Commoners and how they are coerced

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Heather Marsh

Part of a series, Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Posts about our roles, relationships and governance. No article in this section is
meant to stand alone, there will be a lot more coming soon that will clarify the current posts.

Commoners, the middle class, the peasants, the workers, the lumpenproles, the rabble, the hoi polloi
or as Nietzsche so kindly described them, the superfluous ones, by any name, every society must
have a large segment that are either locked into or content to make up the stable majority. Most
people are now commoners for the majority of their participation in society as no one has the time to
be at an elite level of participation in more than one system and few have time or ability to be elite at
any. Keeping this large segment roughly equivalent in all obvious measures was key to peace and
solidarity. Where significant difference among them occurs there is a threat of what is recognized as
deep societal division or civil war. These elements are always in place in society but they are only
recognized as such when they occur among the common majority.
Keeping this group distracted or content was always essential, as seen by political appeals exclusively
to the middle class, a monarchys concern for the mood of the peasantry or medias focus solidly on
the masses. If roused, this group becomes a mob and could destroy an entire society by force of
numbers or at least would need extreme repressive force to contain them. At many times and places in
history this group has been executed in large numbers as they resisted change. At other times they
have managed to slow or even divert change by their opposition. When controlled, this group is used
as a club to enforce the prevailing oligarchy and their interests and block any attempts at change.
During revolutions they can be swayed to follow a new demagogue and topple the existing one. This
is not a group that ever initiates radical change. Commoners are the 99.99% that follow in any given
system. They do not spend a great deal of time questioning the workings of society, they just get on
with their lives within it. When change occurs they resist and are persuaded or resist and are crushed.
During times of peace, this group is the mutually cooperative and sharing society. Their world is built
on an ease of communication, a presumption of equality. They are the most likely to be content
members of society as it is designed for them and they are comfortable and included in it. They are
able to work co-operatively and share commons property easily. They are seldom inclusive of any not
equal to them and are coerced to believe anything not their equal is wrong. If they work in fields then
field work is invariably presented as the most real or valuable work, if they aspire to work in other
areas those are presented as most desirable, even labeled as the only professions. Work they dont
understand is considered lazy and self-indulgent. They provide stability by a coercive peer pressure on
what society should consider normal. Although they usually resent being called average or common,
their normalcy is presented to them as a virtue above any diversity.
A great deal of effort is spent in creating solidarity and removing diversity in this group, largely by
instilling common goals and fears. A goal of aspiring to the upper class motivates them to uphold the

upper class and a fear of the outcasts motivates them to persecute the enemies of the current
oligarchy. Although they are frequently called the middle class, commoners are not middle as much
as they are separate. They live in a society designed for their own coercion. Laws, governance,
education and media are all intended to influence this block of people to move in the direction they are
pointed. Those called upper and lower classes are really just those outside the realm of this coercion
and in many ways they have more in common with each other than they have in common with the
coerced.
Busywork, stress and incessant seductive coercion from all societal institutions keeps this majority
from looking outside the paradigm they are reacting within. They are taught to mistrust the elite who
have greater knowledge than them and the DunningKruger effect allows them to deny greater ability
in anyone. They are taught to despise the outcast and the myth of equality allows them to blame the
outcast for their own persecution. They believe in the myth of their own independence and free will
and believe they participate in their governance. As long as coercion is unrecognized, directing this
majority has been simple. In Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott wrote of the difficulty an entity from Spaceland,
which is aware of three dimensions, has in communicating with the king of Lineland who is only aware
of a line. In a world where everything was set up to reinforce their conditioning, commoners were as
certain of their reality as the king of Lineland.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the
aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. George Bernard Shaw
The will of the majority creates and upholds oligarchy. Commoners have little real interest in
governance, they only desire to be part of the spectacle of governance. They do not want revolution,
they are happy with their messiahs and interfering to protect them can be as hazardous as interfering
with domestic violence. Without this block of protective majority, oligarchies could never be created
much less stand. A system which assumes that all people are equal is imposed on society to appeal to
the conceit of the masses. Since people arent equal, a centripetal force will create oligarchy in every
society set up with this principle. Governance structures did not create oligarchy in spite of democracy,
they have slowed it as seen by the far faster and larger oligarchies created in the more purely
egalitarian structures online. The middle class have disappeared! cry the middle class as they swarm
to support ponzi schemes of celebrity, wealth and power.

Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy, wrote
Robert Michels. Who says organization, says oligarchy. Faced with this frustrating reality and the incompetence
of the masses, many reformers will eventually turn, like Michels, to fascism to implement what they see
as the greater good. The fact that no dictatorship is possible without the support of the democratic
will proves his point.
Whether the government is openly fascist or not, the masses are openly manipulated. From the
coercing of public opinion in the lead up to the US attack on Iraq to the current astroturfing, TED talks,
Thought Leaders and the WE Day phenomenon there is a climate of secular evangelical frenzy we
havent witnessed since the last widespread rise in fascism. The escalating coercive force applied on

those designated as commoners is a reaction to their increasing tendency to disperse and follow
divergent paths and interests. The crack in the monopoly on education and media has created a surge
of independent thought which may finally dissolve the club of cohesive democratic power which has
kept Great Men in power for centuries. With no middle class there will be no oligarchy.
The masses are not and have never been as apathetic as their reputation depicts them. They are
otherwise engaged or their interests lie elsewhere. The idea that everyone ought to be fascinated by
and highly informed regarding governance systems is ridiculous, especially as the puppet show on
display has little or nothing to do with our real governance. As long as governance is peer-promoted,
transparent, permeable and easily challenged there is no need to force people to have interests other
than those they choose. There are plenty of people who are interested in governance that can sound
an alarm to the broader public in cases of concern and plenty of people interested enough to keep an
eye on the workings.
If each system was managed by a permeable and transparent concentric circle everyone could follow
their own interests and acquire their expertise where they chose instead of making part of an
uninformed mass set up to provide power to an oligarchy. Real involvement does not come from
listening to advertising and making a necessarily uninformed choice to legitimize a dictatorship with
consent. Governance should come from all participants in a system under advice from peer promoted
epistemic communities open to all. Epistemic communities should be under no obligation to speak
directly to the masses or earn support from the entirety of an uninformed public. Their work should be
audited and transmitted by those users with the interest in doing so to those users with an interest in
learning about it.
The purpose of a cohesive block of commoners has always been to use them as a weapon in support
of oligarchy. The diffusion of the middle class into autonomous individuals removes the weapon. The
full participation of all in their systems of interest enables self-governance and removes the need for
governance by oligarchy. We need neither democracy nor fascism. The iron law of oligarchy can be
disproved by replacing a system of votes with collaboration.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing Ones Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) George Bernard Shaw
Flatland: A romance of many dimensions (1884) Edwin Abbott Abbott
Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie; Untersuchungen ber die oligarchischen Tendenzen des
Gruppenlebens (1911) Robert Michels

To read more check out, Binding Chaos: mass collaboration global scale by Heather Marsh.
http://www.amazon.com/Binding-Chaos-collaboration-global-scale/dp/1489527680