181A. Can Social Control Be Good?
Society was built on social control, but it also benefited those in control. What would it even look like to use social control to empower people rather than to exploit people?
As a species that started in tribes, social controls were limited to basic rules that made life better for everyone. Rules like “don’t pet the bears” and “don’t eat the cactus without removing the thorns” were common sense. Rules also likely governed relationships, when you could do what to who. After the adoption of agriculture people started living in much larger collectives and this required a lot more laws. This also allowed some people to have occupations that promoted the greater good rather than just focusing on survival.
With this increase in population scale and occupational options came the idea of caste or rank. And wealth. The leader of a town might have privileges that others did not have, and trade with other towns created a greater concept of diplomacy. Heavy handed diplomacy required military occupations and technologies.
During this transition the concept of social control went from purely benevolent applications to now include controlling who would have power over others. For instance, religion allowed a common set of rules to make life safer and more stable. It allowed for the establishment of a “clergy” class who’s job would just be to maintain the religion. In Buddhism, the clergy class (monks) were held in high esteem and were entirely supported by the rest of society. Simultaneously, the rules kept monks from accumulating wealth and power. This created a mutual interdependency which I think is a very clever design. That has started to break down as people started giving monks not just food and clothing, but also money.
Many other religions created a religious elite. That elite could amass massive power and had the ability to sentence others to death or imprisonment. They could even declare wars. In this scenario, the “control” part of social control led to a redistribution of power and resources to a relatively small minority of people. This was great if you were part of the elite, but bad for everyone else.
Over time since those in power had the ability to make the rules, social control increasingly developed to allow a minority to exploit the majority. Thus the concept of social control began to take on a negative connotation, especially in the West. But society still depends on robust systems of social control. Without that, we would have anarchy. Society would revert to tribalism and the systems that allow such a huge population would break down. 95% of humans would die in just a few years, and technology would degrade. Violence would determine who was in the 95% and who was in the 5%.
Can we have the benefits of social control, without all the exploitation and wealth disparities?
Economics and Social Control
The field of economics can be traced back to the source: Adam Smith and his The Wealth of Nations from 1776. The tome was written for the elites to allow them to optimize the social order and increase the wealth of the elite. The rest of society wasn’t benefited. As evidence I would point to how Smith gave instructions on how to starve the children of serfs to death in order to optimize labor supplies, in Book 1 Chapter 8. If you ask AI about that chapter, it very strategically leaves that part out.
Actually, since the tome is more than 80% about social control, and it says the quiet part out loud, at some point we created the field of Economics. All mention of social control was erased, and instead those systems were reduced to mathematical formulas. But the intent was retained. So when you apply economics, you get those huge power and wealth disparities that Smith wanted.
When I returned to school at the age of 41 to study conventional economics, I was honest with all of my professors that I wasn’t there to learn how economics works. I was there to learn why economics doesn’t work. I was such a good student that they allowed me to do this. I did find a number of mathematical errors in the systems they teach, but I didn’t find the real problem until a few months after I finished my classes when I had time to pick up and read The Wealth of Nations entirely.
There is a reason why the Source of Economics is not taught in Economics schools. If you have the time and patience, it’s worth a read. I would imagine that 99% of economists have not read it.
For those without that much patience, trust me that it’s all about social control. It’s quite detailed, and (unlike AI) Smith makes no attempt to be “politically correct”.
Social Control and Autocracy
When social control has the end goal of giving all the power to one person, like a King, you end up with what they called Feudalism in the 18th Century. Today we call that “Autocracy”. This (the “King” part) was the explicit goal for Smith.
We are comfortable with the idea that countries like Russia and China, which don’t have real elections, are autocracies. The current leader of the USA keeps making people nervous by refusing to answer the question of whether he will violate the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution that prevents a President from running a 3rd term. The 22nd Amendment was passed by both parties after Franklin D. Roosevelt won a 3rd and 4th term. He served during WW2, and ended up creating many of the safety nets (“Good” social control) that held the country together in future decades. So while he was a great president, it was agreed that he set a bad precedent by serving too long.
Now the threat of autocracy in the USA is triggering “No Kings” protests. These were some of the largest protests in American history. Social control isn’t the issue here. Losing social control is the issue.
What Makes Social Control “Good” or “Bad”?
At the age of 14 I used polarizing language and went door to door all across West Los Angeles to scare people into voting for “Bomber” Bob Dornan. I was tireless. I told them the Middle Easterners were coming and they needed a strong leader like Bob to protect them. Of course these people didn’t know I was Middle Eastern. If they did, they would have realized I was manipulating them.
Bob went on to win one of the closest victories in American history, and it was considered a miracle since West LA is a very liberal area. He credited me on national TV with his victory, which was fair. This was 1980. I did it because I was a bit irritated that The Ayatollah in Iran had rounded up, tortured, and murdered the Eastern half of my family. Bob was the patriarch of the B-2 bomber, and I knew exactly what that was being built for. Not Russia, Iran. So I did my part in making sure it arrived in Iran.
Four years later (when I was 18) I realized that two wrongs don’t make a right. I rejected my Congressional letters of recommendation to military academies and took a Vow of Pacifism. Regrettably, the social control methods I used to get Bob elected have been repeated in every election since 1980. These are “Bad” social control systems because they have the effect of polarizing the population and handing control to a small elite.
A year and a half later (1982) Ronald Reagan (who I also campaigned for in 1980) proposed a new amendment to the US Constitution to permit prayer in all public schools. While it was framed as being neutral and not promoting any particular religion, we all knew it was there to institutionalize Christianity as the State Religion. I had helped get him elected to oppose Theocracy (in Iran), not create a second one.
I organized my fellow honor students at Santa Monica High School (SaMoHi) to do a little protest. We all got books on Satanism from the local library and walked into the Principle’s office holding the books. We didn’t try to show them off, but we made sure their titles were clear. I told the Principle “We just want to express how eager we are to finally be able to practice our religion here at SaMoHi!” I had just turned 16.
As expected, a call went from the Principle’s office to Sacramento (the Capitol of California). Then a call went to Washington D.C. Ronald Reagan used to be the Governor of California. And just like that, Reagan’s school prayer amendment was Dead on Arrival.
Not because it was bad social control he was proposing, but because it was good social control he was proposing. Reagan didn’t realize just how good it was until I gave him a hint of what was coming. Reagan also was the author of gun control regulation in California, even though he’s conservative and very pro gun. Why? Because gun rights are fantastic for Republicans until the Black Panthers started open carrying weapons on the streets of Los Angeles (my home town). That scared all the white supremacists into wanting gun control.
So what makes social control good or bad? The most important quality is whether it Empowers people or Disempowers people.
Empowerment: Giving a person more options in life than they had before, without taking any options away.
Disempowerment: Taking away options from a person without consent. Sometimes people will accept losing some options if they are simultaneously given some other options that are better. But if this is done without consent, it is coercive. Like, holding a gun to someone’s head and telling them “I will give you the option of living if you give me all your money” is not Empowerment. If you are forcing someone, it’s not consent.
There are some fringe cases that are also “good”. If a population feels sufficiently threatened by something (like guns) they will see attempts to protect them from guns as “good” social control. Murderers may not like it being illegal to murder people, but most people don’t want to murder or be murdered, so laws restricting the “freedom” to murder people are considered “good” social control.
The Patriot Act was an attempt to exploit the fear that people had against Muslims after the 9/11 bombing. It “protected” people (presumably from Muslims) by turning the USA into a surveillance state. I wasn’t in a position to repeat my 1982 performance because I couldn’t go door to door across America and tell people I was looking forward to wire tapping their phone. But if I could have, then it would have been obvious to America that this was not “good” social control.
Can We Have “Good” Social Control?
The easy answer here is that we already do. Laws that protect us from crimes, set up educational opportunities, and create social safety nets are just a few examples. A country is only as strong as its social controls. In the West it just happens that there are so many bad actors in government that the amount of bad social controls far outweighs the good ones, so Westerners have come to fear social control.
Social Controls in social media protect us from some bad actors. But it doesn’t seem to really stop bad actors. On the other hand, it does seem to block good actors. Like people who might be critical of the government or the social media platforms. The measure of how “good” these social controls are depends on if the “control” allows the group administering the controls to benefit themselves at the expense of others. That’s not the easiest thing to measure, but at some point it becomes so obvious that people start to organise protests.
As you can see from just a few of my previous exploits, I see social control as one of my super powers. But I’d like to think that since I’ve been 16 I’ve only been interested in creating good social controls and killing bad social controls. An example of a “good” social control that I’ve put a lot of work into is creating rules and protections for children in computer games. Because of this zeal, international regulators recognized me as the top expert in the world on this subject back in 2013.
People who don’t want to be regulated will produce all sorts of arguments that regulation = bad and takes away their freedoms. These arguments can have merit. It just depends on the quality of the argument, and if the “freedoms” of a few outweigh the protections of a much larger group (like children). Illka Paananen has been one of the loudest advocates for “freedom”. He’s gotten rich off of the freedom to exploit children and he’d logically like to maintain that freedom. Unfortunately for him, his appeal for freedom is falling flat with consumers who pretty much hate his guts. When Bellular talked about Illka’s letter, his comments section just blew up with people hating on Illka. Even I was like “Damn, that’s brutal.”
Social Control in Games
This is the topic of part 2 in this series (182B). Current F2P game models (not including mine) use social control to force players to spend while simultaneously harming those same consumers. I’ve been working hard to replace those systems with “good” social control systems that actually do make games better for consumers. And, by not charging for those protections, I paradoxically make a lot more money. Since developers just preferred harmful social controls, despite them making less money, for whatever reason this is ideological for them. Thus regulation ultimately became necessary.
I first talked about social control in games back in 2013 in my Systems of Control in F2P paper. If you compare the language in that paper to the Digital Fairness Act, you can see that it was a key resource document used to craft the DFA.