Dystopian Utopia

8 notes

When you constantly operate on the assumption that you’re going to internalize the effects of your own actions, you have an incentive to anticipate things that could go wrong. And when you make a decision, you continually revise it in response to subsequent experience. Normal, sane human beings—that is, human beings who are in contact with their environments and not insulated from them by hierarchies—are always correcting our own courses of action.
Authority short-circuits this process: it shifts the negative consequences of decisions downward and the benefits upward, so that decision-makers operate based on a distorted cost-benefit calculus; and it blocks negative feedback so that the locus of organizational authority is subject to the functional equivalent of a psychotic break with reality