Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Systems comprise any structure that makes any group of people function as more than the sum of their parts. By their very nature, systems dehumanize. To benefit from being part of a system, one must conform to its requirements. Exceptions disrupt efficiency.
For example, feudalism characterized most pre-industrial agrarian societies around the world, clarifying authority based upon birth. Monetary economic simplifies the exchange of goods and services through the use of money, a universal means of exchange.
Philosophy and ideology create common languages for political action. Common culture creates a society that can function with efficiency and relative harmony.
The Enlightenment Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau explained all of these above systems and many more as being part of a great Social Contract. In order for the individual to reap the benefits of being part of a shared society, the individual must forego certain freedoms.
A person cannot exist within a society without limits to one’s scope of action. For example, if one wishes to operate a motor vehicle then one must drive on the customary side of the road, obey traffic signals, obey traffic laws, and accept responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions behind the wheel.
All of this is true, logical, and practical. We each renounce certain liberties in order to reap the benefits of being part of society’s commonwealth. This is the Social Contract.
But Rousseau wrote in the 18th century, near the end of the agricultural era. Most members of Western Civilization still lived on farms, relying at least as much upon their own resources of talent and labor as they did on any broad social system. In his time, there was a self that existed beyond any system.
The Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century changed all of that. Systems proliferated, connecting the world’s raw materials to central production facilities in Britain, the United States, and Germany. More and more, every aspect of an individual’s life consisted in full participation in the systematized production that brought living standards out of the squalor and poverty of the previous agricultural age.
The individual’s worth within ever-growing cities and constantly increasing production networks shrank, sometimes into insignificance. More and more, human beings became absorbed by the systems of production.
Today, each of us spider-climbs our way through a series of interconnected webs of finance, commerce, education, information retrieval, religion, political affiliation, acceptable conduct, and permissible personal choice. We obtain our water, our electricity, and our heating fuel through systems. Increasingly, we pay our bills and measure our wealth electronically, without cash.
Contemporary generations reap rich rewards for our participatory compliance within these many interlocked systems. But nothing is gained without cost. Deindustrialization has made the United States vulnerable to the global systems of worldwide trade. Even our foodstuffs are increasingly supplied by the international market. The internet is no longer recognizably American, and increasingly is shaped by the laws of societies far more authoritarian than our own. Our power grid, the basis of all electronic-oriented lifestyles, is ever more delicate and susceptible to tampering.
Most of us haven’t a clue how to survive without being provided for by these systems. Even if many of us could survive the transition, any new life of rugged individualism would be onerous and miserable beyond anything we have experienced. Without these systems, survival indeed requires real struggle.
These systems are not automatic. They are created and maintained by a set of increasingly politicized technocrats. Right now, Artificial Intelligence itself does not pose the primary danger to a free mankind. The weaponization of artificial intelligence to use increasingly ubiquitous surveillance to impose a “Social Credit system is. Such a system, pioneered by the Chinese Communist Party and experimented with by European elites, uses an ideological standard to reward and punish discernable deeds, words, and even thoughts.
The answers of Survivalists and Doomsday Preppers to a Social Credit system is to go off-grid, but this is not ideal. Inevitably, even those who discipline themselves to avoid being dependent upon systems will be absorbed by them.
The answer to a would-be technological totalitarianism is to insist that the liberties enshrined by the U. S. Constitution be maintained within any systems that operate within the United States. No messianic “Tech Lord” should be able to curate our information, censor our expression, throttle our opportunities, restrict our calories, reduce our carbon footprint, or in any other fashion impose his or her will upon us.
No international body should be permitted to employ information systems to censor speech with which they disagree. No education system should be allowed to replace instruction in how to think with indoctrination about what to believe. No news organization, political party, unelected bureaucrat, or elected official should be empowered to define and ban what they deem to be misinformation.
In short, these systems exist to serve each of us human individuals. We do not exist to serve them, or their technocratic masters. Laws should be made and policies implemented that would conclusively prevent our dependence on society’s systems to be exploited by anyone willing to use them to enslave us.
