A recent Aeon article tackled the old governance problem of who watches the watchers. It began with the idea that cooperation is a problem of getting people to serve collective interests over their own. It was about serving the greater good and how, left to pure self-interest, society would be intolerable.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that society doesn’t exist and she had a point, even though it likely didn’t land in her favour. She was after all, a politician and the idea of a society may well be the cornerstone of political power.
If we choose to believe society exists, there is no agreement on its purpose. Some believe it is for human flourishing or to reduce harms. There are also meaning-making or justice-seeking arguments that give it purpose. None of which are wrong if we choose to argue various needs. The commonality is some form of continuous negotiation to fulfill those needs. Groups continue to argue for one set of needs over another and this stops humanity from becoming something else entirely.
If society exists and if it has a purpose then, it is to keep us human and to stop us from becoming ‘something else entirely’. Without the idea of society, discourse may be replaced by monologue, where power consolidates so completely that only one perspective can be heard. Without society, decisions may become algorithmic optimisations where no one decides, because all decisions have already been made. Without society, we could fragment into tribalism and competing interests of pure force or charisma.
So in writing this essay during a week like most others, where pure force served the interests of charismatic voices and algorithms optimised collective action for consumption and compliance; it is difficult to see that even imagining a society is doing anything for humanity except throwing people into an infinite regress of discourse. This discourse is irreconcilable so that those who act can carry on acting, no matter what.
Society is artificial and it casts a shadow so beguiling it distracts us from the reality that solutions are lowly and flow from activities.
Since we find that collective life has become at least unsustainable, at most intolerable and self-interest has eclipsed group-interest for all modernity, my modest proposal is to stop trying to ‘get people’ to serve the collective interests over their own. Getting people to do anything can only be by means of control. Instead we can create the opportunity to align self-interests with group-interests. The one thing that the chorus of singular voices say is impossible.
If everything means something different to different people, we become mere pawns in a game of politics. Society gives us strong convictions and then makes those convictions mean… whatever it wants, when the time comes for control. It makes no difference what side of the fence our convictions push us, it only matters who controls the narrative when decisions are made.
Consider the politics of freedom of movement; the majority are for it or against it depending on whether we’re talking about roads or immigration. The same could be said of war; a selected narrative will serve because it is not society’s discourse, but the narrative of society’s discourse that dictates actions and outcomes.
Society is artificial and it casts a shadow so beguiling it distracts us from the reality that solutions are lowly and flow from activities. No collective challenge can be solved by charisma, grand plans, or monolithic ideas of us being collectively great. There is no centre. Achieving great things together has only ever been the sum of small acts that a hero takes credit for afterwards.
In society, we must concern ourselves with who is watching the watchers, because if we fail to act here, people will fear that no one is watching them. It is impossible for actions, outcomes, and consequences to constrain them as that only works for people who are not watchers.
Consider how intolerable collective life would be if the actions of watchers were tempered by the observations of the many. This symopticon reverses the synoptic condition to balance privilege with visibility. Where few watch many, narrative control follows. Where many watch few, accountability does. This is not transparency as a cultural value, but rather structural visibility as a designed property of our systems. This unrealistic vision, this utopian proposal requires only that the actions of enforcers remain legible and contestable to those who must live under their constraint. Constraint as reciprocal negotiation ensures it is beneficial to the intended ends. Who watches the watchers becomes what constrains the constrainers. This emergent order could end the apparent need to control people through association psychology and bureaucracy.
After centuries of effort spent curating such a bold idea as society, it would be wasteful to simply throw it away. As a lived experience it is real enough to us because we all experience one, but it is as distinct as we are. It is tempting to think that this is semantics. That it makes no difference what we call the management of our collective needs; however, this misreads how we try to solve problems. If there is ‘a society’, we need to ‘get people’ to act in the interests of it and not in their own interests. People must obey society and eschew what they want, which sounds a lot like something you want to avoid and certainly something worth arguing over. Perhaps that is the point. If we each exist in one, we will care about ours. We will invest in its flourishing, in its justness, and in its progress. We will make it mean something to us and we will act in it in ways that protect it from harm.
Now ask yourself when was the last time you felt like you acted in society. When did you last contribute to this collective that means so many things as to mean nothing at all? Even if you arguably work for society, it is likely that you act on it or because of it and not in it.
The alienation we sometimes feel isn’t our failure, but an inevitable consequence of being told that we must do something for somebody. The idea of society ensures that collective action is limited only to ways that are commissioned. Suspend reality for a moment and assume that a job is a genuine choice. A bus driver who would serve genuine need in many cases cannot, because need without purchasing power is invisible to our system. They want to contribute and are willing to drive a bus to that end. If they can only drive it when cash demands, it strips them of the fulfillment that motivated them. This common system feature leaves us all asking why we bother at all.
We could argue that this is necessary, otherwise who decides what gets done when we want something; but there are bugs here too. Assume there is collective will for oil to stay in the ground. The system would keep increasing oil production because the coordination mechanism that would reduce demand cannot rationally be commissioned.
These are both structural failures to name only two. They have nothing to do with either morals or what we collectively want. The gap between need and provision is a gap in coordination capacity. No matter the abundance we have created or will create, we cannot have what we want. No matter how driven we are to contribute, whatever we do will be commissioned into a different form. That is the utopia we live in. That is our best system. The one we call realistic.
We are led to believe that self-interest and group-interest are enemies, but cooperation is simpler than this. Fulfilling one’s need serves self-interest. Contributing to others’ needs serves group-interest. When exchange is reciprocal, the distinction collapses. What looked like an impossibility reveals itself as something ordinary. People made commitments, followed through, and needs were fulfilled. Alignment was never the hard part. The conditions for it were.
The mistake isn’t to believe that we must balance freedom with constraint, it is that freedom is provided by people with direct needs and constraint by someone else entirely. This works for a time, but without being able to contest both, the system drifts towards serving the needs of those who enforce constraint. Needs change but the constraints have already been nudged towards serving others. The system lithifies and decays until it is thrown into crisis because it no longer serves us.
This essay is not an argument for individual sovereignty over collective need, or collective need over individual sovereignty. It is an argument that the opposition itself is a structural artefact that is fabricated by an idea of a society that does not exist. That artefact dissolves when freedoms and constraints are maintained as part of the environment.
Cooperation is not aspirational. By making freedoms and constraints composable and contestable we can build systems that fulfil needs through acts of reciprocal contribution.