power concentration borne of misplaced and distracted concern is the primary social challenge of our time, as well as throughout history. power distorts institu

power concentration borne of misplaced and distracted concern is the primary social challenge of our time, as well as throughout history. power distorts institutions of all sorts, redirecting resources toward self-serving aims and away from the collective good. it subverts governments, businesses, collectives, religions, tribes, and everything else. it requires constant vigilance and resistance--it's the one thing we're never safe from. yet, we allow the powerful to manufacture boogeymen like terrorists, drugs, wmd's, pedophiles, mass shootings, and pandemics as safety theater misdirections distracting us from this very central threat to our personal and collective freedoms. we need human-scale and human-accountable institutions, not conglomerates amassing more and more power against the populace. when considered more deeply, no human endeavor really requires extra-human concentration and centralized control, no matter how much justification is put forth. there's no insurmountable reason a mars mission or pandemic response, for instance, can't be loosely coordinated among small and medium sized organizations, rather than a single, or a few, large institutions. to get those kinds of human-scale and responsive institutions, we each have to actively work to keep organizations in check, each in our own little way. it's a literal sisyphean task, but one that we can't collectively shirk without dire consequences, as we've seen throughout history. it's an integral if inconvenient part of the human condition.