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[[File:North Korea.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A weekly [[stakeholder]] work-stream check-in call, yesterday.]] | [[File:North Korea.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A weekly [[stakeholder]] work-stream check-in call, yesterday.]] | ||
}}{{br|Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed}} — {{author|James C. Scott}}<br> | }}{{br|Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed}} — {{author|James C. Scott}}<br> | ||
{{Quote|No battle — Tarutino, Borodino, or Austerlitz — takes place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition. | |||
:—Tolstoy, ''Wae and Peace''}} | |||
This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reading, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes, JC, I am. Now, [[get your coat]].”</ref> — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t. | This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reading, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes, JC, I am. Now, [[get your coat]].”</ref> — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t. | ||
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That [[diversity and inclusion]] is the ''cause célèbre du jour'' hardly [[Falsification|falsifies]] this observation, especially given the current institutional approach to delivering it, which chimes with this desire for narratising [[legibility]] and [[high-modernism]]: firstly, [[diversity]] inherently ought, you would think, to be difficult to pin down, its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. Yet, to get a handle on it, organisations must make it ''[[legible]]''. This they do by defining it in a strikingly limited way (by reference to religious, ethnic, sexual and gender identification, but not, say, to education-level, socio-economic background, nationality, political identification, pastime, or life skill). Then they seek to gather ethnic, sexual and gender ''data'' from their staff, so that they can present statistics about their changing diversity. Thus, diversity is homogenised, parameterised and regularised. Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too. | That [[diversity and inclusion]] is the ''cause célèbre du jour'' hardly [[Falsification|falsifies]] this observation, especially given the current institutional approach to delivering it, which chimes with this desire for narratising [[legibility]] and [[high-modernism]]: firstly, [[diversity]] inherently ought, you would think, to be difficult to pin down, its manifestations being naturally — well — ''diverse''. Yet, to get a handle on it, organisations must make it ''[[legible]]''. This they do by defining it in a strikingly limited way (by reference to religious, ethnic, sexual and gender identification, but not, say, to education-level, socio-economic background, nationality, political identification, pastime, or life skill). Then they seek to gather ethnic, sexual and gender ''data'' from their staff, so that they can present statistics about their changing diversity. Thus, diversity is homogenised, parameterised and regularised. Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too. | ||
The flaws of hubris in central planning in the high modernist regime | |||
1. the presumptions that planners can make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require. | |||
2. we know a bit more about what constitutes a satisfactory neighbourhood for those who live in it but we still have no idea about how to foster and maintain such a neighbourhood. | |||
3. | |||
Formal order to be explicit is always and in some considerable way parasitic on informal processes which the formal scheme does not recognise without which it couldn't exist and which it alone cannot create or maintain. —see the work to rule. | |||
===An authoritarian state=== | ===An authoritarian state=== | ||
An authoritarian state able and willing to use coercive power to bring high modernist ideals into being. | An authoritarian state able and willing to use coercive power to bring high modernist ideals into being. | ||
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*Metis | *Metis | ||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||