The Road to Compliance

In the years preceding the third millennium, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, we thought to have witnessed a rather obvious and dramatic demonstration as to which economic-political system works, and which is doomed to fail.

So, the obvious path would have been a victorious march towards freer markets, less regulation, less government intrusion, less technocratic language, less bureaucrats in charge, in a nutshell more freedom!

But three decades later, we find ourselves having arrived at the exact opposite destination.

Among the many signs, new vocabularies filled with strange alphabets have made their way into the language of most organizations, always under the camouflage of scientific pretense.

What is most remarkable is the cult-like nature of this virus, with its repetitive catechism being adopted by its adherents with open arms, without the slightest sign of resistance.

In this regard, Friedrich von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" has a chapter dedicated to this question, with the sinister title “The end of Truth”:

“To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.

Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which make the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.

If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to." (Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter Eleven, The End of Truth, 1944).

In the second part we will try to describe how these compliance measures and this uniformity of minds end up in a system that is inherently unstable.