Muddling toward an organic society

Matt Frost is blogging at Ricochet. Here’s a bit of his opening salvo:

By way of introduction, I’ll share a few links and ideas that all relate to the closest thing I have to a political program; I’m convinced that idiosyncrasy and complexity are worthwhile things in their own right and are essential to large numbers of people getting along together. Centralization, whether political or economic, promises efficiency and cohesion, but we pay a heavy price in the brittle institutions that result. Banks aren’t the only institutions that get too big to fail.

But size isn’t the only problem. It’s uniformity of thought and preference that hollows out institutions […]

I don’t mean to propose a squishy relativism here: everyone’s not right about everything. Rather, if you assume that everyone’s going to be wrong sometimes, it’s best they not all be wrong in the same way. People are deeply fallible — fallen, even — but as long as we keep making different mistakes for different reasons, we can muddle through.

I don’t have much to add to this. Essentially this is why I’m a decentralist at heart. I prefer muddling through to too-big-to-fail. I prefer keeping America weird to the endless progression toward conformity and uniformity. I prefer competition and the failure of individuals in a highly diverse and decentralized society to the towering failures of central planners, however efficient centralization can be in the short term. And of course, Matt says all this much better than I could.

Nice to see the Scenester crowd penetrating more mainstream outlets, in any case.