Freedom and Herding Cats

(Expanding on what I said here about the lack of direction in free societies):

When I was about 7, visiting grandparents in Kharkov, my grandfather took my up to the bell-tower of the Blagoveshenski (Annunciation?) Cathedral. Modern pics here and here. It's a very tall building to a 7 yr old. "How did they manage to build it?" I asked. My grandfather told me it was built in the time of the czar, and that he knows an engineer who says he will never attempt this today because today such a project would fail.

Inefficiency/stupidity of communism aside, there's a more general point here. Most of the "great" buildings were constructed by dictatorships at great human cost.

• The Egyptian pyramids: giant slabs had to be dragged up by slaves; alas there was no alien/lost world/Atlantis technology to help.
• During the Great Wall's original construction (Qin dynasty), the death toll was immense.
• The extremely long Road of Bones (as seen in the great series Long Way Round): in true Stalinesque fashion, bones of labour-camp builders were literally incorporated into the road.
• Even today, the largest human construction project is the 3 Gorges Dam. By completion, 1.4M+ people will be relocated. Project stats are gargantuan. This task isn't being run by a free society.

This is no coincidence. I think the best analogy is a magnetic substance -- when all the domains are pointing in random directions ("individual freedom") there's no overall force, but if order is imposed from above the forces align producing a great effect. There's a cliche that organising people is like herding cats; this is only true in a society where individuals expect to be heard -- then the single voice gets replaced by a billion tiny voices.

Sometimes it's frustrating: democracy seems to consist of the following:

1. get elected
2. change direction from previous government
3. persist for the right amount of time to piss off many people but NOT enough time to see through any real changes
4. get defeated by other party
5. rinse and repeat by other party

If we're to survive the next century, surely we'll need to achieve things much greater than the little building projects mentioned. Are we doomed to be slaves to a planned society, where everything is dictatorial orders, red tape and all-pervasive government funding? I hope not, but I've reason for hoping. Great things can also come from billions doing what they want. People don't need to be herded to write open source and free software that rivals/surpasses expensive crap, so it is possible. All that's needed is education and enthusiasm about science/technology/other people/transhumanism/justice.

The lack of direction today is frustrating -- to not feel it is to be a nihilist. The answer's not to direct major projects in a top-down manner but take advantage of the bottom-up approach. I reckon in 100 years we'll have open source legislation/public infrastructure/space programs etc. And of course I recommend participating in something now, not in 15 years. But until these things grow by a few orders of magnitude, we MUST forgo some mammoth projects and some sense of direction. Lest these lead to management styles like those used to build the Blagoveshenski Cathedral (or worse).