The tendency to install technical progress as the highest value is linked up not only with our overemphasis on intellect, but, most importantly, with a deep emotional attraction to the mechanical, to all that is to alive, to all that is man-made. […] One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computer-man idea is the expression of a flight from life and from humane experience into the mechanical and the purely cerebral.*
(Erich Fromm)

More than fifty years ago, Erich Fromm found himself wondering why it was that humans wanted to make machines more human – the computer-man – rather than growing humans more human.

Machines can provide the illusion that we have things under control, but it may be that they are a place to hide.

With all that peculiar stuff happening on the inside.

All that is needed to remedy this is some slowing down, solitude, giving attention, so that we can make a few changes in the direction of what we value most of all.

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.