One of Dean Koontz's Frankenstein books has a scene where a supernatural being is arguing with another supernatural being. The second insists that he is a person with feelings. The first taunts "meat machine, meat machine."
I thought of that scene while watching this Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/...
It's from 1994 and has five or six other parts. Watch it. Not only is it prophecy- everything that Goldsmith predicted came to pass- but it is also instructive about the value systems that would usher in this brave new world. Watch as Charlie and Laura don't allow James to get in a full sentence without interruption. Watching it now, I think that was by design. The same way Mitt Romney "won" the first debate by spewing out more lies than can be responded to, the technique here is to baffle them with bullshit.
But the bottom line- and I saw this coming twenty years ago when I was in high school- is that we have created a world where, in all forms of interaction, human beings are just meat machines. Think back to Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. "Good father? Fuck you." People- in work or human relationships- have no inherent human value anymore. All that matters is how much you can steal. All that matters is how much you make. All that matters is how high you will climb. When I said, back in high school and relatively fresh off the boat, that this would happen, I was laughed at. When I wrote a letter to the editor of the NY Press in 1999- remember the glorious Clinton years?- saying the same thing, letters flooded in calling me an idiot. But look at the world in 2012. Do you have a job? Will you have it tomorrow? You don't really know. Are you in a relationship? Can that be ended with a text message? Will your friend meet you tonight at the theatre as you planned or will it be a no show? If you make plans with someone six months from now, and in the interim nothing changes, does that mean they will hold up their end of the plan? The entire world is nothing more than six billion rats blindly chasing shrinking rations of moldy cheese while trying to outhustle other rats.
My godfather worked as an engineer for the same company for thirty-two years. Can you imagine? Hell, can you imagine being an engineer for thirty-two years? You can't because that's not how we roll. Starting in 1968, accelerating in 1980 and taking off into the stratosphere in 1996, we have followed a course where people are nothing more than chattel, where human lives, skills, hopes and aspirations are expandable, reduced to an economic variable. And, starting before 9/11 but certainly taking full advantage of it, we have developed a security state whose purpose is to intimidate the chattel. The entire world is now a plantation and Obama is every bit as much an overseer as Romney would have been.