of being homeless, zero risk of pathogens from sewage, zero risk of any of the other horrors the bulk of humanity has dealt with in the past. Entertainment alone is so inexpensive that you could use it as housing insulation. Who the fuck wouldn’t want that!?
Hey tomorrow you no longer have to work in a sheet metal factory, you get a nice house in the burbs, you get work that requires zero effort, you get a cool car, all forms of media are cheap as dirt, your wife can stay at home if she chooses, you dont have to cook if you dont want to, your 3 kids go to nice schools in safe areas, and you have enough money to go to a bar every night. Your brain and energy levels are peak so you can engage in any hobby. Oh and the only catch is you can’t literally try to overthrow the government. I know, so oppressive.
You yell about the violence in the system, has their ever been a government that didn’t have that? Go ahead and pick the nicest government you like on earth and ask yourself what would happen to you if you starting burning down buildings and attacking the powers-that-be.
And your comparison about slave owners demanding gratitude is just plain wrong. An abusive parent and a good parent both will say that they are a good one. No one is the villain of their own story. That is why you have to look at facts. And the fact is that those workers had more material wealth and agency compared to chattle slaves.
One thing you got right, they do hate us. I am despised in pretty much every factory I show up at, but it’s fine the feeling is pretty mutual and feelings don’t change facts. These places are a mess of inefficiency, waste, and poor workmanship. I have production horror stories of the union metal shops. A few months ago I came to a metal shop for an upgrade and the machinist had a recliner in the shop. Spent about 6 hours on Faceboot and listening to conservative talk radio. I swept up a bit as I was heading out and he told me that he never cleans because it isn’t his job, then sat in his recliner again.
I think the ending of the book summarized the author pretty well. The luddites had no idea how to replace the society they torched. Kurt didn’t have any solutions, he had complaints, and I can’t do anything with actionable items.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with your interpretation of the ending. I think your interpretation of the whole book says a lot more about you than it does about Vonnegut or other people; it’s misanthropic, unempathetic, and patrician to the point of infantilizing others. I suspect that our views on what we as humans need to be fulfilled, what true freedom really is, and how we should treat each other are so far apart that there’s no bridging it. I hope you one day you reconsider. Until then, it’s been fun chatting. Good luck out there, friend.
My view is simple enough. I want humanity free from bad things. Kurt’s view is that people should be forced against their will to endure the bad. Which one is treating people like infants?
Me: bad things are bad, I am trying to remove bad things. Enjoy the world where you have everything all of the time. Where you can explore, create, procreate, screw, drink, and the only freedom you lose is one you never had to begin with. The freedom to break stuff.
Kurt: no, you must toil despite it being not required. Work shall set you free. Humans should work a job that they hate because it gives them selfworth.
How did that work out for Cambodia?
Your total unwillingness to critically engage with what you do for a living continues to say more about you than it does about Vonnegut.