INTRODUCTION<\/p>\n
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster
\n for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of
\n those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have
\n destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
\n human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological
\n suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have
\n inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued
\n development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly
\n subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage
\n on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social
\n disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased
\n physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.<\/p>\n
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break
\n down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of
\n physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a
\n long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of
\n permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to
\n engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore,
\n if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is
\n no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from
\n depriving people of dignity and autonomy.<\/p>\n
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very
\n painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the
\n results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had
\n best break down sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system.
\n This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden
\n or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We
\n can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the
\n measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in
\n order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of
\n society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be
\n to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis
\n of the present society.<\/p>\n
5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative
\n developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological
\n system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore
\n altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments
\n as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our
\n discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention
\n or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are
\n well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written
\n very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild
\n nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.<\/p>\n
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM<\/p>\n
6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled
\n society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of
\n our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can
\n serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern
\n society in general.<\/p>\n
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century
\n leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today
\n the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be
\n called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in
\n mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types,
\n feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and
\n the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these
\n movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing
\n leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological
\n type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by
\n “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of
\n leftist psychology (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)<\/p>\n
8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less
\n clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for
\n this. All we are trying to do is indicate in a rough and approximate
\n way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main
\n driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling
\n the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is
\n meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of
\n the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of
\n the 19th and early 20th century.<\/p>\n
9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we
\n call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” Feelings of
\n inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while
\n oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of
\n modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.<\/p>\n
FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY<\/p>\n
10. By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings
\n in the strictest sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low
\n self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies,
\n defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend
\n to have such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these
\n feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.<\/p>\n
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said
\n about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that
\n he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is
\n pronounced among minority rights advocates, whether or not they belong
\n to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are
\n hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities. The terms
\n “negro,” “oriental,” “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an
\n Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory
\n connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents
\n of “guy,” “dude” or “fellow.” The negative connotations have been
\n attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal
\n rights advocates have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and
\n insist on its replacement by “animal companion.” Leftist
\n anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about
\n primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative.
\n They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate.” They seem
\n almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive
\n culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that
\n primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the
\n hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)<\/p>\n
12. Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect”
\n terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant,
\n abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of
\n whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from
\n privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold
\n among university professors, who have secure employment with
\n comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white
\n males from middle-class families.<\/p>\n
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of
\n groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American
\n Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists
\n themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit
\n it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely
\n because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with
\n their problems. (We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE
\n inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology).<\/p>\n
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as
\n strong as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women
\n may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.<\/p>\n
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong,
\n good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western
\n civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The
\n reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not
\n correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West
\n because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so
\n forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in
\n primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he
\n GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points
\n out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in
\n Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the
\n leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates
\n America and the West because they are strong and successful.<\/p>\n
16. Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative”,
\n “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc. play little role in the liberal and
\n leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic,
\n pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s needs for them,
\n take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense
\n of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy
\n his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of
\n competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.<\/p>\n
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to
\n focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an
\n orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope
\n of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that
\n was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.<\/p>\n
18. Modern leftist philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science,
\n objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally
\n relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the
\n foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the
\n concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that
\n modern leftist philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians
\n systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply
\n involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack
\n these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one
\n thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent
\n that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More
\n importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they
\n classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and
\n other beliefs as false (i.e. failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings
\n of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification
\n of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or
\n inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the
\n concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are
\n antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior
\n because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or
\n inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or
\n blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is
\n “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been
\n brought up properly.<\/p>\n
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of
\n inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter,
\n a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith
\n in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but
\n he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong,
\n and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant
\n behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings
\n of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as
\n individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the
\n leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization
\n or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.<\/p>\n
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists
\n protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke
\n police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be
\n effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but
\n because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist
\n trait.<\/p>\n
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion
\n or by moral principle, and moral principle does play a role for the
\n leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle
\n cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too
\n prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power.
\n Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of
\n benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help.
\n For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black
\n people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or
\n dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a
\n diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal
\n and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative
\n action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take
\n such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs.
\n Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems
\n serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and
\n frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black
\n people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white
\n majority tends to intensify race hatred.<\/p>\n
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would
\n have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse
\n for making a fuss.<\/p>\n
23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate
\n description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only
\n a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.<\/p>\n
OVERSOCIALIZATION<\/p>\n
24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the
\n process by which children are trained to think and act as society
\n demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and
\n obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning
\n part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists
\n are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel.
\n Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such
\n rebels as they seem.<\/p>\n
25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can
\n think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not
\n supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some
\n time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are
\n so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally
\n imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt,
\n they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives
\n and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality
\n have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe
\n such people. [2]<\/p>\n
26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of
\n powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means
\n by which our society socializes children is by making them feel
\n ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s
\n expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is
\n especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of
\n HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized
\n person are more restricted by society’s expectations than are those of
\n the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a
\n significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty
\n thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate
\n someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick
\n to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do
\n these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of
\n shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even
\n experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to
\n the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And
\n socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to
\n confirm to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading
\n of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological
\n leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down
\n for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of
\n constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest
\n that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human
\n beings inflict on one another.<\/p>\n
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the
\n modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of
\n great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism.
\n Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or
\n members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university
\n intellectuals (3) constitute the most highly socialized segment of our
\n society and also the most left-wing segment.<\/p>\n
28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his
\n psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually
\n he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of
\n society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in
\n conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes
\n an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses
\n mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial
\n equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed
\n to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to
\n animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve
\n society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All
\n these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of
\n its middle and upper classes (4) for a long time. These values are
\n explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the
\n material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and
\n the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the
\n oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but
\n justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of
\n truth) that society is not living up to these principles.<\/p>\n
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized
\n leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our
\n society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists
\n push for affirmative action, for moving black people into
\n high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more
\n money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they
\n regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into
\n the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just
\n like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the
\n last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white
\n man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in
\n what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It
\n can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food,
\n listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going
\n to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express
\n itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects more
\n leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform
\n to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical
\n subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing
\n the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white.
\n They want to make black fathers “responsible.” they want black gangs
\n to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the
\n industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what
\n kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what
\n religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a
\n respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent,
\n is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it,
\n the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the
\n system and make him adopt its values.<\/p>\n
30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the
\n oversocialized type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our
\n society. Clearly they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have
\n gone so far as to rebel against one of modern society’s most important
\n principles by engaging in physical violence. By their own account,
\n violence is for them a form of “liberation.” In other words, by
\n committing violence they break through the psychological restraints
\n that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized
\n these restraints have been more confining for them than for others;
\n hence their need to break free of them. But they usually justify their
\n rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence
\n they claim to be fighting against racism or the like.<\/p>\n
31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing
\n thumb-nail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is
\n complex, and anything like a complete description of it would take
\n several volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim
\n only to have indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies
\n in the psychology of modern leftism.<\/p>\n
32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our
\n society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and
\n defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially
\n noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And
\n today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any
\n previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to
\n exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.<\/p>\n
THE POWER PROCESS<\/p>\n
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something
\n that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the
\n need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same
\n thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut
\n of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs
\n to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed
\n in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more
\n difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it
\n autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).<\/p>\n
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he
\n wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will
\n develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of
\n fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized.
\n Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that
\n leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of
\n fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power.
\n But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert
\n themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even
\n though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must
\n have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.<\/p>\n
35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical
\n necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are
\n made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains
\n these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.<\/p>\n
36. Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are
\n physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals
\n is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals
\n throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.<\/p>\n
37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human
\n being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a
\n reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.<\/p>\n
SURROGATE ACTIVITIES<\/p>\n
38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized.
\n For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent
\n hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he
\n became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to
\n satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for
\n themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same
\n energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put
\n into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the
\n Roman Empire had their literary pretentions; many European aristocrats
\n a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting,
\n though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have
\n competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few
\n aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.<\/p>\n
39. We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that
\n is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for
\n themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us
\n say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from
\n pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of
\n surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy
\n to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most
\n of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that
\n effort required him to use his physical and mental facilities in a
\n varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because
\n he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s
\n pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito’s studies in
\n marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is
\n pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at
\n interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of
\n life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn’t know all about
\n the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the
\n pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity,
\n because most people, even if their existence were otherwise
\n satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without
\n ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But
\n pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can
\n be a surrogate activity.)<\/p>\n
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to
\n satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training
\n program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on
\n time and exert very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only
\n requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence, and most of all,
\n simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from
\n cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take
\n physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of
\n mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is
\n full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic
\n achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation,
\n climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods
\n far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional
\n physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues
\n that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of
\n white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These
\n are not always pure surrogate activities, since for many people they
\n may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some
\n goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive
\n for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings,
\n militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue
\n them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For
\n example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the
\n “fulfillment” they get from their work is more important than the
\n money and prestige they earn.<\/p>\n
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less
\n satisfying than the pursuit of real goals ( that is, goals that people
\n would want to attain even if their need for the power process were
\n already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many
\n or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities
\n are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly
\n strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one
\n problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives
\n himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue
\n surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from
\n these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of
\n satisfying their biological needs, but that it is because in our
\n society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been
\n reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not
\n satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as
\n parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have
\n a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. have
\n a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.<\/p>\n
AUTONOMY<\/p>\n
42. Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for
\n every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of
\n autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be
\n undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own
\n direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this
\n initiative, direction and control as single individuals. It is usually
\n enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen
\n people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint
\n effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be
\n served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above
\n that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then
\n their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true
\n when decisions are made on a collective bases if the group making the
\n collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is
\n insignificant [5]<\/p>\n
43. It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for
\n autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by
\n identifying themselves with some powerful organization to which they
\n belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be
\n satisfied with a purely physical sense of power(the good combat
\n soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills
\n that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).<\/p>\n
44. But for most people it is through the power process-having a goal,
\n making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining t the goal-that self-esteem,
\n self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not
\n have adequate opportunity to go throughout the power process the
\n consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power
\n process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem,
\n inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt,
\n frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism,
\n abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc. [6]<\/p>\n
SOURCES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS<\/p>\n
45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in
\n modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We
\n aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going
\n crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is
\n good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress
\n and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than
\n modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in
\n primitive societies. Abuse of women and common among the Australian
\n aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American
\n Indian tribes. But is does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of
\n problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less
\n common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.<\/p>\n
46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern
\n society to the fact that that society requires people to live under
\n conditions radically different from those under which the human race
\n evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of
\n behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier
\n conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we
\n consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process
\n as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern
\n society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing
\n with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we
\n will discuss some of the other sources.<\/p>\n
47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society
\n are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature,
\n excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural
\n small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or
\n the tribe.<\/p>\n
48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression.
\n The degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from
\n nature are consequences of technological progress. All pre-industrial
\n societies were predominantly rural. The industrial Revolution vastly
\n increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that
\n lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible
\n for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did
\n before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because
\n it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands. For example, a
\n variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles,
\n etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want
\n peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is
\n restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the
\n regulations… But if these machines had never been invented there
\n would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)<\/p>\n
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes
\n only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of
\n security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates
\n nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes
\n very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable
\n framework.<\/p>\n
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of
\n traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological
\n progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that
\n you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the
\n economy of a society with out causing rapid changes in all other
\n aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably
\n break down traditional values.<\/p>\n
51.The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the
\n breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale
\n social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also
\n promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt
\n individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their
\n communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family
\n ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern
\n society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only
\n secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal
\n loyalties of small-scale small-scale communities were stronger than
\n loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own
\n advantage at the expense of the system.<\/p>\n
52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints
\n his cousin, his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than
\n appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted
\n personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is
\n “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in
\n modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor
\n job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the
\n system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an
\n advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale
\n communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the
\n system. [7]<\/p>\n
53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been
\n widely recognized as sources of social problems. but we do not believe
\n they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are
\n seen today.<\/p>\n
54. A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their
\n inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems
\n to the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are
\n uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban
\n areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas.
\n Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.<\/p>\n
55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th
\n century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended
\n families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as
\n these are broken down today. In fact, many nuclear families lived by
\n choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles,
\n that they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to
\n have developed problems as a result.<\/p>\n
56.Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and
\n deep. A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach
\n of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he
\n arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in
\n an ordered community with effective law enforcement. This was a deeper
\n change that that which typically occurs in the life of a modern
\n individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological
\n problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and
\n self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today’s society. [8]<\/p>\n
57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense
\n (largely justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19th
\n century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he
\n created change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a
\n piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his
\n own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a couple of
\n hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity
\n than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a
\n member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered
\n community. One may well question whether the creation of this
\n community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the
\n pioneer’s need for the power process.<\/p>\n
58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which
\n there has been rapid change and\/or lack of close community ties
\n without he kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in
\n today’s industrial society. We contend that the most important cause
\n of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact
\n that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power
\n process in a normal way. We don’t mean to say that modern society is
\n the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably
\n most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power ‘
\n process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial
\n society the problem has become particularly acute. Leftism, at least
\n in its recent (mid-to-late -20th century) form, is in part a symptom
\n of deprivation with respect to the power process.<\/p>\n
DISRUPTION OF THE POWER PROCESS IN MODERN SOCIETY<\/p>\n
59. We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that
\n can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied
\n but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be
\n adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power
\n process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group.
\n The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is
\n frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.<\/p>\n
60. In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be
\n pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to
\n consist increasingly of artificially created drives.<\/p>\n
61. In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into
\n group 2: They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort.
\n But modern society tends to guaranty the physical necessities to
\n everyone [9] in exchange for only minimal effort, hence physical needs
\n are pushed into group 1. (There may be disagreement about whether the
\n effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually, in lower- to
\n middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of
\n obedience. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do
\n what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do
\n you have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly
\n any autonomy in work, so that the need for the power process is not
\n well served.)<\/p>\n
62. Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group
\n 2 in modern society, depending on the situation of the individual.
\n [10] But, except for people who have a particularly strong drive for
\n status, the effort required to fulfill the social drives is
\n insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process.<\/p>\n
63. So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group
\n 2, hence serve the need for the power process. Advertising and
\n marketing techniques have been developed that make many people feel
\n they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed
\n of. It requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these
\n artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs
\n 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely
\n through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and
\n marketing industry [11], and through surrogate activities.<\/p>\n
64. It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these
\n artificial forms of the power process are insufficient. A theme that
\n appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second
\n half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts
\n many people in modern society. (This purposelessness is often called
\n by other names such as “anomic” or “middle-class vacuity.”) We suggest
\n that the so-called “identity crisis” is actually a search for a sense
\n of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It
\n may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the
\n purposelessness of modern life. [12] Very widespread in modern society
\n is the search for “fulfillment.” But we think that for the majority of
\n people an activity whose main goal is fulfillment (that is, a
\n surrogate activity) does not bring completely satisfactory
\n fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy the need for
\n the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully
\n satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such
\n as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.<\/p>\n
65. Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing
\n the status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other
\n way, most people are not in a position to pursue their goals
\n AUTONOMOUSLY. Most workers are someone else’s employee as, as we
\n pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend their days doing what they are
\n told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even most people who are
\n in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It is a chronic
\n complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands
\n are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations
\n are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government
\n regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely
\n complex society. A large portion of small business today operates on
\n the franchise system. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few
\n years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require
\n applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed
\n to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such
\n persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the
\n franchise system. This excludes from small business many of the people
\n who most need autonomy.<\/p>\n
66. Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them
\n or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what
\n they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down
\n by the system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system
\n provides, the opportunities must be exploited in accord with the rules
\n and regulations [13], and techniques prescribed by experts must be
\n followed if there is to be a chance of success.<\/p>\n
67. Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a
\n deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in pursuit of
\n goals. But it is also disrupted because of those human drives that
\n fall into group 3: the drives that one cannot adequately satisfy no
\n matter how much effort one makes. One of these drives is the need for
\n security. Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have
\n no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the
\n people who make them. (“We live in a world in which relatively few
\n people – maybe 500 or 1,00 – make the important decisions” – Philip B.
\n Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York
\n Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards
\n at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much
\n pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into
\n our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we
\n lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government
\n economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals
\n are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to
\n more [than] a very limited extent. The individual’s search for
\n security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of
\n powerlessness.<\/p>\n
68. It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure
\n than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence
\n modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity
\n that is normal for human beings. but psychological security does not
\n closely correspond with physical security. What makes us FEEL secure
\n is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our
\n ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a
\n fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in
\n search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but
\n he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The
\n modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things
\n against which he is helpless; nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food,
\n environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his
\n privacy by large organizations, nation-wide social or economic
\n phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.<\/p>\n
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the
\n things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the
\n risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is
\n no one’s fault, unless is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal
\n demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They
\n are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons
\n whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence.
\n Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.<\/p>\n
70. Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own
\n hands (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group)
\n whereas the security of modern man is in the hands of persons or
\n organizations that are too remote or too large for him to be able
\n personally to influence them. So modern man’s drive for security tends
\n to fall into groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food, shelter, etc.) his
\n security is assured at the cost of only trivial effort, whereas in
\n other areas he CANNOT attain security. (The foregoing greatly
\n simplifies the real situation, but it does indicate in a rough,
\n general way how the condition of modern man differs from that of
\n primitive man.)<\/p>\n
71. People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessary
\n frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become
\n angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations
\n it does not even permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one
\n may be in a hurry, or one may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one
\n generally has no choice but to move with the flow of traffic and obey
\n the traffic signals. One may want to do one’s work in a different way,
\n but usually one can work only according to the rules laid down by
\n one’s employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped
\n down by a network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that
\n frustrate many of his impulses and thus interfere with the power
\n process. Most of these regulations cannot be disposed with, because
\n the are necessary for the functioning of industrial society.<\/p>\n
72. Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In
\n matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can
\n generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like
\n (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the
\n system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice
\n “safe sex”). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT.
\n But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate
\n our behavior.<\/p>\n
73. Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only
\n by the government. Control is often exercised through indirect
\n coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by
\n organizations other than the government, or by the system as a whole.
\n Most large organizations use some form of propaganda [14] to
\n manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to
\n “commercials” and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even
\n consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For
\n instance, the content of entertainment programming is a powerful form
\n of propaganda. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that
\n says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders.
\n Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild
\n like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But
\n in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room
\n in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners.
\n Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.<\/p>\n
74. We suggest that modern man’s obsession with longevity, and with
\n maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced
\n age, is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with
\n respect to the power process. The “mid-life crisis” also is such a
\n symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly
\n common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.<\/p>\n
75. In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs
\n and purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no
\n particular reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man
\n goes through the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for
\n sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food.
\n (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on
\n social power; we won’t discuss that here.) This phase having been
\n successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about
\n settling down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In
\n contrast, some modern people indefinitely postpone having children
\n because they are too busy seeking some kind of “fulfillment.” We
\n suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate experience of the
\n power process — with real goals instead of the artificial goals of
\n surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children,
\n going through the power process by providing them with the physical
\n necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is
\n prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many
\n modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of
\n death, as is shown by the amount of effort they expend trying to
\n maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We argue
\n that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that they
\n have never put their physical powers to any use, have never gone
\n through the power process using their bodies in a serious way. It is
\n not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical
\n purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who
\n has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car
\n to his house. It is the man whose need for the power process has been
\n satisfied during his life who is best prepared to accept the end of
\n that life.<\/p>\n
76. In response to the arguments of this section someone will say,
\n “Society must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through
\n the power process.” For such people the value of the opportunity is
\n destroyed by the very fact that society gives it to them. What they
\n need is to find or make their own opportunities. As long as the system
\n GIVES them their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To attain
\n autonomy they must get off that leash.<\/p>\n
HOW SOME PEOPLE ADJUST<\/p>\n
77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from
\n psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied
\n with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people
\n differ so greatly in their response to modern society.<\/p>\n
78. First, there doubtless are differences in the strength of the
\n drive for power. Individuals with a weak drive for power may have
\n relatively little need to go through the power process, or at least
\n relatively little need for autonomy in the power process. These are
\n docile types who would have been happy as plantation darkies in the
\n Old South. (We don’t mean to sneer at “plantation darkies” of the Old
\n South. To their credit, most of the slaves were NOT content with their
\n servitude. We do sneer at people who ARE content with servitude.)<\/p>\n
79. Some people may have some exceptional drive, in pursuing which
\n they satisfy their need for the power process. For example, those who
\n have an unusually strong drive for social status may spend their whole
\n lives climbing the status ladder without ever getting bored with that
\n game.<\/p>\n
80. People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing
\n techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a
\n great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for
\n the shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their
\n eyes. So they always feel hard-pressed financially even if their
\n income is large, and their cravings are frustrated.<\/p>\n
81. Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing
\n techniques. These are the people who aren’t interested in money.
\n Material acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.<\/p>\n
82. People who have medium susceptibility to advertising and marketing
\n techniques are able to earn enough money to satisfy their craving for
\n goods and services, but only at the cost of serious effort (putting in
\n overtime, taking a second job, earning promotions, etc.) Thus material
\n acquisition serves their need for the power process. But it does not
\n necessarily follow that their need is fully satisfied. They may have
\n insufficient autonomy in the power process (their work may consist of
\n following orders) and some of their drives may be frustrated (e.g.,
\n security, aggression). (We are guilty of oversimplification in
\n paragraphs 80-82 because we have assumed that the desire for material
\n acquisition is entirely a creation of the advertising and marketing
\n industry. Of course it’s not that simple.<\/p>\n
83. Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying
\n themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An
\n individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization,
\n adopts its goals as his own, then works toward these goals. When some
\n of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal
\n efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of
\n the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or
\n organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This
\n phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, nazis and communists. Our
\n society uses it, too, though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was
\n an irritant to the U.S. (goal: punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded
\n Panama (effort) and punished Noriega (attainment of goal). The U.S.
\n went through the power process and many Americans, because of their
\n identification with the U.S., experienced the power process
\n vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama
\n invasion; it gave people a sense of power. [15] We see the same
\n phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian
\n organizations, religious or ideological movements. In particular,
\n leftist movements tend to attract people who are seeking to satisfy
\n their need for power. But for most people identification with a large
\n organization or a mass movement does not fully satisfy the need for
\n power.<\/p>\n
84. Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power
\n process is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs
\n 38-40, a surrogate activity that is directed toward an artificial goal
\n that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he
\n gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal
\n itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building
\n enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a
\n complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society
\n devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp
\n collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and
\n therefore will more readily attack importance to a surrogate activity
\n simply because the people around them treat it as important or because
\n society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very
\n serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or
\n bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are
\n more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the
\n surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach
\n enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process
\n in that way. It only remains to point out that in many cases a
\n person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a
\n PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is
\n to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status
\n and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put
\n into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever
\n money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a
\n surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional
\n investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces
\n acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system,
\n with negative consequences for individual freedom (see paragraph 131).
\n Especially, for the most creative scientists and engineers, work tends
\n to be largely a surrogate activity. This point is so important that is
\n deserves a separate discussion, which we shall give in a moment
\n (paragraphs 87-92).<\/p>\n
85. In this section we have explained how many people in modern
\n society do satisfy their need for the power process to a greater or
\n lesser extent. But we think that for the majority of people the need
\n for the power process is not fully satisfied. In the first place,
\n those who have an insatiable drive for status, or who get firmly
\n “hooked” or a surrogate activity, or who identify strongly enough with
\n a movement or organization to satisfy their need for power in that
\n way, are exceptional personalities. Others are not fully satisfied
\n with surrogate activities or by identification with an organization
\n (see paragraphs 41, 64). In the second place, too much control is
\n imposed by the system through explicit regulation or through
\n socialization, which results in a deficiency of autonomy, and in
\n frustration due to the impossibility of attaining certain goals and
\n the necessity of restraining too many impulses.<\/p>\n
86. But even if most people in industrial-technological society were
\n well satisfied, we (FC) would still be opposed to that form of
\n society, because (among other reasons) we consider it demeaning to
\n fulfill one’s need for the power process through surrogate activities
\n or through identification with an organization, rather then through
\n pursuit of real goals.<\/p>\n
THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS<\/p>\n
87. Science and technology provide the most important examples of
\n surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by
\n “curiosity,” that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on
\n highly specialized problem that are not the object of any normal
\n curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an
\n entomologist curious about the properties of
\n isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious
\n about such a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry
\n is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist curious about the
\n appropriate classification of a new species of beetle? No. That
\n question is of interest only to the entomologist, and he is interested
\n in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the
\n chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to
\n obtain the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their
\n abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit,
\n then they couldn’t giver a damn about isopropyltrimethylmethane or the
\n classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of funds for postgraduate
\n education had led the chemist to become an insurance broker instead of
\n a chemist. In that case he would have been very interested in
\n insurance matters but would have cared nothing about
\n isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into
\n the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that
\n scientists put into their work. The “curiosity” explanation for the
\n scientists’ motive just doesn’t stand up.<\/p>\n
88. The “benefit of humanity” explanation doesn’t work any better.
\n Some scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the
\n human race – most of archaeology or comparative linguistics for
\n example. Some other areas of science present obviously dangerous
\n possibilities. Yet scientists in these areas are just as enthusiastic
\n about their work as those who develop vaccines or study air pollution.
\n Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional
\n involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement
\n stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn’t Dr.
\n Teller get emotional about other “humanitarian” causes? If he was such
\n a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As with
\n many other scientific achievements, it is very much open to question
\n whether nuclear power plants actually do benefit humanity. Does the
\n cheap electricity outweigh the accumulating waste and risk of
\n accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the question. Clearly his
\n emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a desire to
\n “benefit humanity” but from a personal fulfillment he got from his
\n work and from seeing it put to practical use.<\/p>\n
89. The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare
\n exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit
\n humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal
\n (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to
\n attain the goal (solution of the problem.) Science is a surrogate
\n activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get
\n out of the work itself.<\/p>\n
90. Of course, it’s not that simple. Other motives do play a role for
\n many scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be
\n persons of the type who have an insatiable drive for status (see
\n paragraph 79) and this may provide much of the motivation for their
\n work. No doubt the majority of scientists, like the majority of the
\n general population, are more or less susceptible to advertising and
\n marketing techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods
\n and services. Thus science is not a PURE surrogate activity. But it is
\n in large part a surrogate activity.<\/p>\n
91. Also, science and technology constitute a mass power movement, and
\n many scientists gratify their need for power through identification
\n with this mass movement (see paragraph 83).<\/p>\n
92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real
\n welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to
\n the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government
\n officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for
\n research.<\/p>\n
THE NATURE OF FREEDOM<\/p>\n
93. We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot
\n be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively
\n narrowing the sphere of human freedom. But because “freedom” is a word
\n that can be interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what
\n kind of freedom we are concerned with.<\/p>\n
94. By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power
\n process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate
\n activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from
\n anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in
\n control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of
\n the life-and-death issues of one’s existence; food, clothing, shelter
\n and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s
\n environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control
\n other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own
\n life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large
\n organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently,
\n tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is
\n important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see
\n paragraph 72).<\/p>\n
95. It is said that we live in a free society because we have a
\n certain number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are
\n not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that
\n exists in a society is determined more by the economic and
\n technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of
\n government. [16] Most of the Indian nations of New England were
\n monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were
\n controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets
\n the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than out
\n society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient
\n mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern,
\n well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications,
\n no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of
\n average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.<\/p>\n
96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of
\n freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right: it
\n is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power
\n and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly
\n exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of
\n very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass
\n media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are
\n integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have
\n something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some
\n such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of
\n material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect.
\n To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost
\n impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for
\n example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the
\n present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been
\n accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would
\n not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the
\n entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if
\n these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon
\n have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the
\n mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our
\n message before the public with some chance of making a lasting
\n impression, we’ve had to kill people.<\/p>\n
97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not
\n serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois
\n conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free”
\n man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a
\n certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are
\n designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of
\n the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom
\n because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press
\n because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders;
\n he has a rights to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of
\n the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the
\n attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if
\n they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the
\n bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of
\n freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese
\n Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the
\n philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is
\n granted rights because he is a member of society and his community
\n life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of
\n the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang
\n (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom
\n had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a
\n whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only
\n as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of
\n Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such
\n theorists is that they have made the development and application of
\n social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories
\n are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs
\n of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which
\n the theories are imposed.<\/p>\n
98. One more point to be made in this section: It should not be
\n assumed that a person has enough freedom just because he SAYS he has
\n enough. Freedom is restricted in part by psychological control of
\n which people are unconscious, and moreover many people’s ideas of what
\n constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by
\n their real needs. For example, it’s likely that many leftists of the
\n oversocialized type would say that most people, including themselves
\n are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized
\n leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of
\n socialization.<\/p>\n
SOME PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY<\/p>\n
99. Think of history as being the sum of two components: an erratic
\n component that consists of unpredictable events that follow no
\n discernible pattern, and a regular component that consists of
\n long-term historical trends. Here we are concerned with the long-term
\n trends.<\/p>\n
100. FIRST PRINCIPLE. If a SMALL change is made that affects a
\n long-term historical trend, then the effect of that change will almost
\n always be transitory – the trend will soon revert to its original
\n state. (Example: A reform movement designed to clean up political
\n corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect;
\n sooner or later the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in. The
\n level of political corruption in a given society tends to remain
\n constant, or to change only slowly with the evolution of the society.
\n Normally, a political cleanup will be permanent only if accompanied by
\n widespread social changes; a SMALL change in the society won’t be
\n enough.) If a small change in a long-term historical trend appears to
\n be permanent, it is only because the change acts in the direction in
\n which the trend is already moving, so that the trend is not altered
\n but only pushed a step ahead.<\/p>\n
101. The first principle is almost a tautology. If a trend were not
\n stable with respect to small changes, it would wander at random rather
\n than following a definite direction; in other words it would not be a
\n long-term trend at all.<\/p>\n
102. SECOND PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is sufficiently large
\n to alter permanently a long-term historical trend, than it will alter
\n the society as a whole. In other words, a society is a system in which
\n all parts are interrelated, and you can’t permanently change any
\n important part without change all the other parts as well.<\/p>\n
103. THIRD PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is large enough to
\n alter permanently a long-term trend, then the consequences for the
\n society as a whole cannot be predicted in advance. (Unless various
\n other societies have passed through the same change and have all
\n experienced the same consequences, in which case one can predict on
\n empirical grounds that another society that passes through the same
\n change will be like to experience similar consequences.)<\/p>\n
104. FOURTH PRINCIPLE. A new kind of society cannot be designed on
\n paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance,
\n then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to.<\/p>\n
105. The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of
\n human societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of
\n a society and its physical environment; the economy will affect the
\n environment and vice versa, and the changes in the economy and the
\n environment will affect human behavior in complex, unpredictable ways;
\n and so forth. The network of causes and effects is far too complex to
\n be untangled and understood.<\/p>\n
106. FIFTH PRINCIPLE. People do not consciously and rationally choose
\n the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of
\n social evolution that are not under rational human control.<\/p>\n
107. The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four.<\/p>\n
108. To illustrate: By the first principle, generally speaking an
\n attempt at social reform either acts in the direction in which the
\n society is developing anyway (so that it merely accelerates a change
\n that would have occurred in any case) or else it only has a transitory
\n effect, so that the society soon slips back into its old groove. To
\n make a lasting change in the direction of development of any important
\n aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is
\n required. (A revolution does not necessarily involve an armed uprising
\n or the overthrow of a government.) By the second principle, a
\n revolution never changes only one aspect of a society; and by the
\n third principle changes occur that were never expected or desired by
\n the revolutionaries. By the fourth principle, when revolutionaries or
\n utopians set up a new kind of society, it never works out as planned.<\/p>\n
109. The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The
\n American “Revolution” was not a revolution in our sense of the word,
\n but a war of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political
\n reform. The Founding Fathers did not change the direction of
\n development of American society, nor did they aspire to do so. They
\n only freed the development of American society from the retarding
\n effect of British rule. Their political reform did not change any
\n basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along its
\n natural direction of development. British society, of which American
\n society was an off-shoot, had been moving for a long time in the
\n direction of representative democracy. And prior to the War of
\n Independence the Americans were already practicing a significant
\n degree of representative democracy in the colonial assemblies. The
\n political system established by the Constitution was modeled on the
\n British system and on the colonial assemblies. With major alteration,
\n to be sure – there is no doubt that the Founding Fathers took a very
\n important step. But it was a step along the road the English-speaking
\n world was already traveling. The proof is that Britain and all of its
\n colonies that were populated predominantly by people of British
\n descent ended up with systems of representative democracy essentially
\n similar to that of the United States. If the Founding Fathers had lost
\n their nerve and declined to sign the Declaration of Independence, our
\n way of life today would not have been significantly different. Maybe
\n we would have had somewhat closer ties to Britain, and would have had
\n a Parliament and Prime Minister instead of a Congress and President.
\n No big deal. Thus the American Revolution provides not a
\n counterexample to our principles but a good illustration of them.<\/p>\n
110. Still, one has to use common sense in applying the principles.
\n They are expressed in imprecise language that allows latitude for
\n interpretation, and exceptions to them can be found. So we present
\n these principles not as inviolable laws but as rules of thumb, or
\n guides to thinking, that may provide a partial antidote to naive ideas
\n about the future of society. The principles should be borne constantly
\n in mind, and whenever one reaches a conclusion that conflicts with
\n them one should carefully reexamine one’s thinking and retain the
\n conclusion only if one has good, solid reasons for doing so.<\/p>\n
INDUSTRIAL-TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY CANNOT BE REFORMED<\/p>\n
111. The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it
\n would be to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent
\n it from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom. There has been
\n a consistent tendency, going back at least to the Industrial
\n Revolution for technology to strengthen the system at a high cost in
\n individual freedom and local autonomy. Hence any change designed to
\n protect freedom from technology would be contrary to a fundamental
\n trend in the development of our society.<\/p>\n
Consequently, such a change either would be a transitory one — soon
\n swamped by the tide of history — or, if large enough to be permanent
\n would alter the nature of our whole society. This by the first and
\n second principles. Moreover, since society would be altered in a way
\n that could not be predicted in advance (third principle) there would
\n be great risk. Changes large enough to make a lasting difference in
\n favor of freedom would not be initiated because it would realized that
\n they would gravely disrupt the system. So any attempts at reform would
\n be too timid to be effective. Even if changes large enough to make a
\n lasting difference were initiated, they would be retracted when their
\n disruptive effects became apparent. Thus, permanent changes in favor
\n of freedom could be brought about only by persons prepared to accept
\n radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of the entire system.
\n In other words, by revolutionaries, not reformers.<\/p>\n
112. People anxious to rescue freedom without sacrificing the supposed
\n benefits of technology will suggest naive schemes for some new form of
\n society that would reconcile freedom with technology. Apart from the
\n fact that people who make suggestions seldom propose any practical
\n means by which the new form of society could be set up in the first
\n place, it follows from the fourth principle that even if the new form
\n of society could be once established, it either would collapse or
\n would give results very different from those expected.<\/p>\n
113. So even on very general grounds it seems highly improbably that
\n any way of changing society could be found that would reconcile
\n freedom with modern technology. In the next few sections we will give
\n more specific reasons for concluding that freedom and technological
\n progress are incompatible.<\/p>\n
RESTRICTION OF FREEDOM IS UNAVOIDABLE IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY<\/p>\n
114. As explained in paragraph 65-67, 70-73, modern man is strapped
\n down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on
\n the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot
\n influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of
\n arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any
\n technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human
\n behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what
\n they are told to do, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos.
\n Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any
\n substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would
\n disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to
\n differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their
\n discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be
\n eliminated, but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by
\n large organizations is necessary for the functioning of
\n industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of
\n powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however,
\n that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by
\n psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires
\n of us. (Propaganda [14], educational techniques, “mental health”
\n programs, etc.)<\/p>\n
115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are
\n increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For
\n example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It
\n can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to
\n excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being
\n to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A
\n normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the
\n real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are
\n trained to do are in natural harmony with natural human impulses.
\n Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active
\n outdoor pursuits — just the sort of things that boys like. But in our
\n society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which
\n most do grudgingly.<\/p>\n
116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify
\n human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people
\n who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare
\n leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical
\n environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.<\/p>\n
117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate
\n MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any
\n great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into
\n small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the
\n cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a
\n society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that
\n affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a
\n million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the
\n average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What
\n usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public
\n officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but
\n even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters
\n ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be
\n significant. [17] Thus most individuals are unable to influence
\n measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. Their is no
\n conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society.
\n The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make
\n people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if
\n this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel
\n better, it would be demeaning.<\/p>\n
118 Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.”
\n Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes
\n less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with
\n and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer
\n networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern
\n health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that
\n technology applied in one location often affects people at other
\n locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may
\n contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the
\n greenhouse effect affects the whole world.<\/p>\n
119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs.
\n Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs
\n of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social
\n ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the
\n fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but
\n by technical necessity. [18] Of course the system does satisfy many
\n human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent
\n that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of
\n the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For
\n example, the system provides people with food because the system
\n couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s
\n psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it
\n couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious.
\n But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert
\n constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the
\n system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the
\n educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a
\n mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A
\n chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask
\n whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their
\n time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put
\n out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,”
\n no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in
\n this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to
\n technical necessity and for good reason: If human needs were put
\n before technical necessity there would be economic problems,
\n unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in
\n our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual
\n behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without
\n showing signs of stress.<\/p>\n
120. Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy
\n within the system are no better than a joke. For example, one company,
\n instead of having each of its employees assemble only one section of a
\n catalogue, had each assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed
\n to give them a sense of purpose and achievement. Some companies have
\n tried to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but for
\n practical reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited
\n extent, and in any case employees are never given autonomy as to
\n ultimate goals — their “autonomous” efforts can never be directed
\n toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their
\n employer’s goals, such as the survival and growth of the company. Any
\n company would soon go out of business if it permitted its employees to
\n act otherwise. Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system,
\n workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of the enterprise,
\n otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of the
\n system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible
\n for most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in
\n industrial society. Even the small-business owner commonly has only
\n limited autonomy. Apart from the necessity of government regulation,
\n he is restricted by the fact that he must fit into the economic system
\n and conform to its requirements. For instance, when someone develops a
\n new technology, the small-business person often has to use that
\n technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive.<\/p>\n
THE ‘BAD’ PARTS OF TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE ‘GOOD’ PARTS<\/p>\n
121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in
\n favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in
\n which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the
\n “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take
\n modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on
\n progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other
\n fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech
\n equipment that can be made available only by a technologically
\n progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much
\n progress in medicine without the whole technological system and
\n everything that goes with it.<\/p>\n
122. Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of
\n the technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils.
\n Suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People
\n with a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and
\n reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural selection against genes for
\n diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the
\n population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since
\n diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of
\n insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases
\n susceptibility to which is affected by genetic degradation of the
\n population. The only solution will be some sort of eugenics program or
\n extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the
\n future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God
\n (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a
\n manufactured product.<\/p>\n
123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much
\n NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic
\n constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow
\n the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the
\n consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.
\n [19]<\/p>\n
124. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about “medical
\n ethics.” But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in
\n the face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code
\n of ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means
\n of regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody
\n (probably the upper-middle class, mostly) would decide that such and
\n such applications of genetic engineering were “ethical” and others
\n were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on
\n the genetic constitution of the population at large. Even if a code of
\n ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority
\n would be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a
\n different idea of what constituted an “ethical” use of genetic
\n engineering. The only code of ethics that would truly protect freedom
\n would be one that prohibited ANY genetic engineering of human beings,
\n and you can be sure that no such code will ever be applied in a
\n technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to a
\n minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented
\n by the immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible,
\n especially since to the majority of people many of its applications
\n will seem obviously and unequivocally good (eliminating physical and
\n mental diseases, giving people the abilities they need to get along in
\n today’s world). Inevitably, genetic engineering will be used
\n extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs of the
\n industrial-technological system. [20]<\/p>\n
TECHNOLOGY IS A MORE POWERFUL SOCIAL FORCE THAN THE ASPIRATION FOR FREEDOM<\/p>\n
125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between
\n technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful
\n social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED
\n compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the
\n outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful
\n than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land.
\n The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “OK, let’s compromise.
\n Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to
\n give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece
\n of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long
\n series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually
\n gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology
\n and freedom.<\/p>\n
126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force
\n than the aspiration for freedom.<\/p>\n
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom
\n often turns out to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it
\n very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A
\n walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace
\n without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of
\n technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced
\n they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away
\n from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t
\n want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel
\n much faster than the walking man. But the introduction of motorized
\n transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly
\n man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it
\n became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car,
\n especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one
\n likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of
\n traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various
\n obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration,
\n insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on
\n purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer
\n optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the
\n arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority
\n of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of
\n employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that
\n they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they
\n must use public transportation, in which case they have even less
\n control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the
\n walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually
\n has to stop and wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to
\n serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous
\n and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note the important point we
\n have illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item
\n of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept
\n or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many
\n cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people
\n eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)<\/p>\n
128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our
\n sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF
\n appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid
\n long-distance communications . . . how could one argue against any of
\n these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical
\n advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to
\n resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many
\n advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs
\n 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created world
\n in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in
\n the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians,
\n corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and
\n bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence. [21]
\n The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic
\n engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a
\n genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease It does no
\n apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of
\n genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an
\n engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God,
\n or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).<\/p>\n
129 Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is
\n that, within the context of a given society, technological progress
\n marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a
\n technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become
\n dependent on it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced
\n innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a
\n new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes
\n dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if
\n computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in
\n only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology
\n repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back — short of the
\n overthrow of the whole technological system.<\/p>\n
130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at
\n many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and
\n regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large
\n organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic
\n engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and
\n computers, etc.) To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would
\n require a long different social struggle. Those who want to protect
\n freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the
\n rapidity with which they develop, hence they become pathetic and no
\n longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be
\n futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological
\n system as a whole; but that is revolution not reform.<\/p>\n
131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all
\n those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to
\n be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a
\n conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost
\n always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the
\n case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators,
\n humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use
\n propaganda or other psychological techniques to help them achieve
\n their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they
\n find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about
\n individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies
\n are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects
\n and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they
\n can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent
\n those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law
\n officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but
\n when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work
\n is more important.<\/p>\n
132. It is well known that people generally work better and more
\n persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid
\n a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are
\n motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those
\n who oppose technilogiccal invasions of freedom are working to avoid a
\n negative outcome, consequently there are a few who work persistently
\n and well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a
\n signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further
\n erosion of freedom through technological progress, most would tend to
\n relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the
\n scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as
\n it progresses would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more
\n and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent
\n on the system.<\/p>\n
133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or
\n ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology.
\n History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all
\n change or break down eventually. But technological advances are
\n permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for
\n example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangements
\n that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human
\n beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a ways as to threaten
\n freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain waiting.
\n Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably
\n sooner, given that pace of change in our society. Then genetic
\n engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this
\n invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological
\n civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything permanent
\n through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently
\n happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed
\n that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the
\n worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political
\n wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.<\/p>\n
134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful
\n social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement
\n requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next
\n several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing
\n severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and
\n especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion,
\n hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We
\n hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will
\n cause it to break down, or at least weaken it sufficiently so that a
\n revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment
\n the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than
\n technology.<\/p>\n
135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is
\n left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing
\n on him a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong
\n neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak
\n neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can
\n kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to
\n give his land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets
\n well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible
\n alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has
\n the chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we
\n must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its
\n sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom. <\/p>\n
SIMPLER SOCIAL PROBLEMS HAVE PROVED INTRACTABLE<\/p>\n
136. If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the
\n system in such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him
\n consider how clumsily and for the most part unsuccessfully our society
\n has dealt with other social problems that are far more simple and
\n straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop
\n environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or
\n domestic abuse.<\/p>\n
137. Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict
\n of values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving
\n some of our natural resources for our grandchildren [22] But on this
\n subject we get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from the people
\n who have power, and nothing like a clear, consistent line of action,
\n and we keep on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren
\n will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the environmental issue
\n consist of struggles and compromises between different factions, some
\n of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment. The
\n line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion.
\n This is not a rational process, or is it one that is likely to lead to
\n a timely and successful solution to the problem. Major social
\n problems, if they get “solved” at all, are rarely or never solved
\n through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work themselves
\n out through a process in which various competing groups pursing their
\n own usually short-term) self-interest [23] arrive (mainly by luck) at
\n some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we
\n formulated in paragraphs 100-106 make it seem doubtful that rational,
\n long-term social planning can EVER be successful. 138. Thus it is
\n clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for
\n solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is
\n it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of
\n reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut
\n material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means
\n different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured
\n by propaganda and fancy talk.<\/p>\n
139. And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our
\n environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a
\n rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only
\n because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these
\n problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve
\n freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the
\n interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the
\n greatest possible extent. Thus, while practical considerations may
\n eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to
\n environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force
\n the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by
\n indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom.) This
\n isn’t just our opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g. James Q.
\n Wilson) have stressed the importance of “socializing” people more
\n effectively.<\/p>\n
REVOLUTION IS EASIER THAN REFORM<\/p>\n
140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be
\n reformed in a such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The
\n only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system
\n altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed
\n uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature
\n of society.<\/p>\n
141. People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much
\n greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about
\n than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is
\n much easier than reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement
\n can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot
\n inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social
\n problem A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one
\n stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for
\n which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this
\n reasons it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological
\n system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development
\n of application of any one segment of technology, such as genetic
\n engineering, but under suitable conditions large numbers of people may
\n devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the
\n industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132,
\n reformers seeking to limite certain aspects of technology would be
\n working to avoid a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain
\n a powerful reward — fulfillment of their revolutionary vision — and
\n therefore work harder and more persistently than reformers do.<\/p>\n
142. Reform is always restrainde by the fear of painful consequences
\n if changes go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold
\n of a society, people are willing to undergo unlimited hardships for
\n the sake of their revolution. This was clearly shown in the French and
\n Russian Revolutions. It may be that in such cases only a minority of
\n the population is really committed to the revolution, but this
\n minority is sufficiently large and active so that it becomes the
\n dominant force in society. We will have more to say about revolution
\n in paragraphs 180-205.<\/p>\n
CONTROL OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR<\/p>\n
143. Since the beginning of civilization, organized societies have had
\n to put pressures on human beings of the sake of the functioning of the
\n social organism. The kinds of pressures vary greatly from one society
\n to another. Some of the pressures are physical (poor diet, excessive
\n labor, environmental pollution), some are psychological (noise,
\n crowding, forcing humans behavior into the mold that society
\n requires). In the past, human nature has been approximately constant,
\n or at any rate has varied only within certain bounds. Consequently,
\n societies have been able to push people only up to certain limits.
\n When the limit of human endurance has been passed, things start going
\n rong: rebellion, or crime, or corruption, or evasion of work, or
\n depression and other mental problems, or an elevated death rate, or a
\n declining birth rate or something else, so that either the society
\n breaks down, or its functioning becomes too inefficient and it is
\n (quickly or gradually, through conquest, attrition or evolution)
\n replaces by some more efficient form of society.<\/p>\n
[25]<\/p>\n
144. Thus human nature has in the past put certain limits on the
\n development of societies. People coud be pushed only so far and no
\n farther. But today this may be changing, because modern technology is
\n developing way of modifying human beings.<\/p>\n
145. Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that amke
\n them terribley unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their
\n unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent
\n in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical
\n depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe
\n that this is due to disruption fo the power process, as explained in
\n paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of
\n depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in
\n today’s society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people
\n depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect,
\n antidepressants area a means of modifying an individual’s internal
\n state in such a way as to enable him to toelrate social conditions
\n that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that
\n depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to
\n those cases in which environment plays the predominant role.)<\/p>\n
146. Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of
\n controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us
\n look at some of the other methods.<\/p>\n
147. To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden
\n video cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places,
\n computers are used to collect and process vast amounts of information
\n about individuals. Information so obtained greatly increases the
\n effectiveness of physical coercion (i.e., law enforcement).[26] Then
\n there are the methods of propaganda, for which the mass communication
\n media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques have been
\n developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public
\n opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important
\n psychological tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out
\n large amounts of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man
\n with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television,
\n videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration,
\n dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don’t have work to
\n do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all,
\n because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most
\n modern people must be contantly occupied or entertained, otherwise the
\n get “bored,” i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.<\/p>\n
148. Other techniques strike deeper that the foregoing. Education is
\n no longer a simple affair of paddling a kid’s behind when he doesn’t
\n know his lessons and patting him on the head when he does know them.
\n It is becoming a scientific technique for controlling the child’s
\n development. Sylvan Learning Centers, for example, have had great
\n success in motivating children to study, and psychological techniques
\n are also used with more or less success in many conventional schools.
\n “Parenting” techniques that are taught to parents are designed to make
\n children accept fundamental values of the system and behave in ways
\n that the system finds desirable. “Mental health” programs,
\n “intervention” techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly
\n designed to benefit individuals, but in practice they usually serve as
\n methods for inducing individuals to think and behave as the system
\n requires. (There is no contradiction here; an individual whose
\n attitudes or behavior bring him into conflict with the system is up
\n against a force that is too powerful for him to conquer or escape
\n from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration, defeat.
\n His path will be much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system
\n requires. In that sense the system is acting for the benefit of the
\n individual when it brainwashes him into conformity.) Child abuse in
\n its gross and obvious forms is disapproved in most if not all
\n cultures. Tormenting a child for a trivial reason or no reason at all
\n is something that appalls almost everyone. But many psychologists
\n interpret the concept of abuse much more broadly. Is spanking, when
\n used as part of a rational and consistent system of discipline, a form
\n of abuse? The question will ultimately be decided by whether or not
\n spanking tends to produce behavior that makes a person fit in well
\n with the existing system of society. In practice, the word “abuse”
\n tends to be interpreted to include any method of child-rearing that
\n produces behavior inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go
\n beyond the prevention of obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for
\n preventing “child abuse” are directed toward the control of human
\n behavior of the system.<\/p>\n
149. Presumably, research will continue to increas the effectiveness
\n of psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we
\n think it is unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be
\n sufficient to adjust human beings to the kind of society that
\n technology is creating. Biological methods probably will have to be
\n used. We have already mentiond the use of drugs in this connection.
\n Neurology may provide other avenues of modifying the human mind.
\n Genetic engineering of human beings is already beginning to occur in
\n the form of “gene therapy,” and there is no reason to assume the such
\n methods will not eventually be used to modify those aspects of the
\n body that affect mental funtioning.<\/p>\n
150. As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely
\n to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of
\n human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems. And
\n a considerable proportion of the system’s economic and environmental
\n problems result from the way human beings behave. Alienation, low
\n self-esteem, depression, hostility, rebellion; children who won’t
\n study, youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child abuse , other
\n crimes, unsafe sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political
\n corruption, race hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict
\n (i.e., pro-choice vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism,
\n sabotage, anti-government groups, hate groups. All these threaten the
\n very survival of the system. The system will be FORCED to use every
\n practical means of controlling human behavior.<\/p>\n
151. The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the
\n result of mere chance. It can only be a result fo the conditions of
\n life that the system imposes on people. (We have argued that the most
\n important of these conditions is disruption of the power process.) If
\n the systems succeeds in imposing sufficient control over human
\n behavior to assure itw own survival, a new watershed in human history
\n will have passed. Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have
\n imposed limits on the development of societies (as we explained in
\n paragraphs 143, 144), industrial-technological society will be able to
\n pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological
\n methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems
\n will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human
\n being will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.<\/p>\n
[27] 152. Generally speaking, technological control over human
\n behavior will probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention
\n or even through a conscious desire to restrict human freedom. [28]
\n Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be
\n taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society, such as
\n curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to
\n study science and engineering. In many cases, there will be
\n humanitarian justification. For example, when a psychiatrist
\n prescribes an anti-depressant for a depressed patient, he is clearly
\n doing that individual a favor. It would be inhumane to withhold the
\n drug from someone who needs it. When parents send their children to
\n Sylvan Learning Centers to have them manipulated into becoming
\n enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from concern for their
\n children’s welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish that one
\n didn’t have to have specialized training to get a job and that their
\n kid didn’t have to be brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd. But
\n what can they do? They can’t change society, and their child may be
\n unemployable if he doesn’t have certain skills. So they send him to
\n Sylvan.<\/p>\n
153. Thus control over human behavior will be introduced not by a
\n calculated decision of the authorities but through a process of social
\n evolution (RAPID evolution, however). The process will be impossible
\n to resist, because each advance, considered by itself, will appear to
\n be beneficial, or at least the evil involved in making the advance
\n will appear to be beneficial, or at least the evil involved in making
\n the advance will seem to be less than that which would result from not
\n making it (see paragraph 127). Propaganda for example is used for many
\n good purposes, such as discouraging child abuse or race hatred. [14]
\n Sex education is obviously useful, yet the effect of sex education (to
\n the extent that it is successful) is to take the shaping of sexual
\n attitudes away from the family and put it into the hands of the state
\n as represented by the public school system.<\/p>\n
154. Suppose a biological trait is discovered that increases the
\n likelihood that a child will grow up to be a criminal and suppose some
\n sort of gene therapy can remove this trait. [29] Of course most
\n parents whose children possess the trait will have them undergo the
\n therapy. It would be inhumane to do otherwise, since the child would
\n probably have a miserable life if he grew up to be a criminal. But
\n many or most primitive societies have a low crime rate in comparison
\n with that of our society, even though they have neither high-tech
\n methods of child-rearing nor harsh systems of punishment. Since there
\n is no reason to suppose that more modern men than primitive men have
\n innate predatory tendencies, the high crime rate of our society must
\n be due to the pressures that modern conditions put on people, to which
\n many cannot or will not adjust. Thus a treatment designed to remove
\n potential criminal tendencies is at least in part a way of
\n re-engineering people so that they suit the requirements of the
\n system.<\/p>\n
155. Our society tends to regard as a “sickness” any mode of thought
\n or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible
\n because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain
\n to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the
\n manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a
\n “cure” for a “sickness” and therefore as good.<\/p>\n
156. In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of
\n technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN
\n optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a
\n way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to
\n function without using that technology. This applies also to the
\n technology of human behavior. In a world in which most children are
\n put through a program to make them enthusiastic about studying, a
\n parent will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program,
\n because if he does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively
\n speaking, an ignoramus and therefore unemployable. Or suppose a
\n biological treatment is discovered that, without undesirable
\n side-effects, will greatly reduce the psychological stress from which
\n so many people suffer in our society. If large numbers of people
\n choose to undergo the treatment, then the general level of stress in
\n society will be reduced, so that it will be possible for the system to
\n increase the stress-producing pressures. In fact, something like this
\n seems to have happened already with one of our society’s most
\n important psychological tools for enabling people to reduce (or at
\n least temporarily escape from) stress, namely, mass entertainment (see
\n paragraph 147). Our use of mass entertainment is “optional”: No law
\n requires us to watch television, listen to the radio, read magazines.
\n Yet mass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on
\n which most of us have become dependent. Everyone complains about the
\n trashiness of television, but almost everyone watches it. A few have
\n kicked the TV habit, but it would be a rare person who could get along
\n today without using ANY form of mass entertainment. (Yet until quite
\n recently in human history most people got along very nicely with no
\n other entertainment than that which each local community created for
\n itself.) Without the entertainment industry the system probably would
\n not have been able to get away with putting as much stress-producing
\n pressure on us as it does.<\/p>\n
157. Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that
\n technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete
\n control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any
\n rational doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely
\n biological basis. As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as
\n hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on and off by
\n electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can
\n be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to
\n the surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced
\n or moods changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human
\n soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful that the
\n biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case
\n then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human
\n feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents.<\/p>\n
158. It presumably would be impractical for all people to have
\n electrodes inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by
\n the authorities. But the fact that human thoughts and feelings are so
\n open to biological intervention shows that the problem of controlling
\n human behavior is mainly a technical problem; a problem of neurons,
\n hormones and complex molecules; the kind of problem that is accessible
\n to scientific attack. Given the outstanding record of our society in
\n solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly probable that great
\n advances will be made in the control of human behavior.<\/p>\n
159. Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological
\n control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made
\n to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control
\n will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there
\n will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs
\n 127,132, 153.)<\/p>\n
160. To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we
\n point out that yesterday’s science fiction is today’s fact. The
\n Industrial Revolution has radically altered man’s environment and way
\n of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is
\n increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be
\n altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.<\/p>\n
HUMAN RACE AT A CROSSROADS<\/p>\n
161. But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop
\n in the laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques
\n for manipulating human behavior and quite another to integrate these
\n techniques into a functioning social system. The latter problem is the
\n more difficult of the two. For example, while the techniques of
\n educational psychology doubtless work quite well in the “lab schools”
\n where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to apply them
\n effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what many
\n of our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and
\n guns away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for
\n making them into computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical
\n advances relating to human behavior the system to date has not been
\n impressively successful in controlling human beings. The people whose
\n behavior is fairly well under the control of the system are those of
\n the type that might be called “bourgeois.” But there are growing
\n numbers of people who in one way or another are rebels against the
\n system: welfare leaches, youth gangs cultists, satanists, nazis,
\n radical environmentalists, militiamen, etc..<\/p>\n
162. The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to
\n overcome certain problems that threaten its survival, among which the
\n problems of human behavior are the most important. If the system
\n succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly
\n enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We
\n think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several
\n decades, say 40 to 100 years.<\/p>\n
163. Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several
\n decades. By that time it will have to have solved, or at least brought
\n under control, the principal problems that confront it, in particular
\n that of “socializing” human beings; that is, making people
\n sufficiently docile so that their behavior no longer threatens the
\n system. That being accomplished, it does not appear that there would
\n be any further obstacle to the development of technology, and it would
\n presumably advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete
\n control over everything on Earth, including human beings and all other
\n important organisms. The system may become a unitary, monolithic
\n organization, or it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a
\n number of organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes
\n elements of both cooperation and competition, just as today the
\n government, the corporations and other large organizations both
\n cooperate and compete with one another. Human freedom mostly will have
\n vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent
\n vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an
\n arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for
\n manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and
\n physical coercion. Only a small number of people will have any real
\n power, and even these probably will have only very limited freedom,
\n because their behavior too will be regulated; just as today our
\n politicians and corporation executives can retain their positions of
\n power only as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly
\n narrow limits.<\/p>\n
164. Don’t imagine that the systems will stop developing further
\n techniques for controlling human beings and nature once the crisis of
\n the next few decades is over and increasing control is no longer
\n necessary for the system’s survival. On the contrary, once the hard
\n times are over the system will increase its control over people and
\n nature more rapidly, because it will no longer be hampered by
\n difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing. Survival
\n is not the principal motive for extending control. As we explained in
\n paragraphs 87-90, technicians and scientists carry on their work
\n largely as a surrogate activity; that is, they satisfy their need for
\n power by solving technical problems. They will continue to do this
\n with unabated enthusiasm, and among the most interesting and
\n challenging problems for them to solve will be those of understanding
\n the human body and mind and intervening in their development. For the
\n “good of humanity,” of course.<\/p>\n
165. But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming
\n decades prove to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down
\n there may be a period of chaos, a “time of troubles” such as those
\n that history has recorded: at various epochs in the past. It is
\n impossible to predict what would emerge from such a time of troubles,
\n but at any rate the human race would be given a new chance. The
\n greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to reconstitute
\n itself within the first few years after the breakdown. Certainly there
\n will be many people (power-hungry types especially) who will be
\n anxious to get the factories running again.<\/p>\n
166. Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to
\n which the industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must
\n work to heighten the social stresses within the system so as to
\n increase the likelihood that it will break down or be weakened
\n sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. Second,
\n it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes
\n technology and the industrial society if and when the system becomes
\n sufficiently weakened. And such an ideology will help to assure that,
\n if and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be
\n smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The
\n factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.<\/p>\n
HUMAN SUFFERING<\/p>\n
167. The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of
\n revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary
\n attack unless its own internal problems of development lead it into
\n very serious difficulties. So if the system breaks down it will do so
\n either spontaneously, or through a process that is in part spontaneous
\n but helped along by revolutionaries. If the breakdown is sudden, many
\n people will die, since the world’s population has become so overblown
\n that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced
\n technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction
\n of the population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate
\n than through elevation of the death rate, the process of
\n de-industrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much
\n suffering. It is naive to think it likely that technology can be
\n phased out in a smoothly managed orderly way, especially since the
\n technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step. Is it therefore
\n cruel to work for the breakdown of the system? Maybe, but maybe not.
\n In the first place, revolutionaries will not be able to break the
\n system down unless it is already in deep trouble so that there would
\n be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself anyway; and
\n the bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the consequences of
\n its breakdown will be; so it may be that revolutionaries, by hastening
\n the onset of the breakdown will be reducing the extent of the
\n disaster.<\/p>\n
168. In the second place, one has to balance the struggle and death
\n against the loss of freedom and dignity. To many of us, freedom and
\n dignity are more important than a long life or avoidance of physical
\n pain. Besides, we all have to die some time, and it may be better to
\n die fighting for survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but
\n empty and purposeless life.<\/p>\n
169. In the third place, it is not all certain that the survival of
\n the system will lead to less suffering than the breakdown of the
\n system would. The system has already caused, and is continuing to
\n cause , immense suffering all over the world. Ancient cultures, that
\n for hundreds of years gave people a satisfactory relationship with
\n each other and their environment, have been shattered by contact with
\n industrial society, and the result has been a whole catalogue of
\n economic, environmental, social and psychological problems. One of the
\n effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much
\n of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out
\n of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that it implies.
\n Then there is the psychological suffering that is widespread
\n throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of the West (see
\n paragraphs 44, 45). No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone
\n depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that
\n cannot yet be foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new
\n technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and
\n irresponsible Third World nations. Would you like to speculate abut
\n what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering?<\/p>\n
170. “Oh!” say the technophiles, “Science is going to fix all that! We
\n will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody
\n healthy and happy!” Yeah, sure. That’s what they said 200 years ago.
\n The Industrial Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make
\n everybody happy, etc. The actual result has been quite different. The
\n technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their
\n understanding of social problems. They are unaware of (or choose to
\n ignore) the fact that when large changes, even seemingly beneficial
\n ones, are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of
\n other changes, most of which are impossible to predict (paragraph
\n 103). The result is disruption of the society. So it is very probable
\n that in their attempt to end poverty and disease, engineer docile,
\n happy personalities and so forth, the technophiles will create social
\n systems that are terribly troubled, even more so that the present one.
\n For example, the scientists boast that they will end famine by
\n creating new, genetically engineered food plants. But this will allow
\n the human population to keep expanding indefinitely, and it is well
\n known that crowding leads to increased stress and aggression. This is
\n merely one example of the PREDICTABLE problems that will arise. We
\n emphasize that, as past experience has shown, technical progress will
\n lead to other new problems for society far more rapidly that it has
\n been solving old ones. Thus it will take a long difficult period of
\n trial and error for the technophiles to work the bugs out of their
\n Brave New World (if they ever do). In the meantime there will be great
\n suffering. So it is not all clear that the survival of industrial
\n society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of that
\n society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from
\n which there is not likely to be any easy escape.<\/p>\n
THE FUTURE<\/p>\n
171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next
\n several decade and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the
\n system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be?
\n We will consider several possibilities.<\/p>\n
172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in
\n developing intelligent machines that can do all things better that
\n human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be
\n done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort
\n will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might
\n be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human
\n oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.<\/p>\n
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we
\n can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible
\n to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the
\n fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might
\n be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand
\n over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that
\n the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor
\n that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is
\n that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a
\n position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no
\n practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As
\n society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and
\n machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines
\n make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made
\n decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a
\n stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the
\n system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable
\n of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in
\n effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off,
\n because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would
\n amount to suicide.<\/p>\n
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the
\n machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have
\n control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of
\n his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will
\n be in the hands of a tiny elite — just as it is today, but with two
\n difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater
\n control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be
\n necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the
\n system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate
\n the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or
\n other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate
\n until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the
\n elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may
\n decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human
\n race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are
\n satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic
\n conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and
\n that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure
\n his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will
\n have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove
\n their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their
\n drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human
\n beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will
\n not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic
\n animals.<\/p>\n
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in
\n developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains
\n necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the
\n simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human
\n workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening
\n already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to
\n get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they
\n cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves
\n useful in the present system.) On those who are employed,
\n ever-increasing demands will be placed; They will need more and m ore
\n training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more
\n reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more
\n like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly
\n specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with
\n the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The
\n system will have to use any means that I can, whether psychological or
\n biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities
\n that the system requires and to “sublimate” their drive for power into
\n some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such a
\n society will have to be docile may require qualification. The society
\n may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways are found of
\n directing competitiveness into channels that serve that needs of the
\n system. We can imagine into channels that serve the needs of the
\n system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless
\n competition for positions of prestige an power. But no more than a
\n very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is
\n (see end of paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a
\n person can satisfy his needs for power only by pushing large numbers
\n of other people out of the way and depriving them of THEIR opportunity
\n for power.<\/p>\n
176. Once can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than
\n one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it
\n may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real,
\n practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being
\n given relatively unimportant work. It has been suggested, for example,
\n that a great development of the service of industries might provide
\n work for human beings. Thus people will would spend their time
\n shinning each others shoes, driving each other around inn taxicab,
\n making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other’s tables,
\n etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race
\n to end up, and we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives
\n in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets
\n (drugs, , crime, “cults,” hate groups) unless they were biological or
\n psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.<\/p>\n
177. Needless to day, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all
\n the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem
\n to us mots likely. But wee can envision no plausible scenarios that
\n are any more palatable that the ones we’ve just described. It is
\n overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial-technological system
\n survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed
\n certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the
\n “bourgeois” type, who are integrated into the system and make it run,
\n and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever
\n on large organizations; they will be more “socialized” that ever and
\n their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly
\n to a very great extent ) will be those that are engineered into them
\n rather than being the results of chance (or of God’s will, or
\n whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to
\n remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision
\n and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild).
\n In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is it is likely that
\n neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as
\n we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through
\n genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular
\n point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and
\n other organisms have been utterly transformed.<\/p>\n
178. Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is
\n creating for human begins a new physical and social environment
\n radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural
\n selection has adapted the human race physically and psychological. If
\n man is not adjust to this new environment by being artificially
\n re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long an painful
\n process of natural selection. The former is far more likely that the
\n latter.<\/p>\n
179. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the
\n consequences.<\/p>\n
STRATEGY<\/p>\n
180. The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride
\n into the unknown. Many people understand something of what
\n technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude
\n toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don’t think
\n it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here
\n some indications of how to go about stopping it.<\/p>\n
181. As we stated in paragraph 166, the two main tasks for the present
\n are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and
\n to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the
\n industrial system. When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and
\n unstable, a revolution against technology may be possible. The pattern
\n would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions. French
\n society and Russian society, for several decades prior to their
\n respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress and
\n weakness. Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a
\n new world view that was quite different from the old one. In the
\n Russian case, revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the
\n old order. Then, when the old system was put under sufficient
\n additional stress (by financial crisis in France, by military defeat
\n in Russia) it was swept away by revolution. What we propose in
\n something along the same lines.<\/p>\n
182. It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were
\n failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an
\n old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society
\n envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian
\n revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of
\n society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in
\n destroying the existing form of society.<\/p>\n
183. But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have
\n a positive ideals well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as
\n well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is
\n Nature. That is , WILD nature; those aspects of the functioning of the
\n Earth and its living things that are independent of human management
\n and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we
\n include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the
\n functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation
\n by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God
\n (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).<\/p>\n
184. Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several
\n reasons. Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the
\n opposite of technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power
\n of the system). Most people will agree that nature is beautiful;
\n certainly it has tremendous popular appeal. The radical
\n environmentalists ALREADY hold an ideology that exalts nature and
\n opposes technology. [30] It is not necessary for the sake of nature to
\n set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature
\n takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long
\n before any human society, and for countless centuries many different
\n kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an
\n excessive amount of damage. Only with the Industrial Revolution did
\n the effect of human society on nature become really devastating. To
\n relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to create a special
\n kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of industrial
\n society. Granted, this will not solve all problems. Industrial society
\n has already done tremendous damage to nature and it will take a very
\n long time for the scars to heal. Besides, even pre-industrial
\n societies can do significant damage to nature. Nevertheless, getting
\n rid of industrial society will accomplish a great deal. It will
\n relieve the worst of the pressure on nature so that the scars can
\n begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of organized society to
\n keep increasing its control over nature (including human nature).
\n Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial
\n system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature,
\n because in the absence of advanced technology there is not other way
\n that people CAN live. To feed themselves they must be peasants or
\n herdsmen or fishermen or hunter, etc., And, generally speaking, local
\n autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology
\n and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or
\n other large organizations to control local communities.<\/p>\n
185. As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial
\n society — well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one
\n thing you have to sacrifice another.<\/p>\n
186. Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they
\n avoid doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and
\n they like to have such issues presented to them in simple,
\n black-and-white terms: THIS is all good and THAT is all bad. The
\n revolutionary ideology should therefore be developed on two levels.<\/p>\n
187. On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address
\n itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The
\n object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the
\n industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full
\n appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the
\n price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is
\n particularly important to attract people of this type, as they are
\n capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others. These
\n people should be addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts
\n should never intentionally be distorted and intemperate language
\n should be avoided. This does not mean that no appeal can be made to
\n the emotions, but in making such appeal care should be taken to avoid
\n misrepresenting the truth or doing anything else that would destroy
\n the intellectual respectability of the ideology.<\/p>\n
188. On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a
\n simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the
\n conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms. But even on
\n this second level the ideology should not be expressed in language
\n that is so cheap, intemperate or irrational that it alienates people
\n of the thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate propaganda
\n sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more
\n advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of
\n intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an
\n unthinking, fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as
\n someone comes along with a better propaganda gimmick. However,
\n propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may be necessary when the system
\n is nearing the point of collapse and there is a final struggle between
\n rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant when the old
\n world-view goes under.<\/p>\n
189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not
\n expect to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by
\n active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a
\n clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time
\n comes for the final push toward revolution [31], the task of
\n revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the
\n majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people. As for
\n the majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence of
\n the new ideology and remind them of it frequently; though of course it
\n will be desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can
\n be done without weakening the core of seriously committed people.<\/p>\n
190. Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but
\n one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The
\n line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and
\n the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians,
\n scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials,
\n etc..). It should NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the
\n mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the
\n revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption.
\n Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the
\n advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying
\n a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation
\n for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It
\n is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising
\n industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing
\n itself to be manipulated. As a matter of strategy one should generally
\n avoid blaming the public.<\/p>\n
191. One should think twice before encouraging any other social
\n conflict than that between the power-holding elite (which wields
\n technology) and the general public (over which technology exerts its
\n power). For one thing, other conflicts tend to distract attention from
\n the important conflicts (between power-elite and ordinary people,
\n between technology and nature); for another thing, other conflicts may
\n actually tend to encourage technologization, because each side in such
\n a conflict wants to use technological power to gain advantages over
\n its adversary. This is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It
\n also appears in ethnic conflicts within nations. For example, in
\n America many black leaders are anxious to gain power for African
\n Americans by placing back individuals in the technological
\n power-elite. They want there to be many black government officials,
\n scientists, corporation executives and so forth. In this way they are
\n helping to absorb the African American subculture into the
\n technological system. Generally speaking, one should encourage only
\n those social conflicts that can be fitted into the framework of the
\n conflicts of power–elite vs. ordinary people, technology vs nature.<\/p>\n
192. But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is NOT through militant
\n advocacy of minority rights (see paragraphs 21, 29). Instead, the
\n revolutionaries should emphasize that although minorities do suffer
\n more or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral
\n significance. Our real enemy is the industrial-technological system,
\n and in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no
\n importance.<\/p>\n
193. The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily
\n involve an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not
\n involve physical violence, but it will not be a POLITICAL revolution.
\n Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics. [32]<\/p>\n
194. Probably the revolutionaries should even AVOID assuming political
\n power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system
\n is stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure
\n in the eyes of most people. Suppose for example that some “green”
\n party should win control of the United States Congress in an election.
\n In order to avoid betraying or watering down their own ideology they
\n would have to take vigorous measures to turn economic growth into
\n economic shrinkage. To the average man the results would appear
\n disastrous: There would be massive unemployment, shortages of
\n commodities, etc. Even if the grosser ill effects could be avoided
\n through superhumanly skillful management, still people would have to
\n begin giving up the luxuries to which they have become addicted.
\n Dissatisfaction would grow, the “green” party would be voted out of of
\n fice and the revolutionaries would have suffered a severe setback. For
\n this reason the revolutionaries should not try to acquire political
\n power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any
\n hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the
\n industrial system itself and not from the policies of the
\n revolutionaries. The revolution against technology will probably have
\n to be a revolution by outsiders, a revolution from below and not from
\n above.<\/p>\n
195. The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be
\n carried out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that
\n the United States, for example, should cut back on technological
\n progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming
\n that if we fall behind in technology the Japanese will get ahead of
\n us. Holy robots The world will fly off its orbit if the Japanese ever
\n sell more cars than we do! (Nationalism is a great promoter of
\n technology.) More reasonably, it is argued that if the relatively
\n democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology while nasty,
\n dictatorial nations like China, Vietnam and North Korea continue to
\n progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world.
\n That is why the industrial system should be attacked in all nations
\n simultaneously, to the extent that this may be possible. True, there
\n is no assurance that the industrial system can be destroyed at
\n approximately the same time all over the world, and it is even
\n conceivable that the attempt to overthrow the system could lead
\n instead to the domination of the system by dictators. That is a risk
\n that has to be taken. And it is worth taking, since the difference
\n between a “democratic” industrial system and one controlled by
\n dictators is small compared with the difference between an industrial
\n system and a non-industrial one. [33] It might even be argued that an
\n industrial system controlled by dictators would be preferable, because
\n dictator-controlled systems usually have proved inefficient, hence
\n they are presumably more likely to break down. Look at Cuba.<\/p>\n
196. Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to
\n bind the world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements
\n like NAFTA and GATT are probably harmful to the environment in the
\n short run, but in the long run they may perhaps be advantageous
\n because they foster economic interdependence between nations. I will
\n be eaier to destroy the industrial system on a worldwide basis if he
\n world economy is so unified that its breakdown in any on major nation
\n will lead to its breakdwon in al industrialized nations.<\/p>\n
the long run they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster
\n economic interdependence between nations. It will be easier to destroy
\n the industrial system on a worldwide basis if the world economy is so
\n unified that its breakdown in any one major nation will lead to its
\n breakdown in all industrialized nations.<\/p>\n
197. Some people take the line that modern man has too much power, too
\n much control over nature; they argue for a more passive attitude on
\n the part of the human race. At best these people are expressing
\n themselves unclearly, because they fail to distinguish between power
\n for LARGE ORGANIZATIONS and power for INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS. It
\n is a mistake to argue for powerlessness and passivity, because people
\n NEED power. Modern man as a collective entity–that is, the industrial
\n system–has immense power over nature, and we (FC) regard this as
\n evil. But modern INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS have far
\n less power than primitive man ever did. Generally speaking, the vast
\n power of “modern man” over nature is exercised not by individuals or
\n small groups but by large organizations. To the extent that the
\n average modern INDIVIDUAL can wield the power of technology, he is
\n permitted to do so only within narrow limits and only under the
\n supervision and control of the system. (You need a license for
\n everything and with the license come rules and regulations). The
\n individual has only those technological powers with which the system
\n chooses to provide him. His PERSONAL power over nature is slight.<\/p>\n
198. Primitive INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS actually had considerable
\n power over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power WITHIN
\n nature. When primitive man needed food he knew how to find and prepare
\n edible roots, how to track game and take it with homemade weapons. He
\n knew how to protect himself from heat, cold, rain, dangerous animals,
\n etc. But primitive man did relatively little damage to nature because
\n the COLLECTIVE power of primitive society was negligible compared to
\n the COLLECTIVE power of industrial society.<\/p>\n
199. Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should
\n argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and
\n that this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS
\n and SMALL GROUPS.<\/p>\n
200. Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the
\n destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal.
\n Other goals would distract attention and energy from the main goal.
\n More importantly, if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any
\n other goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to
\n use technology as a tool for reaching that other goal. If they give in
\n to that temptation, they will fall right back into the technological
\n trap, because modern technology is a unified, tightly organized
\n system, so that, in order to retain SOME technology, one finds oneself
\n obliged to retain MOST technology, hence one ends up sacrificing only
\n token amounts of technology.<\/p>\n
201. Suppose for example that the revolutionaries took “social
\n justice” as a goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice
\n would not come about spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In
\n order to enforce it the revolutionaries would have to retain central
\n organization and control. For that they would need rapid long-distance
\n transportation and communication, and therefore all the technology
\n needed to support the transportation and communication systems. To
\n feed and clothe poor people they would have to use agricultural and
\n manufacturing technology. And so forth. So that the attempt to insure
\n social justice would force them to retain most parts of the
\n technological system. Not that we have anything against social
\n justice, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to
\n get rid of the technological system.<\/p>\n
202. It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the
\n system without using SOME modern technology. If nothing else they must
\n use the communications media to spread their message. But they should
\n use modern technology for only ONE purpose: to attack the
\n technological system.<\/p>\n
203. Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of
\n him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, “Wine isn’t bad for you if
\n used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good
\n for you! It won’t do me any harm if I take just one little drink…”
\n Well you know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human
\n race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.<\/p>\n
204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There
\n is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a
\n significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude
\n is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears
\n that personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to
\n make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude.
\n Objections to these findings have been raised, but objections are
\n feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one
\n denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes
\n similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t
\n matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically
\n or through childhood training. In either case the ARE passed on.<\/p>\n
205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel
\n against the industrial system are also concerned about the population
\n problems, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way
\n they may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support
\n or at least accept the industrial system. To insure the strength of
\n the next generation of revolutionaries the present generation must
\n reproduce itself abundantly. In doing so they will be worsening the
\n population problem only slightly. And the most important problem is to
\n get rid of the industrial system, because once the industrial system
\n is gone the world’s population necessarily will decrease (see
\n paragraph 167); whereas, if the industrial system survives, it will
\n continue developing new techniques of food production that may enable
\n the world’s population to keep increasing almost indefinitely.<\/p>\n
206. With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which
\n we absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the
\n elimination of modern technology, and that no other goal can be
\n allowed to compete with this one. For the rest, revolutionaries should
\n take an empirical approach. If experience indicates that some of the
\n recommendations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not going to give
\n good results, then those recommendations should be discarded.<\/p>\n
TWO KINDS OF TECHNOLOGY<\/p>\n
207. An argument likely to be raised against our proposed revolution
\n is that it is bound to fail, because (it is claimed) throughout
\n history technology has always progressed, never regressed, hence
\n technological regression is impossible. But this claim is false.<\/p>\n
208. We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will
\n call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology.
\n Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale
\n communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent
\n technology is technology that depends on large-scale social
\n organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in
\n small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES
\n regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down.
\n Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ small-scale
\n technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build,
\n for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by
\n Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans’ organization-dependent
\n technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were
\n never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The
\n Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that until rather
\n recent times did the sanitation of European cities that of Ancient
\n Rome.<\/p>\n
209. The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that,
\n until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most
\n technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology
\n developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent
\n technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made
\n parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be
\n virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a
\n refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it
\n would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power.
\n So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators
\n require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire
\n without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for
\n refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an icehouse or
\n preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention
\n of the refrigerator.<\/p>\n
210. So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly
\n broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same
\n is true of other organization-dependent technology. And once this
\n technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take
\n centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the
\n first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and
\n scattered. An industrial society, if built from scratch without
\n outside help, can only be built in a series of stages: You need tools
\n to make tools to make tools to make tools … . A long process of
\n economic development and progress in social organization is required.
\n And, even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there
\n is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding
\n industrial society. The enthusiasm for “progress” is a phenomenon
\n particular to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have
\n existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.<\/p>\n
211. In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that
\n were about equally “advanced”: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and
\n the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations
\n remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one
\n knows why Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their
\n theories but these are only speculation. At any rate, it is clear that
\n rapid development toward a technological form of society occurs only
\n under special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that
\n long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.<\/p>\n
212. Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an
\n industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying
\n about it, since we can’t predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years
\n in the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who
\n will live at that time.<\/p>\n
THE DANGER OF LEFTISM<\/p>\n
213. Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a
\n movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type are often
\n unattracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and
\n membership are not initially leftist. The resulting influx of leftish
\n types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one, so
\n that leftist goals replace or distort the original goals of the
\n movement.<\/p>\n
214. To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes
\n technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid
\n all collaboration with leftists. Leftism is in the long run
\n inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the
\n elimination of modern technology. Leftism is collectivist; it seeks to
\n bind together the entire world (both nature and the human race) into a
\n unified whole. But this implies management of nature and of human life
\n by organized society, and it requires advanced technology. You can’t
\n have a united world without rapid transportation and communication,
\n you can’t make all people love one another without sophisticated
\n psychological techniques, you can’t have a “planned society” without
\n the necessary technological base. Above all, leftism is driven by the
\n need for power, and the leftist seeks power on a collective basis,
\n through identification with a mass movement or an organization.
\n Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology, because technology is
\n too valuable a source of collective power.<\/p>\n
215. The anarchist [34] too seeks power, but he seeks it on an
\n individual or small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups
\n to be able to control the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes
\n technology because it makes small groups dependent on large
\n organizations.<\/p>\n
216. Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose
\n it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is
\n controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in
\n society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands
\n of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth.
\n In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown
\n again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were
\n outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police,
\n they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth;
\n but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter
\n censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had
\n existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least
\n as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of
\n decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist
\n professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in
\n those universities where leftists have become dominant, they have
\n shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic
\n freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with
\n leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if
\n they ever get it under their own control.<\/p>\n
217. In earlier revolutions, leftists of the most power-hungry type,
\n repeatedly, have first cooperated with non-leftist revolutionaries, as
\n well as with leftists of a more libertarian inclination, and later
\n have double-crossed them to seize power for themselves. Robespierre
\n did this in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks did it in the
\n Russian Revolution, the communists did it in Spain in 1938 and Castro
\n and his followers did it in Cuba. Given the past history of leftism,
\n it would be utterly foolish for non-leftist revolutionaries today to
\n collaborate with leftists.<\/p>\n
218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of
\n religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because
\n leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural
\n being. But for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much
\n like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to
\n believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological
\n economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has
\n a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and
\n that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on
\n everyone. (However, many of the people we are referring to as
\n “leftists” do not think of themselves as leftists and would not
\n describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We use the term “leftism”
\n because we don’t know of any better words to designate the spectrum of
\n related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights, political
\n correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a
\n strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227-230.)<\/p>\n
219. Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position
\n of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every
\n thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the
\n quasi-religious character of leftism; everything contrary to leftists
\n beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian
\n force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to
\n satisfy his need for power through identification with a social
\n movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to
\n pursue and attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83). But no
\n matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the
\n leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate
\n activity (see paragraph 41). That is, the leftist’s real motive is not
\n to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated
\n by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a
\n social goal.[35]<\/p>\n
Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has
\n already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to
\n pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for
\n minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality
\n of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some
\n corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the
\n leftist has to re-educated him. And ethnic minorities are not enough;
\n no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals,
\n disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on
\n and on. It’s not enough that the public should be informed about the
\n hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of
\n cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not
\n banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is
\n outlawed, and after that it will be alco hot then junk food, etc.
\n Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now
\n they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that they will
\n want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another
\n thing and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have
\n complete control over all child rearing practices. And then they will
\n move on to another cause.<\/p>\n
220. Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of ALL the things that
\n were wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted EVERY social
\n change that they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of
\n years the majority of leftists would find something new to complain
\n about, some new social “evil” to correct because, once again, the
\n leftist is motivated less by distress at society’s ills than by the
\n need to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his solutions on
\n society.<\/p>\n
221. Because of the restrictions placed on their thoughts and behavior
\n by their high level of socialization, many leftists of the
\n over-socialized type cannot pursue power in the ways that other people
\n do. For them the drive for power has only one morally acceptable
\n outlet, and that is in the struggle to impose their morality on
\n everyone.<\/p>\n
222. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, are True
\n Believers in the sense of Eric Hoffer’s book, “The True Believer.” But
\n not all True Believers are of the same psychological type as leftists.
\n Presumably a truebelieving nazi, for instance is very different
\n psychologically from a truebelieving leftist. Because of their
\n capacity for single-minded devotion to a cause, True Believers are a
\n useful, perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any revolutionary movement.
\n This presents a problem with which we must admit we don’t know how to
\n deal. We aren’t sure how to harness the energies of the True Believer
\n to a revolution against technology. At present all we can say is that
\n no True Believer will make a safe recruit to the revolution unless his
\n commitment is exclusively to the destruction of technology. If he is
\n committed also to another ideal, he may want to use technology as a
\n tool for pursuing that other ideal (see paragraphs 220, 221).<\/p>\n
223. Some readers may say, “This stuff about leftism is a lot of crap.
\n I know John and Jane who are leftish types and they don’t have all
\n these totalitarian tendencies.” It’s quite true that many leftists,
\n possibly even a numerical majority, are decent people who sincerely
\n believe in tolerating others’ values (up to a point) and wouldn’t want
\n to use high-handed methods to reach their social goals. Our remarks
\n about leftism are not meant to apply to every individual leftist but
\n to describe the general character of leftism as a movement. And the
\n general character of a movement is not necessarily determined by the
\n numerical proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the
\n movement.<\/p>\n
224. The people who rise to positions of power in leftist movements
\n tend to be leftists of the most power-hungry type because power-hungry
\n people are those who strive hardest to get into positions of power.
\n Once the power-hungry types have captured control of the movement,
\n there are many leftists of a gentler breed who inwardly disapprove of
\n many of the actions of the leaders, but cannot bring themselves to
\n oppose them. They NEED their faith in the movement, and because they
\n cannot give up this faith they go along with the leaders. True, SOME
\n leftists do have the guts to oppose the totalitarian tendencies that
\n emerge, but they generally lose, because the power-hungry types are
\n better organized, are more ruthless and Machiavellian and have taken
\n care to build themselves a strong power base.<\/p>\n
225. These phenomena appeared clearly in Russia and other countries
\n that were taken over by leftists. Similarly, before the breakdown of
\n communism in the USSR, leftish types in the West would seldom
\n criticize that country. If prodded they would admit that the USSR did
\n many wrong things, but then they would try to find excuses for the
\n communists and begin talking about the faults of the West. They always
\n opposed Western military resistance to communist aggression. Leftish
\n types all over the world vigorously protested the U.S. military action
\n in Vietnam, but when the USSR invaded Afghanistan they did nothing.
\n Not that they approved of the Soviet actions; but because of their
\n leftist faith, they just couldn’t bear to put themselves in opposition
\n to communism. Today, in those of our universities where “political
\n correctness” has become dominant, there are probably many leftish
\n types who privately disapprove of the suppression of academic freedom,
\n but they go along with it anyway.<\/p>\n
226. Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild
\n and fairly tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole
\n form having a totalitarian tendency.<\/p>\n
227. Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far
\n from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to
\n be much we can do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole
\n spectrum of activist movements. Yet not all activist movements are
\n leftist, and some activist movements (e.g.., radical environmentalism)
\n seem to include both personalities of the leftist type and
\n personalities of thoroughly un-leftist types who ought to know better
\n than to collaborate with leftists. Varieties of leftists fade out
\n gradually into varieties of non-leftists and we ourselves would often
\n be hard-pressed to decide whether a given individual is or is not a
\n leftist. To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of
\n leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this
\n article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in
\n deciding who is a leftist.<\/p>\n
228. But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing
\n leftism. These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner.
\n Some individuals may meet some of the criteria without being leftists,
\n some leftists may not meet any of the criteria. Again, you just have
\n to use your judgment.<\/p>\n
229. The leftist is oriented toward largescale collectivism. He
\n emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of
\n society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude
\n toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be
\n for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically
\n “enlightened” educational methods, for planning, for affirmative
\n action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He
\n tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often
\n finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of
\n using the common catch-phrases of the left like “racism, ” “sexism, ”
\n “homophobia, ” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “neocolonialism ”
\n “genocide,” “social change,” “social justice,” “social
\n responsibility.” Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his
\n tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay
\n rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights political
\n correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with ALL of these
\n movements is almost certainly a leftist. [36]<\/p>\n
230. The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most
\n power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic
\n approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may
\n be certain oversocialized types who avoid irritating displays of
\n aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work
\n quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values,
\n “enlightened” psychological techniques for socializing children,
\n dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These
\n crypto-leftists (as we may call them) approximate certain bourgeois
\n types as far as practical action is concerned, but differ from them in
\n psychology, ideology and motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to
\n bring people under control of the system in order to protect his way
\n of life, or he does so simply because his attitudes are conventional.
\n The crypto-leftist tries to bring people under control of the system
\n because he is a True Believer in a collectivistic ideology. The
\n crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the
\n oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker
\n and he is more securely socialized. He is differentiated from the
\n ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep
\n lack within him that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a
\n cause and immerse himself in a collectivity. And maybe his
\n (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average
\n bourgeois.<\/p>\n
FINAL NOTE<\/p>\n
231. Throughout this article we’ve made imprecise statements and
\n statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and
\n reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be
\n flatly false. Lack of sufficient information and the need for brevity
\n made it impossible for us to fomulate our assertions more precisely or
\n add all the necessary qualifications. And of course in a discussion of
\n this<\/p>\n
kind one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment, and that can
\n sometimes be wrong. So we don’t claim that this article expresses more
\n than a crude approximation to the truth.<\/p>\n
232. All the same we are reasonably confident that the general
\n outlines of the picture we have painted here are roughly correct. We
\n have portrayed leftism in its modern form as a phenomenon peculiar to
\n our time and as a symptom of the disruption of the power process. But
\n we might possibly be wrong about this. Oversocialized types who try to
\n satisfy their drive for power by imposing their morality on everyone
\n have certainly been around for a long time. But we THINK that the
\n decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem,
\n powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not
\n themselves victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism. Identification
\n with victims by people not themselves victims can be seen to some
\n extent in 19th century leftism and early Christianity but as far as we
\n can make out, symptoms of low self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so
\n evident in these movements, or in any other movements, as they are in
\n modern leftism. But we are not in a position to assert confidently
\n that no such movements have existed prior to modern leftism. This is a
\n significant question to which historians ought to give their
\n attention.<\/p>\n
NOTES<\/p>\n
1. (Paragraph 19) We are asserting that ALL, or even most, bullies and
\n ruthless competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority.<\/p>\n
2. (Paragraph 25) During the Victorian period many oversocialized
\n people suffered from serious psychological problems as a result of
\n repressing or trying to repress their sexual feelings. Freud
\n apparently based his theories on people of this type. Today the focus
\n of socialization has shifted from sex to aggression.<\/p>\n
3. (Paragraph 27) Not necessarily including specialists in engineering
\n “hard” sciences.<\/p>\n
4. (Paragraph 28) There are many individuals of the middle and upper
\n classes who resist some of these values, but usually their resistance
\n is more or less covert. Such resistance appears in the mass media only
\n to a very limited extent. The main thrust of propaganda in our society
\n is in favor of the stated values.<\/p>\n
The main reasons why these values have become, so to speak, the
\n official values of our society is that they are useful to the
\n industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the
\n functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic
\n conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the
\n talent of minority-group members who could be useful to the system.
\n Poverty must be “cured” because the underclass causes problems for the
\n system and contact with the underclass lowers the moral of the other
\n classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents
\n are useful to the system and, more importantly because by having
\n regular jobs women become better integrated into the system and tied
\n directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken
\n family solidarity. (The leaders of the system say they want to
\n strengthen the family, but they really mean is that they want the
\n family to serve as an effective tool for socializing children in
\n accord with the needs of the system. We argue in paragraphs 51,52 that
\n the system cannot afford to let the family or other small-scale social
\n groups be strong or autonomous.)<\/p>\n
5. (Paragraph 42) It may be argued that the majority of people don’t
\n want to make their own decisions but want leaders to do their thinking
\n for them. There is an element of truth in this. People like to make
\n their own decisions in small matters, but making decisions on
\n difficult, fundamental questions require facing up to psychological
\n conflict, and most people hate psychological conflict. Hence they tend
\n to lean on others in making difficult decisions. The majority of
\n people are natural followers, not leaders, but they like to have
\n direct personal access to their leaders and participate to some extent
\n in making difficult decisions. At least to that degree they need
\n autonomy.<\/p>\n
6. (Paragraph 44) Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those
\n shown by caged animals.<\/p>\n
To explain how these symptoms arise from deprivation with respect to
\n the power process:<\/p>\n
Common-sense understanding of human nature tells one that lack of
\n goals whose attainment requires effort leads to boredom and that
\n boredom, long continued, often leads eventually to depression. Failure
\n to obtain goals leads to frustration and lowering of self-esteem.
\n Frustration leads to anger, anger to aggression, often in the form of
\n spouse or child abuse. It has been shown that long-continued
\n frustration commonly leads to depression and that depression tends to
\n cause guilt, sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings about
\n oneself. Those who are tending toward depression seek pleasure as an
\n antidote; hence insatiable hedonism and excessive sex, with
\n perversions as a means of getting new kicks. Boredom too tends to
\n cause excessive pleasure-seeking since, lacking other goals, people
\n often use pleasure as a goal. See accompanying diagram. The foregoing
\n is a simplification. Reality is more complex, and of course
\n deprivation with respect to the power process is not the ONLY cause of
\n the symptoms described. By the way, when we mention depression we do
\n not necessarily mean depression that is severe enough to be treated by
\n a psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of depression are involved. And
\n when we speak of goals we do not necessarily mean long-term, thought
\n out goals. For many or most people through much of human history, the
\n goals of a hand-to-mouth existence (merely providing oneself and one’s
\n family with food from day to day) have been quite sufficient.<\/p>\n
7. (Paragraph 52) A partial exception may be made for a few passive,
\n inward looking groups, such as the Amish, which have little effect on
\n the wider society. Apart from these, some genuine small-scale
\n communities do exist in America today. For instance, youth gangs and
\n “cults”. Everyone regards them as dangerous, and so they are, because
\n the members of these groups are loyal primarily to one another rather
\n than to the system, hence the system cannot control them. Or take the
\n gypsies. The gypsies commonly get away with theft and fraud because
\n their loyalties are such that they can always get other gypsies to
\n give testimony that “proves” their innocence. Obviously the system
\n would be in serious trouble if too many people belonged to such
\n groups. Some of the early-20th century Chinese thinkers who were
\n concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of breaking
\n down small-scale social groups such as the family: “(According to Sun
\n Yat-sen) The Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which
\n would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the family to the state. .
\n .(According to Li Huang) traditional attachments, particularly to the
\n family had to be abandoned if nationalism were to develop to China.”
\n (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,”
\n page 125, page 297.)<\/p>\n
8. (Paragraph 56) Yes, we know that 19th century America had its
\n problems, and serious ones, but for the sake of breviety we have to
\n express ourselves in simplified terms.<\/p>\n
9. (Paragraph 61) We leave aside the underclass. We are speaking of
\n the mainstream.<\/p>\n
10. (Paragraph 62) Some social scientists, educators, “mental health”
\n professionals and the like are doing their best to push the social
\n drives into group 1 by trying to see to it that everyone has a
\n satisfactory social life.<\/p>\n
11. (Paragraphs 63, 82) Is the drive for endless material acquisition
\n really an artificial creation of the advertising and marketing
\n industry? Certainly there is no innate human drive for material
\n acquisition. There have been many cultures in which people have
\n desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to satisfy
\n their basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional Mexican
\n peasant culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there have
\n also been many pre-industrial cultures in which material acquisition
\n has played an important role. So we can’t claim that today’s
\n acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a creation of the
\n advertising and marketing industry. But it is clear that the
\n advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in
\n creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on
\n advertising wouldn’t be spending that kind of money without solid
\n proof that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of
\n FC met a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to
\n tell him, “Our job is to make people buy things they don’t want and
\n don’t need.” He then described how an untrained novice could present
\n people with the facts about a product, and make no sales at all, while
\n a trained and experienced professional salesman would make lots of
\n sales to the same people. This shows that people are manipulated into
\n buying things they don’t really want.<\/p>\n
12. (Paragraph 64) The problem of purposelessness seems to have become
\n less serious during the last 15 years or so, because people now feel
\n less secure physically and economically than they did earlier, and the
\n need for security provides them with a goal. But purposelessness has
\n been replaced by frustration over the difficulty of attaining
\n security. We emphasize the problem of purposelessness because the
\n liberals and leftists would wish to solve our social problems by
\n having society guarantee everyone’s security; but if that could be
\n done it would only bring back the problem of purposelessness. The real
\n issue is not whether society provides well or poorly for people’s
\n security; the trouble is that people are dependent on the system for
\n their security rather than having it in their own hands. This, by the
\n way, is part of the reason why some people get worked up about the
\n right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of their
\n security in their own hands.<\/p>\n
13. (Paragraph 66) Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of
\n government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For
\n one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated
\n because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the
\n deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so
\n that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it
\n to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that
\n government interference in his life is replaced by interference from
\n big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more
\n chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The
\n conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting
\n his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.<\/p>\n
14. (Paragraph 73) When someone approves of the purpose for which
\n propaganda is being used in a given case, he generally calls it
\n “education” or applies to it some similar euphemism. But propaganda is
\n propaganda regardless of the purpose for which it is used.<\/p>\n
15. (Paragraph 83) We are not expressing approval or disapproval of
\n the Panama invasion. We only use it to illustrate a point.<\/p>\n
16. (Paragraph 95) When the American colonies were under British rule
\n there were fewer and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than
\n there were after the American Constitution went into effect, yet there
\n was more personal freedom in pre-industrial America, both before and
\n after the War of Independence, than there was after the Industrial
\n Revolution took hold in this country. We quote from “Violence in
\n America: Historical and Comparative perspectives,” edited by Hugh
\n Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, Chapter 12 by Roger Lane, pages
\n 476-478: “The progressive heightening of standards of property, and
\n with it the increasing reliance on official law enforcement (in 19th
\n century America). . .were common to the whole society. . .[T]he change
\n in social behavior is so long term and so widespread as to suggest a
\n connection with the most fundamental of contemporary social processes;
\n that of industrial urbanization itself. . .”Massachusetts in 1835 had
\n a population of some 660,940, 81 percent rural, overwhelmingly
\n preindustrial and native born. It’s citizens were used to considerable
\n personal freedom. Whether teamsters, farmers or artisans, they were
\n all accustomed to setting their own schedules, and the nature of their
\n work made them physically dependent on each other. . .Individual
\n problems, sins or even crimes, were not generally cause for wider
\n social concern. . .”But the impact of the twin movements to the city
\n and to the factory, both just gathering force in 1835, had a
\n progressive effect on personal behavior throughout the 19th century
\n and into the 20th. The factory demanded regularity of behavior, a life
\n governed by obedience to the rhythms of clock and calendar, the
\n demands of foreman and supervisor. In the city or town, the needs of
\n living in closely packed neighborhoods inhibited many actions
\n previously unobjectionable.<\/p>\n
Both blue- and white-collar employees in larger establishments were
\n mutually dependent on their fellows. as one man’s work fit into
\n another’s, so one man’s business was no longer his own. “The results
\n of the new organization of life and work were apparent by 1900, when
\n some 76 percent of the 2,805,346 inhabitants of Massachusetts were
\n classified as urbanites. Much violent or irregular behavior which had
\n been tolerable in a casual, independent society was no longer
\n acceptable in the more formalized, cooperative atmosphere of the later
\n period. . .The move to the cities had, in short, produced a more
\n tractable, more socialized, more ‘civilized’ generation than its
\n predecessors.”<\/p>\n
17. (Paragraph 117) Apologists for the system are fond of citing cases
\n in which elections have been decided by one or two votes, but such
\n cases are rare.<\/p>\n
18. (Paragraph 119) “Today, in technologically advanced lands, men
\n live very similar lives in spite of geographical, religious and
\n political differences. The daily lives of a Christian bank clerk in
\n Chicago, a Buddhist bank clerk in Tokyo, a Communist bank clerk in
\n Moscow are far more alike than the life any one of them is like that
\n of any single man who lived a thousand years ago. These similarities
\n are the result of a common technology. . .” L. Sprague de Camp, “The
\n Ancient Engineers,” Ballentine edition, page 17.<\/p>\n
The lives of the three bank clerks are not IDENTICAL. Ideology does
\n have SOME effect. But all technological societies, in order to
\n survive, must evolve along APPROXIMATELY the same trajectory.<\/p>\n
19. (Paragraph 123) Just think an irresponsible genetic engineer might
\n create a lot of terrorists.<\/p>\n
20. (Paragraph 124) For a further example of undesirable consequences
\n of medical progress, suppose a reliable cure for cancer is discovered.
\n Even if the treatment is too expensive to be available to any but the
\n elite, it will greatly reduce their incentive to stop the escape of
\n carcinogens into the environment.<\/p>\n
21. (Paragraph 128) Since many people may find paradoxical the notion
\n that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we will
\n illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B.
\n Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr. A’s shoulder. Mr. A of
\n course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for
\n him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C
\n tells Mr. A how to make ALL of his moves. In each particular instance
\n he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making ALL
\n of his moves for him he spoils the game, since there is not point in
\n Mr. A’s playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves.<\/p>\n
The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system
\n makes an individual’s life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in
\n doing so it deprives him of control over his own fate.<\/p>\n
22. (Paragraph 137) Here we are considering only the conflict of
\n values within the mainstream. For the sake of simplicity we leave out
\n of the picture “outsider” values like the idea that wild nature is
\n more important than human economic welfare.<\/p>\n
23. (Paragraph 137) Self-interest is not necessarily MATERIAL
\n self-interest. It can consist in fulfillment of some psychological
\n need, for example, by promoting one’s own ideology or religion.<\/p>\n
24. (Paragraph 139) A qualification: It is in the interest of the
\n system to permit a certain prescribed degree of freedom in some areas.
\n For example, economic freedom (with suitable limitations and
\n restraints) has proved effective in promoting economic growth. But
\n only planned, circumscribed, limited freedom is in the interest of the
\n system. The individual must always be kept on a leash, even if the
\n leash is sometimes long( see paragraphs 94, 97).<\/p>\n
25. (Paragraph 143) We don’t mean to suggest that the efficiency or
\n the potential for survival of a society has always been inversely
\n proportional to the amount of pressure or discomfort to which the
\n society subjects people. That is certainly not the case. There is good
\n reason to believe that many primitive societies subjected people to
\n less pressure than the European society did, but European society
\n proved far more efficient than any primitive society and always won
\n out in conflicts with such societies because of the advantages
\n conferred by technology.<\/p>\n
26. (Paragraph 147) If you think that more effective law enforcement
\n is unequivocally good because it suppresses crime, then remember that
\n crime as defined by the system is not necessarily what YOU would call
\n crime. Today, smoking marijuana is a “crime,” and, in some places in
\n the U.S.., so is possession of ANY firearm, registered or not, may be
\n made a crime, and the same thing may happen with disapproved methods
\n of child-rearing, such as spanking. In some countries, expression of
\n dissident political opinions is a crime, and there is no certainty
\n that this will never happen in the U.S., since no constitution or
\n political system lasts forever.<\/p>\n
If a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment,
\n then there is something gravely wrong with that society; it must be
\n subjecting people to severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the
\n rules, or follow them only because forced. Many societies in the past
\n have gotten by with little or no formal law-enforcement.<\/p>\n
27. (Paragraph 151) To be sure, past societies have had means of
\n influencing behavior, but these have been primitive and of low
\n effectiveness compared with the technological means that are now being
\n developed.<\/p>\n
28. (Paragraph 152) However, some psychologists have publicly
\n expressed opinions indicating their contempt for human freedom. And
\n the mathematician Claude Shannon was quoted in Omni (August 1987) as
\n saying, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to
\n humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”<\/p>\n
29. (Paragraph 154) This is no science fiction! After writing
\n paragraph 154 we came across an article in Scientific American
\n according to which scientists are actively developing techniques for
\n identifying possible future criminals and for treating them by a
\n combination of biological and psychological means. Some scientists
\n advocate compulsory application of the treatment, which may be
\n available in the near future. (See “Seeking the Criminal Element”, by
\n W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, March 1995.) Maybe you think this
\n is OK because the treatment would be applied to those who might become
\n drunk drivers (they endanger human life too), then perhaps to peel who
\n spank their children, then to environmentalists who sabotage logging
\n equipment, eventually to anyone whose behavior is inconvenient for the
\n system.<\/p>\n
30. (Paragraph 184) A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal
\n to technology is that, in many people, nature inspires the kind of
\n reverence that is associated with religion, so that nature could
\n perhaps be idealized on a religious basis. It is true that in many
\n societies religion has served as a support and justification for the
\n established order, but it is also true that religion has often
\n provided a basis for rebellion. Thus it may be useful to introduce a
\n religious element into the rebellion against technology, the more so
\n because Western society today has no strong religious foundation.<\/p>\n
Religion, nowadays either is used as cheap and transparent support for
\n narrow, short-sighted selfishness (some conservatives use it this
\n way), or even is cynically exploited to make easy money (by many
\n evangelists), or has degenerated into crude irrationalism
\n (fundamentalist Protestant sects, “cults”), or is simply stagnant
\n (Catholicism, main-line Protestantism). The nearest thing to a strong,
\n widespread, dynamic religion that the West has seen in recent times
\n has been the quasi-religion of leftism, but leftism today is
\n fragmented and has no clear, unified inspiring goal.<\/p>\n
Thus there is a religious vaccuum in our society that could perhaps be
\n filled by a religion focused on nature in opposition to technology.
\n But it would be a mistake to try to concoct artificially a religion to
\n fill this role. Such an invented religion would probably be a failure.
\n Take the “Gaia” religion for example. Do its adherents REALLY believe
\n in it or are they just play-acting? If they are just play-acting their
\n religion will be a flop in the end.<\/p>\n
It is probably best not to try to introduce religion into the conflict
\n of nature vs. technology unless you REALLY believe in that religion
\n yourself and find that it arouses a deep, strong, genuine response in
\n many other people.<\/p>\n
31. (Paragraph 189) Assuming that such a final push occurs.
\n Conceivably the industrial system might be eliminated in a somewhat
\n gradual or piecemeal fashion. (see paragraphs 4, 167 and Note 4).<\/p>\n
32. (Paragraph 193) It is even conceivable (remotely) that the
\n revolution might consist only of a massive change of attitudes toward
\n technology resulting in a relatively gradual and painless
\n disintegration of the industrial system. But if this happens we’ll be
\n very lucky. It’s far more probably that the transition to a
\n nontechnological society will be very difficult and full of conflicts
\n and disasters.<\/p>\n
33. (Paragraph 195) The economic and technological structure of a
\n society are far more important than its political structure in
\n determining the way the average man lives (see paragraphs 95, 119 and
\n Notes 16, 18).<\/p>\n
34. (Paragraph 215) This statement refers to our particular brand of
\n anarchism. A wide variety of social attitudes have been called
\n “anarchist,” and it may be that many who consider themselves
\n anarchists would not accept our statement of paragraph 215. It should
\n be noted, by the way, that there is a nonviolent anarchist movement
\n whose members probably would not accept FC as anarchist and certainly
\n would not approve of FC’s violent methods.<\/p>\n
35. (Paragraph 219) Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but
\n the hostility probably results in part from a frustrated need for
\n power.<\/p>\n
36. (Paragraph 229) It is important to understand that we mean someone
\n who sympathizes with these MOVEMENTS as they exist today in our
\n society. One who believes that women, homosexuals, etc., should have
\n equal rights is not necessarily a leftist. The feminist, gay rights,
\n etc., movements that exist in our society have the particular
\n ideological tone that characterizes leftism, and if one believes, for
\n example, that women should have equal rights it does not necessarily
\n follow that one must sympathize with the feminist movement as it
\n exists today.<\/p>\n
If copyright problems make it impossible for this long quotation to be
\n printed, then please change Note 16 to read as follows:<\/p>\n
16. (Paragraph 95) When the American colonies were under British rule
\n there were fewer and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than
\n there were after the American Constitution went into effect, yet there
\n was more personal freedom in pre-industrial America, both before and
\n after the War of Independence, than there was after the Industrial
\n Revolution took hold in this country. In “Violence in America:
\n Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” edited by Hugh Davis Graham
\n and Ted Robert Gurr, Chapter 12 by Roger Lane, it is explained how in
\n pre-industrial America the average person had greater independence and
\n autonomy than he does today, and how the process of industrialization
\n necessarily led to the restriction of personal freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
INTRODUCTION 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 “advanced” 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1376,1375],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n