Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

When your yen to regularise society is accompanied by the “muscle-bound” self-confidence that you can expand production, better satisfy human needs and master nature (including human nature) and centrally configure social order “commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of the word and depends on central state vision to bring about big projects. Now those infinitesimal interconnections and illegible relations are not just invisible to the state programme but inimical to it. Natural forests are replaced with grid-planted Norfolk pines and swathes of the unwanted ecosystem are rejected ''because they don’t fit the model''. But they can play valuable and vital roles in the ecosystem. The simplistic deterministic belief that they are not necessary will eventually come back to haunt you. “Nature,” as Dr. Ian Malcolm put it in ''Jurassic Park'', “finds a way”.

The [[high modernism|high modernist]] believes the future is somehow solvable and certain, and the [[certainty]] of that better future justifies the disruption and short-term adverse side-effects of putting in place a grand plan to get there. The counterpoint to this approach is the [[iterative]], ground-up organic adjustment of people on the ground, using their judgment and experience to best improve the lot as they personally see it. As long as you have the right people on the ground, this is both far more effective for society, and far ''scarier'' for administrators: they have less ''control'' over progress, less ''sight'' of it, (therefore) less to do, and a harder job justifying the rent they extract (in a government, this is called a “tax”; in a corporation, it is executive [[compensation]]) for providing their “vital” administration.<ref>It is of course a heresy to question it, but is any [[CEO]] ''really'' worth a hundred times the average employee that the firm pays for him?</ref>