This book drives home the message that states are a bureaucracies that seek to standardize and quantify everything they see. They cut down old growth This book drives home the message that states are a bureaucracies that seek to standardize and quantify everything they see. They cut down old growth forests and replace them with orderly, single species lumber farms that come with myriad unforeseen problems because a natural forest is sustained by its entire ecosystem. The state’s attempts to organize and outsmart nature are doomed to failure from the outset because of the hubris of their designers.
The state has attempted to quantify and commoditize its citizens the same way. Standardizing plots of land, measurements, languages and trying to recast society in its high modernist style. This would include things like Stalin’s collective farming initiatives and other similar projects.
The bureaucrats at the top see everyone under them as stupid and backwardly clinging to archaic ideas. In reality, even when these projects have any success or at minimum are survived by its people, it’s in spite of the system, not because of it. The author describes the concept of metis, the knowledge and experience of certain skilled individuals.
He describes it as a factory with machines operated by workers who are considered unskilled and interchangeable by the company. On the surface it seems to be the case , but in reality, the machines are often finicky and require experienced people to operate them correctly. If those workers followed company procedures to the letter, work would grind to a halt. Confronted with that fact, some bureaucrats would turn a blind eye and claim success, others would rather see their project fail done their way than succeed by other means.
The author says that state bureaucracies are parasitic on natural societies and cannot exist without them. There’s a bit of an anarchic bent to this which is easy to agree with on the surface but I wonder what our alternatives are at this point, we can’t go back to an idealized, egalitarian society that may never have truly existed. Is it even possible to move forward from where we are in a balanced way?
Books like this make me think about pessimistic philosophy, the idea that there’s no free will, our brain just rationalizes our biological drives to us so we feel that we’ve made a decision. Could this happens on a civilizational scale? If we are a product of nature and we repeatedly create bureaucratic hierarchies, maybe it’s just our collective natural function, which sounds terrible but here we are. ...more
I saw this and remembered that old show life after people, I guess it’s my own fault that I expected it to be more or less the same thing.
While it doI saw this and remembered that old show life after people, I guess it’s my own fault that I expected it to be more or less the same thing.
While it does get into how buildings would break down and animals would reclaim the planet, it spent most of its page count preaching about the ravages of capitalism and the impending ecological catastrophe that it has wrought. I don’t disagree in principle with the author’s sentiment but this felt like yet another “bait and switch” non fiction book with material that isn’t indicated by the title.
I want to read a book that’s a nuts and bolts breakdown about what would happen to all our crap if we disappeared tomorrow, not a character assassination of Homo sapiens.
Gripes aside, when he sticks to the subject it was well researched and compelling, some of the parts where he gets into how we’ve changed the planet, even in ancient times through the introduction of non native species of plants and animals was interesting, just too long....more
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