Ten political 'commandments'
Nicholas Albery
Many people are pessimistic about the future, believing that the established 'political-industrial-military complex' cannot and will not allow the radical decentralist and ecological transformations required. The reasoning is hard to fault, and there may well be only an outside chance of peaceful change happening in time. It is as if a miracle were needed. And yet it is not irrational to expect a miracle: today's society would seem magically (if insanely) transformed to a past citizen dragged instantly 200, 100 or even 50 years forward into our present. The future is almost bound to be weirder than we can imagine, rather than a straightforward continuation of present trends - and today's seemingly puny David-versus-Goliath style efforts may well turn out to have had a catalytic and positive effect.
One such effort is that of the Fourth World movement for 'small nations, small communities and a human scale,' whose long-term strategy for change seems not only desirable but also just conceivably feasible:
A long-term strategy for change
(1) There would need to be a widespread and well-funded education and publicity campaign by the Greens, the Fourth World movement and others to show how Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' ideas can be applied to the political system - for instance, making sure that no politician or student of politics is unaware of the ten Principles of Scale drawn up by Professor Leopold Kohr and Kirkpatrick Sale. I would like to see these principles published as a poster. They state as follows:
The Principles of Scale
The Beanstalk Principle: For every animal, object, institution or system, there is an optimal limit beyond which it ought not to grow.
The Law of Peripheral Neglect: Governmental concern, like marital fidelity or gravitational pull, diminishes with the square of the distance.
'The Law of Peripheral Neglect: Governmental concern, like marital fidelity or gravitational pull, diminishes with the square of the distance'
The Law of Government Size: Ethnic and social misery increase in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.
Lucca's Law: Other things being equal, territories will be richer when small and independent than when large and dependent.
The Principle of Limits: Social problems tend to grow at a geometric rate, while the ability of humans to deal with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic rate.
The Population Principle: As the size of a population doubles, its complexity - the amount of information exchanged and decisions required - quadruples, with consequent increases in stress and dislocation and mechanisms of social control.
The Velocity Theory of Population ('Slow is Beautiful'): The mass of a population increases not only numerically, through birth, but through increases in the velocity with which it moves.
The Self-Reliance Principle: Highly self-reliant local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than those whose existence depend on worldwide systems of trade.
The Principles of Warfare: a) The severity of war always increases with an increase in state power; (b) War centralises the state by providing an excuse for an increased state power and the means by which to achieve it.
The Law of Critical Power: Critical power is the volume of power that gives a country's leaders reason to believe that they cannot be checked by the power available to any antagonist or combination of antagonists. Its accumulation is the inevitable cause of war.
(See the references below for the background to these laws.)
To which I suppose could be added an eleventh principle, modestly entitled:
Albery's Law of Inevitability: High technology superpowers are inherently unstable and their fragmentation is inevitable within a relatively short time span. The main variable is the violence with which this transformation occurs. (Thus a return to a human scale is guaranteed, even if, at worst, it is a nightmare world of radiated tribes eking out a post-nuclear existence.)
The breakdown of nations
The education campaign would also focus on two main practical policies for achieving a politics of the human scale, both derived from Leopold Kohr's work:
(a) No nation or federation should have more than about 12 million inhabitants.
(b) Within the nation there needs to be a Swiss-style non-centralised structure, with villages and neighbourhoods having as much autonomy as possible within a federation of cantons or counties.
The neighbourhood
(2) Greens or others with policies of this nature would need not only to present them at national election time, but also, as is already beginning to happen, to focus on putting human scale ideas into practice at the local neighbourhood, parish and county levels - in movements for creating urban parishes, smaller schools, locally controlled banks and credit unions, barter currencies and the like. So that if and when a break-up of the centralised nation state occurs, local people are as experienced as possible in running their own affairs.
National elections
(3) In the UK, Greens and others could campaign at national elections on a platform of dividing the UK into half a dozen independent nation states. It took the Labour Party less than fifty years from its founding for it to be elected, despite the UK's lack of proportional representation. It may well take a Greenish party less time, as civilisation continues its downward rush with more events of Chernobylian proportions. And given that their first act on election would be to honour their manifesto commitment to divide the UK into independent nations, the obstructive power of civil servants to carry on the same old policies would be much reduced.
Multinationals
(4) Taxation would need to be altered to make it advantageous for multinational and large companies to divide gradually into independently run units, with incentives for companies to become as small in size as their particular industry allows. (See Shann Turnbull's tax scheme for 'Humanising Corporations' in the chapter on Taxation.)
Superpower size reductions
'Russia, China, India and other megastates giving independence to their constituent parts'
(5) At the international level, there would have to be negotiations for multilateral and balanced reductions in bloc size - with Russia, China, India and other megastates giving independence to their constituent parts at the same rate as the USA gives independence to its states, and the EC to its member countries.
First step
But the first step would have to be a widespread educational debate and campaign, on the lines of the influential campaign for a Swiss-style constitution in South Africa run by the Groundswell group there. Human scale policies would be implemented readily enough once the underlying Kohr philosophy were taken to heart. In Kohr's words:
'The young people of today have yet to grasp that the unprecedented change that has overtaken our time concerns not the nature of our social difficulties, but their scale.
'The more united we become, the closer we get to the critical mass and density at which, as in a uranium bomb, our very compactness will lead to the explosion we try to avert'
'The real conflict of today is between Man and Mass, the Individual and Society, the Citizen and the State, the Big and the Small Community, between David and Goliath...And the more united we become, the closer we get to the critical mass and density at which, as in a uranium bomb, our very compactness will lead to the explosion we try to avert.'
- Nicholas Albery, the Institute for Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).
- The Principles of Scale are examined in detail in the 300 page compendium 'How to Save the World, A Guide to the Laws of Scale', particularly pages 29 to 43. Available from the Institute for L4-95 incl. p&p.
- 'Human Scale' by Kirkpatrick Sale is a 559 page book published by Secker and Warburg, 1980, L4-95.
- A sub to the Fourth World Review, which covers these issues, costs L10 from 24 Abercorn Place, London NW8 9XP (tel 071 286 4366).
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