The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
When you target local issues, and don't wait for the behemoth to get to it, I think you'll agree, that you can be drastically more effective. Now if we could get people to do this at scale as discrete orgs, maybe that would prevent some of the churn and issues we see when orgs get too big.
The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
<https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/gates-foundation-i...>
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
<https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiny-spark/id505053432>
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.