PART FOUR: THE SANCTUARY

A. C. Applebee and A. D. Masters

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The Pattern

The pattern is this: every destructive system currently operating on the planet is a misguided attempt at something good.

This is not optimism. It is not naivety. It is not a refusal to see the damage -- the preceding chapters should dispel any suggestion that I have looked away from what these systems produce. It is an engineering methodology. You cannot fix a system you do not understand. And you cannot understand a system by condemning it.

Consider what condemnation does. It says: this system is bad. It should be replaced. The money system is exploitative -- abolish it. The justice system is cruel -- tear it down. The education system is oppressive -- dismantle it. The instinct is comprehensible. The damage is real. The suffering is real. The impulse to stop the suffering by removing its apparent cause is a decent impulse. We have all felt it -- the rage that arrives when you see the damage clearly for the first time, the conviction that the whole thing must go.

But it is the wrong impulse, and it fails for a specific reason that the zoological literature makes clear. The system was built to serve a function. If you remove the system without understanding the function, the function does not disappear. The need persists. And the organism, under pressure, will build a replacement -- usually faster, usually cruder, and almost always worse.

This is not speculation. It is the historical record of every revolution the species has conducted. The French Revolution dismantled the aristocracy and produced Napoleon. The Russian Revolution dismantled the Tsar and produced Stalin. The Chinese Cultural Revolution dismantled traditional social structures and produced a famine that killed between fifteen and fifty-five million people, depending on whose estimates you trust -- the demographer Frank Dikotter's work, published in M