Blog - David Helkowski
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Institutions Only Do Right At Ease

I believe that institutions, which includes governments and any large societal structure for my statement, only do the right thing out of ease in doing so and self benefit for the institution.

Essentially, I don't believe that institutions at scale are ever primarily sacrificially beneficial to those outside of the institution, regardless of the rules or structure of the institution at its start.

Put more simply, all large groups of people will self corrupt and seek only their own benefit. The only slight thing decreasing this absolutistic dreaful reality is turnover. New people joining an institution, if sufficiently different from it to begin with, may be able to partially resist the corruption for a short time.

This ties into some things said by Robert Michals, with his "iron law of oligarchy", which is that organizations naturally become dominated by self-preserving elites.

This is deeply tied to economic structures used in modern societies and throughout history that trend to preserving dominance through generation wealth and/or generational power structures instead of through actually value of those with wealth or any demonstrable reason that they should remain in their positions.

Yes. I'm basically saying "eat the rich." But with a difference. I respect people who actually do work for humanity. I absolutely do not have any respect for those who do not do anything meaningful to improve humanity and instead of basically mooching off it with claims that they get to do that because of money or position.

The most hopeful perspective I am able to take myself is that some of the institutional systems that exist and/or have existed do have measures to take some amount of public opinion and give some small amount of power to leaders arising from the populous to bring that public opinion to bear to shift society.

I do not believe the amount of that shift is typically great, and whatever positive influences are enabled through that I believe are overpowered by negative affects of large corrupt institutions.

That is, there are periodic "good things for the benefit of all" that occur from governments, but only just enough of them to ensure that the corruption isn't ended. That is, government naturally increases corruption at the maximal rate that doesn't lead to revolution.

When revolution occurs is the only time this increasing cascade of continual corruption ever gets to shift back to a sane baseline. It's like the ever-boiling frog. Eventually the frog just dies and the new frogs say fuck no and jump out.

If we want to cease existing with ever more shitty rulers and upper class and ever increasing divergence of wealth from upper class to the rest, we need to formulate large social systems that periodically cleanse the structure in a sort of faux revolution that has its damage mitigated so that we don't have to actually kill anyone or destroy physical things.

What I suggest needs to be periodically destroyed is the systems of rules that just forever increase till they can only be understood by specialists.

It may not be immediately clear to you as it is to me, but the reason corruption can always keep increasing further is because the ability of the common man to see it decreases as the system becomes more complex and adds more and more incomprehensible systems and rules to itself.

The reason I suggest a periodic reset of the rules is that the rules are the enabling factor that allows the corruption to increase. I do not mean just laws by "rules". I also am referring to the structure of the institution itself, to its increasing complexity.

The more people can't comprehend what is going on, the more corruption can keep scaling.

Complexity is the cause of corruption because there is a realistically very low level of 'something' that can be understood by a single human. Adding more humans does not scale linearly to increase what can be understood either. There is a limit where adding more humans decreases what can be understood by a group working together.

The result is that there is a maximum level of 'something' that can be understood even by a group of people working together. Corruption thrives because institutions are scaled way past that limit.

Note that I'm not arguing that this is the only way for corruption to occur. Any single person can become nearly infinitely corrupt on their own for all manner of reasons.

I'm giving you my observation of why all scaled institutions become corrupt over time and why nothing tried yet by humanity has managed to halt that increasing corruption within institutions except destruction of the institution which comes in the form of revolution when we are talking about governments.

You might say "but we have added measures to institutions that decreases corruption compared to other systems without those measures." And so what? Who cares if the corruption is slowed or decreased if it still continues to scale without limits and can never acctually be reset back to a fresh state?

The measures we have within governments attempt only to limit the increase of corruption. They do nothing to reset systems that have become overwhelmly corrupt throughout them back to a sane base.

Consider for example the US. We started with a somewhat sane constitution. That document no longer has any meaningful bearing on actual law within the US because the necessary interpretive documents, case history, and theory required to apply it have turned it into an excessively complex monster where corruption thrives easily.

There is no mechanism in US government to reset the fucked up modern piles of interpretative confusion to something that can be understood by an individual or ever a couple dozen individuals working together.

I'd like to point out that it is not goverment, law, or even large social institutions generally that I'm opposed to. What I'm opposed to is the acceptance of these systems where they forever increase in size and complexity and are never normalized to something sane and comprehensible.

The existence of sanity in parts of government just nothing to justify the reality that it is a city sized garbage heap of rotting shit with small size nice platforms. You see, those platforms still exist in a cloud of dump swamp haze that makes you sick.

Without anything to realistically undo the damage over time, there is no hope for any government system besides inevitable downfall.

I'm not advocating for destruction. I'm advocating that we should use our intelligence to formulate a better method for reset and/or cleanup lest destruction befall us.

I call this principle "Institutional Decay: Irreversability Under Increase". You see, a well understood notion of information entropy is that information does not refine itself. It only decays into chaos over time. With institutions people fight this by adding more "something" to the system to correct it. This increases complexity. As complexity increases the system becomes more and more unpredictable. More chaotic.

Within that chaos, within that darkness, evil thrives. The only way to prevent this is to reduce the size of the institution from an informational viewpoint to something that is actually clearly clean and sensible.

Such a small new system is one where people look at it and marvel because it is a step forward for humanity. A new system of social engineering and architecture better than the shit that came before. We need that.

And the only way we are getting there is by first acknowledging that what we have is madness.

This is also why Windows sucks by the way.

And yet, we have incomprehensibly complex computers, and they still work. And therein is the key to fixing social structure.