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Essay:The Dialectics of Domination

2026-09-22T21:27:54Z

Yogthos: added an introductory essay on Liberalism

To understand why liberalism is inherently right-wing, it is necessary to discard the views which liberals hold about themselves, and look at the material basis of their ideology. Liberalism professes to be a timeless philosophy embodying lofty ideals such as individual liberty, democratic rights, and the rule of law. But a materialist is not interested in what an ideology says about itself; one must ask what relations of production it supports, whose class interests it serves, and what part it plays in the historical development of society. So considered, liberalism can only be seen as the ideological superstructure of capitalism. It exists to justify private property relations by cloaking them under the guise of human liberty. It began as a progressive force, facilitating the transformation of the material basis of society and releasing the productive forces from their feudal fetters. But today it has turned into a reactionary force, acting as the political and philosophical panoply of a ruling class compelled to increase the sum of social violence in order to safeguard its monopoly of wealth. The productive forces once promoted by capitalism have formed a contradiction with its system of private ownership of the means of production. The progressive negation of the moribund capitalist order is not to be found in perfection of liberalism, but in transcendence towards a socialist stage of development.

== Liberalism as the Ideology of Capital ==
Liberalism is the political expression of a certain type of economic system, namely, one based upon wage-labour and the ownership by a few of the instruments and materials which others must use. Beneath all the rhetoric about freedom and equality lies a hard fact that the workers are cut off from the land and raw materials without which they cannot subsist. As a result, their productive powers become a commodity to be sold to those who own the capital and machinery, and those owners, in turn, get to enjoy an unmerited proportion of the product. This condition has come about through historical processes such as the enclosure of land and the creation of laws which prevented people from working except for wages.

The liberal worldview presents the individual as an abstraction rather than as the product of a community of humans in which exchange-value mediates social relations. Legally equal, the worker and the capitalist meet in the labour market to negotiate a transaction which is formally fair. But behind such formalism the capitalist remains dominant since the worker, cut off from the means of production, must sell labour-power to survive. The capitalist, owning those means, can replace any individual worker by drawing on the reserve army of labour, the pool of unemployed and underemployed workers that is created by the normal workings of capital accumulation. Competition for jobs amongst the workers leads to further downward pressure on wages and disciplines those lucky enough to be employed. Thus, the legal equality of the contracting parties hides the structural imbalance between them.

Similarly, the liberal state itself should not be seen as an impartial arbiter standing above class conflicts. As Marx and Engels state, it “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Its institutions secure the co-operation of all sections of the capitalist class, but do not aim at securing an amicable adjustment of the conflict between capital and labour. Its constitutional safeguards of life, liberty, and property are grounded in guarantees of the sanctity of private ownership necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalist accumulation. The right to property, in practice, is the right of the rich not to share their wealth. Therefore, any democracy which liberalism establishes must necessarily operate within the existing structure of property relations. Periodic elections and parliamentary debate exist to absorb discontent, but the political system can never allow the question of the ownership of the means of production to be raised in a meaningful way. By making the rights of property untouchable and removing them from the sphere of public debate, liberalism reveals its true class character. In material terms, it represents the liberty of capital to exploit labour, and for a minority to enrich itself at the expense of the majority.

Of course, this same liberalism was once a revolutionary force at a time when feudalism, with its fiefs and serfdom, had become an obstacle to further development of the productive forces. The bourgeoisie needed the national market, a supply of labour-power, and the abolition of the parasitical privileges of the aristocracy and the Church. Liberalism provided the ideological weapons for their movement by promoting concepts of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the conception of the free individual. By abolishing feudalism, the bourgeois revolutions in England and France opened the way for an enormous development of productive power.

The progressive element of liberalism was not destined to survive in the long term because capitalist production, once freed from feudal restraints, quickly found itself faced by its own internal contradiction. Production was becoming increasingly socialized in factories and other large enterprises while appropriation remained private. Factory work breaks down commodity production into steps, with each worker performing a specialized task within a process that depends on the co-operation of many hands across the factory floor. And factories, in turn, require inputs of raw materials to operate the machinery which are sourced on the markets linking that factory to producers and consumers across the globe, making production a collective and even international affair. Yet the means of production themselves, along with the product, belong to individual capitalists who decide what shall be produced, where capital shall be invested, and how the surplus value created by the wage-earners shall be distributed. This contradiction forms the basis of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The business owners seek to increase profit by driving down wages and prolonging the working day, while the proletariat seeks to increase its wages and shorten its hours. These opposing interests come into conflict at every point of labour organization and economic policy.

Liberalism, as an ideology, itself represents a unity of opposites with its democratic form and its capitalist content existing in a dynamic equilibrium. While it proclaims freedom for all, the wage system compels workers to sell their labour-power to whichever capitalist will purchase it. It proclaims democracy, but the actual power of capital turns the state into an executive committee of the ruling class. Both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are bound together in one social whole, each determining the existence of the other. Thus, the class struggle becomes the primary motive power that drives the development of a capitalist society. As the productive forces develop, the labour force becomes more concentrated and better organized. The contradiction sharpens in turn, and liberalism is forced to strain itself more and more to mitigate and justify the actual state of labour relations.

Capitalist accumulation proceeds quantitatively as capital becomes concentrated and centralized, leading to recurring crises of overproduction that gradually transform liberalism from a progressive force into a mask of reaction. Each subsequent crisis further impoverishes the workers and bankrupts small capitalists who are forced to let go of some of their remaining assets to weather it. Large capitalists, who are in a much better position to weather the economic downturn, end up scooping up these assets, which leads to further capital accumulation. The concentration of capital in fewer hands and the thinning out of competition create the conditions for a growing dependence of wage-earners upon big business and the dissolution of the petty bourgeoisie. These factors combine to produce a qualitative change in the character of the whole social order. A liberal society that could once afford the appearance of openness can no longer do so. As class conflict grows, its parliamentary machinery becomes increasingly ineffective, and the State transitions to open repression. This trajectory is now unmistakable in the United States, where the state increasingly deploys mass surveillance, militarized policing, and persecution of dissent against any elements that challenge the existing property order.

When the workers organizing around their own class interests threaten to break through the confines of bourgeois parliamentarism, the accumulation of their class pressure imposes upon the bourgeoisie the necessity for a change not only of degree but of kind. The pressure grows until the bourgeoisie can no longer govern by consent and democratic illusion, but must abandon the friendly face of political liberalism to reveal the mailed fist beneath. This is the point where liberal democracy transitions into its fascist phase of development. Fascism can be seen as liberalism turned inside out, revealing the coercive core that was always present beneath its democratic facade used to obfuscate the economic basis of class rule. What gets discarded is the superstructure of parliamentary democracy, which becomes a hindrance to the security of the ruling class once they can no longer control it. As Adolf Hitler himself told the German industrialists, “private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality.” Thus, in order to save capitalism in times of crisis, liberalism must abandon its democratic facade.

And so, the class which formerly allied itself with the masses to destroy feudalism now finds them to be the enemy within. The feast given by the City of London to Cromwell to celebrate his crushing of the radicals at Burford serves as the perfect example of this recurrent spectacle. Every time a capitalist regime has been seriously menaced from below, the liberal state has passed into an increasingly repressive, and finally fascist, form. The Weimar Republic's metamorphosis into Nazism, the Pinochet coup in Chile, and the neoliberal regimes of today discarding their democratic facade as they confront mass movements such as the MAS in Bolivia all belong to a single dialectic.

== Socialism as the Negation of Capitalist Relations ==
History, however, does not end with the bankruptcy of liberalism because capitalism itself produces its own grave-diggers. When capitalism did away with the relations of domination between lords and serfs, the market became a new tyrant. Capital collects the wage-earners in factories to increase the productivity of labour through science and machinery, and thereby transforms the proletariat into a class capable of administering production for itself. All these factors lead to the possibility of a new type of system which represents the socialist stage of development.

At this point we need to clearly define what socialism actually refers to in a Marxist sense. Socialism means that the producers of wealth begin to take into their own hands the control of the existing productive forces. It sets in motion the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, a process that can only be completed through the full development of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The goal of the socialist movement is to make production subordinate to human need rather than profit by re-establishing collective control of social life on a higher material basis than that of primitive communism.

But such a new arrangement cannot arrive fully formed because socialism arises from the existing capitalist relations. Thus, it must necessarily proceed through stages which contain within themselves the residues of the old order alongside the seeds of the new. Here we must grasp the essential distinction between socialism and communism, and the role of what Marx and Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat. The term does not refer to a policy or a strategy involving the establishment of a particular form of government. Rather, it covers the whole of the transition period to communism. Such a transitional stage is not simply one possible path to be decided upon under certain conditions because it is not a matter of choice. It cannot be abandoned, any more than the class struggle can be abandoned, except in words and at the cost of enormous confusion.

To grasp this properly we must first recognize that State power is the political expression of a single ruling class, and as such it is fundamentally rooted in class dictatorship. Bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie while a proletarian democracy is also the dictatorship of a different class. In modern liberal society, State power is held in an absolute way by the capital owning class, who do not share it with any other. From this follows a consequence which is that the only possible historical alternative is an equally absolute hold on State power by the proletariat, the class of wage-labourers formerly exploited by capital. Just as the bourgeoisie cannot share State power, neither can the proletariat share it with other classes.

State power is expressed through the State apparatus in the form of the standing army, the police, the legal system, and the bureaucracy which all serve the interests of the ruling class. Therefore, the working class must tear down the existing machinery of the State, which is the embodiment of the old power structures in order to replace it with one serving its own interests.

Hence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a road of transition to socialism, it is nothing other than socialism itself. Communism is the long-term objective, whose achievement stretches over a very long historical period, and to which socialism is only the means. Seizing control of the State power is the prerequisite first step on this road. If this position is lost, then construction of socialism becomes impossible, at least in so far as socialism represents a revolutionary break with capitalism.

The proletarian dictatorship is itself a contradictory stage since, even though the working class holds State power, existing socioeconomic relations have not yet been abolished, meaning that the old capitalist relations persist within the new socialist framework. This should not be seen as a failure of the revolution, but rather as its necessary form where the contradiction between the new State power and the old economic relations acts as the engine of further development. The proletarian rule exists precisely to resolve this contradiction, abolishing the remnants of capitalist production in order to create the conditions for a classless society.

In the dialectical spiral, liberalism represents the thesis acting as the ideological expression of capitalism in its ascendant and dominant phases. The proletarian revolution, the seizure of State power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the antithesis. But this antithesis itself necessarily produces its own contradictions between the political power of the working class and the economic relations which still bear the mark of the old order. The synthesis is achieved through the long and difficult process of abolishing class distinctions and transforming the material conditions of production.

== The Logic of Reaction ==
With this conceptual framework in place, we can fully understand the present role of liberalism within modern capitalist societies. Liberalism helped to destroy feudalism and to create capitalism along with its formal political democracy. This task accomplished, the liberal ideology ceases to have any progressive content. It exists to justify an outworn system of exploitation with its rhetoric of freedom and democracy serving to obscure the reality of the material relations. What it means in practice is the right of a few to grow rich at the expense of all the rest and of the earth’s finite resources. Every reference to free markets or individual rights is a defense of the status quo in property and power.

This analysis explains why liberalism is invariably compelled to associate itself with fascism against socialism. Capitalist society is organized through conflicting forces; bourgeoisie and proletariat depend upon each other, but are also in conflict with each other. While the proletariat is weak and disunited, the bourgeoisie can maintain its class rule by means of liberal democracy, distributing small reforms to maintain the fiction of democratic rule. But as the class struggle grows acute and socialist doctrine starts to spread among the workers, the property order itself becomes threatened. At that point, the bourgeoisie is faced with the choice of sacrificing its class rule or abandoning the facade of democratic machinery, which becomes intolerable. Power is then handed over to fascist groups to stamp out opposition and repeal economic safeguards for wage-earners.

History shows the process all too clearly. When the quantity of class pressure reaches a certain threshold, it leads to a qualitative change in the nature of the state, transforming what was liberal democracy into a fascist dictatorship. Ishay Landa has demonstrated that the Nazi regime was in no sense anti-capitalist. It sold off state assets, destroyed trade unions, and won the enthusiastic support of major industrialists. In fact, Hitler looked up to the British Empire as a model of ruthless imperialism, and remarked that “no nation ever prepared better for economic conquest even with the sword. or later maintained it more ruthlessly, than the British” The concentration camps had their models in the British camps for Boer civilians and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous peoples from colonized territories. Mass detention and racial extermination, far from having been invented by German fascists, were a direct continuation of liberal colonial practice. Fascism is the logical terminus of liberal capitalism when it can no longer maintain its democratic pretense.

This dialectic is accelerating today all across the western world. Neoliberalism, the contemporary form of economic liberalism, has now dismantled most of the social democratic compromises of postwar capitalism, having abolished welfare protections, privatised public goods, and deregulated finance. Workers are exposed to market shocks while austerity imposes misery on many in order to concentrate the wealth in ever fewer hands. The liberal state constantly seeks to extend its security apparatus by using mass surveillance to spy on citizens, by criminalizing dissent, and by prosecuting whistleblowers like Julian Assange for exposing state crimes. The political centre in the West presents itself as the moderate choice between the extremes of left and right. In reality, it defends the status quo of capitalist relations. All the while, the far right is groomed as a backup plan, ready to step in should the status quo start to tilt toward genuine socialism. Hence, the liberal centre and the fascist right should be viewed as divisions of labour within the camp of capital rather than being opposites.

Liberalism belongs firmly on the right, for it is the ideology of a class system based on exploitation. It peddles abstract notions of freedom and democracy as universal goods, while enshrining in law the right to private property. The tangible result is that economic power remains concentrated in the hands of capitalists, who use it to dominate political life. As the crises of capitalism grow more severe, so does the tension within capitalist societies, leading them to abandon their democratic facade to reveal the true face of class dictatorship. The antidote to fascism is the abolition of the capitalist relations for whose preservation liberalism works, an abolition that can only be achieved through the seizure of State power by the exploited class, which is the very antithesis of liberal governance. Today, the fight is for nothing less than the dictatorship of the proletariat, and through it, for a socialist society in which the workers control the means of production.

Essay:TheToolsetOfReality

2026-08-10T17:47:28Z

Yogthos: added an introductory essay on dialectical materialism

{{infobox essay|title=TheToolsetOfReality|author=Yogthos|date=2026-08-10|excerpt=Many hear the term Dialectical Materialism (or “Diamat”) and think it means entering a world of arcane mysticism or obscure Germanic language. In reality it is simply an analytical toolkit used to analyze and comprehend how the world functions, a worldview which is largely the work of Karl Marx but whose name was coined by Joseph Dietzgen in his description of the method Marxists use for examining reality and connecting high philosophy with rigorous utility. This essay is an introduction to a way of thinking which sees the world as a dynamic interconnected system rather than as a collection of static discrete objects.|name=The Toolset of Reality}}

= The Toolset of Reality =

=== A Practical Introduction to Material Dialectics ===
Many hear the term Dialectical Materialism (or “Diamat”) and think it means entering a world of arcane mysticism or obscure Germanic language. In reality it is simply an analytical toolkit used to analyze and comprehend how the world functions, a worldview which is largely the work of Karl Marx but whose name was coined by Joseph Dietzgen in his description of the method Marxists use for examining reality and connecting high philosophy with rigorous utility. This essay is an introduction to a way of thinking which sees the world as a dynamic interconnected system rather than as a collection of static discrete objects.

=== The Logic of Motion and Dynamic Systems ===
Most of us are taught to regard the world as a static collection of objects: a tree, a smartphone, or a government. Dialectics tells us to reject a simplistic idea of a static world, and instead see these things as evolving processes always in a state of becoming. Consider the staticity and completeness we associate with an object like a smartphone; we think of it simply as an inert thing that is unchanging. But dialectical analysis shows it to be merely a temporary snapshot of many intersecting flows, including raw materials (lithium from Chile or cobalt from the Congo) and labor involving thousands of hours of human work and engineering skill poured into its design. It functions as a node in a global network of satellites and server farms. If you interrupt any of these flows, the nature of the object changes. A smartphone cut off from power, deprived of software updates, or disconnected from global data is redefined by its new inactive state; it becomes merely a dead piece of glass and plastic. Its claim to “quality” as an instrument for communication depends entirely on its ongoing connection with external material processes, and when the interaction ceases, the thing can no longer serve its intended purpose and thus becomes qualitatively transformed. A broader principle, thus, is that every entity in our world exists merely as a temporary snapshot of the relations of forces acting upon it.

A dialectical view suggests that any change of one part in a system, in turn, affects all the others. To see this relation, consider how a classical mechanical watch functions: it is a wholly active mechanism where each component exists within a state of dynamic tension and where every gear is kinetically connected to its successor so that motion cannot be a local or trivial phenomenon but must instead constitute a systemic event. Should one solitary cog cease turning, the whole does not merely decelerate; it stops functioning as an instrument of time-keeping, since the “time” registered by the watch is derived from the collective motion of all. In like manner, the material reality of our world, composed of linked cogs in the form of production, technology, and labor, is such that a disruption in the flow of one singular commodity will produce ripples through the whole global economy. A disruption in any single flow, such as the supply of silicon wafers necessary for modern electronics, sends prices skyrocketing, political alliances shifting, and social organizations into reconfiguration.

=== Stocks, Flows, and the Laws of Contradiction ===
To understand the temporal action of these shifting systems, we must employ two precise Marxist principles. The first is productive forces, which can be viewed as flows, and the second is relations of production, which represent the stocks. Productive forces refer to the tools we create, the technology we construct, and the labor power we utilize. This is a flow which is always accelerating, while relations of production constitute the skeleton of the system; they explain how we organize our societies and how the ownership of the instruments (means of production) and the distribution of wealth or surplus value are arranged. The relationship between these two forces is the very metabolism of history: the productive forces are the energy winding the spring, while the relations are the specific arrangement of gears attempting to contain and distribute that force. This metabolism obeys three main laws: the first is the unity and conflict of opposites, the second is the transformation from quantity to quality, and the third is the negation of the negation.

Every dynamic system is composed of forces in a state of tension which together form a unified whole. The law of contradiction, or the incessant conflict between opposing forces, is what drives change forward, while the “unity of opposites” signifies that conflicting elements within any system are interdependent and give each other meaning. A good example is the relation between capitalists and laborers. The former, whose starting point is the private ownership of productive instruments focused on profit, creates as its polar opposite the latter’s struggle for equitable compensation and a just share of wealth. This is a conflict that is more than merely superficial or subjective. Indeed, the very essence of all dialectic lies in that a thesis (or premise) necessarily creates its antithesis in order, in the end, through their union, to produce a synthesis.

Consider a mundane case. Two brothers are racing bicycles, one with a newer and swifter machine than the other’s older and slower model, so that there is created a conflict in which the brother of superior speed enjoys his advantage (the thesis), while his companion suffers the resentment of his inferior vehicle (the antithesis). Their quarrel leads to arguments, whose resolution forms the synthesis. For example, they may share the faster bicycle or purchase a new one; this latter situation being born of their discord and providing an ephemeral solution which contains within itself its own future contradictions in order that the cycle of change shall be maintained.

=== The Transformation of Quantity into Quality ===
The principle that quantity changes into quality tells us that gradual, invisible buildups accumulate to produce dramatic changes that constitute a qualitative shift. Mechanically, this is accomplished through interactions between stocks and flows. Stocks act as reservoirs or buffers in systems, changing slowly via flows which, while individually trivial in appearance, alter the power balance of internal feedback loops within the system. A large stock can absorb changes for an extended period, leading to an era of pseudo-stability in quantitative growth before the qualitative shift appears suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, or at least from some corner where it was not expected. In our example of the brothers, the stock may be emotional resentment that builds over time. So it is with the brother riding the inferior bicycle, who may exhibit no visible change in demeanor as loss succeeds upon loss, until that internalized resentment finally breaks forth in the qualitative leap of a sudden, seemingly unprovoked fist fight.

Once a critical point is reached, the system shifts its state. A great leap occurs because of an abrupt change in stock that determines what feedback loop controls it, usually shifting from a stable balancing loop to a growing reinforcing one. Just as slowly heated water stays liquid until it suddenly boils, or genetic mutations accumulate until at last a new species appears, so too do social systems behave; the rise of inequality and the exploitation of labor build up pressure which passes some system limit, resulting in great leaps such as revolutions.

Hence, systems often seem stable on the surface, only to undergo rapid and surprising transformation. Economic crashes and major geopolitical events such as wars occur in this way. So long as the stock of the system can absorb the change, the movement toward a phase shift remains hidden, for the existing relationships within the system are able to handle the shifting flows without disruption, and those who look only at the external function of the system cannot perceive it. But once the buffer of the stock is exhausted, change occurs rapidly—suddenly and all at once.

Consider, for instance, the 2008 financial collapse, which, in its time, seemed like a sudden and unexpected “Black Swan” event to people around the world. Yet dialectical analysis shows it to be an inevitable phase transition: years of subprime debt accumulation (the flow) built up within global financial markets (the stock), for a while hidden by the system’s balancing loops such as rising home prices and complex insurance hedges. Eventually, when the quantity of toxic debt passed a critical point beyond which it could no longer be absorbed by the existing relations of production, the behavior of the system changed instantly from stable growth to a runaway reinforcing loop of defaults, bank runs, and panic. What seemed like sudden disaster was in fact an inevitable qualitative explosion resulting from a decade of hidden quantitative accumulation.

=== The Negation of the Negation and the Spiral of Progress ===
The final rule, known as the negation of the negation, describes an ascending pattern resulting from some initial thesis being opposed by its antithesis, leading to a still further new proposition—the synthesis—which embodies elements derived from both the original terms but is not merely a return to an existing state. Such an advance contains new contradictions of its own. The evolution of transportation illustrates this recursive nature admirably: animal power negated human muscle power (the thesis), and steam engines during the Industrial Revolution negated beast propulsion (the antithesis) to produce a synthesis more advanced than either of the preceding stages. The internal combustion engine represents a still further advance beyond both these limits, retaining qualities inherited from earlier phases, while future advances like electric cars and magnetic levitation are destined to continually push this process upward on a spiral toward greater sophistication.

The push towards increased complexity is not merely a social preference, but an existential necessity. All dynamic systems are situated within energy gradients which force them to evolve; in physical terms, if a system ceases its motion it attains a state of thermodynamic equilibrium—effectively death. We may recall this from the mechanical watch example, where the apparatus functions as a “clock” only when the mainspring is wound. Winding creates a gradient of potential energy which is released by uncoiling and dissipated through the gears to drive the hands, but once the spring has fully unwound, that energy is gone, and the system ceases its motion. Without external input, such as a new winding, the watch cannot fulfill its function, remaining merely an assembly of parts rather than a dynamic process.

The laws of thermodynamics are the fundamental engine of reality; entropy always increases, and every system must constantly reorganize itself to capture and use available energy efficiently. This is as true for a biological organism as it is for a global economy. Thus, any social or economic status is ephemeral. Our world is in a perpetual state of motion, and living systems must constantly expend energy to maintain their coherence against the pull of entropy.

When a certain set of social relations can no longer adequately channel the flow of productive forces, its supply of energy, there is a system-wide “clogging” or loss of order which leads to those crises and collapses spoken of before. Evolution, as I have said, is the process where these problems are overcome by the constant reconfiguration needed to harness the productive energy within the system. A rejection of the old form is necessary to tap into a more advanced “metabolism” of the world’s resources. Seen thusly, the transition from one mode of production to another is an entropic necessity, for we construct more complex social structures because they are the only means by which we may utilize the increasingly potent energy gradients produced by our technological progress.

=== The Primacy of Substance ===
The second element of the toolkit is materialism, which asks whether the idea or matter comes first. While Hegel argued for idealistic priority, where ideas are the primary sources of which reality (the physical world) is a manifestation or distinct stage in the development of the Absolute Idea, the materialist believes that substance, atoms, or energy are first, with ideas being secondary results of our cerebral processes. Much as a bee has no perfect “idea” of the hexagon, but has been shaped by evolution to work with wax in such ways as to fulfill the requirements for survival, a human mind is likewise shaped by the environment we live in; our society is a product of our material conditions.

To confront the distinction between Idealism and Materialism more effectively, we should look beyond mere riddles to one of modern philosophy’s most significant debates: that concerning human consciousness. Many people, including some scientists, hold an idealistic position, arguing that man possesses in his mind an ineffable “spirit” or unique internal experience known as qualia, incapable of being accounted for solely on material grounds. They argue that the ‘redness’ and other qualities by means whereof we perceive a rose’s beauty, likewise that subtle essence which is love, exist in an intangible realm beyond science ever to measure or map.

The weight of materialist analysis rejects this mystical dichotomy altogether, declaring that our thoughts, our perceptions, and indeed even the most “private” of internal experiences, are not magical intrusions from another dimension but rather direct products of our material reality. Every sensation which we call a subjective feeling is merely an emergent phenomenon that stems from the physical substrate. Thus, when you feel the “redness” (or whatever) of any rose, it must be because light waves are striking your retina to produce electrical impulses which travel through a nerve fiber of the optic nerve into an area of the brain known as the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, and finally to the visual cortex.

There is no secret observer within the brain that stands apart from its material processes. From a monistic viewpoint, consciousness and mind are but an aspect of cerebral activity, so much so that they are identical with it in every conceivable sense. And if by mechanical injury or chemical disturbance you alter even slightly and temporarily that material state, there is an immediate change of subjective experience, proving consciousness to be not a primary source but merely one among many secondary effects. By linking the mind with matter, we realize our thoughts are no more arbitrary or divinely inspired than any other biological function—such as digestion, growth, and reproduction—which have helped us in moving through this material world of time-space, changing it to suit ourselves.

Marx famously turned Hegel on his head by arguing that ideas emerge from our engagement with the material world. The dialectical spiral of the development of a hammer shows this, for it was not in a vacuum but through observation and interaction—of stone smashing nut—that mankind’s first crude tool emerged. Human concepts were altered by these conditions to produce an implement which would alter the material circumstances under which life is lived. This permits the further development of more complex ideas. This perspective rejects any notion that we can change society merely through “better” or different thoughts and values, for they are reflections (or superstructures) upon economic conditions, such as jobs, food, housing, etc. We must first alter the material way in which humans live in order to transform human consciousness.

This progression, which follows a cyclical pattern or alternation between negations, began when primitive man first used an unwrought stone to crack nuts. This was a simple beginning: a solution to immediate problems using natural objects. Yet it had its limits; for while the stone afforded a grip or balance to those who wielded it, there was always a conflict between accuracy and nature’s irregularity. Then man shaped the stone, attaching a wooden handle thereto. This was a negation of primitive naturalism which produced a new physical reality—the hammer—altering human possibilities at their very foundation rather than merely improving upon an unwrought object.

When this new implement joined the material substrate, it did more than split nuts. It enabled shelter building and novel material working, expanding that “world of ideas” in which the process becomes truly recursive. The hammer was supplemented by the forge, superseding the previous stage with greater complexity and power, and paving the way for the world we find ourselves in today with its digital tools. The physical mallet was supplanted and replaced again, yet it retained its old functions, for it is in this way that evolution proceeds. The industrial worker operating a machine press negated the craftsman, and is now being negated in turn by AI-driven automation that renders the human operator obsolete. Each step acts as a “winding of the spring,” giving more energy to a system which creates an environment of greater material complexity and pushes our brains to develop correspondingly sophisticated conceptual frameworks. We do not think ourselves out of one world; we build forges in it until the forge builds us another way of thinking. That new thought-world then becomes a new environment which again shapes its inhabitants toward more advanced mental processes, and so on ad infinitum.

In the social sciences, historical materialism establishes a distinction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure. The former acts as the mechanical engine or foundation of society, consisting of productive forces (tools and labor) and the relations of production (who owns them and how work is organized). This is contrasted with the latter, the “cabin” built upon this base, which contains the cultural, political, and legal institutions that arise from it. While the superstructure can influence its foundation, the economic base plays the primary definitional role, as seen throughout history. In feudalism, where land ownership (agriculture) formed the base, religious ideas of “divine right” existed to justify the power exercised by the church and nobility. Consequently, the rise of capitalism, with its industrialization and wage labor, necessitated a new superstructure: liberalism. This new ideology emphasized individual freedom and free markets, serving both the interests of the new merchant class and the realities of factory production.

Ideology, whether conscious or unconscious, is the scaffolding upon which societies construct their collective consciousness. Far from being merely an aggregation of personal opinions and attitudes, it represents a unifying force permeating every aspect of life—from political institutions to artistic expression. Like a genetic code guiding the growth of an organic entity, it shapes prevailing societal norms and provides for collective decision-making. It acts as the very framework within which “social organisms” are directed, often to a degree surpassing the individual wills of their members; even those who consciously dissent from prevailing narratives find themselves influenced by them. For ideology forms not just an abstract principle, but the fabric one must navigate for social life to be possible. Yet it is never static, driven as it is by the constant dialectic between individual thought and collective belief. When the material base of society is transformed, as when industrial capitalism gave rise through social unrest to the Russian Revolution, new ideas emerge to challenge established norms, providing a vision for an alternative order (such as communism) that is more compatible with the new material reality.

Finally, it is necessary to issue a cautionary word regarding mechanical materialism, which is the erroneous idea that the base changes itself or spontaneously transforms the superstructure. The substitution of renewable energy for fossil fuels does not automatically “fix” our culture, nor will a shift toward automated production instantly resolve social conflicts, despite providing the new foundation upon which such change acts. We must actively combat old habits of thought inherited from past ages, which are so tenacious that they often persist long after their material justification has vanished. For this reason, history’s progress requires active and deliberate engagement, not merely passive observation or contemplation.

As Marx astutely pointed out, the aim is not merely to analyze and understand reality from a distance, but to engage with it so that it may be changed. When we regard society as an object for action instead of contemplation, politics becomes an expression of the underlying material contradictions, whose discovery gives us the power to do more than merely observe and hope. We cease hoping for change and begin acting on those material conditions which determine our whole world, so that instead of merely changing the score, we radically alter the foundations for human thought, feeling, and action alike.

Essay:DefaultSociety

2026-08-10T17:35:34Z

Yogthos: update title and attribution

{{infobox essay|title=DefaultSociety|author=Yogthos|date=2026-08-10|excerpt=You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.}}

= The Myth of the Default Society =

=== How Material Conditions Engineer the Human Mind ===
You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.

=== How Economic Systems Shape Cultural Values ===
Each type of society represents a different solution to the same underlying problem of securing a comfortable life for the individual by means of co-operation, and any society that is unable to meet this challenge is doomed to fail. The way in which a community organizes its productive forces and distributes its collective goods stems from its material conditions, and forms the basis for its core social structure. An agrarian population living on seasonal crops and mutual aid will construct a different social contract from that of a hyper-financialized urban service economy. Therefore, the day-to-day work of keeping alive within a particular set of circumstances becomes the arbiter of culture.

Each type of economic system must, then, produce a different set of cultural values, since the method of daily life shapes the outlook and ideals of a community. If you take an economic system such as that of the DPRK, where labour is organized in publicly owned industrial concerns and agricultural co-operatives, the material basis of society is social ownership of the means of production, which dictates the psychological gravity of the culture. A citizen of a capitalist society looking in may think people have no incentive in the absence of an individual profit motive. And in doing so, they’d be projecting their own conditioning onto a foreign system because their worldview cannot separate labor from the threat of personal financial ruin. But, in truth, the basic desire for construction, for overcoming difficulties, and for personal achievement exists under any socioeconomic system. The element of competition does not disappear under socialist organization. It merely takes a different form because such a society provides different outlets from our own. It manifests through co-operatives competing with each other for the biggest yield and state design bureaus vying to produce the best tractor. The essential difference is that it operates as a positive-sum game since the economic structure is collectively owned. The purpose is different because victory means social improvement rather than mere individual gain. When one design bureau has a success, it does not keep its methods secret, nor does it wish ruin upon other design bureaus. New techniques are shared so that competition serves as a test of methods under pressure, with the best methods becoming integrated across the entire system. The success of one unit means strength for the whole system and an increase in the general level of efficiency. A culture formed in such an environment will inevitably take an outlook in which individual progress is bound up with that of the whole nation. In such a culture, solidarity and collective duty are elevated to virtues.

Now, let us look back at the society built on the idea of private ownership. The capitalist system demands atomization and generates cut-throat competition where the object is market dominance rather than human progress, and every success must come at somebody else’s expense. If a company invents a new method, its first job is to hide the details and get a patent to prevent others from using it. Its whole existence depends upon being the only possessor of a given secret because that alone gives it power to fix prices. Consequently, you have a situation where many companies burn massive amounts of human labor and resources in secrecy, endlessly reinventing the wheel because sharing knowledge would destroy their profit margins. In such a system, enormous waste is camouflaged as innovation while being praised on the grounds that it rewards initiative. And the culture that forms around it is one of paranoia, rugged self-reliance, and ruthless personal ambition. Thus, the economic engine shapes the moral framework that determines what a particular community regards as a virtue. Our values are a product of our material conditions. They are forged by the mechanics of who owns what and how the labor is organized.

The economic organization of a community thus actively creates the very desires which it proceeds to satisfy. Our conception of happiness is formed by the social norms and institutions around us. A person growing up in a liberal society is inclined towards an individualist view, seeing themselves as something separate from and pitted against the whole. Yet, someone who grew up in a socialist system would have different metrics for success that do not look like a suburban house and a bloated stock portfolio. After all, being social animals means that we are wired to find fulfillment in how effectively we integrate into the rest of our social group, leading us to adopt a world view compatible with others around us. Social training not only affects the form of our desires but also determines the limits of our imagination.

We are naturally social beings and must, therefore, have friends, family, and community, lest we wither from spiritual starvation. Our non-negotiable psychological needs are just as rigid as our need for physical safety and shelter. But how a society satisfies these mental needs is as wildly varied as global cuisine. While you must eat a certain amount of calories to live, a dish of noodles in Pyongyang answers the same biological purpose as a hamburger in San Antonio. The mental need for belonging is much the same thing. The need for human companionship is basic and overmastering, but the particular ways in which your companionships take shape are of the most diverse kinds. The particular forms of expressing loyalty and the boundaries of your friendships are largely authored by the specific culture you inhabit.

=== The Social Scaffolding of the Mind ===
So, then, if social structures are a result of the way our society is organized upon the material base, and our worldview is, in turn, a product of economic relations, how then do these economic necessities get wired into our psychology? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his career studying how social structures get inside us, coined the term habitus to describe the hidden scaffolding in our heads. It represents a durable set of views and dispositions that shape the way we perceive the world, and it is something people rarely choose for themselves. We tend to absorb our understanding of reality by osmosis through countless microscopic interactions from the moment we are born. Kids see which child gets a smile and who gets ignored. They learn what actions lead to respect, such as doing well at school or sport, and what causes rejection, like dressing the wrong way. Upbringing, therefore, ends up sculpting expectations in our adult life, providing a standard by which ordinary things are judged, and from which ordinary desires and aspirations spring. Your conception of a good life grows out of the social structure in which you were born, a particular scaffolding of family, class, and culture that made you who you are. Schools, media, and everyday norms convince you that the social arrangement you live in is natural and inevitable which is what Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, the idea that a ruling class makes its worldview feel like common sense. Our understanding of the world is, thus, built upon a whole scaffolding of expectations, tastes, and gut feelings we absorb from our surroundings.

Beliefs accrete piecemeal over many years and, much like the deposits of epochs in a rock formation, form an increasingly rigid system. Every fresh belief that a person acquires must somehow be fitted with the existing mass of beliefs so that it does not cause any serious upheaval. When a new idea contradicts the existing foundation, it is typically rejected. This is a perfectly rational attitude since we cannot restructure our entire mental edifice each time we run across some new fact. And so, the longer we live, the more entrenched and impervious our ideological foundation becomes since new ideas have ever more existing ones to contend with. Each additional year makes our subconscious more resistant to any opposing force. Over time, the edifice becomes so solidified that its structure begins to pass as truth itself. The rules of one’s own society are repeated in daily rituals and become so deeply ingrained that we start to forget they are mere human conventions.

The orthodoxy of our beliefs is imbibed from relatives and acquaintances before we even begin to think. If you were educated in a Western liberal democracy, your individualism has been ingrained almost from infancy by the pervasive cultural atmosphere you were immersed in. You have learned, as soon as you could understand anything, that you are the hero of your own drama and that your wants and desires are what really matter. You have internalized a conception of freedom in which marking a ballot every few years is held to embody political liberty to the exclusion of more direct forms of collective action and social power. The elementary logic of capitalist relations was taught to you at the dinner table and through the media before you even mastered long division. The principles of private property, wage-earning, and economic competition have been presented to you not as a particular form of social organization but as a natural law. In all probability, you have accepted them uncritically, having had no alternative outlook to use as a point of reference.

Hence, people tend to suffer from a spectacular failure of imagination, seeing other cultures through the distorting medium of their preconceptions. Someone who grew up in the West might only see a tyranny when looking at a culture which has strong communal bonds and tight family obligations, viewing them as suffocating restrictions at odds with the individual liberty they hold so dear. One might not even feel the need to argue this point because the answer feels instinctive and self-evident. A person asks themselves whether they could be happy in such a culture, and their prior conditioning says they would not. But in doing so, they fail to notice that their answer is dictated by a set of social norms they’ve grown accustomed to, having been taught that individual initiative and personal success are supreme virtues. Therefore, a culture dominated by different values such as social duty and family responsibilities, being at odds with their innermost convictions, feels wrong and oppressive.

Such a view results from a lack of perspective, since it fails to account for the fact that people living within each system are organized by their culture and institutions, each producing a different view of the world. To people living in a collectivist system, an individualist and competitive society may seem a dreary social desert and a monument to loneliness. They may honestly ask how you manage to exist in such isolation, living in a culture which invariably prioritizes individual success over community health. Both perspectives spring from reactions that are products of the compromises within each respective system, because every social structure solves one set of problems at the expense of creating another. A judgment of another society based on that which is familiar in our own will necessarily be incoherent because it will employ quite irrelevant criteria.

=== The Pragmatism of Conformity ===
Of course, no society is monolithic in nature, and while the machinery of socialization is extraordinarily efficient in producing uniformity of opinion, it can never be perfectly efficient. There are always individuals who, for one reason or another, do not fully endorse the orthodoxy of their time and place. Yet, the mainstream prevails for a reason. Society, by means of social censure, economic pressure, and legal pressure, compels the majority of the people to conform to an agreed-upon set of rules. The whole system depends upon a very important condition, however, which is that society should be able to provide the bare necessities of life for the critical mass of the population. When the social basis affords security and stability through adequate housing, sufficient nourishment, and necessary social relations to stay sane, the human mind can adapt to almost any ideological programming. Most humans are fundamentally pragmatic creatures and take the line of least resistance.

As long as conformity affords a secure basis for some measure of comfort and security, there is no impetus to question the status quo because having views at variance with orthodox opinion makes one an outcast. There is a certain psychological tax to having views that differ from the common sense of those around us. The possibility of casual conversation becomes diminished because you find yourself talking past each other when you converse with others. Every mundane social interaction becomes a puzzle requiring you to use a mental filter, being careful about what you say. Whenever a political question arises, your subconscious process must engage in internal censorship to carefully measure out how much of your actual perspective you can safely share before the room turns on you. As a rule, people do not enjoy being told that their life goals are artificial, or that their moral high ground is just a byproduct of their local economic engine. Thus, having a different outlook from those around you becomes an exceedingly uncomfortable existence, making one feel like a perpetual outsider trying to blend in. Unless you learn to put a mask on, you risk becoming someone to be avoided and excluded from social interactions.

There is enormous evolutionary pressure to conform because, throughout much of human history, to be cast out by one’s own tribe meant a rapid and violent death. One was helpless against wild beasts or starvation, and so human cognitive faculties are adapted to the need for cooperation. Survival meant tribal solidarity, common food, common shelter, and common defense. So the natural selection within any social environment heavily favors people who go along with the program since such people are the ones who are more likely to grow up and leave offspring. The logic of the thing is quite obvious. By adopting the accepted beliefs of the community, an individual protects their social status and ensures themselves of continued food, water, and freedom from persecution. On the contrary, by challenging fundamental beliefs one exposes themselves to the heaviest penalties, endangering not only their own welfare but also that of their family. And so, it should be no surprise that, in most cases, the unconscious is satisfied with a comfortable path of least social friction, believing whatever will allow one to live comfortably within their community.

People will continue to defend their system with passion, taking ridiculous pride in its most absurd manifestations, even long after their society stops being able to meet the needs of its citizens. The superstructure of ideology is safeguarded by the instinct of habit, for our brains are prediction engines that construct hypotheses about the world, allowing us to go about our daily business in order to meet our needs. And so, we crave security and predictability as much as oxygen in our lungs. You may find your job loathsome and wake up every morning dreading the tedious journey to work where an officious superior makes you feel small. But if you know exactly what drudgery is expected of you and get a wage sufficient to pay your bills, you stay put. The daily unhappiness is a known quantity, a familiar strain which you have learned to bear. To leave means to enter into the world of the unknown. It is to forego the power of knowing what the next day may bring, and to run the risk of making your situation still worse. So, one grows accustomed to a routine and learns to live with the humiliations of one’s position. Certain colleagues may be avoided, or one may simply cease to notice their daily abuses. Add dependents to this situation and the trap is made doubly sure. With children to be supported on your salary, to take a chance on an unknown future seems a massive failure in parental duty. Change means to forego the illusion of power, and to face the unexpected and the uncertain head-on.

=== Systemic Failure and the Breaking Point of Ideology ===
A similar dynamic plays out at a broader societal scale, which is why most people choose to confine themselves to the daily routines and swallow most humiliations as long as they can have stability in return. They invent psychological and moral subtleties to make injustice appear natural and the status quo desirable. They do this for the sake of their own peace of mind and that of their families. But there is a limit to such silent submission. There comes a breaking point where material facts override the official view of how the social system works. At such moments the discrepancy between theory and practice becomes intolerable because the ideological narrative becomes completely unmoored from physical reality.

That the ideas in people’s heads eventually have to square with the reality of their daily lives is the essence of materialist dialectic. People have a natural tendency to believe that they live in a fair society where hard work leads to prosperity, seeing their own society as a natural default for reasons we’ve just discussed. This belief can be internalized, used in judging one’s fellow citizens, made the basis of social policy, and set as the criterion of achievement in general. It can even be maintained long after the fundamentals of a social order start to break down due to factors such as technical progress or change in the climate. In such situations, the working majority might find themselves unable to afford the necessities of life. Then the good story rubs against the facts. The friction between the ideology and the material world becomes violently untenable. These kinds of disruptions act as selection pressures that force societies to adapt or perish.

When a system fails to give basic stability and opportunity for individual development, confidence is sapped little by little. People quietly drop out of the economic and social mainstream, becoming deeply disillusioned with the core beliefs of their society. They play by the rules, try to hold down jobs, avoid debt, and save for old age. Yet they find it more and more difficult to buy groceries every week and pay their rent each month. The myth of failure, which personalizes disaster as the result of laziness or vice, ceases to be plausible when you see yourself work hard, yet barely make ends meet. A disillusionment with the system gradually replaces the former confidence, and a hole opens up in the framework of accepted beliefs. When it has thus been learned that the dominant ideology is a myth that no longer squares with your lived experience, the way opens up to a consideration of other views and different philosophies of existence which might better serve as working hypotheses to illuminate the miserable conditions you are actually experiencing. You find yourself increasingly willing to entertain ideas that you would have readily dismissed at a different time.

Of course, these sorts of transformations don’t happen overnight. It is a dialectical process where the quantity of hardships steadily accumulates, eventually marking a change in the quality of the whole nation. For years the breakdown remains hidden as one individual drops out here and another there, and their misfortunes are attributed to some personal causes. But should economic pressure continue to widen the circle of insecurity, then more and more people are driven to the wall, and their numbers grow imperceptibly until at last the whole system has reached a critical state. And suddenly the collective faith is shattered along with the social cohesion which it ensured.

Social failure of this kind can be observed firsthand in many Western countries today. The historic levels of political polarization tearing these societies apart aren’t happening because people have suddenly forgotten how to live together. They are a direct result of a large segment of the population experiencing conditions which it cannot endure. Holding down a job no longer saves people from suffering when having a job does not guarantee a home or basic safety. And while the personal cost of dissent may be high, the cost of starvation is yet higher.

And so, it is only when the dominant worldview starts to actively contradict the daily material experience of the masses that the calculus of conformity begins to flip. When it ceases to be true that by repeating the official dogmas a man can obtain food, shelter, and security, the existing social contract collapses and conventional beliefs cease to be a satisfactory way of life. The fear of being ostracized evaporates since there is no more social status or physical comfort to be gained from trying to fit in. And thus the views that have been rejected as heretical become practical. Those who were once marginalized for holding them become the focus and leaders of a new movement based upon observable fact instead of crumbling dogma.

=== Beyond the Regional Custom ===
We tend to take our current social arrangement for granted, but most objects of our daily desires do not constitute necessities of human nature. Goals such as having a well-situated job or living in a posh neighborhood are products of a certain time and place. They are not universal values, but rather outcomes of the present economic and social arrangements, which are a local ordinance arrived at step by step to meet the problem of keeping large populations alive and working together. Of course, the knowledge that your desires are contingent does not make them disappear. They remain as strong as ever, but their tyranny is mitigated by the knowledge that they are not universal and that other equally good desires are possible. You will be able to imagine a different life from your own in another age or country. You will no longer take your own way of living for the model to which all others should conform, but will regard other societies as equally wise as your own in finding ways of solving the problems of human existence.

Our present social organization is not the pinnacle of human evolution. It is only one out of many possible arrangements of resources and division of labour for satisfying the basic needs of food, shelter, and security. These needs are always essential to any group of human beings, and one particular arrangement by which they are achieved is not naturally better or more important than any other. Consequently, judgment of another community based primarily on its resemblance to or difference from one’s own becomes an inane preoccupation. It is a mirroring of oneself by which you grade the reflection you obtain rather than the answers to common human needs achieved by different means.

To judge whether a social system is sound, one must put aside the ideological scorecard and look at plain facts. Look at the results as shown in statistics of diet and housing. Look at the way in which the productive forces are made to serve the basic physical and mental needs of the population. Look at the degree of trustworthiness and helpfulness towards each other displayed by the members of the society, as opposed to their disposition to prey upon each other or to become demoralized through lack of social cohesion. These are practical working metrics we can use to judge the health of a society. Everything else, including political names and cultural traditions, is merely a regional custom. Humanity has created countless different types of societies throughout history, all based upon the same human nature but differing widely from each other. Our present mechanism, with its special institutions, is what happens to exist at the moment, not an immutable necessity or an ideal towards which other societies must be tending.

Essay:DefaultSociety

2026-08-10T17:33:46Z

Yogthos: added template

{{infobox essay|title=The Myth of the Default Society|author=Open source|date=2026-08-10|excerpt=You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.}}

= The Myth of the Default Society =

=== How Material Conditions Engineer the Human Mind ===
You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.

=== How Economic Systems Shape Cultural Values ===
Each type of society represents a different solution to the same underlying problem of securing a comfortable life for the individual by means of co-operation, and any society that is unable to meet this challenge is doomed to fail. The way in which a community organizes its productive forces and distributes its collective goods stems from its material conditions, and forms the basis for its core social structure. An agrarian population living on seasonal crops and mutual aid will construct a different social contract from that of a hyper-financialized urban service economy. Therefore, the day-to-day work of keeping alive within a particular set of circumstances becomes the arbiter of culture.

Each type of economic system must, then, produce a different set of cultural values, since the method of daily life shapes the outlook and ideals of a community. If you take an economic system such as that of the DPRK, where labour is organized in publicly owned industrial concerns and agricultural co-operatives, the material basis of society is social ownership of the means of production, which dictates the psychological gravity of the culture. A citizen of a capitalist society looking in may think people have no incentive in the absence of an individual profit motive. And in doing so, they’d be projecting their own conditioning onto a foreign system because their worldview cannot separate labor from the threat of personal financial ruin. But, in truth, the basic desire for construction, for overcoming difficulties, and for personal achievement exists under any socioeconomic system. The element of competition does not disappear under socialist organization. It merely takes a different form because such a society provides different outlets from our own. It manifests through co-operatives competing with each other for the biggest yield and state design bureaus vying to produce the best tractor. The essential difference is that it operates as a positive-sum game since the economic structure is collectively owned. The purpose is different because victory means social improvement rather than mere individual gain. When one design bureau has a success, it does not keep its methods secret, nor does it wish ruin upon other design bureaus. New techniques are shared so that competition serves as a test of methods under pressure, with the best methods becoming integrated across the entire system. The success of one unit means strength for the whole system and an increase in the general level of efficiency. A culture formed in such an environment will inevitably take an outlook in which individual progress is bound up with that of the whole nation. In such a culture, solidarity and collective duty are elevated to virtues.

Now, let us look back at the society built on the idea of private ownership. The capitalist system demands atomization and generates cut-throat competition where the object is market dominance rather than human progress, and every success must come at somebody else’s expense. If a company invents a new method, its first job is to hide the details and get a patent to prevent others from using it. Its whole existence depends upon being the only possessor of a given secret because that alone gives it power to fix prices. Consequently, you have a situation where many companies burn massive amounts of human labor and resources in secrecy, endlessly reinventing the wheel because sharing knowledge would destroy their profit margins. In such a system, enormous waste is camouflaged as innovation while being praised on the grounds that it rewards initiative. And the culture that forms around it is one of paranoia, rugged self-reliance, and ruthless personal ambition. Thus, the economic engine shapes the moral framework that determines what a particular community regards as a virtue. Our values are a product of our material conditions. They are forged by the mechanics of who owns what and how the labor is organized.

The economic organization of a community thus actively creates the very desires which it proceeds to satisfy. Our conception of happiness is formed by the social norms and institutions around us. A person growing up in a liberal society is inclined towards an individualist view, seeing themselves as something separate from and pitted against the whole. Yet, someone who grew up in a socialist system would have different metrics for success that do not look like a suburban house and a bloated stock portfolio. After all, being social animals means that we are wired to find fulfillment in how effectively we integrate into the rest of our social group, leading us to adopt a world view compatible with others around us. Social training not only affects the form of our desires but also determines the limits of our imagination.

We are naturally social beings and must, therefore, have friends, family, and community, lest we wither from spiritual starvation. Our non-negotiable psychological needs are just as rigid as our need for physical safety and shelter. But how a society satisfies these mental needs is as wildly varied as global cuisine. While you must eat a certain amount of calories to live, a dish of noodles in Pyongyang answers the same biological purpose as a hamburger in San Antonio. The mental need for belonging is much the same thing. The need for human companionship is basic and overmastering, but the particular ways in which your companionships take shape are of the most diverse kinds. The particular forms of expressing loyalty and the boundaries of your friendships are largely authored by the specific culture you inhabit.

=== The Social Scaffolding of the Mind ===
So, then, if social structures are a result of the way our society is organized upon the material base, and our worldview is, in turn, a product of economic relations, how then do these economic necessities get wired into our psychology? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his career studying how social structures get inside us, coined the term habitus to describe the hidden scaffolding in our heads. It represents a durable set of views and dispositions that shape the way we perceive the world, and it is something people rarely choose for themselves. We tend to absorb our understanding of reality by osmosis through countless microscopic interactions from the moment we are born. Kids see which child gets a smile and who gets ignored. They learn what actions lead to respect, such as doing well at school or sport, and what causes rejection, like dressing the wrong way. Upbringing, therefore, ends up sculpting expectations in our adult life, providing a standard by which ordinary things are judged, and from which ordinary desires and aspirations spring. Your conception of a good life grows out of the social structure in which you were born, a particular scaffolding of family, class, and culture that made you who you are. Schools, media, and everyday norms convince you that the social arrangement you live in is natural and inevitable which is what Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, the idea that a ruling class makes its worldview feel like common sense. Our understanding of the world is, thus, built upon a whole scaffolding of expectations, tastes, and gut feelings we absorb from our surroundings.

Beliefs accrete piecemeal over many years and, much like the deposits of epochs in a rock formation, form an increasingly rigid system. Every fresh belief that a person acquires must somehow be fitted with the existing mass of beliefs so that it does not cause any serious upheaval. When a new idea contradicts the existing foundation, it is typically rejected. This is a perfectly rational attitude since we cannot restructure our entire mental edifice each time we run across some new fact. And so, the longer we live, the more entrenched and impervious our ideological foundation becomes since new ideas have ever more existing ones to contend with. Each additional year makes our subconscious more resistant to any opposing force. Over time, the edifice becomes so solidified that its structure begins to pass as truth itself. The rules of one’s own society are repeated in daily rituals and become so deeply ingrained that we start to forget they are mere human conventions.

The orthodoxy of our beliefs is imbibed from relatives and acquaintances before we even begin to think. If you were educated in a Western liberal democracy, your individualism has been ingrained almost from infancy by the pervasive cultural atmosphere you were immersed in. You have learned, as soon as you could understand anything, that you are the hero of your own drama and that your wants and desires are what really matter. You have internalized a conception of freedom in which marking a ballot every few years is held to embody political liberty to the exclusion of more direct forms of collective action and social power. The elementary logic of capitalist relations was taught to you at the dinner table and through the media before you even mastered long division. The principles of private property, wage-earning, and economic competition have been presented to you not as a particular form of social organization but as a natural law. In all probability, you have accepted them uncritically, having had no alternative outlook to use as a point of reference.

Hence, people tend to suffer from a spectacular failure of imagination, seeing other cultures through the distorting medium of their preconceptions. Someone who grew up in the West might only see a tyranny when looking at a culture which has strong communal bonds and tight family obligations, viewing them as suffocating restrictions at odds with the individual liberty they hold so dear. One might not even feel the need to argue this point because the answer feels instinctive and self-evident. A person asks themselves whether they could be happy in such a culture, and their prior conditioning says they would not. But in doing so, they fail to notice that their answer is dictated by a set of social norms they’ve grown accustomed to, having been taught that individual initiative and personal success are supreme virtues. Therefore, a culture dominated by different values such as social duty and family responsibilities, being at odds with their innermost convictions, feels wrong and oppressive.

Such a view results from a lack of perspective, since it fails to account for the fact that people living within each system are organized by their culture and institutions, each producing a different view of the world. To people living in a collectivist system, an individualist and competitive society may seem a dreary social desert and a monument to loneliness. They may honestly ask how you manage to exist in such isolation, living in a culture which invariably prioritizes individual success over community health. Both perspectives spring from reactions that are products of the compromises within each respective system, because every social structure solves one set of problems at the expense of creating another. A judgment of another society based on that which is familiar in our own will necessarily be incoherent because it will employ quite irrelevant criteria.

=== The Pragmatism of Conformity ===
Of course, no society is monolithic in nature, and while the machinery of socialization is extraordinarily efficient in producing uniformity of opinion, it can never be perfectly efficient. There are always individuals who, for one reason or another, do not fully endorse the orthodoxy of their time and place. Yet, the mainstream prevails for a reason. Society, by means of social censure, economic pressure, and legal pressure, compels the majority of the people to conform to an agreed-upon set of rules. The whole system depends upon a very important condition, however, which is that society should be able to provide the bare necessities of life for the critical mass of the population. When the social basis affords security and stability through adequate housing, sufficient nourishment, and necessary social relations to stay sane, the human mind can adapt to almost any ideological programming. Most humans are fundamentally pragmatic creatures and take the line of least resistance.

As long as conformity affords a secure basis for some measure of comfort and security, there is no impetus to question the status quo because having views at variance with orthodox opinion makes one an outcast. There is a certain psychological tax to having views that differ from the common sense of those around us. The possibility of casual conversation becomes diminished because you find yourself talking past each other when you converse with others. Every mundane social interaction becomes a puzzle requiring you to use a mental filter, being careful about what you say. Whenever a political question arises, your subconscious process must engage in internal censorship to carefully measure out how much of your actual perspective you can safely share before the room turns on you. As a rule, people do not enjoy being told that their life goals are artificial, or that their moral high ground is just a byproduct of their local economic engine. Thus, having a different outlook from those around you becomes an exceedingly uncomfortable existence, making one feel like a perpetual outsider trying to blend in. Unless you learn to put a mask on, you risk becoming someone to be avoided and excluded from social interactions.

There is enormous evolutionary pressure to conform because, throughout much of human history, to be cast out by one’s own tribe meant a rapid and violent death. One was helpless against wild beasts or starvation, and so human cognitive faculties are adapted to the need for cooperation. Survival meant tribal solidarity, common food, common shelter, and common defense. So the natural selection within any social environment heavily favors people who go along with the program since such people are the ones who are more likely to grow up and leave offspring. The logic of the thing is quite obvious. By adopting the accepted beliefs of the community, an individual protects their social status and ensures themselves of continued food, water, and freedom from persecution. On the contrary, by challenging fundamental beliefs one exposes themselves to the heaviest penalties, endangering not only their own welfare but also that of their family. And so, it should be no surprise that, in most cases, the unconscious is satisfied with a comfortable path of least social friction, believing whatever will allow one to live comfortably within their community.

People will continue to defend their system with passion, taking ridiculous pride in its most absurd manifestations, even long after their society stops being able to meet the needs of its citizens. The superstructure of ideology is safeguarded by the instinct of habit, for our brains are prediction engines that construct hypotheses about the world, allowing us to go about our daily business in order to meet our needs. And so, we crave security and predictability as much as oxygen in our lungs. You may find your job loathsome and wake up every morning dreading the tedious journey to work where an officious superior makes you feel small. But if you know exactly what drudgery is expected of you and get a wage sufficient to pay your bills, you stay put. The daily unhappiness is a known quantity, a familiar strain which you have learned to bear. To leave means to enter into the world of the unknown. It is to forego the power of knowing what the next day may bring, and to run the risk of making your situation still worse. So, one grows accustomed to a routine and learns to live with the humiliations of one’s position. Certain colleagues may be avoided, or one may simply cease to notice their daily abuses. Add dependents to this situation and the trap is made doubly sure. With children to be supported on your salary, to take a chance on an unknown future seems a massive failure in parental duty. Change means to forego the illusion of power, and to face the unexpected and the uncertain head-on.

=== Systemic Failure and the Breaking Point of Ideology ===
A similar dynamic plays out at a broader societal scale, which is why most people choose to confine themselves to the daily routines and swallow most humiliations as long as they can have stability in return. They invent psychological and moral subtleties to make injustice appear natural and the status quo desirable. They do this for the sake of their own peace of mind and that of their families. But there is a limit to such silent submission. There comes a breaking point where material facts override the official view of how the social system works. At such moments the discrepancy between theory and practice becomes intolerable because the ideological narrative becomes completely unmoored from physical reality.

That the ideas in people’s heads eventually have to square with the reality of their daily lives is the essence of materialist dialectic. People have a natural tendency to believe that they live in a fair society where hard work leads to prosperity, seeing their own society as a natural default for reasons we’ve just discussed. This belief can be internalized, used in judging one’s fellow citizens, made the basis of social policy, and set as the criterion of achievement in general. It can even be maintained long after the fundamentals of a social order start to break down due to factors such as technical progress or change in the climate. In such situations, the working majority might find themselves unable to afford the necessities of life. Then the good story rubs against the facts. The friction between the ideology and the material world becomes violently untenable. These kinds of disruptions act as selection pressures that force societies to adapt or perish.

When a system fails to give basic stability and opportunity for individual development, confidence is sapped little by little. People quietly drop out of the economic and social mainstream, becoming deeply disillusioned with the core beliefs of their society. They play by the rules, try to hold down jobs, avoid debt, and save for old age. Yet they find it more and more difficult to buy groceries every week and pay their rent each month. The myth of failure, which personalizes disaster as the result of laziness or vice, ceases to be plausible when you see yourself work hard, yet barely make ends meet. A disillusionment with the system gradually replaces the former confidence, and a hole opens up in the framework of accepted beliefs. When it has thus been learned that the dominant ideology is a myth that no longer squares with your lived experience, the way opens up to a consideration of other views and different philosophies of existence which might better serve as working hypotheses to illuminate the miserable conditions you are actually experiencing. You find yourself increasingly willing to entertain ideas that you would have readily dismissed at a different time.

Of course, these sorts of transformations don’t happen overnight. It is a dialectical process where the quantity of hardships steadily accumulates, eventually marking a change in the quality of the whole nation. For years the breakdown remains hidden as one individual drops out here and another there, and their misfortunes are attributed to some personal causes. But should economic pressure continue to widen the circle of insecurity, then more and more people are driven to the wall, and their numbers grow imperceptibly until at last the whole system has reached a critical state. And suddenly the collective faith is shattered along with the social cohesion which it ensured.

Social failure of this kind can be observed firsthand in many Western countries today. The historic levels of political polarization tearing these societies apart aren’t happening because people have suddenly forgotten how to live together. They are a direct result of a large segment of the population experiencing conditions which it cannot endure. Holding down a job no longer saves people from suffering when having a job does not guarantee a home or basic safety. And while the personal cost of dissent may be high, the cost of starvation is yet higher.

And so, it is only when the dominant worldview starts to actively contradict the daily material experience of the masses that the calculus of conformity begins to flip. When it ceases to be true that by repeating the official dogmas a man can obtain food, shelter, and security, the existing social contract collapses and conventional beliefs cease to be a satisfactory way of life. The fear of being ostracized evaporates since there is no more social status or physical comfort to be gained from trying to fit in. And thus the views that have been rejected as heretical become practical. Those who were once marginalized for holding them become the focus and leaders of a new movement based upon observable fact instead of crumbling dogma.

=== Beyond the Regional Custom ===
We tend to take our current social arrangement for granted, but most objects of our daily desires do not constitute necessities of human nature. Goals such as having a well-situated job or living in a posh neighborhood are products of a certain time and place. They are not universal values, but rather outcomes of the present economic and social arrangements, which are a local ordinance arrived at step by step to meet the problem of keeping large populations alive and working together. Of course, the knowledge that your desires are contingent does not make them disappear. They remain as strong as ever, but their tyranny is mitigated by the knowledge that they are not universal and that other equally good desires are possible. You will be able to imagine a different life from your own in another age or country. You will no longer take your own way of living for the model to which all others should conform, but will regard other societies as equally wise as your own in finding ways of solving the problems of human existence.

Our present social organization is not the pinnacle of human evolution. It is only one out of many possible arrangements of resources and division of labour for satisfying the basic needs of food, shelter, and security. These needs are always essential to any group of human beings, and one particular arrangement by which they are achieved is not naturally better or more important than any other. Consequently, judgment of another community based primarily on its resemblance to or difference from one’s own becomes an inane preoccupation. It is a mirroring of oneself by which you grade the reflection you obtain rather than the answers to common human needs achieved by different means.

To judge whether a social system is sound, one must put aside the ideological scorecard and look at plain facts. Look at the results as shown in statistics of diet and housing. Look at the way in which the productive forces are made to serve the basic physical and mental needs of the population. Look at the degree of trustworthiness and helpfulness towards each other displayed by the members of the society, as opposed to their disposition to prey upon each other or to become demoralized through lack of social cohesion. These are practical working metrics we can use to judge the health of a society. Everything else, including political names and cultural traditions, is merely a regional custom. Humanity has created countless different types of societies throughout history, all based upon the same human nature but differing widely from each other. Our present mechanism, with its special institutions, is what happens to exist at the moment, not an immutable necessity or an ideal towards which other societies must be tending.

Essay:DefaultSociety

2026-08-10T17:26:02Z

Yogthos: added an essay discussing how the material conditions shape our worldview

= The Myth of the Default Society =

=== How Material Conditions Engineer the Human Mind ===
You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.

To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.

=== How Economic Systems Shape Cultural Values ===
Each type of society represents a different solution to the same underlying problem of securing a comfortable life for the individual by means of co-operation, and any society that is unable to meet this challenge is doomed to fail. The way in which a community organizes its productive forces and distributes its collective goods stems from its material conditions, and forms the basis for its core social structure. An agrarian population living on seasonal crops and mutual aid will construct a different social contract from that of a hyper-financialized urban service economy. Therefore, the day-to-day work of keeping alive within a particular set of circumstances becomes the arbiter of culture.

Each type of economic system must, then, produce a different set of cultural values, since the method of daily life shapes the outlook and ideals of a community. If you take an economic system such as that of the DPRK, where labour is organized in publicly owned industrial concerns and agricultural co-operatives, the material basis of society is social ownership of the means of production, which dictates the psychological gravity of the culture. A citizen of a capitalist society looking in may think people have no incentive in the absence of an individual profit motive. And in doing so, they’d be projecting their own conditioning onto a foreign system because their worldview cannot separate labor from the threat of personal financial ruin. But, in truth, the basic desire for construction, for overcoming difficulties, and for personal achievement exists under any socioeconomic system. The element of competition does not disappear under socialist organization. It merely takes a different form because such a society provides different outlets from our own. It manifests through co-operatives competing with each other for the biggest yield and state design bureaus vying to produce the best tractor. The essential difference is that it operates as a positive-sum game since the economic structure is collectively owned. The purpose is different because victory means social improvement rather than mere individual gain. When one design bureau has a success, it does not keep its methods secret, nor does it wish ruin upon other design bureaus. New techniques are shared so that competition serves as a test of methods under pressure, with the best methods becoming integrated across the entire system. The success of one unit means strength for the whole system and an increase in the general level of efficiency. A culture formed in such an environment will inevitably take an outlook in which individual progress is bound up with that of the whole nation. In such a culture, solidarity and collective duty are elevated to virtues.

Now, let us look back at the society built on the idea of private ownership. The capitalist system demands atomization and generates cut-throat competition where the object is market dominance rather than human progress, and every success must come at somebody else’s expense. If a company invents a new method, its first job is to hide the details and get a patent to prevent others from using it. Its whole existence depends upon being the only possessor of a given secret because that alone gives it power to fix prices. Consequently, you have a situation where many companies burn massive amounts of human labor and resources in secrecy, endlessly reinventing the wheel because sharing knowledge would destroy their profit margins. In such a system, enormous waste is camouflaged as innovation while being praised on the grounds that it rewards initiative. And the culture that forms around it is one of paranoia, rugged self-reliance, and ruthless personal ambition. Thus, the economic engine shapes the moral framework that determines what a particular community regards as a virtue. Our values are a product of our material conditions. They are forged by the mechanics of who owns what and how the labor is organized.

The economic organization of a community thus actively creates the very desires which it proceeds to satisfy. Our conception of happiness is formed by the social norms and institutions around us. A person growing up in a liberal society is inclined towards an individualist view, seeing themselves as something separate from and pitted against the whole. Yet, someone who grew up in a socialist system would have different metrics for success that do not look like a suburban house and a bloated stock portfolio. After all, being social animals means that we are wired to find fulfillment in how effectively we integrate into the rest of our social group, leading us to adopt a world view compatible with others around us. Social training not only affects the form of our desires but also determines the limits of our imagination.

We are naturally social beings and must, therefore, have friends, family, and community, lest we wither from spiritual starvation. Our non-negotiable psychological needs are just as rigid as our need for physical safety and shelter. But how a society satisfies these mental needs is as wildly varied as global cuisine. While you must eat a certain amount of calories to live, a dish of noodles in Pyongyang answers the same biological purpose as a hamburger in San Antonio. The mental need for belonging is much the same thing. The need for human companionship is basic and overmastering, but the particular ways in which your companionships take shape are of the most diverse kinds. The particular forms of expressing loyalty and the boundaries of your friendships are largely authored by the specific culture you inhabit.

=== The Social Scaffolding of the Mind ===
So, then, if social structures are a result of the way our society is organized upon the material base, and our worldview is, in turn, a product of economic relations, how then do these economic necessities get wired into our psychology? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his career studying how social structures get inside us, coined the term habitus to describe the hidden scaffolding in our heads. It represents a durable set of views and dispositions that shape the way we perceive the world, and it is something people rarely choose for themselves. We tend to absorb our understanding of reality by osmosis through countless microscopic interactions from the moment we are born. Kids see which child gets a smile and who gets ignored. They learn what actions lead to respect, such as doing well at school or sport, and what causes rejection, like dressing the wrong way. Upbringing, therefore, ends up sculpting expectations in our adult life, providing a standard by which ordinary things are judged, and from which ordinary desires and aspirations spring. Your conception of a good life grows out of the social structure in which you were born, a particular scaffolding of family, class, and culture that made you who you are. Schools, media, and everyday norms convince you that the social arrangement you live in is natural and inevitable which is what Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, the idea that a ruling class makes its worldview feel like common sense. Our understanding of the world is, thus, built upon a whole scaffolding of expectations, tastes, and gut feelings we absorb from our surroundings.

Beliefs accrete piecemeal over many years and, much like the deposits of epochs in a rock formation, form an increasingly rigid system. Every fresh belief that a person acquires must somehow be fitted with the existing mass of beliefs so that it does not cause any serious upheaval. When a new idea contradicts the existing foundation, it is typically rejected. This is a perfectly rational attitude since we cannot restructure our entire mental edifice each time we run across some new fact. And so, the longer we live, the more entrenched and impervious our ideological foundation becomes since new ideas have ever more existing ones to contend with. Each additional year makes our subconscious more resistant to any opposing force. Over time, the edifice becomes so solidified that its structure begins to pass as truth itself. The rules of one’s own society are repeated in daily rituals and become so deeply ingrained that we start to forget they are mere human conventions.

The orthodoxy of our beliefs is imbibed from relatives and acquaintances before we even begin to think. If you were educated in a Western liberal democracy, your individualism has been ingrained almost from infancy by the pervasive cultural atmosphere you were immersed in. You have learned, as soon as you could understand anything, that you are the hero of your own drama and that your wants and desires are what really matter. You have internalized a conception of freedom in which marking a ballot every few years is held to embody political liberty to the exclusion of more direct forms of collective action and social power. The elementary logic of capitalist relations was taught to you at the dinner table and through the media before you even mastered long division. The principles of private property, wage-earning, and economic competition have been presented to you not as a particular form of social organization but as a natural law. In all probability, you have accepted them uncritically, having had no alternative outlook to use as a point of reference.

Hence, people tend to suffer from a spectacular failure of imagination, seeing other cultures through the distorting medium of their preconceptions. Someone who grew up in the West might only see a tyranny when looking at a culture which has strong communal bonds and tight family obligations, viewing them as suffocating restrictions at odds with the individual liberty they hold so dear. One might not even feel the need to argue this point because the answer feels instinctive and self-evident. A person asks themselves whether they could be happy in such a culture, and their prior conditioning says they would not. But in doing so, they fail to notice that their answer is dictated by a set of social norms they’ve grown accustomed to, having been taught that individual initiative and personal success are supreme virtues. Therefore, a culture dominated by different values such as social duty and family responsibilities, being at odds with their innermost convictions, feels wrong and oppressive.

Such a view results from a lack of perspective, since it fails to account for the fact that people living within each system are organized by their culture and institutions, each producing a different view of the world. To people living in a collectivist system, an individualist and competitive society may seem a dreary social desert and a monument to loneliness. They may honestly ask how you manage to exist in such isolation, living in a culture which invariably prioritizes individual success over community health. Both perspectives spring from reactions that are products of the compromises within each respective system, because every social structure solves one set of problems at the expense of creating another. A judgment of another society based on that which is familiar in our own will necessarily be incoherent because it will employ quite irrelevant criteria.

=== The Pragmatism of Conformity ===
Of course, no society is monolithic in nature, and while the machinery of socialization is extraordinarily efficient in producing uniformity of opinion, it can never be perfectly efficient. There are always individuals who, for one reason or another, do not fully endorse the orthodoxy of their time and place. Yet, the mainstream prevails for a reason. Society, by means of social censure, economic pressure, and legal pressure, compels the majority of the people to conform to an agreed-upon set of rules. The whole system depends upon a very important condition, however, which is that society should be able to provide the bare necessities of life for the critical mass of the population. When the social basis affords security and stability through adequate housing, sufficient nourishment, and necessary social relations to stay sane, the human mind can adapt to almost any ideological programming. Most humans are fundamentally pragmatic creatures and take the line of least resistance.

As long as conformity affords a secure basis for some measure of comfort and security, there is no impetus to question the status quo because having views at variance with orthodox opinion makes one an outcast. There is a certain psychological tax to having views that differ from the common sense of those around us. The possibility of casual conversation becomes diminished because you find yourself talking past each other when you converse with others. Every mundane social interaction becomes a puzzle requiring you to use a mental filter, being careful about what you say. Whenever a political question arises, your subconscious process must engage in internal censorship to carefully measure out how much of your actual perspective you can safely share before the room turns on you. As a rule, people do not enjoy being told that their life goals are artificial, or that their moral high ground is just a byproduct of their local economic engine. Thus, having a different outlook from those around you becomes an exceedingly uncomfortable existence, making one feel like a perpetual outsider trying to blend in. Unless you learn to put a mask on, you risk becoming someone to be avoided and excluded from social interactions.

There is enormous evolutionary pressure to conform because, throughout much of human history, to be cast out by one’s own tribe meant a rapid and violent death. One was helpless against wild beasts or starvation, and so human cognitive faculties are adapted to the need for cooperation. Survival meant tribal solidarity, common food, common shelter, and common defense. So the natural selection within any social environment heavily favors people who go along with the program since such people are the ones who are more likely to grow up and leave offspring. The logic of the thing is quite obvious. By adopting the accepted beliefs of the community, an individual protects their social status and ensures themselves of continued food, water, and freedom from persecution. On the contrary, by challenging fundamental beliefs one exposes themselves to the heaviest penalties, endangering not only their own welfare but also that of their family. And so, it should be no surprise that, in most cases, the unconscious is satisfied with a comfortable path of least social friction, believing whatever will allow one to live comfortably within their community.

People will continue to defend their system with passion, taking ridiculous pride in its most absurd manifestations, even long after their society stops being able to meet the needs of its citizens. The superstructure of ideology is safeguarded by the instinct of habit, for our brains are prediction engines that construct hypotheses about the world, allowing us to go about our daily business in order to meet our needs. And so, we crave security and predictability as much as oxygen in our lungs. You may find your job loathsome and wake up every morning dreading the tedious journey to work where an officious superior makes you feel small. But if you know exactly what drudgery is expected of you and get a wage sufficient to pay your bills, you stay put. The daily unhappiness is a known quantity, a familiar strain which you have learned to bear. To leave means to enter into the world of the unknown. It is to forego the power of knowing what the next day may bring, and to run the risk of making your situation still worse. So, one grows accustomed to a routine and learns to live with the humiliations of one’s position. Certain colleagues may be avoided, or one may simply cease to notice their daily abuses. Add dependents to this situation and the trap is made doubly sure. With children to be supported on your salary, to take a chance on an unknown future seems a massive failure in parental duty. Change means to forego the illusion of power, and to face the unexpected and the uncertain head-on.

=== Systemic Failure and the Breaking Point of Ideology ===
A similar dynamic plays out at a broader societal scale, which is why most people choose to confine themselves to the daily routines and swallow most humiliations as long as they can have stability in return. They invent psychological and moral subtleties to make injustice appear natural and the status quo desirable. They do this for the sake of their own peace of mind and that of their families. But there is a limit to such silent submission. There comes a breaking point where material facts override the official view of how the social system works. At such moments the discrepancy between theory and practice becomes intolerable because the ideological narrative becomes completely unmoored from physical reality.

That the ideas in people’s heads eventually have to square with the reality of their daily lives is the essence of materialist dialectic. People have a natural tendency to believe that they live in a fair society where hard work leads to prosperity, seeing their own society as a natural default for reasons we’ve just discussed. This belief can be internalized, used in judging one’s fellow citizens, made the basis of social policy, and set as the criterion of achievement in general. It can even be maintained long after the fundamentals of a social order start to break down due to factors such as technical progress or change in the climate. In such situations, the working majority might find themselves unable to afford the necessities of life. Then the good story rubs against the facts. The friction between the ideology and the material world becomes violently untenable. These kinds of disruptions act as selection pressures that force societies to adapt or perish.

When a system fails to give basic stability and opportunity for individual development, confidence is sapped little by little. People quietly drop out of the economic and social mainstream, becoming deeply disillusioned with the core beliefs of their society. They play by the rules, try to hold down jobs, avoid debt, and save for old age. Yet they find it more and more difficult to buy groceries every week and pay their rent each month. The myth of failure, which personalizes disaster as the result of laziness or vice, ceases to be plausible when you see yourself work hard, yet barely make ends meet. A disillusionment with the system gradually replaces the former confidence, and a hole opens up in the framework of accepted beliefs. When it has thus been learned that the dominant ideology is a myth that no longer squares with your lived experience, the way opens up to a consideration of other views and different philosophies of existence which might better serve as working hypotheses to illuminate the miserable conditions you are actually experiencing. You find yourself increasingly willing to entertain ideas that you would have readily dismissed at a different time.

Of course, these sorts of transformations don’t happen overnight. It is a dialectical process where the quantity of hardships steadily accumulates, eventually marking a change in the quality of the whole nation. For years the breakdown remains hidden as one individual drops out here and another there, and their misfortunes are attributed to some personal causes. But should economic pressure continue to widen the circle of insecurity, then more and more people are driven to the wall, and their numbers grow imperceptibly until at last the whole system has reached a critical state. And suddenly the collective faith is shattered along with the social cohesion which it ensured.

Social failure of this kind can be observed firsthand in many Western countries today. The historic levels of political polarization tearing these societies apart aren’t happening because people have suddenly forgotten how to live together. They are a direct result of a large segment of the population experiencing conditions which it cannot endure. Holding down a job no longer saves people from suffering when having a job does not guarantee a home or basic safety. And while the personal cost of dissent may be high, the cost of starvation is yet higher.

And so, it is only when the dominant worldview starts to actively contradict the daily material experience of the masses that the calculus of conformity begins to flip. When it ceases to be true that by repeating the official dogmas a man can obtain food, shelter, and security, the existing social contract collapses and conventional beliefs cease to be a satisfactory way of life. The fear of being ostracized evaporates since there is no more social status or physical comfort to be gained from trying to fit in. And thus the views that have been rejected as heretical become practical. Those who were once marginalized for holding them become the focus and leaders of a new movement based upon observable fact instead of crumbling dogma.

=== Beyond the Regional Custom ===
We tend to take our current social arrangement for granted, but most objects of our daily desires do not constitute necessities of human nature. Goals such as having a well-situated job or living in a posh neighborhood are products of a certain time and place. They are not universal values, but rather outcomes of the present economic and social arrangements, which are a local ordinance arrived at step by step to meet the problem of keeping large populations alive and working together. Of course, the knowledge that your desires are contingent does not make them disappear. They remain as strong as ever, but their tyranny is mitigated by the knowledge that they are not universal and that other equally good desires are possible. You will be able to imagine a different life from your own in another age or country. You will no longer take your own way of living for the model to which all others should conform, but will regard other societies as equally wise as your own in finding ways of solving the problems of human existence.

Our present social organization is not the pinnacle of human evolution. It is only one out of many possible arrangements of resources and division of labour for satisfying the basic needs of food, shelter, and security. These needs are always essential to any group of human beings, and one particular arrangement by which they are achieved is not naturally better or more important than any other. Consequently, judgment of another community based primarily on its resemblance to or difference from one’s own becomes an inane preoccupation. It is a mirroring of oneself by which you grade the reflection you obtain rather than the answers to common human needs achieved by different means.

To judge whether a social system is sound, one must put aside the ideological scorecard and look at plain facts. Look at the results as shown in statistics of diet and housing. Look at the way in which the productive forces are made to serve the basic physical and mental needs of the population. Look at the degree of trustworthiness and helpfulness towards each other displayed by the members of the society, as opposed to their disposition to prey upon each other or to become demoralized through lack of social cohesion. These are practical working metrics we can use to judge the health of a society. Everything else, including political names and cultural traditions, is merely a regional custom. Humanity has created countless different types of societies throughout history, all based upon the same human nature but differing widely from each other. Our present mechanism, with its special institutions, is what happens to exist at the moment, not an immutable necessity or an ideal towards which other societies must be tending.