Seattle may be the end of that discouragement and the beginning of action. I think the new century, by necessity, will be a time of human values, of the reassertion of the human scale in all things, and a time when large organizations cannot hold together against the forces of decentralization introduced by new technologies and renewed human concerns. If the small scale wins out against the large scale too completely, the resulting anarchy will be as harmful as the present domination by large scale institutions. We do need a balance. We cannot survive without large institutions, just as we cannot be free without small ones.
Large institutions can be our tools for fairness and peace and productivity.
The larger the institution, however, the more it must be rounded by the participation of a wide range of people and issues. The breaking of that simple law is what makes multinational corporations and organizations like the World Trade Organization so dangerous. The keeping of that law is what makes our constitutional government and organizations like the United Nations so valuable and so worth our efforts to preserve and improve. For those of us who find fault with large organizations that are too narrowly cast, let us resolve to help those worthy institutions that are properly devised. Let us continue our work to clean corporate money out of our elections, so that our democratic institutions can effectively represent the values of the American people, whose deepest values are indeed sound.