From cruelty to mercy, from physical punishment to physical and mental discipline, from offending From criminals of the law to ordinary people, from punishment afterward to taking precautions against the slightest, the technology of power continues to evolve and change, the intensity gradually decreases, but the breadth and depth are increasing - the tentacles of power spread to everyone in the "unit". the individual.
If it continues to evolve, what will the technology of power look like, and how will it implement new "discipline and punishment" in today's world where democracy and equality are the mainstream values? The first episode of the third season of the British drama "Black Mirror" has an answer.
In the three technologies of power mentioned above, the subjects of punitive power are: the monarch and his authority, the (imaginary) social community, and the governing body - the punitive power is in the hands of a few, which is contrary to the The universal principles of democracy and equality, and those who are not in the "unit" are excluded from "discipline and punishment".
Then all members of society are both the disciplined and the disciplined, the punisher and the punished, the subject and the object. Isn't this "power legitimacy" problem solved?
This is exactly the background of the story of "Black Mirror": people can take out their mobile phones to establish a p2p connection with each person (mobile phone) they meet through "Bluetooth", carry out identification, and can also rate each other's words and deeds, and rate the score. Upload your ethics archive to the cloud - if you want to. (Note 1)
"Discipline" is no longer one-way and condescending, it is realized in every encounter in an atmosphere of democracy and equality.
With only "discipline" and moral profile scores, without subsequent "punishment," this evaluation system would obviously be meaningless. After people are morally divided into three, six and nine grades, people of different grades will enjoy different treatment and priorities, such as shopping, being allowed to enter certain places..., which provides a utilitarian impetus for "moral construction".
The hostess is a believer in this system. She wants to rent the house she likes, but the financial situation is a little tight. The owner said that as long as the score of the moral file exceeds 4.5 points, she can enjoy a 20% discount - this is the scene of this scene" Incentive Events". Under the advice of the consulting company, the protagonist decides to have more contact with high scorers (high scorers give more weight to others) in order to improve his moral score. And the opportunity also came. One of her classmates is about to get married, and she invites her to be a bridesmaid. The guests attending the wedding are all people with high morals... Of course, what happened next to her was unexpected—nosedive—her moral score plummeted and she ended up in a detention center.
Obviously, what is presented in the film is a highly developed system of democracy and rationalism. Although not mentioned in the film, it is conceivable that the establishment of this system should be the product of democratic procedures, which comes from the moral self-confidence of most people and the desire for a moral society. This system aims to further "purify" society, allowing everyone to lead a moralized life through mutual discipline and supervision. There is no such personified "evil" at the top of the pyramid as "Big Brother" in "1984" in this kind of society, but everyone has become someone else's "big brother" to some extent - it's paradoxical Transformed into moral totalitarianism.
Why was the dragon seed planted in the original intention, but fleas were harvested in the end? To answer this question, perhaps we should return to the attributes of morality itself: morality has always been generated from the inside out, it comes from the free will of free people in a free state, so the moral law only exists in the hearts of people. Although social norms and social relations can reflect a person's external words and deeds, in fact, it has nothing to do with morality. It is the result of people's "forced submission" to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages. But the virtuous and the docile are distinct, even though they may seem similar at times. This is also the reason for the saying "slaves have no morals".
The system has overstepped human nature, and will inevitably lose to human nature. When people are forced to pretend to be people because of the interests associated with moral archives, this system of trying to produce moral people can only produce moral hypocrites, so moral construction also becomes moral kidnapping, starting from equality The original intention can only lead to interpersonal moral discrimination.
The film still throws out and "answers" several propositions: the scope of democracy - can democracy enter the private domain from the public domain? The answer is obviously "no"; whether the moral field can introduce a reward and punishment mechanism, the answer is also "no" - because morality itself is non-utilitarian, it can neither be rewarded nor punished, and its quantitative assessment can only lead to the negative ——It is a reserved land left to human nature for self-cultivation, which is fundamentally different from the law. And more importantly, the film points to the methodological origin behind all these propositions—and this is what sets this episode apart from other Black Mirror episodes—continental rationalism. Rationalism believes in and worships human rationality, and believes that human beings can understand the world through reason, gain insight into the truth, and grasp the inevitable laws of human social development, and then design the top-level system to create a "beautiful new world" - this is all human utopias It is also one of the sources of legitimacy of totalitarianism.
This film is a question of British empiricism and liberalism to mainland rationalism and democracy, just like Orwell who returned from the Spanish battlefield.
Note 1: In the film, the "popularity" of people is scored, but considering that there are no details of giving high scores to a person's "look" and "talent", it is simply agreed here. , are considered "moral" scores.
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