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Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions
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This yen to regularise often comes with a “muscle-bound” self-confidence that the state 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”. This is the “[[high-modernist]]” view. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of a world which depends on the benign guiding vision of the state to bring about big projects. | This yen to regularise often comes with a “muscle-bound” self-confidence that the state 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”. This is the “[[high-modernist]]” view. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of a world which depends on the benign guiding vision of the state 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 | 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 Norway spruce: swathes of the unwanted ecosystem — which provide a richness and benefit to participants in that ecosystem which the state cannot “see” — are rejected ''because they don’t fit the model''. But they can play valuable and vital roles in the ecosystem — even for the Norfolk pines. The [[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 alternative to this approach is an [[iterative]], ground-up, organic interaction of people on the ground, using their judgment and experience to best solve their own problems and improve the general lot as they personally perceive it. Their read of the landscape will be necessarily far richer and more detailed than the state’s. If 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> | 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 alternative to this approach is an [[iterative]], ground-up, organic interaction of people on the ground, using their judgment and experience to best solve their own problems and improve the general lot as they personally perceive it. Their read of the landscape will be necessarily far richer and more detailed than the state’s. If 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> | ||