Society and Exploitation, Oppression, and Seduction Shift

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Human society has always been a project of value-making. From the earliest rituals around fire to the algorithmic regulation of digital life, we have never lived outside of meaning. We construct it, negotiate it, and fight over it. Meaning is not optional; it is inevitable. In this sense, society is a system of negotiated meanings that give rise to moral orders, identities, roles, and ultimately, hierarchies.

But this meaning-making comes with consequences. As soon as a society begins to name values—what is sacred, who is respectable, which labor is dignified—it also begins to create gradients of worth. Hierarchies originally arise not from evil intent, but from the natural drive to coordinate, organize, and sustain collective life. However, once a hierarchy is formed, power becomes sedimented. The inevitable temptation follows: to exploit, to preserve advantage, and to rationalize that advantage as natural, deserved, or even divine.

In ancient societies, hierarchy was often justified cosmologically. Kings ruled by divine right, castes by spiritual purity, and men by virtue of "rational superiority." These essentialist claims were narratives, not facts. But they were effective. They rooted oppression in the soil of myth and transmitted it through generations as tradition.

Oppression, in this classical form, was visible. It was formal, brutal, and often physical. People were chained, silenced, exiled, enslaved. Social orders made no attempt to hide domination; they justified it.

In modern societies, however, this mode of domination has undergone a transformation. Elite may not oppress through ugly violence, but they seduce.

Where once power ruled through visible chains, today it operates through invisible scripts. We are not beaten into submission—we are persuaded into desire. The modern citizen is not told “you must serve,” but rather, “you must succeed.” The chains are now internal, in the form of self-optimization, brand-building, and emotional labor. Exploitation wears the perfume of freedom.

Having said that, it is also important to note that oppression is not completely gone. Not all societies are linearly moving from brutality to seduction. Myanmar is one of these examples of violent oppression. The transformation is not necessarily a complete replacement but rather a layering of control mechanisms, where subtle "seduction" often coexists with more traditional forms of domination, sometimes even reinforcing them. Burmanization is still exist as coerced assimilation of indigenous people but it is more and more legitimized by the power of seduction for instance. Our focus here, however, is the manufacturing of desires, fabrication of consent and internalization of oppression.

We know it is bad to be exploited by stimulating anger, sadness, guilt or fear. However, we don't necessarily feel bad for being exploited by stimulating "happiness" or "pleasures". The pursuit of Dopamine is affecting everyone. After all, these all emotions are not good, not bad or not neutral. They are natural. We should not be taken advantage of them, should we?

Let us look at marketing or a fashion trend. It is not simply a neutral economic act; it is an act of desire-production. It exploits not just values or labor but attention, affection, identity, and aspiration. Capitalism itself is a value creation mechanism that created our "progress" but hierarchy created by unlimited accumulation of non-expiring wealth (or money) can be used in many ways to go beyond "just personal freedom". People may be more happy and more miserable at the same time. As Amitai Etzioni once asked: "Is happiness the wrong metric?"

In a post-industrial society, we are not just workers—we are consumers, influencers, dreamers, and brands. We are not commanded to obey; we are seduced to participate. Social media, advertising, careerism, and romantic ideals all converge to create a logic of self-exploitation. We curate our suffering for visibility. We grind not because we are told to, but because we believe we must. This is the genius of seduction—it does not oppose your will; it co-opts it.

In classical oppression, there were rulers and the ruled. Today, the system is more diffused. As Byung-Chul Han puts it “exploit themselves in the belief that they are realizing themselves.”

We have become our own taskmasters. The boundary between the external power and the internal “self” is blurred, if not broken. You no longer need to be silenced; you voluntarily curate your expression. You no longer need to be marginalized; you can be commodified. You no longer need to be denied freedom; you can be sold the fantasy of it.

This form of seduction is not benign. It erodes emotional freedom and disorients agency. When the rules are invisible, you cannot rebel against them. When the master speaks in the voice of your dreams, you cannot disobey. In this world, “freedom” becomes a strategy of control.

To be emotionally free is not merely to escape physical violence but to discern the subtle pressures that shape your desires. Human agency in such a context is not about declaring independence from society because no such exit exists within the realm of narrative animals. It is about navigating the social field with strategic awareness, resisting seduction where it erodes agency and reshaping meaning without being trapped by it. It is not to renounce worldly desires and become a monk. It is about intellectual independence.

Every society needs meaning and to create values. But meaning breeds order, and order not only breeds security, it also breeds power. Power itself can be a force of progress and provide foundations of human agency itself but its hierarchy creates exclusions. Let us have skepticism and critical awareness towards hierarchies. Let us first check against oppression, then against seduction. The challenge of emotional freedom and human agency, then, is not to destroy society but to unmask its scripts, to refuse essentialized hierarchies, and to live with strategic awareness. Individuals can cultivate critical awareness, self-reflection, and engagement with diverse perspectives. Practices like critical media literacy and conscious consumption can help individuals identify and resist the temptations so that we don't loose our focus on creating a society of freedom, political friendship with our fellow humans and the construction of Common Good.

Society will always attempt to name what is right, beautiful, worthy, and desirable. But we do not have to blindly accept those names. We can reclaim our right to redefine them. In that act of redefinition—not as a final truth but as a living negotiation—emotional freedom becomes possible again.