Morality vs. Power and Control

Kaczynski makes an observation that deserves more attention than its source usually permits: morality in small-scale societies functions as a conflict-prevention device (the Bushmen's territorial foraging rights), while morality in technological societies functions as a control-facilitation device (property law that lets corporations accumulate dominance). The mechanism is identical — shared rules enforced by social pressure — but the vector reverses completely. Rifkin, approaching from the opposite direction, traces the same inversion through theology: the Good Samaritan's compassion is instrumentalized the moment it becomes a ticket to heaven, just as Kant's categorical imperative strips moral feeling from moral action to make it administrable. The pattern is that every system of power eventually captures the moral language meant to constrain it, not by abolishing morality but by scaling it past the point where its original function — preventing harm between people who can see each other — still operates. What Turkle documents with teenagers negotiating phone-free dinners is the Bushmen's problem in miniature: morality that works is local, concrete, and relational. The moment you abstract it into a universal principle, it becomes available to whoever controls the abstraction.