No plan for a perfect society can withstand unpredictable human plurality

Evidence

As Arendt observes, part of what these escapes from politics are specifically avoiding is the “unpredictability” of “a plurality of agents.” It’s this ineradicable plurality of real people that spells the downfall of the Platonic city. She writes that the all-seeing plan is unable to withstand the weight of reality, “not so much the reality of exterior circumstances as of the real human relationships they could not control.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to the reader’s own archival-crypto—Plato’s city, Skinner’s Walden Two, Thiel’s seasteading. Arendt on the political as unpredictable plurality also feeds the ‘attention as world-constitution’ throughline. — connects to: No permanent human social group has ever been fully egalitarian — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 56