Is the Social Contract Endangered? The Unraveling Pact in the Age of Autonomy and Technology
Dear Nyaaba,
You will recall that before the advent of the Whiteman “burdened” with his mission to civilize the “Dark Continent”, you were already living in some sort of order. You had headmen and chiefs, family heads and “tindama” (landowners-owners of the allodial rights to the land on which you settle). There was order, basic, maybe even unsophisticated but order there was.
The Whiteman then came and “put order” to this order, in a manner conducive to their plan to make our sacred land the unquestioning source of raw material for their Industrial Revolution.
Next came Kwame Nkrumah and his posse, who mobilized you to wrest power from the hands of the Whiteman, with a loud promise of self-rule. And thus saw the birth of the country called Ghana. That arrangement birthed a state and those whose business it is to find reason for and form to the political behaviour of man have long posited that at the base of this arrangement and the earlier loose understanding that governed your earlier existence, was a contract, The Social Contract.
The social contract is a philosophical concept that refers to an implicit agreement among individuals to form a society and abide by its rules, laws, and norms in exchange for protection, order, and the benefits of collective life.
At its core, it is the idea that people consent, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some personal freedoms to a governing authority (such as a state or community) in return for security, justice, and the preservation of other, more fundamental freedoms.
This Social Contract has come to be deemed as the elixir of man’s innate brutishness, allowing for him to co-exist in some amount of mutual respect and benefit. But alas today, that bedrock, that reportedly underpins every human society is facing an existential challenge.
In the shadow of gleaming screens and the relentless pursuit of individual freedom, a foundational pillar of civil society trembles: the social contract. Once an invisible but binding agreement forged between the individual and the collective, a mutual surrender of absolute freedom in exchange for order, rights, and protection, it now faces erosion from two seemingly unstoppable forces: the rise of personal autonomy and the seductive sprawl of modern technology.
Today, “freedom” is interpreted less as shared liberty and more as limitless self-determination. Autonomy has become absolute. The citizen, once bound by civic duty and mutual obligation, is now a sovereign consumer, defining truth by preference, and morality by convenience. The once-noble concept of the common good is buried under algorithmic feeds curated for self-interest. The “we” has fractured into a million curated “me’s.”
Technology is not without culpability in this decay, it is the accelerant. The platforms that promised connection have instead cultivated division. Surveillance capitalism monetizes our desires and stokes tribal identities, breeding suspicion rather than solidarity. Algorithms reward outrage, not consensus. Truth itself is destabilized, replaced by filter bubbles and conspiratorial echo chambers. When everyone is their own authority, who is left to trust?
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence begins to make decisions once reserved for human judgment, who gets hired, who gets parole, who lives or dies in a war zone. But unlike the democratic structures of old, these systems answer to no electorate, no constitution. Power has been privatized, digitized, and abstracted. The social contract depended on reciprocal accountability; machine governance offers only the cold logic of code.
What happens to the social contract when technology enables autonomy without accountability? When people retreat into digital enclaves and resist even basic collective norms, can a society still claim to be united under law, reason, and mutual respect? Increasingly, the answer seems bleak.
Look around: public discourse has become warfare. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Civic engagement is shallow, performative, and transactional. The marketplace has replaced the agora. Responsibility is out; rights are in. And yet, we are lonelier, more anxious, more alienated than ever before.
The social contract is not just endangered, it is unravelling.
But this need not be terminal. A society can reinvent its contract, but not without effort, and not without pain. It requires the courage to reimagine autonomy not as the right to escape obligation, but as the capacity to choose interdependence. It demands we reclaim technology not as an escape pod, but as a tool for rebuilding civic trust. And most of all, it calls for a collective reawakening to a truth we’ve forgotten: that freedom is meaningless without community.
If we fail to act, we may wake one day in a world that is perfectly personalized, meticulously optimized, and utterly unliveable.
The social contract is calling. Will we answer, or scroll past it one last time?
Call me alarmist or conspiratorial, call me whatever, the evening of organized society is nigh. It may not be replaced by bedlam but it sure will look, feel and operate differently from that which we have known for eons.
Pensively yours,
The Honourrebel Siriguboy
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