Working draft
Human beings are animals: territorial, status-seeking, social, capable of attachment and rivalry. We form bonds, defend boundaries, compete for standing, and seek the approval of those whose judgment matters to us. None of this, by itself, makes domination inevitable. The danger begins when these impulses are organized into systems that can accumulate power, conceal its operation, and reproduce it beyond the reach of ordinary correction.
Call that system the machine.
The machine is literal: industrial production, energy infrastructure, transport, communication, and the technologies that amplify human action. It is also institutional: authority, hierarchy, administration, organized force, and the norms that tell people whose interests count. And it is psychological: the habits of obedience, conformity, and identification through which individuals can serve a system while experiencing themselves as responsible, decent, or merely realistic.
This argument is not that tools make us cruel, or that human nature is fixed and vicious. It is that industrial capacity and human institutions can bind familiar animal motives—territory, tournament, and tryst—to systems of power that outlast particular leaders and participants. The machine does not need to invent the drive to dominate. It gives that drive reach, durability, and cover.
The pattern is older than the machine
Plato’s Republic offers an early and influential account of political decline. In Book VIII, Socrates describes regimes deteriorating through successive forms, as changes in political order correspond to changes in the character and desires of citizens. It is a philosophical model, not historical proof that every society follows one inevitable cycle. But its enduring insight is relevant here: political arrangements can cultivate the very dispositions that help undo them.
The machine extends that problem. A society can formally reject one ruler, one ideology, or one hierarchy while preserving the systems that make concentrated power possible. The names and personnel change; the capacity to accumulate and defend advantage remains. What looks like a break in the pattern may be its renewal at a different scale.
This is why the question is not simply whether people can cooperate beyond kinship. They can. Large-scale societies have developed norms and institutions that support cooperation among strangers, and research across different societies has linked such cooperation to institutions, markets, and shared norms—not only to kin-based loyalties. The harder question is whether cooperation across a larger circle actually abolishes the old boundary-making logic, or whether it builds a larger “us” with new outsiders beyond it.
How the machine recruits us
Milgram’s experiments are often reduced to a claim that people blindly obey authority. That account is too simple. A prominent reinterpretation argues that participation may depend not only on submission to authority but on identification with a leader and a cause: people can act harmfully because they believe they are helping something they regard as valuable. Other analyses emphasize that behavior changed across experimental variations, so the results do not support a single, universal rule about obedience.
That complication strengthens the argument. The machine need not force everyone to act against their values. It can recruit values: duty, order, progress, security, loyalty, even care for the community. It can make compliance feel like contribution, and dissent feel like betrayal or irresponsibility.
A conformity cycle follows. Authority sets the frame for what is reasonable. People watch one another for cues. The cost of dissent rises, so fewer people speak. Silence is mistaken for agreement; apparent agreement then lends authority greater legitimacy. Responsibility spreads across institutions and procedures until no one feels powerful enough—or responsible enough—to interrupt the process.
This is not an accusation against some uniquely corrupt group. It is a warning about ordinary human susceptibility within arrangements that reward conformity and protect power. Inclusion matters: people are differently positioned within these systems, and responsibility is not equal when power and benefit are not equal. But repair cannot be confined to identifying villains. It must also change the conditions that make harmful participation normal, invisible, or difficult to refuse.
What the machine makes possible
Industrialization brought extraordinary productive capacity, but it also enabled large-scale dependence on fossil energy. Fossil fuels became fundamental to industrial development and remain a major driver of human-caused climate change; the effects of warming are already visible across physical and biological systems.
That evidence does not, by itself, prove that industrial society must collapse or that technology is inherently destructive. It does illustrate the scale of the problem: a system can generate benefits, distribute them unevenly, and impose costs far away in space or time. Those who make decisions may not experience the damage directly; those who bear the damage may have little power over the decisions. Feedback arrives late, diluted across institutions, or after losses are irreversible.
This is one sense in which the machine shields evidence. It need not keep facts literally secret. It can make consequences hard to trace, responsibility hard to assign, and correction hard to enforce. The crisis becomes undeniable after it has already unfolded.
What lies outside it?
Small-scale foraging societies are sometimes treated as evidence of a more egalitarian human past. The reality is more instructive than an idealized picture. Research on the Hadza describes relative equality as something actively maintained through sharing expectations, negotiation, and social pressure that can limit accumulation and power. The researchers caution against imagining egalitarianism as effortless altruism or a conflict-free utopia.
That matters because it shifts the question. Perhaps societies do not escape domination because people cease to compete or seek advantage. Perhaps they can prevent those tendencies from becoming entrenched by keeping power legible, resources accessible, and corrective action close at hand.
The machine, in this view, is not every tool or every form of coordination. It is the coupling of production, authority, hierarchy, and force that lets advantage accumulate beyond a community’s practical ability to monitor and reverse it. A technology or institution belongs to the machine insofar as it deepens that distance and makes power more durable, impersonal, and difficult to contest.
The claim should be tested carefully. Egalitarian societies are not perfect, and their practices cannot simply be transplanted into industrial societies. Nor does evidence from one community establish a universal law. But such examples challenge the assumption that hierarchy is an unavoidable expression of human nature. They point instead to a distinction between human impulses and the social arrangements that either constrain them or magnify them.
Breaking in order to repair
To break the machine is not necessarily to break human beings, abolish all technology, or retreat into nostalgia. It is to identify which arrangements make domination opaque and self-reproducing, then replace them with arrangements that expose power to correction.
That means asking concrete questions. Who controls essential resources? Who can challenge a decision without risking their livelihood or safety? Can those affected see how authority is exercised? Can a community reverse the accumulation of power before it becomes permanent? Do the systems that claim to serve the public also make it possible for the public to scrutinize and change them?
Repair begins when we stop treating these arrangements as nature. The machine is made of human choices, habits, and institutions; therefore it can be remade. But it will not be remade by moral declarations alone. The conformity cycle has to be interrupted where it is produced: in the concentration of authority, the punishment of dissent, the concealment of consequences, and the diffusion of responsibility.
The task is inclusive because no one stands wholly outside the pattern. We inherit it, benefit from it in different ways, suffer under it in different ways, and reproduce it in ordinary acts of accommodation. The point is not to assign equal blame. It is to build forms of life in which fewer people must rely on exceptional courage to do what is right—and in which power cannot quietly turn that courage into a liability.
History is now, just as it always is. The question is whether we will keep calling the machine inevitable, or begin to make it answerable to the life it claims to serve.
Editorial note: I’ve treated this as a thesis-driven essay, not yet a fully evidenced historical article. The central claim—that machine-like systems convert human drives into durable, self-protecting domination—needs case studies to establish its scope and limits. The Plato, Milgram, Hadza, cooperation, and industrial-energy material here gives us an initial framework; it does not prove every link in that causal chain.
