The loose cohering of interests which characterize a capitalist society also accounts for the strange autocratic purgatory we find ourselves in.
Right-behavior has been snapped into place through a mixture of legal codification, cultural internalization, and informal pressures exerted by multiple sectors of society cohering together and influencing each other.
Every sector of society is set against each other in interest, while at the same time they are bound together to make each other work, or capital descends like a ghost, attracted to the disturbance, to correct it.
What is meant by this? No there is no dictator (yet) leering through the two-way monitor. But make a very minor ruckus in the suburbs and see how free you are. How strange it is, to sit in the still air, listening to the neighborhood and contemplating free possibility and free movement, yet at the same time aware that simply turning up an amplifier and opening the window could lead to descending clubs!
The more noise and "disorder" you beget - and the more predetermined you are to be under suspicion in the first place - the more quickly the state shows up to your door to quiet you down and set you back in place, and that is after the household or neighborhood attempts to do it itself through social pressure and sanction.
That sudden fire that breaks out in the belly, that howling anxiety that bears witness to a growing chaos, must be put out at any cost. And so the family preemptively puts out its fires, and when that fails, the police, who anxiously cruise the streets searching for disorder, put out the fires in their own bellies and make the disorder orderly again.
And fires that break out in the police are quickly put out within the department, or else some internal affairs department or government regulator descends to put out the fires in their own bellies. And when the fires of the regulators break out, some financial institution or committee descends to put out the fire in their own bellies, and enforce fiscal responsibility, and so on.
And much like in the forests of the west, all those fires being constantly put out contributes to the development of choking undergrowth, ready to go up in flame en masse when conditions allow.
It isn't fire and chaos that is categorically snuffed out. There is always chaos, and there is always fire, but these things are marshalled in a single direction: consumption and dissolution for the powerless, and energy and constitution for the powerful.
The burning always has consequences, but those consequences become distributed in unique patterns of their own, patterns which tighten all the more that controls on the burn tighten.
I'm getting more vague and obscure as the post goes on, I know. The rest is ground I'll have to cover and flesh out at another time.
