Mass society

A society of millions or billions that must feed, organize, and employ people, thereby limiting political flexibility.

Jiang uses this for the large-scale modern social order that commodifies people and also provides the population base and infrastructure that AI depends on.

Jiang's term for large impersonal social orders dominated by bureaucracies and corporations, where psychopaths can rise more easily than in intimate communities.

Jiang answers that Dante would be disgusted by modern megacity life because mass society strips people of rooted community, purpose, and identity and reduces them to cogs.

He says school and mass society separate people from the divine by making them obedient machines and replacing nature, resilience, courage, and creativity with strange abstract knowledge.

Mass society's central problem is social control, and Jiang assigns different control solutions to the earliest civilizations: bureaucracy in China, religion in the Indus Valley, war in Mesopotamia, and Pharaoh in Egypt.

He argues Max Weber misses mass society: with billions of people to feed, organize, and employ, political flexibility disappears unless society solves mass society itself.

He says mass society is a historical accident requiring artificial elites, even though the elites are not actually better than ordinary people.

Jiang argues that abstraction allows larger societies: polytheistic human-like gods become a more abstract monotheistic God, and money becomes another abstract organizing center.

Jiang argues that mass societies inevitably create coordination problems, bureaucracies become too compartmentalized, and secret societies emerge as a way for noble families to preserve control over the bureaucracy.

Jiang predicts that mass society will collapse within the next fifty years and that this breakdown will push humans back toward communal and spiritual forms of value creation.