There is a tendency in human nature to over-attribute agency to regularities or apparent irregularities of nature. This is not necessarily maladaptive; if you lived in ancient Minoan Greece, attributing the capricious nature of weather to the temper of some powerful yet jealous agent would strongly curb the idea that you might control the weather, if only you could force everyone to work with you on that project. No, Zeus and Poseidon are beings of greater station than your own, and you are best to give them due reverence and otherwise avoid their attention. The gods of ancient societies and the gods of the Lovecraftian mythos occupy that same space of horror in the psyche, the realization that we are as dust in the wind, and as readily tossed about by the inexorable cosmos. There may be the occasional deposition of a Titan by his offspring, or the thwarting of a divine plan by a Prometheus, but more often than not to gain the attention of the gods is to secure your eternal doom.

The tendency of over-attributing agency is not any less a feature of our thought and language. Indeed, at times the attribution of agency is a key construct of law (e.g. corporations are legally “persons”). There abounds in the mind of the uninitiated the notion that society is nothing but the design of intelligences, which is more evocative the reasoning we identify with William Paley’s argument for intelligent design than an ostensibly post-Darwinian world. In just the way we (think we) understand the Copernican Revolution to have upset man’s cosmology, it is the province of a very few who have completely imbibed the lesson of Darwin. The Darwinian Revolution, if we are to give it a name, first revealed that man as a creature is the product of accidental forces, but he yet holds to his notion that, at the very least, society, and the parts of its operation, is yet the product of intelligent design, even if that intelligence is only at the level of mere humans.

The form of society, however, in just the same way that the form of the human body is unplanned, the product of a ruthless evolutionary logic, is not the product of intelligence. Conspiracy, i.e. the coordination of individuals for the achieving of goals, is the exception. Mass social movements are largely the product of material conditions which no individual or group has deigned to impose. The notion that the state eliminates the war of all against all is a pretty fiction, a modern Noble Lie. We have, for the most part, swept the fact of competition and conflict under the rug. The only thing that is different between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is merely that, instead of conflicts being (always) resolved by the violent destruction of all but one of the contesting parties, we have developed norms for conflict resolution which are less destructive and allow for the future possibility of production.

This is a preface for our feature this week at Social Matter. We intend to explore that part of the Cathedral called the Social Justice Industrial Complex. Such a Complex, we note, is by and large the result of impersonal, social evolutionary forces. The alignment of personal interests into such a collective is the result of decades of small squabbles and interpersonal exchange; the accretion of such arrangements between individuals and groups is the result of benefits to cooperation. There is nothing more mysterious here going on than the fact that small conspiracies take place all the time, and given a shared agenda derived through the development/manufacturing of consensus, the spontaneous arrangement of forces to push such an agenda on other groups is quite ordinary.

The apparently opposed theories (rather, the umbrella of theories each refers to) of Capitalism and Marxism are agreed on a fundamental premise: that order in society is the result of impersonal conditions which put individuals and groups in conflict with each other, forcing them to resolve those conflicts through whatever available means, be those discussion, law, politics, or war. The generation of a Complex was only a matter of time. Between the machinations of academia and activists/NGOs to distort and destroy the cultural elements perceived to be the fundamental grounds of oppression, a media which can rapidly subsume any and all news and filter it through the exceedingly narrow and stringent orthodoxy of liberal belief politics, and the expansion of a new digital territory, a conflict was inevitable. Indeed, the very conflict is something the Complex feeds off of and gains more power from, producing a positive feedback loop of ever-greater efforts at uncovering persecution and provoking insufficiently politicized groups into conflict. As time goes on, the conflict will increase in velocity and intensity, and we will see the numerous, but as yet not explicitly allied groups, band together in increasingly obvious and explicit ways. That is just how a war takes place, after all.

To perceive the group dynamics at work which is the Complex is first to distinguish between those forms of cooperation which are and are not taking place. Is there some evil mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows? No. The impetus in this case is nothing but the aggregation of personal interests aligned to a collective interest. The actions taken by these individuals are spontaneous, in the sense that the actions taken by soldiers on the battlefield are spontaneous, but behind this spontaneity the order is derived of the motivation which we variously call ideology, purpose, or religion. There is less agency at work in the camp of the Social Justice Industrial Complex than might be presumed from a precursory glance, reflecting that human tendency towards over-attribution of agency. No less, though, are we able to dismiss the notion of an agenda taking place; it is no grand conspiracy, but rather, very small conspiracies united by a vision of utopia which sees all present social structures as oppressions to be destroyed, the far side of which shall inevitably emerge their egalitarian eschaton.