Technology: The Modern Pied Piper

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a story by Robert Browning detailing a legend regarding the abduction of children from the village of Hamelin in 1284.

The town of Hamelin was rat infested and the citizens hired a man, who described himself as a rat catcher, to rid them of their rats. The man accepted their offer and used a musical pipe to lure the rats into following him. He led them into the river where they drowned. Despite his success the town reneged and refused to pay him.

The man later returned to town one Sunday morning; while the citizens were in church he used the musical pipe to lure the town’s children into following him out of town. The children were never seen again.

Technology is our modern day version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Technology has enchanted the Global village, especially the young, with hand-held gadgets and various kinds of digital technology to the extent that reading and intellectual growth has become seriously hindered.

Sapiens seek titillation and seem to find it foremost in trivial pursuits; technology facilitates those pursuits while simultaneously facilitating a more comfortable standard of living.

Our lives are filled with clusters of goals to be achieved and means devised to reach those goals. We have proximate goals and ultimate goals that we try to make coherent throughout our lives.

When we focus our mental prowess on goals and the means for achieving those goals we come face to face with the fact that we spend great quantities of our intellectual energy on means and very little intellectual energy on long range ultimate goals.

Economics dominates our thought processes in matters of defining goals. We give insufficient intellectual energy toward moral values that will help us set useful long range goals.

When we examine the matter of means and ends we discover that we have become enchanted with technology as our Idol, it becomes the means to achieve whatever goals we might decide in the future. Technology, however, provides little help in establishing goals that can alleviate our most stressful problems.

It's always a matter of choice. People create what they believe is real by association to that which has power. In the idea that the human is a victim to circumstance or to those who have when one does not, all self esteem and self creation is abandoned.
Fear of suppression, lack and low self esteem is not the product of breeding but a product of societal beliefs that are handed down by the tradition of ignorance and the choice to accept it as a way of life.

Those that can make a difference are often entertaining themselves with other distractions. Some talk alot about what is wrong but are themselves doing nothing to effect a change.

Technology has provided the greatest ability the planet has ever seen to communicate with each other and to inform the ignorant of greater truths. That technology is often misused or absorbed in the addiction to distraction like a drug is used to stimulate the body and mind to create illusions to take one away from their incessant thoughts.

Technology in itself is not a living entity that has its own agenda. People create technology and they also have the ability to use it for good or evil. Humans are responsible for their own world and the future.
The reality of life is that we have by choice created our own distractions.

I agree. Now we must recognize that the time has come--we must put up or pass away. We have created a monster and it will carry us to destruction unless we develop the character to create a better set of values.

Technology is not the monster, ego is.

Technology is merely a means to power. Power in the hands of the good is good. It's the holders of power who are key. That's why democracy is so important. We are in the process now, in the USA, of purging the evil ones from positions of power. The rest of the world contains problem areas too.

There is a level of technology that becomes very dangerous for the species. It is that level when we humans have the power to easily destroy our self without the intellectual sophistication to prevent that from happening. We have long ago passed that point.

We do not allow children to drive because they lack the intellectual sophistication to handle such a dangerous situation. We are adolescents with far too much power for our level of sophistication.

When man first picked up a club and whacked his enemy the technology was dangerous to the species because it was not the club that was threatening but the man behind the club.

Similarly in todays world the club has grown to accommodate a the need to take a larger swipe or to take out more of ones enemies.

We teach our children to fear. Technology is the result of our interests.


The Parent of such an adolescent has allowed the condition to exist. Obviously the adolescent is not familiar with the construct of any relationship with a guiding or should I say a principle of relationship, that leads to the inevitable self discovery of responsibility.

If after so many thousands of years of ignoring basic realities of life we continue to ignore our potential, does it not seem appropriate to allow the disease to cleanse itself of its threatening presence? Or is it possible to manipulate the outer world to guarantee the inner sanity of mankind and to prevent ego from its need to self destruct? Perhaps the Earth is an asylum for souls not yet ready to emerge into the universe of greater Truth and possibility.

Man by his thoughts, creates the foundation of his world.

There is always perfection in chaos, if you know where to look.


What you focus on grows.