Collective rationalization has imprisoned the individual

The argument

We devise societal institutions to make our lives simpler, make processes more efficient and preserve our values. These technological, organizational and efficiency institutions are a direct product of our wisdom and rationalization, but they are ultimately imprisoning us. In rationalized populations, a capitalist system emerges through which every element of society is measured through the lens of returns on investment. While societies streamline labor and improve decision-making, they pursue efficiency for efficiency’s sake. In the pursuit of maximum returns on investment, values fall by the wayside and the individual is trapped in the machine of efficiency. This is visible in the development of modern societies. When humans developed from hunter-gatherer societies to pastoral societies in which rationality played a central role in decision making and efficiency was prioritized, food surpluses resulted in the emergence of different economic classes. Along with the emergence of economic classes came slavery, patriarchy and other repressive organs in society.

Context

Human rationality and knowledge lead to the development of societal institutions designed to make our lives better. These institutions have become prisons within which we are trapped.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument identifies a cost of rationalisation and then promotes it to a definition. Its own opening concedes what defeats the move: institutions were devised to simplify life, make processes more efficient and preserve values, which are goods, and the same institutions that impose efficiency also supply literacy, medicine, courts and the vocabulary in which the critique is written. A prison is an institution whose defining purpose is confinement; using the word for any structure that constrains empties it, since every arrangement that enables anything also forecloses something. The historical claim likewise proves less than it needs to. If class, slavery and patriarchy appeared alongside surplus and settlement, that dates particular oppressive arrangements to particular societies rather than to society as such — hunter-gatherer bands were societies too, so the argument implicitly treats the earlier form as unimprisoned and thereby contradicts its general definition. The capitalist framing narrows the case further: measuring everything by return on investment belongs to one economic system, not to sociality, so on the argument's own terms societies organised otherwise would not be prisons. That leaves a claim about a specific historical formation, which is a criticism of modern capitalist society rather than an account of what society is.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise concedes that institutions were built to simplify life and preserve values, so it identifies a side-effect of rationalisation rather than establishing confinement as what society is. [Rejecting P2] Dating class, slavery and patriarchy to the arrival of surplus locates them in particular societies, not in society as such — hunter-gatherer bands were societies too — so the historical sequence does not support the general definition.

Framing

Capitalism is an unavoidable product of organized society. Once capitalism and the establishment of economic classes occurs, the individual becomes imprisoned by the machine and their value is reducible to a return on investment.