"The Machine, " they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition; the Machine is omnipotent, eternal, blessed is the Machine." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word "Religion" was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and implement of man. But in practice all, save a few retrogrades, worshipped it as divine. Nor was it worshipped in unity. One believer would be chiefly impressed by the blue optic plates, through which he saw other believers; another by the mending apparatus, another by the lifts; another by the Book. And each would pray to this or to that, and ask it to intercede for him with the Machine as a whole. Persecution—that also was present and all who did not accept the minimum known as "Undenominational Mechanism" lived in danger of Homelessness, which means death, as we know.
-E.M.Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Every human being is enmeshed in the vast and intricate world-wide system that I call the Machine. The Machine is a network consisting of a large number of social, political, military, economic and cultural components. I call it the Machine because its mode of operation is so very much like the smaller machines man has produced in such abundance. The essential characteristic of machine is repetition—it repeats a sequence of movements over and over again, always the same, though differing perhaps in speed or force produced. The pistons of an automobile engine move up and down, up and down, endlessly. The wheels of a locomotive turn around and around. A printing press goes through the same complex sequence of movements, over and over again. To mechanize a process is to organize it to repeat itself as exactly as possible.
So it is with the World Machine. It imposes on each human being a variety of patterns that he or she is expected to follow repeatedly. Get up, make breakfast, wash the dishes, make the beds, go shopping, come home, fix dinner, wash the dishes, watch TV, go to bed, etc. … —patterns we repeat again and again, patterns we follow exactly lest we be punished. The Machine rules us all. We are only cogs spinning around and around.
Each of us was drawn into the Machine the minute he or she was born. None has any choice in the matter. True, there are moments in our lives when we do have a choice between alternatives; but the alternatives that are available are almost always those defined by the Machine, they are seldom our own. Even here, more often than not, the Machine exerts subtle pressures upon us, manipulating us with carrot and stick to choose the alternative preferred by the Machine. Having the illusion of choice, we then feel more committed to the path we have "chosen."
How did this Frankenstein's monster arise? And why do human beings so meekly submit to it? (Ordinary machines like automobiles, washing machines, or electric typewriters operate at the command and under the control of human beings. Why shouldn't the Machine also serve man, instead of the other way around?)
What follows is admittedly an oversimplification and involves some speculations that are difficult to prove or disprove. A far better analysis is provided in the works of Lewis Mumford and other writers. But it does provide a simple, clear picture that is, I believe, not in contradiction to what is known; a picture that clearly shows how we are chained to the Machine. Some might call it a fable, the Fable of the Machine. But it is a fable that rings true.
It began a long time ago. Some say about 8000 B.C.
Some unknown genius, probably a woman, discovered or invented agriculture and, at about the same time, animal husbandry.
The ways of human kind were revolutionized, never again to be the same. For the first time, humans had a reasonably assured food supply. No longer were they forced to live a nomadic existence, hunting, fishing, and picking and eating wild fruits and vegetables. No longer did they have to move from place to place, always going to where the food was. No longer were they entirely dependent on the vicissitudes of weather, climate and animal competitors for the available food supply.
Humans could grow their own food in abundance. And "civilization" became possible.
Many humans became farmers. But at this point another element entered the picture. Farmers were able to produce more than they themselves actually needed. In other words, a surplus was possible. This meant that not all humans had to be farmers. Moreover, a farmer was necessarily tied to the land. He could move about, of course; but he always had to return to the farm where his crops and animals were, and he had to spend most of his time there. This left him vulnerable.
And since not all humans had to become farmers, some did not. Those who did not were those who naturally preferred to hunt and to fish and those who were good at it. Those were the ones with the weapons.
And so the hunter became the warrior. He killed the farmer and stole his food or forced the farmer to give him food under threat of death.
And in due course, some warriors were better users of weapons than others, and, true to their kind, they forced the lesser warriors to do their bidding. And they organized the warriors into armed groups. Such groups were far superior to individual warriors.
And so the warrior-kings emerged. And they took control of the land. They let the farmers continue to farm, provided they obeyed the warrior-kings and gave each king and his generals and his warriors food.
And the food the warrior-king took was called "taxes." And the orders of the warrior-king were called "laws." And the farmers and other subjects obeyed the laws "or else." And they paid the taxes "or else."
And as time went on, the warrior-king became more clever, not only in using weapons and in organizing armies, but in persuading people to obey him. He learned the warriors could be conditioned to obey (this is now called military training). After a period of this conditioning, the warrior learned to obey orders instantly, that to question them was to die. And he was given a false image to live up to—the image of the Hero, the Fearless and Brave. And, of course, the warrior-king was the Great One, the Champion of His People, the Superhero. Sometimes he claimed to have Supernatural Powers—to be a god.
And the same methods of conditioning were applied to farmers. The warrior-king, who had actually seized power by force, claimed that he had it by Right. And he gave the farmer another image to live up to—that of the Loyal Subject, the Obedient Citizen who faithfully obeyed the Law and paid the Taxes. And he was taught to revere the warrior-king (this is now called patriotism), who was his Protector (against other warrior-kings), and who settled his disputes with other farmers Fairly and with Justice.
And since women were physically weaker than men, but necessary for the pleasure of men and the production of new warriors, it was only fitting that women become the property of men. And so it was decreed that women belonged to their fathers or their brothers or their husbands. And the men agreed that this was Fair and Just.
Now the warrior-king was the Greatest One among his people. And this made him very happy. And since happiness equals Greatness, he naturally reasoned that he would be even happier if he were still Greater. But to do this he had to overcome another warrior-king to prove he was Number One.
Thus war was invented.
To prove his Greatness, the warrior-king invented The Enemy—another warriorking and his soldiers and subjects.
The Enemy is always less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes. Moreover, he is out to get you—the Good Guy, the Hero. So you have to kill him first, before he kills you.
(Of course, the other warrior-king is doing the same thing with his young Heroes. To them, you are The Enemy—less than human, capable of murder, torture, rape, and the most unspeakable crimes.)
And so Warrior-King A—the Good, the Wise, the Just, the Protector of His People— orders his young Heroes to a place where they must kill the Enemy—the young Heroes of Warrior-King B. And lo! It is true! The Enemy is trying to kill the young Heroes and therefore he must be Evil, less than human, and everything the Warrior- King has said.
And so the young Heroes come to hate The Enemy. And the parents and sisters and younger brothers and grandparents of the young Heroes learn to hate The Enemy even more. And the Warrior-King is satisfied, because hasn't it been proved that what he said was Right and True? And doesn't this prove that he is Wise and indeed the Protector of his people? And doesn't this prove that The Enemy must be murdered or tortured if he is captured? And doesn't this prove that The Enemy's women, who are less than human—deserve to be raped by the young Heroes, etc. etc. etc.?
And so the young Heroes become what they hate.
But there is one thing worse than The Enemy without and that is The Enemy within, the Traitor.
For it happens that, ever so often, a person sees through all this nonsense and refuses to take part in it. But this means that he has Disobeyed the King—the Wise, the Good, the Great. He who is not With Us, the Good Guys, is Against Us. He is one of Them and therefore less than human. Worse, he has deceived us into trusting him, pretending falsely to be one of us Good Folk.
Punish the Traitor! Kill him! Kill! Kill! Kill!
And so it went. The Warrior-King was able to expand his territory and kill so many of the other Warrior-King's soldiers that The Enemy was subdued. Thus, the Warrior-King brought Peace to his people.
And since all the people wanted peace, and never really wanted to hate and kill in the first place, they were grateful to the Warrior-King. For didn't he Protect them from The Enemy? And hadn't he ended the War and brought Peace?
Thus it began 10,000 years ago. This is the way kings and laws and taxes and governments were formed. And the people were conditioned to believe that all these things were Good and Right. And so they taught their children, who in turn taught their children, and so on down the generations until it was our turn. And we accepted it, too.
Let us pause, for a moment, and analyze the Fable of the Machine, as told thus far.
First, just as it was useful to make a distinction between individual and group consciousness, so it is helpful to distinguish a third form of consciousness, the consciousness of a person when he thinks of himself as a member of a large social unit such as a nation. I call this social consciousness. When an individual's social consciousness turns on, he or she may become aware of, and subject to, contents that go back many years in history. These social contents are not part of his individual consciousness and may be a source of dysergy for him.
Second, an important feature of the individual's social consciousness is his perception of the social consensus. This perception may be mistaken, but as long as he holds it, his actions and communications and interactions are influenced by it. These actions, communications, and interactions with others in turn help to determine the (actual) social consensus. A cyclical process is thus established, which may continue indefinitely.
Third, the Mode Ladder may be applied to social consciousness. This means, among other things, that certain processes of social consciousness may be Identic or Reactive in mode. I call such processes, and the patterns that govern them, sociodynes.
Sociodynes, clearly, are a major source of dysergy. This dysergy is of two main kinds: social dysergy and individual dysergy. Social dysergy takes the form of wars, crime, political and economic strife, racism, poverty, etc. The individual dysergy produced by sociodynes results from the Patterns-of-expected-behavior they impose on the individual.
A sociodyne is much more complex than a protodyne or a chronic reaction, so much so that it requires a major study to characterize one in detail. For our purposes, it is sufficient to identify a sociodyne and perhaps to indicate a few salient features. In the Fable of the Machine, we can identify at least three: the war sociodyne, the state sociodyne, and the male chauvinist sociodyne.
From the standpoint of social synergetics, clearly a long-term objective is to eliminate all sociodynes from the social matrix. Desirable though this may be, it is equally clear that this is a formidable task; one that would probably require many decades to accomplish. For sociodynes have been accumulating since the dawn of history and probably long before then.
From the standpoint of the individual, the patterns-of-expected-behavior associated with sociodynes are of interest. Two responses to these patterns are worth noting: the individual may accept the pattern or he may react to it.
When he accepts the pattern, his response is primarily Identic in mode; when he reacts to the pattern, his response is primarily Reactive. In either case, the response is dysergic. And in both cases, he can clear the dysergy by eliminating his own identifications and reactions.
This process is called neutralizing the sociodyne. Please note that neutralization does not clear the sociodyne from the social matrix. Also, it does not eliminate the problems and difficulties the individual may encounter in dealing with the sociodyne in its social and group aspects. But the individual does have the power to neutralize sociodynes, and when he does so, he feels better and can achieve more.
Let us now return to the Fable of the Machine.
As we have seen, the Machine was born when agriculture was invented. And since farmers were able to produce a surplus, not all people had to be farmers. Some became warriors, as we have seen; and the warrior-kings emerged and established the State. Others became carpenters, weavers, smiths, masons, etc. producing goods and services that people needed or wanted. At first, these were traded by simple barter. Later, money was invented as a medium of exchange and a measure of value.
By and by another group of people began to emerge. Workers and farmers were very busy working and farming. They had little time to take their goods to people who needed them or to find where these people were. So some people saw in this an opportunity. They bought the goods cheaply from the farmers and workers who produced them, and they stored them or took them to people who needed the goods and sold them for high prices. These were the traders.
Now some traders realized they were performing a service and charged for that service only what they needed to buy their fair share of the goods and services that society as a whole produced. But others didn't worry about this. They had no qualms about cheating or deceiving the people they bought from or sold to. Buying cheap and selling dear enabled them to keep the difference, which they called "profit." And some traders became very rich this way.
One day, a rich trader got the idea of bringing all the workers, together in one place called a manufactory. This made it easier for the trader, who could organize the workers so they produced more. And since the trader was very rich, he could pay the workers for the goods they produced, only now he called this payment wages. And since the. workers now had to get wages in order to buy food and other things they needed, they pretty much had to do what the trader wanted. In this way, the trader became a boss.
Some workers remained free, of course, at least for awhile, producing things themselves and selling them. But free workers could not compete in the long run. Because things were organized in the manufactory, goods could be produced a lot more efficiently and sold at a lower price than the goods of the free worker, even though the trader-boss still made a large profit.
Meanwhile, science was invented. A scientist is a funny person who is smart in some ways and dumb in others. Scientists began to find out more and more about nature; and one day they discovered how to make machines run by natural energy.
The trader-bosses were delighted about this. Being very rich, they paid the scientists to design machines for their manufactories; and they paid workers to build the machines. With machines, workers could produce a lot more than they could before. And so the manufactories became factories. And the trader-bosses became even richer.
Some of the trader-bosses were generous and kind and tried to help the workers to make things easier for them. But to do this cost money and reduced their profits. So the trader-bosses who were most ruthless, buying the workers' labor cheap and selling their products dear, made the most profits and soon drove the generous traderbosses out of business.
Sometimes a factory became so efficient that it produced more than people wanted or could afford to buy. When this happened, the trader-boss would lay off workers in order to keep his profits.
The trader-boss didn't mind this, because it made sure that the workers he kept on would work harder and not get any radical ideas.
And the trader-bosses saw the value of machines and the scientists who were smart enough to design them. So they hired scientists (who were then called engineers) to design more and better machines. And most of the scientist-engineers didn't mind this, because they loved to do research and design machines, and the trader-bosses paid them well. They became workers, bought and paid for like any other thing by the trader-bosses. But most of them didn't realize this.
Trader-bosses were constantly trying to figure out new ways to buy cheap and sell dear. Some of them noticed that money could also be treated as a commodity to be bought cheap and sold dear. They also saw that farmers and workers needed a place to keep their money, temporarily, until they spent it.
So these trader-bosses became money-bosses. They stored the money of the workers and farmers in a safe place called a bank. But they realized that on any given day farmers and workers would draw out only a small fraction of their money; the rest of the time the money-bosses could use it as they pleased. So, they loaned it out, mostly to other trader-bosses, and charged interest for it. And in this way they became very rich.
Now the trader-bosses and the money-bosses and the modem-day warrior-kings (who are called politicians) are not evil men. They are just doing what their roles tell them to do. If they don't perform according to their roles, the Machine causes them to lose, and they become workers or farmers or unemployed.
The Fable of the Machine could be continued indefinitely; but enough has been told to provide a basis for understanding how this Frankenstein's monster arose. Let us now consider the second question posed at the start of this chapter: Why do human beings so meekly submit to it? (There are, of course, individuals who love the Machine. For those, the question has no meaning. We leave them to their worship.)
A simple answer would be: Because we have no choice. But this may immediately be modified to: Because we believe—we have no choice. And this leads to another question: Why do we accept this belief?
Whenever the Machine permits us the illusion of choice, it always defines the alternatives in terms favorable to it. Catch 22. In the case of submission to the Machine, the choice offered is submit or perish. You need food, which only the Machine can provide. And, for almost everyone, this is true. But there are other alternatives, which become clear once we refuse to limit ourselves only to those stated by the Machine.
But there is more to the problem than this. Let us probe more deeply.
The human mind is so organized that when a pattern occurs that "works," the mind tends to use that pattern again in a similar situation. This is the Identic mode in operation. There is no discrimination or awareness.
The warrior-king established the original pattern of the state with laws and taxes. This same pattern prevails today, despite the fact that, to many thinking persons, the nation-state has become an anachronism, and despite the fact that the original warrior-kings used brute force to seize power and to keep that power. Whatever was, is right and it will be repeated, over and over again, till the end of time.
The endless repetition of the Machine is nothing more than the projection, upon the screen of social consciousness, of the Identic mode of function.
This insight provides the basis for understanding why the Machine has such power over us. It is because we unconsciously give it that power. It is as if the Machine were under the control of a pseudomind, operating entirely in the Identic and Reactive modes. Like the Freudian Id, which imposes its protodynes to control the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the individual consciousness, this pseudo-mind imposes its sociodynes upon our social consciousness.
It will be useful to give this pseudo-mind a name. I call it Dysergy Prime because it is a primary source of dysergy upon the planet earth.
To understand how Dysergy Prime. controls us, let us once again consider the distinction between individual and social consciousness. When you are alone, doing something you enjoy and do well, your consciousness is your own; it isn't shared with anyone else. The contents of your consciousness are your sights, sounds, ideas, etc. Your will, too, is your own—you do as you choose, selecting from alternatives you yourself formulate, not those of the Machine.
But when you become a member of a group, your consciousness subtly changes. The contents of your consciousness are no longer purely your own, but are selectively focused upon those contents that you perceive to be occupying the consensus-attention of the group. Moreover, you tend to perceive those contents the way the groupconsensus perceives them, which may differ from the way you would view them through individual consciousness.
The same thing applies to your will. You are limited to alternatives that you perceive to be acceptable to the group, indeed, that are expected by the group. You may, on occasion, choose; but you do so as a member of the group, not as an individual.
Now, in addition to membership in a group, an individual also has one or more roles in the group and a certain status in the group. If your role happens to be one of leadership, you may imagine that you have power to shape things as you choose and, to a limited extent, you do. But power attracts power seekers like garbage attracts flies. You soon find yourself surrounded by flies clamoring for attention or cleverly massaging your ego so they can wield some of the power in your name. And in your role, you are expected to manage every crisis that comes along. Your consciousness again is not your own, but is governed by your perception of the contents occupying group attention, modified by your perception of what-you-areexpected- to-do.
If your status is low in the group hierarchy, your image of yourself is profoundly affected. Instead of seeing yourself as you actually are a unique individual with unique potentials and unique needs—you view yourself in terms of your status, your perception of how-you-are-regarded-in-the-group. You feel inferior, inadequate; and because this is unpleasant, you may try to compensate by covering it up, by taking it out on someone else whose status is even lower than yours or by finding something outside yourself to glorify. As for your will, your lowly status insures that you end up doing the scut work that nobody else wants to do.
Generalize this to include all the groups to which we belong, and to society as a whole, and we see that we become absorbed in a social consciousness that to a considerable degree governs what we perceive, the way we think, the way we regard ourselves, and the actions we take. Each of us assumes a False Identity that is a kind of average of his various memberships, roles, and statuses, while the real "I" is submerged, confused, and impotent.
But this is not the whole story. From social consciousness that occupies our minds there emerges a new entity whose existence and reality are determined by collective agreements. This entity is Dysergy Prime.
Dysergy Prime may be defined as the set of sociodynes that have accumulated since the beginning of humankind, controlling us through patterns-of-expected-conduct associated with our memberships, roles, and statuses in various groups and other social entities. The Machine serves Dysergy Prime, not individual human beings. The Machine itself is only a machine, and could be made to serve us if Dysergy Prime were destroyed.
How can Dysergy Prime be destroyed?
In principle, the solution is easy. Dysergy Prime exists because we unconsciously believe in it. If all of us, collectively, became fully and knowledgeably conscious of Dysergy Prime and of the ways it controls us, and collectively decided not to believe in it any more, Dysergy Prime would disappear.
Unfortunately, this has to be a collective decision. One person, discovering the truth, can stop believing in Dysergy Prime; but his social consciousness discloses that everyone else still believes; and their collective belief so influences their perceptions, thoughts, and actions that his individual consciousness is overwhelmed. He must continue to deal with the reality of this collective belief.
In the movie "Forbidden Planet," a human scientist, Dr. Morbius, spent many years studying the remains of an advanced civilization whose citizens had mysteriously disappeared. The resources of the planet had been harnessed by a technology far in advance of that of man, and this technology continued to function automatically. Ultimately, Morbius discovered that the vanished race had been destroyed by an Id creature produced by their collective unconscious, a creature that drew upon the inexhaustible energies of that technology.
Let us hope that a similar fate does not await humankind.
This text forms Chapter 16 of Human Synergetics by N. Arthur Coulter (Internet Edition 2002).
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