The Weakness of Large Groups - and Governments

As groups of people grow too large for the members to know all the other members, a problem arises: The people a member does not know necessarily become abstractions to him. When the group is large enough that members not only don’t all know each other, but also don’t even know of each other, the unknown members become more abstract still.

This can become a big problem when decisions are made by people that affect the well-being of people they do not know. It is especially true of those who rise to positions of leadership or authority in a group, because their decisions affect many more members of the group and the group as a whole. The farther removed they are from the individuals their decisions affect, the worse those decisions are likely to be for the persons affected. 

In part this is because the decisionmaker cannot fully know the needs, interests or wishes of people he does not know. In part, it is because communication passed among persons who are strangers to one another and not in direct contact is unavoidably imperfect. The process of communication itself necessarily slows the decision process, and the longer the chain of persons through which communications flow, the slower and more cumbersome the overall process becomes. Such communication is also subject to omissions both deliberate and unintentional; to incompleteness; to becoming garbled, misunderstood or lost while being transmitted; and to deceit - the parlor game known as “Telephone” illustrates the effect perfectly. In part it is because the decisionmaker will inevitably have a bias, unintentional or not, in favor of his own interests, values and perceptions over those of people he does not know. And in part, the likelihood increases with numbers and degrees of separation that the interests of leaders and other decisionmakers may come into conflict with the interests of people affected by them. When such conflict happens, many bad things can occur.

All of this assumes that those in control of such groups are well-intended, and their choices wise. As history has sadly shown, those assumptions are all too often not the case.

If the decisions are bad enough, individuals may suffer or die, and the group may destabilize or become disrupted altogether. The problem is potentially at its worst in the case of governments, where it is accepted that the government can use the rule of law and the use of force, including armed force, to impose decisions on people the leaders do not know, some of whom may have wishes or interests the leaders may dislike or oppose.