style="font-size:15px;"> *
The distinction between context and identity is useful but the line between the two is irrevocably blurred. The situations we experience shape our identities and our identities determine the choices we make in any given situation.27 Even violent coercion relies on the shaping of identities. Law enforcers and soldiers under all regimes are subject to psychological conditioning in preparation for their work and the wider culture in every system legitimises – often glorifies – the coercive function they fulfil.
How do these strategies of control impact our power to choose? The answer is that, in almost every case, they don’t. As long as our behaviour is the result of what we decide, given our character, values, beliefs and circumstances, the power to choose is preserved. Even when circumstances place extreme limits on our options, or when our identity is the product of indoctrination, we still have choices to make. This is true even when we are physically threatened or restrained. When physically coerced, for instance, we have the choice to resist or comply. If we are physically paralysed, we have the choice to refocus our thoughts. In this sense, at least, we are ‘condemned to be free’: we cannot escape our ability to choose.
The capacity to choose is fundamental to any meaningful notion of freedom, yet it is only a starting point – necessary but not sufficient. Precisely because it is possessed by anyone with a choice to make, the ‘freedom to choose’ is extremely limited. Held equally by slaves and slave-owners, it is compatible with the most insidious forms of control. A more profound concept of freedom is needed to answer the deeper question of what qualifies as control and what does not – something that will be developed in Part Three.
Two and a half revolutions: a brief history
The history of our species is bound up with two revolutions of immense significance – the agricultural and the industrial – and the beginnings of a third: the democratic. The agricultural and industrial revolutions transformed the way wealth was produced, distributed and controlled. The democratic revolution threatened to do the same. An understanding of these revolutions sheds light on how control is maintained in the world we see today.
Whether they are armies, state bureaucracies or multinational corporations, large hierarchical structures characterise the modern world, amplifying the dictates of those who control them. Hierarchical social organisation has been around for a long time, but scholarship across numerous fields suggests that for the vast majority of our history we humans lived in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, in highly egalitarian societies, with a substantial degree of gender equality, and no war.28 Hierarchical structures emerged as a product of specific historical conditions.29 About ten thousand years ago, in part because of changes in the climate, communities in certain regions began to make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. This change spread across Asia and Europe from a starting point in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. Although it was labour intensive, the domestication of plants and animals enabled more food to be produced than was needed for the community to survive. The emergence of agriculture and the surplus it produced, though small, proved to be a revolutionary step in human history, a precursor to the written word, social stratification, bureaucracy, cities, states and armies – in short, ‘civilisation’.
The far-reaching effects of agricultural development manifested themselves over thousands of years, transforming what it meant to be human. The cultivation of grains enabled communities to build permanent homes and live together in villages. Populations expanded, and the surplus allowed some members of the community to dedicate their time to activities unrelated to farming. Divisions of labour were established and hierarchical social structures took hold. Six thousand years ago, the invention of the plough, along with other technological developments, led to an even larger surplus, not just in food but in clothes and raw materials.
Slowly but surely, stratified social structures hardened into rigid hierarchies and gender equality was eroded. The struggle for territory and security, as well as the need for internal social cohesion, gave rise to warrior chiefs and high priests, powerful figures within the community who exerted significant control over the surplus. Inequality was reinforced over the generations as wealth was passed from parents to their children. Elites monopolised new forms of knowledge, taking control of decision-making. Roughly five thousand years ago, certain towns became the world’s first cities and soon deep social divisions and centralised government emerged. A military force was required to defend and control the highly unequal distribution of wealth. Power was concentrated in the hands of kings, priests, military leaders and a newly created class of specialists trained in the esoteric arts of writing and book-keeping, both developed to keep records of the many transactions of wealth transfer taking place. Innovations in technology, law, bureaucracy and finance were spurred on by the pressures of warfare and the search by elites for more effective means of governing the surplus. For the next few thousand years, as John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change.’30 Then a few centuries ago, advances in technology and the rapid accumulation of capital set the stage for humanity’s second major revolution.
In the fifteenth century, advances in shipbuilding and navigation brought about the first truly global trading network linking Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, England, Japan, China and India. Key items like spices, silk and wool were sought-after commodities and a form of international currency. Merchants bought cheap and sold dear, moving across continents and amassing great fortunes. Trade in slaves became an integral part of the process as unpaid labour flooded the market with valuable goods. First in England, then across Europe, the system of feudalism, having enjoyed centuries of stability, began to break down. In its place emerged a world of markets, commodities, wage labourers and capitalists.
Under feudalism, the nature, size and distribution of the surplus was relatively clear to all concerned. Peasants could see how much they had produced and how much was taken by the landlord who had contributed no labour to its creation. With the emergence of international trade, open markets and complex financial tools, the scale, diversity and distribution of society’s surplus wealth became far harder to comprehend.31 As divisions of labour became more finely demarcated; as human toil was combined with ever more complex machinery, tightly controlled by a class of managers; and as the role of finance became more central, the processes by which wealth was created were increasingly shrouded in mystery. Adding to the confusion was the fact that labourers were given their share in advance, in the form of wages, before the production process had been completed.32 Built on a thriving slave trade and an army of impoverished workers living and labouring in deplorable conditions, this system was the source of both immense riches and immense human misery. This was the start of the Industrial Revolution: a second profound change in the way our species produced its surplus.
As merchants grew rich, they eagerly sought opportunities for profitable investment. At the same time, peasants who had been thrown off their land constituted a newly formed workforce desperate for a wage. Technological advances brought these two social groups together in a new kind of workplace: the factory. This system of mass production transformed society at a breakneck pace. Yet the complex world of long-distance trade and volatile markets continued to obfuscate the means by which wealth was created and distributed. The market seemed to have its own economic laws, independent of politicians and the state. In reality, the role of government was central. Its coercive hierarchy determined the rules of the market and stood in the wings ready to defend (and often expand) the growing inequalities of wealth, domestically and internationally. The evolution of the modern state is bound up with the fulfilment of this function. For instance, the need to finance astronomically costly wars played a vital role in shaping core institutions such as efficient tax-collecting bureaucracies, bond markets, stock exchanges and central banks.
Political struggles determine whose interests the governing hierarchy upholds and whose
