4 replies to this topic

[Cinco Jotas]

Here's a good video that's right up your alley, Nancy.  It's overly vague, but we can forgive that because it promises to be the first of a multi-part series on the topic of scale.



It's produced by something called the Abbeville Institute, a think tank that wants to provide the intellectual firepower for Southern succession. (The Chronicle of Higher Education is predictably up in arms about them.)

[PLEASUREMAN]

[Mercenary]

Can't wait to tell people I knew about Scale before it was cool

[George Obsolete Peppard (GOP)]

Going in that vein of logic, it seems especially disastrous that Federal Government has been sublimating state's rights and responsibilities for the last 30 years.  A state level is about the pinnacle that a person without immense resources and ties to enfranchised interests can reasonably influence politics, no matter how exemplary the person.

[PLEASUREMAN]

In a sense the shift in power from local to federal is a natural consequence of scale, even though it presents long term problems.  Our shift from local to federal coincided with the growth of large, dense cities, and these urban environments altered our psychology.  It doesn't matter if world-cities are surrounded by miles of rural wilderness, their inhabitants are aswim in an ocean of other people--mostly other people they don't trust and have no organic connection to.

For the city man, a massive government seems logical to manage a massive collection of people.  And it does address certain short term problems, particularly those involving the allocation of major resources and the mass commerce that develops.  The new scale of business can efficiently serve mass society and also fill the void of identity left by weakening nationalism (with branded consumerism and class niches).  But of course these large businesses must be regulated because their interests do not align with those of either the government or the citizenry.  Regulation is somewhat effective in the short term, but eventually power and wealth buy the influence they need--this is unavoidable, whether the mass society has a small government or a large one.  By the same token, allocation of resources on this mass scale--which can only be done by large government--has considerable complexity costs.

The next evolution then is a government and business that develop aligned interests--partly because the same elites move back and forth between the two (this is of course no longer a scandal, it being assumed that all government officials will inevitably pass through the revolving door to serve the needs of large business).  This is in fact our present state.

This leaves us with some very big problems.  Devolution of power is not likely barring a cataclysmic failure of central government, which no one wishes for.  Regardless, there will probably be a lengthy run-up involving years or decades of stagnation and general strife, the time frame depending on whether there is a crisis to help things along.  Candidates include massive climate shift, depletion of essential resources, other major environmental disaster, disruptive civil unrest, and of course war.

Moreover, opposition to a controlled break-up on the part of one of the major power blocs, Jews, is likely to be fierce.  Jews will tend to equate regionalism with Southern secessionists and white separatism, and Jews stand the most to lose with the formation of regional nations or sub-nations (this is because their power base is geographically limited).  Nevertheless, I still think our best chance of coping with the disasters that scale will produce is to continue spreading these ideas as far as possible, not only to other conservatives but to moderates and liberals as well.