The elided footnote in that long quotation from Kent’s Handbook chapter talks about how work can be destructive, but a crew wrecking a building or even a terrorist bombing has a purpose of clearing away an established structure (and the environmental feedback paths that it enables) so that it can be replaced with something else.
Even in these cases, however, the evidence of work having been done is provided by perceptible changes in the physical environment, changes that allow for the better control of the perceptions defining the purpose of the work. As I will argue below, changes in the physical environment that promote the control of some perceptions will ordinarily make a range of other perceptions harder to control in that environment. By the same token, the destabilization of portions of the physical environment that have been stabilized to facilitate the control of some perceptions may clear the way for the control of other perceptions, as when workers tear down buildings so that others may be built. How any given change in the physical environment is to be evaluated depends entirely on the perceptions one seeks to control.
Robert Moses famously, or infamously, directed the destruction of neighborhoods (effectively, small villages abutting each other) in New York City for the purpose of ever expanding building more and more highways for cars. Beginning in the 1930s, he arranged to be in charge of the Triborough Bridge Authority and a number of other toll-collecting authorities which funded his projects, and which were were never subject to voters on any ballot. His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, the 10-lane LOMAX, would have gone through Greenwich Village, Washington Square, and most of SoHo and Little Italy. Jane Jacobs, a journalist in Greenwich Village, was a focal organizer of political opposition which defeated him for the first time in over 30 years.
Fascism rises when individuals seek exemption from exposure to collective control and circumvents and destroys the customs, norms, laws, and other institutions which enable collective control. Oligarchy limits collective control (affecting everybody) to a few, the oligo or ‘few’ who rule. Authoritarianism limits control to the authoritarian dictating what the obedient followers shall collectively control (affecting everybody).
Democracy rises to the extent that everyone affected by collective control have influence in it. A neat trick that we humans haven’t yet quite got the hang of, but we have learned how to create and maintain some social institutions that facilitate an approximation. Voting is a central institution, and the ballot or list of issues to be decided at a particular time. Crucially, democracy requires everybody affected — and ultimately that’s everybody — to participate in voting and in collective maintenance of the institutions that enable definition of issues and voting on them.
In Athens and Rome only the wealthy could vote, and anyway nobody else could take time out from making a living. To get around this problem we elect representatives to do the hammering out of bills to vote on. With low turnout to vote due to disaffection, disinterest, or just tied down to the wage slave wheel of breaka-da-rocks-to-maka-da-money-to-buy-da-bread-to-give-me-da-strength-to-breaka-da-rocks, the representatives become at best technocrats cobbling together what keeps the wheels rolling and keeps campaign donations up to pay for those marvelous tools of rhetoric persuading those who do vote to keep them in office. At worst, we have the autocrat directing use of those marvelous rhetorical tools to persuade people that voting is meaningless, democracy is a naive utopian fantasy that can never work, and to dismember the customs, norms, laws, and other institutions which enable collective control.
What we see in Minneapolis is neighbors taking care of neighbors. And learning from one another, like learning from the first guy who put on a whistle and blew it to alert his Latino section of Chicago. That’s where collective control starts. That 10-lane dictatorship isn’t coming through my village. Or yours. Or that village over there.
We’ve still got to figure out how to do it on a bigger scale, through collective influence on elected representatives. And that means build back better, collectively build customs, norms, laws, and other institutions with more oversight, collective oversight, over those representatives. Quis custodiet hos custodes? Nos omnes.