Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG
I don't see a particular way to bring about a mostly uniform, decentralized way of life without some kind of catastrophe (either causing the decentralization or caused by it).
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The reason people have centralized ways of life in the first place is because they derive benefits from them. That there isn't any way of removing them without also losing those benefits really ought to be obvious, but somehow....
Breaking up big institutions automatically means a lot of people are worse off than they would be. You can mitigate that by having some other factor make everybody drastically better off - this is usually either those various forms of cheap energy and miracle productivity, or by playing up the intangible benefits like "feeling of community" or "oneness with nature" and asserting they outweigh the losses. But the advantages of cooperation are big enough that explaining why people fail to organize into ever larger cooperative units almost requires something fairly nasty that interferes with the effort.
Though it might not necessarily look like a *disaster* from their viewpoint - ours seems to be "nationalism" these last couple centuries, and lots of people think that's a good thing. A widely popular suitable ideology could work, it just makes the place somewhat alien from the point of view of most of your audience.