The Steader heap — the fertile soil of the fruitful mind.
The Managerial Regime relies on virtues it cannot itself reproduce
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis
America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
He dissects the decline with a laser. This is the state we are in and how we got here. One question he doesn’t have room to explore is why.
The answer is simple. Meritocratic managerialism does not promote the virtues that it relies on.
At least in our version, it was never a steady system. Even in the heyday of the 1920s to the 1960s it was not steady, because it was not reproducing. The engineering and managerial wonders like the Apollo program were drawing on huge reserves of social capital that they did not replenish or reproduce.
Founders take note. Your creation will not long outlast you if all you leave is a series of procedures, rules, and incentives. There is a reason that the longest lived organizations are religions, fraternities, and family firms.
At the same time, the virtues of meritocratic managerialism were real. Can they hybridized in some vital social context where the s ystem and the virtues that make the system possible can both exist and feed each other?
The Permaculture of People
Anonymous:
Plants, and therefore weeds, are information about the ecology they inhabit. The weeds present in your yard manifest the climate, the soil, the environs, toxins and nutrients, and your relative level of care. If you have dandelions and nettles, your soil is not aerated enough so these come forth to perform the action. If you have broadleaf plantain in North America, you live in what is considered a disturbed ecosystem.
So also with life. The weeds you support are information about your ecology, including the fact of what you consider a weed and why. (Much like wilderness, the idea of a weed is artificial.) The soil of your mind and habit gives rise to characteristic ecological niches which will be inhabited by memes.
(Properly speaking none of these are analogies, because the observed referent is itself a manifestation of an archetypal pattern that precedes material being.)
Let’s zero in on that insight.
The Steader mixes permaculture, homesteading, family succession, organization, and national systems because at some level these are all the same. Their principles of health and generational survival are the same.
Many people who have deep insight in one of these areas still accept transitory and shallow systems in the others. Those who advocate complex interacting systems in the fields and forests still monocrop their minds.
Smart kids need smart games
And dumb games. But also smart games.
The key criterion is not whether you think it educates them. Its whether they like it.