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Essays reflect solely their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays The Myth of the Default Society
by Yogthos
Published: 2026-08-10 (last update: 2026-09-22)
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To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.
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The Myth of the Default Society
How Material Conditions Engineer the Human Mind
You look at a picture of a busy street in a strange country, and your glance travels from person to person. It notices their dress, the surrounding architecture, the poses they assume. And you might ask yourself if you could live in this place. This is a natural, basic reflex we all have. Each of us has conceived some particular kind of life as worthy of desire, and this conception has been moulded by the customs and traditions of our youth. We take our individual conceptions and transfer them upon those who live by other standards and have different ideals from our own. We imagine that they must be unhappy because they lack the comforts and conveniences which we have come to regard as necessities, or that they cannot be free because their daily life is not governed by the same social understandings and traditions as where we happen to live. But in this moment of judgment, few people are reflective. They do not turn the question back upon themselves and inquire what is the source of their own moral and aesthetic standards.
To understand what is really happening, it is necessary to strip away all ornament and look at the facts of human life without any preconceptions. Every civilization begins with the basic fact that we are animals living on a rock in space, with certain needs which are very much the same in all times and places. A certain amount of food is required for our bodies to work properly, and this is measured in terms of calories and protein. We need shelter from the weather so as not to die of cold at night. We need physical and psychological safety as we go about our lives. Above all, we need some means of production so that we can meet our fundamental needs. A society must produce food and goods that its citizens need, which, in turn, require agriculture, manufacture, mining, and all the other industries our modern world depends on. This is the material basis upon which everything else is built up. It must be secured first because nothing else can exist without it. Everything else, such as our laws, our art, and our religion, is an ornament which we have built upon this foundation.
How Economic Systems Shape Cultural Values
Each type of society represents a different solution to the same underlying problem of securing a comfortable life for the individual by means of co-operation, and any society that is unable to meet this challenge is doomed to fail. The way in which a community organizes its productive forces and distributes its collective goods stems from its material conditions, and forms the basis for its core social structure. An agrarian population living on seasonal crops and mutual aid will construct a different social contract from that of a hyper-financialized urban service economy. Therefore, the day-to-day work of keeping alive within a particular set of circumstances becomes the arbiter of culture.
Each type of economic system must, then, produce a different set of cultural values, since the method of daily life shapes the outlook and ideals of a community. If you take an economic system such as that of the DPRK, where labour is organized in publicly owned industrial concerns and agricultural co-operatives, the material basis of society is social ownership of the means of production, which dictates the psychological gravity of the culture. A citizen of a capitalist society looking in may think people have no incentive in the absence of an individual profit motive. And in doing so, they’d be projecting their own conditioning onto a foreign system because their worldview cannot separate labor from the threat of personal financial ruin. But, in truth, the basic desire for construction, for overcoming difficulties, and for personal achievement exists under any socioeconomic system. The element of competition does not disappear under socialist organization. It merely takes a different form because such a society provides different outlets from our own. It manifests through co-operatives competing with each other for the biggest yield and state design bureaus vying to produce the best tractor. The essential difference is that it operates as a positive-sum game since the economic structure is collectively owned. The purpose is different because victory means social improvement rather than mere individual gain. When one design bureau has a success, it does not keep its methods secret, nor does it wish ruin upon other design bureaus. New techniques are shared so that competition serves as a test of methods under pressure, with the best methods becoming integrated across the entire system. The success of one unit means strength for the whole system and an increase in the general level of efficiency. A culture formed in such an environment will inevitably take an outlook in which individual progress is bound up with that of the whole nation. In such a culture, solidarity and collective duty are elevated to virtues.
Now, let us look back at the society built on the idea of private ownership. The capitalist system demands atomization and generates cut-throat competition where the object is market dominance rather than human progress, and every success must come at somebody else’s expense. If a company invents a new method, its first job is to hide the details and get a patent to prevent others from using it. Its whole existence depends upon being the only possessor of a given secret because that alone gives it power to fix prices. Consequently, you have a situation where many companies burn massive amounts of human labor and resources in secrecy, endlessly reinventing the wheel because sharing knowledge would destroy their profit margins. In such a system, enormous waste is camouflaged as innovation while being praised on the grounds that it rewards initiative. And the culture that forms around it is one of paranoia, rugged self-reliance, and ruthless personal ambition. Thus, the economic engine shapes the moral framework that determines what a particular community regards as a virtue. Our values are a product of our material conditions. They are forged by the mechanics of who owns what and how the labor is organized.
The economic organization of a community thus actively creates the very desires which it proceeds to satisfy. Our conception of happiness is formed by the social norms and institutions around us. A person growing up in a liberal society is inclined towards an individualist view, seeing themselves as something separate from and pitted against the whole. Yet, someone who grew up in a socialist system would have different metrics for success that do not look like a suburban house and a bloated stock portfolio. After all, being social animals means that we are wired to find fulfillment in how effectively we integrate into the rest of our social group, leading us to adopt a world view compatible with others around us. Social training not only affects the form of our desires but also determines the limits of our imagination.
We are naturally social beings and must, therefore, have friends, family, and community, lest we wither from spiritual starvation. Our non-negotiable psychological needs are just as rigid as our need for physical safety and shelter. But how a society satisfies these mental needs is as wildly varied as global cuisine. While you must eat a certain amount of calories to live, a dish of noodles in Pyongyang answers the same biological purpose as a hamburger in San Antonio. The mental need for belonging is much the same thing. The need for human companionship is basic and overmastering, but the particular ways in which your companionships take shape are of the most diverse kinds. The particular forms of expressing loyalty and the boundaries of your friendships are largely authored by the specific culture you inhabit.
The Social Scaffolding of the Mind
So, then, if social structures are a result of the way our society is organized upon the material base, and our worldview is, in turn, a product of economic relations, how then do these economic necessities get wired into our psychology? French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his career studying how social structures get inside us, coined the term habitus to describe the hidden scaffolding in our heads. It represents a durable set of views and dispositions that shape the way we perceive the world, and it is something people rarely choose for themselves. We tend to absorb our understanding of reality by osmosis through countless microscopic interactions from the moment we are born. Kids see which child gets a smile and who gets ignored. They learn what actions lead to respect, such as doing well at school or sport, and what causes rejection, like dressing the wrong way. Upbringing, therefore, ends up sculpting expectations in our adult life, providing a standard by which ordinary things are judged, and from which ordinary desires and aspirations spring. Your conception of a good life grows out of the social structure in which you were born, a particular scaffolding of family, class, and culture that made you who you are. Schools, media, and everyday norms convince you that the social arrangement you live in is natural and inevitable which is what Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, the idea that a ruling class makes its worldview feel like common sense. Our understanding of the world is, thus, built upon a whole scaffolding of expectations, tastes, and gut feelings we absorb from our surroundings.
Beliefs accrete piecemeal over many years and, much like the deposits of epochs in a rock formation, form an increasingly rigid system. Every fresh belief that a person acquires must somehow be fitted with the existing mass of beliefs so that it does not cause any serious upheaval. When a new idea contradicts the existing foundation, it is typically rejected. This is a perfectly rational attitude since we cannot restructure our entire mental edifice each time we run across some new fact. And so, the longer we live, the more entrenched and impervious our ideological foundation becomes since new ideas have ever more existing ones to contend with. Each additional year makes our subconscious more resistant to any opposing force. Over time, the edifice becomes so solidified that its structure begins to pass as truth itself. The rules of one’s own society are repeated in daily rituals and become so deeply ingrained that we start to forget they are mere human conventions.
The orthodoxy of our beliefs is imbibed from relatives and acquaintances before we even begin to think. If you were educated in a Western liberal democracy, your individualism has been ingrained almost from infancy by the pervasive cultural atmosphere you were immersed in. You have learned, as soon as you could understand anything, that you are the hero of your own drama and that your wants and desires are what really matter. You have internalized a conception of freedom in which marking a ballot every few years is held to embody political liberty to the exclusion of more direct forms of collective action and social power. The elementary logic of capitalist relations was taught to you at the dinner table and through the media before you even mastered long division. The principles of private property, wage-earning, and economic competition have been presented to you not as a particular form of social organization but as a natural law. In all probability, you have accepted them uncritically, having had no alternative outlook to use as a point of reference.
Hence, people tend to suffer from a spectacular failure of imagination, seeing other cultures through the distorting medium of their preconceptions. Someone who grew up in the West might only see a tyranny when looking at a culture which has strong communal bonds and tight family obligations, viewing them as suffocating restrictions at odds with the individual liberty they hold so dear. One might not even feel the need to argue this point because the answer feels instinctive and self-evident. A person asks themselves whether they could be happy in such a culture, and their prior conditioning says they would not. But in doing so, they fail to notice that their answer is dictated by a set of social norms they’ve grown accustomed to, having been taught that individual initiative and personal success are supreme virtues. Therefore, a culture dominated by different values such as social duty and family responsibilities, being at odds with their innermost convictions, feels wrong and oppressive.
Such a view results from a lack of perspective, since it fails to account for the fact that people living within each system are organized by their culture and institutions, each producing a different view of the world. To people living in a collectivist system, an individualist and competitive society may seem a dreary social desert and a monument to loneliness. They may honestly ask how you manage to exist in such isolation, living in a culture which invariably prioritizes individual success over community health. Both perspectives spring from reactions that are products of the compromises within each respective system, because every social structure solves one set of problems at the expense of creating another. A judgment of another society based on that which is familiar in our own will necessarily be incoherent because it will employ quite irrelevant criteria.
The Pragmatism of Conformity
Of course, no society is monolithic in nature, and while the machinery of socialization is extraordinarily efficient in producing uniformity of opinion, it can never be perfectly efficient. There are always individuals who, for one reason or another, do not fully endorse the orthodoxy of their time and place. Yet, the mainstream prevails for a reason. Society, by means of social censure, economic pressure, and legal pressure, compels the majority of the people to conform to an agreed-upon set of rules. The whole system depends upon a very important condition, however, which is that society should be able to provide the bare necessities of life for the critical mass of the population. When the social basis affords security and stability through adequate housing, sufficient nourishment, and necessary social relations to stay sane, the human mind can adapt to almost any ideological programming. Most humans are fundamentally pragmatic creatures and take the line of least resistance.
As long as conformity affords a secure basis for some measure of comfort and security, there is no impetus to question the status quo because having views at variance with orthodox opinion makes one an outcast. There is a certain psychological tax to having views that differ from the common sense of those around us. The possibility of casual conversation becomes diminished because you find yourself talking past each other when you converse with others. Every mundane social interaction becomes a puzzle requiring you to use a mental filter, being careful about what you say. Whenever a political question arises, your subconscious process must engage in internal censorship to carefully measure out how much of your actual perspective you can safely share before the room turns on you. As a rule, people do not enjoy being told that their life goals are artificial, or that their moral high ground is just a byproduct of their local economic engine. Thus, having a different outlook from those around you becomes an exceedingly uncomfortable existence, making one feel like a perpetual outsider trying to blend in. Unless you learn to put a mask on, you risk becoming someone to be avoided and excluded from social interactions.
There is enormous evolutionary pressure to conform because, throughout much of human history, to be cast out by one’s own tribe meant a rapid and violent death. One was helpless against wild beasts or starvation, and so human cognitive faculties are adapted to the need for cooperation. Survival meant tribal solidarity, common food, common shelter, and common defense. So the natural selection within any social environment heavily favors people who go along with the program since such people are the ones who are more likely to grow up and leave offspring. The logic of the thing is quite obvious. By adopting the accepted beliefs of the community, an individual protects their social status and ensures themselves of continued food, water, and freedom from persecution. On the contrary, by challenging fundamental beliefs one exposes themselves to the heaviest penalties, endangering not only their own welfare but also that of their family. And so, it should be no surprise that, in most cases, the unconscious is satisfied with a comfortable path of least social friction, believing whatever will allow one to live comfortably within their community.
People will continue to defend their system with passion, taking ridiculous pride in its most absurd manifestations, even long after their society stops being able to meet the needs of its citizens. The superstructure of ideology is safeguarded by the instinct of habit, for our brains are prediction engines that construct hypotheses about the world, allowing us to go about our daily business in order to meet our needs. And so, we crave security and predictability as much as oxygen in our lungs. You may find your job loathsome and wake up every morning dreading the tedious journey to work where an officious superior makes you feel small. But if you know exactly what drudgery is expected of you and get a wage sufficient to pay your bills, you stay put. The daily unhappiness is a known quantity, a familiar strain which you have learned to bear. To leave means to enter into the world of the unknown. It is to forego the power of knowing what the next day may bring, and to run the risk of making your situation still worse. So, one grows accustomed to a routine and learns to live with the humiliations of one’s position. Certain colleagues may be avoided, or one may simply cease to notice their daily abuses. Add dependents to this situation and the trap is made doubly sure. With children to be supported on your salary, to take a chance on an unknown future seems a massive failure in parental duty. Change means to forego the illusion of power, and to face the unexpected and the uncertain head-on.
Systemic Failure and the Breaking Point of Ideology
A similar dynamic plays out at a broader societal scale, which is why most people choose to confine themselves to the daily routines and swallow most humiliations as long as they can have stability in return. They invent psychological and moral subtleties to make injustice appear natural and the status quo desirable. They do this for the sake of their own peace of mind and that of their families. But there is a limit to such silent submission. There comes a breaking point where material facts override the official view of how the social system works. At such moments the discrepancy between theory and practice becomes intolerable because the ideological narrative becomes completely unmoored from physical reality.
That the ideas in people’s heads eventually have to square with the reality of their daily lives is the essence of materialist dialectic. People have a natural tendency to believe that they live in a fair society where hard work leads to prosperity, seeing their own society as a natural default for reasons we’ve just discussed. This belief can be internalized, used in judging one’s fellow citizens, made the basis of social policy, and set as the criterion of achievement in general. It can even be maintained long after the fundamentals of a social order start to break down due to factors such as technical progress or change in the climate. In such situations, the working majority might find themselves unable to afford the necessities of life. Then the good story rubs against the facts. The friction between the ideology and the material world becomes violently untenable. These kinds of disruptions act as selection pressures that force societies to adapt or perish.
When a system fails to give basic stability and opportunity for individual development, confidence is sapped little by little. People quietly drop out of the economic and social mainstream, becoming deeply disillusioned with the core beliefs of their society. They play by the rules, try to hold down jobs, avoid debt, and save for old age. Yet they find it more and more difficult to buy groceries every week and pay their rent each month. The myth of failure, which personalizes disaster as the result of laziness or vice, ceases to be plausible when you see yourself work hard, yet barely make ends meet. A disillusionment with the system gradually replaces the former confidence, and a hole opens up in the framework of accepted beliefs. When it has thus been learned that the dominant ideology is a myth that no longer squares with your lived experience, the way opens up to a consideration of other views and different philosophies of existence which might better serve as working hypotheses to illuminate the miserable conditions you are actually experiencing. You find yourself increasingly willing to entertain ideas that you would have readily dismissed at a different time.
Of course, these sorts of transformations don’t happen overnight. It is a dialectical process where the quantity of hardships steadily accumulates, eventually marking a change in the quality of the whole nation. For years the breakdown remains hidden as one individual drops out here and another there, and their misfortunes are attributed to some personal causes. But should economic pressure continue to widen the circle of insecurity, then more and more people are driven to the wall, and their numbers grow imperceptibly until at last the whole system has reached a critical state. And suddenly the collective faith is shattered along with the social cohesion which it ensured.
Social failure of this kind can be observed firsthand in many Western countries today. The historic levels of political polarization tearing these societies apart aren’t happening because people have suddenly forgotten how to live together. They are a direct result of a large segment of the population experiencing conditions which it cannot endure. Holding down a job no longer saves people from suffering when having a job does not guarantee a home or basic safety. And while the personal cost of dissent may be high, the cost of starvation is yet higher.
And so, it is only when the dominant worldview starts to actively contradict the daily material experience of the masses that the calculus of conformity begins to flip. When it ceases to be true that by repeating the official dogmas a man can obtain food, shelter, and security, the existing social contract collapses and conventional beliefs cease to be a satisfactory way of life. The fear of being ostracized evaporates since there is no more social status or physical comfort to be gained from trying to fit in. And thus the views that have been rejected as heretical become practical. Those who were once marginalized for holding them become the focus and leaders of a new movement based upon observable fact instead of crumbling dogma.
Beyond the Regional Custom
We tend to take our current social arrangement for granted, but most objects of our daily desires do not constitute necessities of human nature. Goals such as having a well-situated job or living in a posh neighborhood are products of a certain time and place. They are not universal values, but rather outcomes of the present economic and social arrangements, which are a local ordinance arrived at step by step to meet the problem of keeping large populations alive and working together. Of course, the knowledge that your desires are contingent does not make them disappear. They remain as strong as ever, but their tyranny is mitigated by the knowledge that they are not universal and that other equally good desires are possible. You will be able to imagine a different life from your own in another age or country. You will no longer take your own way of living for the model to which all others should conform, but will regard other societies as equally wise as your own in finding ways of solving the problems of human existence.
Our present social organization is not the pinnacle of human evolution. It is only one out of many possible arrangements of resources and division of labour for satisfying the basic needs of food, shelter, and security. These needs are always essential to any group of human beings, and one particular arrangement by which they are achieved is not naturally better or more important than any other. Consequently, judgment of another community based primarily on its resemblance to or difference from one’s own becomes an inane preoccupation. It is a mirroring of oneself by which you grade the reflection you obtain rather than the answers to common human needs achieved by different means.
To judge whether a social system is sound, one must put aside the ideological scorecard and look at plain facts. Look at the results as shown in statistics of diet and housing. Look at the way in which the productive forces are made to serve the basic physical and mental needs of the population. Look at the degree of trustworthiness and helpfulness towards each other displayed by the members of the society, as opposed to their disposition to prey upon each other or to become demoralized through lack of social cohesion. These are practical working metrics we can use to judge the health of a society. Everything else, including political names and cultural traditions, is merely a regional custom. Humanity has created countless different types of societies throughout history, all based upon the same human nature but differing widely from each other. Our present mechanism, with its special institutions, is what happens to exist at the moment, not an immutable necessity or an ideal towards which other societies must be tending.