Or: On Simplification.
Those who wish to control you must first simplify you.
To control a person, you must be able to predict a person. You must be able to predict their desires as well as their reactions and responses - by knowing what a person will react to, and how they will react, is how you come to direct their behavior through your own cues.
The problem, for those seeking control of a human being, is that any given human being is too complex to be predicted without first being paid a great deal of personal attention. You must know a person to predict them. And to know them, generally, takes quite a lot of time and energy. Years; decades of work, even. Anything less is a guess. Humans have all these layers of experiences, memories, scars, joys, philosophies, morals, and other psychological phenomena that muddy the waters for any potential tyrant. Give one person an order and they will seek to please you; give another an order and they will do the opposite to spite you; a third will follow your command to the letter in a way which exposes your own shortsightedness; a fourth will ignore you altogether.
The would-be controller knows this; people are chaotic, cunning, unpredictable, and generally a lot of trouble without all the legwork to get to know them. Threats of violence, starvation, isolation, and death bring a handful into line, and set the rest on a path to behead you. This is the perennial problem for all tyrants, from the abusive spouse to the imperial dictator. Even the state, perhaps the most hypothetically benign of overlords, must predict and control the people within its borders.
The solution of the would-be oppressor is straightforward: simplify the would-be oppressed.
The oppressor, the abuser, the tyrant, the state - all abide by the same tactic. They will strip you of your layers, whittle down your facets, shrink you in conceptual (if not physical) space until you fit neatly into a labeled shoebox. They will start by simplifying you in their minds, then simplify you in rules and laws, then finally, and most insidiously, simplify you in your own self.
There is a process to this simplification. It is not necessarily a linear process, though it has a necessary foundational step, described below.
The zeroth step, the baseline of the simplification strategy, is itself deviously simple: the tyrant simply chooses not to see the soon-to-be tyrannized as human. Humans often struggle to understand the true depth and complexity of one another - there is even a word, "sonder", for when this understanding hits you in a sudden moment of clarity - but all of us understand on a sub-intellectual level that if we are deeply complex, others must be as well. Complexity is a fundamental characteristic of humanity. Therefore, the tyrant must cease to understand their fellows as human.
This is step zero rather than step one because in itself, nothing truly comes of this; you can view people as objects from birth until death and never act on it in any meaningful way. It is likely to come out in some way or another, true, unless you become very good at hiding this sort of evilness; but to hide it, essentially, means to act as though human beings are human beings. One might even find a person who sees their fellows as objects, but treats objects with such respect and regard as to be indistinguishable from the average person.
But I digress. The tyrant must, before anything else, deny the humanity of another in their own mind before any action can be taken. Then the strategy of simplification follows.
The first step is willful ignorance: the tyrant simply ignores the existence of any layer, any facet, which has no chance of being properly simplified until such a time when it is proven to be simplifiable. Though I am loath to invoke the specter of capitalism, it provides a stellar example - that which has monetary value, in profit or cost, remains within the capitalist worldview. That which does not directly result in changes to the bottom line are ignored outright. Income, taxes, commodities, spending habits, these exist; environmental damage, destruction of community, these do not.
The forest engineers of early modern Germany did much the same with their natural resources. Trees for lumber existed; the other 90% of the ecosystem did not. Ecosystems are unto human beings in their complexity, and it was much easier for the German government to simply imagine that a forest was only the trees that could provide good construction materials. The consequences of this view proved the folly of the simplification strategy, but we will return to that later.
Free from these inconvenient truths, the tyrant may act without concern for them.
The second step is isolation; human beings do not exist self-contained. To say that no person is whole on their own flies in the face of accepted wisdom, yet who are we without our communities to support us? We exist without relationship to others, but we are less than our best, less than ourselves, when we are alone. Existence is not all there is to a person.
Communities make us more complex; connection makes us more complex. These interrelationships add the complexity of other human beings to our already maddeningly untameable complexity. The tyrant knows this, and so strips the would-be controlled of their relations.
You see this often with abusive romantic partners. It is "textbook", in fact; denying the target of abuse access to friends, family, and any other interpersonal relationship that has not been pre-approved by the abuser, should any exist at all - few signs of abuse are more obvious than this. Cult leaders, famously, are equally unsubtle in employing this tactic at scale. The non-believers are only holding you back, they say. Your loyalty is to the tyrant and no other.
You may see this in more insidious and subtle ways than the examples presented. Take the American conversation about "third spaces", and the lack there-of; I have generous critiques of this framing, but at heart the conversation is a cry for help toward the feeling of disconnection between one American and another. Americans are so lonely, but rarely realize the cause for this loneliness.This loneliness works in the tyrant's favor. From abusive spouse to cult leader to state apparatus to would-be dictator, all tyrants benefit from this loneliness. What need would they see to change it?
Isolation from others is the most obvious manifestation of this step and bears mentioning on its own, but in truth, it is a manifestation of a more general isolation: the isolation of the mind. Information is a tricky thing for the oppressor; to learn new things may give the oppressed ideas, and ideas can lead to all sorts of unpredictable behaviors. Friends and loved ones are second opinions, people with worldviews other than the tyrant who may be able to feed the tyrannized new, unpredictable, uncontrollable ideas. These loving relationships are also power, which is a threat to the tyrant's control; an enemy army or insurgency with the legitimate power to undermine the careful simplification by the oppressor.
Dangerous ideas come from many places, however, and controlling the flow of information is vital to the success of the abuser, no matter how short-lived. When the state or the dictator simplifies the knowledge access of their people, it is called propaganda.
There is a variation on this form of simplification, which is known by the term "gaslighting" in psychiatric circles - a repeated, systematic process of causing one to question their confidence in their own memory and perception. By this process, the tyrant removes that last agent that can oppose their views - the oppressed themselves. Unable to rely on their own reality, the oppressed can only turn to the tyrant for confidence in understanding and interpreting perceptions of reality. In other words, the intent is not simply to restrict the perceptions and knowledge of the tyrannized, but to erode the trust of the tyrannized in any knowledge and interpretation of reality not supplied by the tyrant.
The third step is fear. The would-be tyrannized fear the wrath of the tyrant. This need not be their only feelings toward the tyrant; abused spouses often do indeed love their abusers, at least for a time; cultists admire their cult leaders; and so on. But fear will always play a part. The tyrant threatens: "Obey me, or else." Or else, what? Or else the tyrant will beat you, will starve you, will explode into a rage and there is no telling what he will do. Or else you will be alone, no one will love you, no one will care. Or else the tyrant will kill you. Or else… Perhaps the rest is left unsaid. The best horror writers know the individual imagination can conjure atrocities greater than the most powerful tyrant could ever employ.
A small aside about fear: fear, like anger and sorrow, has an undue reputation in the culture of my birth. They are feelings one must "never feel." They are "bad" emotions, painful emotions. Notice this simplification - we all feel a great many emotions, perhaps more than we can name. To insist that certain emotions are undeserving of being felt is to simplify you. Americans do not often question this; avoidance of "negative emotions" is so essential to the American worldview that even adopted philosophies from the other side of the planet must be contorted to fit the lens (I speak in particular of American Buddhists, but my critiques of them, again, must be saved for a different essay).
To deny themselves fear does not imply that Americans are particularly courageous. Rather, if one never learns to feel fear, one never learns to confront it; one never learns not to listen to it. Fear takes the wheel all too easily. I mention this to illustrate a particular quirk of American cultural norms which lends itself to being abused and tyrannized. That said, abuse and tyranny are not unique to Americans, and so let us return to a more general discussion about fear.
One can only feel fear about things that have not yet happened. Consider: if a bee lands on your arm, you may fear that it will sting you. If the bee then stings you, you might feel several things - pain, annoyance - but you will cease to be afraid that the bee will sting. In other situations, you may be afraid of a second attack; yet the bee cannot sting you again, for it is well known that to sting is suicide for a humble bee, unlike their vespidaen cousins.
Thus, the tyrant instills fear in the tyrannized through threat of what may happen, definitionally. The tyrant need not have the means or even the fortitude to act on their threats, they only need to convince the tyrannized that the probable outcome of disobedience is worse than the known outcome of obedience. A tyrant may enact the worst abuses imaginable upon the obedient tyrannized so long as the tyrannized are convinced the only alternative is unimaginable abuses.
It is said that the masses hand the reins to tyrants of their own volition, because they fear the alternative. But what power does the tyrant have before the reins are handed to him?
The tyrant, the abuser, the state, the dictator, they are as likely as not to act on their threats. The likelihood of action seems to rise as the scale of abuse rises - the abusive spouse may, in truth, be a sniveling coward who is nothing but bluster; the dictator, far removed from emotional connection to the abused, will put thousands to the sword if it sways the millions. This is because the dictator sees the masses as just that - a mass. The tyrannized millions are but one faceless shape, each individual simplified down to a single drop of water in a river. Is taming rivers not what emperors do? What is it to him that a few bucketfuls are lost in the changing of the water's course?
The fourth step is often labeled "control." This label is true, and perhaps the most succinct way to describe the variety of forms it takes, though it seems less than descriptive when all elements of the tyrant's playbook are meant to control you.
It is here you will find a miscellany of behaviors meant to pull the reigns of your life into the tyrant's grip. Spying is one - a spouse will check your phone and demand to know your exact plans, while a dictator will gather that information from the phone lines or a cadre of disguised men. Both may hide cameras; the point is to know all there is to know about you for the sake of predicting or limiting your behavior. Exploitation is another - demanding control of your bank account, your home, your tools, or demanding you perform labor so that you are too tired and too busy and too drained of resources to fight back or seek help (while the tyrant, of course, stays refreshed on the fruits of your labors - all the better to reserve that energy in order to exploit you more).
You will find many more such behaviors on this list, but we have no need to explore them all point-by-point. You get the picture.
A note: when you reach a certain scale of society, the tyrant will call this whole process "order." You will often hear from authoritarians that they have a vested interest in imposing "law and order" for the sake of the people's safety and well-being, and they will repeat this phrasing while actively skirting the law and undermining the social order. Democratic states, too, valorize "order" as quintessential to a functioning society. Order is sometimes a great asset - to be organized is a valuable quality, and to have an orderly process can make a difficult task easy to perform.
This is not the "order" to which the tyrant refers. The tyrant's definition of "order" may include such things (and often does, due to its inherent simplification of reality), but the fundamental meaning of "order" is obedience to the tyrant's rules. Such orderliness will inevitably be pedestaled as a societal virtue, equating orderliness with righteousness and success. Obedience to the rules (to the law) is saintly, and thus disobedience is sin; to commit crimes - to behave outside the simplification of the tyrant - is to be branded a sort of sinner called a criminal, a person who will be thereafter treated with suspicion and revulsion for their transgression against the morality of law.
This is a memetic self-taming of the tyrannized; for the tyrannized to police their own behavior is the goal of any tyrant, as it frees up the tyrant's time and resources to do whatever else it is they do. In case it needs to be said: rules are not inherently good, law is not morality, and obedience is not virtue. Rule-breakers are not inherently evil, and criminality is not inherently sinful.
See the man who is imprisoned for feeding the hungry, while the tyrant allows hunger to exist. See the priest who is jailed for housing the unhoused in his own church, while the tyrant allows the people to go unhoused. Such examples should make obvious the disconnect between law and morality.
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You may take from this essay that the tyrant does not value complexity, but this is far from the truth. The tyrant only understands complexity as a barrier between the controller and the controlled; chaos protects. Therefore, while he does all he can to strip his targets of their complexity, simplify them down to the raw and atomize the rest, the cunning tyrant - which, to be clear, is not all of them - erects walls of increasing complexity around himself.
Consider the most hypothetically benign of overlords: the state. So far I have only mentioned the state here and there, but in truth any state makes use of all the steps of simplification to construct its rule. The state simplifies its citizens primarily for tax revenue; citizens are broken down into demographic and geographic components that the state deems important, ignoring all else, so that the state can predict its projected tax revenue with some accuracy. The state simplifies its citizens' behavior through threats - what the anarchist crowd calls "the monopoly of violence," or in other words, the state can do more harm to you than you can do to it and you can't say otherwise. Your agency is restricted by the state's laws, not only in your own ability to enact violence, but also in your ability to move, to act toward your neighbors, to use the land.
The state cloaks itself in layers of bureaucracy and law. It weaves a complex web of promises, demands, and conditionals, ostensibly for the good of the governed but in reality to protect the state. A simple state would be simple to overthrow; a state ornamented with ordinances, cocooned in red tape, becomes a near-impossibility to navigate. How can you fight back against a state you can't even find, lost as it is in labyrinthine paperwork? A class of specialists, called lawyers, arises solely to interpret and understand the web of law like the oracles of old interpreting the web of fate. Law may as well be fate to the citizen of the bureaucratic state, for it is to the layman as cryptic, as arbitrary, as immutable, and as lethally consequential as the will of the gods.
This is how the tyrant understands complexity: despite what you have been told all your life, despite how it shall be framed below, the tyrant knows complexity to be armor and shield against attack. This is why they must deny you complexity. This is why they must simplify you, yet complexify themselves. For all the bluster about "order", which we touched on before and will touch on again, it is a mere excuse. Complexity protects. Simplification makes vulnerable.
You have read this far, likely with a sense of revulsion, with only one horror after another to look forward to. It is time for that to change. Should you find yourself in the grip of the tyrant, the cult leader, the abuser, what can you do? The fundamental rule is simple.
Embrace complexity. Embrace chaos.
I earlier wrote on how "order" is but simplification and control. It is opposed conceptually to chaos, that which is outside control - by definition, that which is complex. The philosophers of the orderly look upon their own confusion with disgust; they declare their own misunderstanding unacceptable and seek not to understand the world as it is, but to carve it away until they can understand the universe as they are. Proponents of the orderly paradigm have spent centuries convincing you that "order" is akin to "rightness," that God himself hath decreed an orderly universe as Goodness Incarnate.
Do not be fooled. If God made the cosmos, she is no orderly watchmaker. She is the home chemist or gardener, her universe an experiment of the sort where one says "How exciting, that we could not guess the result. Let us put the pieces together, step back, and see what happens." One hopes she wore her safety goggles.
Chaos is not the inherent descent into horror that priests of order sermonize against. Chaos is the mere complexity of being alive, fundamental to our being classed as living. Chaos is being outside the ken of the small-minded; chaos is that which one must be forced to grow to understand. Chaos is the difficulty of being labeled or neatly divided.
It is the inability to be simplified. It is to be outside of another's control. It is to be, as some say, ungovernable.
Do you remember the German foresters? They return now: the German state simplified the forest down to timber, down to a usable, knowable, easily-ordered resource; worse still, reduced the forest down to a number representing tonnage of wood for ships and houses and so forth. They carved away the rest, ignored undergrowth and "unusable" trees as worthless, leaving only straight lines of pure hardwood. Do you know what happened? You can probably guess.
The forest died. The trees, the hardwood the state sought to maximize, withered. Within a few generations of trees the forest produced nothing. What plants and animals were thought to be meaningless fluff, unworthy of an economic spreadsheet, were the vital organs of the whole ecosystem. Simplifying the forest first caused the forest to cease being a forest; then the forest ceased being, altogether.
The forest cannot be simplified. The forest is chaos.
To embrace chaos is to know that you are a forest. You contain uncountable facets. To embrace chaos is to keep those facets from being polished away from the outside. It is to be too many things to define. It is to frustrate label-makers, to ensure that there are never boxes into which you will satisfyingly fit. To embrace chaos is to recognize this in others; always be on your guard against the impulse to simplify others for your own convenience. To embrace chaos is to live your totality, to value it when it is devalued by the tyrant, to know your facets when the tyrant denies them.
To embrace chaos is to invest yourself across space and time so fully that the ordermongers can never find your entirety. To embrace chaos is to be enmeshed in a web of your peers, your elders, your descendents of mind as well as blood - community beyond the dictates and observations of the tyrants. To embrace chaos is to build knots of connections so Gordian that the tyrant cannot even cut the ties, to string yourself to so much that the tyrant cannot find all the threads, to enmesh yourself in so much it sets the tyrant's head spinning.
It is simple to say. It is another thing to do. Community and complexity come naturally but do not always come easily. It is to the benefit of the ordermonger to make you crave simplicity. The living do not like to expend unnecessary energy; this coded into most of us. We would sooner laze in the shade than dance in the sun; we would sooner know nothing than challenge ourselves. This is simple conservation of energy.
So, we must see chaos as necessary energy. Acts of chaos, acts of complexification, are vital not only in that they are the animating power that knocks the tyrant from the throne, but vital in that they are one and the same with being alive.
Be complex. Embrace chaos.