On organisation

Monday, 08 July, Year 5 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

Any attempts to organise the human herd will necessarily fall into one of two categories : either personal or impersonal (which is to say legalistic). The reason is simply that no alternatives exist, just like a point can either be on one side of a plane or on the other.

The personal attempts, whether they be led by Hitler or Jesus inevitably end in bloodshed. The former case perhaps needs less explanation seeing our friends the Jews have expended so much of their little remaining intellectual strength after the carnage explaining to everyone who'd listen and especially those who won't that HITLER IS BAD MMKAY!!! The latter case is perhaps confusing in that it's a personal attempt turned impersonal after the depersonification of the leader (the artist formerly known as death), and thus the empty hope arises that maybe things could be finagled so the resulting halfbreed only inherit the good parts of both parents. The purity of the nonsense should be apparent to common sense, but fail that it is perhaps best typifed by that Jesus copycati with a turban (the artist formerly known as Danishface), who came up with the notion of jihad.

The impersonal attempts always end up in playing RPGs. Be it the bureaucratic "any time you want something done here's a quest for you, please collect signed&stamped papers of achievement aka PlotCoupons" so very familiar to East Europeans but now becoming increasingly the in thing across the pond or be it the out and out soma-esque "come to a large building and stay there all your waking hours playing click the farm on Facebook", no legalistic approach can or indeed seems to want to escape this ultimate fate of its ilk.

In short it's either war, which is scary, or peace, which is alienating. Neither approach works, and neither approach is worth two shits in anyone's estimation. The solution often appears to be creating tailored, designer organisational structures, but consider their fate. Buddhism is this personal scheme in which followers sit around in an empty room and play tabletop D&D in their head by themselves millenia after the guy's demise. Are they so very much better than those dudes depicted in Trainspotting, waiting around with their RPG while the baby dies ? I don't see it. Do you ?

Supposedly here's where I explain that if things were just let be and the herd "self-organised" everything would be ok on some arcane considerations of nonsense. Perhaps the contrary tendencies cancel each other out leaving us with pure goodness, or perhaps Adam Smith comes and fucks everyone in the ass with a broomstick to everyone's satisfaction. Well... not so. "Self-organised" still comes down to either personal or legalistic, or some mix of the worst in both worlds. Consider for instance this discussion of citizen justice to get an idea of how it works.

Just pick something. Would you rather be gutted by some foul smelling, fur covered, pox ridden, bad breathed bearded fuckwit wielding an ax, or would you rather have all meaning slowly sucked away from you to the point you'd rather gut yourself with a guitar pick, at some point after you've let yourself go past the point were bad breath and foul smells were an endearing feature ?

Have fun. Life be a gift.

———
  1. This is exactly what Islam is, a poor attempt on the part of some other desert goatherders to copy the originals, a few hundred years late and with all the panache of Joe Smith. []
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6 Responses

  1. Well if you have a lot of small herds instead of one big one you can perhaps move to the one that suits - today.
    Certainly a large number of smaller things is much more anti-fragile than one big one.

  2. David FRANCOIS`s avatar
    2
    David FRANCOIS 
    Monday, 8 July 2013

    "no alternatives exist, just like a point can either be on one side of a plane or on the other"

    AHEM.

  3. Vexare`s avatar
    3
    Vexare 
    Monday, 8 July 2013

    have a lot of small herds

    Which is how "society" worx, because there is no society. There is no global nor united etc.

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 8 July 2013

    @Chett At least that's how things used to work. The problem is that it's cheaper to have a really big herd. It's not novel either, bison used to herd in the millions.

    @David FRANCOIS Yeeees ?

  5. Successful legalistic structures are those which provide cheaper costs to accomplish organizational goals, vs. the costs of personal means. For example, a democratic system can survive for quite awhile without much violence so long as it is cheaper for an ambitious politician to win power through the electoral system than through violence. Of course, in practice it is not so simple -- most democracies are full of corruption at many points in the structure, where the legalistic system is not so efficient.

  6. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    6
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 8 July 2013

    Yes, this divorcing of ambition from the means to exert it efficiently is what makes democracy initially great. As the schizoid nonsense propagates it inevitably reaches the point where it divorces the ambition from the means to exert it efficiently in the body economic as well as in the body politic, at which point you get what's called (by outsiders and outsiders only) irrational self entitlement. With that the end is nigh.

  7. second option

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