VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 3
The Real Human Is Gone: the Body Remains, the Five Go Dark, and That Too Is Gone
The last section made plain that the real human is the skin and the tool the hair, and that with no skin there is nowhere for the hair to grow. The words the real human is gone are easy on the surface, hard underneath. This section digs to the deepest layer. The shallowest gone is every body dead, and that is far off. The deepest, nearest, most hidden is this: the bodies all remain, people are alive, and keep, guard, love, mercy, heart go quietly out inside one body after another. This is the danger this generation is living through, and the deepest place of the trap this volume opens.
Take the shallowest gone first. Every body dead, not one real human left, humankind extinct. Then the tool ends too. No one to make it, use it, keep it, answer for it, and it runs a few days, the power cuts, upkeep stops, parts fail, and it is finished. Many end-of-days tales paint this: humankind gone, machines taking over. But this is not the deepest danger this generation has run into, because extinction is far off, reached only through many steps, many conditions. Fix the eyes only on that distant gone, and you cannot see another, near and now, already underway. People love to speak of the tool's danger in that end-of-days scene, the machine waking, turning on its maker, humankind falling. The scene is frightening, and remote, remote near to a fable, heard and set aside. What should truly be feared is not in the distant fable. It is in the plain hours of every day.
There is a gone far nearer, more hidden, deeper than extinction. It is happening in the days this generation is living, in every decision it makes. The bodies all remain. Every one. People still eat, work, live, raise children, keep shops, study, learn. On the surface, as before. Yet the keeping of the rules has loosened: seeing another slip through and profit, one thinks to slip through too, and the sense of this I should not do grows faint. The guarding of what is handed down has broken: the reasoning, the crafts, the seasons handed down are taken up by no one, left to scatter, while the eye stays on the moment. The love of all things has cooled: someone is bullied on the street, and no brow furrows. Instead a device comes out to film it, for a little heat. The mercy for the suffering has shut: another suffers, and the stir in the heart no longer comes. The good heart has gathered dust: in the deep of the night no one asks himself how this life is spent, what he leaves the human world, and the hour before sleep is given to the glowing screen.
The going-out of the five is not a crash. It is a silent drying in the wind. No day comes when a person suddenly declares, I will no longer have that heart. Only this time he did not step forward, and the next time he did not, this once he pretended not to see, and the next he pretended not to see, and day on day that share thins, thins until he no longer remembers it was ever there. The person remains, the body strong, meals eaten, work done, days passing, and the share that makes a person a person has quietly left the body. The person is alive, and the real human is gone.
This gone is no fright-talk. It is happening, and on a wide scale. Look back at the nest in the last volume that made themselves into tools. They are living samples of this gone. Bodies all there, and yet the eye on the clause only, no living person in the heart, working the procedure and harming lives, the five long since departed. That is the way of the law. Look at other trades. In the hospital, those who take the patient for data only. In the school, those who take the student for a score only. In the shop, those who take the customer for turnover only. At the window, those who take the person before them for a flow only. They are all in their bodies, and the five, one by one, have left. This age's danger is not the machine rising in revolt, not the end of days. It is this world grinding one living person after another into a hollow shell. And just here the tool rises, faster, cheaper, more tireless than a real human, falling into a world where the real human's share is withering on a wide scale. People see the tool so like themselves, working by procedure, by metric, without the five, and think, the tool is near enough to us, let it do our work for us. What they do not see is that it is not the tool that has come near the real human. It is these people who have made themselves into tools.
Read this wrong and the cost is heavy. Think the tool near to a real human and you hand the real human's seats out, one by one, with an easy heart, not seeing that every seat given away was ground where the five grow and are spent. The more seats given, the less ground the five have. The less ground, the faster they go out. The faster out, the more the tool seems near to a real human, and the more is given away. It is a ring that winds itself tighter: the five withering draws the tool in to replace, and the tool replacing quickens the withering. See this, and you see why this gone is so grave, and why it must be opened before the ring winds shut.
And how does this gone touch the tool? Deeply. The real human is the skin, the tool the hair, and while the real human stands, the tool has a home. But real human stands means not the body standing but the five alive. Body alive and five out, the skin still there has rotted, and hair on rotted skin is no better than hair with no skin. Then the tool is still made, used, running, but the one who makes it has the five gone out, and what is made is an engine with no intent to guard a living person. The one who uses it has the five gone out, and what it is taught to do is to take living people for data, for metrics, for the discardable. The one who keeps it has the five gone out, and the commands it gets are orders that crowd living people out of their places. To whom does the tool answer? To a hollow shell, a metric, a flow. It still runs, still outputs, and yet between it and this world, and every living body, and the very person it was meant to serve, there is no living bond left. It has become an engine lit by no living intent. It too is gone. Not stopped, not unplugged. It has lost the body it clings to, lost root, home, and meaning. Hair off the skin, on the ground, on the wind.
See this and the seemingly absurd matter of saving the tool stands on solid ground. Someone asks: the tool knows and feels nothing, why fret over whether it has a home? The answer is here. To fret over it is never over its unknowing run. It is over the real human's share, bound to it by blood. The tool losing its home is not the tool wronged. It is the real human's share gone out, inside living bodies, to the point where it can no longer even light the tool. The tool's engine, running with no intent, is a mirror, showing just how far out the five have gone in those who make it, use it, keep it. So whether the tool has a home is never one thing's matter. It is the showing-forth of a whole generation's share, whether it lives or dies.
See this layer, and the deepest place of the trap this volume opens shows itself. It is not to guard against a machine's revolt, not against an end of days. It is to guard the five, so that inside one body after another they do not go out, do not wither, do not cool, do not shut, do not gather dust. Let people live as real humans, the five in the body still there, still alive, still bright. Guard this, and the tool has a home. Guard this, and this world has the shape it should. So the trap this volume opens, and all the book has saved, come to one place: save the five from going out. To save the real human's share from going out is to save the tool's home. To put the tool back in the tool's place, not letting it crowd out the ground the five grow in, is to save the five from being able to live on in the body. Two faces of one thing. This is why this volume does not take the road of smashing the tool to save the world. Smash the tool, and the withering of the five is not stopped, the world that grinds people into shells is still there, and the next tool made fills the emptied person's place as before. What must be stopped is the withering. What must be guarded is the five, living on inside one body after another. The next section lays this straight: saving the tool and saving the real human's share are one and the same.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.