They couldn’t resist Growth, they couldn’t resist Wealth, they couldn’t resist Power

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/american-military-afghanistan.html

Owing to the consequences of the folly, devolution will be forced on us, but as it occurs it would be great to see an enlightenment in regard to “What Happened?”

Enraptured with growth and development, everything went toward hypertrophy.

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We need systems that accommodate people who are not good. There’s no point, it seems to me, in dreaming that people will be good, because there’s every reason to suppose that it is simply not likely to take place on this planet in this galaxy. We must dream of systems, rather, which allow people to be people in all their variety, to be wrong upon occasion and errant and bad and even evil, to commit the crimes that as near as we know have always been committed, and yet systems in which all social and civil structures will work to minimize such errancies and, what is even more important, hold them within strict bounds should they occur.

Bioregionalism, properly conceived, is such a construct, for it provides a scale at which misconduct is likely to be mitigated because bonds of community are strong, and material and social needs for the most part fulfilled; a scale at which the consequences of individual and regional actions are visible and unconcealable, and violence can be seen to be a transgression against the environment and its people in defiance of basic ecological common sense; a scale at which even error and iniquity, should they happen, will not do irreparable damage beyond the narrow regional limits and will not send their poisons coursing through the veins of entire continents and the world itself.

— Kirkpatrick Sale, Third Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture, 1983