Isegoria

Emile Durkheim was a master diagnostician of our modern ills:

Durkheim lived through the immense, rapid transformation of France from a largely traditional agricultural society to an urban, industrial economy. He could see that his country was getting richer, that Capitalism was extraordinarily productive and, in certain ways, liberating. But what particularly struck him, and became the focus of his entire career, were the psychological costs of Capitalism. The economic system might have created an entire new middle class, but it was doing something very peculiar to people’s minds. It was — quite literally — driving them to suicide in ever increasing numbers.

He isolated five crucial factors:

1. Individualism

In traditional societies, people’s identities are closely tied to belonging to a clan or a class. Their beliefs and attitudes, their work and status follow automatically from the facts of their birth. Few choices are involved: a person might be a baker, a Lutheran, and married to their second cousin — without ever having made any self-conscious decisions for themselves. They could just step into the place created for them by their family and the existing fabric of society.

But under Capitalism, it is the individual (rather than the clan, or ‘society’ or the nation) that now chooses everything: what job to take, what religion to follow, who to marry… This ‘individualism’ forces us to be the authors of our own destinies. How our lives pan out becomes a reflection of our unique merits, skills and persistence.

If things go well, we can take all the credit. But if things go badly, it is crueller than ever before, for it means there is no one else to blame. We have to shoulder the full responsibility. We aren’t just unlucky any more, we have chosen and have messed up. Individualism ushers in a disinclination to admit to any sort of role for luck or chance in life. Failure becomes a terrible judgement upon oneself. This is the particular burden of life in modern Capitalism.

2. Excessive hope

Capitalism raises our hopes. Everyone — with enough effort — can become the boss. Everyone should think big. You are not trapped by the past — Capitalism says — you are free to remake your life. Advertising stokes ambition by showing us limitless luxury that we could (if we play our cards right) secure very soon. The opportunities grow enormous…as do the possibilities for disappointment.

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3. We have too much freedom

One of the complaints against traditional societies — strongly voiced in Romantic literature — was that people needed more ‘freedom’. Rebellious types complained there were far too many social norms: telling you what to wear, what you were supposed to do on Sunday afternoons, what parts of an arm it was respectable for a woman to reveal…

Capitalism — following the earlier efforts of Romantic rebels — relentlessly undermined social norms.

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4. Atheism

Durkheim was himself an atheist, but he worried that religion had become implausible just as its communal side would have been most necessary to repair the fraying social fabric. Despite its factual errors, Durkheim appreciated the sense of community that religion offered: “Religion gave men a perception of a world beyond this earth where everything would be rectified; this prospect made inequalities less noticeable, it stopped men from feeling aggrieved.”

Marx had disliked religion because he thought it made people too ready to accept inequality. It was an ‘opiate’ that dulled the pain and sapped the will. But this criticism was founded on a conviction that it would not actually be too difficult to make an equal world and therefore that the opiate could be lifted without trouble.

Durkheim took the darker view that inequality would be very hard to eradicate (perhaps impossible), so we would have to learn, somehow, to live with it.

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5. Weakening of the nation and of the family

In the 19th century, it had looked, at certain moments, as if the idea of the nation might grow so powerful and intense that it could take up the sense of belonging and shared devotion that once had been supplied by religion. Admittedly there were some heroic moments. In the war against Napoleon, for instance, the Prussians had developed a dramatic all-encompassing cult of the Fatherland. But the excitement of a nation at war had, Durkheim saw, failed to translate into anything very impressive in peacetime.

The biggest paradox of today’s world is that we have rapid, constant progress in physical technologies like phones and computers, but billions of people have no access at all to good law and governance, or what you might call social technologies:

I met one trashpicker named Miriam who made her livelihood with her teenage daughter by selling plastic scraps for a dollar or two a day. She was telling me her story: the grinding poverty, the constant threat of extortion and murder by organized crime, the shooting of her husband, the sexual assaults on her daughter. In the middle of this heartbreaking story, her phone rings and she pulls out a nice smart phone, texts someone, and turns back to me like nothing happened. Miriam faces these ancient human problems of violence and poverty, yet she owns a futuristic technology like a smartphone. This haunted me for months.

Political reform is risky:

Typically, we only think that a reform has ‘failed’ when a new law or program doesn’t pass Congress. But reform, just like entrepreneurship, is full of failure. Sometimes a reform is captured by special interests and becomes like Frankenstein – some horrible creation that its inventors never wanted. Or a committee somewhere along the way destroys it. Worst of all, sometimes reformers are just mistaken and they end up ‘doing bad while trying to do good’. Political systems are complex, so it’s easy to misdiagnose a problem – just like it’s easy to design a fancy new product that no one wants to buy.

You make all these risks worse if you try to reform on the national level. Think about it: you have millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of people in this incredibly complicated social system called an economy. You hire the smartest people you can and put them in an office away from the customer: your citizens.

Then those people try to design some solution. You don’t ‘test’ anything. You don’t ‘validate’ your ideas. In the words of start-up guru Steve Blank, you never “get out of the building”. You just put some huge plan together and then impose it on millions of people.

Startup Cities reverse this logic.

Scott Alexander presents his meditations on Moloch, referring to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:

What has always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes…

A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, definitely even a big piece. But it doesn’t exactly fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question — C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers — what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

The implicit question is — if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct — nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything — but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state.

Rome’s city population swelled from an influx of non-citizens — favor-seekers, merchants, professionals, entertainers — including many slaves and ex-slaves:

Somewhat surprisingly, being a slave in an important Roman family was a path to upward mobility, since slaves did most of the household and administrative work (being a slave in agriculture or mining was a different story) and many of them were eventually freed as an incentive for loyal service.

Since old Roman conservatives looked down on business, ex-slaves became part of the growing capitalist class. Most important of all was a class of capitalists who leased the state’s public land, since they had the capital to achieve economies of scale in working large plantations, mines, timber, and importing the food supply to feed the population of Rome. It was a minimalist state in most respects. Rome owned vast properties but had few public officials, and they were appointed to very short terms. Hence most public enterprises were leased out; capitalists undertook to collect taxes, advancing cash for state needs and squeezing what they could out of subject peoples.

The New Testament gives us a glimpse of these Roman citizens out in the provinces: Jesus offended local ethnic loyalties by converting tax collectors; and Paul himself was a Roman citizen. Since the most important state organization was the army, the biggest state-related business was supplying it with weapons, armor, food, ships, and harbors. Rome thus developed its “military-industrial complex”, similar to the US since late 20th century in outsourcing as much as possible to private contractors.