The transition from foraging to farming, paradoxically, accelerated the growth of meanings and at the same time slowed it down. An increase in activities meant an acceleration, an increase in order—a slowing down of cultural evolution. The entire history of traditional society is a very slow and gradual increase in the proportion of people who are subjects of choice. Why was this process so slow? Perhaps because personal freedom depends on the progress of personality, that is, consciousness. It is personal freedom, the ability to choose for oneself, that is the main condition for the growth of meanings and for the acceleration of this growth:
“Locke says that ‘Freedom of Men under Government’ means ‘not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another man.’ Uncertainty in general and man’s inconstancy in particular therefore become the arch-enemy that needs to be exorcised” (Hirschman 1977, p. 53).
We would not reduce the complication of thinking and consciousness to the division and addition of knowledge, personality or identity. We are talking about the division and addition of active power as a whole. The division, addition and multiplication of active power means an increase in the complexity of the subject, both the individual human being and the culture-society as a whole. An increase in the number of counterfacts with which a culture-society or an individual operates means an increase in the entropy of the source of meanings, i.e. an increase in the minimal subject.
The division of active power develops along with the division of activity and the division of order that we discussed earlier. Historically, the division, addition and multiplication of meanings leads to a gradual and eventually major divergence between the complexity of the individual and the complexity of the culture-society. An individual takes part in only some of the activities produced by culture-society and operates within only a small part of the socio-cultural order. As a result of this divergence in the growth of meanings, a culture-society creates more counterfacts and produces more complex activities than any one person, or even all of them individually, could create and produce.
We have seen that meaning is not reducible to a minimal action: it contains “redundant” figurae. Likewise, the subject is not reducible to a minimal subject: it also contains “redundant” figurae. The mass of the subject, that is the length of the string of figurae or cultural bits by which it is described, depends on the mass of meanings of which it is the product. The result of the historical division, addition and multiplication of meanings is a growing multiplicity and mass of activities and meanings. However, the multiplicity and mass of meanings necessary for the reproduction of a culture-society as a whole are much greater than those necessary for the reproduction of the individuals who make up that society. We call the multiplicity and mass of activities that reproduce a culture-society the