Smaller units (individuals, communities, etc.) have efficient but localized forms of doing a thing. The doing of the thing is plugged into a much larger worldview which explains both how to do the thing and why you do the thing — James Scott calls that metis. When a larger unit (states, corporations, what have you) subsumes the smaller unit, it ten... See more

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways the modern state has run roughshod over local, customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices that have profit as their primary motivation. In

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