"When you have a company or a government or a country full of these people, everybody does whatever stupid thing "the system" tells them to do. And nowhere is anybody responsible for it. From the top to the bottom and back, the buck just gets passed round and round."
Ok, this is a statement of the problem that the series above considers (at some length, but then, I like that kind of thing).
But in the last essay - https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-thresher/ - he makes a handy distinction between different kinds of power. Agency - which is personal power Command - which is power OVER others
I found that this distinction beautifully explains what *exactly* is going on in the scenario you describe. (And it is almost equally true of mobs, as it is of bureaucracies).
When no one has agency, it is harder for them to fend off structures or entities that command them, even when it works against their interests.
However, not having (or not accepting) agency powers does not mean one does not have or exercise power, because certain group entities - eg. a mob, eg. a bureaucracy - can wield, and even weaponise, effective command powers without any participating individual ever being responsible (ie - accepting the responsibility that their *agency powers* would entail).
Of course people always have MORE agency than we believe, if we choose to act on it, but a) everything in our economy, culture, politics, etc, has an interest in helping us ignore this, and b) there are risks, since accepting power entails accepting responsibility, and it is all too human to be risk averse.
no subject
Ok, this is a statement of the problem that the series above considers (at some length, but then, I like that kind of thing).
But in the last essay - https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-thresher/ - he makes a handy distinction between different kinds of power.
Agency - which is personal power
Command - which is power OVER others
I found that this distinction beautifully explains what *exactly* is going on in the scenario you describe. (And it is almost equally true of mobs, as it is of bureaucracies).
When no one has agency, it is harder for them to fend off structures or entities that command them, even when it works against their interests.
However, not having (or not accepting) agency powers does not mean one does not have or exercise power, because certain group entities - eg. a mob, eg. a bureaucracy - can wield, and even weaponise, effective command powers without any participating individual ever being responsible (ie - accepting the responsibility that their *agency powers* would entail).
Of course people always have MORE agency than we believe, if we choose to act on it, but a) everything in our economy, culture, politics, etc, has an interest in helping us ignore this, and b) there are risks, since accepting power entails accepting responsibility, and it is all too human to be risk averse.