The reason why freedom of thought and democracy exist in our times is because they are powerless in the face of the technological system. The real ruler is far too abstract, diffuse, and more importantly, necessary in our life to ever be challenged. Atomized, solipsistic and powerless individuals are allowed to be "free" because ultimately the system is in charge.
This is an unfashionable view in our times to say the least. We are supposed to believe that the enlightenment, a movement "consciously" devised by intellectuals became widespread based on its own merits, brought us modernity and everything good about it, such as material abundance and increased freedom, and that now we are figuring out how to deal with its imbalances and "synthesize" our way towards a better form of modernity.
The idea that this entire trajectory follows the increasing power of the system and the integration of all of human life into the same nightmarish omni-institution, that individual ideologies mainly get filtered based on how system-friendly they are, all of this forms a strange view for people who believe in the narrative of human agency, that we individually and collectively shape the trajectory of our society.
What am I saying exactly? Am I saying that humans are under some deterministic force, that there is no free will or individuality whatsoever? No, I am not saying anything as crude as that. The system is clearly built by human beings, it's not manifested into existence by supernatural entities or aliens, human beings were involved in thinking about it, designing it, and implementing it in our physical reality.
The problem is that the trajectory of such a system is not within our control, even if we can talk about it and seemingly change it. We can see a microcosm of this dynamic in two major domains: urban living and politics.
It's undeniable that motorized transport has become indispensable to modern life. Even if you don't own or use a car, you are still dependent on public transports, on supply chains which extend to all continents and bring you what you need, and nowadays, people delivering stuff to your door. In fact, based on the fact that cities are designed around roads, how much surface area is allocated to them and parking lots, how much money is spent on maintaining and building those, and how much individuals value their car to the point of seeing it as an expression of their self, we could almost say that our world is more catered towards cars than human beings.
Before cars entered the mainstream, they were a luxury good reserved to those who were rich and interested enough in them, which also meant that roads and city life weren't built with the assumption that people had one. As the car industry developed and standards of living rose, more and more people could afford a car, which seemed like a new-found freedom. But only at first. As the number of cars increased, traffic jams and accidents became more common, which forced cities to build more roads and increase regulation and traffic surveillance.
The things that people needed, such as their job and the shops they would go to, were now built further and further from the center of the city, since the land was cheaper there and it could now be assumed that people had a car to travel to that place. What seemed like a freedom at first for individuals became mandatory eventually, as is the nature of the technological system, which must integrate any innovation into how people live, no matter what they think of it.
Nowadays we see the consequences of a world built around cars, where everything is further and further from where you live, where local conviviality is gone, where noise and pollution become widespread, where people become disembodied from only using their body to move between buildings and their car, and where there is no serendipity or play whatsoever because everyone is always "en route" to where they want to go, thereby never allowing reality to surprise them.
We see all of this and we also know that this was not a decision, this was an inevitable trend in how the system unfolds. No one voted for a car-only world and all of its consequences, it simply happened due to how technological progress works.
The same thing is happening with smartphones too of course. They too used to be convenient, giving people access to the internet from their phone, and they too are now largely mandatory and a net negative in people's lives. Society is not built by conscious decisions or voting, it is mainly shaped by the system.
Even politics itself is the result of forces which are outside of what people consciously what, for instance in what CGP Grey called The Rules for Rulers. Every ruler needs people under them to do their bidding, which are separated in key supporters, such as those who write laws, manage banks, enforce the law and defend the nation, and the population at large, or the mass. A ruler must necessarily provide benefits to the key supporters, and maybe the mass if they get too angry. What happens if they don't is that they get overthrown, whether by another ruler who is more popular amongst the key supporters, or by the population at large, though those revolutions tend to happen only because they are allowed by key supporters who wish to replace the current ruler.
What this shows is that those who appear to be in positions of power aren't anywhere near as powerful as one might naively think. There is a structural demand to power, which is why corruption shows up again and again. A ruler who is bad at pleasing the key supporters will get out-competed by another one who is, even if the latter is more tyrannical with respect to the population at large. Another way to state what has been said so far is that rulers also have their quotas to meet, just like regular people do, they cannot simply impose their will onto the world, as they are in competition with one another, both horizontally (other potential rulers) but also vertically (their key supporters who might become rulers).
People who claim that civilization is the result of "choices", and that we can simply vote our way to better "choices" do not take this reality seriously enough. They rarely internalize the fact that powerful people compete too, which inevitably results in concessions made to keep power, at the expense of the population at large.
The reason why politicians do not keep their promises is simply because their main job consists in being elected, and promises are good for that, but following through with them isn't really. In short, rulers too have their own incentive structures which they need to follow, even if they are at the top, because of horizontal and vertical competition.
But what if you remove this competition somehow? This is essentially what dictatorships are, many of which see themselves as being ruled by an "enlightened" despot. So-called democracy is a system where there are many key supporters, meaning that the ruler's individual whims and fancies must be secondary to the network of demands from the key supporters, who also have their own interests in mind, which in general have very little to do with those of the population. Dictatorships and monarchies on the other hand have far less key supporters and less horizontal competition, but there is still a lot of energy which goes into maintaining one's power, and we can obviously see that in those cases too is the population the last of the concern for the ruling class.
Democracy is really only a way to make people feel like they are participating in a fair world, because the reality is quite different.
First of all, most of our time is spent in environments which are decidedly not democratic, such as schools and the workplace. We could at least argue that this or that politician we vote for really makes a difference, but we never even get a chance to elect who is going to be our manager, our boss, our teacher, and so on. They are there because they were better at playing power games, or simply because no one wanted to do their job, and they will remain there as long as they are good at meeting the internal demands of the school or company, even if they are terrible to those under them. The job of a teacher is really to not be hated by the school director, rather than being a good teacher, and the job of a school director is to maintain their institution, on a financial and social level.
Education as a result becomes a very minor concern, and children exploring the world and knowing more about themselves is not even a concern at all. In fact when was the last time a school spent time listening directly to children about what they think of school? It never happens in a sincere manner, to the extent that it does it's always some inane mandatory form which no one reads and where the questions and answers concern minute details, never the school as a whole. This certainly doesn't sound very democratic to me.
Second of all, we can vote for people within the system, but we can certainly not vote to change the system itself. For instance, technological progress will keep happening, as the left and the right wing are both committed to it, since they are both directly reliant on it for their power. The left needs technology to manage other people, the right needs it to dominate and rule over others. It doesn't matter how much the right talks about "tradition", the system is ultimately what is in charge.
This can be seen in the deeper problem that only people who are system-friendly can rise to power in the first place. I am not just talking about the amount of money necessary to be a politician, which means that only those who are good at playing the game of money can even find themselves in the race, but also the social relationships needed to rise in the ladder, to prove that one could be a "ruler" who is good at pleasing the key supporters, and who thinks similarly enough to others to gain mass appeal.
In a globalized world such as ours, the only way to gain mass approval is to directly appeal to ego: its thirst of power through money and less overt forms of domination, its existential fear which leads it to constantly run away from its own mortality, its incessant need for cheap, and nowadays pornographic, entertainment—which includes the pornography of the news—and constant reassurance through promises of safety, predictability and messages of "hope".
I do not wish to make this all about democracy, 1 as it would render this piece too long, a bit boring and also moves us away from the initial subject about the existence of freedom of thought.
Just like "democracy" exists because it is useless, since the system itself remains in place no matter what, so is "freedom" of thought useless because those who read from a thousand different sources remain powerless in face of the system. Modern people are largely zoo animals, utterly dependent on the system to provide for every basic need, which is why it is guaranteed that their worldview will ultimately justify the system as necessary, or perhaps even good.
It's very easy to notice the way in which people's worldviews are shaped by their survival conditions, the way that for instance landlords think that acquiring land and getting people to rent for it is simply how the world works, or how those who can live off financial assets likewise think that they are doing a great job when it comes to contributing to our world.
But people are the same when it comes to the system, they are looking for the easiest way to resolve their cognitive dissonances, it's just that there is no one on the other side to point it out usually.
Anyone who has found themselves to be truly different from the world they lived in knows full well how bullshit "freedom" of thought exists. You are free to think whatever you want as long as you support whatever version of the system exists in your time. In the past we had kings and priests who could abuse their power, and we called that tyranny. Nowadays we do not have to deal with the whims of abusive people, but rather an abusive system made of masses of faceless individuals known as "professionals" or managers.
The system is significantly more efficient and stable than monarchies and dictatorships, which is why by and large we live in a "democratic" world, but true outsiders know that what is repressed has merely become more subtle in nature. We don't think of our times as violent because the warfare happens through the screen, and even the spectacle of our society. We think that we have moved past superstitious thinking because we now have "science" and "progress", which have ironically become quite religious in how much they rely on beliefs, and treat ideas as being more real than our direct experiences.
And we think that we are free, because we do not see the prison which the ego, the same ego which builds civilization, represents. We think that being able to earn our living online is freeing, when in reality it makes us slaves to what the lowest common denominator likes, and can pay attention to. 2 We think that being able to choose from hundreds of different versions of the same product is freeing, when in reality a world obsessed with quantity only appears because we have lost touch with quality, such as intimacy, peace, freedom and joy. And we think that we are free to think whatever we want, because ultimately we are afraid to live true to ourselves, because deep down we know that we would become outcasts in matters of minutes. The true outsiders know what I am talking about.
1 Check out Democrapathy by Darren Allen for a good overview
2 Short clips of what is essentially pornography, not in terms of it being sexual, but in terms of crude excitement.
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Freedom Illusion Technosystem Solipsism Atomization Democracy Irresponsibility Ego Dynamic
2025-10-09