ISAIF Commentary - Disruption of power process in modern society (part 2)

"65. (fr) Moreover,where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing the status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other way, most people are not in a position to pursue their goals AUTONOMOUSLY. Most workers are someone else’s employee and, as we pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend their days doing what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large portion of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise system. This excludes from small business many of the people who most need autonomy."

"66. (fr) Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselve is done more and more along channels laid down by the system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must be exploited in accord with rules and regulations [13], and techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success."

"67. (fr) Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in the pursuit of goals. But it is also disrupted because of those human drives that fall into group 3: the drives that one cannot adequately satisfy no matter how much effort one makes. One of these drives is the need for security. Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them. (“We live in a world in which relatively few people — maybe 500 or 1,000 make the important decisions” — Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21,1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent. The individual’s search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness."

The need of security has been decreasing after the end of the cold war however the recent financial crisis has changed the tides again. Many things such as finding a job fall now into group 3 and the only thing people can really blame for it is the governement. The government itself (as well as banking corporations, etc.) can be considered partially responsible because it theoretically holds the political power to control society but the truth is no one is able to control our society at all anymore. Actually society controls itself nowadays. More discussion from the author on the uselessness of politics will come later in the essay. What I feel like adding now is that when under difficult conditions people tend to trust more direct, iron-fist based forms of government over democracy. There is for example a direct historical relationship between the rise of hitler and the '29 financial crisis. This proves that during periods of crisis people have little to no trust in the political system as it is (since it can't solve society's problems),  so they choose dictatorship over it.

"68. (fr) It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What makes us FEEL secure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless: nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life."