“It was a machine like no other.” With this sentence Franz Kafka opens his metaphorically true story In the Penal Colony. The “machine” is a device that tatoos social imperatives into the skin of those perceived as violating them.
The Pioneer (the protagonist of the story, acting in the capacity of a sociologist) shows up in the penal colony just in time to witness the tatooing of a miscreant. The soldier who is duty-bound to administer the tatoo is checking and preparing the machine for operation. He personally is opposed to use of the machine, but he has his job to do and has been ordered by his commanding officer to do it.
The miscreant has been sentenced to receive an educative and corrective tatoo that reads: RESPECT YOUR SUPERIORS. The man who was found guilty of violating this social imperative will lie down in the machine under its tatoo needles, and as the tatooed imperative is repeated over and over again the machine will rotate the recipient until his body is completely covered from head to toe with the repetitive sentence (in both meanings of the word).
The object of the tatooing process willingly accepts the tatooed message, knowing full well that the procedure is always fatal – not just to his disposition and personality, but literally. A bowl of mush sits on the base of the machine beneath his head, and at the point of his rotation where his face points downward he can get a mouthful or two of food. Thus the machine feeds him. The tatooing is a lengthy process.
Social norms and imperatives are a potpourri of many influences, including myths, moral codes, ideology, ideals, interests, stereotypes (including the stereotype of human nature), culture, tradition, and human psychology, character, and behavior. These can all be manipulated by propaganda, and their aggregate constitutes prevailing public opinion.
The “machine” – and the ideology that created it – can operate at maximum efficiency only in a total environment. In such an environment, the ideology is all-encompassing and negates any interference, however slight, with its declared aim. This may be why Kafka chose to set his story in a penal colony.
In Kafka’s day, capitalism had not yet been organized into the globalized world-system that is the goal of its proponents today. While capitalism seems to be spreading rapidly over the globe, until all national economies are firmly consolidated into a single world system the nation-state remains the seat of the total environment. Its borders define where its social forces are most strongly exercised. Connecting these geographically defined centers of political and economic power is the capitalist market system called the “free market.” This system has become the “machine”: system as machine is an apt metaphor from the viewpoint of capitalist ideology. The “free market” with its supposedly automatic responses calibrating price to supply and demand is perceived as a mechanism.
The efficiency of the market system is based on the efficiency of the capitalist system of production – a myth based on a myth. If production under this system were truly efficient, it would be able to adjust to market fluctuations rather than descend into crisis. The distribution of commodities in the market system follows money only, and lack of “effective demand” means that needs will go unmet. Myth is essential to ideology. No ideology is complete without its myth.
Martin Luther, who initiated the Reformation in the early 16th century, shared with Thomas Aquinas the view that “the phenomenon of the division of labor and occupations in society” is a “direct consequence of the divine scheme of things” (Weber, Spirit of Capitalism). Luther himself held that “the differentiation of men into classes … established through historical development is a direct result of the divine will.” The dominant class was provided with “sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen” who, inculcated as they were with religious asceticism, “clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.” Members of the dominant class felt “comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of divine providence,” while the dominated class of workers rejoiced in providing blessings for their masters. Myth begets myth, often leading to the emergence of a moral code – in this case, the Protestant work ethic.
Myths and moral codes often suffice to obscure the motives behind events, even to those participating in them. Such is the myth that the middle section of the eastern coast of North America was settled by Protestants fleeing religious persecution. This may in fact have been a factor, but people are more than one thing at once and those first settlers in what later became the United States of America were mostly of the dominant class on their home continent. Together with their servants, apprentices, and indentured workers, they brought with them and transplanted in the New World the Protestant work ethic, which regulated labor on the psychosocial plane. They also brought a material goad to keep workers more securely under their control – one that had been used back home to great effect: “Toward the end of the 17th century, [the Puritans] began the deterrent system of workhouses for the unemployed” (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines).
Myth, when it becomes a moral code, can influence the structure of society and government and even form the basis of its administrative institutions.
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