goula.sh

📰 Book Review: Seeing Like a State

Author: slatestarcodexabridged.com

Full Title: Book Review: Seeing Like a State

URL: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Book-Review-Seeing-Like-A-State

Highlights from March 13th, 2021.

The state pro­moted the High Mod­ernists’ plat­i­tudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to im­ple­ment the to­tal­i­tar­ian schemes they wanted to im­ple­ment any­way. The re­sult­ing ex­per­i­ments were usu­ally fail­ures by the hu­man­i­tar­ian goals of the Mod­ernists, but re­sound­ing suc­cesses by the command-​and-control goals of the state. And so we grad­u­ally tran­si­tioned from sys­tems that were messy but full of fine-​tuned hid­den order, to ones that were barely-​functional but re­ally easy to tax.
So from the be­gin­ning, kings had an in­cen­tive to make the coun­try “leg­i­ble” – that is, so or­ga­nized and well-​indexed that it was easy to know every­thing about every­one and col­lect/double-​check taxes. Also from the be­gin­ning, no­bles had an in­cen­tive to frus­trate the kings so that they wouldn’t be out of a job. And com­mon­ers, who fig­ured that any­thing which made it eas­ier for the State to tax them and in­ter­fere in their af­fairs was bad news, usu­ally re­sisted too.
Peas­ants didn’t like per­ma­nent sur­names. Their own sys­tem was quite rea­son­able for them: John the baker was John Baker, John the black­smith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Un­der­hill, John who was re­ally short was John Short. The same per­son might be John Smith and John Un­der­hill in dif­fer­ent con­texts, where his sta­tus as a black­smith or place of ori­gin was more im­por­tant.