Humans can also form involuntary organizations—that is, ones that compel the participation of at least some of their members. Individuals who refuse to comply or who attempt to resign may be forcibly deprived of their liberty (by incarceration) or other values. (At this point we are not attempting to make ethical judgments about such organizations, but merely to understand the causes of action in them.) Superficially, these organizations may resemble their voluntary counterparts. Individuals may appear to cooperate, and such mechanisms as voting may create the illusion of voluntarism. (The shortcomings of voting as a means of conveying individual purposes will be addressed in Section 5.) Nevertheless, those individuals who are caused to participate by means of compulsion do not truly adopt the "organizational goals." Rather, their behavior is prompted, at least in part, by the fear of losing a value, and it consequently tends to differ in subtle or drastic ways from voluntary cooperative action. In such cases the phrase "organizational goals" is especially misleading and masks the reality of the situation: more properly, these goals are associated with the organization's leaders and enforcers. We should especially avoid the mistaken notion that "society" acts through such organizations.

Involuntary organizations are again fundamentally different from organisms. Only in rare cases of brain damage do we observe different simultaneous parts of a human being struggling for hegemony. Although a human must weigh competing values against each other in order to make a decision, the individual then acts as a single, indivisible unit.