Internalized belief systems can shackle people more effectively than force

Evidence

Frazier laments that people “have been kept in their places,” not just by external forces, “but much more subtly by a system of beliefs implanted within their skins. It’s sometimes an almost hopeless task to take the shackles off their souls, but it can be done.… You can’t in the long run enforce anything. We don’t use force! All we need is adequate behavioral engineering.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1187

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s internalized discipline and the previous chapters on ‘silent’ surveillance-based control operating without overt coercion. — connects to: Social precepts can become interiorized until external compulsion becomes unnecessary — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 6435; Self-endorsed ideologies substitute for physical coercion in hierarchy; Regime norms embed themselves in officials’ belief systems, creating internal momentum to perpetuate them.
• SEED: Angle: behavioral engineering as the successor to both state force and ideology — control that needs no enforcement because it reengineers desire itself.

Broader Connections

• Social precepts can become interiorized until external compulsion becomes unnecessary #corroborates (0.95) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 6435
• Self-endorsed ideologies substitute for physical coercion in hierarchy #corroborates (0.93)