A Nation's Perspective: How Projects That Tried to Improve the Human Condition Failed

Modern countries, especially centralized governments, tend to simplify and unify everything, and then only focus on the parts that are useful to them and quantify and standardize them, while the rest can be ignored, so as to achieve ideal management and governance goals. Typical For example, forest land, the government can convert the forest land into a single planting of certain trees with higher economic value, which may yield good results in the short term, but because the local biodiversity is destroyed and the soil becomes barren, the final result is the possible number of flowers. Damage that cannot be remedied at a price.

In "The State's Perspective", author James C. Scott summarizes several basic characteristics of those ultramodernist projects that attempted to build utopias that ultimately failed or turned into disasters: First, the rulers had extremely ambitious ambitions and goals And they are confident in themselves and the whole system they govern. In their view, the transformation of the country or society is like a gardener carefully building a potted plant, requiring absolute beauty, and those parts that seem to be miscellaneous branches. Even the slightest dissonance should be removed. Second, the ruler has absolute power to put his ideas into practice, and in this context all things can be reduced to quantifiable quantities for the achievement of grand goals. Tools, such as people, are statistics that achieve tax production and military service, and other characteristics need not be considered. Finally, a totalitarian rule is usually a weak civil society, although in the process of advancing those unrealistic projects often All kinds of harm to places and individuals, but citizens are unable to organize a strong resistance. Typical examples are the genocide carried out by the Nazis in an attempt to purify human genes, the planned economy in the Soviet era, and the Great Leap Forward, which is familiar to the Chinese, and the rulers embraced It is the ideal of establishing an unprecedented utopia, and then realizing it at all costs, and finally causing the tragedy of the entire country and nation. Because death is reduced to numbers, the rulers do not care.

From the planning and design of ultra-modern cities to the industrialization of agricultural collectivization, these grand reconstruction projects failed to be realized step by step in the precise and scientific planning according to the wishes of the rulers, but failed and provoked various resistances among the people. High-level managers and designers think that they have mastered all scientific knowledge and truth. They can easily design ideal and aesthetic models. Of course, the most important thing is to be simple, clear and convenient to rule. However, they always ignore or don't care at all. The basic element of these projects - people. Seemingly disorganized communities may have important social significance for local residents, and farmers in the smallholder economy know best about the local soil and climate conditions and know how to make the most of it. A macro that seems completely in line with science Design cannot succeed without people's actual needs and feelings. Ironically, the rulers and designers at the highest level often have a genuine desire to improve the living conditions of the people they rule at first, but they have the supremacy The authority of the project is so high that the officials below know there are problems and will not refute it. This is even more a source of disaster in a centralized country. What officials need is to present their achievements to the top rather than to be responsible for the bottom, so they will use various The only means is to achieve the statistics in the project plan, and the highest level will think that everything is feasible and continue to expand the project until irreparable damage is caused, the collectivization of the Soviets, the forced villageization of Tanzania, the Great Leap Forward of China, all of which are in this way.

"To be ruled is to be constantly watched, to be watched, to be investigated, to be controlled, to be taught, to be taught, to be listed and deleted, to be estimated, to be appraised, to be accused, to be ordered...to be ruled is to be An operation, every transaction, every action is recorded, registered, counted, priced, warned, prevented, reformed, adjusted and corrected."