As mentioned in the previous post about a conflict of visions, and as alluded to in the post about how freedom of thought exists largely because it is useless, one of the biggest illusions of our times is that human beings are in control of the system we live in, and could steer it in any direction we wished if the living conditions started to become too undesirable.
Let me recap the main points from the previous post, the details of which can be found there, so that I may expand on some of them to give a more complete picture.
Let's examine a few fundamental ideas about how we could solve this situation, and why they do not work.
The engine of technological progress comes from the fact that companies and institutions will do whatever it takes to chase profits, seize clients and employees, and grow themselves. This leads to various externalities, whether environmental, social (exploitation of cheap labor), or even more subtle externalities, such as the ones on our information ecology (when everyone is incentivized to bullshit for you to click on their site, then social media becomes ar acket) or on our attention (social media are incentivized to control people's attention as much as possible).
The naive response to this is that we can somehow regulate all of this, so that technological progress is aligned with human prosperity. There are many problems with this approach.
First of all, regulation always, always lags behind. It's not very difficult to see all the social problems that come from porn addiction for instance, but it is only now that the pendulum has swung to the right-wing that people are only seriously considering on banning pornography, or at least heavily restricting it. This post of mine is not about this specific issue, because whether you think a ban on porn would be good or bad, I think what it clearly illustrates is that regulations are incredibly slow, because there have already been billions of people who have grown up with screens, which means that they could have started watching porn all the way back as a kid, shaping how they view intimacy, love and everything related.
The damage has already been done, which doesn't mean that things cannot be done about that, but this is always the nature of regulation: first the damage is done and there is an irreversible loss of capacity, whether environmental, individual or collective, and then and only then do discussions arise, and then many, eventually, regulations come up.
Those regulations tend to be laughably trivial in practice however. This is clear as day with the attempts made to thwart (anthropogenic) climate change. The Paris agreements were signed in 2016, but their impact was nominal at best. Not only is the goal to mitigate carbon emissions, already accepting the basic assumption of perpetual technological progress, it seems like it's already failed its already restricted ambition, given that "after the Paris Agreement was signed, global emissions continued to rise rather than fall, and that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with a rise of more than 1.5°C in global average temperature" 1
The second major problem with regulations is that they do nothing whatsoever about our fundamentally atomized world, which incentivizes the pursuit of your own interests over everything else. Thus, regulation must constantly push against a force which grows stronger and stronger, the growth not just of the system, but of the unchecked and alienated ego which gives rise to it.
What this means in practice is that powerful actors will always look for ways to bypass regulations, or at least bullshit their ways towards meeting them. An attempt to regulate the pollution of the most economically developed countries for instance will incentivize them to relocate their industries abroad, with the added benefit of cheaper labor. This will make it seem like Europe and the USA are getting "greener", when in reality the pollution has simply been relocated to another country. Of course, the phenomenons of climate change do not care about our petty man-made boundaries, but this basic trick would allow a country to Goodhart its way into being compliant. 2
The fundamental problem which this hints at is the fact that technological progress is a reflection of our increasingly egoic world. And there is no technological or systemic solution that can address this egoic trend, because technology and social systems are themselves what the ego creates and maintains. You cannot use the ego to make the ego more selfless, loving or conscious. It's impossible.
The attempt to do so usually results in tyranny, such as how all the attempts of communism have resulted in, which confuses selflessness with maintaining a system which utterly crushes people and their individual freedom. This is not love, which we consciously engage in with others, it's slavery to a system which enforces submission to its order. There is no community whatsoever in communism, it's just another form of the system, albeit one that is less efficient, more centralized and far more deadly.
Another failed attempt at controlling ego with more ego is the subtle forms of coercion used by activists. Activism tends to start from good intentions, but in practice it always defaults to a form of emotional attack when its demands aren't met, which is what happens most of the time since technological progress is so central to our world.
This is why people tend to react so negatively to environmental activism. It's not that they have strong opinions about that specific issue, in fact it's so abstract and diffuse that in all honesty, most people probably don't care because they don't notice it in their lives, but it's that they don't want to be coerced into living simpler lives, when they already are struggling to afford the necessities for life.
Debates about climate change are besides the point, the real problem is the high levels of inequality and the fact that lower and middle class people are the ones expected to make a change to their life, not the wealthier ones, and the fact that activism uses very emotionally charged language to talk about people who do not adhere to its agenda, calling them terrible, stupid, irresponsible, and so on. 3
Thus the fundamental problem with the ego is that it cannot consciously change itself. What it can do is restrict itself or other egos, but that doesn't create real change, but only submission and reaction. Given a tyrannical structure such as a school, a child has two main options: either submit to the rules, or rebel against them. A third option would be leaving the tyrannical institution altogether, but as a child this is not an option you have, and in general we cannot leave the technological system, especially since few of us have any meaningful form of self-reliance skills and community.
What might not be so obvious is that both submission and reaction are fundamentally part of the same egoic pendulum. This is why people who work at a job they hate, one which requires them to accept absurd tasks and a diminished sense of freedom, often come home in order to engage in total self-absorption, such as their favorite TV shows, video games or pornography.
The conscious option, outside of this false dichotomy presented by the ego, is to have smaller collectives which people can participate in, rather than systems which an individual has to work under, which allows them an important degree of freedom and mastery (of themselves and their tool), and which connects them with other people through their participation.
Submission is antithetical to this ethos because it has to use coercion, whether physical or in our times financial, to get people to do anything, which is why the output of people constrained by our system is so often mediocre, not only because there is no reason to be excellent, but also for the simple fact that few people actually do what they would want to do.
Reaction and egoic self-absorption are also antithetical to the ethos of participation because they reject the possibility of a healthy collective altogether, and double down on their egotism, which in its most extreme form, is essentially suicide since no human being can live as an island. The only reason that people can live as "individuals" nowadays is because they rely on the technological system, one which is built from a very large and high pyramid of submission.
These two sides of the same pendulum, the masochistic submitters, and the sadistic rebels, often present themselves as complete opposites. The left-wing is by and large a proponent of submission, and the right-wing tends to favor individualism, but it isn't as clear cut because in cultural terms, it's the opposite, where the left-wing rebels against older cultural norms, whereas the right-wing promotes tradition.
But it doesn't matter in practice, because they are both defenders of the system and the alienated ego. They both disagree about how best to run the system, but they would never, ever consider the idea of living without the technological system altogether. If one were to suggest this, they would quickly find that both "sides" actually agree on quite a lot of things.
The submitters would say that human beings are greedy and selfish, which is why we need systems to keep us in check and work with one another. Their evidence comes from incredibly egoic collectives, including our own modern world, where people are forced to work in collectives so large that they cannot see and receive the fruits of their own action, which naturally leads them to be more selfish with their own time, energy and money.
The rebels might nominally agree that it would be best for the system to disappear, but considering that they too are incredibly conformist, just in the opposite bank of the river, and that they too are utterly reliant on the system for their survival, in practice they will always defend when it matters most. They are what we could say fairweather rebels, only rebelling as long as their comfort is guaranteed.
Regulations against technological progress do not work in practice. I haven't spent that much time on the social and economical side, because fundamentally I think the egoic side is significantly more important to see.
We can notice for instance that Goodhart's Law shows up again and again in how regulations and policies are made, which I think points to an important issue which I will address in a future post, which is that unity cannot be measured. What policies aim at creating is a more harmonious world, but fundamentally that harmony cannot be measured.
But the idea that we can simply regulate our world to prevent all the possible excesses of technological progress is hopelessly naive. In fact, it itself is a technological idea, that culture, behavior and human beings themselves are modular and can comply to certain specifications, if we simply choose the right ones.
What this perspective misses is that our system creates people who are more and more egoic as the decades go by, which includes the masochistic submitters, by virtue of depriving them of conscious participation and the natural world, which confronts us with pain, uncertainty and death, yes, but also with the ineffable from which we emerge.
Thus regulations are problematic not just on the level of their ideas and implementations, but also in the fact that they completely ignore people's conscious being. This is not a coincidence, this is how a machinic world operates, by ignoring consciousness which is too unpredictable, difficult to grow and also fundamentally ineffable, and instead by reducing all of life into literal, predictable processes.
This project of reducing life to such crude mechanisms is doomed to fail, but because the ego, individual or collective, cannot face its own death, our world will keep doubling down on technological progress and regulations even as both of them keep failing. Ego and the system cannot solve their own problems, and this basic reality is something they will never accept.
But as a conscious individual, you can decide to step away from the racket as much as you can. I doubt that many people can say that they can live without the system, and the idea of simply going to the countryside and try to live on a homestead strikes me as very naive based on what I have read, but at the very least some type of change can arise from the individual who consciously perceives all of this happening in our world, and realizes that whatever better life they can build for themselves doesn't arise from either position of the dominant or the dominated, for they are both sides of the same pendulum.
1 From Wikipedia (November 2025). Not the most reliable source for heavily politicized subjects I know, but the information ecology is so incredibly disrupted about those same subjects that it's basically impossible to find consensus.
2 In reference to Goodhart's Law, which states that "when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric".
3 See also my piece on environmental collectivist deontology
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Technosystem Illusioncontrol Freedom Dynamic Ego Unsustainability Pendulum Regulation
2025-11-15