The phrase has a military origin, a reference to a marching column of soldiers in mechanical lock step. Militaries are machines, and, as with all mechanical devices, function only when each part is operating in sync with the others.
Our psychological sensitivities in this area are informed from two directions, internally, from intuition grounded in evolved primate proclivities, from two and a half million years of life in small foraging groups where affiliation and consensus were matters of life and death, and externally, from the forced mechanical roles of civilization, from a lifetime embedded in steeply hierarchical power relations where compliance is nonnegotiable and obedience is ensured through the application of lethal force.
These two, the internal and the external, meet in the middle, in compelling social pressure, in a social-psychological compulsion, impossible to ignore, overwhelming in its insistence that we conform, that we “toe the line”—a quip, incidentally, with its origin in the starting line of a footrace. To be out of step is not merely an uncomfortable state, to remain out of step for any length of time is intolerable. And to be intentionally out of step, to purposefully step out of line, to forcefully extract yourself from the drivetrain, is a clear sign of mental illness.
But what are you to do when you start to see civilization as the death machine that it is? What if standing apart, or stepping out of line becomes a moral imperative? What if you can no longer, with clear conscience, continue to conform to a system that intentionally intensifies suffering, a system that is systematic in the ways it metes out misery and death to everything within its purview, a system that insists that there is nothing in the entire universe outside of its purview?
