Читать книгу The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy - David Boyle - Страница 23

Average Man belongs to the Industrial Revolution and the Age of the Masses, but we just don’t believe most of that Marxist stuff any more. It belongs in the twentieth-century world of mass production, where people were transformed into cogs in giant machines, as pioneered by the great American industrialist Henry Ford – the man who offered his customers ‘any colour you like as long as it’s black’. Mass production and Average Man had no space for individuality. Figures reduce their complexity, but the truth is complicated.

Now, of course, you can almost have your car tailor-made. You can mass-produce jeans using robots to designs which perfectly match the peculiarities of individual bodies on the other side of the world. The days have gone when clothes issued by the military didn’t fit, when you struggled to keep up with the speed of the production line, with your tasks individually timed for Average Person by the time and motion experts. And we can see more clearly how difficult it is to categorize these widely different individuals who make up the human race. But in the hands of a bureaucratic state, people who don’t conform to the norm get hounded and imprisoned. Or, these days, social workers visit them and remove their children.

And after all that, when you get to know Mr Average, you find he has a bizarre taste in underwear, he has extraordinary dreams about flying through galaxies, and a hidden collection of Abba records. He wasn’t average at all. Counting him in with other people ignores the real picture.