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# non-fiction, 2025-03-21
I might have thought about this many years ago. An ordinary school day in China begins with students gathering in the stadium, running circles in units resembling the medieval foot soldiers’ formation. Occasionally there would be one or two people outside the arena, peering in with the kind of look you’d have when observing ducks in a pond. It was while speculating their thoughts, I was struck by how peculiar it was for hundreds of people doing such mindless activity.
I sensed the presence of a structure – or rather, the collective imagination of a structure that pushed us into these invisible rectangular boxes. Of all the forces that surrounded us, this one was particularly interesting to me. And it was precisely because nobody else seemed to notice it, or care about it for that matter. The knowing or not-knowing of purpose was irrelevant. It functioned as autonomous machinery with such efficiency and grace.
It might be, in a homogeneous group, we tend to follow the rules. But later in life, after spending a great deal of time wrestling with my day-to-day decisions, I came to realize the “structure” is not just a symptom specific to the crowd, but a more general pattern of thinking.
In my theory, it is a type of thinking that desires nothing but structural stability. And it achieves that by both describing and prescribing the reality. The first part builds a narrative, provides explanations to how things come to be. The second part gives instructions, moves things in harmony with the narration. Two parts individually are not very powerful – narration, like every other scientific theory and dogmatic belief we’ve had, can be overruled by a competitor; actions, happening in the moment, are ephemeral and limited in impact. But together, their fusion creates a transformative function that converges myriads of experiences to one fixed point, a black hole that attracts possibilities of worlds into one center. When all is settled, reality will be on its new orbit, irrevocably different from before.
And it does explain why many things change so little through the course of our life:
(1) Identity emerges as an abstract personality trait to summarize a person’s behavior. We often perceive it as an integral part of the Self, and this perception is continuously enhanced each time we do and don’t do things based on the archetype.
(2) Social interaction between acquaintances is formed when we make a first impression and role-play accordingly. This initial dynamics repeats itself time over time in vastly different situations. Even if one party is open for a change, he is still forced to play along if the other parties assume their pre-existing roles. And vice versa, when we act in the role, other participants conform to complete the cycle.
(3) Motives play a huge part in orienting our life, and they can be fabricated quite easily. Consider the statement “I do A(ction) because of M(otive)”. Many different actions can satisfy an existing motive, and many motives can rationalize an existing action. Their pairing is a choice, one that is far from voluntary. (3.1) A false action, nonetheless, channels, diverts and controls the underlying desire. Desire then loses the capability to motivate new ideas, much like how modern consumers paralyze themselves in endless purchasing. (3.2) A false motive, relentlessly optimizes action within its measurement, until the action becomes overfitted for one purpose only. Many have written about this in the context of corporate management.
(4) Power conventionally stems from resource disparity. Yet in abusive relationships or primitive oligarchies, dominance often relies on fictitious advantages validated solely through submission – e.g. racial hierarchies, divine mandates.
(5) Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory investigates the process of social hierarchies being transmitted from generation to generation. One of the key components is education, which is exactly the “describe-and-prescribe” part of a society.
(*) There are behaviors being part of more complex systems that can’t be explained this way. But the point remains that it shouldn’t be considered the natural or default state for things to be stationary, motionless. There are always some sort of hidden forces behind the scene.
Structural stability is not inherently bad. I have always loved consciously building structures into my life. They are the sources of mental security that keeps me afloat in days good or bad. What concerns me, is the proportion between effort required to grow and dismantle structures. Too easy to break and we don’t have much stability. Too easy to build and we quickly sink into a mess of self-imprisonment. For many of us, the situation leans more towards the latter. Beneath hierarchies of our behavior, trivial psychological cues can seed self-ballooning ideas. And those ideas continue to influence us day after day, so fundamentally as to be inseparable from the reality they result in.
The picture of humanity, thus involves the constant labor to comprehend, navigate and resist the invisible orbits of all subjects. For me, it all echoes back to David Graeber’s propelling statement: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Thank J for proofreading this.