The ever thought-provoking Wrath of Gnon posted a quote from Leopold Kohr tonight:

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassible barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the disease of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or massive derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers.

And if the careful calibration of mental wellbeing falls to pieces, it is because someone was a complete idiot and visited the campus Starbucks not once but three times to ingest tepid cups of overly-charred and hyper-caffeinated coffee-like drinks.

The best Starbucks is a gamble. The worst Starbucks is old, Pike roast from a “proudly serving” outpost that’s not staffed by coffee-obsessed baristas and will sink you into a deep, deep depression. Whether that’s because of how the char interacts with the excess caffeine, or whether that combination helps one become excessively dehydrated, or if it’s just the physical consequences of ingesting the product of a late-stage corporatist SJW-converged company, I don’t have an answer for that one.

Seriously, though, I am becoming convinced that any and every large system is evil. Not just suboptimal, but evil. Any time you remove yourself from immediate consequences through a system, there is opportunity for exploitation and dehumanization. And anything that does not treat human beings as human beings, is evil. Like Starbucks.

There are other ways to be evil, certainly, but I’m not so sure we can build something both BIG and GOOD. 

We humans have this horrible problem of dreaming too small and building too big.