The Calculus of Control
by Kort E Patterson
Most of the attention paid to authoritarian societies has been on their
external impacts on neighboring populations. The armies of authoritarian
societies have earned a well deserved reputation for violence and
depravity committed while attempting to conquer resisting nations, but
this tendency to murder is an external manifestation. There is a deeper
more fundamental aspect that must be accomplished in order to make
authoritarian systems possible in the first place.
In this exploration of the calculus of control I'll use Fascists as a
convenient example because their policies and practices are well
documented, but nearly any advocate of authoritarianism would do. Down
through history the Communists, Royalists, Militarists, and Religionists
have all used similar means to multiply their effective presence and
establish control over their subject populations.
A single Fascist ranting in isolation is little more threat to those
around him than any other individual who believes violence is an
acceptable means of achieving his goals. Even a group of Fascists are
only as dangerous as a violent criminal gang of similar size. In order
to pose a real threat, Fascists need a nation of supporters willing to
do their bidding. A dead body becomes a disposal problem, while a living
body under Fascist control becomes a tool in the service of the Fascist
agenda. The core of authoritarianism is not so much killing as control.
Even inside a Fascist state not all of the citizens are members of the
ruling elite. And yet the Fascist elite needs a means by which it can
bend the rest of the population to its will, a means by which the will
of the ruling elite can be multiplied without consuming more effort and
resources than it controls.
Consider the basic economics of exploitive systems. In any economic
system the productive individual must support not only his own standard
of living, but also some percentage of society's operating overhead. In
an exploitive system, the overhead of supporting those seeking to
control the society must be added to the overhead required to provide
the basic services of that society, placing an even greater burden on
the productive sector.
If the productive sector resists control, they increase the amount of
direct involvement by those seeking to control them. Take for example
the amount of direct supervision required to get children to do chores
they don't want to do. In many cases supervising a child takes more
effort than doing the task directly would require. In this case the cost
to the supervisor is justified since the objective is more to provide a
learning experience than extract productivity from the child.
However, when the objective is to maximize the productivity of the
controlled side of the equation, this level of one to one supervision is
not sustainable. Few individuals are sufficiently productive to carry
the load of direct one to one supervision - especially since the
intention of most supervisors is to obtain for themselves a superior
quality of life than that available to those they control.
Operating an authoritarian society requires a great deal of control over
the domestic population. Not only must the economy be directed into
efforts that are contrary to the best interests of the citizens, but
care must be taken to deal with the inevitable resistance that is the
natural human response to such control.
Resistance to control can be infectious. Human behavior is strongly
influenced by suggestion and a tendency to imitate those around us. Once
resistance gets established it rapidly becomes ever more difficult to
suppress. Even the slightest rumblings of resentment and political
dissent must be quickly and aggressively suppressed before they can grow
into more serious problems. And yet, the ruling elite can hardly be
everywhere all the time suppressing the slightest rumblings of dissent.
And as it turns out, they don't have to.
Wartime Nazi Germany provides an excellent example of a fully developed
police state with near absolute control over the population. The Nazis
were obsessed with record keeping, and Gestapo records seized after the
war provide a comprehensive account of just how they operated. The
popular perception of a police state has sinister agents lurking around
every corner, listening to every phone call, reading every piece of
mail. But Gestapo records paint a far different - and more cost
effective - picture.
According to Gestapo records, it only took a couple dozen agents to
control a city of fifty thousand, and these agents spent very little of
their time actually engaged in the sort of activities popularly
associated with the secret police. It turns out that they had little
need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens
themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. Gestapo
agents spent most of their time sorting through the volumes of informant
reports that filled their offices.
Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed
the propaganda manufactured by the ruling elite. Some denounced their
enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their
own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves by
calling attention to others. Some were motivated by the sense of power
turning in their neighbors gave them. Some informants simply went along
with what they believed everyone else was doing.
With so many unpaid spies eager - or at least willing - to serve the
police state, the Gestapo agents had little need to do their own
surveillance of the general population. They simply sorted through the
stacks of informant supplied rumors and gossip that flowed into their
office, and investigated the ones that caught their attention. As long
as the agents made their investigations sufficiently public, and made
enough of a spectacle of hauling away the accused, they maintained the
atmosphere of terror that made sure the informers kept sending
information to their office.
The objects of unwanted attention by their neighbors didn't have to
actually do anything against the state in order to accumulate a file in
the Gestapo office. It turns out that most of the accusations in the
Gestapo files involved petty little complaints about individuals who
didn't get along with their suspicious neighbors, said something
indiscreet in an unguarded moment, or dressed differently than their
accuser thought they should. But even these petty accusations were
enough to condemn the accused to the dark depths of the Gestapo terror.
Perhaps more importantly from the perspective of the police state, the
general knowledge of how easy it was to attract the attention of Gestapo
strongly encouraged the rest of the population to be ever more careful
in complying with the will of the ruling elite for fear of being next.
While the above example is drawn from the records of the Nazi police
state, the same means of control have been employed by all authoritarian
systems. The economics of authoritarianism requires that all such
systems turn the controlled population against itself. The Soviet system
was very similar to that used by the Nazis except that it lasted far
longer. The Soviets did take the concept a step further when they used
their control over the schools to train children to spy on their parents
and the parents of their friends.
The Chinese have employed variations of the same system ever since the
Communist takeover, although their perverse implementation has
repeatedly degraded into self destructive insanity. During the Maoist
period, efforts by the Chinese authorities to turn the citizens against
each other resulted in the cultural revolution, which consumed the best
and brightest of their society in murderous violence. At first the
primitive Communist leadership encouraged the violence against the
intelligentsia since as uneducated peasants they feared those with
knowledge and understanding of the real world.
It took the massive incompetence of the "Great Leap Forward"
and the wide spread famine created by Mao's monumental bungling to force
the Chinese leadership to allow even a modicum of common sense in their
policies. Eventually, in spite of their pathological resistance to
rationality, even Mao and his gang of peasant thugs had to admit that
they needed at least a few intelligent people to run a modern nation.
Since then, except for periodic massacres of those citizens who think a
civilized society should include respect for human and civil rights, the
criminals and barbarians who still control China have restrained their
terror to using elderly women as spies. Each block of homes now has at
least one "grandmother" whose full time job is to watch those
who live in her block and report even the slightest suspicions to the
authorities.
The intended result of the dynamics of terror is to create a population
that participates in its own oppression and control. Even worse, the
dynamics of terror create a controlled population that will turn against
those who resist the terror, making those who most need saving the
greatest threat to those who would save them.
While these tactics have been routinely used by police states to control
their populations, they can also be a very effective means of destroying
a free society from within. It should alarm anyone who values their
freedom that we're now seeing these same tactics being put into practice
in America today. Consider the tactics that are being employed in what
is claimed to be a war on drugs, but which is increasingly becoming a
war on the basic principles of our free society.
It started with a campaign to demonize drug dealers - a class of
citizens who only exist because prohibition has created an artificially
profitable market for their products. All drug dealers could be
instantly eliminated by eliminating the socially destructive prohibition
that props up their market, but that would also end the justification
for eroding civil liberties. Instead the tactic of choice is to flood
the media with messages promoting as heroes those who spy on their
neighbors and turn in drug dealers. Claiming to be motivated by concern
for the safety of children, the schools are increasingly being used to
turn students into informants for the authorities.
Having broken down the principle of respecting each other's privacy with
the manufactured fear of the drug war as justification, it's proving an
easy step to expand the practice to other imagined offenses. The media
treats as heroes those who spy on their neighbors and make accusations
of child abuse, improper care of pets, or engaging in a growing list of
proscribed activities. What gets far less media coverage is that many of
these accusations turn out to be unfounded. Nor does the media like to
report on the amount of trouble our increasingly intrusive government
causes for the falsely accused.
Snooping and gossiping have now been elevated into honored functions of
protecting society from imagined threats. Those among us who have long
wanted to dictate to others how to live their lives now believe they've
been empowered to persecute anyone who doesn't conform to the dictator's
view of a proper life-style. And these former busybodies turned
defenders of society are very eager to take on this imagined new duty.
Each intrusion on our civil liberties appears a worthy cause on a
superficial level. But none are of greater value than the basic
principles of a free society that are compromised when citizens begin to
spy on each other and become agents of authoritarianism. Every society
that has allowed its citizens to be turned against each other has
degraded into some form of authoritarianism. Will America choose
tolerance and freedom, or enforced conformity and tyranny?
http://www.hevanet.com/kort/CONTROL1.HTM
Back |
email Jacq'