Excerpt from Welcome to the Machine

Transportation Engineer (p. 136)

From chapter "Nothing to Fear"

You go to work. You have a very busy day ahead of you. You always do. Your work is very important. You are a transportation engineer. Your job is to manage a crucial sector of the economy. It’s complicated. You love telling your friends—as they struggle to keep their eyes from glazing—about the difficulties of making sure the trains run on time, and of making sure resource A arrives at factory B before the factory runs out of raw materials, and that the train used to carry resource A never leaves factory B empty. It needs to carry product C to endpoint consumers. “That’s you,” you like to tell your friends, who smile weakly and blink their eyes.

“Sometimes we have to use trucks,” you continue, “if we have a sudden glut of resource A to move. Not just anyone can predict when more resource A will be released for us to use. That takes expertise and experience.”

You finally notice that their attention is lagging, so you pull out your trump card. You say, “You do like your product C, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” they say, finally enthusiastic. “We like our product C very much.”

This is how the world is destroyed. This is how atrocities are committed.

Resource A = Jews (each of whom had, before being sorted by the Panopticon, a life and personality and desires unique to that individual).

Factory B = Auschwitz, Treblinka, or any other death factory.

Product C = Eyeglasses, bales of human hair, soap made from the flesh of humans, and so on.

Or,

Resource A = Cows (each of whom had, before being sorted by the Panopticon, a life and personality and desires unique to that individual).

Factory B = A factory slaughterhouse or any other death factory.

Product C = Hamburgers, steaks, and other products made from the flesh of cows.

Or,

Resource A = Trees (each of whom had, before being sorted by the Panopticon, a life and personality and desires unique to that individual).

Factory B = A sawmill or any other death factory.

Product C = Toilet paper, chopsticks, newspaper, and other products made from the flesh of trees.

It doesn’t matter what (or rather who) A is. A could be any living being. That is the strength of the machine: individuals do not matter. They never matter. All can be consumed. All can be converted to fuel for the machine.

It doesn’t matter what kind of factory B is. B could be designed to convert any type of living beings into products, that is, to kill them. That is the strength of the machine: individuals do not matter. They never matter. All can be consumed. All can be converted to fuel for the machine.

It doesn’t matter what kind of product C is. It could be anything from food (or in the case of most of what we eat, “food”) to nuclear bombs. That is the strength of the machine: individual products do not matter. They never matter. All of life can be turned into generic products. Interchangeability is the key.

Standardization, utility, efficiency, interchangeability. How to destroy the world is as easy as A, B, C.

Let’s say you’re not a transportation engineer. Let’s say you’re appalled by the use of resource A at factory B to make product C. You confront the transportation engineer.

Chances are good this person won’t know—or rather acknowledge—what you’re talking about. “I just make the trains run on time,” the engineer might say. “And that’s a very difficult job. You wouldn’t believe how much expertise and experience it takes.”