They thus belong to the environment. And if they belong to the environment, they do not communicate. Only communications communicate, and given that society is nothing else but the totality of the communications, people are not only expelled from society, but they can hardly intervene it in it either. The system can only communicate about the environment within itself. It cannot communicate with the environment.
Society has no centre and no head.
Representation of the social totality is impossible and so is steering. The world may be adrift like a ship without moorings, but given that there is and can no longer be a captain on board to coordinate and steer the operations of the different subsystems, the rhetorics of anxiety of the critical theorists only show the superfluity of their normative mode of thought and their incapacity to come to terms with the hypercomplexity of modern societies. The functional specialization has increased the rationality of each of the social subsystems, but only at the price of the irrationality of the global system. Luhmann literally demoralizes the world. He has given up hope and given away the normative foundations of social criticism.