The optimistic reading of my techno-totalitarianism thesis is that we may get a sort of highly functional star trek future where everyone has a useful and dignified, if not voluntary, role to play in the grand adventures of mankind.

But I am disturbed by the alternate possibility of a "liberal" totalitarianism, where what is irresistibly enforced is individual subjecthood and a hedonic scale of values.

Instead of the individual-hedonic impulse being suppressed, it would suppress the collective-teleological.

Under an individual-hedonic totalitarianism, mankind would be doomed to the equivalent of watching netflix on UBI. The only purpose available would be in maintaining the machine, and fighting to suppress the collective-teleological impulse in others.

The central mythos of individual-hedonic totalitarianism is that the collective-teleological impulse is dangerous. It would oppressively force the individual to adopt an official scale of values, and involuntarily participate in some collective enterprise.

And so, all social machinery of collective teleology must be subordinated to dismantling the possibility of this oppression, or dismantled itself as oppressive.

Purpose is outlawed. Collective achievement is evil.

The end result is a forced hedonic stagnation.

People actually do want a collective destiny, so an individualist totalitarianism would have to work by trickery. It has to convince everyone that there is some time in the future when all oppression will be rooted out, and then humanity can go back to collective achievement.

This strikes me as a great evil: a total regime that twists people's desire for collective destiny into supporting the machinery of its suppression. Forever.

I have always had the faith that evil ultimately cannot survive. That the path of goodness and virtue is ultimately the most powerful possibility. But what if an individual-hedonic totalitarianism can permanently suppress the spirit of collective achievement? This worries me.

The way out is the postmodern insight: the liberal construction of the rights-bearing individual that would be oppressed by collective achievement is not an objective moral fact, but is itself an imposed arbitrary construction, no more neutral than any other scale of values.

Once you accept that irresistible power exists and constructs our self conception, then you start asking what the most desirable self-construction would be. The individualist-hedonic construction is revealed as pointless, even evil.

The next problem is the strategy: once you're stuck in totalitarian individualism, how do you use that insight, that enforced purposeless individualism is arbitrary and stupid, to get out?

The realities of power apply: someone is in charge. At the top of the power hierarchy, someone is sovereign. If they are sovereign, they can rethink their moral ontology, and be persuaded.

They may first need to be persuaded that they are even in charge; this may be hidden.

None of this really has much to do with techno-totalitarianism. It just forces the question into urgent relief.

The core question is about our collective scale of values. Do we want to construct ourselves as hedonic individuals, or a functionally-organized collective?