When Involution Becomes a Moral Virtue: East Asia's Triple Bind • HUYIFAN

Cybernetics studies how systems achieve self-regulation and control through feedback: a system receives information, compares deviations, and adjusts its actions to maintain a stable state. A thermostat, for example, senses temperature and adjusts the heating to keep a room at a stable temperature. That is a simple control system. Human society can also be understood as a control system. To keep functioning normally, it must use certain control programs to maintain order, coordinate action, and transmit information.

As a control system, society must consist of three parts: an operator, a program, and an object being controlled. The operator and the controlled object are, clearly, both human beings.

The key question, then, is what the control program is and where it is written: deeply imprinted in each person's habits and intuitions, embedded in concrete social activities, or existing as independent tools and institutions.

Viewed through cybernetics, human civilization reveals three sharply different ways of constructing order, each writing a different kind of “control program” into a different place. What follows is an ideal-type account of the most salient organizing logic of each civilization, not a comprehensive description of its internal diversity.

1. The Confucian Tradition: The Person as Program

The Confucian cultural sphere programs the person itself. Ritual norms and religious precepts together form a complete internal operating system. A properly formed person in the Confucian tradition should automatically run the correct subroutine in any situation: encountering an elder activates the filial-respect program, encountering conflict activates the forbearance program, and confronting desire activates the restraint program.

The person thus becomes a highly predictable executing machine, and social order is maintained by hard-coding each individual. This strategy is exceptionally resilient. Even when the external environment collapses, order can quickly be restored as long as people's internal programs remain intact. After dynastic changes in ancient China, social structures could often be rebuilt relatively quickly, partly because, although regimes changed, ritual and customary norms at the grassroots level continued.

The cost is that human flexibility and creativity are severely restricted. The system's feedback space is compressed into highly moralized binary judgments such as “proper ritual conduct” and “improper ritual conduct.” When people encounter a situation for which the program has made no provision, they experience cognitive dissonance and may even become paralyzed in action.

2. Japan: The Activity as Program

While receiving the Confucian tradition, Japan developed a distinctive variant by programming the activity itself. Every social activity, every work process, and every category of interpersonal exchange has extremely detailed procedural rules. The way of tea, the way of flowers, and the way of the warrior all, to a considerable extent, elevate a particular activity into a precise algorithm. When a person enters the setting of an activity, that setting's program automatically guides and shapes them.

Japanese people do not run the same program in every situation. They switch behavioral modes according to the type of activity. The program at work, the program at home, and the program in an izakaya can be entirely different, and people display striking adaptability in moving between these settings.

Japanese craftsmanship and the perfectionism of its service industry may both arise from the extreme optimization of the activity-program, which also helps explain the appearance of masters in every trade. But people become fragmented. Using different programs in different affairs leaves them without a unified sense of self. This inner division may be one among many structural factors behind the widespread sense of repression and the problem of suicide in Japanese society.

3. The West: Method as Program

Mainstream modern Western culture programs “the method of doing things.” It programs neither what a person should be nor how an activity should proceed. Instead, it creates abstract programs independent of both person and activity, allowing people to remain relatively free and complete tasks by operating these external tools.

The scientific method, legal institutions, democratic procedures, and market mechanisms are all abstract programs that can exist independently of particular people and particular activities. People need not be remade, and activities need not be sacralized. One need only master the right tools and methods.

This strategy is highly extensible. Programs can be continually updated and iterated without changing people themselves, while new technologies and institutions can be designed to solve new problems. But people consequently become estranged from programs, becoming their operators rather than a part of them. This produces an existential crisis: if no program defines me, who exactly am I?

4. Rivets: The Price of Freedom

When people are no longer defined by internalized programs or by the roles of activities, but instead become freely floating operators of programs, they may experience severe existential anxiety because no program tells them “who I am.” In this state of being “disembedded” from traditional roles and essential narratives, the self needs new anchors to gain continuity and certainty.

Various “rivets” then emerge. A tattoo becomes a bodily rivet, inscribing a permanent mark on a body that can otherwise change indefinitely and creating an irrevocable choice to fix a drifting self-identity. The various isms become intellectual rivets: in a mental space without an inbuilt worldview, people actively choose and cling to an ideological framework in order to fix drifting values. Diagnoses of psychological conditions such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, and anxiety may at times also become emotional rivets, giving one's state a medicalized name and location so that it acquires a stable form that can be understood and narrated.

These rivets are all trying to solve the same problem: how can a stable self-identity be established in a culture that no longer programs people essentially through a single tradition?

5. The Triple Structural Burden of Modern East Asians

Once these different cultural logics are understood, the distinctive predicament facing modern East Asians becomes clearer.

The first burden is the traditional person-program: the internalized Confucian moral program, collectivist social expectations, and behavioral norms of family responsibility. It requires people to run complex social calculations in almost every situation, repeatedly asking themselves: Will this disappoint my parents? Will it damage relational harmony? Will I be considered inconsiderate? For Japanese people, this burden is compounded by the demands of the activity-program, requiring precise switches between programs in different settings and the maintenance of the perfect performance prescribed by each activity.

The second burden is the modern instrumental program: Western rational systems, competitive logic, and demands for individualism. Tradition demands filial piety, modesty, sociability, and self-restraint; modernity demands independence, innovation, competition, and self-realization. The two programs are not simply opposed. In many areas they are deeply fused. The clearest example is “involution,” which combines Confucian moral esteem for diligence and hardship with the efficiency competition of capitalism. In the West, workplace competition is primarily a contest of rules and performance. In East Asia, overtime is more often seen as a way to demonstrate attitude and loyalty. Insufficient effort means not only possible elimination but also a moral defect.

The third burden is the Western demand for rivets. On top of the first two burdens, individuals are required to declare “who I am” through external marks: tattoos declare rebellion, isms prove a position, and diagnoses explain suffering. But East Asians have never been “empty.” They have been densely programmed from birth. When the burden is already too great, rivets cease to be support and become another shackle.

These three programs operate simultaneously within the same body. A typical East Asian young person spends eight hours at work using contractual thinking and the logic of efficiency, switches at home to an algorithm of human obligation and filial duty, and must also cultivate some identity label in their leisure time to answer “who exactly am I?” Every switch is exhausting, and every program competes for control over behavior.

The core predicament of East Asians, then, is not the emptiness of “who am I?” but “can I be someone other than the person I have been prescribed to be?” Some turn to tattoos, political identification, or psychological diagnosis to resist internal over-programming, but after getting a tattoo they must still face parental expectations, workplace discipline, and social judgment. The resistance itself only adds another layer of conflict. Even when people recognize the contradictions of the system cognitively, they still find it difficult to break free emotionally.

Many modern psychological problems arise from this. They are not personal weakness or failure, but the inevitable product of multiple cultural programs in conflict with one another. The old programs are gradually failing, and the new ones have not yet emerged. This transition is bound to be long and difficult, but understanding itself is the beginning of change.