Complexity is a challenge to the mind and the soul. Bigness combined with complexity is a challenge humans should work to avoid…especially in their institutions and other social organizations. When it is too big and too complex for humans to manage and control, an institution or social organization will collapse or rule human behavior leaving human beings impotent.
Such is the problem with “banks too big to fail,” auto manufacturers “too big to fail,” and a collapsing economy too complex to understand and respond to human intervention.
This is the condition we have overwhelming the world’s financially dependent societies. This is the calamity now destroying individual and family lives.
The cause of this rush to form a global financial system “too large to fail” rests with corporations that have exceeded their role and responsibility in society. The cause is the idea that unlimited growth of anything is desirable. The cause is unfettered greed. “Bigger is better,” so the propaganda resounds in the advertisements for everything from a meal to a car to a house to a company. The one thing advocates of unlimited growth called for that wasn’t the propaganda line? Regulation and control of government growth…make smaller government…meaning impotent government.
What a sly advertising campaign. Make the only representative of the people’s voice and interests impotent by demeaning it and describing “government as the problem.”
Since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rose to power in the two leading English-speaking governments, these notions…this propaganda…has reigned subordinating good sense and human need.
“Too big to fail” is a strange idea. Indeed, if it is too big it must fail. Human beings must be able to comprehend what they construct. Failure to do so ensure human impotence. We must work to maintain our institutions and social bodies at human scale and avoid creating monstrosities that become a threat to life and limb.
The only solution to growth is intentional division, breaking down big things into smaller things. Then will it be possible for humans to maintain human scale institutions that benefit human beings.
Powered by ScribeFire.
