Decentralization: The Solution For Our Institutions

Jared Barlament
6 min readJul 17, 2019

The Many Woes of Modernity

Our modern world is plagued by a mass suffocation of the human spirit orchestrated by a myriad of failed institutions. We have, as a species, progressed immeasurably far from our humble beginnings. We have, however, also kept many tendencies that served us well in the past but serve only to hinder us in the present. Our primal urges to establish unalterable belief systems have cast much suffering on the globe. We must recognize that there is not just one way to live correctly. There are infinite ways, and we must forge a world that shall allow them all to flourish.

The Savage State by Thomas Cole

The Natural State of Man

To understand what sort of world we must make for our descendants, we must first understand what sort of world our ancestors made for us. The mankind of millennia past was terrorized by many threats; predators, starvation, disease and natural disasters decimated us for generations on end. After switching to agricultural and urban lifestyles, these threats dissipated, but they were replaced by a set of new threats that have continually grown. Inner unfulfillment, civil strife and tribalism all now ravage our world. The solution lies in banishing problematic attitudes and institutions, but the difficulty lies in achieving this feat.

The Arcadian State by Thomas Cole

Solutions of the Past

Great ideas wielded by powerful people tend to end up becoming new institutions. Every nation, religion and ideology in the whole world came into existence through this principle. When an inspired individual or a commanding collective introduced a new institution and the common populace embraced it, this new institution became ingrained into the society. A paradox plagued every single sort of system across the globe, though. Those systems that failed to catch on with more than a few isolated groups were powerless to make meaningful and moral change to the world at large. Meanwhile, those systems that did become widespread and wildly influential were soon so powerful that their former moral foundations were corrupted into becoming immoral monsters.

Jared Barlament

Author and essayist from Wisconsin studying anthropology and philosophy at Columbia University.