What is SCALE?

Mass society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

This post is about One Big Idea. SCALE is that idea. It has been expressed as a
backronym

• Size

• Complexity

• Atomization

• Liberalism

• Elitism  

SCALE reduces to the idea that changes in size of social organization have large effects on human behaviour, and that at the terminal stage the effects on behaviour become pathological and lead to deterioration of social health that can only be addressed by reversing the scale of social organization.  

This theory was originally inspired by (but is not dependent on) experiments performed on mice and rats at the National Institute of Mental Health between 1958 and 1972, which showed behavioural changes strikingly similar to those seen in the modern world. These experiments, by JB Calhoun, showed that population concentrations reached an inflection point beyond which the population would rapidly destroy itself.