The foremost problem of the world in the coming century, the one most likely to drive humanity to extinction or degradation is the problem of social organization. It is unfortunately not the fanciest or most scientific of problems. Rather, it is painfully elementary, and can be seen largely only in the absence of solutions to the most pressing issues. In short, it is that the fundamental forms of our society and their continued evolution—our social organization—are inimical to the creation of meaningful solutions for either the problems of the individual or the society. Society’s functionality, in essence, is tenuous.
Freedom is the Individual Good. Control is the Social.
“Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.”
– Rousseau, The Social Contract
And in her struggle between bondage and freedom she thrashes and strains, either suffering her bondage or breaking herself free to fall into the chasm below. Such a metaphor precisely illustrates the poisonous nature of society for the individual; that it is a necessary provider for our lives but also a deep violation of our freedom. All of its goodness is built upon slavery and suffering that is either quickly forgotten or deftly charmed from its victims’ consciousness.
Freedom is inimical to the functions of a society, and to the wellbeing of its individuals as collective. Yet at the same time the individual as particulate struggles and suffers in bondage; even as tacitly they reap benefit from the bondage of those around them. All long to be free, but only for their own freedom; this is more properly called the pursuit of power. Freedom proper, freedom of all, is a death nell. This is quite simply because the functions that make life tolerable in such a large society are the result of careful programming and control that has erased real freedom. To restore freedom back is herculean, and would result in nothing like we know. The last whisper of freedom was the nomadic and the indigenous; and we are too far now to go back to it; we are “domesticated” like cattle to the functions of society.[1]
Power and control came about due to the rise of organized mass-scale society and spread through everything like a viral contagion. All were quickly transformed to subjugators and subjugated. Every social contact into the beyond rippled with this movement of power and the indigenous-nomadic who did not drop to regular disease were swiftly culled by the disease of power. Power and control became essential even to freedom itself; whereby a person’s freedom could now be measured—whereas before it could not—by their power against the power laid upon them.[2] Yet even this freedom died a quick death, as control became automotive; absorbed into social concepts and ideas that enthralled the minds of even the powerful.[3]
It is the human being in the organized mass-scale social sphere that is pushed to oneness with the pursuit of power; a power that is made synonymous with freedom and goodness. The rationing of goodness and goods pushes the human being to chase after them, yet the path laid out to their achievement is ultimately the pursuit of power. Economics exemplifies this: the deep incentive to profit is caused by the granting of goodness and goods only to those with money, and so all actors are slowly transformed by the incentive structure into profit-seekers. When this is extrapolated to a broader sense, money becomes only one of the means to power that is sought after in a society that incentivizes power.
This power smacks against a second surface: control. Upon its move to automation, control and power separated so that power became the human pursuit of agency and control became the force that bound society together. Control manifests itself in the ways we order our minds, our thinking, our concepts, and even our society itself. It is what we share, the common forces that propel all our actions and thoughts together. Control is the ever-changing physical laws of the social universe; the heart of social organization that pushes all together to create and sustain some interpretation of the social form. Humans then battle out for power within the system. Freedom and the individual’s capacity to pursue their good become lost.
All of this is merely academic; a recording and a set of lenses on what has already come about.
But as we move forwards, our technology reinterprets these relations. It provides new spaces of organization and puts into human hands the means to control. Even freedom as the struggle over the distribution of power loses its meaning. For what is strength compared to the capacity to manipulate gravity itself?
The online world allows for the construction of social and digital systems with limited bounds and centralized control; available for manipulation. The increasing use of data means that programs of control rather than power are becoming more accessible; with fuller knowledge meaning fuller potential for purified manipulation. The global scale of culture has permitted in a new form the battle between different systems of control; understanding control and the rise of controllers means understanding new venues of conflict. The changes and failures we see within our democracies today illustrate the need to understand control and how it can be changed and circumvented by changes in information and social connections. Even conspiracy theories that initially seem insane can be explained. Relevant too is the rise of authoritarianism; a seemingly different but fundamentally similar system of social organization due to its reliance on similar schemes of control. Further, the tension between western-democratic systems and their alternatives illustrate a need to look beyond freedom and systems of power to the question of control. Increasingly scientific approaches to psychology and politics also enable the shift to control.
Social organization was never about freedom. It was for a time about power and its pursuit within a framework of automotive control. But what lies ahead in increasing potency and potentiality is the human harnessing of control to create forceless and irresistible methods of manipulation.
Science fiction has always had painters of a grim future, but in all honesty this is the bettor’s approach; there is truth to this dark Hegelianism. We have furnished ourselves with the incentives for a worse world, and we approach the realization of its means. From incentives and means, ends quickly follow.
[1] Scott, James C. Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 29
[2] MacCallum, Gerald. “Negative and Positive Freedom.” The Philosophical review 76, no. 3 (July 1967): 312–334. 314. Compare this model of freedom to classical conceptualizations such as Rousseau’s.
[3] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. 176-177
