Petition to Stop Atlas Shrugging: Part 7
Step 2: The Solution May Be Simple - SIMPLIFY!
Ayn Rand’s famous novel (which this substack is named after) ends with Atlas shrugging – an iconic metaphor for what happens when those who carry the world on their shoulders are pushed to their limit and forced to say, “No more!”. It is my belief that we are getting very close to experiencing this Earth-shaking shrug. How do we stop it from happening?
In this series of posts, I draw on a variety of sources by those who are much smarter than me and pondering the same issues. My goal is to organize the thought process. I hope that you, the reader, see this series as an invitation to an honest, meaningful discussion that will bring us together to work out a constructive and positive way forward.
In the first five posts, I tried to get to the root of our problem, because defining the problem is the first step towards solving it. The rest of this series is devoted to considering possible solutions.
Every now and then, I will follow with a HANDOUT – a succinct one- or two-page summary you will be able to download, print and distribute.
“There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud.”
It is becoming more and more obvious that we have made our world too complex to be efficiently manageable.
Economies of scale, which emerged as an advantage of large-scale production at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, have devolved into huge and often disastrous diseconomies of scale as efforts at managing cumbersome federations and monstrous multinational corporations consume more and more of our society’s limited resources.
The complex structure of our society has bred an even more complex superstructure. Bloated post-nation-state bureaucracies and impotent, costly, corrupt, and unwieldy “world institutions” tucked on top of it all spend greater and greater portion of the people’s wealth on increasingly futile efforts of trying to run themselves, which leaves them with less and less ability to actually do what they were set up to do.
Those who govern us are becoming utterly detached from the reality we live in. I would argue that our current system makes this trend inevitable: the larger and more complex our governance model, the less time and resources our “leaders” devote to being concerned with our needs and priorities. They are too busy “governing”.
Enormous institutions are not designed to value or respect human life. To them, we are but numbers.
“One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.”
It is no accident that this famous quote is attributed to none other than the notorious communist dictator and mass murderer, Joseph Stalin.
Increased complexity breeds more complexity. New laws and regulations are constantly created to counteract the “unintended consequences” of previous laws and regulations.
Increased complexity is making it more and more difficult for an average person to live in this brave new world of ours, where one cannot take a proverbial piss without some drops of it falling afoul of some contrived and superfluous rule, with punishment to follow.
Increased complexity also makes it harder, to the point of being near impossible, for an average person to fight against our rulers’ ignorance and injustice. One can’t help wondering whether it’s by design.
Let me give you an example. I have recently delved into the laws of the Canadian province of British Columbia that govern the province’s municipalities. My local community group was contemplating petitioning our local government not to proceed with the “rainbow sidewalk” installation, and I was tasked with figuring out what the process is.
I found that municipalities in BC are largely governed by two statutes:
The Community Charter, which consists of 292 articles, and
The Local Government Act, containing the whooping 796 articles!
I am a professional accountant, used to the incomprehensible language of Canada’s Income Tax Act – but even I couldn’t find what I was looking for in this maze of circular references and confusing legalese.
The Canadian taxation system is another glaring example of this trend. It has gotten to the point where even we the professionals don’t always know what’s “correct”, and it has become virtually impossible for an average Canadian to navigate their own personal taxes without running afoul of some obscure provision of the increasingly voluminous Income Tax Act and its bloated, convoluted regulations.
What’s more, even the Canada Revenue Agency is finding it increasingly impossible to navigate its own rules. On one occasion, I phoned the CRA three times on the same day with the same question, and three different CRA employees gave me completely different answers!
It is a known fact that the CRA give people wrong information in at least 30% of inquiries – and that’s when the taxpayers are “lucky” to even get through to an agent. This was a known issue back in 2017:
This government’s typical “solution” is to throw more of the taxpayers’ money at the problem, which – surprise! – does nothing to solve the problem.
One wonders WHY everything is so complex. Ayn Rand answers this question brilliantly in Atlas Shrugged. “We’re after power and we mean it,” government mouthpiece Dr. Ferris says to Rearden. “… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of lawbreakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”
Shocking revelation? Alas, nothing shocks me anymore…
Aside from the obvious damage to the society from turning ordinary, well-meaning and law-abiding citizens into criminals, the unnecessary complexity of our taxation system and of our governance system as a whole is damaging our entire economy.
To sum up, the larger the system, the more complex and resource-consuming structures are needed to maintain it, the more laws and rules are invented to manage the increased complexity - and the more stressful people’s lives become. It is a known fact that levels of stress, anxiety, depression and mental illness in our society are through the roof.
The logical conclusion is that, in order to simplify and “happify” our world, we need to break it up into manageable and livable chunks.
What appears to confirm this theory is the fact that smaller entities today tend to be more successful than larger, more structurally complex ones. Individual, relatively culturally homogeneous European countries generally do better than the bureaucratic, disparate, constantly squabbling among themselves European Union. Canada, which is a very centralized federation, seems to fare much worse economically, politically, and culturally than a decentralized union of largely autonomous states such as the United States of America. Small towns house happier, friendlier, more cohesive communities than huge megapolises. Universal human yearning for that happy place is evidenced by the almost immediate mass exodus from monster cities at the start of the “pandemic”, when people discovered that their job had been the only tie that bound them to the metropolis and not having to go to work every day instantly destroyed that tenuous bond.
I have observed firsthand that smaller countries clearly tend to do better today. Let’s take a look, for example, at the tiny island state of St. Kitts and Nevis (population around 53,000 - July 2019 estimate). Here’s what I observed on my repeated visits in the last couple of years:
· There is very little homelessness. The govt provides young families with their first home, a basic three-bedroom bungalow, on which they can add and improve later.
· There are very few drug issues. This may in part be because drugs are not tolerated: purchase, use or possession of drugs are illegal and are severely punished. But it may also be due to the fact that people who are happy and unstressed do not resort to drugs as often.
· Tourism enriches the entire society. The island state has no income tax but a very high sales tax (18%). Visitors, of course, pay that tax on everything they buy, from a T-shirt to a hotel room to a restaurant meal – and thus contribute to the local economy without the need for complex “residency” rules or tax collection machine. Public parks are being built for the locals to enjoy. Education is very good: all children are required to wear uniforms, schools appear to be very well run, clean and orderly.
· People go on with their lives without much micro-management and are encouraged to deal with their issues without running to the nanny-state for handouts.
In contrast, in our bizarro “developed” world governments in their arrogance are sticking their out-of-joint noses ever deeper into our most intimate affairs. Remember the relatively recent attempts to regulate how many people could gather in a private home? How about mandating (on pain of being completely excluded from society!) what is injected into your body, or forcing everyone to wrap a useless piece of cloth around their faces? A couple of years ago, the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Dr. Theresa Tam even went as far as to suggest that people should be masked when having sex! As a result of this explosion of nonsensical and intrusive government diktats, more and more of us are seeking ways to opt out of existing systems altogether and, instead of trying to fix what appears to be irreparably broken, focus our attention and our efforts on what truly matters. I saw a headline recently that said: “Generation No Thanks” – very succinct.
Every historical attempt at building a large-scale societal structure seems to eventually reach a “critical mass” beyond which it cannot function efficiently anymore.
Maybe this IS indeed a simple matter of size?
Let’s once again turn to history for our lessons.
The Roman Empire exemplified the trend I am referring to. Its impact on the civilization as we know it was nothing short of revolutionary, and its initial success caused it to grow and grow, fusing its diverse, far and wide possessions into a unified political and economic commonwealth. That commonwealth eventually metastasized into an unwieldy monster. What was regarded as best and most important by individual provinces and groups within the Empire became so varied that eventually there couldn’t possibly be one central system that would bind it all together efficiently. Not only did the Empire become geographically overstretched (which meant, among other things, longer and more vulnerable supply chains – does that sound familiar?), it was also extremely culturally disparate (can someone say ‘multiculturalism’?), which led to its eventual moral bankruptcy when Rome’s ruling class became completely detached from the reality of ordinary subjects’ life. National Geographic in its very interesting Jesus and the Origins of Christianity edition talks about “corrosion of Rome’s state religion into little more than a propaganda cult, which produced a deep yearning for a new religion.” ‘Propaganda cult’ is how many of us today refer to state-controlled mainstream media.
We all know what the end result was – the mighty Empire eventually imploded and disintegrated, breaking up into more manageable chunks that eventually evolved into modern-day nation-states.
Unfortunately, implosion of an empire seldom goes smoothly: this kind of event is usually accompanied by cataclysmic changes, lawlessness, chaos and the resulting human suffering. The Scottish-Canadian writer Jack Whyte in his series of novels about post-Roman Britain shows us what happened after legions withdrew and Pax Romana collapsed, and the tremendous effort it took for remnants of that society to simply survive.
The historian Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens cites sociological research showing that about 150 individuals (sic! This few!) is the maximum size of a group that can be efficiently bonded by natural social cooperation, without requiring formal societal structures and an ideology to support and justify those structures. The main reason for this limitation is that most people cannot intimately know more than 150 human beings, and cohesiveness and collaboration within such a natural group relies heavily on personal ties.
Research tells us that chimpanzees have developed a way of dealing with this sociological phenomenon. A typical chimpanzee troupe consists of 20-50 individuals. If a troupe meets with extraordinary success in reproduction, self-defense from predators and procurement of food, to the point where its size increases dramatically, the social order within the troupe usually destabilizes, leading to a subset of individuals breaking away to start a new, separate group.
Humans chose a different path: instead of breaking up into manageable group sizes, they continued sticking together, forming larger and larger bands, journeying from fragile territorial alliances of primitive tribes to modern day cities containing millions of individuals living literally on top of each other. The elaborateness of structures, and of the underlying mythology that would compel members of these groups to toe a common line with a bunch of complete strangers, grew exponentially. This trend eventually led to our society being so complex, so constantly ripped apart by conflicting interests and opinions, that it can no longer govern itself with any degree of efficiency, unless it develops mechanisms for forcing its members to comply – thus bringing on the rise of Tyranny.
In order to reverse this trend, we should go back to doing what we’ve done for centuries: banding together locally, building relationships, helping each other. I do not see how governments can effectively interfere with that - UNLESS WE LET THEM. They simply do not have the resources to successfully invade all our private lives. The recent years of “pandemic” lockdowns and “social distancing” can be interpreted as an attempt to destroy our sense of community, to disempower us by isolating us from each other. However, that only succeeded with those who bought into the paradigm. Many, perhaps most of us are more resilient than that. When pushed to the brink, we reached out to each other and forged new connections. We became even stronger by building on these connections to establish groups of like-minded individuals. Community groups (such as, for example, Action4Canada chapters) have exploded across the country.
Since time immemorial, ethnicity and culture have served as a community’s binding element, a mortar for commonality of purpose. It is not accidental that today’s rulers try very hard to convince us we have nothing in common. Justin Trudeau’s infamous statement that Canada has “no core identity” is nothing but wishful thinking by a wannabe tyrant who knows he must divide us in order to be able rule us with impunity.
https://torontosun.com/2016/09/14/trudeau-says-canada-has-no-core-identity
CONCLUSION: STEP 2
A well-functioning society hinges on commonality of purpose and personal connections. A society of strangers with conflicting interests can only function as a tyranny.
Our next step in fixing our world is to build and strengthen small, independently functional, grassroots communities where people know each other and care about each other. This will not only simplify our immediate world but also empower us to stand up to the intentional complexity of central governance that seeks to divide and control us.
Thank you for reading! Stay tuned!