System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, An Order of Disorder

1. Society as a System
“Law and Order” has become the battle standard for the contemporary world's most conservative movements. Without exception, it is the ideal with which they have justified dominant social interests in order to defend themselves against calls for change. Richard Nixon rationalized events like Watergate by referencing the need to protect law and order in the United States against a “leftist conspiracy.” Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan has tried to justify his aggression against Central-American peoples (including terrorist actions in Nicaragua such as mining ports and training soldiers for systematically assassinating political figures) with the geopolitical pretext that the area is part of “America’s” backyard, claiming it was all necessary to preserve law and order for the sake of American capitalism. It is not surprising, then, that “death squads” threw themselves into the streets of Brazil and Argentina, Chile and Guatemala, under the ideological excuse that they were engaging in counter-insurgency, trying to foil the “Communist conspiracy,” and defending law and social order, which translated to “private property, country, and family.”

It does not take much effort to understand why the defense of law and order is a conservative ideal; in every instance, what one claims to defend is a particular law and social order—the social organization reflected in and consecrated by legislation, which makes prevailing social interests in each moment of history viable. Thus, those who defend law and order are the stewards of the established system, the principal beneficiaries of the so-called status quo, those who have more personal and class stakes in the system at a given moment.

Yet, every society as such contains order, even if its structure is the product of class domination (whether of the bourgeoisie or proletariat) or the consequence of egalitarian and popular governance, and whether one is talking about an authoritarian order or a revolutionary one. The essential condition of a society is that there exists some coordination between the actions of the individuals and the groups which compose it. Coordination implies a kind of order, and there is no way to avoid the reality of a collective order when thinking about a society, not even in the most radical conditions of all-out anarchism. If there exists a society, it is because there is some kind of order among its members, a set of patterns which harmonize the actions of groups and individuals in a way such that the work of one does not destroy or prevent the activity of another, but allows, permits, or complements it. Such a social order of actions and relations is normatively reflected in the law, the broadest regulatory frame of life in a given society, but it is likewise reflected in numerous formal and informal standards which prescribe all the aims of existence for different social groups. Individuals disclose themselves as people assimilating into a social order, which assigns them roles and allows them to acquire social identities through socialization processes (See Martín-Baró, 1983b, Chapter 4).

The existence of order provides the groundwork for viewing society as a system. Etymologically, the term system comes from the Greek sún-istanai, which means “to put together.” For the Stoics, “system” meant order. With that word, they asserted that all reality was subject to some law, and that one's thoughts should pursue that law of systematic order to understand reality (See Ferrater Mora, 1966, p. 687). From the perspective of society-as-system, the nature of the society’s unity and order, along with the character of its parts or elements, determine what that society is.

Thus, we ought to ask what such an order in El Salvador is, or what we ought to call its element of unity, since the country's prolonged civil war between its ruling forces and various insurgent, democratic, and revolutionary movements radically puts it under question. This inquiry is particularly interesting, given the contradictions which appear within the groups in power fighting to maintain or re-establish Salvadoran “law and order” (See Text One).

The Christian Democrats is perhaps the most interesting case (See Hinkelammert, 1981). Christian Democracy is a political party of the reformist persuasion inspired by centrism and the Catholic Church's social doctrine, primarily appealing to the middle sectors as its social base of support. In El Salvador, loa Democracia Cristiana rose to public life at the beginning of the 1970s in the space opened by the industrializing optimism of the Mercado Común Centroamericano and the reformist winds of the “Alianza para el Progreso” (See Webre, 1985). The Christian Democrats, who have been victims of electoral fraud and repressive acts from the governments in charge several times over, recognize, or at least did until their rise to power, that the existing order in the country was unjust and oppressive, and they proposed that it be transformed through socio-economic reforms. Nevertheless, confronted with the demand for a new order expressed by revolutionary and popular organizations, they have clung to the ruling order, which they have even defended with the same tactics with which they were once victimized. In fact, the years 1980 to 1982, during which la Democracia Cristiana shared power with la Fuerza Armada, form the period of Salvadoran history in which there was, both quantitatively and qualitatively, more repression against the Salvadoran people (See a chart of victims in Martín-Baró, 1983b, p. 361). Facing the demands of radical change, Napoleón Duarte, the leader of la Democracia Cristiana, then chief of the Junta de Gobierno, realized at one time or another the need for reforms, but only if they developed through the established “law and order;” then, as constitutional president of the country from 1985 to 1988, this same Duarte, in the midst of a war of counterinsurgency and perpetual operations of the (appropriately named, unfortunately) “death squads,” maintained that those changes had already been realized, and therefore it was necessary that all yield once more to constitutional law and order. What, then, is that order which the Salvadoran Christian Democrats condemn yet at the same time fight to maintain, criticize yet utilize, consider inadequate and yet defend with the entire lethal apparatus of war?

The answer varies significantly depending on the perspective one adopts. To speak of a system is to discuss a totality, a unity of meaning; and to arrive at defining a whole implies the collection of relevant facts and creating an interpretation thereof. However, the way one privileges some facts over others, or prioritizes and evaluates information, results in a particular interpretation. This is the importance of choosing which theoretical criteria should distinguish relevant facts from secondary ones. Social psychology has rarely questioned the social system, in whose boundaries and from whose factors the behaviors of individuals and groups are produced. With only a few exceptions, the lens adopted in these rare cases has been functional structuralism. The functionalist perspective emphasizes harmony and equilibrium in all social organization—a framework which puts forth an understanding of the social system based on its regulatory reliability. The almost inherent and often implied acceptance of this model has exacerbated its limitations and deficiencies, preventing social psychology from confronting important problems. This does not mean that the functionalist perspective does not have noteworthy contributions, but that it should at least be compared to other possible perspectives on social systems. In particular, there are other kinds of frameworks which do not emphasize order, but disorder within social organization, offering an understanding of the social system based on its unstable appearance. This focus has scarcely been used in social psychology, so it has gone on with very little source material, and more importantly, with little empirical data. Now, we shall try to examine both kinds of frameworks and contrast the images of the Salvadoran system as it appears in either perspective.

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