In James C Scott's "Seeing Like a State" he posits that, because states require information in order to make decisions about how they will exert power and because there are very few people deciding how that power will be exerted, states necessarily compress social context.

Scott calls this compression of context "legibility." Information must be "legible" to the state. But when this demand for legibility truly spells disaster, he says, is when the state requires that inherently complex systems are compressed. That context was required for stability

Ecologies are the most dangerous examples of legibility disasters that Scott gives. Ecologies do not avail themselves of simplifying schemes, thus state desires for intense ecological legibility spell ecosystem collapse, famine, and their associated economic depressions.

I think Scott does a good job of expanding on this idea, showing how high modernist demands for urban engineering often lead to alienated, socially deprived citizens. However, I think the concept goes further than the coverage he gives in this book.

Humans, despite our extraordinary adaptability, do have inherent needs, not merely biological, but social. Just like a forest ecology, our social arrangements are complex systems and they beget complex needs. When those needs are not met, we are driven to misery.

When an ecology is under distress, its trees wither, its diversity declines, and the imperative inter-connections of its pieces dissolve. Human communities are the same. Without solidarity, without self-determination, we suffer, our robust social tendencies enter decline.

Human society under domination is an ecology whose imperative social context is forced into reductive schemes of legibility for power structures. Creativity and its ensuing beauty is reduced to what power needs and in that process it is stripped of its freedom and complexity.

In this we recover Marx's theory of alienation, but we also recover the thesis of Rocker's "Nationalism and Culture." Human liberation is not just about adherence to a lofty ethical goal, it is a rejection of the demands of the dominators in favor of our natural creative urges.

In, say, a plant ecology, there is a system of feedback by which divergence from the system's ecological needs are enforced. If you destroy the natural diversity of that biome, you are doomed to watch as soil quality declines until it is unusable, for example.

And so, what is the human social ecology's natural response to these anti-humanist reductions by power structures? Revolution and revolt.

This is why power structures must enforce false consciousness, why they must manufacture consent, why they give us bread and circuses.

As they separate us from our natural human needs, they must then escalate the systems of extraction which allow them to enforce that false consciousness, manufacture that consent, and supply us with that bread and circuses. And in doing so, they externalize revolution and revolt.

Instead of revolution and revolt, these escalating power structures pillage the planet, they exploit those who live where those resources lie, and they extract ever-growing economic concessions from abroad. This is the price we all pay so that hierarchy can remain.

The dismantling of capitalism is not sufficient to solve this inherent problem of legibility. It is much deeper than that. Hierarchies of power and every body which furnishes them, formal or informal, state or economic, must be demolished. It is the only possible solution.