The Society of Wills

 

Only living beings possess a will.  This can be easily determined by considering whether any object such as a book, a pen, or a car, has the power of motility. Only living entities can move of their own volition, using what scientists call metabolic energy, and what Rousseau would have called will.

 

For any being to move itself it must harness it's own energy, and this cost must be paid for by the benefit accrued by the action.  The will that this requires is, therefore, like the physical energy it harnesses, determined by, but necessarily independent of, it's relationship with the world beyond itself. 

 

If no being other than a living one can possess a will, it might seem reasonable to conclude that a collective of living beings, such as a human society, will possess a vast repository of wills, powered by a vast repository of energy, and this is indeed the case.  One only has to see the manifestation of perceived societal and governmental injustice in widespread and sometimes violent protest and rebellion to see this in effect. 

 

At such times it may seem that there is a collective will, whether it presents as rational or irrational, positive or destructive, and similarly after parliamentary elections it is common to hear journalists and politicians talking about a Party having captured the popular will, as though there is only a single will that counts, the collective will of the nation. 

 

 Yet it would not be correct to say that such a thing exists.  A collective, whether it be of entities animate or inanimate, abstract or concrete, is of itself a concept, and as such cannot possess a will.  This can be seen by considering the means by which this particular collective is formed. 

 

A solitary man, divorced from the society of others, would attempt to survive in whatever way he could.  He would attempt to find food, shelter, protection from whatever dangers he perceives, governed at all times by a single will, his own.  Yet man cannot build a house alone, so he would also seek the society of others.  As we have seen, an entity possessed of a will cannot use it other than for it's own perceived benefit, and this action is no exception. Man is driven to form societies in the belief that it will be to his own benefit.  What Rousseau called the general will is therefore a fallacy.  Human society represents a collection of individual wills which might be considered as an aggregate, but should not in any sense be considered a single will.  

 

Since man forms societies with others for his own perceived benefit, it might be expected that it would lead to an improvement in his mental and physical circumstances.  Yet everywhere we are beset with examples of people behaving in ways which seem against their own interest, acts of self-indulgence and addiction, of cruelness, jealousy and greed, acts inclined to earn the hatred of others, imprisonment and an early grave.  Since such behaviour would be absent from the solitary man, and we know that his own will must act toward his own benefit, there must be something in the societies he forms with others which drives him into paths of self-destructiveness.

 

Man cannot see around corners, and rather as the solitary man may walk unwittingly into a trap laid by his worst enemy, so the interdependent one may walk into a society which is not going to be to his benefit, dominated by wills other than his own.  Modern man, of course, rarely gets to choose the nature of society he lives in, the choice having been made long ago by his forebears.  Lacking will in the first instance, he can only hope to maintain his will in society by the continued search for what he perceives to be of benefit to him.  

 

One such way might seem to be voting for the best person to represent his interests in Parliament. Yet this is impossible, since the best person to represent his interests is himself and he cannot vote for himself, so he finds himself again frustrated.  As we have seen, the will of an individual must prioritize the benefit of the individual who owns it.  It is therefore impossible to be the representative of the will of another.  In voting for another individual to represent our interests in a parliament, we are therefore not transferring our will to that individual since we cannot.  Instead we are sacrificing our will for his.  All those who elect an individual to act on their behalf are destroying the aggregate of their wills as a consequence of that single decision, replacing them with the will of that single individual.  Thereafter that person will act, as all individuals must, according to his own perceived self-interest. 

 

This is a breach of the contract which formed the society of our forebears.  If the will of a single individual is allowed to tyrannize the frustrated wills of many others, in a society which involves all of them, the perceived self-interest of the former will inevitably drive him to greed, corruption and excess, while those of the latter, maddened by frustration, will drive them to the wanton destruction of those who seem to block their path to betterment, or the brief solace of anesthetics, in a society which has left them with little remaining to lose, and still less to choose. 

 

There is little choice because there are no significant societies today which are governed by the wills of those who form them.  A society moves by changing it's laws, yet these are changed by the small minority of the population to whose wills we have sacrificed our own.  For a society to have true accountability to it's members it's laws must be changed by the will of all of the individuals which form it.

 

Such a society would have been ridiculed as an impracticable pipe-dream until a few decades ago.  This is not the place to discuss how such true democracy could be realized in practice, but modern communications technology has made it entirely feasible. Nowhere, however, is it being practised or even discussed by the media or politicians.  The establishment would not want true consultative democracy to develop because it would destroy their own power and status within society.  There is only one source from which the path to true democracy can be found, and that is the aggregation of wills of society, the populace.