Who Was Self-Denial Invented For? Tracing Its History as a Technology of Governance

Introduction: The Odd Resemblance Across Ages

We feel disciplining ourselves to be a thoroughly spontaneous undertaking. Not ordered by anyone, we restrain our desire by our own will. Because that sensation is there, self-denial carries a scent of nobility.

But trace history back a little and the impression begins to waver. The practice of cutting off desire appears throughout human history wearing a strangely similar face. The precepts of ancient religions. The rules of the medieval monastery. The work ethic of the modern age. Different in age and place, they agree oddly on one point: that restraining desire is good.

Material on the practice of self-denial is plentiful. What this article treats is the ground beneath it: when, and from whose need, this practice was born, and how it is still distributed in changed form today — its lineage.

Let me give the conclusion first. Self-denial was not born from a natural human drive to improve. It is a technology reinvented, again and again, in places that needed to govern people.

Managing Desire Dramatically Lowers the Cost of Governance

Appearing this widely and this repeatedly, self-denial cannot be explained as an individual’s stray idea. There is a shared circumstance that keeps producing it: the need to gather many people under a single order and move them in a desired direction — the need to govern.

For one who would govern people, nothing is more troublesome than people’s desire. Desire is unpredictable, hard to control, and shakes order from within.

Here the example of medieval Europe is suggestive. What covered every corner of people’s lives was the authority of the Church, and at the centre of its standard sat the handling of desire. What matters is that the Church did not try to erase desire itself. It tried to hold the right to adjudicate desire. What may be wanted and what may not. The authority over that line was taken from people’s hands. People go on having desire, but they can no longer decide for themselves whether it is right or sinful.

Why is this effective? To make people obey by the sword takes watchmen and expense. But once people come to regard their own desire as sin and clamp it down themselves, no watchman is needed. Internalising the management of desire was an invention that dramatically lowered the cost of governance.

The Energy of Resistance Is Bent From Outward to Inward

Consider more coolly. If you stood in the position of governing many people, which people would be easiest to handle? Those who act on desire and loudly assert their demands? Or those who doubt their own desire, restrain it of their own accord, and think the shortfall is because their cultivation falls short?

The latter are easier to handle for three decomposable reasons. First, people who restrain desire do not throw demands at you; even with grievances, they process them internally before turning them outward. Second, they seek the cause of disorder not in the structure but in themselves. Third, since they police themselves, no surveillance cost is incurred.

Here lies the core of self-denial as a technology. It is a device that bends the direction of the energy of resistance from outward to inward. Left alone, unfulfilled desire can become energy directed at the outer structure that thwarts it. Ask why do I want this and not get it, and the gaze turns to structure. But the value system of self-denial reverses that aim. It makes you think the problem lies in the self that cannot hold back.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me add: this is not a story of conspiracy — of some evil ruler, somewhere, inventing self-denial to deceive people. The matter is more structural. A group that spread the value of restraining desire could keep order more cheaply than one that did not. So societies with such a value survived and spread. Even with no one intending it, a value advantageous to governance is selected out amid attrition and settles in.

From Religion to Economy, the Supplier Is Replaced

Entering the modern age, this technology shifts its main battlefield. The one who unravelled that shift was the sociologist Max Weber.

He drew out the paradox that it was not world-renouncing asceticism but asceticism practised in the midst of the secular world that prepared modern capitalism [Weber, 1905]. Not shutting yourself in a monastery to cut off desire, but, in the very midst of daily labour and life, spurning pleasure, working diligently, and accumulating wealth. This way of life, his insight runs, became the womb of the spirit that drives the modern economy.

The key was an anxiety over salvation. With no means to confirm whether one was among the saved, before this bottomless anxiety people found one outlet: perhaps to labour diligently, live ascetically, and succeed was a sign of being among the saved. Inner anxiety was converted into the outward conduct of diligence and self-denial.

And as the ages descend, the religious core thins. What remained is only the mode of conduct. Work diligently. Cut out waste. Do not drown in pleasure. These commands came to be taken as good in themselves, no longer needing to invoke God.

Survey modern life and this husk is everywhere. Rising before dawn to train yourself. Spending your day off on learning. Trimming wasted time. Once this was service to God. Now it is spoken of as becoming a self of value in the market. Only the backing has been replaced; the content of the command — discipline yourself and keep working — has not changed one bit.

Let me make clear that I am not denying diligence itself. To pour your strength into achieving something is a rich undertaking. The problem is for whose purpose that diligence is mobilised. To work for a purpose set from your own worldview is the exercise of sovereignty. To work driven by an ethic that does not ask its source — working is good — is the surrender of sovereignty.

The Supplier Changes; the Mechanism Does Not

The same practice of cutting off desire is sometimes spoken of in wholly different circles with wholly different benefits. In one circle it is spoken of as a technique for raising your attractiveness. In another, as a technique for raising male hormones and recovering the drive to take on challenges. In yet another, as a discipline for raising a spiritual dimension. The benefits held up are all over the place, circle by circle.

But peer into several circles and something comes into view. However different the flags they raise, the content they demand is the same everywhere. Cut off desire. Extend the streak. Be ashamed of the self that cannot keep it up. Emulate those doing it more strictly. Strip away the signboard of benefits, and beneath it lies, without a hair’s difference, the same practice.

Call this the separation of supplier and mechanism. The supplier is the side that sells self-denial; the benefits held up differ by supplier. But the mechanism is the workings actually operating beneath. Make people doubt desire, make them discipline themselves, make them judge themselves by an external standard, make them attribute the shortfall to their own want of cultivation. This mechanism does not change under any supplier.

Once this separation is seen, history and present join in a single line. The Church, the faith over salvation, the work ethic — each was the supplier of its age. The signboard has been swapped age by age. But the mechanism that kept moving the sovereignty of people’s desire outward has not changed once.

Precisely for that reason, switching suppliers offers no solution. Someone worn out by self-denial for attractiveness moves to self-denial for spirituality. Someone worn out by self-management for productivity moves to self-management for health. As long as you merely swap the signboard and stay inside the mechanism, the structure that surrenders the standard outward changes nothing.

▸ What industrial form this mechanism takes in the present is dissected in why decluttering turns into a competition to let go.

Conclusion: Knowing the Source Is the Condition for Gripping It Anew

Self-denial has survived a long history not because it makes people happy. Because it was advantageous to governance. Keeping order cheaply, turning resistance inward, making people work of their own accord, attributing unfulfilment to individual responsibility — self-denial has performed these functions efficiently.

This conclusion contains a great release. If self-denial were a pure virtue, then a self who cannot practise it enough would be a person short on virtue. But once you see it is a device, the story reverses. The suffering you have felt was not because your virtue fell short but because you were trying to fit yourself to a standard that was not your own. The location of responsibility moves from character to structure.

The detour through history was the work of drawing a map for that. A standard of unknown source, however you think you hold it, you do not truly hold. Only once you know where it came from can you choose, by your own will, to grip it anew or to let it go. The whole picture of this argument — sovereignty — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
• Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish (1975)