When good ideas rot into unmanageable systems
“First we shape the system. Then the system shapes us. Then we forget we ever had a choice.”
I. Origins: The Beauty of the Early Idea
Every large system begins with a good idea. To protect. To coordinate. To share. To build.
Democracy began as a way to distribute voice. Science began as a way to understand without myth. Money began as a tool for cooperation.
These were radical acts of human imagination.
Simple.
Elegant.
Purposeful.
But systems do not want to stay small. They accrue layers. Rules. Exceptions. Guardians. They lose memory of their origin and begin to act as if they were always here.
And when that happens, the system forgets who it serves. It begins to serve itself.
II. Growth Without Grace
Most systems do not fail from lack of vision. They fail from too much layering.
Rules are written on top of rules. Departments are built to oversee departments. Metrics are invented to track compliance with the metrics.
The complexity becomes self-justifying.
No one remembers the original problem. But now there’s a full-time team managing the workaround to the workaround to the workaround.
What began as cooperation becomes compliance.
III. The Trap of Inherited Complexity
By the time a system is bloated, no one understands it. Not the public. Not the leaders. Not even the administrators inside it.
The language becomes specialized. The interface becomes hostile. The logic becomes circular.
It is nobody’s fault - and everybody’s burden.
People stop asking, Why do we do it this way? They ask, How do I survive inside it?
The tragedy of the overbuilt is not malevolence. It is inertia.
IV. Hypernormalisation: Participation Without Belief
There is a name for what happens next: hypernormalisation.
The system no longer works. Everyone knows it. But no one can admit it - because the alternatives seem worse.
So we go through the motions. We file the reports no one reads. We teach the curriculum no one believes. We vote in systems that no longer represent.
And yet, we perform the ritual. Because leaving the system feels like exile.
The map is broken. But we keep walking it. Because there is no new map.
V. Why Systems Don’t Shrink Themselves
Systems have survival instincts. They hoard data. Expand budget lines. Inflate roles.
Every reform becomes a subcommittee. Every innovation is absorbed by the bureaucracy it was meant to fix.
Critique is labeled chaos. Simplicity is labeled naivety. And so the system grows, even as it decays.
Collapse becomes the only editor.
VI. From Collapse to Compost
Not all systems can be saved. And not all should be.
Collapse is not always failure. Sometimes it is release.
When a structure rots, it returns its nutrients to the ground. And from that compost, new systems grow: smaller, lighter, humbler.
But to get there, we must unlearn our attachment to scale. Not every cathedral needs to be rebuilt.
Some should become gardens.