Change We Can Believe In? The Problem With “Mass” Society

For as long as there have been political leaders, there have been impassioned speeches promising social change. And for as long as such promises have been made, so too have they been broken. I believe we are right to be skeptical of politicians, for it is plainly clear that they are, by and large, incompetent and corrupt.

However, I do not think that blaming individual politicians will ever amount to any qualitative social change. Sure, it’s very easy to blame President Bush for mismanaging the war in Iraq, or damaging the environment, but surely it is not only his fault. Nor do I think that blaming any single political groupis productive; it is clear that Bush’s administration is not the sole cause of social injustice. Instead, we must look for problems within the entire system of social organization – we must get a handle on the totality of complex relations that comprise our society before we can begin to lay blame.

Let us consider North American society. How does it work as a ’system’? Let’s forget about the agency of individuals for just a moment, and think about the structurality of our little experiment in liberal democracy. By what kind of structure is our society organized? I can think of two big ones: capitalism and democracy.

Capitalism is a set of economic principles that governs our lives in a number of ways. For example, under capitalism, people are entitled to the ownership of private property. One person can own a thing, and trade it with another person for an agreed-upon price. In it’s very essence, capitalism provides a simple and fair economic model. Democracy is, like capitalism, simple in its most basic form. It says that decision makers in society should be chosen by, and be responsible to, the people. That is why we have elections. Both democracy and capitalism are, in principle, fair and reasonable models for government and economy. Thus, North American society has fairness and equability built into its very organizational structure.

So then, why are things such a mess?

The blame, I would argue does not necessarily lay with politicians, CEOs, or other corrupt agents within the system. Rather, the problem is one of scale – our society is simply too big, and too complex.

Capitalism in Mass Society

As a system of trade, capitalism seems to work just fine. But, as a society grows in population, the economy becomes much more complex. A hundred years ago, for example, a farmer grew his crops, sold them at the farmers market at practical price, and kept the profits for himself. But over several generations of steady population growth, producers have gradually become centralized – administered through top-down organizational bureaucracies which apply rational scientific management techniques in order to maximize profitability. This is all in congruence with the logic of market capital, and a natural outcome of market competition. The ultimate realization of such centralizing tendencies is the conglomeration of businesses into what we now call corporations, the pinnacles of institutionalized capitalism.  

Corporations obviously get a lot of flak, and are often damned for having some inherently evil character. This is clearly not a fair criticism – corporations have no character. They are, by their very nature, dispassionate legal entities. The point is that, in the context of growing population and mass society, capitalism tends to produce institutions which incorporate, into their very ethos, a policy of unmitigated growth, and above all, the privatization of increasingly sparse natural resources. Herein lies the danger, and the connection to overpopulation. But what about democracy?

Democracy in Mass Society

Democracy demands transparent interaction between policy makers and the public. In mass society, this is increasingly impossible. Because there are more people being governed, there is need for more levels of representation. Representation is a simple idea; your congressman represents your vote, your will, your input. Ultimately, through a complex system of political representation, your vote eventually informs national policy. At least, this is how it ought to work.

In fact, the more levels of representation there are, the more room there is for distortion, corruption, and ultimately misrepresentation.

Invisible Connections

So far we have treated economy and government as separate fields. In fact, this is increasingly not the case. Take for example Kenneth Lay, former CEO of an energy company called Enron. He also served on a number of governmental bodies which regulated (or rather, de -regulated) energy. Thus, an agent withing the system acted on behalf of both government and economy. This is a dangerous overlap of capitalist and democratic principles. Was the deregulation of natural gas markets really in the best interest of the public? Or was it in the best interest of Enron? Perhaps a more salient question: was it simply in the best interest of Kenneth Lay?

That’s ultimately the point I want to make; mass society creates overlapping economic and political structures, and within this overlap, there are opportunities for all new levels of corruption – new avenues for greed. So next time you hear a politician preaching”change”, ask yourself how they plan on solving this problem of overlapping structurality. How can we keep the overarching logic of capitalism in check? How do we ensure that policy makers won’t be bribed into forfeiting what remains of our dwindling natural resources to the unstoppable machinery of capitalism? I’m not sure if there is a solution. I’m sorry for sounding bleak, but I think the reason for all of it is painfully simple – our society is too big.

The corruption and complicity of government officials with the pressures of corporate power is generally symptomatic of mass society. It will persist for as long as our society is regarded as a mass. All of the problems facing the world today are problems of human scale.