Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Derecho Público "Dr. Humberto J. La Roche"
de la Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas de la Universidad del Zulia
Maracaibo, Venezuela
Esta publicación cientíca en formato digital es continuidad de la revista impresa
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Vol.39 N° 70
2021
Recibido el 12/05/2021 Aceptado el 01/08/2021
ISSN 0798- 1406 ~ De pó si to le gal pp 198502ZU132
Cues tio nes Po lí ti cas
La re vis ta Cues tio nes Po lí ti cas, es una pu bli ca ción aus pi cia da por el Ins ti tu to
de Es tu dios Po lí ti cos y De re cho Pú bli co “Dr. Hum ber to J. La Ro che” (IEPDP) de la Fa-
cul tad de Cien cias Ju rí di cas y Po lí ti cas de la Uni ver si dad del Zu lia.
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ción, dis cu sión y con fron ta ción de las ideas y avan ces cien tí fi cos con com pro mi so so cial.
Cues tio nes Po lí ti cas apa re ce dos ve ces al año y pu bli ca tra ba jos ori gi na les con
avan ces o re sul ta dos de in ves ti ga ción en las áreas de Cien cia Po lí ti ca y De re cho Pú bli-
co, los cua les son so me ti dos a la con si de ra ción de ár bi tros ca li fi ca dos.
ESTA PU BLI CA CIÓN APA RE CE RE SE ÑA DA, EN TRE OTROS ÍN DI CES, EN
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Vol. 39, Nº 70 (2021), 270-281
IEPDP-Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas - LUZ
Hypernomie as a Phenomenon of
Modern Society *
DOI: https://doi.org/10.46398/cuestpol.3970.17
Vladimir Kuzmenkov **
Konstantin Starostenko ***
Iryna Soina ****
Alexander Chekulaev *****
Abstract
The purpose of the article is to clarify the essential
characteristics of hypernomy as a social phenomenon. The
comparative-historical, structural-functional and evaluative
methods were used. Reference to the works of R. Dahrendorf, E.
Gellner, K. Stenner, theorists of anomie, allowed us to identify
several characteristic features of hypernomy. The rst must
include strict disciplinary control over the behaviour of citizens
that aects bodily customs. There is another characteristic of
hypernomy which is the identication of the functions of power and control
over power. This is inherent not only in communist and post-communist
countries, but also in traditional democracies that exert control over
citizens through the Internet. The third characteristic of hypernomy is the
predominance of production planning and control. Hypernomic societies
impose a utilitarian understanding of good and evil, erasing traditional
moral language. The fourth property of hypernomy is the ubiquitous spread
of conformism, self-deception, and the cult of authoritarian personality.
Two main conclusions are formulated: while hypernomics is the opposite
of anomie, dialectically they complement each other and can pass from one
to another.
Keywords: anomie; power; hypernomia; social control; conformism.
* The article was written in the process of dissertation research.
** Department of Social and Philosophical Disciplines of the Orel Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Aairs of
Russia named after V.V. Lukyanov, Orel, 302027, 2, Ignatovast, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
9872-1417. Email: vakuzmenkov@gmail.com
*** The chief of the Department of general and applied politology of Orel State University named after I.S. Turgenev,
Orel, 302026, 95, Komsomolskayast, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1850-8606. Email:
pilotskv@bk.ru
**** Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Languages, Kharkov State Academy of Physical Culture, Kharkov, 61058,
99Klochkovskayast, Ukraine. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9554-999X. Email: soinairina2003@
gmail.com
***** Department of general and applied politology of Orel State University named after I.S. Turgenev, Orel, 302026,
95, Komsomolskaya., Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0812-9023. Email: sascha.chekulae@
yandex.ru
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Hipernomía como fenómeno de la sociedad moderna
Resumen
El propósito del artículo es aclarar las características esenciales de
la hipernomía como fenómeno social. Fueron utilizados los métodos
comparativo-histórico, estructural-funcional y valorativo. La referencia
a los trabajos de R. Dahrendorf, E. Gellner, K. Stenner, teóricos de la
anomia, nos permitió identicar una serie de rasgos característicos de la
hipernomía. El primero debe incluir un estricto control disciplinario sobre
el comportamiento de los ciudadanos que afecte las costumbres corporales.
Existe otra característica de la hipernomía que es la identicación de las
funciones de poder y el control sobre el poder. Esto es inherente no solo
a los países comunistas y poscomunistas, sino también a las democracias
tradicionales que ejercen control sobre los ciudadanos a través de Internet.
La tercera característica de la hipernomía es el predominio de la planicación
y el control de la producción. Las sociedades hipernómicas imponen una
comprensión utilitaria del bien y del mal, borrando el lenguaje moral
tradicional. La cuarta propiedad de la hipernomía es la difusión ubicua del
conformismo, el autoengaño y el culto de la personalidad autoritaria. Se
formulan dos conclusiones principales: si bien la hipernomía es lo opuesto
a la anomia, dialécticamente se complementan y pueden pasar de uno en
otro.
Palabras clave: anomia; poder; hipernomía; control social; conformismo.
Introduction
Postindustrial society, the main value of which is information and
knowledge, contributes to the creation of new relations between people,
including in the political sphere. Despite the fact that a strong civil society,
political pluralism and the gradual erasure of class dierences are usually
referred to the main features of a post-industrial society, it is information
(authority) and knowledge (power) that will determine the further
development of a post-industrial society. Therefore, the simultaneous
possession of information and knowledge opens up wide opportunities
for the authorities in matters of mass control of the population, de-
individualization of citizens, and destruction of traditional forms of
relations. At the same time, these processes are clothed in a legal and
technologically progressive form, which makes it possible to characterize
them as hypernomie – a state of overcontrol, overregulation of everyday
life. Hypernomie is the excessive attachment of citizens to role standards
that determine the nature of their behavior in society with the application
of positive and negative sanctions by the controlling state bodies. In this
regard, the refusal of initiative, the strictly obligatory fulllment of one’s
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Vladimir Kuzmenkov, Konstantin Starostenko, Iryna Soina y Alexander Chekulaev
Hypernomie as a Phenomenon of Modern Society
social roles, and adaptation to imposed norms without manifesting a
personal position are an obligatory behavioral ritual. At the same time, the
phenomenon of hypernomie remains relatively poorly studied in science,
therefore, in this article we will consider it in more detail.
The object of our research is society, the subject is hypernomie as a state
of society. The purpose of the article is to highlight the essential features of
hypernomie as a social phenomenon.
The study of hypernomie refers to the phenomenon of political power.
Power is usually understood as the ability to have a determining inuence
on the activities and behavior of other people through authority, law, and
violence. Unfortunately, a situation often arises when the rulers, endowed
with power, do not properly care about the welfare of their citizens, the
political elite is busy with issues of personal enrichment and tries to maintain
its inuence over society. In this case, when solving internal problems, the
main support of the existing government is the coercive organs, which are
entrusted with the functions of intimidation and control. Having lost its
weight, the authorities are trying to compensate for their inuence over
society by developing a new eective mechanism, which is total control over
all spheres of public life. All this is facilitated by the disunity of society, the
underdevelopment of its civil institutions, leading to the suppression of
individual consciousness by the power and the imposition of certain forms
of behavior. Thus, the issue of hypernomie is associated with the essence of
power and its transformations in modern times.
In general, in the article we will consider the theoretical and methodological
prerequisites for the study of hypernomie, its modern characteristics and
some debatable issues. In the conclusion, ndings and guidelines for further
research will be formulated. Our work should be considered a description of
general issues related to hypernomie.
1. Theoretical framework. Methodology
The theoretical and methodological basis of the research is, rst, the
study of hypernomie in the works of the sociologist and political scientist
R. Dahrendorf; secondly, studies of right-wing authoritarianism and
nationalism, rst of all, by T. Adorno, E. Gellner, K. Stenner; thirdly, a
number of works on the theory of anomie and deviantology.
The appeal to anomie is not accidental: as we will show below, anomie
(a state of normlessness, lawlessness, loss of normative-value coordinates)
is often a consequence of hypernomie in the preceding period of social
development. The study of hypernomie allows us to understand the features
of the development of an individual in a post-industrial society, including
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the tendency to deviations. Many publications are devoted to the study of
the emergence of anomie during the transformation and modernization of
hypernomic societies, including in the aspects of the growth of the terrorist
threat, the rise of theft, murder and corruption (Galtung, 1996; Zhao, 2015;
Messner et al., 2017; He and Messner, 2020).
Three methods were used. The comparative historical approach allowed
us to examine hypernomie from a historical perspective. The structural-
functional method was used to determine the elements of the social structure
that contribute to the formation of hypernomie. Value analysis revealed the
dynamics of norms and values in a hypernomical society.
2. Results and discussion
The concept of “hypernomie” was introduced by the Anglo-American
political scientist and sociologist R. Dahrendorf in his work “Letter to a
Polish friend” (Dahrendorf, 1994). In it, he notes that hypernomie for
a short time contributed to the ourishing of communist regimes, but in
post-communist societies it was replaced by anomie (lack of norms and
their mismatch). However, hypernomie cannot be regarded as the exclusive
domain of communist countries, as we will show below.
Communist societies rely on strict discipline, including in everyday life.
The political space is built with the help of technologies of power oriented
towards control over the human body: obligatory subbotniks, marches
and demonstrations, passing the norms of physical training, military eld
training, etc. When detailing the technologies for the implementation
of political power in the USSR, one should list the social technologies of
localization (passport regime, registration, “invisible queues” for housing),
technologies for manipulating scarcity (housing, food, cultural values,
educational opportunities), indoctrination technologies (ideology and
propaganda), isolation technologies (restrictions on travel abroad, closed
cities, prisons and psychiatric hospitals for dissidents) and conscation
technologies (conscription) (Korolev, 2008). Other communist regimes
add their own characteristics. In modern China, for example, this is also the
birth rate (no more than two children per family) and even the compulsory
communication with relatives, and in the DPRK – a ban on living in cities
for “disloyal” and food corruption.
The classical analysis of disciplinary institutions was given by the French
philosopher M. Foucault, singling out as the most important schools, the
army, a psychiatric hospital, and a prison (Foucault, 2018); he believed,
however, that the communist reality was not much dierent from the reality
of Western societies (with the exception that party discipline still existed
under communism). Thus, political dominance takes on the features of
biopolitics.
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Hypernomie as a Phenomenon of Modern Society
Modern Western society also has a hypernomical character in relation
to human corporeality. The dierence is that control is clothed in softer
features and is implemented, as a rule, not directly by the state, but by
private structures, nevertheless, associated with the government. Typical
examples of hypernomie in the eld of bodily control are transhumanism,
neuropharmaceuticals, cosmetology, and plastic surgery. One can even
speak of “posthuman showcase corporeality” as the demonstrativeness of
body modications and orientation towards sensory perception (Barichko,
2010: 101). Often, modern bodily practices (tattoos, piercings, surgical
deformations of one’s own body (scarring, tunneling, replacing bones with
articial alloys, etc.) subordinate biological nature to the cult of social
prestige. The fact of their extreme prevalence in the modern world is also
conrmed by medical practitioners (Shepherd, 2019).
Other examples are biohaking – the improvement of the human body
with the help of biomedical procedures, including direct intervention
in the work of the body and the CRISPR / cas9 – widely known and,
unfortunately, scandalous technology of the human genome modications
that could potentially divide humanity into the people of a dierent nature
and therefore biologically and socially unequal.
Concentration on caring for health means devaluation of caring for the
soul and mind, that is, eternal life (salvation) in heaven is replaced by a
pleasant life on earth. This kind of human perception reects the process
of cultural primitivization. Sports propaganda, the reclame of cosmetics,
the widespread introduction of drugs and other things contribute to
the oblivion of the spiritual and the perception of the bodily as intrinsic
value in isolation from the higher reality. The unrestricted exploitation
of corporeality testies to the transformation of the body into a symbol,
into an object of consumption, i.e., to the enslavement of man by the mass
media (Baudrillard, 2000). Moreover, these biotechnological practices
can become constituents of new social relations. It is no coincidence that
F. Fukuyama, in his work “Our Posthuman Future” (Fukuyama, 2004),
speaks of a change in society and culture as a whole if the biological nature
of man changes.
Another feature of hypernomical societies is the identication of the
functions of power and control over power. If in a democratic society power
and control functions are separated, in a society of an authoritarian kind
they continue each other. The best indicator is the status of the prosecutor’s
oce. If in a democratic country it is usually a civil structure, then in an
authoritarian country its representatives usually wear shoulder straps and
are thus actually subordinate to the executive branch.
The purpose of identifying power and control functions is the formation
of “power over power”, endowing certain people or structures with exclusive
authority. Examples from the communist past and present: the General
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Secretaries and the Politburo itself of the Central Committee of the CPSU
and the Communist Party of China, the General Secretary and the Central
Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, etc. Many post-communist states
(Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) retained this function
of “power over power”, most often in the hands of the country’s president.
It is impossible, however, to draw in this aspect rigid boundaries between
democratic and authoritarian countries, since the former are also subject to
the erosion of fundamental principles. One-sided presentation of the racial
issue and open terror of dissent, legal humiliation of indigenous Europeans
before migrants, excessive emphasis on sexual issues, scandalous elections
in the United States in 2020 and much more symbolize the onset of a kind
of time of “controlled democracy”. It is associated with the removal of a
number of issues outside the scope of public discussion, which means
the introduction of ideological control and the imposition of sanctions
on freedom of thought. If the Soviet society left citizens the freedom of
“kitchen conversations”, then during the period of “electronic democracy”
this freedom is increasingly taken away due to the inuence of the media.
The story of the Telegram service, which refused to transfer the keys to
decrypt messages to the Russian special services, as well as the scandal with
the Facebook social network, which used the personal data of users to form
targeted advertising and transfer this data to the governments of various
states, became widely known.
The very activity of a person on the Internet in general and on social
networks in particular is hypernomical: on the one hand, every citizen has
the right to anonymity, on the other hand, it cannot but be public in the
space of mass interactions. Internet companies have the right to form the
rules of human activity, but the question is their humanity and morality.
It also raises the issue of memory and its use. If human memory tends to
forget and is always limited by personal experience, then digital memory
is potentially eternal and accessible to many. As noted by the Russian
academician V.A. Lektorsky:
In principle, digital memory of you can be stored forever. You stop being the
owner of information about your life and its owner. Your personal space turns out
to be hacked, as it were, and you become the subject of control by other people
(Lektorsky, 2020: 17).
The apotheosis of hypernomie on the Internet is the so-called “cancel
culture”. This is “a special form of behavior of Internet users who begin to
massively boycott or express their contempt for some public gure who has
spoken out on a sensitive and controversial issue not in a popular fashion”
(Trufanova, 2021: 31). The fate of D. Trump’s Twitter page is a vivid
example of the “annihilation of existence” of a user in public discourse. For
the average person, this culture can cost an unfair loss of reputation, job,
family conicts and health problems. Let us emphasize that Soviet society,
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Hypernomie as a Phenomenon of Modern Society
often demonized on the same Internet, at least left a person a chance for
public repentance and the preservation of common life benets. Modern
hypernomie is becoming more and more dehumanized.
Another feature of hypernomie is the dominance of plan, control, and
regulation of production. In the USSR, that was reected in the classical
principles-slogans “Five-year plan in four years”, “Overfulll the plan”,
“Catch up and overtake America”, etc. Modernity oers new forms of the
plan. Leaving aside the DPRK Songbun system, let us turn to the “social
rating” model ocially introduced in China in 2016.
According to the Chinese rating system, all actions of a person are
assessed by adding or subtracting points to the originally assigned
indicator of 1000 points. The rating is changed electronically, regardless
of the will of the person. Absolutely everything aects the rating: attitude
to the authorities, communication with relatives, credit history, even the
cleanliness of the place of residence. Interestingly, a decrease in the rating
automatically “pulls into a funnel” of unreliability: a low-rated person cannot
buy tickets for a plane or train, cannot work in a prestigious position, other
people will not want to communicate with him (this leads to a decrease in
their points), it sharply decreases chances of getting quality medical and
educational services or even a fair trial. In fact, this is a system of social
exclusion and alienation of people from the blessings of life, providing
for unquestioning loyalty. At the same time, power claims to dierentiate
between good and evil as fundamental ethical categories: good is behavior
that meets the criterion of politically established utility and expediency, evil
is all alternative. The requirement to “do the right thing” and “understand
rightly” becomes the basis of social morality.
The very existence of a “social rating” does not allow us to talk about moral
and immoral in our usual sense. Traditional moral language is inadequate
to describe the moral state of such a society. As Russian researchers note:
The archaizing mechanism of palliative resolution of conicts and
contradictions begins to consist in the fact that dierent social groups cease to
be compared with each other in the same normative space. Some citizens are
becoming more and more unequal to others, which cannot receive a convincing
moral justication... (Martyanov et al., 2016: 65).
Thus, the “plan” becomes an end in itself and acquires an internal logic
that dictates indierence to everything that is not related to its conduct. The
very system of “social rating” speaks of the close attention of the Chinese
authorities to absolutely everything except human life. It is institutionalized
indierence based on technical and technological dominance. The myth of
“e-democracy” cannot be realized without all-encompassing technological
progress.
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In the middle of the last century, the German philosopher R. Guardini
accurately noted the changed role of technology in modern society and its
place in maintaining power:
Technique ultimately has nothing to do with either benet or well-being,
it is about power; about power in the broadest sense of the word. The bearer
of such power is trying to lay his hand on the primary elements of nature and
human existence. This means the boundless possibilities of construction, but also
destruction, especially where it comes to a human being, which is far from being so
rm and reliable in itself, as is usually believed. So, there is an undeniable danger,
immeasurably growing because it is trying to impose its own authority and power
– not someone specic, but an anonymous “state” (Guardini, 1990: 144).
This opens up prospects for qualitatively new totalitarian and
authoritarian regimes. Their technical basis is the Internet of Things,
which allows total control of all human actions. It is no coincidence that
some scientists, such as the Canadian sociologist V. Mosco, talk about:“the
emergence of a new type of panopticon – an impersonal controlling
structure” (Kravchenko, 2019: 30).
Finally, we note one more feature of hypernomie – the widest spread of
collectivism and conformism, idealization of obedience, self-sacrice for the
sake of the group, rejection of private property and personal independence.
Therefore, in a “hypernomical society” there is a cult of violence and
coercion, and much attention is paid to historical events associated with the
use of force, and historical revisionism is often spread. Communist societies,
again, are not alone: for example, the events in the United States in 2020
clearly illustrate the validity of this thesis, and above all, for democratic
societies. To survive in such conditions, an individual needs to educate
and develop the following negative qualities: conformism, opportunism,
acceptability of corruption, deception, pretense, and doublethink.
British anthropologist E. Gellner reveals this feature in more detail.
First, he wrote about the USSR as follows (although his thought is valid not
only in relation to the USSR):
Social control presupposes the purposeful drawing of practically all members
of society into the mud of hypocrisy and demagoguery, both moral and economic.
Everyone had to express support for the persecution of dissidents, recite sacred
truths, and participate in illegal economic activities. And since everyone was
somehow guilty – before morality or before the law – the likelihood of moral
rebellion turned out to be extremely low… (Gellner, 2004: 155).
Secondly, he notes that, in a paradoxical way, many hypernomic societies
speak of high culture, the purication of the people’s soul, the armation
of truth, and other serious things. The general meaning of these speeches is
the armation of unity, but in reality, these societies are internally divided.
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Hypernomie as a Phenomenon of Modern Society
A society striving to become an Ummah, that is, to embody some unique truth
bordering on revelation, a charismatic community that arms truth on earth and
makes virtue the main goal of its state – such a society can be atomized and in
reality is atomized in the name of achieving higher goals (Gellner, 2004: 155-156).
These higher goals are illusion, painstakingly indoctrinated into the mass
consciousness. However, without this disunity, there will be no higher goals,
as well as vice versa. Real higher goals have already been given to the value
consciousness in religious and moral rules, and there is no need to rediscover
them. The sacred and the social are two interconnected, but still dierent
spheres of society, and only with hypernomie they try to merge them together.
For this reason, a distinctive feature of hypernomical societies is the
weakening of the ability of many citizens to make independent and rational
judgments and a tendency to conformism. T. Adorno, B. Altemeyer, E. Fromm,
K. Stenner and other researchers of right-wing authoritarianism concluded
that reduced intelligence indicates adherence to ultra-conservative ideology
and love of hierarchy. Right-wing authoritarianism provides simple answers to
people with low abstract thinking abilities (Adorno, 2001; Altemeyer, 2006).
There is some dierence between right and left authoritarianism, however,
according to the common belief of some contemporary authors, it is not
fundamental, and conformism is inherent in both left and right authoritarians
(Stenner, 2009a; Stenner, 2009b).
The psychological boundaries of authoritarian thinking are quite wide: its
carriers may tend to all-encompassing conformism, turning into submission
even to criminal orders. Virtually all military and political criminals were
pathological conformists. As Russian psychologists write, “the conformist
consciousness is automated, it lacks a sense of responsibility, there is no
distinction between good and evil, a person becomes a “cog” of a machine, an
automaton, ready at any moment on the command to “turn on” and blindly
execute any orders, orders coming from above” (Korolenko and Donskikh,
1990: 148-149). They emphasize that both hypernomie and anomie are
essentially based on widespread deviations, which in value and psychological
terms brings them closer to each other.
Conclusions
Thus, hypernomie is the opposite of anomie, however, dialectically they
complement each other, they are able to pass into each other according
to Hegel’s law of dialectics. This happens due to the fact that overcontrol
gives rise to a person who is ill-adapted to life in a free society. Hypernomie
rests on fear and the imposition of a primitive worldview, which often
disguises the incompetence of the social elite. Such a model of behavior
is pathological, because it kills in the bud the sense of justice, any positive
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initiatives, encourages skepticism, nihilism, hypocrisy, deception and self-
deception – that very doublethink. On the other hand, anomie can result
in the establishment of hypernomie. Typical examples are the history of
any totalitarian country right before the establishment of a totalitarian
regime. Chaos, crime, extreme decentralization of power and other crisis
phenomena can be eliminated with strict control of the behavior of the
population by the authorities.
The destruction of the hypernomic order inevitably leads to the growth
of anomie, as we have already noted above. There are many reasons for this:
the abolition of social institutions of moral control of society (for example,
the party and its youth wing), the collapse of the centralized economy, a sharp
withdrawal from decits, a management vacuum, weakening of ideological
control, and much more. Although hypernomic societies have their own
strengths, they are nevertheless characterized by hypertrophy of certain
traits, which eventually leads to their historical defeat. However, modern
hypernomie is increasingly acquiring electronic features, which allows us to
speak of the emergence of a completely new, network hypernomie, which
inevitably encompasses any socialized person. It is likely that this opens the
stage of a new totalitarianism, more resistant to all threats.
An inevitable problem of traditional hypernomieis the diculty and
cost of control and the ineectiveness of technological and disciplinary
action. On the one hand, citizens resist the right of the state to interfere
in their daily existence and therefore actively double-think, that is, they
behave demonstratively obediently, deep down in their hearts denying their
obedience. On the other hand, overregulation slows down social progress
and is increasingly becoming the subject of intra-elite power struggles. In
the digital age, this is taking on unpredictable directions. Therefore, the
sustainability of modern hypernomic societies is an open question and only
the development of human civilization can give an answer to it.
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