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FOURTH WORLD PRINCIPLES

First published by Kirkpatrick Sale in 'Human Scale'

The Law of Government Size
Ethnic and social misery increase in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.

The Population Principle
As the size of a population doubles, its complexity, the amount of information exchanged and decisions required quadruples, with consequent increases in stress and dislocation and mechanisms of social control.

The Beanstalk Principle
For every animal, object, institution, or system, there is an optimal limit, beyond which it ought not to grow.

The Law of Peripheral Neglect
Governmental concern, like marital infidelity or gravitational pull, diminishes with the square of the distance.

The Self-Reliance Principle
Highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than those whose existence depend on world-wide systems of trade.

The Principle of Warfare
The severity of war always increases with an increase in state power; and that war centralises the state by providing An excuse for an increased state power and the means by which to achieve it.

The Principle of Limits
Social problems tend to grow at a geometric rate, while the ability of humans to deal with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic rate.

Lucca's Law
Other things being equal, territories will be richer when small and independent , than when large and dependent.

Man is The Measure of All Things
This does not mean that size and its companion notion of scale, or sizes in relation to each other, is the only measurement to make in judging something. But it does make sense that it should be the first, and the central consideration, in as much as it is likely to affect, in one degree or another, all other considerations.

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