rationalization and dehumanization
I’m really worn out tonight. Wednesdays are my weekday at home. I spent today writing a 2 page paper about the black women’s welfare rights movement for Women, Activism & Social Change and composing an outline for a writing exercise worth 30%(!) of our final grade for U.S. Society. I wrote a paper yesterday right before it was due for Film & Social Justice about “Incident at Oglala” that I’m pretty pleased with and will maybe post on the site. All in all, I am really enjoying my classes; I definitely look forward to attending them and the reading is all very interesting and inspires ideas in me.
One book in particular that I’m just wrapping up for U.S. Society is The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer. In it he defines four elements that characterize our increasingly rationalized, “McDonaldized” society: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Further on, he explains how irrational it all really is because it’s taking the humanness out of the living experience. Everywhere there is evidence of those four elements and their dehumanizing effects - eating (in and out), entertainment, health care, sports, religious worship, education, etc… You name it.
While reading, I had a recurring, depressing thought…
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