Small structures are nimble. They move quickly, adapt quickly and remain relatively close to the people they are supposed to serve.
Large structures have weight. They have power, resources and reach. But those advantages come with a cost. They become cumbersome, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary constituents and progressively more vulnerable to small, loud and well-organised pressure groups.
This dynamic is as obvious in corporate life as it is in politics.
And the pressure groups understand it perfectly.
They know that their relative power increases as the stage becomes larger. A group that would be almost irrelevant in a small local setting can become extraordinarily influential once it reaches a national, continental or international institution. That is why these groups are perpetually angling for the biggest stage available.
The larger the institution, the further the decision-makers are from the consequences of their decisions.
Eventually, the people making the decisions are not even homeopathically connected to anything resembling normal life.
And then something rather peculiar happens to the concept of public opinion.
It ceases to be something observed and becomes something manufactured.
Instead of asking what people actually think, institutions increasingly ask what can be presented as public opinion. Polls, campaigns, advocacy organisations, media narratives, expert panels and carefully selected representatives are assembled into a picture of “society” that may have very little relationship to what society actually thinks.
That creates the perfect environment for narratives detached from reality.
A small, organised group can appear enormous. A widespread but quiet majority can become effectively invisible. The people who shout the loudest acquire disproportionate influence, while those who simply get on with their lives are represented by nobody.
This is not a peculiarity of politics.
Corporations suffer from exactly the same disease. The larger the organisation becomes, the more layers accumulate between the people making decisions and the people actually affected by them. Eventually management begins responding to internal constituencies, consultants, activists and institutional incentives rather than customers.
The solution, therefore, is not to build ever larger stages.
It is to dismantle them.
We need smaller stages.
Much smaller.
Applied to my own country, I am increasingly convinced that Austria’s membership in the European Union is ultimately a disadvantage. The EU is the largest possible stage for problems that often require much smaller ones. It creates another enormous layer of decision-making, another level of institutional distance and another opportunity for organised minorities to acquire influence far beyond their actual numbers.
The larger the structure becomes, the harder it is to distinguish the signal from the noise.
But the principle should not stop at the national border.
Even within Austria, power and responsibility should be devolved substantially further down—to the district level. Roughly speaking, that is comparable in scale to a US county.
Policies should be decided at the lowest level capable of dealing with the problem.
If a matter can be decided by a district, let the district decide it.
If it can be decided by a municipality, let the municipality decide it.
Only matters that genuinely cannot be handled locally should move upwards.
This is not merely an administrative preference. It is a defence against institutional drift.
The closer the decision-maker is to the people affected, the harder it becomes to manufacture an imaginary public. The smaller the stage, the harder it is for a handful of organised voices to masquerade as everyone.
We have spent decades believing that bigger means better: larger institutions, broader jurisdictions, more harmonisation, more integration, more centralisation.
I increasingly suspect we have confused scale with competence.
The direction should be reversed.
Power should move down.
Responsibility should move down.
Decision-making should move down.
We do not need bigger stages.
We need smaller ones.
Right now, we are moving in precisely the wrong direction.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/11/climate-blame-game-global-central-planning-needed/