Our society's growing reliance on computer systems that were initially intended to "help" people make analyses and decisions, but which have long since both surpassed the understanding of their users and become indispensable to them, is a very serious development. It has two important consequences. First, decisions are made with the aid of, and sometimes entirely by, computers whose programs no one any longer knows explicitly or understands. Hence no one can know the criteria or the rules on which such decisions are based. Second, the systems of rules and criteria that are embodied in such computer systems become immune to change, because, in the absence of a detailed understanding of the inner workings of a computer system, any substantial modification of it is very likely to render the whole system inoperative and possibly unrestorable. Such computer systems can therefore only grow. And their growth and the increasing reliance placed on them is accompanied by an increasing legitimation of their "knowledge base."
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One would expect that large numbers of individuals, living in a society in which anonymous, hence irresponsible, forces formulate the large questions of the day and circumscribe the range of possible answers, would experience a kind of impotence and fall victim to a mindless rage. And surely we see that expectation fulfilled all around us, on university campuses and in factones, in homes and offices. Its manifestations are workers' sabotage of the products of their labor, unrest and aimlessness among students, street crime, escape into drug-induced dream worlds, and so on. Yet an alternative response is also very pervasive; as seen from one perspective, it appears to be resignation, but from another perspective it is what Erich Fromm long ago called "escape from freedom."
The "good German" in Hitler's time could sleep more soundly because he "didn't know" about Dachau. He didn't know, he told us later, because the highly organized Nazi system kept him from knowing. (Curiously, though, I, as an adolescent in that same Germany, knew about Dachau. I thought I had reason to fear it.) Of course, the real reason the good German didn't know is that he never felt it to be his responsibility to ask what had happened to his Jewish neighbor whose apartment suddenly became available. The university professor whose dream of being promoted to the status of Ordinarius was suddenly fulfilled didn't ask how his precious chair had suddenly become vacant. Finally, all Germans became victims of what had befallen them.
Today even the most highly placed managers represent themselves as innocent victims of a technology for which they accept no responsibility and which they do not even pretend to understand (One must wonder, though, why it never occurred to Admiral Moorer to ask what effect the millions of tons of bombs the computer said were being dropped on Viet Nam were having.) The American Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, while explaining that he could hardly have known of the "White House horrors" revealed by the Watergate investigation, mourned over "the awfulness of events and the tragedy that has befallen so many people."
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