Two months ago I took part in an entrance examination (unfortunately not successful) and did the following project work on “Blind Spot”.
A blind spot in the industrialized world is the subdivision of people into subgroups. In English, one speaks of “scenery, machinery, and people”. Only the last group is really seen and treated as human. In the picture there are several people shopping in the supermarket – the person at the cash desk is not human but “machine” (automat, robot), the cleaning lady in the background is scenery, as well as the alcoholic, the handicapped person, the beggar, the street worker, the foreigner, etc. In some cases, you only see the status symbol or a similar sign and the rest of the person becomes blurred or almost invisible.
Even though these mechanisms are a protective function of the psyche in a macro-society, many fellow human beings who need us as counterparts will be ‘dehumanized’ as a result. This process then opens the door for ‘inhuman’ treatment of others, e.g. aggression against foreigners, human trafficking, pornography. This happens to a large extent on the Internet, where forum participants feel free to verbally attack others because they do not see the other person and forget that a human being is sitting at the other end of the ‘line’. The question is whether the increase in virtual depersonalized relationships will become a black hole.
