There are things more interesting than people

> Richard Powers: There Are Things More Interesting Than People

>Richard Powers hates the hulking white Chevy Silverado pickup he’s driving. He apologizes after picking me up at the airport in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cool evening in early April, that his Chevy Volt, an electric hybrid, is in the shop, and he has to maneuver this beast, with its 20 miles to the gallon, across winding country roads. He’s pretty sure the service-department guy at the Chevy dealer, having identified Powers as a treehugger, is still grinning at loaning him a four-by-four. I laugh off Powers’ apology, knowing he’s a good environmentalist, but am a little concerned when he veers into the opposing lane. “Holy, crap, sorry about that,” he says, nervously correcting an oversteer, as an oncoming truck whizzes by us.

>A few miles from Powers’ home in the Smoky Mountain foothills, we stop at a scenic overlook. Powers strikes up a conversation with a Tennessee old-timer, who’s standing beside an immaculately restored 1935 Ford pickup. He opens the engine hood for us. “Ford’s early V8,” he says. “Look at that flathead,” Powers says. “A beauty.”

Bringing the subtext to light: the journalist who wrote this piece disagrees with the assertion "there are things more interesting than people". He then goes about in advancing this view in a variety of ways:

1. He writes in a way so that the most interesting subject in his article is a person.

2. He creates negative emotions at the start of the article so as to emotionally color how people will read the tamer, more objective rest of the article.

3. He shares his (negative) personal experiences with the interviewee so as to both create a sense of sympathy for the journalist and a sense of animosity towards the interviewee. That is, he brings up unrelated information so as to bolster his main subtextual argument.

Among other ways. I leave their spotting as an exercise for the reader.

That the world exists only to satiate our appetites is practically a founding doctrine of consumerism. That kind of "human exceptionalism" actually degrades man and reduces him to a mere consumer and then corrupts him and renders him an obsessive, exploitative, perverse, and disordered creature, a voracious idiot and a pathetic disgrace. If you want to live the good life, you must respect human nature and its inherent end(s). Dismiss ends, and not only do human beings unravel and become unintelligible, but so does everything in existence. No bespoke delusion engineering here.

And yet this article is about 75% human interest fluff and 25% substance.

A point I agree with, though the article very much focused on people instead of the interesting bits.

Reminds me of when people criticize some sci-fi works for lacking in character development. My default response is: almost every other literary genre is about character development. I read sci-fi precisely because it's about ideas, about things more important than how people feel about each other. If I wanted to experience more of the interpersonal drama, I'd pick up a romance novel instead. Alas, I see enough of that in the real life.

It was only last night that I was thinking, assuming the eventuality of the emergence of a self-sustaining super-intelligance (doesn't matter whether it takes form a hybrid long living cyborg race or not ), what justifications would it have to keep around the human race besides the kind of empathy that drives humans to conservation for things whose absence would not affect the ecology? (IOW, is the only way a hypothetical superior lifeform will consider letting human exist be based on the the existence of empathy in the lifeform? Or is there any other rational reason that necessitates keeping us around?)... (IyOW, purely logical, uncaring children of the elite who'd have the benefits of longevity research as well as superior intellect may consider rodent conservation more important than human conservation... aka There possibly are things more interesting than people)

I can't help but think that perhaps there is something in brain structure and genetics which creates one class of people focused primarily on people and another class focused primarily on ideas. I couldn't agree more that there are things more interesting than people, but obviously the author wants to sell us on the opposite notion.

this is a beautiful piece of writing, thank you for sharing.

Was framing 20 mpg as if it were bad supposed to be facetious?