Sometimes it’s the culture itself that creates the problem. I could speculate about which European country you mean- it sounds like Germany or Scandinavia or the Netherlands more than any other, but let me not automatically assume it’s impossible to one of the others. It probably worked that way because that country is that country and America is America. Ditto Switzerland. If you have a country of Germans/Danes/Swiss/French/Italians/whatevers, you’ll have German/Danish/Swiss/French/Italian/whateverish problem sets and available solutions.

AS to whether our current institutional forms will bring eventual disaster, yeah probably, but they’ll be reflecting the society at large. Every civilization falls eventually.

I’m not a big fan of libertarianism, anarchy, or any of the rest of the “isms”, but I will tell you this much: What we’re doing ain’t working. Past a certain point of complexity and size, the current methodology of human organization simply doesn’t work over the long haul. You can look at certain small and carefully curated examples of governance, like the Swiss Cantons, and see effective long-term organizational entities, but there is something going on that militates against these things from being more widespread. It’s cultural, to a degree.

One of my favorite examples is actually Swiss; take a look at the Swiss Army NCO association, and then compare it to the presumably equivalent US Army version. The Swiss version is dramatically different, being an organization that focuses itself on professional standards and training, having published many professional military works that were taken up as doctrine by the Swiss Army. The US version, known as NCOA? LOL… It’s a damn mob of rat-bastard rent-seekers, mostly concerned with insuring that they get the most benefits possible out of the government and their fellow citizens.

Similarly, there are massive differences between some European unions and the US version: In one case that I witnessed, a European union actually took actions against a member that resulted in said employee being black-balled from employment in that entire industrial sector, because he was stealing from the company he worked for. The other employees turned him in to the union, they held a tribunal, and the result was that he was fired and banned from employment in that entire industry in that region. Try that on for size, Detroit… You’d never see a US union doing something like that, upholding professional standards and requiring member responsibility.

Funniest thing about that deal with the German union…? The owner of the company was beside himself–The idiot kid who was blackballed was an in-law, and he was going to have hell to pay at home because of the whole thing. He’d have happily kept the kid on, and eaten the amount he was stealing, but the other employees were like “Not happening…”.

Much of what is wrong with our world boils down to dysfunctional and short-sightedness in our culture. Nobody takes the long view, nobody worries about whether or not that guy stealing from the company is contributing to the long-term demise of its ability to continue functioning… It’s all about the short-term, sadly.

The only remaining human government was Australia [no, this was not a Neville Shute story]. An alien spokesman was explaining to an Australian how things worked. The alien civilization was vast, but organized into various kinds of associations and cooperatives [business, research, family, whatever, even military professionals perhaps] never over 10,000 or so members. All higher organization was ad hoc and project-based. The alien was struck dumb anyone would operate in another way. He noted that organizations that try to get bigger or violate other rules were hit with an antitrust action. Most were legal actions, but he noted the biggest antitrust actions involved fleets of starships, so…

But still organized ad hoc.

So the Australian thinks he gets the gist, fearing the end of the last human-style social organization on Earth, and tentatively asks when he might expect an antitrust action against the Government of Australia. As this was also an allegory of colonization, the alien replies he need not worry, since Earth organizations were outside the system anyway. I think Earth was just owned by some trading association or some such.

As so often, no idea what the story was.

Though first, Alcibiades. HT to Sam J for the reminder. Highly recommend the novel The Tides of War by Steven Pressfield. I wonderful take on the life and times of Alcibiades, the great aristocratic desperado of his times. Villain, or hero of a sort? The novel is not as good as Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, which is a class of its own, but it’s very good and to my mind the second-best of his novels.

Per another thread, I note Alcibiades has also been remembered for nearly 2500 years, though not as widely, so he is ranking near Alexander the Great in his own right and ahead of Herostratus. Since Herostratus only did the one nasty thing and in pursuit of memory, it seems a fair ranking. On the matter of novels of this sort of character, Justinian by HN Turteltaub [aka Harry Turtledove]. Well worth it.

Maybe this is not true at all and I think it could be reasonably argued with great force and sureness that it is not. What kills Empires and large organizations? What killed Athens? Attacking Syracuse was what did them in. Whose bright idea was that and who talked them into it. It was Alcibiades that pushed the great idea of attacking Syracuse. The same Alcibiades went from city to city in the ancient world. In Sparta he was more Spartan than the Spartans. Changing his chameleon skin every time he moved somewhere else and betraying everyone he came in contact with. Alcibiades killed Athens with risky schemes to glorify himself. Alcibiades was to my mind no doubt at all a psychopath. Look what Plutarch said about him.

Story of Alcibiades

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alcibiades*.html

“…He had, as they say, one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others, thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon. That animal, however, as it is said, is utterly unable to assume one colour, namely, white; but Alcibiades could associate with good and bad alike, and found naught that he could not imitate and practice. 5 In Sparta, he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for p65 luxurious ease and pleasure; in Thrace, for drinking deep; in Thessaly, for riding hard; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. It was not that he could so easily pass entirely from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior which might in each case be suitable for them…”

I wonder if all Empires after consolidation into large units allow psychopaths to move up the chain of command until…the whole thing is so dysfunctional it falls apart in a heap of contradictions and risky foolish gambles the Spaths do to entertain themselves. Looking at our society right now, USA, see anything that might remind you of that?

So saying “humans aren’t very good” I think is incorrect because I don’t consider psychopaths humans. They’re like really smart lizards.

So, a lion pride or wolf pack whose hierarchy ceases to be effective shortly breaks up, or dies off. Not so the human equivalent at the macro level, such as the bureaucracies we’ve generated.

Now, it is somewhat arguable that the IRS could be likened to a hunter-gatherer band or wolf pack writ large, but the fact remains that it’s a human-created hierarchy, and as such, it’s a part of the continuum that stretches from the band to the nation-state superpower. And, it also is exquisitely clear that humans aren’t very good at doing these large-scale hierarchical organizations at all well over long periods of time. Which leads to the implication that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to create these things the way we are, and that standing up these huge hierarchical organizations that are so prone to what Jerry Pournelle termed “the Iron Law of Bureaucracy” is a huge mistake, in the first place. Humans lack the necessary quantity of self-sacrificing altruism that would be required for these things to actually work, over the long haul, and as we aren’t ants, it might be about time we quit emulating them. Although, admitting to ourselves that we’re a bunch of chiseling bastards might be painful, it would have the salutary effect of driving the development of some more workable schemes for organizing large groups of humans for some large-scale enterprises.

Regardless, Banks’ Culture always struck me as a plausible illustration of the doctrine that one man’s paradise is another’s hell. But I guess if one is born into it, one adapts.

Science Fiction terrifies me a lot more than it did 20 years ago. Fancy that.