The Downfall continues

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Another excellect article by Butler Shaffer.

EXCERPT
All of this foreshadows what appears to be the breakdown of traditional social systems that operate on the pyramidal model of the vertical and bureaucratic direction of mankind. The presumed capacity of those at the top of the pyramid to gather information imagined to be otherwise unavailable to ordinary people and to promulgate policies and practices that would lead to predictable and favorable results, has been the central article of faith in society. The premise is virtually synonymous with all forms of political behavior, but also finds itself generally expressed throughout the business community, organized religions, and school systems. Its underlying assumption has never been more clearly expressed than it was by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who employed it to help engineer the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings during the Vietnam War: “Vital decision-making, particularly in policy matters, must remain at the top. This is partly, though not completely, what the top is for.”

As institutional authority continues to collapse into decentralized networks of autonomous individuals, those whose conditioned mindset is unable to imagine a world functioning without formal direction and control experience a chilling fear. To such people, social systems that run themselves without superintendence is not only disturbing to their ambitions for power, but a form of fanciful thinking. At what is no doubt an unconscious level, such persons seek to revivify the dying model by its endless reiteration throughout the realm of human activity. Such people bear a sad but frightening resemblance to brain-injured people described by Abraham Maslow as wanting “to manage to maintain their equilibrium by avoiding everything unfamiliar and strange and by ordering their restricted world in such a neat, disciplined, orderly fashion that everything in the world can be counted upon.”



Butler Shaffer (send him email) teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.