In cold and dehumanized culture, many yearn to feel human again

The hand-painted letters on the side of a van seemed to scream like an outraged shout. I was just east of Birmingham Monday afternoon — heading east on I-20 — when I saw the words.

“I AM A HUMAN BEING.”

That’s all it said. There appeared to be a young white man driving. The van had out-of-state license plates. There was no other clue about what the words meant. But, somehow, it made sense to me. I like to imagine that I know how the man inside felt.

A human being is naturally free. He doesn’t live with shackles on his hands and feet, but he also doesn’t allow shackles on his mind. He doesn’t live in a cage with bars and a lock on the outside. But neither does he allow his mind to be caged and controlled.

We don’t enslave people’s bodies anymore. The chains and shackles are mostly in museums. But we’ve done something far worse. We’ve given up control of our minds. We’ve turned over control to bullies and politicians and advertisers and carnival barkers.

And even though our bodies wander the world freely, this control of our minds leaves us doing and saying and being what someone else wants us to be. But every now and then, one of us wakes up to the reality of the culture we’ve created. And even before we fully understand what’s going on, something inside cries out.

I am a human being! I have a right to be free!

The rock artist Tonio K released a song in 1986 which I heard and liked at the time, but didn’t fully understand. I was still asleep myself. In “You Will Go Free,” he sang about our invisible cages.

You can’t see your jailer
You can’t see the bars
You can’t turn your head around fast enough
But it’s everywhere you are
It’s all around you
Everywhere you walk, these prison walls surround you

A lot of artists have dug in this fertile soil, but I have a feeling that few fully comprehend the problem, much less find viable solutions. It’s not really a political issue. It’s not about economics. It’s not about our work or careers.

It’s about something fundamental to the human experience. It’s about the choices we make. It’s about our values. It’s about the truth we choose to learn.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut was attempting to address it when he wrote, “I am a human being, not a human doing.”

Poet Maya Angelou tried to look at being a free person when she said in a speech, “I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.”

And in the script for the movie, “The Elephant Man,” the tragic character who has been a freak show exhibit all his life finally demands to be treated with humanity when he cries out, “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I … am … a … man!”

When I was just a child, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a book called “Future Shock.” When I finally read it in my 20s, I didn’t quite get it. I was still too much a cog in the unthinking mass machine to understand.

Toffler — writing with his wife, Adelaide Farrell — defined the “future shock” which he saw coming as a psychological state for both individuals and entire cultures — when they were faced with “too much change in too short a period of time.”

For many thousands of years, men and women had lived close to nature. They struggled to survive in brutal conditions, but the ways in which they lived didn’t change much for generations. People could go most of their lives without seeing many other people, much less being directly controlled by outsiders. The wisdom of one generation was still useful wisdom two generations afterward. Even a dozen generations.

Language might change slightly. Styles of dress might change. Minor technological change might occur. But individuals knew who they were and where they fit into a culture or tribe or village. Real change was slow. Life might be hard, but they knew what to expect.

Toffler saw that the rate of change in modern society was increasing in ways which would have been unimaginable to people of the past. Industrialization had already changed everything in about 150 years — and uprooted societies — and as Toffler wrote, information and communication were starting to do the same thing in an even more brutal way. And at a far faster pace.

The speed of information and communication technology has created something we never expected. It’s created a web of tentacles which control us — by our own choice.

We have more choices today than ever before. We have easier lives than any generation ever born. We have more leisure time. We have more physical freedom than ever.

But a web of tentacles has grown — without us realizing it — and it does more than connect us. It tells us what to think. The images it gives us tell us what’s wrong with us and how we must change. The ideas which are handed to us as normal reshape our minds in ways that force more and more people to unconsciously deny the reality which they’ve experienced with their own eyes.

As politicians and advertisers and charlatans of all sorts compete to control this vast web of conformity, we are the pawns of their struggles. We obey the programming which seems so normal to us. And we end up with our minds controlled by forces which we don’t even understand.

There are some people — not many — who sense something is wrong and are screaming for freedom that they don’t fully understand. In their blindness, many people push competing ideas about how to push back against the madness. And that leads some people to cry out for change — to demand a different world — even to the point that someone might just paint, “I am a human being,” on his van.

In the Tonio K song I mentioned earlier, he has a degree of confidence that the right kind of change is going to happen. He seems to be speaking to someone in particular, but he could just as well be speaking to our culture in general. He’s confident that we’re going to break free. This is the way he ends the song.

Well I don’t know when
And I don’t know how
I don’t know if you’ll be leaving alone
Or if you’ll be leaving with me
But I know
You will go free
I know the truth will set you free
The truth about who you are
The truth about who you were always meant to be

When I read Toffler’s book in my 20s, I couldn’t even see the problem he was describing, so his words had no effect on me at the time. It took me many years to start internalizing the “future shock” which he accurately predicted would arise.

And when that happened for me, I found myself separating from the mainstream of this culture more and more. I saw just how toxic it was becoming. I started understanding just how dysfunctional our direction was. And I was shocked at how hard it was for others to see.

I haven’t known precisely how to handle things. In a metaphorical sense, I’ve been screaming and shouting and hoping that someone would see what it took me so long to see. But I still feel as though I’m standing on a beach looking at a tsunami rushing toward me — and I’m shaking my fist at the giant waves of a dysfunctional reality which I can’t change.

I’m not the sort to go spray-paint “I am a human being” on my car. But I like to think I understand how this guy might feel. Maybe he’s on his own journey toward philosophical and emotional freedom.

I just hope you and I really will go free, because the lives we’ve chosen for ourselves today are not what we were meant to be.