They say that the earth is not doing well, or, to narrow it down, the people living on this rock are not working together well.

First, the Earth. I am no expert, but even if we all wanted to, we could not destroy the Earth. I doubt that in 500 million years, there will be any trace left of us, and we could not even imagine what will see the sunset by then, but I am pretty sure it is not reminiscing about us while enjoying the colours.

On working together. If you read history in a certain way and combine that with some unattached observations made during your own life, you will know that two or more people working together is more often than not a challenge. Even if you live with the same person in the same house for many years, you will still encounter odd miscommunications that result in late arrivals or worse.

Most of us have also worked in groups, whether at work, in a sports club, or organizing a family event. If you work together enough, a certain rhythm will take over, but I can’t imagine someone who has never felt a slight chaos while achieving a goal. Sometimes you see this happening right in front of you, as someone who is led around, but also when you have been in charge, the feeling of a loss of control will not be unknown to you.

Now extend it to the country you live in. There are good leaders, and the bigger the pool, the larger the chance one of these exemplary leaders will be in charge. But even if this is happening, these people’s organizing skills have to be delegated downwards, and the first layers in this bureaucracy might be staffed by competent people, but soon the first administrators are directly recruited out of the cultural habits of that particular country, and acting accordingly. From a few people to the largest countries, they all had and have their goals, they started in the direction they wanted, and sometimes reached them. However, they all share a low efficiency, a high amount of wasted resources through mismanagement, and incompetence.

We can fine-tune these processes, and in a factory where cars are made, for instance, this is possible. All the different parts come from all over the world and end up just in time. These parts only have to wait a few seconds before the half-assembled car passes by, and a robot arm attaches them to the car. This regimented style of organizing and movement has inspired many, sometimes good-willed, dictators or proponents of many different isms. But people are not doors or boxes of screws that stay on a spreadsheet if you tell them to. You can never organize a streamlined factory if some of the parts arrive at their own leisure.

Where am I going with these… observations? I come across many “recipes” on how to let the human factory/society run better. Just look at all the different political parties that are convinced that they know what to do. I think anarchism is a good idea, but I am the first to admit that this and all these other systems, these different ideologies and beliefs, work well in a theoretical setting, but not when you try to put them in practice. When setting up a factory with the least amount of human involvement, a particular cure might work to resolve some issues, but there has never been a cure that solves the problem of excessive waste produced by any political or wider cultural system.

Organizing a group of people is possible, but not without compromises and realistic goals. We are not one machine; we are all little machines with our own direction. Even if you find a characteristic we all share that hinders our cooperation, there is no easy way to upgrade us all by the simple fact that we might disagree.

We all should look in the mirror and ask ourselves: Who are we? We should not answer with answers but with more questions, and we should do this for the foreseeable future. The biggest problem will be finding the pause button that stops the conveyor belt from going forward and forward.