We have no will unless it is what is prescribed which by definition is not will. We long for a satisfying, meaningful struggle, a chance to transform our ordariness into something great through some exercise of personal initiative. This is the only remaining arena for the experience of power but it is vicarious. The powerlessness of its members is dangerous to a society and American society is reaping the results of the current sense of impotency and helplessness. Hidebound in these endlessly replicating systems of control, individuals are driven increasingly to excess to protest their inefficacy and pervasive lack of identity and role.
Loss of control appears to be proliferating as a response to over-control.
Americans believe that the last generation gave us greater freedom, chance, opportunity. In reality the most important freedom, the freedom of will and efficacy, is more and more denied in the morass, the tentacles of complete control of all areas of our lives. 1990 Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish, Pantheon, 1977. Hollingdale, R. Nietzsche, Publishing, 1974. Foucault, Marxism and History, Polity Press, 1984.