Why the Inquisition Built the Surveillance State

Part II · The pattern that did not end with the killing

Most people who know anything about the Inquisition picture torture chambers and burning stakes, and whilst those did exist, they were not the main event.

The Dominican order was founded in 1216, in the middle of the Albigensian Crusade, by a Castilian priest named Dominic de Guzmán. Its specific organisational purpose was to develop the techniques of identifying, isolating and converting heretics.

The military phase of the campaign against the Cathars had been brutally effective but blunt. Armies are not precision instruments. What was needed, once the open resistance had been broken, was a method for finding the remaining believers. They were now hiding inside ordinary Catholic communities — going to mass, taking the sacraments, doing everything outwardly expected of them. While continuing, inside, the practice that had drawn the army in the first place.

The Dominicans created a remarkable set of practices for finding these people, and those practices are similar to those we use now.

They began with the network. If you can find one suspected heretic and interrogate them about their associations, who they speak to, who they share meals with, whose homes they visit and which neighbours are sympathetic, you can build a list of names.

Then, you visit each of those people on the list and ask them the same questions. From this you can build a map of the entire community, identifying relationships and flagging suspects.

The Inquisition was, by the standards of medieval administration, almost obsessive about written records. Each testimony was transcribed in full, and cases were cross-referenced. The moment the same person’s name appeared in three different interrogations across two villages, they would be flagged as significant.

They kept these records in central archives. If you were to take a look at Bernard Gui’s Practica Inquisitionis, which was written around 1323, you would find a working manual for case management and pattern recognition across a heretical population.

They used the social fabric of communities and rewarded those who denounced others. They reduced penalties for cooperation, and built the assumption that staying silent is itself suspicious.

They made it so the rational choice for any individual in the community is to inform on neighbours before neighbours inform on them. This creates a self-policing community. The community does the work, with the institution as the receiving authority.

Think about that for a moment, because it describes the current digital surveillance apparatus exactly.

Identify the individual, map their network and keep records. The community can be used as the primary surveillance organ by giving it incentives to inform.

The mechanism is identical despite the substrate changing.

The Inquisitors used informants and written transcripts and parish networks. The contemporary apparatus uses behavioural data and algorithmic correlation and platform terms of service.

The Inquisitors took seven hundred years to build out the system. The digital equivalent has reached comparable depth in about twenty.

There is a recurring genre of book and documentary that traces the origins of the surveillance state to the late nineteenth century, to the rise of fingerprinting, to the development of the modern intelligence agency, to the East German Stasi, to the post-9/11 expansion of signals intelligence, but none of them are the original lineage.

The original lineage was built inside the Catholic Church across the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was built specifically to identify people who were thinking wrongly against the system. By mapping this and intervening early, they were able to stop the wrong type of thinking before it could organise itself into a movement.

The intelligence agencies of the modern state have inherited these practices. The institution claims the right to know what you believe, who you are connected to and that they can act on those connections, continuously, without any specific accusation on the grounds of keeping the population safe - from itself.

I know I keep saying that once you see it, you can’t unsee it, but it shows up in every day life. Whether it’s the platform notification informing you that your post has been flagged as misinformation, or the credit-score system, or the move to a cashless society. The whole apparatus has a single ancestor, and that ancestor was built by an institution that had just finished killing twenty thousand people in a French town for the crime of believing they could reach God without it.

I think this means that the contemporary moment is not unprecedented. It is the late phase of a very long argument. The Cathars are upstream of us in the lineage of people who noticed what was happening and tried to organise around the alternative. The Inquisition is upstream of the apparatus that is currently responding to anyone asking the same questions. So, the fight is not new, it just has a different method.

However, no matter how sophisticated the methods have become, it has a known failure mode.

The Inquisitorial system in Europe survived for centuries, and during those centuries it killed and ruined an enormous number of human lives. It did not, in the end, succeed in suppressing what it was built to suppress.

The argument the Cathars made was made again, and again, and again, by different people in different vocabularies, until the institution that had originally suppressed it lost its monopoly on truth-making altogether.

The Reformation was not the end of religious authority but it was the end of the Inquisitorial monopoly. The thing the Church most wanted to prevent happened anyway.

There is no reason to assume the digital version will fare better. The apparatus is bigger and more sophisticated. It has access to more data than any thirteenth-century Dominican could have imagined. But this doesn’t address the original problem, which is that the underlying impulse to know directly is older than the apparatus and operates at a level the apparatus cannot reach.

The Cathars, the Gnostics, the witches, the Sufis, the Quakers, the Indigenous spiritual traditions across continents have all known it. It is in the human animal that you can’t remove with surveillance.

I think, we are at that moment now.

The system we are looking at feels overwhelming when you read the news, but it is one chapter in a story that has been running for two thousand years.

All the previous chapters have a pattern. The institutions over-extend, the surveillance becomes oppressive and the population that the apparatus was designed to monitor begins, in sufficient numbers, to notice what the apparatus is.

The institution loses its monopoly and a new arrangement emerges, with the cycle restarting in a different form.

We are not the first generation to live through this. We are just the most recent one. The Cathars are not behind us, they are ahead of us, in the sense that they have already shown us what the institution does, and what the answer is.

The answer is to keep noticing, to keep speaking, to keep building the parallel, and to refuse to be silent on the grounds that the apparatus is large.

The apparatus has always been large and has won many battles, but it doesn’t win the long game.

THE CATHARS - You Tube