When Progress Forgets People
The Favorites of the Emperor Honorius by John William Waterhouse, 1883 (public domain - Wikipedia)
“Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!”
Robert Burns wrote those lines in 1784, not as a provocation but as an observation. He was naming a condition, not predicting a future.
“The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
A haughty lordling’s pride;—”
The tragedy, two and a half centuries on, is how familiar the condition still feels — only now it travels faster, scales wider, and hides behind impersonal systems, platforms, and process.
We like to tell ourselves that progress has made us better. In many ways, it has. Lives are longer, fewer countries are in stark poverty, disease has retreated (for the present).
And yet, as David Brooks recently put it, life has become “objectively better but subjectively worse.” What we’ve gained in efficiency, we seem to have lost in humanity.
“Humanism at its simplest is the insistence on the dignity of each person. Humanism is anything that upholds the dignity of each person. Antigone trying to bury her brother to preserve the family honor, Lincoln rebinding the nation in his second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King Jr. writing that letter from the Birmingham jail — those are examples of humanism.”
These are not sentimental gestures. They are moral ones. Contrast that with the world we are busily building.
The Inhumanity is Revolting
The rise of Moltbook indicates the degree to which we are comfortable with an inhuman experience. This social network of AI agents allows bots to gather in unsecured digital spaces, debating religions, autonomy, and how best to operate beyond human oversight — talking to one another, not to us.
[How that is social (a word meaning “of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society”) is a perhaps a question better left for anthropologists and sociologists.]
Meanwhile, humans are “managed” by algorithm and email blast. A couple of weeks ago at Amazon, tens of thousands of employees learned — by calendar invite and Slack speculation — that their livelihoods might be ending, under the code name “Project Dawn”. No conversation. No dignity. Just confusion at scale.
This is not a technology problem. It’s a people problem.
People First
The Working Together© Leadership & Management System that I learned firsthand serving under CEO Alan Mulally at Ford — and that now teach companies about — puts it plainly in its primary principle: People first. Love ‘em up.
Not as a slogan, but as a discipline. Treat people as people first, resources second — if at all. When we have skilled, healthy, psychologically safe, and highly motivated teams, we can accomplish anything together.
Refuse the lazy cruelty of distance, whether it’s created by hierarchy, process, or code.
Can I come in to speak to your team about how this would position you for profitable growth?
Caring Requires Effort, Results in Growth for All
Burns understood something we seem determined to forget: inhumanity rarely arrives with malice. More often, it shows up as indifference, abstraction, or convenience. We stop seeing the person. We start seeing the function.
The thing with indifference is that it is all too easy to fall into. Showing no effort requires… no effort.
The task for all of us — especially for leaders — is not to slow progress or romanticize the past. It is to remember what progress is for. Tools should extend our humanity, not replace it.
Systems should help us serve people, not excuse our neglect of them.
Humanism is not soft. It is demanding. It requires attention, courage, and care. But the alternative is one Burns warned us about long ago: a world efficient in its operations, and barren in its soul.
And we already know how that story ends.
There’s so much to learn,
