As social and political animals, society itself exists to our perception as the proverbial water exists to the fish. It can be difficult to ascertain its nature because we are suffused with it and it is us. For example, the rebellious teenager looks at society and sees it as a noxious monolith, which at times does indeed behave as one, but under closer inspection, is much more strange than all that. The teenager can be forgiven though, as after all many people never quite advance intellectually beyond that basic perception, or that aspiration anyway.
We see this all the time in the common attitude of: why can't we make so and so do this, or why can't things simply be such and such way and then it will all be fine? This is an attitude that usually crops up when some society-wide change is desired, which flattens the infinitely complex intricacies of social reality in favor of a given individual's field of vision and being.
This is setting aside the more principled stances based upon more complex theories of change, in which a complex array of considerations informs a given plan of action's impact on society. Which, considering the nature of society itself, are considerations that are nevertheless steep simplifications, yet these compressions that are required for navigating the complexities of the social arena, unless one is to become completely overwhelmed and paralyzed by those complexities. Social changes themselves then proceed from the distortions introduced by limited intelligences initiating changes that reflect their limited perspectives and loci of action, which generalize and fan out from a minority and ripple through the greater population.
I suppose though that I should get to the point, and illustrate some of the strange aspects of what society is. From a vantage point of naivety, what motivates people to cohere in the incredibly complex living patterns required to sustain a society like this one? The whip of hunger and the direct threat of violence are good places to start I suppose, but even those supposedly simplistic motivations quickly melt into vast complex historical processes upon further analysis.
Say, with the technologies and wealth of technical knowledge, why can't burdened people simply get up, move somewhere else, stick their shovels into the dirt and produce their own food, and so on? Most people can get beyond this simple question: movement is difficult and expensive in a dense human environment, and the movement itself - along with habitation, food and water, etc. - is subject to a complex web of permissions and obligations which track along lines of class, race, ability, gender, and etc.
Producing food is reliant on the characteristics of a given habitation and its ownership, as well as zoning, climate, soil characteristics, and so on. It takes time to produce food, within which existing food must be obtained, establishing economic, political, and social dependencies that aren't easily departed from. These conditions then imply historical processes that arrive at those points.
Violence too requires a class-based application of force, force that is applied in a way that a majority considers legitimate enough not to intervene or respond in kind, and this legitimacy is constructed through sustained propaganda or else simply maintained through fear. And where does the violence emanate from, and in what direction? Questions like these then reference the historical rise and fall of empires and centers of power.
We've got the coercive part, but society also has to function, and industrial society in particular has to function with a steady 3% annual growth rate, at least theoretically. That's compound growth. We're talking an enormous amount of sustained motivation and dynamism. We are talking now about a delicate balance between coercive motivations and positive motivations in which through individuals' own interests, the numerous aims and desires of a society are propelled forward.
Adam Smith's conception of capitalism then is in one way the attempt of a society to reorganize itself around the falling debris of a disintegrating feudal order. Indeed, very strange. Now I'm going to pivot a bit, but I'm trying to further the general point: society is really strange.
How is it that the absolute figure of an absolute monarch can go bankrupt? Doesn't the absolute monarch have absolute power to do whatever the monarch wants? Another naïve question worth asking, which eventually dispels the notion of an absolute power in itself. Nay, that absolute power is the intersection of a vast web of powers that are crossing at the right points with the right directions and velocities at that moment. And yes, we do still have monarchs, there are just more of them and they've agreed to share power through various elaborate rituals.
Money and banking are not only tools, they are expressions of a distinct human tendency which given enough mass and velocity takes on a life of its own, as distinct from the absolute authority of a dictatorial power. The need to rule and organize is very different from the requirements of talent in trade and enterprise, and these tendencies tend to differentiate and are only fully expressed in individuals and institutions which specialize in them, which then develop dialectically together in need of each other, but distinct from each other and operating apart from each other, and so exert influence and constraint on each other.
The banker would devour the host through exploitative accumulation without some sort of external constraint, while the absolute monarch would freeze society into a petrified husk without the vigorous dynamism of enterprising investment and opportunity. Of course, these extreme states of imbalance are constantly approached, ever more so as a given society becomes more unstable and the various sectors vie to take control.
However, the existence of both the banker and the monarch, their mutual dependence on each other and then the dependence of them on their societies and vice versa (at least in certain points of time) are facts contingent on historical trajectories. What's more, everyone attempting to escape capital in the world system have been forced to revert to the logics of capital to survive; it all has to be done together at this point, another state of affairs worth analyzing.
Now, strangeness is only a reality that remains unexamined or fully judged by the human perception, itself an ideal that will never be fully realized. But we can live alongside the strange, and continue our examination anyway. So it goes.
