The Image of the Human

This is the moment to wake up to the idea the world we live in is drastically dysfunctional? Why?  There was some sort of gestalt with the beginning of the scientific-economic era that redefined the human being to be a skin encapsulated ego, a singular atom disconnected in space.  We were emancipated supposedly from the moral and mythical universe of all the irrational ages that preceded the modern age of reason.  Walter A. Weisskopf helps here.   He writes:

"During the ascendency of economics, theology and philosophy declined in importance.  Assumptions about human nature in economics were incidental byproducts of what was supposed to be empirical and logical truth.  The very question of what a human is cannot be and is not answered by any segmented discipline such as economics but only by a philosophy which encompasses the totality of experience.  This philosophy of life has been destroyed by modem life.  He goes on:  nevertheless the history of economic thought abounds with statements and  implicit assumptions which put together present an image of man."  In other words the earlier theorists (such as Adam Smith) looked at the values that they felt would make the system work and wrote that these are human nature.  The author explains that there was a great need for moral justification of this new system and it came from a variety of sources.  What were once vices were now turned into virtues.  He writes:  "money-making for its own sake, the taking of interest, buying cheap and selling dear, exploiting the fluctuations of supply ad demand for one's own advantage - all these and other activities which form the daily routine of economics life in the modern were considered morally reprehensible throughout Western civilization until the advent of capitalism."  The market would act as an "invisible hand" so that private vices would become public benefits. 

It is much more complex obviously, but what emerged was a new image of the human being.