In our macro-obsessed times, our preferred solution to every problem is to do what we were doing, but do it bigger! Centralize! Expand the scope! Increase the budget! Pass the new law! Implement a new policy!
The list of problems we expect leaders, managers and experts to solve unrolls into eternity. While the list of problems we expect men to solve on their own has been locked up and the key thrown away.
This is for our own good! When institutions are built bigger the necessary consequence is the men they serve are made to be smaller. No one can escape the compressing gravity well of scope creep, including those same leaders, managers and experts who we expect to make it bigger!
The smaller, less capable we become individually, the larger, more powerful we will demand they become. This trend is so total that our biggest businesses, cultural icons, political groups and other large organizations are not only too big to fail but too big to succeed.
The Downside of the Human System
The opposite of bigger solutions, bigger corporations, bigger laws and bigger scope is to rely on the bonds that we forge, one to one, with each other through marriage, family and friendship.
Those bonds of love and fellowship, and of loyalty and trust create the great chain of humanity that extends from forever ago, to forever from now.
Besides their eternal, intangible reach, they serve as the roots which anchor us deep while in life… fastening us to families, clans, tribes and society. These bonds are the foundation for human flourishing.
Of course, there is a fatal weakness to this “human system”… that’s the human part. Humans have freedom and at times a mind for menace. Sometimes they choose poorly. Sometimes they are wrong or they fail. Sometimes they prove themselves unworthy of trust and respect.
As easily as human bonds are forged through loyalty, they are shattered through betrayal. As surely as joy is achieved through human triumph, grief arises from all-too-common human failure. Only the people who give you dignity, can give you grief.
History, both world and personal, is littered with human failures of all kinds. Whether by apathy or animosity, human beings have proven the most capable of destroying the human system.
Non-Human Systems
To escape the human risk of the human system we increasingly seek the comfort and protection of bigger systems, which we ask our leaders, managers and experts to design and run. While these non-human systems come in many forms and can include a lot or very little technology, the most basic building block of any non-human system is the presence of policy.
Policy exists to fill voids of trust. The human chain is based on relationships between known people. Policy allows standardized interaction between unknown people. These systems are a direct threat to each other. One cannot thrive while the other survives.
Modern employment is the most commonly experienced non-human system, based entirely on policy. The whole of business thought, innovation and energy for the last 100 years has been focused on how to make employment as non-human as possible. During its reign, policy has attempted to cast out the devils of nepotism, favoritism, discrimination, corruption, inefficiency and any other negative human tendency.
But being non-human it cannot long abide the positive human tendencies either like loyalty, trust, respect, work ethic or dignity. All of which are rendered inert and seem foolish beneath the bright lights of policy.
We rely on the non-human system, it all its vastness and complexity, to carry the risk of failure that comes with “knowing” more and more unknown people. And when failures inevitably occur, it is no longer human failing, but a policy one. A gap that requires more non-human systems to correct.
Policy removes the messiness of human choice by removing human choice. Whereas the human system requires human growth, maturity and accountability in order to succeed, the non-human system conquers by growing its policies to infinity. One policy necessarily begets another and another and in a long line of posterity.
And over time, the scope of policy gets larger while the people whom the policy governs have less and less power, and our expectations and hopes for others dip ever lower.
Employment is only one example of this phenomenon. Political parties, business strategy, cultural norms, entertainment, manners, customer service, product development, sports and even our own personal & family development all become plug and play models where the people are interchangeable. And the policy is supreme.
The Human System Is Worth The Cost
Human dignity, and flourishing requires rejection of non-human systems whenever possible. A life dominated by policy is a life surrendered. Investments in people, relationships and heartstrings are the only true investment there is.
In the human system, the people who make up the chain are themselves the ends, the product, the final testament to the system’s strength. The human system enables human dignity. No man is dignified all by himself. He can only be dignified in the presence of others; by receiving their love, trust and loyalty.
Instead of creating human dignity, we who are stuck in the web of non-human systems are humiliated. The literal humiliation of being lessened in the eyes of others - the reduction of our humanity to roles mapped out in flowcharts, phone trees, manuals, handbooks, codes, and frameworks. Where our names are blotted out and are replaced with the policy-based role we play: employee, manager, customer, end user, etc.
We have a choice. We can be the celebrated result of our family’s or community’s effort, or we can be the recipient of policy’s implementation. And as such are subject to the “fairness” of the policy’s execution regardless of our individuality or circumstance.
But what of the great flaw in the human chain? What of the risk of failure, betrayal, and mistrust? What of broken human experiences?
This is the feature, not the bug of the human system.
In fact, you can make the case that God Himself views the human system’s weakness as THE feature. Most vital and most treasured by Him. He himself works within the human system and has accepted the risk - the inevitable truth that some, perhaps even most, humans will use their choice to fail and betray Him. But this is no reason to Him to abandon that system. Heaven is not ruled by policy.
Because God’s glory is found in those of us who push through and build eternal bonds with other people. And it is through those bonds that we and everyone around us find our glory and power and dignity.
Human bonds are THE eternal system. They will endure through time and space long after every non-human system invented by leaders, managers and experts has crumbled to dust.
I feel this. And I am thinking about what has caused us to prioritize policy over human connection.. My best theory is that it is a consequence of increasing mobility. Human trust requires repeated interaction. It can be shown that altruistic behavior appears, even in animals, whenever there is a repeated interaction. Game theory supports this. Altruistic behavior appears in repeated iterations of the prisoners dilemma, as long as the participants do not know the number of repetitions in advance..
High mobility allows the worst actors to keep on betraying others, while avoiding punishment as they can just leave and repeat the process elsewhere. This necessitates a larger system to regulate such behavior. Despite its inefficiency and impersonal nature, it is the best solution we could come up with.