We’ve got two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical. The left one? Brilliant at building bridges, splitting atoms, counting beans. It’s been instrumental in all that humankind has achieved. Unfortunately, it’s also a terrible driver of the human experience. A wonderful servant, yes — but an appalling master.
The right hemisphere, though not dependent on the left in the same way, needs it to achieve its full potential — to be its wild, flowing, metaphor-loving self. But the left? Oh no, it pretends it doesn’t need the right at all. Denial, thy name is cortex.
But what if society starts running everything like a left-hemisphere project plan? What if we let the detail-obsessed bureaucrat in our heads take over entirely? Spoiler: we get a world that increasingly treats everything like a lifeless mechanism.
Systems thinking, now with added blind spots
Abstraction: The cult of clarity
The left hemisphere hates ambiguity. The big picture lacks the kind of neat edges it loves, so it replaces it with a restricted, highly detailed — and completely myopic — world-view. Suddenly, the parts become more real than the whole.
Specialisation explodes. Technicised “knowledge” (read: jargon and academic turf wars) replaces actual wisdom or understanding gained through lived experience. Because if it isn’t on paper or in a spreadsheet, did it even happen?
We end up refining the details while missing the entire forest, let alone the raccoon hiding in the undergrowth. Anything that can’t be measured becomes irrelevant. People who “see the whole” are dismissed as dreamers. Or worse — unqualified.
And when in doubt? Replace skill with tokens and procedures. Certificates are shiny. Experience? Meh. So real experts are phased out in favour of “experts” who’ve mastered the handbook but never faced the real world.
Skills? Standardised. Algorithmic. Regulable. Applied evenly, like bland icing on a very confused cake.
Virtualisation: Reality? Who needs that?
Everything is now a concept
Slowly but surely, the concrete gets swapped out for the abstract. Bodies, touch, nature, art — all reduced to ideas. You won’t need to interact with anything in the real world. You’ve got a keyboard.
“Work” becomes the act of documenting and justifying that work. Not actually doing it, of course — that’s for marginalised folks. Your job is to make a slide deck explaining how someone else should do the thing you’ll never touch.
Bureaucracy: Because nothing says progress like more paperwork
Effects of virtualisation
Expect a bureaucracy boom. Abstract systems of control. Procedure-obsessed. Predictable. Anonymised. Equal (ish). But most of all: abstracted.
Everything becomes interchangeable and depersonalised. Your uniqueness? Gone. Please take a number and wait for your metaphysical redundancy.
Mechanisticity: Treating life like a broken toaster
Humans as faulty machines
Life becomes modelled on the mechanical. Speed, precision, capacity — those are the only metrics that matter. Never mind that tweaking those dials in the real world tends to wreck things.
Quality? Replaced by quantity. Humans become numbers. Context vanishes. Degrees of variation are crushed into binary decisions. Yes/no. On/off. Tick the box or begone.
Mechanistic effects: The left hemisphere takes the wheel
The world gets redesigned to suit left-hemisphere values — measurable, repeatable, soulless. Bureaucracy isn’t just a by-product — it’s the ideal. Quantify everything. Reduce all relationships to analysable components. Abandon context.
Individual integrity? You won’t need that where we’re going. Mystery? Wonder? Sorry, those don’t fit into the database schema.
Values are now purely utilitarian. Morality? Reduced to a cost-benefit analysis. We get enlightened self-interest, but the “enlightened” bit is… negotiable.
Exploitation: All for One and None for You
Commodifying everything
As the impersonal replaces the personal, we begin to value things more than living beings. Connection? Trust? Pfft. Try measuring that.
Social cohesion is either neglected or actively dismantled. Relationships are depersonalised. Exploitation becomes the default mode of interaction — between humans, and between humanity and the rest of the planet. Cue resentment.
That resentment? Perfect soil for authoritarian “equality” — a flattened sameness that’s anything but just. “Balance” is replaced by a one-size-fits-all ideology, ripe for exporting (by force if necessary).
Marginalised groups get extra marginalised. Paranoia blooms. Trust dries up. People, groups, governments — all suspect each other. And your benevolent overlords? They see themselves not as servants of the people but as their evolutionary betters.
Total control: smile, you’re on Bureaucracy-Cam™
Governments: We’re here to help (ourselves)
Liberty is praised in the abstract while individual freedom is quietly throttled. Surveillance becomes normal. DNA databases? Introduced under “emergency powers”, obviously. The real aim: control, not safety.
The state grabs more power while pushing individual responsibility out the window. And the people follow suit, losing their sense of agency in the process.
Altruism? Treated with suspicion. Family roles and skilled professions based on trust? Threats to efficiency. Better bring them under bureaucratic control, just in case.
Society: A well-oiled machine with no soul
Death becomes taboo. Illnesses are your fault. Organs become replaceable parts in our new biotech economy. Enter: Immortality Inc.
Sex, stripped of subtext, is splashed everywhere like cheap perfume. Rationality (now rebranded as Super-rationality™) replaces common sense.
Insight, responsibility, empathy? Too right-hemisphere. Too messy. What we get instead is aggression, rigidity, denial, and — of course — the inability to change our bloody minds.
Consumerism: Because you’re worth it™ (But not really)
Autonomy is a quaint idea from the past. We’re all passive now. Suggestible. Manipulatable. And oh so ready for “forced utilisation behaviours” — you know, like using the thing just because it exists.
We no longer choose to use things; we’re exposed to them. Willpower is dead — unless you count the drive to acquire more stuff and manipulate others.
So yes, use the thing. Click the thing. Post on the thing. Consume. Conform. Be watched. Be analysed. Be monetised. Welcome to the Panopticon Mall.
Disenchantment: Killing the magic
Awe and wonder are now classified as delusions. Spirituality? Fantasies for the weak.
The left hemisphere hates being led by examples it can’t control. So it ridicules them. The right hemisphere’s love of pathos? Shamed. Its yearning for meaning? Mocked.
We lose our sense of flow — of time, shape, decay. Everything is fragmented. Life becomes a series of moments, each copy-pasted until boredom sets in. And it will set in.
Culture: Now with 100% more irony
We stop participating and become spectators — culture as Netflix playlist.
Art loses depth. Music devolves into rhythm with all the soul of a metronome. Dance turns inwards. Words, meanwhile, proliferate — abstract, meaningless, hollow.
History is irrelevant. Tradition? A liability. The body is a machine. Nature is a resource depot.
And anything wild — anything not efficiently managed or bureaucratically controlled — is considered dangerous and must be domesticated. Now.
All Aboard the Left-Hemisphere Express
All prepare for the great flattening. The systematic society of the future, lovingly assembled by the hemisphere that’s forgotten how to love.
And frankly, judging by where we are now, we may already be halfway there.