Thoughts On Kirkpatrick Sale's 'Looking at This Nation’s Mess, Small Is More Beautiful Than Ever'
This morning while consuming my regular diet of alt-Right conspiracy theories, Russian influenced antiwar rhetoric, anti-Democracy disinformation, and ‘own the libs’ hottakes I ran across this piece which dovetails nicely with my thoughts on Making America Small Again and wanted to share it with a few comments on the highlights.
Sale has long been a prolific critic of big government and his thesis just seems so obvious to wit,
There is one and only one conclusion that I should think everyone alive during this last few years of shutdowns and “vaccinations” and election chicanery and a sham (and crooked) presidency and a ridiculous election season and unprecedented government intrusions, would come to is this: the government we have in this country is too incompetent, inept, corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient, too centralized, undemocratic, unjust, and invasive, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities, and all because it is too big. Simple as that.
And his solution as audacious and original as it should be(but isn’t) obvious,
And yet it is only by admitting that nation is too big to work that we stand a chance of ever getting out of the deep mess we’ve created. That is the first step toward thinking about the alternative. It’s not elections, of course, for that doesn’t change anything, certainly not size. It’s not amendments to the Constitution (the document that inevitably got us where we are today), for that only tries to reform a system that has grown so far beyond the Founders’ conception (they had a nation of just under 4 million people) that it bears scant relation to the original. And it’s not any sort of rejiggering or reorganizing or reworking or even revolution.
It’s devolution, dissolution, secession, separatism. It’s making everything smaller.
Sale goes through history to try and discover what an optimal size for human society’s should be. Mentioning Plato’s ideal(I think this must be from Republic although I didn’t track down the reference) that a community should be 5040 citizens and census detail from Peloponnesian city states as topping out mostly at around 40k people during their heyday. He finds similar numbers for other European metropolises during their most productive periods before moving on to look at society’s that collapse from being too large,
Toynbee showed years ago that states that grow into empires inevitably collapse as a result of the growing numbers of problem as a state grows bigger, and that “forcible political unification” in a centralized state—when in fact it might seem to be at its height—is the last stage before collapse. As governments grow, regardless of their systems of command, their bureaucracies and armies grow, and to justify this expansion they almost always choose warfare—as Lewis Mumford put it, they “squander human vitality and economic wealth on the acts of war”—and that requires enemies, real or, many times, fabricated. Warfare in turn requires increased taxes or deficit borrowing to pay for it all, resulting almost always in great disparity between rich and poor, and measures necessary to keep that disparity from reversing. That produces a polity that, though increasingly authoritarian, in time becomes fragile and eventually both politically and economically unsustainable: hence Toynbee’s law.
It is not possible to come up with a population figure for the point at which such a collapse happens, because this stage is different with different ages, technologies, geographical reaches, and political conditions. It’s only possible to determine where a contemporary nation is on this trajectory, and it takes no imagination to see where the United States stands. The wonder is that it has not succumbed sooner.
The fundamental argument, taken from Leopold Kohr, is that as society’s grow social problems grow at a geometric rate(something like cr^x) while their ability to deal with those problems scales linearly with population. Something like this,
So, a small enough population(the far left) has more problems than they can handle. Although this point is debatable and is not the main idea. As the population gets larger for awhile everything gets better, until you reach the inflection point(the hanging down pot belly of the fat green curve) and after that adding people adds more problems than it adds capacity to deal with problems and the more people that you add the worse that it gets. The point is that America is waaayyyy off to the right side of the graph(here Right is bad. Unusual in a MASA post so keep up).
Now the problem is not ‘there are too many people’ or even ‘there are too many people here’. The problem is simply that we need to reorganize the people into more smaller groups. As Sale points out every congressman(xan)person(xerson) is trying to represent 58,000 people on average. So even if the congresscritters(xritters?) weren’t stupid and weren’t corrupt and were trying they would probably fail miserably, they certainly wouldn’t be very likely to accurately represent your interests.
Sale’s solutions are ‘devolution, dissolution, secession’. I think that by devolution he means that power needs to come back to local government which I am certainly down for. The American dream(the real one that some of us received into our imagination as children and still hazily see in, with, and under the Empire not the cricketchicken in every pot/pull myself up by my bootstraps BS) was always about the last being first and the first being last, flipping the pyramid upside down. The most practical way to do this politically is with the primacy of the small and the local over the gigantic and universal. Some of Sale’s comments suggest that the States should be the highest level of organization and I suspect that that is what he is getting at with ‘dissolution, secession’ which I don’t specifically endorse but it is worth having a serious conversation about.
Anyway, I am having a world of trouble with the Sermon on the Mount. How did these texts get so familiar yet not become in any way more comprehensible? I see very clearly that the themes of Matthew 6 are children being like their father and a sort of ‘anti-performativeness’-something that goes beyond authenticity and integrity to the point of deliberately hiding, sort of an antithesis of hupokrites(actors). I see those clearly but can’t seem to tell the story. I’d appreciate any thoughts on that or comments on Sale’s article or MASA in general.
Love and peace, jc
.