Comment by jongjong
8 hours ago
My view is that they never brought any balance. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Global institutions, especially NGOs, wrecked havoc. My view is that the nexus of power is guaranteed to be corrupt. Inescapably so. It's just a number's game; in any game/competition with many participants, the winners who rise to the top will always be in the category of "the cheaters who didn't get caught". Given enough power, they can use that power to cover up their tracks and craft narratives to make themselves look good and their opponents look bad. So there's nothing worse than centralization. Anything which centralizes power is bound to be corrupt and harmful.
If corruption is an unavoidable property of power, centralization is not the core problem, scale is.
Decentralized systems still concentrate power, they just do it informally, locally, without visibility or accountability.
Eliminating institutions does not remove the nexus of power, it just relocates it to actors with fewer constraints and less scrutiny.
If winners are always cheaters who did not get caught, then weakening shared rules only selects for better cheaters, not better outcomes. At least institutions create friction, records, and points of contestation. Without them, power does not disappear, it simply becomes cruder and harder to challenge.
The claim that centralization is uniquely corrupt assumes fragmentation produces virtue.
History suggests it mostly produces unchecked local coercion and chaos, not justice.