{"id":41502,"date":"2018-12-10T09:38:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T14:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41502"},"modified":"2018-12-10T09:49:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T14:49:08","slug":"the-conflicting-forces-of-modernism-kafka-and-kierkegaard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41502","title":{"rendered":"The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard<\/a><\/h3>\n

We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and economic might of the central state.<\/i><\/p>\n

In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score”<\/a> (May 7, 2018), I wrote about Kafka’s vision of a bureaucratic nightmare emerging in China’s “Social Credit Score.”<\/p>\n

The idea here is the central state sets up a vast, pervasive surveillance system to monitor all its citizens,<\/b> and assigns a social score to each citizen based on his\/her compliance with regulations and social norms as defined by the state.<\/p>\n

In Kafka’s nightmarish novels, an opaque, impenetrable and impersonalized bureaucracy controls the social and economic structures of everyday life.<\/p>\n

China’s system is based on a social score, but one’s social score has enormous economic consequences: the citizen with a low score can be denied rights to travel, his\/her children can be denied access to educational opportunities and so on.<\/p>\n

As I noted, there doesn’t appear to be a legal process for challenging one’s low social score, or much transparency on the various violations and weighting of violations that go into calculating each individual’s score.<\/p>\n

I’ve often written about the difference between force and power:<\/b> as per Edward Luttwak, force (coercion) is costly and clumsy, while power works via persuasion, grudging or otherwise.<\/p>\n

China is attempting to create a system that is extremely coercive (a low score generates severe punishments) but also seeks to internalize the social scoring system: no authority figure is required to force individuals to comply; each individual internalizes the rules and modifies their own behavior accordingly.<\/p>\n

This aligns with China’s historic reliance on internalized social norms to control its vast populace.<\/b> Even in the Song Dynasty (960 AD to 1279 AD), the central state relied on the internalized social norms of Confucian values to “order society” with minimal coercion.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Conflicting Forces of Modernism: Kafka and Kierkegaard We seem to be heading into a confrontation between the two forces of Modernism: the primacy of the individual versus the increasing technological and economic might of the central state. In Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score” (May 7, 2018), I wrote about Kafka’s vision of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[11055,1670,127,1248,4376,11679,5570,2601,587,20060],"class_list":["post-41502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-central-state","tag-centralization","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-individualism","tag-kafka","tag-kierkegaard","tag-mass-surveillance","tag-modernism","tag-of-two-minds","tag-social-credit-score"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41503,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41502\/revisions\/41503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}