On the contrast between the good individual and evil systems
2023-12-22
When reading the news thesedays, you are often presented with a huge contrast between the good individual person, who might have saved his neighbour's cat from a tree, and the bad society or political system, which just decided to cut down the budget for social welfare impacting millions of people due to higher expenses for the military. There obviously is a lot of biased filtering in these reports that I already describes in this article , but I believe there to be a fundamental contrast between how we humans behave "good" on an individual level and "bad" or "evil" as a part of some larger systems. So, let's explore some of my thoughts on the topic as well as a possible way to improve the situation.
Before we go any further, I want to clarify what I mean with "good" and "evil" as its definition here might vary from the general understanding. On the one hand, I use "good" to describe that the large majority (I would even argue almost everyone) cares about the well-being of his surrounding and takes it into account for decisions on a personal level. No one actively works to worsen a good friends or even distant relatives life, no one strives for others to feel bad and no one personally wants society to collapse or earth become uninhabitable. Within this scope the overall behaviour is beneficial to everyone and can therefore be considered "good".
On the other hand, I understand "evil" in the sense that not the system itself but rather it outcomes can be anywhere from disadvantageous to unhuman. In a system - as a part of a huge machinery of people - there is always someone else to blame for a bad decision and often times the controversial decisions one makes don't even effect him or her directly. This opens the door for decisions no one would ever make in a personal settings - such as choosing rare earths from mines using child labor over fairly mined ones due to cost-cutting demands from the share holders. Nobody directly advocated to destroy these childrens' lifes, but it still happened through the complex windings of the corporate area.
As one might have guessed, this effect gets worse and worse as the hierarchy within an organization grows, there are more and more levels of responsibility and every demand as well decision/action becomes increasingly opaque. Negative examples of this are governmental agencies and the federal administration as a whole, since these levels of complexity are otherwise unheard-of and a distinct hierarchy all the way from simple public officials to the president need to be established. Combine that with stable funding from taxes or loans as well as inherited complexity from prior decades (or even centuries) and you have a very slow-moving beast, which regularly makes decisions to society's disadvantage - not because anyone indented for it to happen, but because complexity has stripped away the good will of the people involved.
Positive examples are rather unsurprisingly individuals and start-ups with no or very shallow hierarchies, clear responsibilities and low operating complexity, which leaves most of the time for actually doing the work at hand. Contrary to governments, they also wouldn't survive if they did continuously bad stuff, since they would either not earn money from customers and investors or would fail to find friends and sexual partners ultimately leading to them dying out. This creates a need for doing the right thing, producing beneficial outcomes and thus be "good".
My easier said then done recommendation is to drastically reduce complexity and redundant responsibilities . Throw every structure you have established out of the window and get back to the basics. What is the purpose of what you are doing, what are you fundamental working principles and what is your vision for the future? These questions aren't easy to answer, but you should certainly spend the time to come up with satisfying answers, since this will be the foundation for your new structure. Beauty truly lies in simplicity, so reduce the number of divisions, hierarchy levels and so on to an absolute minimum based on your answers. Studies have shown that giving employees the freedom to work as their own "microcosm" and organize themselves is the most effective corporate structure anyway - so let the people just do what you want them to do in the larger picture and they'll usually come up with the best solution.
This topic can fill entire books and even though I barely scratched the surface, I hope to have gotten the main point across. We individuals are "good", because there are not as much structures restricting our actions and this freedom/simplicity can be transformative for businesses and larger systems in general, if applied correctly. I highly recommend you to dig depper on your own in case you're actually interested and able to change your company's, project's or club's structures. As always, feel free to share your experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day.