Autonomy and the Automaton

A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration. Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with the word today. It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.

That’s Ernst Jünger (German WWI hero, novelist, dissident philosopher) writing in 1951 in The Forest Passage, a slim volume on resistance to totalitarian tyranny that I’ve come to consider one of the most poetic meditations on the nature of individual freedom ever written. Densely, often even beautifully symbolic, his book aims to show us the importance of man’s individuality in maintaining our collective humanity. But it also helps reorient us, reminding us that the way in which we typically conceive of individual freedom today is indeed corrupted, “washed out,” and feeble compared to what we once understood.

Moreover, I believe Jünger helps resolve a paradox that I at least have wrestled with for some time (especially as a freedom-loving American): the paradox of individual autonomy. The paradox is this: we subsist under an increasingly totalizing and oppressive managerial regime, in which a vast impersonal hive-mind of officious bureaucrats and ideological programmers aims to surveil, constrain, and manage every aspect of our lives, from our behavior to our associations and even our language and beliefs. This rule-by-scowling-HR manager could hardly feel more collectivist – we’re trapped in a “longhouse” ruled over by controlling, emasculating, spirit-sapping, safety-obsessed nannies. Naturally, our instinct is to sound a barbaric yawp of revolt in favor of unrestrained individual freedom. And yet, as I’ve endeavored to explain several times before, it is also a kind of blind lust for unrestrained individualism that got us stuck here in the first place…

The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and