Glossary
A society of millions or billions that must feed, organize, and employ people, thereby limiting political flexibility.
Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
mass society
A society of millions or billions that must feed, organize, and employ people, thereby limiting political flexibility.
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Key Notes
diagnosis
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.
model
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.
model
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.
model
He says mass society is a historical accident requiring artificial elites, even though the elites are not actually better than ordinary people.
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model
Jiang argues that abstraction allows larger societies: polytheistic human-like gods become a more abstract monotheistic God, and money becomes another abstract organizing center.
Timestamped Evidence
Transcript
"...to forget we're connected to the divine. Okay? Why? Because society, mass society, needs you to be obedient, needs you to be a machine,..."
Transcript
"Right? So, kids who are autistic, kids with disabilities, kids who are just different. Okay? Once you discard it, they actually return to the..."
Transcript
"...So let's go back to the four earliest civilizations. These are mass societies. So these four societies that first came into being are China,..."
Transcript
"So in China, we developed a bureaucracy. And what underpinned the bureaucracy? The first is something called the keju, which is the civil service..."
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"But in Mesopotamia, it's a desert. And so it's really easy to attack. And therefore, they had centuries of warfare. And that's what kept..."
Transcript
"...is all these problems we're talking about is a problem of mass society, okay? When you have mass society, your options are much more..."
Transcript
"But if we choose to continue the system where you have eight billion people struggling on this earth, then you're stuck with moving towards..."
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"...happen is the idea of mass estás? You can say that mass society is a complete, what's the word I'm looking for, deviation from..."
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"...Is in order. To increase. The population. In order to. Create. Mass. Society. Okay? So let me give you an example of this. The..."
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"More people. Believing in one god. And it. Motivate you. To work harder. Okay? Because it's such an abstract concept. And. Because of. Abstraction...."
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"...Well, the main reason is because of civilization, okay? Because of mass society, civilization. Because we chose to settle down and learn agriculture and..."
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"...the difference between an energetic society like the Vikings and a mass society like China. Okay? I am, I'll be very serious with you...."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
Reading
A source-grounded reading of Jiang's dawn-of-humanity lecture: Darwinism becomes a rival theology, cave art becomes a portal, speech begins as song, and modern society is accused of socializing people out of empathy.
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Reading
The lecture turns evil into a technology of dissociation: ancient priests allegedly learn to split the pharaoh into identities, modern institutions learn to do it to everyone, and the hard refrain is that social...
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Reading
The Protestant Reformation begins as liberation from priest, pope, and ritual.
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Reading
The final class turns collapse into an assignment: build a democratic psychohistory that can model war, correct history, answer great-man edge cases, and still preserve the human heart that wants to love, create, learn,...
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Related Topics
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