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4

Control

Sitting in a field, you notice an ant struggling to climb a long blade of grass. It falls, and then starts the climb again, diligently persevering until it reaches the top. Why might the ant be doing this? What will it gain? Nothing, actually. Its brain has been modified by a tiny parasite, known as a lancet fluke, that needs to find its way into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. The fluke is manoeuvring the ant into the position where it is most likely to be eaten.¹ It is not conscious of what it is doing (it has no brain of its own); it is simply endowed with features that affect the ant’s brain in this way. Similar parasites infect fish and mice, among other species.

Creatures like the fluke control the brains of other organisms directly. Most species exert control by manipulating the signals that reach a brain. The mirror orchid tricks male wasps into delivering their pollen to other flowers by resembling a female wasp. Its deceptive appearance and scent exploit the sexual urges of the male to its own advantage. In fact, the imitation scent is even more intoxicating and alluring than the real thing, leaving male wasps unable to resist doing the orchid’s bidding. Other creatures, such as moths, lizards and octopuses, exhibit remarkable powers of camouflage which enable them to deceive predators and prey alike.

In nature, the struggle to survive and the drive to procreate maintain a relentless battle for control. Some species exert control by brute force, others have evolved more subtle strategies. Organisms fight to the death to access the myriad forms of energy locked up around them – in sunlight, plants, flesh and bone. The outcome of this endless struggle determines which creatures gain control over the resources available, including that most valuable resource: other organisms.

Ultimately, all conflicts arise from the desire to control the future. Today’s struggles shape what tomorrow will look like. When two aims are incompatible, for one to succeed, the other must fail. The human realm has its own conflicts: the control of slaves by their masters; the persecution of one race by another; the subjugation of women by men; the manipulation of the illiterate by the educated; the exploitation of workers by bosses; and the oppression of poorer nations by richer ones. Like the struggles of other species, human conflict is a battle to determine who gets to do what with the resources available, including that most valuable resource: other people.

We all have visions of the future that we’d like to realise – some grand, some modest – but shaping the future is no easy task. Under our direct and immediate control we have the movement of our limbs and the production of speech, but even these physical and cognitive resources are subject to strict constraints. We can only be so smart and so strong. Our power to act on the world is tightly bounded. One way to transcend our individual limits is cooperation – another is control (and the line between the two is often blurred). If we control not just our own limbs and speech but those of others too, we increase our capacity to bring about the outcomes we desire. The will of a single individual can be channelled through the bodies and minds of many. Alone, a president cannot invade another country, but, positioned at the top of a hierarchy giving him control over a vast army, it becomes possible. Unaided, a media mogul may not be able to sway an election but, as the head of an organisation that directs the activities of hundreds of journalists whose words reach millions of people, it becomes conceivable.

Pyramidal structures concentrate power in the hands of those who sit atop them. This power is always open to abuse. It enables the ideas and priorities of a small number to be imposed on the lives of millions – ideas and priorities that have a strong tendency to include wide-ranging privileges for those doing the imposing. However, the attempt to control people always risks provoking resistance, one born of the power possessed by every one of us: the power to choose. Although we are not ultimately responsible – because we make choices with a brain we didn’t choose – we do still make choices. And this power to choose is extremely valuable, the starting point for all the freedom that is available to us.

Choices present an opportunity to those who control them and can pose a threat to those who do not. Unavoidably, they affect the balance of power in society and it is power that determines the future. Just as the power of the river shapes the landscape, the power of choices moulds our social reality. The work we do, the politicians we vote for, the products we buy, the groups we support, the words we say – all of it produces ripples of effects that either reinforce or change the way things are. Every choice becomes part of the chain of causality, transforming the collective reality and altering the course of history. This becomes even clearer when we realise that a choice to do one thing is at the same time a choice not to do something else. The choice to work is a choice not to strike. The choice to buy a sports car is a choice not to give that money to charity. The choice to spend billions preparing for war is a choice not to spend that amount on feeding malnourished children. We are condemned to make choices. We cannot avoid taking sides, consciously or otherwise, in the ubiquitous power struggles that characterise our world.

Every choice that is made has two aspects: the situation being faced (the way the world is) and the identity of the chooser (the way the chooser is). In other words, who we are, as well as what we are faced with, determines how we will act at a particular point in time. The decisions we make emerge from the interaction of identity and context. Control of a person’s actions can be achieved by shaping either of these elements. Understanding how is central to understanding freedom.

Shaping context

Given who we are, we make the choices we do because of the circumstances we find ourselves in. Choices are not made in the abstract; they are made in concrete situations, at particular times, in particular places. These particulars matter. The greater the limits on what we can do, the narrower the range of potential behaviour. Some constraints are imposed by the laws of physics, others by those of society.

The ultimate way to reduce someone’s options is to cut short their life. To kill someone is to extinguish their capacity to act on the world. Short of that, the direct application of coercive force, such as imprisonment or physical restraint, dramatically curtails the options available. Threats of physical or emotional punishment can exert control by raising the perceived costs of certain choices. Cultural values can restrict access to many desirable things: a parent can withhold affection, peers can withhold respect, and society at large can deny acceptance and status. Controlling the context of a choice reduces the number and appeal of the options available to a chooser: behaviour is then channelled in the desired direction by shutting off options. While cultural incentives can be powerful, organised coercive force is necessary to close down avenues of action on a large scale.

Modern states expend vast resources on shaping the possibilities and incentives of their populations. Intelligence agencies, police forces and soldiers – along with surveillance cameras, guns and barbed wire – guard the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ behaviour, changing the risks associated with different courses of action. Laws define what is allowed, and coercive force awaits those who step beyond the paths of compliance. It is in the context of wide-ranging laws, backed by state power, that we make all of our choices.

Without the threat of coercive power, massive inequalities of wealth could not be sustained. The starving will take food if they can, the homeless will occupy empty buildings if they are able, and the sick will obtain treatment if not prevented from doing so. The more concentrated wealth becomes in a society, the more resources must be dedicated to its protection. One way to measure this is to look at the proportion of the national workforce dedicated to maintaining ‘security’. This includes police officers, military personnel, prison guards, court officials, but also private security firms and weapons manufacturers. Across nations, a clear pattern can be observed: more unequal nations have a higher proportion of their workforces dedicated to ‘guard labour’.² Since inequality exploded in the United States, there has been a marked increase in guard labour – in fact, it is a world leader in this respect, boasting 5.2 million workers in the sector in 2011.³ As a proportion of the total workforce this amounts to four times that of Sweden, a nation with a comparable standard of living. The pattern holds within nations just as it does between them. The most unequal American states have double the amount of guard labour (as a proportion of the workforce) as the most equal ones.⁴

The function of guard labour is to restrict the ways that people can gain access to valuable, often essential, resources – resources under the legal ownership of someone else. Ownership, by definition, reduces the options of other people. The owner of a resource has the power to decide what to do with it. Put another way, to own a resource is to deny the rest of the world the right to use it without permission. It is a relationship between one person (one company, one country) and the rest of humanity – one that is ultimately founded on force.

Centuries of violence have drawn and redrawn national borders, and ownership rights have been transferred to those who wielded the most effective fighting force. Indeed, the modern state was born of war. Given a fairly broad definition, one count estimates that over a thousand wars took place between 1400 and 1984.⁵ European monarchies averaged 40 per cent of total expenditure on warfare in the fifteenth century, 27 per cent in the sixteenth, 46 per cent in the seventeenth, and 54 per cent in the eighteenth.⁶ In times of war, military costs can exceed 90 per cent of total expenditure. In fact, over the past two centuries, there has not been a single year in which the world has been without military conflict.

From 1500 to the twentieth century, almost every country on Earth came under the direct or indirect control of European colonial powers. Native populations were wiped out or dispossessed of their land. Natural resources were stolen and used to enrich the colonising nations. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw almost all of Africa conquered and divided up between a handful of European nations. In the blink of an eye, 110 million Africans were turned into subjects.⁷ Nations were conjured out of thin air as territory was demarcated with clean straight lines across the continent. Joseph Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.⁸ Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a key player in this ‘scramble for loot’. For decades he had been obsessed with obtaining a colony for his young country. Belgium ‘doesn’t exploit the world’, he told one of his advisers. ‘It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.’⁹ Though he never set foot on Congolese soil, Leopold took control of a territory seventy-six times larger than Belgium itself with the aim of growing rich on the systematic theft of rubber and ivory. Under his brutal and exploitative rule, at least half the population of his newly created nation perished. According to authoritative estimates, that amounted to roughly 10 million people. It was genocide.¹⁰

Prior to the First World War, the European powers owned more than three-quarters of the industrial capital in Africa and Asia.¹¹ During this period, writes Thomas Piketty, ‘the rest of the world worked to increase consumption by the colonial powers and at the same time became more and more indebted to those same powers. . . . The advantage of owning things is that one can continue to consume and accumulate without having to work . . . The same was true on an international scale in the age of colonialism.’

Ownership has always been a defining concept of legal frameworks. Laws determine who controls what, what limits exist on that control, and how rights can be transferred. Much ownership can be traced back to acts of violence and subterfuge. Leopold’s legal ownership of the Congo began with African chiefs signing treaties in a language they didn’t understand and with no idea of what they were giving away. Over the course of history, claims of ownership have been made on all kinds of things, from land, buildings and machinery to water, ideas and even DNA. Claims of ownership have also been made on human beings. The idea that women are a resource to be owned and controlled by men has been deeply embedded in the laws and practices of civilisation for thousands of years. The same is true of slavery. Many millions have lived their lives as the state-enforced legal property of someone else.

In almost every large civilisation, slaves have occupied the lowest tier of a large and complex social hierarchy. Their intelligence, talents and energy were used to bring about outcomes desired by their owners. Just two centuries ago, over three-quarters of humanity were held captive by systems of slavery or serfdom.¹² Traders from Britain shipped close to 1.5 million slaves across the Atlantic, earning for themselves roughly £8 billion in today’s money. The conditions of a slave’s existence, as historian Adam Hochschild testifies, were abysmal: ‘They plant, cultivate, and harvest most of Earth’s major crops. They earn no money from their labor. Their work often lasts twelve or fourteen hours a day. Many are subject to cruel whippings or other punishments if they do not work hard enough. They die young.’¹³

Today, the ownership of the talents, energies and time of human beings persists, but takes a very different form. In the past, the control exerted by masters over their slaves was lifelong, coercive and bound by few constraints. Now, control of human labour manifests as highly constrained, temporary forms of consensual ownership: ‘employment’. Instead of being sold against our will into indefinite servitude, we rent ourselves out for a fee, for defined purposes and set periods of time (of course, some people are still forced into slavery).

Why do people sell their labour? In the present system, access to basic goods and services – food, shelter, energy, education and healthcare – is increasingly obtainable only in exchange for money. Access to money is closely controlled (a primary function of guard labour). For those that do not inherit wealth, the ways of obtaining this currency are extremely limited. To survive, most people must pass through the tight bottleneck of employment. That money is paid does not change the fact that at the heart of this arrangement is a relationship of control. The employer determines a vision of the future and the employee works to bring it about. Many people are compelled to do this because other paths to meeting their fundamental needs have been closed off or are just too risky to take. In fact, the options available to many people are so limited that those who manage to obtain employment – even dangerous, unsatisfying or low-paid employment – are considered the lucky ones.

Loans are the only other viable source of money for most people. Taking on a debt appears to be a voluntary action, but as pathways to life’s indispensable resources are increasingly closed off, it may become unavoidable. The need to borrow money in order to pay for life’s fundamental necessities locks people into a relationship of compliance and control. The legal obligation to repay what is borrowed (plus substantial amounts of interest) traps people in a form of indentured labour with respect to the lenders making the loans. The coercive apparatus of the state ensures that failure to make repayments carries heavy penalties, ranging from the repossession of a home to a stretch in prison.

Young people are increasingly burdened by crushing debts. The average US college graduate amasses nearly $30,000 of debt.¹⁴ More and more, parents are co-signing their children’s loans, making them liable if their children cannot meet their payments. In one case, parents grieving the death of their daughter Lisa learned that they still had to pay back her student loan worth over $100,000.¹⁵ This was in addition to taking in their daughter’s three children. As Lisa’s father points out: ‘It’s just impossible on a pastor’s salary raising three kids to pay $2,000 a month on loans.’ Today, Americans owe a total of $1.2 trillion in student loans. In the UK, university fees are so high that financial experts estimate that nearly two-thirds of students will never fully pay them off.¹⁶

The harder it gets for people to meet their basic needs, the more amenable they will be to the demands of a prospective employer, client or creditor. With enough currency in your bank account, the minds and bodies of others – the builder, the artist, the prostitute, the lawyer – are then suddenly at your disposal. Money buys labour power. Some will argue that the poor are still making ‘free choices’ – after all, no one is holding a gun to their head. But not being able to pay bills, make rent or even eat is as good as a gun to the head for many people, coercing them into agreeing to arrangements of control and compliance: they do so in order to secure their children’s education, their parents’ health and the roof over their head.

Separated from almost every resource by a price tag, our options expand and contract with our bank balance. Poverty diminishes freedom by reducing the number and appeal of our options. It determines the context of our choices and functions as a remarkably effective mechanism of control.

Shaping identities

Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, we make the choices we do because of who we are. But who we are has already been shaped by our circumstances. From infancy, the conditions created by our natural, built and social environments send us down a particular path of development, one of many permitted by our genetic inheritance. We adopt a way of life through a process of socialisation. This shaping of our identity is unavoidable – every community socialises its young according to dominant ideas about what is valuable or necessary – but socialisation can take many forms. It can enlighten or suppress, empower or tame, control or liberate.¹⁷

The shaping of a person’s identity – their beliefs, values, fears and desires – can be an extremely effective form of control. Coercion based on force alone requires extensive resources. On a large scale and for extended periods of time, it is almost impossible to sustain. It will always provoke resentment and risk rebellion. However, through the shaping of identities, people can be channelled down paths without ever coming into contact with the forces guarding their boundaries. They may even cease to notice these boundaries, and forget the harsh reality of batons and guns, censure and violence awaiting those who veer too close to their edge. As philosopher and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg is often credited as saying: ‘Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.’

Unlike the lancet fluke, humans cannot plant themselves in the brain of another being in order to take control – but they can plant ideas and desires, cultivate habits and values, and instil fears and insecurities, loyalties and beliefs. They can plant them young and from the exalted position of religious, cultural or familial authorities. By the time we have the conceptual tools necessary to question them, the world is already perceived, categorised and interpreted from within the framework of our particular identity.¹⁸ History tells many a tale of people acting against their own interests as a result of such conditioning. Again and again, men and women have upheld ideologies, supported systems and accepted lies that disempower them; over and over, subjugated groups have internalised their oppressor’s perspective, accepting as right and proper their subordinate role. The ant sacrifices itself because its brain has been changed by a lancet fluke. The soldier sacrifices himself because his brain has been changed by a belief. Both end up dead.

Social conditioning provides us with a common set of assumptions that colour the way new information is interpreted. From one perspective, a war can look like an act of justice and liberation; from another, an act of theft and murder. To one group, a natural disaster may signify the wrath of God; to another, a symptom of global warming. Within some ideologies, poverty looks like inferiority; within others it looks like exploitation. Dominant narratives tell us what is worth striving for and what can be sacrificed. They tell a story about why things are the way they are, what problems must be addressed, who is to blame, and how the problems should be solved.

Maintaining a highly unequal social order requires the propagation of justifying beliefs and the stamping out of dissent. The domination of Western Europe by the Catholic Church saw not only books burnt but heretics too. According to some scholars, the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century played a key role in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and bringing about the Reformation.¹⁹ In part, this was due to the proliferation of different interpretations of the Bible, which cast doubt over the idea that there was one infallible text. Violent suppression of dissenting narratives in the work of scholars, artists or scientists has been a regular occurrence since the first publications. Book-burning and the persecution of scholars goes back at least two thousand years to China’s Qin dynasty, when special emphasis was placed on the dangers of non-conformist poets, philosophers and historians.

The battle to control narratives is continuous. Starting in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to highlight the power of ‘the 1 per cent’, the corruption of the financial industry, and the extreme inequality produced by the present economic system. Leading Republican strategist Frank Luntz conceded that he was ‘frightened to death’ by the impact of Occupy on the ideas of ordinary Americans.²⁰ In a bid to neutralise the threat and retake control of the narrative, Luntz tutored Republicans on how to ‘talk about Occupy’. He warned against the word ‘capitalism’, preferring instead either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’. He advised against talking about ‘raising taxes on the rich’, preferring the phrase ‘taking money from hardworking Americans’. He disliked talk of ‘bonuses’, offering instead the term ‘pay for performance’. He discouraged the term ‘government spending’, recommending the alternative ‘government waste’. Most tellingly of all, he advised Republicans to deflect blame for the crisis away from banks and onto government by declaring ‘You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.’

The moulding of beliefs to meet the needs of a political system, although ubiquitous, is most apparent when the reins of power are seized to take society in a radically new direction. Times of revolution are invariably accompanied by attempts to transform the process of socialisation in order to produce the kind of people suitable for the new system. It makes sense: deep social change requires deep shifts in beliefs and values. An oppressive, violent past can leave its scars on whole continents, inhibiting free thought and perpetuating insidious forms of oppression. The decision to change the socialisation process may be motivated by a genuine impulse for greater freedom. On the other hand, it may be little more than a cynical ploy to consolidate power. The twentieth century offers a variety of examples.²¹

When Hitler took power in 1934, significant resources were expended on shaping the beliefs and values of the German population. Censorship was extreme, and the messages conveyed by the media – from films to books – were tightly controlled. Hitler, who devoted three chapters of Mein Kampf to the subject of propaganda, was acutely aware of the importance of shaping belief and opinion as a means of control. When the Nazis took power, the German education system was comprehensively revamped so that subjects were approached from within the state’s ideological framework. History lessons focused on German military achievements, biology classes taught Aryan superiority and, across the board, Jews were demonised and blamed for the economic hardships Germany had experienced. Outside school, millions of children were signed up to the Hitler Youth by parents keen to appear supportive of the regime. By 1939 the organisation had eight million members.

In spite of their ideological differences, examples of rapid political and social change from the twentieth century share some common features. Whether in Bolshevik Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or Communist China, seizure of power was followed by a restructuring of the education system to approach academic subjects from within the confines of the newly adopted ideological framework; teachers who deviated from the prescribed curriculum often faced strict penalties. A violent clampdown on dissenting views was typical. Youth organisations worked with schools to shape the young, and songs, marches and oaths of allegiance were commonplace.

Periods of political upheaval throw into sharp relief the ways in which socialisation is used to meet the demands of a new social system, but every system shapes people to meet its needs, often in ways that tighten centralised control. Collective acceptance of social structures is reinforced through established institutions such as schools, churches, the media and the workplace. If people believe the Queen is ordained by God, they will be more inclined to bend to her will. If people believe they live in a democracy, they will more readily accept their leaders. And if people believe the wealth of the rich is deserved, they will be less likely to ask why they themselves have so little. Cultivating the appearance of legitimacy reduces the risk of protest, rebellion and revolution, and historical narratives are key to establishing legitimacy. Origin stories, whether invoking gods or founding fathers, are used to make sense of life. They serve various functions, including the concealment of uncomfortable realities and inconvenient truths – imperial wars, colonial legacies, mass enslavement and genocidal destruction. As George Orwell put it in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ What we are and therefore what we can be changes with our understanding of what has gone before.

Success, responsibility, ownership, work, normality, equality, freedom – the way we think about such foundational concepts frames reality and guides our choices. Moral concepts exert a particularly powerful force. When deeply internalised, the paths permitted by our moral codes need no armed guards to patrol their boundaries. We reduce our own options, police our own actions, punish our own failings: parents disown their children, patients forego treatment, couples refrain from pre-marital sex, and the young volunteer to kill.

People react strongly if they feel cheated, tricked or manipulated. When economic arrangements are viewed as illegitimate, inefficient or exploitative, they will be contested. One way around this is to obscure and confuse the reality of a coercive relationship, to draw a veil of complexity over it. Those being controlled can then be led into blaming themselves or finding a convenient scapegoat for their predicament. The use of language is important here. Think again of the concept of ownership. We use it to describe a hungry family’s relationship to the food on their table, the wealthy businessman’s relationship to his factory, the landowner’s relationship to thousands of inherited acres, and the pharmaceutical company’s relationship to life-saving medicine. The significant moral differences among these relationships are lost beneath the blanket label ‘ownership’. As we broaden the scope of our definitions, we erase crucial ethical distinctions, with far-reaching social consequences.

Debt is another example. The repayment of one’s debts has long been presented as a moral and social duty. As anthropologist David Graeber points out, ‘in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, “debt,” “guilt,” and “sin” are actually the same word’.²² But taking on debt, for nations as well as individuals, is often an act of desperation. Although economic exchanges give the appearance of parity, they mask injustice when the more powerful party, be they employer or creditor, gets to set the terms of exchange. The fact that a loan has to be taken out to meet extortionate medical bills (the primary cause of bankruptcy in the US) becomes an irrelevant detail. Once the labels ‘debtor’ and ‘creditor’ are stamped on the relationship, the moral obligation falls on the debtor to pay back what they have borrowed and that is that. Reducing an obligation to a financial transaction robs it of history and context. Other obligations – of society to its members, of one human being to another, of those with much to those with little – are crowded out. David Graeber writes:

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something.²³

In past centuries, European colonialists used debt as a control mechanism to devastating effect.²⁴ Today it operates as a weapon of what can justly be described as economic imperialism. In the 1970s, as Western banks sought to create investment opportunities for vast sums of money arriving from the world’s leading oil-producing nations, they set about trying to convince Third World leaders to take out large loans with interest rates that quickly soared into double digits. This precipitated the Third World debt crisis, giving the Western-dominated IMF (International Monetary Fund) the leverage it needed to take control of the economies of supposedly sovereign nations, cutting vital welfare programmes and public services. Perhaps worst of all, the powerful logic of compound growth meant that the original amount borrowed had to be paid back many times over by the domestic populations who, often ruled by corrupt dictators, played no part in authorising the loans and rarely benefited from them. Since 1970, for instance, the Philippines has borrowed $110 billion, has paid back $125 billion, yet still owes $45 billion.²⁵

The spate of foreclosures that followed the 2008 economic crash in the US left many former homeowners blaming themselves.²⁶ A veil of complexity shrouded the collapse in confusion. In this vacuum of understanding, myths of the industrious rich and the lazy poor prospered, turning economic failure into something shameful for the individual rather than the result of a corrupt, deregulated financial sector and a rigged economic system that was rapidly increasing social inequality. Many victims of the crash channelled their anger inwards or towards their peers rather than towards those whose actions had caused the crisis. The sense of obligation that naturally arises when someone does you a favour has been hijacked by our banking system to place a veneer of legitimacy over what are plainly coercive relationships.

The supposed moral obligation to repay debt – irrespective of the wider context – has trumped far more important obligations. Employing the language of austerity and the rhetoric of ‘tough choices’, cities and states have been slashing welfare, cutting pensions and dismantling public services, ruining the lives of countless people in the process: children, the disabled, the in-work poor, the mentally ill and the elderly. The claim that we should honour our obligations to billionaires and banks before honouring our obligations to the most vulnerable in society is a thinly veiled attempt to lend moral legitimacy to rampant greed.

In all modern states, a massive infrastructure exists to shape people’s identities. From the blackboard to the billboard, the supermarket aisle to the evening news, we are confronted by constant attempts to influence our emotions and priorities. To the extent that this infrastructure defines our thinking, sets the terms of debate and influences our ideas, it exerts a tight grip on our thoughts and actions. It is safe to assume that some of our beliefs, loyalties, biases, habits and values exist simply because they serve the interests of those who have the power to shape them. This has always been how power defends itself. But there are countervailing forces: innate instincts and prior conditioning place limits on how much we can be moulded. Securing our consent, therefore, is not always possible. But short of consent, compliance will do. And the outcome is often the same. People may despise the system under which they live, they may hate the jobs they are forced to do and the conditions under which they must work, they may even long for revolution of one sort or another, but as long as they do not act on these feelings, they do not pose a threat. Upon the obedience of the many, be it secured by inducing fear, ignorance, cynicism or loyalty, rests the power of the few.

*

The distinction between context and identity is useful but the line between the two is irrevocably blurred. The situations we experience shape our identities and our identities determine the choices we make in any given situation.²⁷ Even violent coercion relies on the shaping of identities. Law enforcers and soldiers under all regimes are subject to psychological conditioning in preparation for their work and the wider culture in every system legitimises – often glorifies – the coercive function they fulfil.

How do these strategies of control impact our power to choose? The answer is that, in almost every case, they don’t. As long as our behaviour is the result of what we decide, given our character, values, beliefs and circumstances, the power to choose is preserved. Even when circumstances place extreme limits on our options, or when our identity is the product of indoctrination, we still have choices to make. This is true even when we are physically threatened or restrained. When physically coerced, for instance, we have the choice to resist or comply. If we are physically paralysed, we have the choice to refocus our thoughts. In this sense, at least, we are ‘condemned to be free’: we cannot escape our ability to choose.

The capacity to choose is fundamental to any meaningful notion of freedom, yet it is only a starting point – necessary but not sufficient. Precisely because it is possessed by anyone with a choice to make, the ‘freedom to choose’ is extremely limited. Held equally by slaves and slave-owners, it is compatible with the most insidious forms of control. A more profound concept of freedom is needed to answer the deeper question of what qualifies as control and what does not – something that will be developed in Part Three.

Two and a half revolutions: a brief history

The history of our species is bound up with two revolutions of immense significance – the agricultural and the industrial – and the beginnings of a third: the democratic. The agricultural and industrial revolutions transformed the way wealth was produced, distributed and controlled. The democratic revolution threatened to do the same. An understanding of these revolutions sheds light on how control is maintained in the world we see today.

Whether they are armies, state bureaucracies or multinational corporations, large hierarchical structures characterise the modern world, amplifying the dictates of those who control them. Hierarchical social organisation has been around for a long time, but scholarship across numerous fields suggests that for the vast majority of our history we humans lived in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, in highly egalitarian societies, with a substantial degree of gender equality, and no war.²⁸ Hierarchical structures emerged as a product of specific historical conditions.²⁹ About ten thousand years ago, in part because of changes in the climate, communities in certain regions began to make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. This change spread across Asia and Europe from a starting point in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. Although it was labour intensive, the domestication of plants and animals enabled more food to be produced than was needed for the community to survive. The emergence of agriculture and the surplus it produced, though small, proved to be a revolutionary step in human history, a precursor to the written word, social stratification, bureaucracy, cities, states and armies – in short, ‘civilisation’.

The far-reaching effects of agricultural development manifested themselves over thousands of years, transforming what it meant to be human. The cultivation of grains enabled communities to build permanent homes and live together in villages. Populations expanded, and the surplus allowed some members of the community to dedicate their time to activities unrelated to farming. Divisions of labour were established and hierarchical social structures took hold. Six thousand years ago, the invention of the plough, along with other technological developments, led to an even larger surplus, not just in food but in clothes and raw materials.

Slowly but surely, stratified social structures hardened into rigid hierarchies and gender equality was eroded. The struggle for territory and security, as well as the need for internal social cohesion, gave rise to warrior chiefs and high priests, powerful figures within the community who exerted significant control over the surplus. Inequality was reinforced over the generations as wealth was passed from parents to their children. Elites monopolised new forms of knowledge, taking control of decision-making. Roughly five thousand years ago, certain towns became the world’s first cities and soon deep social divisions and centralised government emerged. A military force was required to defend and control the highly unequal distribution of wealth. Power was concentrated in the hands of kings, priests, military leaders and a newly created class of specialists trained in the esoteric arts of writing and book-keeping, both developed to keep records of the many transactions of wealth transfer taking place. Innovations in technology, law, bureaucracy and finance were spurred on by the pressures of warfare and the search by elites for more effective means of governing the surplus. For the next few thousand years, as John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.’³⁰ Then a few centuries ago, advances in technology and the rapid accumulation of capital set the stage for humanity’s second major revolution.

In the fifteenth century, advances in shipbuilding and navigation brought about the first truly global trading network linking Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, England, Japan, China and India. Key items like spices, silk and wool were sought-after commodities and a form of international currency. Merchants bought cheap and sold dear, moving across continents and amassing great fortunes. Trade in slaves became an integral part of the process as unpaid labour flooded the market with valuable goods. First in England, then across Europe, the system of feudalism, having enjoyed centuries of stability, began to break down. In its place emerged a world of markets, commodities, wage labourers and capitalists.

Under feudalism, the nature, size and distribution of the surplus was relatively clear to all concerned. Peasants could see how much they had produced and how much was taken by the landlord who had contributed no labour to its creation. With the emergence of international trade, open markets and complex financial tools, the scale, diversity and distribution of society’s surplus wealth became far harder to comprehend.³¹ As divisions of labour became more finely demarcated; as human toil was combined with ever more complex machinery, tightly controlled by a class of managers; and as the role of finance became more central, the processes by which wealth was created were increasingly shrouded in mystery. Adding to the confusion was the fact that labourers were given their share in advance, in the form of wages, before the production process had been completed.³² Built on a thriving slave trade and an army of impoverished workers living and labouring in deplorable conditions, this system was the source of both immense riches and immense human misery. This was the start of the Industrial Revolution: a second profound change in the way our species produced its surplus.

As merchants grew rich, they eagerly sought opportunities for profitable investment. At the same time, peasants who had been thrown off their land constituted a newly formed workforce desperate for a wage. Technological advances brought these two social groups together in a new kind of workplace: the factory. This system of mass production transformed society at a breakneck pace. Yet the complex world of long-distance trade and volatile markets continued to obfuscate the means by which wealth was created and distributed. The market seemed to have its own economic laws, independent of politicians and the state. In reality, the role of government was central. Its coercive hierarchy determined the rules of the market and stood in the wings ready to defend (and often expand) the growing inequalities of wealth, domestically and internationally. The evolution of the modern state is bound up with the fulfilment of this function. For instance, the need to finance astronomically costly wars played a vital role in shaping core institutions such as efficient tax-collecting bureaucracies, bond markets, stock exchanges and central banks.

Political struggles determine whose interests the governing hierarchy upholds and whose it ignores – what is permitted and what is not. Shifts in power are complex affairs, impacted by technological innovation, cultural change, popular resistance and war. Groups who benefit from these shifts can use the coercive apparatus to modify the ‘rules of the game’, consolidate their advantage and exert greater influence over the surplus. Social change can be fraught with contradiction, and usually unfolds over long periods of time, but gradually it has produced profound changes in how, and in whose interests, society is organised.

For thousands of years, states were ruled by unaccountable elites. In the age of the Enlightenment, revolutionary energy was unleashed and society transformed. The rise of electoral democracy opened up radical possibilities; it was a chance for the disadvantaged majority to take back control of government, and for the vast productive powers of humanity and the wealth created by them to be freed from the grasp of monarchs, emperors, merchants and industrialists, and placed in the hands of ‘the people’. In other words, the rise of democracy threatened to revolutionise – through social rather than technological change – the way wealth was produced, distributed and controlled. At least, that is what many hoped for and, of course, some feared.

The roots of the word ‘democracy’ – demos, meaning ‘people’ and kratos, meaning ‘rule’ – convey what appears to be a simple concept: rule of the people. But what it really means and how it should actually work has long been debated. Who are ‘the people’ and what does it mean ‘to rule’? Ancient Athens is often held up as the first democratic state, yet, even at its height, only a small minority of men had the right to take part. For the next two millennia, this was the rule rather than the exception. Until the twentieth century, in almost every instance of state-sanctioned electoral democracy, the majority of ‘the people’ were excluded.

The freedoms that have been fought for and won over the last five centuries have been substantial, paving the way for the creation of today’s democracies. In 1500, however, power and privilege was concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of aristocrats and senior clergy who monopolised access to education, politics and wealth. Notions of individual liberty, privacy, freedom of thought and speech, universal education, rights for working people, equality before the law, representative government and universal suffrage were little more than distant dreams. Making them a reality meant overcoming enormous obstacles: the authority of the Church, the dictatorship of powerful monarchs, and a political culture that upheld institutions of slavery and patriarchy.

Since the first modern campaigns for democratic reform in seventeenth-century England, the transition from aristocracy to democracy has encountered powerful resistance from those who stood to lose power and privilege. As the forces for democratic reform grew over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, old power structures sought new ways of maintaining control. An early strategy was simply to prevent those without wealth and property from voting. After the British Reform Act of 1832, only 18 per cent of men (and no women) could vote, and even late into the nineteenth century, the franchise was restricted to freeholders, leaseholders and householders whose property exceeded a certain value. In 1866, responding to plans to extend the right to vote, parliamentarian Lord Salisbury expressed a common concern when he said that granting the working poor the vote would likely lead to the passing of ‘laws with respect to taxation and property especially favourable to them, and therefore dangerous to all other classes.’³³

James Madison, co-author of the US Constitution, saw the role of government as protecting ‘the minority of the opulent against the majority’. He claimed that those ‘without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathise sufficiently with its rights to be safe depositories of power over them’.³⁴ The solution, according to Madison, was to keep the power of the government in the hands of those who represent the wealth of the nation. Another Founding Father, John Adams, feared that ‘If all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have . . . Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich . . . and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded.’³⁵

It is no accident that neither the US Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence describes the US as a democracy. In fact, for much of its history, ‘democracy’ and ‘democrat’ were terms of abuse. The Canadian political philosopher Francis Dupuis-Déri has shown that major political figures only began to refer to themselves as ‘democrats’ decades after the American and French Revolutions.³⁶ Such resistance to democratic reform among elites meant that by 1900 the world still did not have a single country in which all adults could vote.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the elite’s fears of public participation in the political process were growing as pressure to extend the franchise increased. These fears were clearly articulated by the influential sociologist Gustave Le Bon in a book entitled The Crowd (1895). Le Bon stressed that the inability of crowds to reason ‘prevents them displaying any trace of the critical spirit . . . of discerning truth from error’ and claimed that ‘the entry of the popular classes into political life . . . is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition . . . Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists . . . The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.’³⁷

Historically, the majority of venerated political thinkers have been critical of democracy in both theory and practice. Influenced by the writings of Le Bon, Joseph Schumpeter, one of the twentieth century’s leading theorists of democracy, believed that ‘democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule.” Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.’³⁸ Reflecting a common attitude, he saw the public as weak, overly emotional, impulsive and lacking the intellectual capacity to think for themselves about complex issues. Not even education could help: ‘people cannot be carried up the ladder’ for they are able to discuss complex issues only in ‘an infantile way’ and are ‘incapable of action other than a stampede’.

Power, he believed, should be in the hands of ‘governments of experts’. His justification is interesting. Living through the emergence of advertising as a potent social force, he observed the increasing power of advertisers to shape needs, cultivate desires and direct behaviour. For him, this process discredited the notion of an authentic ‘popular will’. If public opinion could be shaped by outside forces, it must lack any independent or rational basis. ‘If all the people can in the short run be “fooled” step by step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them.’³⁹

Well into the twentieth century, these sentiments were still being voiced. In 1934, the head of the American Political Science Association, Walter J. Shepard, declared that government should be in the hands of ‘an aristocracy of intelligence’, not directed by ‘the ignorant’ or ‘the uninformed’.⁴⁰ This view of the people, held in common by Schumpeter, Le Bon, Weber, Madison and many others, has a lineage reaching back to Plato and Aristotle, both of whom thoroughly distrusted the notion of democracy. Aristotle was concerned with the power democracy would give to the poor, while Plato viewed democracy as rule by the unqualified, and advocated a system of elite rule instead.

The seventeenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume was fascinated by ‘the easiness with which the many are governed by the few’. He found it surprising because ‘force is always on the side of the governed’ and concluded that government is founded on control of opinion, a principle that ‘extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular’.⁴¹ The claim that force is always on the side of the governed is questionable – certainly in our own time, given the amount of coercive power wielded by modern states – but Hume had a point. The control of public opinion is central to the exercise of power. Preserving domestic inequalities has always required a range of non-violent strategies. From the Pharaohs of Egypt to the Industrial Revolution, writes economist Yanis Varoufakis:

[T]he rulers’ command over the surplus and its uses was based on a combination of their capacity to make compliance seem individually inescapable (indeed, attractive), ingenious divide-and-rule tactics, moral enthusiasm for the maintenance of the status quo (especially among the underprivileged) and the promise of a pre-eminent role in some afterlife. Only very infrequently was it based on brute force.⁴²

Where unrestrained force can be used, it lessens the need to control people’s beliefs and desires – if you can put a gun to someone’s head, it matters less what’s going on inside it. It is precisely in societies that combine great disparities of wealth with formal freedom that we should expect to find the most sophisticated forms of control.

As we will see, the threat faced by elites at the start of the twentieth century spawned a subversive solution, one that sought to reinterpret the very meaning of democracy. Modern democracies are founded on the idea that government is legitimised by a mandate – the consent of the governed – but from this principle emerge two conceptions of democracy, for there are two ways to gain the public’s consent: one is to modify the government; the other is to modify the public.

The power to choose

The creativity of our species has harnessed more forms of energy, in more complex ways, than any other creatures on the planet. From the domestication of animals and the advent of agriculture to the invention of the steam engine and the nuclear reactor, we have devised ingenious methods for harnessing the power of nature. Technology expanded the power of our species, but it has been techniques of social control that have determined how that power is used. Since the dawn of civilisation, through the shaping of identities and context, extremely skewed distributions of burdens and benefits have been perpetuated. Systems of rule have changed, methods of production have evolved, but coercive hierarchies and deep inequalities have persisted.

Centralised control has always been contested. Until recently, most rulers lacked the means to exert tight control across the vast territories they claimed to govern. Coercive power was dispersed among competing elites, and isolated communities enjoyed considerable political autonomy. There are many cases of communities escaping the reach of centralised power and experimenting with novel forms of self-government. Some were ultimately crushed by force in a relatively short amount of time, but others have survived for thousands of years. The active creation of spaces free from the constraints of centralised power continues today, from the Zapatistas in Mexico and tribes in isolated regions to urban occupations of public and private spaces and virtual communities online.

The many achievements of democratic experiments around the world demonstrate that coercive control is not the only way to coordinate action on a large scale. Mutually beneficial cooperation is the alternative – working together for a common end, one that benefits all those involved in its creation, in which unity of purpose is preserved by common interest, decisions are reached by dialogue rather than by manipulation or intimidation, and social cohesion is achieved not through carrot-and-stick incentives but by cultivating social values, including a respect for reason, evidence, fairness, equality and democracy. This is an ideal but it has practical value. Ideals orient us. They enable us to evaluate the ongoing experiment that is human society: an experiment in sharing this planet with each other, as families, communities and nations.

In every generation, it is incumbent on those who value freedom to identify its limits and – given our opportunities and talents – work to overcome them. Crucial to being effective in this struggle is an understanding of where power lies. This requires that we look beyond rhetoric and ideology, beyond words laid down in constitutions and legislation, and beyond myths of the market and formal political procedures. It requires that we peel away propaganda, peer behind rituals and lay bare the mechanisms of control that constrain us. It is through understanding control that we understand freedom.

Market democracies are founded on the so-called ‘freedom to choose’: between competing political parties, products, employers and news sources. But without a careful look at the nature of the choices we face and the way we arrive at our decisions, the experience of making choices can create the illusion that we possess more freedom than we really do. Focusing on the apparent options available to people in the voting booth and the market, while glossing over the way in which people’s options and identities are manufactured, conceals the profound imbalances of power at the heart of the system. It conceals entire professions, billions of dollars and increasingly complex technologies dedicated to predicting, understanding and controlling behaviour. It conceals the fact that most of the planet’s wealth remains in the hands of a tiny segment of humanity. It conceals a bitter struggle between two competing principles of power: ‘one dollar one vote’ versus ‘one person one vote’ – a struggle that continues to shape our world.

The following three chapters examine this wider context. They explore how our political and economic freedoms have been hollowed out while preserving the shell that is the ‘freedom to choose’. As we will see, the democratic revolution is far from over. Much of the freedom attributed to the institutional pillars of modern democracies – free elections, free markets and free media – is illusory, compatible as it is with extensive mechanisms of control.