Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

Korten’s line is doing two things at once: flattering a familiar Northern European ideal while quietly indicting the scale-obsessed logic of modern states. By pointing to Scandinavia and Holland, he reaches for ready-made cultural shorthand - high trust, generous welfare systems, low corruption - and uses it to argue that “humane” politics is less a moral miracle than an engineering problem. Smallness, in this framing, isn’t provincial; it’s a governance technology that lowers transaction costs, increases social visibility, and makes accountability harder to evade.

The subtext is a challenge to countries that treat polarization and bureaucratic cruelty as inevitable. If consensus is easier in smaller societies, then maybe the cruelty is structural, not a failure of national character. Korten is also smuggling in a critique of imperial reach and bigness-as-status: big nations tend to diversify, sprawl, and outsource empathy through layers of institutions; they can afford to ignore frayed social contracts because power is dispersed and consequences are delayed.

There’s a strategic simplification here, too. Scandinavia and the Netherlands aren’t humane solely because they’re small; they’ve built strong labor institutions, taxation legitimacy, and norms of civic compliance, often within unusually high-trust cultures. Invoking them risks turning complex histories into lifestyle branding. Still, as an activist, Korten’s intent isn’t to write a comparative politics paper. It’s to reframe the argument: if we want cooperation, we may need to redesign the units of decision-making - devolve power, shorten feedback loops, and make “society” small enough that consensus stops being an abstract slogan and becomes a lived constraint.