Businesses are always looking to “scale” – i.e., become bigger and multiply their production and consumerbase. If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, you’ll see business ideas rejected because they aren’t “scalable”. In big business, scalability is the most important concept. If your product’s production (or service’s maintenance) can’t scale, you’re doomed to remain small.
But there are several problems with scale. The first is the most obvious. If there are no boundaries, then some businesses can and will end up becoming essential to the economy. Why is this unacceptable? Because they become “too big to fail” – because if they ever were to fail, it would plunge the economy into strife. So, they guarantee themselves State support by becoming indispensable. They end up being able to dictate to the State, which is never a good thing since they’re inherently motivated by self-interest.
When we allow businesses to become too large, we also willingly allow them to become economy-ending (should they fail), and this cannot be tolerated in any rational world. Businesses that want to perpetually scale up are absolute poison to people’s freedom. All larger businesses should be broken up by mandate of the State. Companies must never be allowed to have too much power. They should be subordinate to the State (which, ideally, has the interests of its citizens in mind), not the other way around. Right now, companies that act in self-interest have the most power and therefore they benefit. If a government oriented towards protecting and empowering its people had the most power, then the people would benefit. Can there be any question as to which is the most rational scenario?
Depersonalization
To understand the second problem of scale, we must consider the scope of what individuals are capable of knowing personally. How many people do you know? You probably can’t list off every single one unprompted, but consider the scales at which you can know them:
- You have your family, the people you’re close to and grew up with.
- You have your friends, people who aren’t from your family but whom you confide in.
- You have your acquaintances, people you work with. These can often play temporary roles in your life.
- You have your neighborhood, which is a broader entity you have a place in, around where you live.
- You have your town or city. Even if you live in a smaller settlement, scale is starting to get unknowable. If you live in a city, you already have trouble working out what your place is within it. You probably have no real power in a city, but power is concentrated in its government.
- You have your county, province, or region. This is (usually) a very broad area, with power condensed into the hands of even fewer people.
- You have your country – the broader nation under whose authority you live. The leaders of your country are probably so distant, you’ll never once meet them. And these are the people whose decisions make such decisive changes in your life, despite the fact that they can’t know who you are. There is nothing personal to you at this scale, unless you happen to be extremely powerful – like the super rich.
How reasonable is it to try and make decisions on this scale, considering how distant the powers-that-be are from ordinary people and how impersonal it all is? Invariably, sacrifices must be made. Some people must be screwed over. You can only know so much about the people you’re governing because they’re so different from each other. You inevitably end up seeing people as faceless shadows. You have to generalize. You have to make too many assumptions.
Sure, some decisions can and should be made on this scale, but how much could we benefit from deferring more decisions to states, counties/provinces, or even cities?
At high scales, you must govern with a one-size-fits-all formula. At high scales, ordinary people are seen as numbers and resources, not people. This problem of scale applies to corporations as well. They often take on tedious bureaucracy. Everything small becomes a statistic, a form, or an insignificant anomaly. It’s only the larger issues that ever register.
So, as a low-ranking individual in these systems, you often feel depersonalized, like your opinion doesn’t matter and you’re not being treated with common human respect. You play no role in shaping your environment, so you feel like a stranger or even an alien. Management doesn’t take you into account aside from your numbers, because you’re just one among many. You’re merely part of a generalized statistic. And if you get fired, the decision will not be personal, either – it will be made on the basis of numbers alone. There’s nothing human about such massive systems.
Humans are social creatures, which means we thrive on personal relationships. We don’t thrive on mechanistic, impersonal government making decisions for us. Democracy is good at making it feel a little more like you have a say, but the more people who cast a vote, the less an individual vote matters. Quickly, scale can make voting feel futile and unaccounted for at any personal level. There are people who, because they vote for fringe parties, will literally never get a government they are happy with. At enormous scales, democracy, which is supposed to be personal, becomes not only so vast as to be impersonal in its results, but also influenced by the super rich because of the small number of people who are involved at the highest scales (it’s easier to bribe small numbers of people, especially when said people have so few scruples as to surrender to the temptation of accepting money from special interests).
No wonder some people are attempting to resurrect personality by engaging in extreme individualism. But the antidote to corporate and governmental bureaucracy and numbers games is not extreme individualism (which depersonalizes everyone else in favor of the self); it’s community: a thing of moderate scale in which an individual can feel like they have a role to play and have something to contribute. Being one of the best in the world at something is extremely difficult – but being one of the best in a community? That’s much more achievable for a lot of people.
There’s a reason why people tend to coalesce into smaller groups on the internet – because, again, we thrive on personal social connections. We need a certain group of people we see every day. We need lasting friends and family.
Encountering a lot of people also means that we are presented with an abundance of information regarding people, and the more we have to process, the more we imperfectly generalize. We make snap judgments about people more often. We judge people based on their clothes, their possessions, their status, their singular opinions, rather than getting to know who they really are. In a sense, this is necessary in an ever-scaling world, but it is by no means good or optimal.
And that doesn’t mean you should define yourself this way. Lots of people fall victim to status syndrome – they define themselves with regard to their appearance or their status. They resort to giving off signs and signals, so to speak, and these signs are taken as reality by their observers because they provide a quick way to gauge who someone is. In other words, if you make yourself look important, you thereby become important because plenty of people will take you at face value.
There’s a difference between a persona (a shallow image of who someone is) based on happenstance and one which is carefully curated, but neither of them can tell us who someone really is. There is no substitute for getting to know people, and that’s why excessive scale threatens our sense of self – and our perception of other people. We might become shallow, and indeed many people already have. And the environment this creates is highly impersonal – we fail to be recognized for who we are, and we, in turn, fail to recognize who others are. We end up giving birth to all kinds of personal demons.
The internet is an incredible achievement – it’s made information available to an unprecedented extent. Yet it used to be a much smaller place, not just because less people were using it, but also because it was less centralized and thus, sites were smaller in scale. Nowadays, the vast majority of internet traffic pertains to a handful of websites, which often leaves us unable to feel personalized in huge landscapes of content, much of which we can’t even relate to because it comes from people so far away (hence we have trouble meaningfully engaging with it unless we stop to have a conversation, which many of us don’t have time for, only checking social media during a break at work or during a commute).
In every area of our life now, corporate scale is intruding. Everything has to be huge, the equivalent of blockbuster movies, in order to be considered successful. Small cult hits aren’t good enough. We want to create something that relates to everyone and in doing so, we end up with something that relates to no one. To whose benefit? – the super rich, of course.
It’s time to scale it back. Reduce the multinational enterprises. Reduce the blanket, one-size-fits-all mandates. Reduce websites. When you embrace the small – that’s when personality really has a chance to shine, and it doesn’t have to shine at anybody else’s expense. Society should emphasize the social connections that help us all, rather than emphasizing the numbers, which help only a few to make cold, calculating, over-generalized decisions.
Extreme Individualism
Extreme individualism, as said above, depersonalizes everyone in favor of the self. It’s usually a characteristic of narcissists, but it’s becoming more and more common on the internet today. It’s a reaction to the depersonalization they’re subjected to on social networks, and in their everyday lives. They want to be noticed and appreciated as people, so to do that, they shout louder, become brighter and more obnoxious, ensure they are front-and-center at all times. In doing so, they starve others of attention, who then feel more compelled to shout even louder and become even more extreme in their conduct and opinions. Some make purely fake posts, saying deliberately incendiary things they don’t believe in, in order to draw people’s attention.
This cacophony of nothing benefits no one except the rich. If social media isn’t enriching your life, then get off it. Forget FOMO. You won’t be missing out on much.
The Beautiful People
You know who always gets noticed? – the beautiful people. That’s why the beauty industry is so lucrative. Yet there’s a contradiction in that it can’t actually make you beautiful. Have you ever noticed that people in ads for beauty products are always naturally beautiful people? Have you ever seen an ugly person transformed in a beauty ad to look amazing? Hardly, if ever – they always start out looking pretty good. Yet if the “beauty” industry really could make people beautiful, why wouldn’t they show that? Why would they only show naturally beautiful people?
In beauty ads, the implication is always that you could look like this person. You could become this beautiful if you used this product. Well, yes, it might be able to make improvements to you, but unless you have a similar bone structure and similar skin, you probably won’t be going around looking like them. And that’s what they don’t want you to think about, since, if the illusion were revealed to you, you wouldn’t bother buying beauty products. Beauty ads have to convince you the product is effective, even though in all likelihood, it won’t be as effective as it’s implied to be.
Right now, the most distant people, who operate on the highest scales, are the one with the most power – but what if we tried the opposite? How about the more people you have power over, the less power you have? In this system, towns and cities would have the most power, and federal governments would only have power insofar as they could enforce basic principles – or a constitution (which should be subject to change, of course) – and keep peace between municipalities. They would have the least executive power.
Here’s another aspect: how many super-rich, billionaire psychos would pursue high positions of power if they required real, personal sacrifice? What if those in the highest positions weren’t allowed the most extravagant lifestyles or the most money, but were sworn to poverty? Imagine if the most prominent politicians today were stripped of their money and comfy lifestyles and forced to go homeless. Might they then gain an appreciation of what the poorest of us have to go through every day just to survive? And might they then rule in a fairer way? Might they make actual change? But of course, they’ll never submit to poverty voluntarily, because they are all in it for themselves. They can sleep at night only because their minds are so warped by adoration for personal comfort.
Why not “poverty for president”???
It will take many steps to move towards a good world, but one of the most important will be fixing the problem of scale. We weren’t meant to live like this. We need to fix it. And what’s for sure is that the people in power have no intention of doing so, which leaves it down to us. This will not get fixed unless we take action.