[Image source: The Herald]
Someone once said that we are shaped by history and that we in turn shape history by the lives we lead. Well, I’m sure that has been said more than once. But the mix of historical determinism versus self-directed action (agency) in one’s life seems to vary from person to person. Everyday observations suggest that some individuals shape history much more than others do.
Some folks appear to simply follow the path their history has determined for them, while others react strongly to the conditions under which they develop their identity and act in that context, sometimes quite creatively, either positively or negatively. So, I would suggest that the old argument between ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’ is really a matter of who responds how to the conditions of their life. Some seem hardwired to be obnoxious, while others seem bent on being kind. But that is where the idea of agency comes in; history is always mitigated by human choice.
Socialization and Self-Control
I am reminded of the fact that many who were abused as children turn out to be abusers too, while other victims of abuse rebel against abuse itself and become activists in fighting child abuse. But there is also a similar and very common socialization structure in society, which I call “passing it on.” I first noticed it (in its extreme form) many years ago during my officer training as an aviation cadet in the US Air Force. There was a hierarchy of four classes of cadets, each with its own distinct level of privilege of subordination. Members of the first class dominated and enforced its domination on the second class-men. They had all the privileges and nobody to harass them. First class-men rarely interacted with fourth class-men; in s strict hierarchy of power each upper class focused its attention on the class just below,. For the fourth class, the experience was all subordination and hazing, with occasional small rewards for exemplary behavior.
Hazing constituted the medium for expressing the hierarchy of power. Each class hazed the class below it in increasing intensity, down to the fourth class, who took it all and had no class below them to pass on the hazing to. On observing that process from the inside as I moved up the hierarchy, I came to call that process of inflicting control from the top down as “passing it on.” Nobody hazed the first-class men (there were no women cadets back then). The actual officers in charge of the program gave them orders in the standard military manner, as if the highest-ranking cadets were now junior officers. This process of socialization seemed to work for most.
Who knows why one responds by ‘passing on’ her/his ordeal while another rebels against victimhood itself. That is a very important question to which there is no easy answer. The military exercise of extreme training rituals, such as how one must move one’s fork into one’s mouth in the dining hall, and many other such rigid requirements, were intended to instill in the cadets an ability to control his own behavior in response to difficult situations.
The dining hall protocols were as interesting as they were difficult to master and radically ritualistic. Some cadets chafed at the struggle to eat within the constraints of every utensil being required to be placed in a certain position and used in a certain way, or one would have a senior cadet down on his case, slowing the process of actually eating. If you didn’t get it, you would not be able to eat your full meal, a definite problem for a hungry nineteen-year-old. I saw it as a challenge. My hunger compelled me to master the discipline as quickly as possible. Soon I was able to eat all I wanted, having internalized the ritualized eating behavior.
There were countless other domains of enforced ritual discipline, designed so that it was almost impossible to fully comply. Cadets found ways to make compliance easier, such as when we were required to get out of bed at the sound of the alarm and be out in the street in full uniform in some thirty seconds (or was it a minute, I don’t remember), with the bed fully made up. We kept our beds mostly made when we slept and kept our uniforms as assembled as possible so we could dress in a few seconds. I assumed the military goal was to instill maximum skills in self-control. Those who could not constrain their behavior to conform to the ritual requirements, or foolishly tried to rebel against what they saw as ridiculous, were typically “washed out” of the program.
The Person in the System
But in civil society, if one is properly socialized into an integrated community, s/he will behave within the context of knowing that s/he has internalized behavioral constraints that make community possible. The existence of actual community varies widely by societal context. But modern American individualism is an ideology that serves the industrial-consumer economy more than the individual person. Personhood is a product of the interaction with family and community. “The System” much prefers to deal with the isolated unattached individual who has no social limits on her/hid willingness to be employed individually without community constraints, and whose identity has become dependent on her/his consumption.
The trajectory of anyone’s life is a product of both historical and contemporary forces, mediated by that person’s own sense of self and the degree of agency their identity allows. Some folks feel stifled and often fail to act in their own behalf, while others freely act in their own interests, sometimes to an extreme. While the narcissistic sociopath may appear to act with strong agency, he is more likely to follow a path that was determined from the start by his pathology. He is driven to seek power and approval in very erratic ways, even in self-defeating ways, since his actions are compelled by his obsession with needing constant self-affirmation in the context of having no capacity for empathy. Underneath, he may be a frightened child, but his compulsions can make him very dangerous.
Falling into the old-labels trap instead of looking at the facts of where the world is right now and where it is going without major ‘collective’ intervention will lead to mega-failure. The old label of “American individualism” is a failed trope in the present context. The only way out of our current global predicament is to begin a process of the creative destruction of the global system of technocracy (tech-capital monopoly aided by the nation state) that is plundering the Earth System. We must transform society from whatever you want to call it to create livable social formations that no longer destroy the only habitat humans will ever know, the living Earth System some call Gaia.
Individualism in this context is either counterproductive or irrelevant. It’s not about asserting absolute personal liberty in a finite world. That is the story The System uses to obscure its techno-corporate domination, as if corporations and billionaires were merely lone individuals seeking personal freedom. All freedom comes with a hefty dose of responsibility. Corporations are not persons, but because their actions affect so many people, they have much more responsibility than any individual could.
Elon Musk and his peers all fall into the same category of responsibility as the corporations they control. Their status as individuals pertains only to their personal private lives, not to their corporate positions of power. But the two often bleed into one another, producing the “system man.” The trajectory of our current corporate state, is in the not-so-early stages of a doom loop.
That is precisely why we must transform the industrial society we don’t want to give up but must, into something very different. So many think that we just can’t live without what so many generations never had and we don’t really need. Because of our full embeddedness in the industrial-consumer culture, we will have a lot of decisions to make regarding what to consume and what to abandon. We will also need to transform some of our existing technologies to make them more efficient but also more effective, while simply abandoning others that are superfluous or counterproductive to the goal of living an ecologically viable life.
Yet, with creativity and transformed application of technological know-how (not the fossil-fueled tech we think we cannot live without) to produce what we NEED first to drop carbon emissions to near ZERO (not the fake “net-zero”) and hope that we have done enough to stabilize the climate and ecological systems to retain at least in part a livable planet, we may yet survive as a species.
We have to ‘power a civilization’ vastly more efficiently with CLEAN power, but with far less total energy consumption. In fact, humans can live quite comfortably under a completely redesigned energy regime if we apply the creativity and willingness to change that we can. We ARE at the end of the industrial era.
The transformation we desperately need will not happen on its own. Nor will it happen by individual action alone. I suspect that is will require a heavy dose of good old-fashioned craftsmanship, coordinated among several fields. We now need to shape a new era of ecologically harmonious civilization, which will require a lot of creativity and skill.
