Controlling the behavior of a system by controlling the behavior of will-less components: this is engineering. Engineering is concerned solely with the empirically observable outcome.

Influencing the actions of a system by influencing the free actions of its free-willed participants, and controlling behaviors of will-less components: this is design.

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Design concerns itself with harnessing moral energies – inspiring individuals to put willingly and if possible enthusiastically join and participate in whatever system is being created. Designs require less energy to be pumped in from the outside: design systems seem to generate their own energy because people add energy into it willingly. They also “take part” willingly, they recognize themselves (even discover more of themselves) in performing whatever part the design offers them. The role is not imposed, and nobody is forced to play a role that feels unnatural or forced, because the system is designed around natural inclinations, existing self-images, even untapped potentials.

Engineering excludes moral energies from consideration. This is entirely appropriate when a system is made entirely of will-less elements. But “for a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” — and for many engineers (especially young engineers who know everything because they can’t see how they do not know everything) who are men equipped with excellent engineering tools, everything looks like an engineering problem.

(And this, I will repeat once again, was the state of 19th-20th Century mainstream thought: to shape the world is to engineer it. Popular thought tended to either accept an active politics of social engineering or to reject active shaping altogether. This either-or, more than any other thing, produced the 20th century with its constant rationalist and irrationalist clashes, the left and the right, the liberals and the illiberals, taking turns playing at one extreme and then the other.)

If a person complies with socially engineered system, the goal is met. But engineered systems require monitoring, enforcement, rewards for compliance, punishments for non-compliance — in other words a constant influx of resources to fuel the human part of the system with motivations to act, and to enforce the performance of the roles the system requires of its component parts.

Somewhere between these two ideals of engineering and design is the whole field of psychological manipulation where behaviors are induced without coercion, but also without engagement of the will. Behavioral economics, advertising strategies designed to operate on an unconscious level, pick-up artistry, propaganda — these are in some ways worse than the brute coercion of social engineering, in the same way Brave New World is more horrifying than 1984.