för naturens skull

"With the wrong structure, even small cities are too big. Anthropologists have calculated, and anecdotal evidence has confirmed, that when a group of humans gets bigger than about 150, it undergoes a phase change where people can no longer work things out socially, but only with the help of rules and central control. This doesn't mean we can't have big systems. The Iroquois ran a huge region with a system where small groups would gather and talk until they reached consensus, and then each group would send a representative to a higher-level group that reached consensus, and so on. This was the inspiration for our American "democracy" in which a hundred million people watch propaganda and then impose the tyranny of the majority on each other.

A healthy big system needs to be composed, as far as possible, of sub-150 semi-autonomous cells, the same way our bodies are made up of cells. The danger is that some of these cells will fall into a pattern of runaway increase and drag the rest with them. In the body this is called "cancer," and in the culture of Empire it's called "success."" (Ran Prieur i denna essä)