Decentralism
Someone asked me recently what my political beliefs are, and on the spot I coined "Decentralism" to describe them. But of course everything already exists on the web, and sure enough punching the term into google turns up a few thousand results and some interesting reading.
I use the term to mean that central control is to be avoided 'at scale'. And this holds true for all large-scale systems — be they software, corporations, societies, or governments. As the scale of a system increases, the need for decentralism rises exponentially.
Why? Because serious disaster looms for any large system that has a central node.
A large system amplifies problems with central nodes. If that central node has a bug, the whole system also has the bug, but now it's been multiplied by the scale of the system into an epic disaster.
Bob doesn't like a particular race? He's ostracized. Your dictator has the same character flaw? Millions or perhaps billions are deeply affected for generations and the course of history changes.
It happens with more banal politics too: Canada is having an election right now and Rural vs. Urban issues keep coming up. The same rules for guns just don't work in both places. I'll tell you what, that should be a sign for more decentralism. The federalists are trying to centralize something that should be decentralized. One-size-fits-all rules are causing strife and keeping the more important issues out of focus.
Centralism is killing us. We eat garbage food imported from a central food factory that maximizes profit while minimizing quality, instead of buying from our local farmer who has no incentive to poison us with hormones, commodity corn, and e-coli — mostly because we know where he lives :)
Centralism is bad business. Again and again, the best and most successful ideas and projects come from the roots (like the internet), and the most banal and profit-killing initiatives trickle down from wise-guys with power (DRM, Enron, Madoff). The theory makes a prediction: Long-term profitable organizations have a decentralized nature, and traditional management-heavy companies will do poorly in the long run.
I'm firmly in the camp that holds that local decisions are best, and that centralists are uniformly wrong. Some claim that a centralized system is more efficient, but these are illusions based on false analogy to small scale thinking. Thinking big means thinking decentralized.
Top down command from a central authority is a recipe for failure and disaster. Be you a right-wing military fascist or a lefty socialist, you're wrong if you think centralizing control will help anything. If you're doing something big, you have to plan to do it decentralized, or you will end up amplifying your problems into globe-killing monsters.
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government
politics
