Joe describes a pattern that applies to both organizations and societies: one person gets hurt, so you make a rule. One person gets offended, so you make another rule. Each rule seems caring and compassionate—preventing risk, protecting people. But the accumulation creates stagnation.
“At the beginning of an empire, there’s few rules and everybody obeys them. At the end of an empire, there’s a ton of rules and nobody obeys them.”
This is perfectionism at a systemic level: trying to make the whole system perfect so nothing bad can happen. But it sacrifices the whole for the individual—the attempt to protect everyone from any discomfort creates a brittle system that can’t adapt, innovate, or handle real change when it comes.
Over the same 30-year period that perfectionism increased 33%, technology increased exponentially—creating enormous back-pressure between the forces of change and the forces of risk aversion. The result: an accumulating backlog of fear with nowhere to go.