"CLARITY IS VIOLENCE":

Against Well-designed Reputation Systems (An Argument for Community Patent) (Clay Shirky , 1/29/07, Many 2 Many)

As David Weinberger noted in his talk The Unspoken of Groups, clarity is violence in social settings. You don’t get 1789 without living through 1788; successful constitutions, which necessarily create clarity, are typically ratified only after a group has come to a degree of informal cohesion, and is thus able to absorb some of the violence of clarity, in order to get its benefits. The desire to participate in a system that constrains freedom of action in support of group goals typically requires that the participants have at least seen, and possibly lived through, the difficulties of unfettered systems, while at the same time building up their sense of membership or shared goals in the group as a whole. Otherwise, adoption of a system whose goal is precisely to constrain its participants can seem too onerous to be worthwhile. (Again, contrast the US Constitution with the Articles of Confederation.)

Or, as Jefferson put it in the Kentucky Resolutions:

In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2010 12:24 AM