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Title: Industrial Society and Its Future Author: FC Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: revolution, technology, ted kaczynski, anti-technology, civilization, anti-civilization Source: This version was extracted from the book https://www.wildwill.net/blog/2018/06/13/technological-slavery-2010-by-ted-kaczynski/][Technological Slavery]] by [[https://www.wildwill.net/
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster
for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of
those of us who live in âadvancedâ countries, but they have destabilized
society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to
indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the
Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe
damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology
will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to
greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it
will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological
suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in
âadvancedâ countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down.
If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and
psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very
painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently
reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered
products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system
survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of
reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving
people of dignity and autonomy.
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful
But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its
breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down
sooner rather than later.
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system.
This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or
it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We canât
predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the
measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order
to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This
is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not
governments but the economic and technological basis of the present
society.
5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative
developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system.
Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether.
This does not mean that we regard these other developments as
unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to
areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we
have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed
environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little
about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even
though we consider these to be highly important.
6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society.
One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world
is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an
introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in
general.
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20^(th) century
leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the
movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a
leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind
mainly socialists, collectivists, âpolitically correctâ types,
feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the
like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is
a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so
much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a
collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by âleftismâ will emerge
more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology.
(Also, see paragraphs 227â230.)
8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear
than we would wish, but there doesnât seem to be any remedy for this.
All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way
the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving
force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE
truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply
to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to
which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19^(th) and
early 20^(th) centuries.
9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call
feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority
are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization
is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this
segment is highly influential.
10. By âfeelings of inferiorityâ we mean not only inferiority feelings
in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low
self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies,
defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend
to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed), and that
these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern
leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said
about him (or about groups with whom he identifies), we conclude that he
has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced
among minority-rights activists, whether or not they belong to the
minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about
the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said
concerning minorities. The terms âNegro,â âoriental,â âhandicapped,â or
âchickâ for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman
originally had no derogatory connotation. âBroadâ and âchickâ were
merely the feminine equivalents of âguy,â âdudeâ or âfellow.â The
negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists
themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject
the word âpetâ and insist on its replacement by âanimal companion.â
Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything
about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as
negative. They want to replace the word âprimitiveâ by ânonliterate.â
They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any
primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that
primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the
hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about âpolitically incorrectâ
terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant,
abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of
whom do not even belong to any âoppressedâ group but come from
privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold
among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable
salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from
middle to upper-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of
groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American
Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists
themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit
to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because
they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their
problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE
inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong
and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may
NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong,
good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization,
they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists
give for hating the West, etc., clearly do not correspond with their
real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike,
imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same
faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the
leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that
they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly
exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization.
Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftistâs real motive for
hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they
are strong and successful.
16. Words like âself-confidence,â âself-reliance,â âinitiative,â
âenterprise,â âoptimism,â etc., play little role in the liberal and
leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic,
pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyoneâs problems for
them, satisfy everyoneâs needs for them, take care of them. He is not
the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability
to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is
antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he
feels like a loser.
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus
on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone,
throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing
anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to
immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.
18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science,
objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative.
It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of
scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective
reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish
philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically
analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved
emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these
concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their
attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is
successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the
leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain
beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false
(i.e., failed, inferior). The leftistâs feelings of inferiority run so
deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as
successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also
underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental
illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to
genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such
explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to
others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an
individualâs ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is âinferiorâ it is
not his fault, but societyâs, because he has not been brought up
properly.
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of
inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a
ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in
himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he
can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and
his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior.[1]
But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority
are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually
strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel
strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with
which he identifies himself.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest
by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or
racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but
many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER
masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or
by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the
leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle
cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too
prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power.
Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of
benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For
example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black
people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or
dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a
diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and
symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action
discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an
approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping
black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an
excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for
power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the
activistsâ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify
race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would
have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse
for making a fuss.
23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate
description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a
rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.
24. Psychologists use the term âsocializationâ to designate the process
by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A
person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the
moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that
society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are
oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless,
the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they
seem.
25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think,
feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed
to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or
other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly
socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a
severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they
continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find
moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a
non-moral origin. We use the term âoversocializedâ to describe such
people.[2]
26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of
powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by
which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of
behavior or speech that is contrary to societyâs expectations. If this
is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such
feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought
and the behavior of the over-socialized person are more restricted by
societyâs expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person.
The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty
behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws,
they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or
they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The
oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he
generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The
oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or
feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think
âuncleanâ thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality;
we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall
under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on
a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society
has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a
sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We
suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that
human beings inflict on one another.
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern
left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great
importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of
the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper
middle class. Notice that university intellectuals[3] constitute the
most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most
left-wing segment.
28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his
psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he
is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society.
Generally speaking, the goals of todayâs leftists are NOT in conflict
with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted
moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream
society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality
of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence
generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More
fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty
of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply
rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper
classes[4]) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly
expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the
mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists,
especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel
against these principles but justify their hostility to society by
claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to
these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized
leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our
society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists
push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige
jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such
schools; the way of life of the black âunderclassâ they regard as a
social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system,
make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper
middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing
they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man;
instead, they want to preserve African-American culture. But in what
does this preservation of African-American culture consist? It can
hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening
to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a
black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only
in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the
oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white
middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects,
become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status
ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to
make black fathers âresponsible,â they want black gangs to become
nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the
industrial-technological system. The system couldnât care less what kind
of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what
religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a
respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a âresponsibleâ parent, is
nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the
oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system
and make him adopt its values.
30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the over-socialized
type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly
they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to
rebel against one of modern societyâs most important principles by
engaging in physical violence. By their own account, violence is for
them a form of âliberation.â In other words, by committing violence they
break through the psychological restraints that have been trained into
them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have been more
confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of
them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream
values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against
racism or the like.
31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing
thumbnail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex,
and anything like a complete description of it would take several
volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim only to have
indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies in the
psychology of modern leftism.
32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our
society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism
are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in
the left, they are widespread in our society. And todayâs society tries
to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are
even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how
to raise our kids and so forth.
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something
that we will call the power process. This is closely related to the need
for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing.
The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these
we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have
goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in
attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more
difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it
autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42â44).
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he
wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop
serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but
by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he
may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured
aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting
aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But
leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves
usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have
power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward
which to exercise oneâs power.
35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical
necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are
made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these
things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
36. Non-attainment of important goals results in death if the goals are
physical necessities, and in frustration if non-attainment of the goals
is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals
throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human
being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a
reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.
38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For
example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent
hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became
distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy
their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves.
In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and
emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search
for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had
their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries
ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they
certainly didnât need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for
status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like
Hirohito, have turned to science.
39. We use the term âsurrogate activityâ to designate an activity that
is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves
merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or, let us say, merely
for the sake of the âfulfillmentâ that they get from pursuing the goal.
Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities.
Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal
X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to
satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use
his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would
he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the
answer is no, then the personâs pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate
activity. Hirohitoâs studies in marine biology clearly constituted a
surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had
to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order
to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived
because he didnât know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine
animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is
not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence
were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their
lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite
sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really
needs, can be a surrogate activity.)
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to
satisfy oneâs physical needs. It is enough to go through a training
program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time
and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only
requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all,
simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from
cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take the
physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream
society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of
surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic
achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing
the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond
the point at which they cease to give any additional physical
satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not
important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists
who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always
PURE surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated
in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue.
Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige,
artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social
activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these
activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the
majority of scientists will probably agree that the âfulfillmentâ they
get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they
earn.
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less
satistying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people
would want to attain even if their need for the power process were
already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or
most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are
never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives
for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem
than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to
run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate
activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these
activities than they do from the âmundaneâ business of satisfying their
biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort required
to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More
importantly, in our society people do not satisty their biological needs
AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine.
In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing
their surrogate activities.
42. Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for
every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of
autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken
on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and
control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction
and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a
member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal
among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal,
their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under
rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for
autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power
process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on
a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so
large that the role of each individual is insignificant.[5]
43. It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for
autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by
identifYing themselves with some powerful organization to which they
belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be
satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat
soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that
he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).
44. But for most people it is through the power processâhaving a goal,
making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goalâthat self-esteem,
self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not
have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the
consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power
process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem,
inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt,
frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism,
abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.[6]
45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in
modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We arenât
the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This
sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to
believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and
was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true
that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of
women was common among the Australian aborigines, transsexuality was
fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But it does
appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed
in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples
than they are in modern society.
46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society
to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions
radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to
behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the
human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is
clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of
opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most
important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects
people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of
the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of
the other sources.
47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society
are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature,
excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural
small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the
tribe.
48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The
degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from
nature are consequences of technological progress. All preindustrial
societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly
increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that
lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible
for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did
before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it
puts increased disruptive powers in peopleâs hands. For example, a
variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc.
If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and
quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people
who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations. But if these
machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and
no frustration generated by them.)
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes
only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of
security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature
rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very
rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable
framework.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of
traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological
progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that
you canât make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy
of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the
society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down
traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the
breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social
groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted
by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to
move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities.
Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local
communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an
individualâs loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to
a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of
small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such
communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the
system.
52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints
his cousin, his friend or his coreligionist to a position rather than
appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted
personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is
ânepotismâ or âdiscrimination,â both of which are terrible sins in
modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job
of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system
are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced
industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that
are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.[7]
53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been
widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe
they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen
today.
54. A few preindustrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their
inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to
the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are
uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban
areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas.
Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.
55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19^(th)
century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended
families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as
these are broken down today. In fact, many nuclear families lived by
choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles, that
they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to have
developed problems as a result.
56. Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and
deep. A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach
of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he
arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in an
ordered community with effective law enforcement. This was a deeper
change than that which typically occurs in the life of a modern
individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological problems.
In fact, 19^(th) century American society had an optimistic and
self-confident tone, quite unlike that of todayâs society.[8]
57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely
justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19^(th) century
frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created
change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of
land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort.
In those days an entire country might have only a couple of hundred
inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a
modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a
relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One
may well question whether the creation of this community was an
improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneerâs need for the
power process.
58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which
there has been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without
the kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in todayâs
industrial society. We contend that the most important cause of social
and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people
have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a
normal way. We donât mean to say that modern society is the only one in
which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all
civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater
or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has
become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid- to
late-20^(th) century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with
respect to the power process.
59. We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can
be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but
only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately
satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the
process of satistying the drives of the second group. The more drives
there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger,
eventually defeatism, depression, etc.
60. In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed
into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist
increasingly of artificially created drives.
61. In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into
group 2: They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort.
But modern society tends to guarantee the physical necessities to
everyone[9] in exchange for only minimal effort, hence physical needs
are pushed into group 1. (There may be disagreement about whether the
effort needed to hold a job is âminimalâ; but usually, in lower- to
middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of
OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do
what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you
have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any
autonomy in work, so that the need for the power process is not well
served.)
62. Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group 2
in modern society, depending on the situation of the individual.[10]
But, except for people who have a particularly strong drive for status,
the effort required to fulfill the social drives is insufficient to
satisfy adequately the need for the power process.
63. So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group
2, hence serve the need for the power process. Advertising and marketing
techniques have been developed that make many people feel they need
things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It
requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial
needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs 80â82.) Modern
man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit
of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing
industry,[11] and through surrogate activities.
64. It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial
forms of the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears
repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of
the 20^(th) century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many
people in modern society. (This purposelessness is often called by other
names such as âanomieâ or âmiddle-class vacuity.â) We suggest that the
so-called âidentity crisisâ is actually a search for a sense of purpose,
often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that
existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of
modern life.[12] Very widespread in modern society is the search for
âfulfillment.â But we think that for the majority of people an activity
whose main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not
bring completely satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not
fully satisfy the need for the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That
need can be fully satisfied only through activities that have some
external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge,
etc.
65. Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing
the status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other
way, most people are not in a position to pursue their goals
AUTONOMOUSLY. Most workers are someone elseâs employee and, as we
pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend their days doing what they are
told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even most people who are
in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It is a chronic
complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands
are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations
are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations
are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A
large portion of small business today operates on the franchise system.
It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of
the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to
take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have
creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently
docile to go along obediently with the franchise system. This excludes
from small business many of the people who most need autonomy.
66. Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or
TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do
for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the
system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the
opportunities must be exploited in accord with the rules and
regulations[13] and techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if
there is to be a chance of success.
67. Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a
deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in the pursuit of
goals. But it is also disrupted because of those human drives that fall
into group 3: the drives that one cannot adequately satisfy no matter
how much effort one makes. One of these drives is the need for security.
Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control
over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make
them. (âWe live in a world in which relatively few peopleâmaybe 500 or
1,000âmake the important decisions,â Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law
School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our
lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are
properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our
food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or
incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on
decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and
so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves
against these threats to more than a very limited extent. The
individualâs search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to
a sense of powerlessness.
68. It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than
modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man
suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal
for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond
with physical security. What makes us FEEL seeure is not so much
objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care
of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger,
can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no
certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless
against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other
hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless; nuclear
accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing
taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nationwide social
or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the
things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the
risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no
oneâs fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon.
But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not
the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose
decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he
feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.
70. Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own
hands (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group), whereas
the security of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations
that are too remote or too large for him to be able personally to
influence them. So modern manâs drive for security tends to fall into
groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food, shelter, etc.) his security is
assured at the cost of only trivial effort, whereas in other areas he
CANNOT attain security. (The foregoing greatly simplifies the real
situation, but it does indicate in a rough, general way how the
condition of modern man differs from that of primitive man.)
71. People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessarily
frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become
angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it
does not even permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one may be
in a hurry, or one may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one generally
has no choice but to move with the flow of traffic and obey the traffic
signals. One may want to do oneâs work in a different way, but usually
one can work only according to the rules laid down by oneâs employer. In
many other ways as well, modern man is strapped down by a network of
rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate many of his
impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these
regulations cannot be dispensed with, because they are necessary for the
functioning of industrial society.
72. Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In
matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can
generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as
long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system).
We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice âsafe
sexâ). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in
all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our
behavior.
73. Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only
by the government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion
or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations
other than the government, or by the system as a whole. Most large
organizations use some form of propaganda[14] to manipulate public
attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to âcommercialsâ and
advertisements, and sometimes it is not even consciously intended as
propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the content of
entertainment programming is a powerful form of propaganda. An example
of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work
every day and follow our employerâs orders. Legally there is nothing to
prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from
going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little
wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited
number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as
someone elseâs employee.
74. We suggest that modern manâs obsession with longevity, and with
maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age,
is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to
the power process. The âmid-life crisisâ also is such a symptom. So is
the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern
society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.
75. In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and
purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular
reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through
the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for
fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food. (In young women
the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on social power; we
wonât discuss that here.) This phase having been successfully passed
through, the young man has no reluctance about settling down to the
responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people
indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking
some kind of âfulfillment.â We suggest that the fulfillment they need is
adequate experience of the power processâwith real goals instead of the
artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully
raised his children, going through the power process by providing them
with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is
done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and
death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the
prospect of physical deterioration and death, as is shown by the amount
of effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition,
appearance and health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment
resulting from the fact that they have never put their physical powers
to any practical use, have never gone through the power process using
their bodies in a serious way. It is not the primitive man, who has used
his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of
age, but the modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body
beyond walking from his car to his house. It is the man whose need for
the power process has been satisfied during his life who is best
prepared to accept the end of that life.
76. In response to the arguments of this section someone will say,
âSociety must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through
the power process.â This wonât work for those who need autonomy in the
power process. For such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed
by the very fact that society gives it to them. What they need is to
find or make their own opportunities. As long as the system GIVES them
their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To attain autonomy
they must get off that leash.
77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from
psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied
with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people
differ so greatly in their response to modern society.
78. First, there doubtless are innate differences in the strength of the
drive for power. Individuals with a weak drive for power may have
relatively little need to go through the power process, or at least
relatively little need for autonomy in the power process. These are
docile types who would have been happy as plantation darkies in the Old
South. (We donât mean to sneer at the âplantation darkiesâ of the Old
South. To their credit, most of the slaves were NOT content with their
servitude. We do sneer at people who ARE content with servitude.)
79. Some people may have some exceptional drive, in pursuing which they
satisfy their need for the power process. For example, those who have an
unusually strong drive for social status may spend their whole lives
climbing the status ladder without ever getting bored with that game.
80. People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a
great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the
shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So
they always feel hard-pressed financially even if their income is large,
and their cravings are frustrated.
81. Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques. These are the people who arenât interested in money.
Material acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.
82. People who have medium susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques are able to earn enough money to satisfy their craving for
goods and services, but only at the cost of serious effort (putting in
overtime, taking a second job, earning promotions, etc.). Thus material
acquisition serves their need for the power process. But it does not
necessarily follow that their need is fully satisfied. They may have
insufficient autonomy in the power process (their work may consist of
following orders) and some of their drives may be frustrated (e.g.,
security, aggression). (We are guilty of oversimplification in
paragraphs 80â82.)[15]
83. Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying
themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual
lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its
goals as his own, then works toward these goals. When some of the goals
are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have
played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels
(through his identification with the movement or organization) as if he
had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the
Fascists, Nazis and Communists. Our society uses it too, though less
crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S. (goal:
punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega
(attainment of goal). The U.S. went through the power process and many
Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced
the power process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of
the Panama invasion; it gave people a sense of power.[16] We see the
same phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian
organizations, religious or ideological movements. In particular,
leftist movements tend to attract people who are seeking to satisfy
their need for power. But for most people identification with a large
organization or a mass movement does not fully satisfy the need for
power.
84. Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process
is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38â40, a
surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial
goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the âfulfillmentâ that
he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal
itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous
muscles, hitting a little white ball into a hole or acquiring a complete
series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote
themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some
people are more âother-directedâ than others, and therefore will more
readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the
people around them treat it as important or because society tells them
it is important. That is why some people get very serious about
essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or
arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted
never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that
they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to
satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to
point out that in many cases a personâs way of earning a living is also
a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the
motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for
some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them
want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is
necessary to earn whatever money and status they require,
85. In this section we have explained how many people in modern society
do satisfy their need for the power process to a greater or lesser
extent. But we think that for the majority of people the need for the
power process is not fully satisfied. In the first place, those who have
an insatiable drive for status, or who get firmly âhookedâ on a
surrogate activity, or who identify strongly enough with a movement or
organization to satisfy their need for power in that way, are
exceptional personalities. Others are not fully satisfied with surrogate
activities or by identification with an organization. (See paragraphs
41.) In the second place, too much control is imposed by the system
through explicit regulation or through socialization, which results in a
deficiency of autonomy, and in frustration due to the impossibility of
attaining certain goals and the necessity of restraining too many
impulses.
86. But even if most people in industrial-technological society were
well satisfied, we (FC) would still be opposed to that form of society,
because (among other reasons) we consider it demeaning to fulfill oneâs
need for the power process through surrogate activities or through
identification with an organization, rather than through pursuit of real
goals.
87. Science and technology provide the most important examples of
surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by
âcuriosityâ or by a desire to âbenefit humanity.â But it is easy to see
that neither of these can be the principal motive of most scientists. As
for âcuriosity,â that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on
highly specialized problems that are not the object of any normal
curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an
entomologist curious about the properties of isopropyltrimethylmethane?
Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such a thing, and he is
curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is
the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new
species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the
entomologist, and he is interested in it only because entomology is his
surrogate activity. If the chemist and the entomologist had to exert
themselves seriously to obtain the physical necessities, and if that
effort exercised their abilities in an interesting way but in some
nonscientific pursuit, then they wouldnât give a damn about
isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose that
lack of funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become
an insurance broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have
been very interested in insurance matters but would have cared nothing
about isopropyltrimcthylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put
into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort
that scientists put into their work. The âcuriosityâ explanation for the
scientistsâ motive just doesnât stand up.
88. The âbenefit of humanityâ explanation doesnât work any better. Some
scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human
raceâmost of archaeology or comparative linguistics for example. Some
other areas of science present obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet
scientists in these areas are just as enthusiastic about their work as
those who develop vaccines or study air pollution. Consider the case of
Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting
nuclear power plants. Did this involvement stem from a desire to benefit
humanity? If so, then why didnât Dr. Teller get emotional about other
âhumanitarianâ causes? If he was such a humanitarian then why did he
help to develop the H-bomb? As with many other scientific achievements,
it is very much open to question whether nuclear power plants actually
do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the
accumulating waste and the risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one
side of the question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear
power arose not from a desire to âbenefit humanityâ but from the
personal fulfillment he got from his work and from seeing it put to
practical use.
89. The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare
exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit
humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a
scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain
the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity
because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the
work itself.
90. Of course, itâs not that simple. Other motives do play a role for
many scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be
persons of the type who have an insatiable drive for status (see
paragraph 79) and this may provide much of the motivation for their
work. No doubt the majority of scientists, like the majority of the
general population, are more or less susceptible to advertising and
marketing techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods
and services. Thus science is not a PURE surrogate activity. But it is
in large part a surrogate activity.
91. Also, science and technology constitute a powerful mass movement,
and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification
with this mass movement. (See paragraph 83.)
92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare
of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the
psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials
and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.
93. We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot
be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing
the sphere of human freedom. But because âfreedomâ is a word that can be
interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom
we are concerned with.
94. By âfreedomâ we mean the opportunity to go through the power
process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate
activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from
anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in
control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the
life-and-death issues of oneâs existence: food, clothing, shelter and
defense against whatever threats there may be in oneâs environment.
Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but
the power to control the circumstances of oneâs own life. One does not
have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power
over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that
power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere
permissiveness (see paragraph 72).
95. It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain
number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as
important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a
society is determined more by the economic and technological structure
of the society than by its laws or its form of government.[17] Most of
the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the
cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in
reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed
far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was
because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the rulerâs will:
There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid
long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of
information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively
easy to evade control.
96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of
freedom of the press. We certainly donât mean to knock that right; it is
a very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and
for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly
exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of
very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media
are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated
into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something
printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but
what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put
out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an
impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most
individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never
done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a
publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been
accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many
readers, because itâs more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the
media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many
readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had
read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the
media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with
some chance of making a lasting impression, weâve had to kill people.
97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not
serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois
conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a âfreeâ
man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain
set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to
serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.
Thus the bourgeoisâs âfreeâ man has economic freedom because that
promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public
criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to
a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be
bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of SimĂłn BolĂvar. To
him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress
(progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have
taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends.
Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, page
202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-Min: âAn
individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his
community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole
society or the nation.â And on page 259 Tan states that according to
Carsun Chang (Chang Chun-Mai, head of the State Socialist Party in
China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the
people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use
it only as someone else prescribes? FCâs conception of freedom is not
that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble
with such theorists is that they have made the development and
application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently
the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than
the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society
on which the theories are imposed.
98. One more point to be made in this section: It should not be assumed
that a person has enough freedom just because he SAYS he has enough.
Freedom is restricted in part by psychological controls of which people
are unconscious, and moreover many peopleâs ideas of what constitutes
freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs.
For example, itâs likely that many leftists of the oversocialized type
would say that most people, including themselves, are socialized too
little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized leftist pays a heavy
psychological price for his high level of socialization.
99. Think of history as being the sum of two components: an erratic
component that consists of unpredictable events that follow no
discernible pattern, and a regular component that consists of long-term
historical trends. Here we are concerned with the long-term trends.
100. FIRST PRINCIPLE. If a SMALL change is made that affects a long-term
historical trend, then the effect of that change will almost always be
transitoryâthe trend will soon revert to its original state. (Example: A
reform movement designed to clean up political corruption in a society
rarely has more than a short-term effect; sooner or later the reformers
relax and corruption creeps back in. The level of political corruption
in a given society tends to remain constant, or to change only slowly
with the evolution of the society. Normally, a political cleanup will be
permanent only if accompanied by widespread social changes; a SMALL
change in the society wonât be enough.) If a small change in a long-term
historical trend appears to be permanent, it is only because the change
acts in the direction in which the trend is already moving, so that the
trend is not altered but only pushed a step ahead.
101. The first principle is almost a tautology. If a trend were not
stable with respect to small changes, it would wander at random rather
than following a definite direction; in other words it would not be a
long-term trend at all.
102. SECOND PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is sufficiently large to
alter permanently a long-term historical trend, then it will alter the
society as a whole. In other words, a society is a system in which all
parts are interrelated, and you canât permanently change any important
part without changing all other parts as well.
103. THIRD PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is large enough to alter
permanently a long-term trend, then the consequences for the society as
a whole cannot be predicted in advance. (Unless various other societies
have passed through the same change and have all experienced the same
consequences, in which case one can predict on empirical grounds that
another society that passes through the same change will be likely to
experience similar consequences.)
104. FOURTH PRINCIPLE. A new kind of society cannot be designed on
paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance,
then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do.
105. The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of human
societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a
society and its physical environment; the economy will affect the
environment and vice versa, and the changes in the economy and the
environment will affect human behavior in complex, unpredictable ways;
and so forth. The network of causes and effects is far too complex to be
untangled and understood.
106. FIFTH PRINCIPLE. People do not consciously and rationally choose
the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social
evolution that are not under rational human control.
107. The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four.
108. To illustrate: By the first principle, generally speaking an
attempt at social reform either acts in the direction in which the
society is developing anyway (so that it merely accelerates a change
that would have occurred in any case) or else it has only a transitory
effect, so that the society soon slips back into its old groove. To make
a lasting change in the direction of development of any important aspect
of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is required. (A
revolution does not necessarily involve an armed uprising or the
overthrow of a government.) By the second principle, a revolution never
changes only one aspect of a society, it changes the whole society; and
by the third principle changes occur that were never expected or desired
by the revolutionaries. By the fourth principle, when revolutionaries or
utopians set up a new kind of society, it never works out as planned.
109. The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The
American âRevolutionâ was not a revolution in our sense of the word, but
a war of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political
reform. The Founding Fathers did not change the direction of development
of American society, nor did they aspire to do so. They only freed the
development of American society from the retarding effect of British
rule. Their political reform did not change any basic trend, but only
pushed American political culture along its natural direction of
development. British society, of which American society was an offshoot,
had been moving for a long time in the direction of representative
democracy. And prior to the War of Independence the Americans were
already practicing a significant degree of representative democracy in
the colonial assemblies. The political system established by the
Constitution was modeled on the British system and on the colonial
assemblies. With major alterations, to be sureâthere is no doubt that
the Founding Fathers took a very important step. But it was a step along
the road that the English-speaking world was already traveling. The
proof is that Britain and all of its colonies that were populated
predominantly by people of British descent ended up with systems of
representative democracy essentially similar to that of the United
States. If the Founding Fathers had lost their nerve and declined to
sign the Declaration of Independence, our way of life today would not
have been significantly different. Maybe we would have had somewhat
closer ties to Britain, and would have had a Parliament and Prime
Minister instead of a Congress and President. No big deal. Thus the
American Revolution provides not a counterexample to our principles but
a good illustration of them.
110. Still, one has to use common sense in applying the principles. They
are expressed in imprecise language that allows latitude for
interpretation, and exceptions to them can be found. So we present these
principles not as inviolable laws but as rules of thumb, or guides to
thinking, that may provide a partial antidote to naive ideas about the
future of society. The principles should be borne constantly in mind,
and whenever one reaches a conclusion that conflicts with them one
should carefully reexamine oneâs thinking and retain the conclusion only
if one has good, solid reasons for doing so.
111. The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it
would be to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it
from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom. There has been a
consistent tendency, going back at least to the Industrial Revolution,
for technology to strengthen the system at a high cost in individual
freedom and local autonomy. Hence any change designed to protect freedom
from technology would be contrary to a fundamental trend in the
development of our society. Consequently, such a change either would be
a transitory oneâsoon swamped by the tide of historyâor, if large enough
to be permanent, would alter the nature of our whole society. This by
the first and second principles. Moreover, since society would be
altered in a way that could not be predicted in advance (third
principle) there would be great risk. Changes large enough to make a
lasting difference in favor of freedom would not be initiated because it
would be realized that they would gravely disrupt the system. So any
attempts at reform would be too timid to be effective. Even if changes
large enough to make a lasting difference were initiated, they would be
retracted when their disruptive effects became apparent. Thus, permanent
changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons
prepared to accept radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of
the entire system. In other words by revolutionaries, not reformers.
112. People anxious to rescue freedom without sacrificing the supposed
benefits of technology will suggest naive schemes for some new form of
society that would reconcile freedom with technology. Apart from the
fact that people who make such suggestions seldom propose any practical
means by which the new form of society could be set up in the first
place, it follows from the fourth principle that even if the new form of
society could be once established, it either would collapse or would
give results very different from those expected.
113. So even on very general grounds it seems highly improbable that any
way of changing society could be found that would reconcile freedom with
modern technology. In the next few sections we will give more specific
reasons for concluding that freedom and technological progress are
incompatible.
114. As explained in paragraphs 65â67, 70â73, modern man is strapped
down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the
actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence.
This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant
bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically
advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in
order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do,
when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it,
otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO
be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal
discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead
to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual
bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some
restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING
the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the
functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense
of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be. however.
that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by
psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of
us. (Propaganda,[18] educational techniques, âmental healthâ programs,
etc.)
115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are
increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For
example, the system needs scientists. mathematicians and engineers. It
canât function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to
excel in these fields. It isnât natural for an adolescent human being to
spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal
adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real
world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to
do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among
the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor
pursuitsâjust the sort of things that boys like. But in our society
children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do
grudgingly.
116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify
human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who
cannot or will not adjust to societyâs requirements: welfare leeches,
youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical
environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
117. In any technologically advanced society the individualâs fate MUST
depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great
extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small,
autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of
very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly
organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers
of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of
the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share
in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that
decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by
technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the
number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of anyone
individual to be significant.[19] Thus most individuals are unable to
influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There
is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced
society. The system tries to âsolveâ this problem by using propaganda to
make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if
this âsolutionâ were completely successful in making people feel better,
it would be demeaning.
118. Conservatives and some others advocate more âlocal autonomy.â Local
communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and
less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and
dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer
networks, highway systems, the mass communications media and the modern
health-care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that
technology applied in one location often affects people at other
locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may
contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the
greenhouse effect affects the whole world.
119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs.
Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs
of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social
ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not
the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the
fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by
technical necessity.[20] Of course the system does satisfy many human
needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is
to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system
that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the
system provides people with food because the system couldnât function if
everyone starved; it attends to peopleâs psychological needs whenever it
can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldnât function if too many people
became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid,
practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their
behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The
government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists,
everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need
more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study
science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents
to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects that most of them
hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances
and have to undergo âretraining,â no one asks whether it is humiliating
for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted
that everyone must bow to technical necessity. And for good reason: If
human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic
problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of âmental
healthâ in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an
individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so
without showing signs of stress.
120. Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within
the system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead
of having each of its employees assemble only one section of a
catalogue, had each assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to
give them a sense of purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried
to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but for practical
reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited extent, and in
any case employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goalsâtheir
âautonomousâ efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select
personally, but only toward their employerâs goals, such as the survival
and growth of the company. Any company would soon go out of business if
it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any
enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts
toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not
serve its purpose as part of the system. Once again, for purely
technical reasons it is not possible for most individuals or small
groups to have much autonomy in industrial society. Even the
small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from the
necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he
must fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For
instance, when someone develops a new technology, the small-business
person often has to use that technology whether he wants to or not, in
order to remain competitive.
Parts
121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor
of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all
parts are dependent on one another. You canât get rid of the âbadâ parts
of technology and retain only the âgoodâ parts. Take modern medicine,
for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in
chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced
medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be
made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich
society. Clearly you canât have much progress in medicine without the
whole technological system and everything that goes with it.
122. Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of
the technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils.
Suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with
a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and
reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural selection against genes for
diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the
population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since
diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of
insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases
susceptibility to which is affected by genetic factors (e.g., childhood
cancer), resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population. The
only solution will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic
engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be
a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God (depending on your
religious or philosophical opinions), but a manufactured product.
123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much
NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic
constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow
the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the
consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.[21]
124. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about âmedical
ethics.â But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the
face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of
ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means of
regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably
the upper middle class, mostly) would decide that such and such
applications of genetic engineering were âethicalâ and others were not,
so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on the genetic
constitution of the population at large. Even if a code of ethics were
chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would be imposing
their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea of
what constituted an âethicalâ use of genetic engineering. The only code
of ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited
ANY genetic engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no
such code will ever be applied in a technological society. No code that
reduced genetic engineering to a minor role could stand up for long,
because the temptation presented by the immense power of biotechnology
would be irresistible, especially since to the majority of people many
of its applications will seem obviously and unequivocally good
(eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the abilities
they need to get along in todayâs world). Inevitably, genetic
engineering will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with
the needs of the industrial-technological system.[22]
Freedom
125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology
and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force
and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.
Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the
same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other.
The powerful one demands a piece of the otherâs land. The weak one
refuses. The powerful one says, âOkay, letâs compromise. Give me half of
what I asked.â The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time
later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there
is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises
on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So
it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.
126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than
the aspiration for freedom.
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often
turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider
motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased,
go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was
independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were
introduced they appeared to increase manâs freedom. They took no freedom
away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didnât
want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel
much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of
motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict
greatly manâs freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous,
it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car,
especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one
likes at oneâs own pace; oneâs movement is governed by the flow of
traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various
obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration,
insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase
price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.
Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our
cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer
live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping
areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the
automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public
transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own
movement than when driving a car. Even the walkerâs freedom is now
greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for
traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the
country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along
the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated
with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is
introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he
chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new
technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find
themselves FORCED to use it.)
128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our
sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF
appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-
distance communicationsâŠhow could one argue against any of these things,
or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have
made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the
introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages
and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59â76, all
these technical advances taken together have created a world in which
the average manâs fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of
his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation
executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as
an individual has no power to influence.[23] The same process will
continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few
people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that
eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents
much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken
together will make the human being into an engineered product rather
than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on
your religious beliefs).
129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is
that, within the context of a given society, technological progress
marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a
technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become
dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it
is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people
become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even
more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would
happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.)
Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater
technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step
back but technology can never take a step backâshort of the overthrow of
the whole technological system.
130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at
many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations,
increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda
and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of
privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back
any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult
social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by
the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they
develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each
of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only
by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution,
not reform.
131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all
those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be
so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a
conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost
always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the
case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators,
humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use
propaganda[24] or other psychological techniques to help them achieve
their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they
find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals
without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently
inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of
completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally
(or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of
these educators, government officials and law officers believe in
freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with
their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.
132. It is well known that people generally work better and more
persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a
punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are
motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those
who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a
negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and
well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a signal
victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of
freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn
their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the scientists would
remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progressed would
find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over
individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.
133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or
ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology.
History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all
change or break down eventually. But technological advances are
permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for
example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangement that
would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or
prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and
dignity. Still, the technology would remain, waiting. Sooner or later
the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace
of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade
our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of
a breakdown of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about
achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be
dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation.
A few years ago it seemed that there were secure legal barriers
preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental
degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to
crumble.
134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful
social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement
requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next
several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing
severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and
especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion,
hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope
that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause
it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a
revolution against it becomes possible. If such a revolution occurs and
is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom
will have proved more powerful than technology.
135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left
destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him
a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets
sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can
force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him. If
he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land
back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again
take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for the
weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the
same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we
compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will
eventually wipe out all of our freedom.
136. If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the
system in such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him
consider how clumsily and for the most part unsuccessfully our society
has dealt with other social problems that are far more simple and
straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop
environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or
domestic abuse.
137. Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of
values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of
our natural resources for our grandchildren.[25] But on this subject we
get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from the people who have
power, and nothing like a clear, consistent line of action, and we keep
on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren will have to
live with. Attempts to resolve the environmental issue consist of
struggles and compromises between different factions, some of which are
ascendant at one moment, others at another moment. The line of struggle
changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This is not a
rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and
successful solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get
âsolvedâ at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational,
comprehensive plan. They just work themselves out through a process in
which various competing groups pursuing their own (usually short-term)
self-interest[26] arrive (mainly by luck) at some more or less stable
modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in paragraphs
100â106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social planning
can EVER be successful.
138. Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited
capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems.
How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem
of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut
material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means
different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by
propaganda and fancy talk.
139. And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our
environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a
rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only
because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these
problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve
freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest
of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest
possible extent.[27] Thus, while practical considerations may eventually
force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental
problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to
regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means
that will disguise the encroachment on freedom). This isnât just our
opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g., James Q. Wilson) have stressed
the importance of âsocializingâ people more effectively.
140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be
reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only
way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system
altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising,
but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.
141. People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much
greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about
than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much
easier than reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can
inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot
inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social
problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one
stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for
which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this
reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological
system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or
application of anyone segment of technology, such as genetic
engineering, for example. Not many people will devote themselves with
single-minded passion to imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic
engineering, but under suitable conditions large numbers of people may
devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the
industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132, reformers
seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid
a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a powerful
reward-fulfillment of their revolutionary vision-and therefore work
harder and more persistently than reformers do.
142. Reform is always restrained by the fear of painful consequences if
changes go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold of a
society, people are willing to undergo unlimited hardships for the sake
of their revolution. This was clearly shown in the French and Russian
Revolutions. It may be that in such cases only a minoriry of the
population is really committed to the revolution, but this minority is
sufficiently large and active so that it becomes the dominant force in
society. We will have more to say about revolution in paragraphs
180â205).
143. Since the beginning of civilization, organized societies have had
to put pressures on human beings for the sake of the functioning of the
social organism. The kinds of pressures vary greatly from one society to
another. Some of the pressures are physical (poor diet, excessive labor,
environmental pollution), some are psychological (noise, crowding,
forcing human behavior into the mold that society requires). In the
past, human nature has been approximately constant, or at any rate has
varied only within certain bounds. Consequently, societies have been
able to push people only up to certain limits. When the limit of human
endurance has been passed, things start going wrong: rebellion, or
crime, or corruption, or evasion of work, or depression and other mental
problems, or an elevated death rate, or a declining birth rate or
something else, so that either the society breaks down, or its
functioning becomes too inefficient and it is (quickly or gradually,
through conquest, attrition or evolution) replaced by some more
efficient form of society.[28]
144. Thus human nature has in the past put certain limits on the
development of societies. People could be pushed only so far and no
farther. But today this may be changing, because modern technology is
developing ways of modifying human beings.
145. Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them
terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness.
Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own
society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been
greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to
disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59â76.)
146. Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of
controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us
look at some of the other methods.
147. To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden
video cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places,
computers are used to collect and process vast amounts of information
about individuals. Information so obtained greatly increases the
effectiveness of physical coercion (i.e., law enforcement).[29] Then
there are the methods of propaganda, for which the mass communications
media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques have been
developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public
opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological
tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts
of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential
means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can
forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive
peoples, when they donât have any work to do, are quite content to sit
for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with
themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly
occupied or entertained, otherwise they get âbored,â i.e., they get
fidgety, uneasy, irritable.
148. Other techniques strike deeper that the foregoing. Education is no
longer a simple affair of paddling a kidâs behind when he doesnât know
his lessons and patting him on the head when he does know them. It is
becoming a scientific technique for controlling the childâs development.
Sylvan Learning Centers, for example, have had great success in
motivating children to study, and psychological techniques are also used
with more or less success in many conventional schools. âParentingâ
techniques that are taught to parents are designed to make children
accept the fundamental values of the system and behave in ways that the
system finds desirable. âMental healthâ programs, âinterventionâ
techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to
benefit individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for
inducing individuals to think and behave as the system requires. (There
is no contradiction here; an individual whose attitudes or behavior
bring him into conflict with the system is up against a force that is
too powerful for him to conquer or escape from, hence he is likely to
suffer from stress, frustration, defeat. His path will be much easier if
he thinks and behaves as the system requires. In that sense the system
is acting for the benefit of the individual when it brainwashes him into
conformity.) Child abuse in its gross and obvious forms is disapproved
in most if not all cultures. Tormenting a child for a trivial reason or
no reason at all is something that appalls almost everyone. But many
psychologists interpret the concept of abuse much more broadly. Is
spanking, when used as part of a rational and consistent system of
discipline, a form of abuse? The question will ultimately be decided by
whether or not spanking tends to produce behavior that makes a person
fit in well with the existing system of society. In practice, the word
âabuseâ tends to be interpreted to include any method of child-rearing
that produces behavior inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go
beyond the prevention of obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for
preventing âchild abuseâ are directed toward the control of human
behavior on behalf of the system.
149. Presumably, research will continue to increase the effectiveness of
psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we think it
is unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be sufficient to
adjust human beings to the kind of society that technology is creating.
Biological methods probably will have to be used. We have already
mentioned the use of drugs in this connection. Neurology may provide
other avenues for modifying the human mind, Genetic engineering of human
beings is already beginning to occur in the form of âgene therapy,â and
there is no reason to assume that such methods will not eventually be
used to modify those aspects of the body that affect mental functioning,
150. As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely
to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of
human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems, And a
considerable proportion of the systemâs economic and environmental
problems result from the way human beings behave. Alienation, low
self-esteem, depression, hostility, rebellion; children who wonât study,
youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child abuse, other crimes, unsafe
sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political corruption, race
hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict (e.g., pro-choice
vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism, sabotage, anti-government
groups, hate groups. All these threaten the very survival of the system.
The system will therefore be FORCED to use every practical means of
controlling human behavior.
151. The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the result
of mere chance. It can only be a result of the conditions of life that
the system imposes on people. (We have argued that the most important of
these conditions is disruption of the power process.) If the systems
succeeds in imposing sufficient control over human behavior to assure
its own survival, a new watershed in human history will have been
passed. Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have imposed
limits on the development of societies (as we explained in paragraphs
143, 144), industrial-technological society will be able to pass those
limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or
biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be
adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will
be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.[30]
152. Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will
probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through
a conscious desire to restrict human freedom.[31] Each new step in the
assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational
response to a problem that faces society, such as curing alcoholism,
reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to study science and
engineering. In many cases, there will be a humanitarian justification.
For example, when a psychiatrist prescribes an antidepressant for a
depressed patient, he is clearly doing that individual a favor. It would
be inhumane to withhold the drug from someone who needs it. When parents
send their children to Sylvan Learning Centers to have them manipulated
into becoming enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from concern
for their childrenâs welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish
that one didnât have to have specialized training to get a job and that
their kid didnât have to be brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd.
But what can they do? They canât change society, and their child may be
unemployable if he doesnât have certain skills. So they send him to
Sylvan.
153. Thus control over human behavior will be introduced not by a
calculated decision of the authorities but through a process of social
evolution (RAPID evolution, however). The process will be impossible to
resist, because each advance, considered by itself, will appear to be
beneficial, or at least the evil involved in making the advance will
seem to be less than that which would result from not making it. (See
paragraph 127.) Propaganda for example is used for many good purposes,
such as discouraging child abuse or race hatred.[32] Sex education is
obviously useful, yet the effect of sex education (to the extent that it
is successful) is to take the shaping of sexual attitudes away from the
family and put it into the hands of the state as represented by the
public school system.
154. Suppose a biological trait is discovered that increases the
likelihood that a child will grow up to be a criminal, and suppose some
sort of gene therapy can remove this trait.[33] Of course most parents
whose children possess the trait will have them undergo the therapy. It
would be inhumane to do otherwise, since the child would probably have a
miserable life if he grew up to be a criminal. But many or most
primitive societies have a low crime rate in comparison with that of our
society, even though they have neither high-tech methods of
child-rearing nor harsh systems of punishment. Since there is no reason
to suppose that more modern men than primitive men have innate predatory
tendencies, the high crime rate of our society must be due to the
pressures that modern conditions put on people, to which many cannot or
will not adjust. Thus a treatment designed to remove potential criminal
tendencies is at least in part a way of re-engineering people so that
they suit the requirements of the system.
155. Our society tends to regard as a âsicknessâ any mode of thought or
behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible,
because when an individual doesnât fit into the system it causes pain to
the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation
of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a âcureâ for a
âsicknessâ and therefore as good.
156. In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of
technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN
optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a
way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to
function without using that technology. This applies also to the
technology of human behavior. In a world in which most children are put
through a program to make them enthusiastic about studying, a parent
will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program, because if
he does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively speaking, an
ignoramus and therefore unemployable. Or suppose a biological treatment
is discovered that, without undesirable side-effects, will greatly
reduce the psychological stress from which so many people suffer in our
society. If large numbers of people choose to undergo the treatment,
then the general level of stress in society will be reduced, so that it
will be possible for the system to increase the stress-producing
pressures. This will lead more people to undergo the treatment; and so
forth, so that eventually the pressures may become so heavy that few
people will be able to survive without undergoing the stress-reducing
treatment. In fact, something like this seems to have happened already
with one of our societyâs most important psychological tools for
enabling people to reduce (or at least temporarily escape from) stress,
namely, mass entertainment (see paragraph 147). Our use of mass
entertainment is âoptionalâ: No law requires us to watch television,
listen to the radio, read magazines. Yet mass entertainment is a means
of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become
dependent. Everyone complains about the trashiness of television, but
almost everyone watches it. A few have kicked the TV habit, but it would
be a rare person who could get along today without using ANY form of
mass entertainment. (Yet until quite recently in human history most
people got along very nicely with no other entertainment than that which
each local community created for itself.) Without the entertainment
industry the system probably would not have been able to get away with
putting as much stress-producing pressure on us as it does.
157. Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that
technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete
control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any rational
doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely biological basis.
As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure,
anger and fear can be turned on and off by electrical stimulation of
appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can be destroyed by damaging
parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface by electrical
stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by drugs.
There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it
clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human
behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be
able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and
electrical currents.
158. It presumably would be impractical for all people to have
electrodes inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by
the authorities. But the fact that human thoughts and feelings are so
open to biological intervention shows that the problem of controlling
human behavior is mainly a technical problem; a problem of neurons,
hormones and complex molecules; the kind of problem that is accessible
to scientific attack. Given the outstanding record of our society in
solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly probable that great
advances will be made in the control of human behavior.
159. Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological
control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to
introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will
be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be
no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127.)
160. To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we
point out that yesterdayâs science fiction is todayâs fact. The
Industrial Revolution has radically altered manâs environment and way of
life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly
applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as
radically as his environment and way of life have been.
161. But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop
in the laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques for
manipulating human behavior and quite another to integrate these
techniques into a functioning social system. The latter problem is the
more difficult of the two. For example, while the techniques of
educational psychology doubtless work quite well in the âlab schoolsâ
where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to apply them
effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what many of
our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and guns
away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making
them into computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical advances
relating to human behavior, the system to date has not been impressively
successful in controlling human beings. The people whose behavior is
fairly well under the control of the system are those of the type that
might be called âbourgeois.â But there are growing numbers of people who
in one way or another are rebels against the system: welfare leeches,
youth gangs, cultists, satanists, Nazis, radical environmentalists,
militia-men, etc.
162. The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome
certain problems that threaten its survival, among which the problems of
human behavior are the most important. If the system succeeds in
acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will
probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will
most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to 100
years.
163. Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades.
By that time it will have to have solved, or at least brought under
control, the principal problems that confront it, in particular that of
âsocializingâ human beings; that is, making people sufficiently docile
so that their behavior no longer threatens the system. That being
accomplished, it does not appear that there would be any further
obstacle to the development of technology, and it would presumably
advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete control over
everything on Earth, including human beings and all other important
organisms. The system may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or
it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of
organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes elements of
both cooperation and competition, just as today the government, the
corporations and other large organizations both cooperate and compete
with one another. Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because
individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-Ă -vis large
organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced
psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings,
besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion. Only a small
number of people will have any real power, and even these probably will
have only very limited freedom, because their behavior too will be
regulated; just as today our politicians and corporation executives can
retain their positions of power only as long as their behavior remains
within certain fairly narrow limits.
164. Donât imagine that the system will stop developing further
techniques for controlling human beings and nature once the crisis of
the next few decades is over and increasing control is no longer
necessary for the systemâs survival. On the contrary, once the hard
times are over the system will increase its control over people and
nature more rapidly, because it will no longer be hampered by
difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing. Survival is
not the principal motive for extending control. As we explained in
paragraphs 87â90, technicians and scientists carry on their work largely
as a surrogate activity; that is, they satisfy their need for power by
solving technical problems. They will continue to do this with unabated
enthusiasm, and among the most interesting and challenging problems for
them to solve will be those of understanding the human body and mind and
intervening in their development. For the âgood of humanity,â of course.
165. But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming
decades prove to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down
there may be a period of chaos, a âtime of troublesâ such as those that
history has recorded at various epochs in the past. It is impossible to
predict what would emerge from such a time of troubles, but at any rate
the human race would be given a new chance. The greatest danger is that
industrial society may begin to reconstitute itself within the first few
years after the breakdown. Certainly there will be many people
(power-hungry types especially) who will be anxious to get the factories
running again.
166. Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which
the industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to
heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the
likelihood that it will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a
revolution against it becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to
develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the
industrial system. Such an ideology can become the basis for a
revolution against industrial society if and when the system becomes
sufficiently weakened. And such an ideology will help to assure that, if
and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be smashed
beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories
should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.
167. The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of
revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack
unless its own internal problems of development lead it into very
serious difficulties. So if the system breaks down it will do so either
spontaneously, or through a process that is in part spontaneous but
helped along by revolutionaries. If the breakdown is sudden, many people
will die, since the worldâs population has become so overblown that it
cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced technology. Even if
the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the population can
occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through elevation of
the death rate, the process of de-industrialization probably will be
very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naive to think it likely
that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed, orderly way,
especially since the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step.
Is it therefore cruel to work for the breakdown of the system? Maybe,
but maybe not. In the first place, revolutionaries will not be able to
break the system down unless it is already in enough trouble so that
there would be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself
anyway; and the bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the
consequences of its breakdown will be; so it may be that
revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown, will be
reducing the extent of the disaster.
168. In the second place, one has to balance struggle and death against
the loss of freedom and dignity. To many of us, freedom and dignity are
more important than a long life or avoidance of physical pain. Besides,
we all have to die sometime, and it may be better to die fighting for
survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless
life.
169. In the third place, it is not at all certain that survival of the
system will lead to less suffering than the breakdown of the system
would. The system has already caused, and is continuing to cause,
immense suffering all over the world. Ancient cultures, that for
hundreds or thousands of years gave people a satisfactory relationship
with each other and with their environment, have been shattered by
contact with industrial society, and the result has been a whole catalog
of economic, environmental, social and psychological problems. One of
the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over
much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown
out of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that that
implies. Then there is the psychological suffering that is widespread
throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of the West (see
paragraphs 44, 45). No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone
depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that
cannot yet be foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new
technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and
irresponsible Third World nations. Would you like to speculate about
what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering?
170. âOh!â say the technophiles, âScience is going to fix all that! We
will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody
healthy and happy!â Yeah, sure. Thatâs what they said 200 years ago. The
Industrial Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everybody
happy, etc. The actual result has been quite different. The technophiles
are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their understanding of
social problems. They are unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact that
when large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones, are introduced into
a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes, most of which
are impossible to predict (paragraph 103). In the mean time there will
be great suffering. So it is not at all clear that the survival of
industrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of
that society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from
which there is not likely to be any easy escape.
171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next
several decades and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the
system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be?
We will consider several possibilities.
172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in
developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human
beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by
vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be
necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be
permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or
else human control over the machines might be retained.
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions we
canât make any conjecture as to the results, because it is impossible to
guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of
the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued
that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power
to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would
voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would
willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might
easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the
machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the
machinesâ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become
more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent,
people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them,
simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than
man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions
necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human
beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the
machines will be in effective control. People wonât be able to just turn
the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning
them off would amount to suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the
machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control
over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his
personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in
the hands of a tiny elite-just as it is today, but with two differences.
Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the
masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses
will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is
ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If
they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or
biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of
humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the
elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role
of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it
that everyoneâs physical needs are satisfied, that all children are
raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a
wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become
dissatisfied undergoes âtreatmentâ to cure his âproblem.â Of course,
life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or
psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power
process or to make them âsublimateâ their drive for power into some
harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a
society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been
reduced to the status of domestic animals.
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in
developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains
necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the
simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human
workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening already.
There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work,
because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire
the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present
system.) On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be
placed: They will need more and more training, more and more ability,
and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because
they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks
will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense,
out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice
of reality. The system will have to use any means that it can, whether
psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have
the abilities that the system requires and to âsublimateâ their drive
for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people
of such a society will have to be docile may require qualification. The
society may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways are found of
directing competitiveness into channels that serve the needs of the
system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless
competition for positions of prestige and power. But no more than a very
few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see
end of paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a person can
satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other people
out of the way and depriving them of THEIR opportunity for power.
176. One can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than
one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it
may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real,
practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being
given relatively unimportant work. It has been suggested, for example,
that a great development of the service industries might provide work
for human beings. Thus people would spend their time shining each
otherâs shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts
for one another, waiting on each otherâs tables, etc. This seems to us a
thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we doubt
that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless
busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime,
âcults,â hate groups) unless they were biologically or psychologically
engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.
177. Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all
the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to
us most likely. But we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any
more palatable than the ones weâve just described. It is overwhelmingly
probable that if the industrial-technological system survives the next
40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed certain general
characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the âbourgeoisâ type,
who are integrated into the system and make it run, and who therefore
have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on large
organizations; they will be more âsocializedâ than ever and their
physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a
very great extent ) will be those that are engineered into them rather
than being the results of chance (or of Godâs will, or whatever); and
whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants
preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and
management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the
long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither the
human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them
today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic
engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that
the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms
have been utterly transformed.
178. Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is
creating for human beings a new physical and social environment
radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural
selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. If
man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially
re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful
process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the
latter.
179. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the
consequences.
180. The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into
the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological
progress is doing to us, yet take a passive attitude toward it because
they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) donât think it is inevitable.
We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of
how to go about stopping it.
181. As we stated in paragraph 166, the two main tasks for the present
are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and
to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the
industrial system. When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and
unstable, a revolution against technology may be possible. The pattern
would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions. French
society and Russian society, for several decades prior to their
respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress and weakness.
Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a new world-view
that was quite different from the old one. In the Russian case
revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the old order. Then,
when the old system was put under sufficient additional stress (by
financial crisis in France, by military defeat in Russia) it was swept
away by revolution. What we propose is something along the same lines.
182. It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were
failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old
form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society
envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian
revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society
of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the
old society. We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a
new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing
form of society.
183. But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a
positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as
well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature.
That is, WILD nature: Those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and
its living things that are independent of human management and free of
human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human
nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human
individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but
are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your
religious or philosophical opinions).
184. Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several
reasons. Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the
opposite of technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of
the system). Most people will agree that nature is beautiful; certainly
it has tremendous popular appeal The radical environmentalists ALREADY
hold an ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology.[34] It is
not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or
any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a
spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for
countless centuries many different kinds of human societies coexisted
with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with
the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature
become really devastating. To relieve the pressure on nature it is not
necessary to create a special kind of social system, it is only
necessary to get rid of industrial society. Granted, this will not solve
all problems. Industrial society has already done tremendous damage to
nature and it will take a very long time for the scars to heal. Besides,
even preindustrial societies can do significant damage to nature.
Nevertheless, getting rid of industrial society will accomplish a great
deal. It will relieve the worst of the pressure on nature so that the
scars can begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of organized
society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human
nature). Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the
industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to
nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other
way that people CAN live. To feed themselves they must be peasants, or
herdsmen, or fishermen, or hunters, etc. And, generally speaking, local
autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology
and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other
large organizations to control local communities.
185. As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial
societyâwell, you canât eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing
you have to sacrifice another.
186. Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid
doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like
to have such issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms:
THIS is all good and THAT is all bad. The revolutionary ideology should
therefore be developed on two levels.
187. On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself
to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object
should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the
industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full
appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price
that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is particularly
important to attract people of this type, as they are capable people and
will be instrumental in influencing others. These people should be
addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts should never
intentionally be distorted and intemperate language should be avoided.
This does not mean that no appeal can be made to the emotions, but in
making such appeal, care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the
truth or doing anything else that would destroy the intellectual
respectability of the ideology.
188. On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a
simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the
conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms. But even on this
second level the ideology should not be expressed in language that is so
cheap, intemperate or irrational that it alienates people of the
thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate propaganda sometimes
achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more advantageous
in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of intelligently
committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking, fickle
mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a
better propaganda gimmick. However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing
type may be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse
and there is a final struggle between rival ideologies to determine
which will become dominant when the old world-view goes under.
189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect
to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active,
determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and
consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time comes for the
final push toward revolution,[35] the task of revolutionaries will be
less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small
core of deeply committed people. As for the majority, it will be enough
to make them aware of the existence of the new ideology and remind them
of it frequently; though of course it will be desirable to get majority
support to the extent that this can be done without weakening the core
of seriously committed people.
190. Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but
one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The
line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the
power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists,
upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should
NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For
example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn
Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American
should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing
industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he
doesnât need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom.
Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter of
attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the
public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a
matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public.
191. One should think twice before encouraging any other social conflict
than that between the power-holding elite (which wields technology) and
the general public (over which technology exerts its power). For one
thing, other conflicts tend to distract attention from the important
conflicts (between power-elite and ordinary people, between technology
and nature); for another thing, other conflicts may actually tend to
encourage technologization, because each side in such a conflict wants
to use technological power to gain advantages over its adversary. This
is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It also appears in ethnic
conflicts within nations. For example, in America many black leaders are
anxious to gain power for African-Americans by placing black individuals
in the technological power-elite. They want there to be many black
government officials, scientists, corporation executives and so forth.
In this way they are helping to absorb the African-American subculture
into the technological system. Generally speaking, one should encourage
only those social conflicts that can be fitted into the framework of the
conflicts of power-elite vs. ordinary people, technology vs. nature.
192. But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is NOT through militant
advocacy of minority rights (see paragraphs 21). Instead, the
revolutionaries should emphasize that although minorities do suffer more
or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral significance.
Our real enemy is the industrial-technological system, and in the
struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no importance.
193. The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve
an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve
physical violence, but it will not be a POLITICAL revolution. Its focus
will be on technology and economics, not politics.[36]
194. Probably the revolutionaries should even AVOID assuming political
power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is
stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in
the eyes of most people. Suppose for example that some âgreenâ party
should win control of the United States Congress in an election. In
order to avoid betraying or watering down their own ideology they would
have to take vigorous measures to turn economic growth into economic
shrinkage. To the average man the results would appear disastrous: There
would be massive unemployment, shortages of commodities, etc. Even if
the grosser ill effects could be avoided through superhumanly skillful
management, still people would have to begin giving up the luxuries to
which they have become addicted. Dissatisfaction would grow, the âgreenâ
party would be voted out of office and the revolutionaries would have
suffered a severe setback. For this reason the revolutionaries should
not try to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself
into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the
failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of
the revolutionaries. The revolution against technology will probably
have to be a revolution by outsiders, a revolution from below and not
from above.
195. The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be
carried out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that
the United States, for example, should cut back on technological
progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming
that if we fall behind in technology the Japanese will get ahead of us.
Holy robots! The world will fly off its orbit if the Japanese ever sell
more cars than we do! (Nationalism is a great promoter of technology.)
More reasonably, it is argued that if the relatively democratic nations
of the world fall behind in technology while nasty, dictatorial nations
like China, Vietnam and North Korea continue to progress, eventually the
dictators may come to dominate the world. That is why the industrial
system should be attacked in all nations simultaneously, to the extent
that this may be possible. True, there is no assurance that the
industrial system can be destroyed at approximately the same time all
over the world, and it is even conceivable that the attempt to overthrow
the system could lead instead to the domination of the system by
dictators. That is a risk that has to be taken. And it is worth taking,
since the difference between a âdemocraticâ industrial system and one
controlled by dictators is small compared with the difference between an
industrial system and a non-industrial one.[37] It might even be argued
that an industrial system controlled by dictators would be preferable,
because dictator-controlled systems usually have proved inefficient,
hence they are presumably more likely to break down. Look at Cuba.
196. Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to bind
the world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements like NAFTA
and GATT are probably harmful to the environment in the short run, but
in the long run they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster
economic interdependence between nations. It will be easier to destroy
the industrial system on a worldwide basis if the world economy is so
unified that its breakdown in any one major nation will lead to its
breakdown in all industrialized nations.
197. Some people take the line that modern man has too much power, too
much control over nature; they argue for a more passive attitude on the
part of the human race. At best these people are expressing themselves
unclearly, because they fail to distinguish between power for LARGE
ORGANIZATIONS and power for INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS. It is a
mistake to argue for powerlessness and passivity, because people NEED
power. Modern man as a collective entityâthat is, the industrial
systemâhas immense power over nature, and we (FC) regard this as evil.
But modern INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS have far less
power than primitive man ever did. Generally speaking, the vast power of
âmodern manâ over nature is exercised not by individuals or small groups
but by large organizations. To the extent that the average modern
INDIVIDUAL can wield the power of technology, he is permitted to do so
only within narrow limits and only under the supervision and control of
the system. (You need a license for everything and with the license come
rules and regulations.) The individual has only those technological
powers with which the system chooses to provide him. His PERSONAL power
over nature is slight.
198. Primitive INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS actually had considerable
power over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power WITHIN
nature. When primitive man needed food he knew how to find and prepare
edible roots, how to track game and take it with homemade weapons. He
knew how to protect himself from heat, cold, rain, dangerous animals,
etc. But primitive man did relatively little damage to nature because
the COLLECTIVE power of primitive society was negligible compared to the
COLLECTIVE power of industrial society.
199. Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should
argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that
this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and
SMALL GROUPS.
200. Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the
destruction of that system must be the revolutionariesâ ONLY goal. Other
goals would distract attention and energy from the main goal. More
importantly, if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other
goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to use
technology as a tool for reaching that other goal. If they give in to
that temptation, they will fall right back into the technological trap,
because modern technology is a unified, tightly organized system, so
that, in order to retain SOME technology, one finds oneself obliged to
retain MOST technology, hence one ends up sacrificing only token amounts
of technology.
201. Suppose for example that the revolutionaries took âsocial justiceâ
as a goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice would not come
about spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In order to enforce
it the revolutionaries would have to retain central organization and
control. For that they would need rapid long-distance transportation and
communication, and therefore all the technology needed to support the
transportation and communication systems. To feed and clothe poor people
they would have to use agricultural and manufacturing technology. And so
forth. So that the attempt to ensure social justice would force them to
retain most parts of the technological system. Not that we have anything
against social justice, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the
effort to get rid of the technological system.
202. It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the
system without using SOME modern technology. If nothing else they must
use the communications media to spread their message. But they should
use modern technology for only ONE purpose: to attack the technological
system.
203. Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him.
Suppose he starts saying to himself, âWine isnât bad for you if used in
moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine, are even good for you!
It wonât do me any harm if I take just one little drink...â Well, you
know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human race with
technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.
204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is
strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant
extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct
outcome of a personâs genetic constitution, but it appears that
personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality
traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more
likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these
findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be
ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend
on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their
parents. From our point of view it doesnât matter all that much whether
the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training.
In either case they ARE passed on.
205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel
against the industrial system are also concerned about the population
problem, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they
may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support or at
least accept the industrial system. To ensure the strength of the next
generation of revolutionaries the present generation should reproduce
itself abundantly. In doing so they will be worsening the population
problem only slightly. And the most important problem is to get rid of
the industrial system, because once the industrial system is gone the
worldâs population necessarily will decrease (see paragraph 167);
whereas, if the industrial system survives, it will continue developing
new techniques of food production that may enable the worldâs population
to keep increasing almost indefinitely.
206. With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we
absolutely insist are that the single, overriding goal must be the
elimination of modern technology, and that no other goal can be allowed
to compete with this one. For the rest, revolutionaries should take an
empirical approach. If experience indicates that some of the
recommendations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not going to give
good results, then those recommendations should be discarded.
207. An argument likely to be raised against our proposed revolution is
that it is bound to fail, because (it is claimed) throughout history
technology has always progressed, never regressed, hence technological
regression is impossible. But this claim is false.
208. We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call
small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology.
Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale
communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent
technology is technology that depends on large-scale social
organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in
small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES
regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down.
Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romansâ small-scale
technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build,
for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman
methods, and so forth. But the Romansâ organization-dependent technology
DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt.
Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of
urban sanitation was forgotten, so that not until rather recent times
did the sanitation of European cities equal that of ancient Rome.
209. The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that,
until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most
technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology
developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent
technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made
parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be
virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a
refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it
would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So
they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators
require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire
without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for
refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an icehouse or preserve
food by drying or pickling, as was done before the invention of the
refrigerator.
210. So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly
broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is
true of other organization-dependent technology. And once this
technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take centuries
to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time
around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered. An
industrial society, if built from scratch without outside help, can only
be built in a series of stages: You need tools to make tools to make
tools to make tools...A long process of economic development and
progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of
an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that
anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society. The
enthusiasm for âprogressâ is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of
society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17^(th) century
or thereabouts.
211. In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that
were about equally âadvancedâ: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the
Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of these civilizations remained
more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why
Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their theories but
these are only speculation. At any rate it is clear that rapid
development toward a technological form of society occurs only under
special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that a long-lasting
technological regression cannot be brought about.
212. Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an
industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying
about it, since we canât predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in
the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who will
live at that time.
213. Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a
movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type often are
attracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and
membership are not initially leftist. The resulting influx of leftish
types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one, so that
leftist goals replace or distort the original goals of the movement.
214. To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology
must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all
collaboration with leftists. Leftism is in the long run inconsistent
with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern
technology. Leftism is collectivist; it seeks to bind together the
entire world (both nature and the human race) into a unified whole. But
this implies management of nature and of human life by organized
society, and it requires advanced technology. You canât have a united
world without rapid long-distance transportation and communication, you
canât make all people love one another without sophisticated
psychological techniques, you canât have a âplanned societyâ without the
necessary technological base. Above all, leftism is driven by the need
for power, and the leftist seeks power on a collective basis, through
identification with a mass movement or an organization. Leftism is
unlikely ever to give up technology, because technology is too valuable
a source of collective power.
215. The anarchist[38] too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual
or small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups to be able
to control the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes technology
because it makes small groups dependent on large organizations.
216. Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose
it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is
controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society,
so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of
leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In
doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again
and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders,
they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated
self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as
they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and
created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under
the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the
tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when
leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were
vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our
universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown
themselves ready to take away everyone elseâs academic freedom. (This is
âpolitical correctness.â) The same will happen with leftists and
technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get
it under their own control.
217. In earlier revolutions, leftists of the most power-hungry type,
repeatedly, have first cooperated with non-leftist revolutionaries, as
well as with leftists of a more libertarian inclination, and later have
double-crossed them to seize power for themselves. Robespierre did this
in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks did it in the Russian
Revolution, the communists did it in Spain in 1938 and Castro and his
followers did it in Cuba. Given the past history of leftism, it would be
utterly foolish for non-leftist revolutionaries today to collaborate
with leftists.
218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of
religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist
doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But
for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which
religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism;
it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not
easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism
is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but
a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone. (However, many of the
people we are referring to as âleftistsâ do not think of themselves as
leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We
use the term âleftismâ because we donât know of any better word to
designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay
rights, political correctness, etc., movements, and because these
movements have a strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs
227â230.)
219. Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of
power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought
into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious
character of leftism: Everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents
Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the
leftistsâ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for
power through identification with a social movement, and he tries to go
through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of
the movement (see paragraph 83).That is, the leftistâs real motive is
not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is
motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then
reaching a social goal.[39] Consequently the leftist is never satisfied
with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process
leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal
opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on
statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone
harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some
minority, the leftist has to re-educate him. And ethnic minorities are
not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward
homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and
on and on and on. Itâs not enough that the public should be informed
about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every
package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted
if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is
outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol, then junk food, etc.
Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now
they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that they will want
to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another thing and
then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete
control over all child-rearing practices. And then they will move on to
another cause.
220. Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of ALL the things that
were wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted EVERY social
change that they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of
years the majority of leftists would find something new to complain
about, some new social âevilâ to correct; because, once again, the
leftist is motivated less by distress at societyâs ills than by the need
to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his solutions on society.
221. Because of the restrictions placed on their thought and behavior by
their high level of socialization, many leftists of the oversocialized
type cannot pursue power in the ways that other people do. For them the
drive for power has only one morally acceptable outlet, and that is in
the struggle to impose their morality on everyone.
222. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, are True
Believers in the sense of Eric Hofferâs book, The True Believer. But not
all True Believers are of the same psychological type as leftists.
Presumably a true-believing Nazi, for instance, is very different
psychologically from a true-believing leftist. Because of their capacity
for single-minded devotion to a cause, True Believers are a useful,
perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any revolutionary movement. This
presents a problem with which we must admit we donât know how to deal.
We arenât sure how to harness the energies of the True Believer to a
revolution against technology. At present all we can say is that no True
Believer will make a safe recruit to the revolution unless his
commitment is exclusively to the destruction of technology. If he is
committed also to another ideal, he may want to use technology as a tool
for pursuing that other ideal. (See paragraphs 200, 201.)
223. Some readers may say, âThis shit about leftism is a lot of crap. I
know John and Jane who are leftish types and they donât have all these
totalitarian tendencies.â Itâs quite true that many leftists, possibly
even a numerical majority, are decent people who sincerely believe in
tolerating othersâ values (up to a point) and wouldnât want to use
high-handed methods to reach their social goals. Our remarks about
leftism are not meant to apply to every individual leftist but to
describe the general character of leftism as a movement. And the general
character of a movement is not necessarily determined by the numerical
proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the movement.
224. The people who rise to positions of power in leftist movements tend
to be leftists of the most power-hungry type, because power-hungry
people are those who strive hardest to get into positions of power. Once
the power-hungry types have captured control of the movement, there are
many leftists of a gentler breed who inwardly disapprove of many of the
actions of the leaders, but cannot bring themselves to oppose them. They
NEED their faith in the movement, and because they cannot give up this
faith they go along with the leaders. True, SOME leftists do have the
guts to oppose the totalitarian tendencies that emerge, but they
generally lose, because the power-hungry types are better organized, are
more ruthless and Machiavellian and have taken care to build themselves
a strong power-base.
225. These phenomena appeared clearly in Russia and other countries that
were taken over by leftists. Similarly, before the breakdown of
communism in the USSR, leftish types in the West would seldom criticize
that country. If prodded they would admit that the USSR did many wrong
things, but then they would try to find excuses for the communists and
begin talking about the faults of the West. They always opposed Western
military resistance to communist aggression. Leftish types all over the
world vigorously protested the U.S. military action in Vietnam, but when
the USSR invaded Afghanistan they did nothing. Not that they approved of
the Soviet actions; but, because of their leftist faith, they just
couldnât bear to put themselves in opposition to communism. Today, in
those of our universities where âpolitical correctnessâ has become
dominant, there are probably many leftish types who privately disapprove
of the suppression of academic freedom, but they go along with it
anyway.
226. Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild and
fairly tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole from
having a totalitarian tendency.
227. Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far
from clear what we mean by the word âleftist.â There doesnât seem to be
much we can do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole
spectrum of activist movements. Yet not all activist movements are
leftist, and some activist movements (e.g., radical environmentalism)
seem to include both personalities of the leftist type and personalities
of thoroughly un-leftist types who ought to know better than to
collaborate with leftists. Varieties of leftists fade out gradually into
varieties of non-leftists and we ourselves would often be hard-pressed
to decide whether a given individual is or is not a leftist. To the
extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined
by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can
only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a
leftist.
228. But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing
leftism. These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner.
Some individuals may meet some of the criteria without being leftists,
some leftists may not meet any of the criteria. Again, you just have to
use your judgment.
229. The leftist is oriented toward large-scale collectivism. He
emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of
society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude
toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be
for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically
âenlightenedâ educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative
action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He
tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds
excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using
the common catchphrases of the left, like âracism,â âsexism,â
âhomophobia,â âcapitalism,â âimperialism,â âneocolonialism,â âgenocide,â
âsocial change,â âsocial justice,â âsocial responsibility.â Maybe the
best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with
the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability
rights, animal rights political correctness. Anyone who strongly
sympathizes with ALL of these movements is almost certainly a
leftist.[40]
230. The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most
power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic
approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be
certain oversocialized types who avoid irritating displays of
aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work
quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values, âenlightenedâ
psychological techniques for socializing children, dependence of the
individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists (as we may
call them) approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical
action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology and
motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control
of the system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply
because his attitudes are conventional. The crypto-leftist tries to
bring people under control of the system because he is a True Believer
in a collectivistic ideology. The crypto-leftist is differentiated from
the average leftist of the oversocialized type by the fact that his
rebellious impulse is weaker and he is more securely socialized. He is
differentiated from the ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact
that there is some deep lack within him that makes it necessary for him
to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself in a collectivity. And
maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the
average bourgeois.
231. Throughout this article weâve made imprecise statements and
statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and
reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be flatly
false. Lack of sufficient information and the need for brevity made it
impossible for us to formulate our assertions more precisely or add all
the necessary qualifications. And of course in a discussion of this kind
one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment, and that can sometimes be
wrong. So we donât claim that this article expresses more than a crude
approximation to the truth.
232. All the same, we are reasonably confident that the general outlines
of the picture we have painted here are roughly correct. Just one
possible weak point needs to be mentioned. We have portrayed leftism in
its modern form as a phenomenon peculiar to our time and as a symptom of
the disruption of the power process. But we might possibly be wrong
about this. Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for
power by imposing their morality on everyone have certainly been around
for a long time. But we THINK that the decisive role played by feelings
of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, identification with
victims by people who are not themselves victims, is a peculiarity of
modern leftism. Identification with victims by people not themselves
victims can be seen to some extent in 19^(th)-century leftism and early
Christianity, but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low
self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in
any other movements, as they are in modern leftism. But we are not in a
position to assert confidently that no such movements have existed prior
to modern leftism. This is a significant question to which historians
ought to give their attention.
[1] We are not asserting that all, or even most, bullies and ruthless
competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority.
[2] During the Victorian period many oversocialized people suffered from
serious psychological problems as a result of repressing or trying to
repress their sexual feelings. Freud apparently based his theories on
people of this type. Today the focus of socialization has shifted from
sex to aggression.
[3] Not necessarily including specialists in engineering or the âhardâ
sciences.
[4] There are many individuals of the middle and upper classes who
resist some of these values, but usually their resistance is more or
less covert. Such resistance appears in the mass media only to a very
limited extent. The main thrust of propaganda in our society is in favor
of the stated values. The main reason why these values have become, so
to speak, the official values of our society is that they are useful to
the industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the
functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic
conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the talents
of minority-group members who could be useful to the system. Poverty
must be âcuredâ because the underclass causes problems for the system
and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes.
Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to
the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women
become integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to
their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity. (The leaders of
the system say they want to strengthen the family, but what they really
mean is that they want the family to serve as an effective tool for
socializing children in accord with the needs of the system. We argue in
paragraphs 51,52.)
[5] It may be argued that the majority of people donât want to make
their own decisions but want leaders to do their thinking for them.
There is an element of truth in this. People like to make their own
decisions in small matters, but making decisions on difficult,
fundamental questions requires facing up to psychological conflict, and
most people hate psychological conflict. Hence they tend to lean on
others in making difficult decisions. But it does not follow that they
like to have decisions imposed on them without having any opportunity to
influence those decisions. The majority of people are natural followers,
not leaders, but they like to have direct personal access to their
leaders, they want to be able to influence the leaders and participate
to some extent in making even the difficult decisions. At least to that
degree they need autonomy.
[6] Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those shown by caged
animals. To explain how these symptoms arise from deprivation with
respect to the power process: common-sense understanding of human nature
tells one that lack of goals whose attainment requires effort leads to
boredom and that boredom, long continued, often leads eventually to
depression. Failure to attain goals leads to frustration and lowering of
self-esteem. Frustration leads to anger, anger to aggression, often in
the form of spouse or child abuse. It has been shown that long-continued
frustration commonly leads to depression and that depression tends to
cause anxiety, guilt, sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings
about oneself. Those who are tending toward depression seek pleasure as
an antidote; hence insatiable hedonism and excessive sex, with
perversions as a means of getting new kicks. Boredom too tends to cause
excessive pleasure-seeking since, lacking other goals, people often use
pleasure as a goal. The foregoing is a simplification. Reality is more
complex, and of course deprivation with respect to the power process is
not the ONLY cause of the symptoms described. By the way, when we
mention depression we do not necessarily mean depression that is severe
enough to be treated by a psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of
depression are involved. And when we speak of goals we do not
necessarily mean long-term, thought-out goals. For many or most people
through much of human history, the goals of a hand-to-mouth existence
(merely providing oneself and oneâs family with food from day to day)
have been quite sufficient.
[7] A partial exception may be made for a few passive, inward-looking
groups, such as the Amish, which have little effect on the wider
society. Apart from these, some genuine small-scale communities do exist
in America today. For instance, youth gangs and âcults.â Everyone
regards them as dangerous, and so they are, because the members of these
groups are loyal primarily to one another rather than to the system,
hence the system cannot control them. Or take the gypsies. The gypsies
commonly get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are such
that they can always get other gypsies to give testimony that âprovesâ
their innocence. Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too
many people belonged to such groups. Some of the early-20^(th)-century
Chinese thinkers who were concerned with modernizing China recognized
the necessity of breaking down small-scale social groups such as the
family: â[According to Sun Yat-Sen] the Chinese people needed a new
surge of patriotism, which would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the
family to the state.... [according to Li Huang] traditional attachments,
particularly to the family, had to be abandoned if nationalism were to
develop in Chinaâ (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the
Twentieth century, page 125, page 297).
[8] Yes, we know that 19^(th)-century America had its problems, and
serious ones, but for the sake of brevity we have to express ourselves
in simplified terms.
[9] We leave aside the âunderclass.â We are speaking of the mainstream.
[10] Some social scientists, educators, âmental healthâ professionals
and the like are doing their best to push the social drives into group 1
by trying to see to it that everyone has a satisfactory social life.
[11] Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial
creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is
no innate human drive for material acquisition. There have been many
cultures in which people have desired little material wealth beyond what
was necessary to satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian
aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures).
On the other hand there have also been many preindustrial cultures in
which material acquisition has played an important role. So we canât
claim that todayâs acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a
creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it IS clear that
the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in
creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on
advertising wouldnât be spending that kind of money without solid proof
that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met
a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him,
âOur job is to make people buy things they donât want and donât need.â
He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the
facts about a product and make no sales at all, while a trained and
experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same
people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they
donât really want.
[12] The problem of purposelessness seems to have become less serious
during the last 15 years or so [this refers to the 15 years preceding
1995], because people now feel less secure physically and economically
than they did earlier, and the need for security provides them with a
goal. But purposelessness has been replaced by frustration over the
difficulty of attaining security. We emphasize the problem of
purposelessness because the liberals and leftists would wish to solve
our social problems by having society guarantee everyoneâs security; but
if that could be done it would only bring back the problem of
purposelessness. The real issue is not whether society provides well or
poorly for peopleâs security; the trouble is that people are dependent
on the system for their security rather than having it in their own
hands. This, by the way, is part of the reason why some people get
worked up about the right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that
aspect of their security in their own hands.
[13] Conservativesâ efforts to decrease the amount of government
regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only
a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations
are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects
business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is
to take power from the government and give it to private corporations.
What this means for the average man is that government interference in
his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be
permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water
supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the
average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to
promote the power of Big Business.
[14] When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being
used in a given case, he generally calls it âeducationâ or applies to it
some similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the
purpose for which it is used.
[15] Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial
creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is
no innate human drive for material acquisition. There have been many
cultures in which people have desired little material wealth beyond what
was necessary to satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian
aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures).
On the other hand there have also been many preindustrial cultures in
which material acquisition has played an important role. So we canât
claim that todayâs acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a
creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it IS clear that
the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in
creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on
advertising wouldnât be spending that kind of money without solid proof
that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met
a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him,
âOur job is to make people buy things they donât want and donât need.â
He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the
facts about a product and make no sales at all, while a trained and
experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same
people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they
donât really want.
[16] We are not expressing approval or disapproval of the Panama
invasion. We only use it to illustrate a point.
[17] When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer
and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the
American Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal
freedom in preindustrial America, both before and after the War of
Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold
in this country. We quote from Violence in America: Historical and
Comparative Perspectives, edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert
Gurr, chapter 12 by Roger Lane, pages 476â478: âThe progressive
heightening of standards of propriety, and with it the increasing
reliance on official law enforcement [in 19^(th)-century America]...were
common to the whole society... [T]he change in social behavior is so
long term and so wide-spread as to suggest a connection with the most
fundamental of contemporary social processes; that of industrial
urbanization itself....Massachusetts in 1835 had a populacion of some
660,940, 81 percent rural, overwhelmingly preindustrial and native born.
Its citizens were used to considerable personal freedom. Whether
teamsters, farmers or artisans, they were all accustomed to setting
their own schedules, and the nature of their work made them physically
independent of each other....Individual problems, sins or even crimes,
were not generally cause for wider social concern ....But the impact of
the twin movements to the city and to the factory, both just gathering
force in 1835, had a progressive effect on personal behavior throughout
the 19^(th) century and into the 20^(th). The factory demanded
regularity of behavior, a life governed by obedience to the rhythms of
clock and calendar, the demands of foreman and supervisor. In the city
or town, the needs of living in closely packed neighborhoods inhibited
many actions previously unobjectionable. Both blue- and white-collar
employees in larger establishments were mutually dependent on their
fellows; as one manâs work fit into anotherâs, so one manâs business was
no longer his own. The results of the new organization of life and work
were apparent by 1900, when some 76 percent of the 2,805,346 inhabitants
of Massachusetts were classified as urbanites. Much violent or irregular
behavior which had been tolerable in a casual, independent society was
no longer acceptable in the more formalized, cooperative atmosphere of
the later period....The move to the cities had, in short, produced a
more tractable, more socialized, more âcivilizedâ generation than its
predecessors.â
[18] When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being
used in a given case, he generally calls it âeducationâ or applies to it
some similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the
purpose for which it is used.
[19] Apologists for the system are fond of citing cases in which
elections have been decided by one or two votes, but such cases are
rare.
[20] âToday, in technologically advanced lands, men live very similar
lives in spite of geographical, religious, and political differences.
The daily lives of a Christian bank clerk in Chicago, a Buddhist bank
clerk in Tokyo, and a Communist bank clerk in Moscow are far more alike
than the life any one of them is like that of any single man who lived a
thousand years ago. These similarities are the result of a common
technology....â L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers, Ballantine
edition, page 17. The lives of the three bank clerks are not IDENTICAL.
Ideology does have SOME effect. But all technological societies, in
order to survive, must evolve along APPROXIMATELY the same trajectory.
[21] Just think, an irresponsible genetic engineer might create a lot of
terrorists.
[22] For a further example of undesirable consequences of medical
progress, suppose a reliable cure for cancer is discovered. Even if the
treatment is too expensive to be available to any bur the elite, it will
greatly reduce their incentive to stop the escape of carcinogens into
the environment.
[23] Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large
number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we illustrate with an
analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a grand
master, is looking over Mr. Aâs shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win
his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is
doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make
ALL of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by
showing him his best move, but by making ALL of his moves for him he
spoils his game, since there is no point in Mr. Aâs playing the game at
all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is
analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individualâs life easier
for him in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control
over his own fate.
[24] When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being
used in a given case, he generally calls it âeducationâ or applies to it
some similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the
purpose for which it is used.
[25] Here we are considering only the conflict of values within the
mainstream. For the sake of simplicity we leave out of the picture
âoutsiderâ values like the idea that wild nature is more important than
human economic welfare.
[26] Self-interest is not necessarily MATERIAL self-interest. It can
consist in fulfillment of some psychological need, for example, by
promoting oneâs own ideology or religion.
[27] A qualification: It is in the interest of the system to permit a
certain prescribed degree of freedom in some areas. For example,
economic freedom (with suitable limitations and restraints) has proved
effective in promoting economic growth. but only planned, circumscribed,
limited freedom is in the interest of the system. The individual must
always be kept on a leash, even if the leash is sometimes long. (See
paragraphs 94, 97.)
[28] We donât mean 10 suggest that the efficiency or the potential for
survival of a society has always been inversely proportional to the
amount of pressure or discomfort to which the society subjects people.
That certainly is not the case. There is good reason to believe that
many primitive societies subjected people to less pressure than European
society did, but European society proved far more efficient than any
primitive society and always won out in conflicts with such societies
because of the advantages conferred by technology.
[29] If you think that more effective law enforcement is unequivocally
good because it suppresses crime, then remember that crime as defined by
the system is not necessarily what YOU would call crime. Today, smoking
marijuana is a âcrime,â and, in some places in the U.S., so is
possession of an unregistered handgun. Tomorrow, possession of ANY
firearm, registered or not, may be made a crime, and the same thing may
happen with disapproved methods of child-rearing, such as spanking. In
some countries, expression of dissident political opinions is a crime,
and there is no certainty that this will never happen in the U.S., since
no constitution or political system lasts forever. If a society needs a
large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something
gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe
pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only
because forced. Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or
no formal law-enforcement.
[30] To be sure past societies have had means of influencing human
behavior, but these have been primitive and of low effectiveness
compared with the technological means that are now being developed.
[31] However, some psychologists have publicly expressed opinions
indicating their contempt for human freedom. And the mathematician
Claude Shannon was quoted in Omni (August 1987) as saying, âI visualize
a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and Iâm
rooting for the machines.â
[32] When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being
used in a given case, he generally calls it âeducationâ or applies to it
some similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the
purpose for which it is used.
[33] This is no science fiction! After writing paragraph 154 we came
across an article in Scientific American according to which scientists
are actively developing techniques for identifying possible future
criminals and for treating them by a combination of biological and
psychological means. Some scientists advocate compulsory application of
the treatment, which may be available in the near future. (See âSeeking
the Criminal Element,â by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, March
1995.) Maybe you think this is okay because the treatment would be
applied to those who might become violent criminals. But of course it
wonât stop there. Next, a treatment will be applied to those who might
become drunk drivers (they endanger human life too), then perhaps to
people who spank their children, then to environmentalists who sabotage
logging equipment, eventually to anyone whose behavior is inconvenient
for the system.
[34] A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal to technology is
that, in many people, nature inspires the kind of reverence that is
associated with religion, so that nature could perhaps be idealized on a
religious basis. It is true that in many societies religion has served
as a support and justification for the established order, but it is also
true that religion has often provided a basis for rebellion. Thus it may
be useful to introduce a religious element into the rebellion against
technology, the more so because Western society today has no strong
religious foundation. Religion nowadays either is used as cheap and
transparent support for narrow, short-sighted selfishness (some
conservatives use it this way), or even is cynically exploited to make
easy money (by many evangelists), or has degenerated into crude
irrationalism (fundamentalist protestant sects, âcultsâ), or is simply
stagnant (Catholicism, mainline Protestantism). The nearest thing to a
strong, widespread, dynamic religion that the West has seen in recent
times has been the quasi-religion of leftism, but leftism today is
fragmented and has no clear, unified, inspiring goal. Thus there is a
religious vacuum in our society that could perhaps be filled by a
religion focused on nature in opposition to technology. But it would be
a mistake to try to concoct artificially a religion to fill this role.
Such an invented religion would probably be a failure. Take the âGaiaâ
religion for example. Do its adherents REALLY believe in it or are they
just play-acting? If they are just play-acting their religion will be a
flop in the end. It is probably best not to try to introduce religion
into the conflict of nature vs. technology unless you REALLY believe in
that religion yourself and find that it arouses a deep, strong, genuine
response in many other people.
[35] Assuming that such a final push occurs. Conceivably the industrial
system might be eliminated in a somewhat gradual or piecemeal fashion.
(See paragraphs 4, 167 and Note 32.)
[36] It is even conceivable (remotely) that the revolution might consist
only of a massive change of attitudes toward technology resulting in a
relatively gradual and painless disintegration of the industrial system.
But if this happens weâll be very lucky. Itâs far more probable that the
transition to a non-technological society will be very difficult and
full of conflicts and disasters.
[37] The economic and technological structure of a society are far more
important than its political structure in determining the way the
average man lives. (See paragraphs 95, 119 and Notes 16, 18.)
[38] This statement refers to our particular brand of anarchism. A wide
variety of social attitudes have been called âanarchist,â and it may be
that many who consider themselves anarchists would not accept our
statement of paragraph 215. It should be noted, by the way, that there
is a nonviolent anarchist movement whose members probably would not
accept FC as anarchist and certainly would not approve of FCâs violent
methods.
[39] Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but the hostility
probably results in part from a frustrated need for power.
[40] It is important to understand that we mean someone who sympathizes
with these movements as they exist today in our society. One who
believes that women, homosexuals, etc., should have equal rights is not
necessarily a leftist. The feminist, gay rights, etc., movements that
exist in our society have the particular ideological tone that
characterizes leftism, and if one believes, for example, that women
should have equal rights it does not necessarily follow that one must
sympathize with the feminist movement as it exists today.