How we were cut apart, and why there is no longer anyone to blame for it

We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. - E. O. Wilson
What we no longer need each other for

Start with something small enough to be sure of. You buy bread. Money crosses, and the thing is finished. You owe the baker nothing, he owes you nothing, and tomorrow the same clean nothing passes between you again. That is not a flaw in the arrangement. It is what the arrangement is for. A transaction is defined by the fact that it can be settled, and once it is settled, the two of you owe each other nothing — which is another way of saying that you are nothing to each other.

Now run that outward, because almost everything in your life now works this way. Food you would have been given. Childcare a sister or a neighbour would have done. Advice from someone who knew you. Company on a bad evening. A ride. A repair. Somewhere to put your grief. Every one of these used to be an obligation running between people who would still be there next week, and nearly all of them have been broken into pieces, priced, and sold back to you individually, which is the only sense in which anyone has become free.

The usual complaint about this is that we are sold things we do not need, and that is true but too weak, because it suggests we were fooled and could be unfooled. What actually happens is worse and harder to reverse. When something is bought, the ability to do it without buying begins to die. Once a car owns the road, walking is not an option you considered and turned down; the distances have rearranged themselves and the capacity has gone. Once a professional owns grief, the friend who would have sat with you in the dark does not refuse — he does not know how, and by now he is right to think a professional would do it better. The purchase is not optional, because the alternative no longer exists in working order.

And this is where the loop starts turning on its own. Each thing you buy is one fewer reason to need anyone. Each person you no longer need is one fewer person who needs you. The obligations thin out, and when they have thinned enough there is nothing left holding a street together except the fact that people happen to sleep on it — at which point the last few things that were still free have to be bought too. The market did not take anything from us by force. It offered, over and over, in pieces small enough that nobody ever had the experience of deciding.
The cut is what makes us weak

We were told this would make us strong. Needing nobody was supposed to be the whole point — the self-sufficient individual, unencumbered, able to go anywhere, able to be anyone. What it produced instead is a population that is measurably more fragile than the one before it, and the fragility is not a coincidence or a side effect. It is caused by the cut.

The body already knew this. An immune system is not a wall, it is something that learns, and what it learns from is contact. Deprived of enough of it early, it does not become calm and safe. It becomes badly calibrated and starts attacking pollen, food, and eventually the body's own tissue. It has to discriminate — that is the only thing it knows how to do — and if there is nothing outside to practise on, the target is you.

The same shape shows up everywhere you look. Muscle needs load. A mind needs to be disagreed with by someone it cannot get away from, or it loses the ability to hold a position under pressure and starts treating every objection as an attack. Skill needs failure in front of people. What we removed under the name of convenience was friction, and friction turns out not to be the obstacle to living but the material of it. There is no version of enjoyment that is not partly effort, partly waiting, partly other people being difficult. Strip that out and what remains is not pleasure, it is smoothness, and smoothness is why so many people with nothing whatsoever wrong with their lives report that nothing in them lands.

We are lonelier, more anxious, more allergic and more easily knocked over than the people who had far less, and we got that way by being given exactly what we asked for. 

Which is also why it is so hard to argue against. Nobody experiences the cut as a loss. You experience it as the absence of hassle, one small relief at a time, and the bill arrives years later in a currency nobody warned you about.
And then they tell us how to live

A person who needs nobody has to get his picture of the world from somewhere, and there is now an entire industry standing ready to supply it.

Not by lying, mostly. By selection. Everything that reaches you has been chosen, ranked, timed, tested against people like you, and tuned by whether you kept looking. What to eat, how to sleep, what your body should look like, what a marriage should feel like, what counts as a life going well, what to be angry about this week and who to be angry at. These used to be settled slowly and locally by people who knew your circumstances and had to live with the results. Now they arrive pre-formed from strangers who will never meet you and cannot be reached, and they arrive continuously, which is the part that matters, because nothing that continuous can be examined.

Zamyatin saw the finished version of this a hundred years ago, and the reason We outlives the dystopias with boots in them is that his citizens are not prisoners. The OneState is made of glass because nobody thinks they have anything to hide. Its people rise together, eat together, walk in ranks, and are issued an hour for the blinds to come down. D-503 is not oppressed by this. He is its poet. When his imagination starts coming back he experiences it as an illness, which in his world it is, and he goes willingly to have it removed.

Huxley wrote the same warning with the pain taken out and the pleasure left in, and between them they describe the thing we are actually inside. This is worth saying plainly, because the five famous dystopias are usually quoted as though they all said one thing, and they did not. One regime wants your suffering, another wants your comfort, another wants your arithmetic, and the differences are the whole content. We did not get the boot. We got the glass, and we like it, and the fact that nobody had to force us is the strongest evidence that it worked.
The machines move faster than we do

So we are separated, weakened, and instructed. Now put that population underneath a technology accelerating faster than any of them can follow.

"regulating humans, while deregulating machines" 

Wilson's line is usually read as a joke about being badly matched — emotions from the savannah, institutions from the Middle Ages, tools from the future. Read it instead as three things that no longer connect to each other. Our feelings are calibrated for a group small enough that every consequence came back to us within a week, wearing a face we knew. Our institutions were designed for the kingdom: the parliament, the ministry, the court, the ledger, all of them built to move at the speed of a man on a horse. And the thing now sitting on top is operating at planetary scale, changing month to month, and nobody in the middle can read it.

The animal is wired straight to the machine with everything that used to sit between them removed, and the institution stands off to one side holding a ledger it cannot understand. Ask anyone, including the people who work in it, to explain what actually determines the price of their groceries, or why their application was refused, or what the model in front of them is doing, and you will get a story rather than an answer. This is not stupidity. The thing to be understood moved, and it is still moving.
There is already a theory of this, and it was written in a cell

The most complete account of what that gap does to a country was written in 1940, in a prison cell, by a man who had just heard his closest friend dragged past the door.

Vladimir Bogrov had been an old comrade. He was taken out to be shot, and on the way he was hauled along the corridor screaming Rubashov's name, and every man in every cell stood at his spyhole and listened. Rubashov listened too. Then he sat down with the notebook his interrogator had allowed him and began to write a theory of the pendulum motion of history.

Hold onto that, because it is the most important fact about the document and it happens before a single word of the argument. The theory is not a reflection on what he has just heard. It is what he does instead of feeling it. And eleven paragraphs later, when he arrives at his conclusion — that tiredness, disgust and shame are to be cut off root and branch — he is not proposing something. He is describing the operation we have just watched him perform on himself, at the desk, with his friend's voice still in the corridor.

The passage is printed in full at the end of this essay, and it deserves to be read whole, because it is the most persuasive reasoning in the book and it was built to justify a confession. Strip it to the bone first.

Freedom is not something you have, it is something you are capable of, and the capability is technical: to know your own interest, you must understand how the thing you live inside actually works. Every advance in technique makes that thing more complicated, so every leap forward leaves people further behind than they were — not stupider, just further from a target that moved. Understanding catches up over decades or generations, and until it does, self-government is not difficult but impossible, and somebody has to govern without asking.

Then the image, which is better than the argument. A ship rising through a canal lock: the walls are the level of technology, the water is what people understand, and there is no point measuring the water against the sea, only against the wall in front of it. And when the water finally reaches the top, the achievement is a fraud, because the next chamber is higher still and the whole slow rise has to start again.

He pushes it further than anyone quoting him usually does. He claims the political maturity of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century was lower than in 200 BC, or at the end of the feudal age. He offers nothing to support this and moves straight on, and it is the most aggressive sentence in the passage, because it wrecks the one story we all still privately believe — that understanding rises alongside the machinery, that each generation grasps its world a little better than the last.

Now look at what he is doing with all this. He is not arguing against the men who arrested him. He is handing them a defence, written inside their own prison, and it is very nearly the last thought he has before he gives in. The theory is not analysis. It is the anaesthetic. Its gift is that it makes his powerlessness lawful: the horror is the visible expression of a law, nothing can be done until the water rises by itself, and therefore the reasonable course is to stop struggling and remain useful.

And here is the thing he never asks. A lock is not a feature of a landscape. A lock is masonry. Somebody surveyed the river, poured the chambers, and stands at the gate deciding when the water is let in. Rubashov looks up at the wall rising above him and concludes that history is simply shaped this way — and every section of this essay up to here has been a description of the building work.

The water cannot rise on its own. People cannot work out what is being done to them when every channel by which they would have worked it out has been cut, one convenience at a time.

So the incapacity is real, and it is manufactured, and then it is produced as the reason nobody needs to be consulted. That is the trap in its finished form: they are not ready yet stops being a diagnosis and becomes a constitution. And in his day there was a mercy in it that we no longer have. His gap could close, because the steam engine held still long enough for a generation to catch up, and it did. What sits above us now changes faster than understanding accumulates, and is not fully understood by the people building it either. The water is rising toward a wall that is rising faster.

He also names the error that keeps the machine running, and he names it against his own side: the belief that mass consciousness rises constantly and steadily. That belief has not gone anywhere. It has only changed owners. Every new machine arrives advertised as the one that will finally inform the public and hand them back their competence, and it is the advertisement, every time, that buys the machine its exemption from being slowed down.

Where he is wrong is in his mood rather than his mechanism. The nineteenth-century rise was not an illusion — literacy spread, the vote spread, schooling spread, and the water genuinely came up. What he was living through was a fall, not the revelation that rising had never happened, and a man writing in the worst decade of the century needed history to be a machine in order to bear it. Take his description and refuse his consolation.

Because there is one more thing missing from his page, and it is the largest thing in it. He lists what the opposition can do in a period like this, and he finds exactly three options: seize power by force without the people behind you, throw yourself off the swing and die in silence, or publicly disavow what you believe in order to stay useful. Speak, and be heard, and change something, is not on the list. He does not argue against it. He does not notice it is absent — because in the world he is describing there is nowhere for speech to go and nobody at the other end of it who could be reached.
Nobody did it

All of which arrives somewhere very specific. When something is done to you now, there is no one to hold responsible.

Your claim was refused. It is policy. The system flagged it. That is handled by another department, and the person you are speaking to is not lying and also cannot help you, and both of those are true at once. Dan Davies calls these accountability sinks, and the important point is that it is not an accident of size. The whole structure exists to break the line between a decision and the person it lands on, because a line like that creates somebody who can be asked, and somebody who can be asked is a cost. Remove it and the decision can be made anywhere, by anyone, with no one downstream.

Notice that this is the same operation as everything above, performed a third time. The transaction settles so that nothing is owed. The cut removes everyone who could have been owed something. The sink absorbs the complaint so that nothing comes back. A society arranged end to end to make sure nothing returns is not just an unjust one. It is a society that cannot learn, because learning is what a thing does when something comes back.

And there is a consequence that we are living through right now, and it is the ugliest one. Rage does not evaporate for lack of an address. When there is genuinely no one to blame for what is happening to you, you will blame whoever you have been handed: the migrant, the elite, the other party, the other religion, the young, the old, the foreigners, the locals. Every one of these is available, cheap, and visible, and none of them will require anybody to answer for anything. The people supplying the target are not doing it out of malice, mostly. They are doing it because attention is the product and anger is what holds it.

The same logic is now being applied to the machines themselves, and it works so well that both sides of the argument are doing it. One camp says an alien intelligence is arriving that we may not be able to control. The other says an unstoppable force is arriving that we should not want to slow. They are shouting at each other and they agree on the only thing that matters: that the thing has a will of its own. A will of its own is exactly what a sink manufactures. Somewhere a decision was made in a room, by people with names and equity and alternatives, and both scripts turn that room into weather.
Which is the condition a regime needs

Hannah Arendt's finding, and it is the one to hold onto: totalitarian rule does not merely produce isolated people. It requires them. Loneliness is the precondition, not the result.

The reason is mechanical. A man with a trade that vouches for him, neighbours who owe him money, a congregation that would notice his absence, and a family with standing has other places to put his loyalty and other people against whom to check a claim. He is not available. Before anything can move into the space between people, the space has to be emptied — and once it is empty, the emptiness does the rest of the work by itself.

Put her next to Koestler and the circle closes with a click. Cut people off from each other and they stop sharing a world. People who do not share a world cannot share an interest. People with no shared interest have no collective will that anybody is obliged to consult. And a population that can be described as not ready can be governed without being asked — which is precisely what Rubashov wrote down, as a law of history, from inside the prison of the state that had done the cutting.

Every step there follows honestly from the one before. Only the first one was built.

And notice what this does to the politics we actually have. It does not require a dictator, or a plan, or anyone at the top who understands the system. It only requires that people be separated enough, instructed enough, and confused enough that they are impressionable — and impressionable is exactly what we are. The most reliable sign of it is how quickly a population can be turned on a subject it had no view about a month ago, and how completely the people turned are convinced they arrived at it themselves.
The last time this happened

There is a precedent for a world this tightly wired coming apart, and it is not the one people usually reach for.

The eastern Mediterranean in the century before 1177 BC was the most connected place that had ever existed. Tin came overland from Afghanistan and copper by sea from Cyprus, and the two had to meet or there was no bronze, and therefore no tools, no weapons, no state. Kings wrote to each other in a shared language and married each other's daughters. A single merchant ship went down off the Turkish coast carrying goods from seven cultures. It was a system, not a collection of neighbours.

And then, across a few decades, almost all of it fell and stayed down. Earthquake, drought, famine, movement of peoples, revolt, invasion — every one of these shows up in the record and no single one of them was enough. What made them enough together was that everything had been wound so tight that a failure anywhere travelled faster than anyone could absorb it. Cut the tin, and the bronze stops, and the army thins, and the border opens. They were not destroyed because they were connected to something bad. They were destroyed because they were connected to everything, at speed, with no slack anywhere in the system.

Rubashov saw this coming from an unexpected direction and put it in one sentence: the capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it. He wrote that in 1940 and meant it as a prediction about economics. Read it now as a statement about everything — that the thing may well come apart before anybody works out how it was running — and it stops being a boast about the revolution and becomes the most accurate line in the passage.

We have built that again, and larger, and faster, and we are running it into a climate that is changing underneath it. Our version has the same property that theirs did: it works superbly until the day it does not, and it has no reserve anywhere, because reserve is waste and waste was optimised out.

And the detail that ought to interest anyone currently building a bunker: the palaces went too. The people with the storerooms, the archives, the walls and the soldiers did not ride it out. The system that made them rich was the same system that made them survivable, and when it stopped, it stopped for them first, because they were the ones with the furthest to fall and the least practice at doing anything themselves. There is no exit from a collapse of the thing you are standing on, and the men currently buying islands and selling the rest of us legibility are betting against a case history that says otherwise.
What it would cost

Before any of this turns into a complaint about the good old days, the objection has to be paid, and it is a real one.

Everything that was cut was also an escape. The woman leaving a marriage a village would have made her keep. The son leaving a trade chosen before he could speak. The heretic leaving a congregation that would have burned him, and the odd one leaving a street that would have driven him out and told the story for forty years. The old obligations were not warm to everybody inside them. They were warm to the approved, and the price of belonging was that everyone else had a permanent right to inspect you. When people ran to the anonymous city and the impersonal market they were not being tricked. They were getting out, and many of them were getting out of something real.

So it is not a theft. It is a trade, and the emancipation was genuine, and we paid in a currency nobody had priced. I would take the deal again, and I have: I work remotely for a system spread across a dozen countries, live in one whose language is not my first, and spend my days designing the standard interfaces this essay has spent nine sections describing. That is not a confession. It is the reason to trust the account. The people best placed to see this clearly are the ones it worked for.

And there is no answer at the scale of the problem. Anyone who offers you one is selling something, and the last century was spent on people who had one. What there is instead is a test small enough to actually apply, and it works on a bank, a platform, a landlord, a government office, a machine, and a friendship without any modification at all.

Is there a person at the other end who can be reached. Can that person say yes — not escalate it, not log it, but decide. And would that person be harmed if the decision turned out to be wrong.

All three, or it is a sink. The third is the one that is always missing, and its absence is always explained as efficiency.

It is a small test and it is small on purpose. But look at what applying it actually does. It puts back, one relationship at a time, the single thing every mechanism described here was built to remove: a path along which something returns. That is not a consolation prize. It is the only way water has ever risen in a chamber.

None of this is hard to understand. It is hard to want. Every rung we are missing is made of somebody having to be reachable — interrupted by people whose problems are not interesting, staying in the room after the pleasure has gone out of it, owing things to people you did not choose and being owed by people you cannot leave. We did not have this taken from us. We were offered its removal a thousand separate times, in pieces small enough that no one ever felt himself deciding, and every single time we kept the exit. Getting any of it back means putting yourself somewhere you can be reached and not leaving when it stops being convenient — obligation with no unsubscribe button, which is the thing most of us have spent our whole adult lives arranging not to have.
Epilogue - Theory of Relative maturity

What follows is the document this essay has been arguing with. It is the finest piece of reasoning in the book that contains it, and it was written to make a confession bearable. Read the first line twice.

The Third Hearing

"Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts, but this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it, or if it should be noticed, excuses must be had to be produced immediately." — Machiavelli instructions to Raffaello Girolami, 1522 

"But let your communication be Yay, yay; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." — Matthew 5:37 

One

Extract from N.S. Rubashov's diary: 20th day of prison

Vladimir Bogrov has fallen out of the swing.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the day of the storming of the Bastille, the European swing, after long inaction, again started to move. It had pushed off from tyranny with gusto and an apparently uncheckable impetus, swinging up towards the blue sky of freedom. For a hundred years, it had risen higher and higher into the spheres of liberalism and democracy. But see: gradually the pace slowed down as the swing neared the summit and turning point of its course. Then, after a second of immobility, it started the movement backwards with ever-increasing speed. With the same impetus as on the way up, the swing carried its passengers back from freedom to tyranny again. He who has gazed upwards, instead of clinging on, became dizzy and fell out. Whoever wishes to avoid becoming dizzy must try to find out the swing's law of motion.

We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, and from democracy back to absolute dictatorship. The amount of individual freedom which people may conquer and keep depends on the degree of their political maturity. The aforementioned pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing of the masses does not follow a continuous rising curve like the growing up of an individual, but is governed by more complicated laws.

The maturity of the masses lies in their capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people's capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and functioning of the whole social body.

Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication in the economic apparatus and causes the appearance of new factors and combinations which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump in technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, thus causing a fall on the political maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.

Hence, the political maturity of the masses cannot be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively—that is, in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment. When the level of mass consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force, until the next jump in technical civilization (the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example) sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity and renders possible, or even necessary, the establishment of some form of absolute leadership.

This process might be compared to the lifting of a ship through a lock with several chambers. When it first enters a lock chamber, the ship is on a low level relative to the capacity of the chamber. It is slowly lifted up until the water level reaches its highest point. But this grandeur is illusory: the next lock chamber is higher still, and the leveling process has to start again. The walls of the lock chambers represent the objective state of control of natural forces— of the technical civilization. The water level in the lock chamber represents the political maturity of the masses. It would be meaningless to measure the latter as an absolute height above sea level; what counts is the relative height of the level in the lock chamber.

The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid objective progress and, consequently, of equally rapid subjective political retrogression. The industrial era is still young in history. The discrepancy is still great between its extremely complicated economic structure and the masses' understanding of it. Thus, it is comprehensible that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of the 20th century is less than it was in 200 BC or at the end of the feudal epoch.

The mistake in socialist theory was to believe that the level of mass consciousness rose constantly and steadily—hence its helplessness before the latest swing of the pendulum, the ideological self-mutilation of the peoples. We believed that the adaptation of the masses' conception of the world to changed circumstances was a simple process which one could measure in years, whereas according to all historical experience, it would have been more suitable to measure it by centuries. The people of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine. The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.

As to the fatherland of the revolution, the masses there are governed by the same laws of thought as anywhere else. They have reached the next higher lock chamber, but they are still on the lowest level of the new basin. The new economic system which has taken the place of the old is even more incomprehensible to them. The laborious and painful rise must start anew. It will probably be several generations before the people manage to understand the new state of affairs which they themselves created by the revolution.

Until then, however, a democratic form of government is impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is even less than in other countries. Until then, our leaders are obligated to govern as though in empty space. Measured by classical liberal standards, this is not a pleasant spectacle. Yet all the horror, hypocrisy, and degradation which leap to the eye are merely the visible and inevitable expression of the law described above.

"Woe to the fool and the aesthete who only ask how and not why; but woe also unto the opposition in a period of relative immaturity of the masses such as this." 

In periods of maturity, it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses. In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the higher judgment of the people. In such situations, the opposition has two alternatives: to seize power by a coup d'état without being able to count on the support of the masses, or, in mute despair, to throw themselves out of the swing—to die in silence.

There is a third choice which is no less consistent, and which in our country has been developed into a system: the denial and suppression of one's own convictions when there is no prospect of materializing them. As the only moral criterion which we recognize is that of social utility, the public disavowal of one's convictions in order to remain in the party's ranks is obviously more honorable than the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle. Questions of personal pride or prejudices—such as exist elsewhere against certain forms of self-abasement—and personal feelings of tiredness, disgust, and shame are to be cut off root and branch.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940), trans. Daphne Hardy