The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one.
Legibility from the receiving end.
Quotes
Passages I've underlined while reading. The raw material the essays are made from.
No passages match. Clear filters.
There is no story that is not true.
Think slow, act fast: That's the secret of success.
Slowness is rehearsal.
The pattern was so clear that I started calling it the 'Iron Law of Megaprojects': over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.
What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
· The Remains of the Day · p. 244, April 2026
Currently reading. Probably entering a future essay on professional restraint.
Street-level bureaucrats develop conceptions of their work and their clients which narrow the gap between their personal and work limitations and the service ideal.
Currently reading. The mētis of the regulator.
You have to carry the fire. I don't know how to. Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
Resilience is what gets handed down.
He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and'.
Meadows quoting a Sufi proverb. The 'and' is where governance fails.
The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior.
Bureaucracies are not merely tools — they are also frameworks for the perceptual and cognitive work of organizations.
Perrow's earlier book — bureaucracy as cognition.
We have produced designs so complicated that we cannot anticipate all the possible interactions of the inevitable failures.
The clearest one-sentence statement of the thesis.
Most high-risk systems have some special characteristics that make accidents in them inevitable, even 'normal'.
'Normal' as statistical, not moral.
The trick is to design a system that fails gracefully, in ways its operators can recognize and reverse.
The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.
Legibility is a forcing function, not passive observation.
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.
Such knowledge is particular, by definition; it can be acquired only by local practice and experience.
Mētis is the residue legibility cannot capture.
Domination of Thailand and Burma was justified, in part, by the alleged anarchy of those who had successfully evaded state control.
Scott's later book — anarchy as the state's projection.
Anticipation seeks to preserve stability by predicting and preventing disturbances. Resilience seeks to preserve stability by reacting to disturbances after they occur.
The pivot. Wildavsky's whole argument runs on this distinction.
Trial without error is impossible. The question is what kind of errors a system can survive.