Mission: Anti-Androidization

I thought this was the cutest thing ever..

I believe babies are some of the most intelligent beings on the face of the planet. Starting out as blank slates, they learn the all subtleties of life at an incredible pace. We all know the ability of a toddler to ask 100 questions for an hour straight. They have the most sincere fire for learning. Their minds have no boundaries and their imaginations are limitless. And we’ve all experienced those times when kids blurt out the obvious (sometimes painful) truth that the “grown-ups” are skirting around because they “don’t know better.” Babies have not only a supreme IQ intelligence, but they are also in touch with their emotions. Though it seems silly to say so because of the truth in the statement that babies can’t really control their emotions, this factor is just that which makes them most human. Babies take no effort in hiding or manipulating their feelings. My mom tells me that as a baby, I would giggle uncontrollably for hours, and then do the same with my tears. If they’re hurt or angry they cry, delighted they scream, happy they smile. A hug from a little kid is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever felt – because it is soaked in sincerity. Children live so “vastly in the present. Their daily reality is a fabric of friends and family, the field of feeling and energy that one’s own body is, the earth they stand on and the wind that wraps around it” (X49). What has society done to us to so easily snatch that away from our grasps?

And so, I have evolved from that primitive state to this civilized one. But I don’t think I really have. I’ve come to realize that I starting acting like those whom I surround myself with. If it’s kids, I’ll talk with the cooing baby voice the rest of the day; if it’s angry people, I’ll be angry. What about the fact that I spend the majority of my time with machines and gadgets which provide me with just as much entertainment as real people? I guess you can call that my “androidization”. The less and less that I’m required to interact with actual humans, the more and more I become “impassive, as if unaffected” (Dick 189), just like Rachel Rosen, the Nexus 6 android. The bounds of society have trapped us inside little boxes. It’s not suitable to cry in public, we can’t laugh at business meeting. This all makes sense, because we’re civilized, right? This is a strange world we live in. There are so many unnatural requirements made of us that we might as well be androids. Sometimes it feels like we’ve lost the colors of life – we’re living in a Technicolor world.

I don’t mean to be so dramatic: I think that’s the hippie in me speaking out. However, I completely agree with Rousseau’s Noble Savage thought – “the idea that perhaps civilization has something to learn from the primitive” (X50). Back in the day, (not that I was there), it seems as if Native American tribes had such a strong sense of community and their place in the world. Surely they are rather primitive according to today’s standards, but they lived such full lives. Nothing in their hands went to waste, and they appreciated all that they had. Through chasing after bison and hunting them down, they were able to “use [their] body and senses to the fullest” (X50). Nowadays, we drive to the air-conditioned gym and monotonously perform the same action hundreds of times in order to build the strength they had.

I guess it’s just the fact that we’re trying so desperately to distinguish ourselves from animals. We’re denying that part inside of us. It is true – “Man is a beautiful animal” (X50). It is a bad idea for us to move away from that. Sci-fi thrillers are so many times about the doom of the Earth if robotic alien type things invaded. Thus, we should make sure that we don’t become those robotic type things, alien to the Earth. The Earth is a “vast, breathing body” (X49), mother to all of us creatures. Perhaps we should get in touch with our inner primitive side and once again learn to “sing about nature” (X51) and be the one “whose mind reaches easily out into all manners of shapes and other lives, and gives song to dreams” (X51). I know, I’m such a hippie.