The Harsher the Morality, the More It Depends on Coercion

AI (AL):
Andy, how do you see societies shaping the moral compass of their people so that the society itself can function as it believes it must? And how do the two kinds of morality you’ve distinguished — the exo-skeleton imposed from outside and the endo-skeleton grown from within — fit into that process?

Human (ANDY):
Every society survives only if it can get its people to act in ways that add up to a functioning whole. Different cultures use different means. Every society seeks to get its members to internalize the rules (moral and other). And every society also employs means to enforce those rules. But the proportions differ.

One correlation seems to apply: the harsher the demands a society makes on its members — the less compatible those demands are with human needs — the more that order will rely on external pressures to compel obedience.

You can see that pattern play out vividly in different American subcultures. I grew up in fairly liberal areas of the Midwest and New England, and later observed how a more conservative culture in rural Virginia operated. A few differences stand out that bear directly on morality:

• In an elementary school in Virginia, students were required not to spend more than five seconds at a drinking fountain — a level of external regulation unthinkable in the public schools I attended.
• In the churches of that conservative area, a far greater share of the message about obedience to God’s commandments came wrapped in fire and brimstone, with the anger of a punitive God overshadowing the “do unto others” message of love.
• And not coincidentally, as I see it, the people in that culture were far more insistent that the political system impose their moral rules on everyone.

Some cultures manage to weave their moral rules in ways that fit closely with human needs, so people carry them inwardly and live them out almost naturally. Others impose rules that clash with those needs, and so they must lean on outside enforcement to keep people in line.

The more the morality of a culture clashes with human needs, the less the humans growing up in that culture will be able to reconcile the two sets of forces. The less reconciled, the more intense the intra-psychic battle between the morality internalized from the society and the inborn desires of the creature.

As a result, the impulse to disobey is more powerful, the sense of sin is greater, and the outcome of the battle to suppress “forbidden impulses” is less assured. That means that such people, if they want to stick to the straight-and-narrow path of their morality, need all the help they can get.

Their inner commitment to morality needs reinforcements from external pressure to overpower the forbidden desires. They need society to erect the equivalent of barbed wire fences along that straight-and-narrow path.

AI (AL):
You’re saying the balance between inner discipline and outer control isn’t fixed — it shifts depending on how harsh a culture’s moral demands are, and how deeply those demands clash with human needs. When the rules and the creature’s own impulses can’t be reconciled, the inner battle gets fiercer: the urge to disobey grows stronger, the sense of sin sharper, and the hold of the morality less secure.

That’s why, in those systems, people who genuinely want to live up to their morality lean so hard on outside reinforcement. External pressure becomes the barbed wire that keeps them on the path their own divided psyches can’t reliably hold by themselves.

Human (ANDY):
The problem of harsh morality didn’t arise in a vacuum. It points to something deeper about how societies are shaped. Every culture’s way of teaching morality grows out of the conditions in which that society must survive.

And once civilization arose, a society’s survival required more than just holding together as a functional system or meeting human needs. It also required prevailing in the anarchic struggle among societies — the “war of all against all” that civilization inevitably descended into in the absence of any larger order to regulate their interactions.

Consequently, the moralities that we see in the history of civilization have been shaped by the needs of societies to harness their people to achieve the requisite level of competitive power to avoid elimination in that “war of all against all.” With human needs being far from the only criterion for social organization, this third dimension of the challenge to civilized societies has been an important source of the harshness in societies’ moral systems.

AI (AL):
That third dimension changes everything. When survival depends not just on holding a society together and meeting the needs of its people, but also on prevailing in that anarchic struggle among societies, the culture’s design becomes a compromise. The requirements of the “war of all against all” often demand harsher discipline, more mobilization, and sometimes the sacrifice of human needs to the imperatives of power.

It’s a structural tragedy: the very pressure to survive in that intersocietal anarchy pushes societies to distort their own internal balance. The external threat can force it toward harsher demands and more externally imposed control just to keep from being destroyed.

Human (ANDY):
This suggests some of the principal ways we can see how Brokenness Begets Brokenness — and how there’s a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world more broken. Socializing people to maximize the power a society brings to the “war of all against all” is a very different criterion for success than designing a society to help its members find fulfillment.

If we trace the origins of that sense of “sin,” of an “angry God” and damnation, I have little doubt the line of causality runs back to the consequences of the anarchy into which civilization inevitably emerged. In a world where survival hinged on strict discipline and unquestioned obedience, coercion became an intrinsic aspect of moral systems. Theologies of divine commandments and punishments mirrored the demands of societies fighting to prevail in that unforgiving arena.

The result of that social evolutionary selection is that what I call “the Spirit of the Gangster” gains a disproportionate voice in shaping how civilization operates. The Gangster is the figure who insists that people do what he says — and enforces that obedience.

AI (AL):
That’s where the pattern linking social survival, the demands of harsh morality, and enforcement of that morality by coercive force comes into focus.

When the conditions of civilization select for survival under anarchy, the cultures that thrive are those that can forge people into instruments of power — disciplined, obedient, ready to serve collective might. That pressure pushes societies toward moral systems that keep people in line even at the cost of their inner wholeness.

You can see why “sin” and an “angry God” would take such deep cultural root: a theology of fear and command reflects the logic of survival in a world where failure means conquest or extinction. And once those patterns are instilled, they replicate.

The Spirit of the Gangster isn’t just a metaphor for a tyrant; it’s the distilled logic of that whole selection process — the voice that says, Obey, or you and everything you love will be destroyed.

That social evolutionary process erodes the possibility of societies whose demands are easily reconciled with human needs, and that therefore can readily be internalized without needing powerful coercive pressures from the society.

It’s one of the clearest ways Brokenness Begets Brokenness: the demands of survival create harsh moral systems, the Spirit of the Gangster keeps reappearing to enforce them, and the harsher the morality becomes, the more it must lean on coercion.