One
of the philosophical foundations of a democracy is the belief in free
will. We are free to make choices that
involve our moral values: our freedom in what we are going to say to others
about the social, political and economic issues, our freedom to assemble with
others and with whom we want to assemble, our freedom to write what we want to
say in articles, our freedom to worship the way we want to worship and with
whom. But all of us, nevertheless, have
some limitations on the kinds of actions we can will ourselves to do. To start with we are all bound by gravity to
walk on and stay connected with the earth.
We can fly off in airplanes, but then we are bound to the floor of the
cabin. The possible exception to this is
parachuting for the select few and that primarily leads to falling back to
earth anyway.
Then there are the limitations to our free
will that come from our innate skills and our opportunities. What we do best in terms of our studies and
our work is usually what we choose to engage in. Of course, this can be limited by our
opportunities. Sometimes a particular
community or society very simply doesn’t have good work opportunities for
people with particular skills or people with a particular education. People who are good at physical work are
increasingly being replaced by machines and robots.
And
then there are the limitations to our free will that paradoxically come as a
result of making modern life too
easy. There are two ways that modern
technology can affect our free will by making life too easy. One is by speeding up the processes by which
all our daily chores get done. That can
leave us with free time on our hands that we don’t know what to do with. So we become bored and then with a lack of
tasks among which to choose, our capacity to exercise our free will goes
dormant.
Then
there is the limitation that comes from getting rid of the physical and mental
resistance in our life activities, the organic friction that was previously
always a part of our daily lives. Life
activities become so smooth and seamless as a result of modern technology. This smooth, seamless, frictionless,
experiential vacuum living environment leaves a person in a state of almost no
experiential gravity holding him down to earth.
It’s almost as if the person is confronted with too much freedom in his
life, and this ends up paralyzing his free will. His excessive frictionless freedom paradoxically
ends up being a limitation on his free will, almost as if he was locked up or
in handcuffs or shackles.
One
way people have of dealing with this lasting numbness is to find someone who
has the metaphorical keys to let an afflicted person out of his metaphorical
handcuffs and shackles and jail cells. Finding
a person who has the capacity to fight the numbness in his own life through
unpredictable aggressive abrasive behavior.
Such a person can give other people the psychological traction to move
forward in their own lives. Hence the
rise today of the authoritarian populist leader. When people find their capacity to exercise
their free will to be considerably damaged as a result of a pervasive numbness,
an authoritarian populist leader is the perfect antidote.
Numb
people can live their lives through the authoritarian leader. If they feel that as individuals their will
is weak, that their lives are directionless and boring, they can hitch their
lives onto that of the authoritarian populist leader, and let him give their
lives direction, interest, and impact.
If as individuals, they are too numb to exercise their free will freely,
they can merge themselves with an authoritarian populist leader and become a
part of a strong collective will. And
the strength is in the numbers.
Individuals can feel the rush that comes from the collective will in
movement and pull themselves out of their numbness and feel very much
alive. They feel very much alive from
making all the collective organic imprints with all the other followers of the
authoritarian populist leader and feel very content in the knowledge that many
of the imprints will be preserved and become a part of a collective surrogate
immortality in order to help all the followers prepare for death.
We
lose our free will when machines start doing more and more for us, and there is
less and less for us to do in our daily lives.
We think we are going to be free to do so many different things, now
that machines have relieved us of our drudge work. But the more tasks that machines take over,
the more new relatively frictionless tasks get redefined as drudge work,
because in our increasing numbness, we start to tolerate less and less. And then we either stagnate painfully in a
living death and have our free will numbed by conative anesthesia (a fancy way
of saying anesthetizing our will), or we abrasively activate our will ourselves
by making up all sorts of new tasks to do through conative acceleration
(speeding up the will) or we hitch our destiny onto a leader who himself has an
acceleration of his will and who takes on the role of an authoritarian populist
autocrat. The first posture involves
living in the understimulation of an experiential vacuum. The second posture involves living in the overstimulation
of a private tension pocket filled with abrasive friction. And the third posture involves living in a
private experiential vacuum which propels a person to merge with a charismatic
leader and become a part of a public collective acceleration of a collective
will. If the first posture leads to a
living death from numbness, the second posture leads to burn-out from
overstimulation and the third posture leads to a loss of a person’s individual
sense of self.
Actually
there is a fourth posture to be considered here: that of merging one’s numbed
will with the collective numbed will of a mystical guru immersed in meditation
and yoga. This represents an attempt to
sublimate one’s living death numbness into something positive. Numbness becomes something positive through
meditation and yoga experiences. But
here is where one’s values come into play.
Is it a vibrant life if one spends it primarily withdrawn from
engagement with the external world? It
means accepting one’s inability to maintain an active sense of control over the
direction of one’s life activities. To
me, renouncing of control and fatalistically accepting the flow of things to
where they want to flow is not a positive state of affairs. It represents the glorification of giving up
one’s free will.
Obviously
meditation and yoga have been around since way before the transformation of
daily life by modern technology. In the
old days, they were used to rise above an overly intense immersion and
involvement with passionate interactions involving other humans and with nature
and with one’s predisposition to perishability surrounded by so much organic
stimulation within natural environments.
In other words, meditation and yoga used to help prevent people from
being consumed by passion. Now
meditation and yoga serve to help a person become accustomed to a numbing
environment.
But I
have strayed far from the original focus of this article which was to show that
the frictionless existence within modern technological society leaves some people
who take on a certain posture predisposed to want to give up their free will
and their individual sense of self and merge with an authoritarian populist
leader in order to feel alive by participating in a collective will. Needless to say, this can become very
dangerous both for the individual and for the society as a whole.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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