Amerika

The mainstream media comes dangerously close to mentioning the Cathedral:

The major issue the public is reacting to isn’t terrorism or racism. We didn’t see these numbers after 9/11. We didn’t even get these sorts of responses in the late 1960s, when American cities were torn by riots and when the Vietnam War was raging.

It’s the rigging of our economy – the increasingly tight nexus between wealth and political power. Big money has been buying political clout to get laws and regulations that make big money even bigger.

What few understand is that Cathedralism is a theory: that human intent can design complete systems based on human intent, and not on watching how something is used and interacts with its world, and adapting to that.

Cathedralism arises in every case of democracy because the voters have no accountability. They vote, something happens, and everyone goes home and avoids thinking about it again if they can. No one gets what they want.

Our democracy has had these moments before. In near-white heavy cities like Chicago and New York, vast “political machines” did the same thing two hundred years ago.

In fact, every democracy has these moments. The more we try to govern by human intent, the more we need a powerful central agency to keep everyone in line with these unrealistic and rapidly obsolete intentions. This creates a nexus between media, government and industry dedicated to that purpose, and profiting from it, which is responsible for the links across types of power structure, for example lobbyists working in media.

What the author of the quoted piece has done is to identify the effect, which is a type of legalized corruption, but not the cause: the tendency of humans in group to unite on symbolic abstractions based in human intention, and then to vigorously approve of powerful agencies forcing those ideals on reality.

Tags: cathedralism, democracy, political macines, the cathedral