If your group or organisation gets too big here is what happens. Its humanity become abstract, diffuse, flattened and reduced. Slogans, abstractions, formula become paramount, and large and lifeless spaces multiply over the surface of the earth. Cultic tendencies spread like viruses and people gather around charismatic individuals, those mediocre souls who thrive on the weakness of others. The shimmering individuals become marginalised or ejected, the louder ones rise prominence. Everything becomes highly expensive, and yet intrinsic value is lost. Abstraction and representation, replace organic aliveness, like that sticky white substance they call packaged bread. All the goodness is removed, taste is replaced by addictive maddening chemicals and sugar, and new vitamins are added, making a sort of toxic substance which fills your belly, but makes you continually hungry. Hunger and frustration are the fuel which drives large organisations and the more misery the larger the organisation grows, like the bubonic plague.

Perhaps, I seem to exaggerate here, however, it can be easily observed that such organisations are destroying the natural world at a pace which is truly terrifying. In Canada the largest industrial project in the world will soon reduce a pristine rainforest and an area as big as Belgium into ashes and nightmares — none of my European friends seem to be aware of the existence of the Alberta Oils sands, by the way. And nobody seems particularly responsible for this — the machinery is too large and complex to hold anybody accountable, or to cure the illness of large organisations, which seems incurable. Everybody knows its the case. We are all guilty, and yet nobody is to blame.

This super-sizing can be observed on all levels of life and in every kind of institution. Political parties right and left, sports teams, higher learning institutions, science labs, religions. The bigger they get, the more they excel in what Freud called ‘The death drive’. But I disagree with Freud about something. The death drive is not intrinsic, it is something that is created by large organisations, in other words, humanity abstracted and subtracted, mass produced and multiplied. Here the human lives in a paradox. He worships individuality, but his uniqueness is lost. He worships the social, but he is relationally damaged, he has a thousand Facebook friends, yet he feels that he lives in a lonely fragmented world. He has endless ways to pleasurise himself, and yet nothing touches him.

This is not to say that there is not flash of evolutionary insight at the origin of different institutions. Only that disciples have an uncanny ability, to not only betray and harm the teacher, reduced what they have learned to its polar opposite — the corruption of the best is the worst — as Ivan Ilych put it. In other words the corruption of the best original communities, which were all small and intimate pods of radical discovery and new unfolding circles evolutionary creativity, becomes the truly demonic mega-churches, mega political parties, mega-companies, of our time — the Holy Ghost lost in a proliferation of machines.

It is a terrible seduction, to become big. Better contain your truth, keep it on the level of intimacy, build your own homemade bombs — not weapons of destruction, but proliferations of beauty. Shumachers phrase small is beautiful, doesn’t mean having a small vision. It means planting deep seeds in the soil, giving them time and space for gestation and growth. Small groups of people, what Darin Stevenson calls pods, are the human model most finessed, most potent, most potential, most human. Its not isolated individuals who have shifted society, as is often said, but individuals in small groups, who have created radical seismic shifts, introduced new languages, forms of artistic beauty, are capable of clairvoyance and revolution, and restoring humanity to its natural birthright. Our extended families, biological and affective, our friends and micro-communities, are our real countries, our real identities, our real bodies… These bodies are not contained by abstract boundaries, even the limits of the body. We move in and about and between and around each other in a mutual dance of intoxicating possibility for radical uplift.