A country and a people can be measured in its breath and its depth. A government can either choose breadth of control or depth of control—but it cannot have both.
Governments that choose breadth of control are able to
govern a large territory with a light touch, but breadth of control depends on
a population that governs itself through a national identity rooted in an
ethical, religious or tribal code. When a government attempts to replace this
code with its own control, then it trades breadth of control for depth of
control.
Depth of control can only be extended over a limited area.
When governments invest in depth of control, then they tighten control over a
handful of urban centers clotted with massive bureaucracies that carefully
regulate the lives of its middle class while the rest of the country begins
going its own way unknown to the ruling class. These decadent systems lose
touch with the outskirts and with their own lower classes and remain unaware
even as their empire crumbles.
Modern government is fixated on depth of control over
people. It plots to control every aspect of their lives with the goal of
creating a completely harmonious whole. Technology has fed the illusion that
such control has become more feasible than ever allowing for the rise of truly
scientific government. This illusion is destroying the nation-states of modern
civilization by overburdening them with massive governments flailing for
control and destroying their economies in order to achieve that control.
Bureaucracy is the sticking point of depth of control. Each
level of control requires more staff to implement that control. The more
aspects of private life that government seeks to make public, the more men and
women sitting behind desks are needed to formulate the rules, promulgate them,
process them and enforce them.
The nationalization of private life runs into the same
problem of all nationalization and collectivization. Large operations tend toward
greater degrees of inefficiency due to the diffusion of responsibility and
accountability. Large systems respond to inefficiency by creating more
redundant structures which only increase the inefficiency.
Bureaucracies cope with all problems by adding new layers of
paperwork without recognizing that paperwork is itself the problem. The world
outside comes to be modeled through paper so that rather than interacting with
problems, the system interacts with a paperwork model of the real world that is
detached from the real world and requires ever increasing resource of paperwork
handlers to maintain.
Governments begin by seeking depth of control and end by
losing control over the depths of their own bureaucracy which not only becomes
incapable of managing an entire control, but develops its own agenda and
becomes a political rival of the politicians who serve as the conduit of their
rulership and also the void into which all their ideas, both good and bad, fall
into and vanish without a trace.
Depth of control is implemented through the proliferation of
laws, regulations, mandates and codes, but the proliferation of laws is also
the proliferation of lawlessness. The more laws exist, the more they are broken
and the more the system must struggle to restore credibility with constant
crackdowns or sink into a state of complete lawlessness.
Like a war, depth of control takes on its own momentum and
comes to exist for the sake of existing. Even though the various social wars
can never be won, the ruling class and the middle class are obligated to
believe that victory is at hand. The working class and the lower class, as well
as the lower middle class, who are usually the targets of government problem
solving, are usually well aware that the problems are unsolvable. Their
obstinacy acts as a kind of passive aggressive insurgency against the problem
solvers.
Like most wars, especially unwinnable wars, depth of control
is also very expensive and there is no end to the expense. But once depth of
control has become the default mode of government, the system loses the ability
to disengage from its own obsession with control. Every new measure and program
appears to be the genius idea that will finally turn the tide. And after a
while no one in power can accept the idea that the alternative to depth of
control will be anything but anarchy. This contention even has a basis as once
a system switches from breadth of control to depth of control; it tears apart
the codes that made the old way of life possible.
When enough people become used to dumping their
responsibilities to their parents and children onto the government, the moral
and social codes of responsibility wither so that the alternative to the system
really does become the ice floe and the beggar boy. And when marriage falls
into sufficient disuse and few people believe in a higher power and even fewer
in the power of personal achievement, then the people have become unfit for any
system but that of the nanny state.
Breadth of control depends on moral and social capital that
the planners who implement their depth of control mousetraps do their best to
subvert and destroy as backward and outmoded. And once they have accomplished
that then the society is broken and the only thing keeping it together in a
limited way is an equally broken government.
Technology is not the dealbreaker that scientific government
advocates believe it to because technocratic government does not solve problems
or make decisions, it only harvests and collects masses of information, virtual
paperwork that still has to be fed into a flesh and blood bureaucracy. Rather
than streamlining bureaucracy, technology adds another layer to the information
management staffs of the bureaucracy and holds out the promise of solutions
without ever offering any.
The problems of government have never really changed in
thousands of years and the obstacle to depth of control is still the human
factor. And the human factor does not change. Technology appears to make human
data more accessible, but it does not make human beings more amenable.
Governments strive for depth of control because they
distrust breadth of control. Breadth of control is based on organic social
codes and not easily amenable to changes by politicians who seek to remake the
society they rule over into one that is more responsive to their control. Their
campaigns for control lead not to more control, but to more illusory control,
and their control is limited to the centers of bureaucracy.
While breadth of control effectively holds together large
rural territories, depth of control works best within the urban model. Breadth
of control allows a people to develop their own identity, while depth of
control fragments identities. Depth of control is unable to hold the same
breadth of territories because it innately fragments societies and its
aspirations to total control lead to multiple centers of authority.
Depth of control governments actively or passively disrupt
the codes of the old society, Modern systems in the West even deliberately
export large numbers of exotic and foreign cultures and religions to make any
of the old social or ethnic codes outdated and unworkable. These actions are
meant to unglue the old horizontal peer-to-peer bonds of a society and recreate
them in a vertical puppet-master-to-puppet system that controls behavior from
the top down. However the new populations are much less amenable to control
than the old populations were because of their essential foreignness.
Hubris is the essential human fallacy and the one that
brings down empires. Depth of control is the ultimate expression of hubris in
the modern age. Past the age of kings, the new folly is not the building of great
pyramids or model castles, but the construction of edifices of unlimited
political authority that are meant to enforce complete control over the people.
Like the pyramids of ancient Egypt, the marble edifices of modern authority
that bury a government and its people within their depths for the greater
glorification of its rulers.
Only by escaping the tombs of government, can a nation and a
people come alive again.
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