Human Scale Development

Today I've been going back over Manfred Max-Neef's work in "Human Scale Development." A favorite quotation: “There is no possibility for the active participation of people in gigantic systems which are historically organized and where decisions flow from the top down to the bottom.” Combined with another favorite, “There’s no longer any beautiful specific problem” it seems that there might be a wonderfully powerful lesson here. What that lesson is, I'm not exactly sure... but I think it has something to do with how we look at the world. So often in our mechanical world, we solve problems by breaking them down and isolating them in order to identify the one thing that is not working or the one thing that is causing our problem. We do this as multiple levels... and yet it doesn't really work at any of those levels.

We set policies at community, state, and federal levels. Those policies are intended to make our lives better -- to protect us, to promote development in order to better meet our needs, etc. Unfortunately, what so often happens is that as we set one policy in order increase protection or promote economic development, that policy undermines the ways in which we meet our other needs.

Going back to the second quote above -- one can see that Max-Neef is talking about how these specific problems -- the ones that we have isolated in order to try to solve -- are not really individual problems that are separate from many other problems. And when we treat them in that way -- forming policies to address a single problem... it tends to just really mess things up.

Somehow that idea leads - in my mind anyway - back to another page in this book:
"The discourses of power are full of euphemisms. Words no longer fit with facts. Annihilators are called nuclear arms, as if they were simply a more powerful version of conventional arms. We call 'the free world' a world full of examples of the most obscene inequities and violations of human rights. In the name of the people, systems are created where people must simply comply obediently with the dictums of an 'almighty state.' Peaceful protest marchers are severely punished and imprisoned for public disorder and subversion, while state terrorism is accepted as law and order. Examples could fill many pages. The end result is that people cease to understand and, as a consequence, either turn into cynics or melt into impotent, perplexed, and alienated masses."

Collectively, we have spent so much of our lives breaking problems down into the tiniest of details in order to be able to make sense of them. "It's the little things that count [matter most]" we say... and that is half right. It is the little things that count -- but the other half of the answer is about how we put those little things together. Think of an orchestra: it is indeed the little things that make an orchestra great: the talent of each individual musician, and his/her ability to do exactly as they are intended to do. AND it is the synthesis of those talented individuals -- the coming together of these individual talents -- that produce the sounds in which we delight. Without talented individuals, the noise would be drudgery. Without synthesis, the noise would be no better.