The European Union and the Misery of Bigness
Brexit voters should recognize Leopold Kohr’s belief that large institutions concentrate power and ignore local needs.
Big cities, states or businesses: ‘They can’t work or prosper for long because their scale is inhuman, abusive and wrong.’ Airship image via Shutterstock.
Whether British citizens vote to leave or remain in the European Union this week, the central global issue won’t go away and that’s the misery of bigness.
Of course, that’s not the way the media and pundits have framed this important debate. They present the vote on whether Britain should remain or leave the European Union as some sort of proxy war on immigration, free trade and the tolerance of so-called progressive societies.
But these issues are just symptoms of a much greater malaise: the tyrannical nature of big organizations. They can’t work or prosper for long because their scale is inhuman, abusive and wrong.
Years ago, the great Austrian economist Leopold Kohr argued that overwhelming evidence from science, culture and biology all pointed to one unending truth: things improve with an unending process of division.
The breakdown ensured that nothing ever got too big for its own britches or too unmanageable or unaccountable. Small things simply worked best.
Kohr pegged part of the problem with bigness as “the law of diminishing sensitivity.” The bigger a government or market or corporation got, the less sensitive it became to matters of the neighbourhood.
In the end bigness, just like any empire, concentrated power and delivered misery, corruption and waste.
And that’s the problem today with the European Union, big corporations, large governments and a long parade of big trade pacts.
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