I’ve been looking for this article for years, and found it just recently. Just, all the loops of things that are needed to get a single #2 pencil to the store and sell it…
I suspect that the Transcend would know how to make a #2 pencil, but mostly stays out of the way while everybody else makes the pencil.
They’d agree with it, obvs.
Actually, it seems to me that the most controversial thing about it is that any grown human needs to have it pointed out to them, because this is the sort of thing they cover in the middle-school-equivalent. Even, perhaps especially, for people whose culture-hero image is the Wise Polymath/Polygnostic, the awesome complexity of things is a Very Important Lesson.
And, in the Meditations on the Aspects of Self, this is fundamentally what gives oath-contracts their power. Wield many as one, indeed!
(And, yes. Although as is hinted at in several places, while the Transcend could, in theory, plan the entire Imperial economy, that’s just a way of combining all the information available to a collective consciousness and then using it to run an computationally expensive simulation of a free market when it could just use the free market it already incorporates to do exactly the same thing without imposing a giant “cycle tax” drag on the economy to do it.)
I’m reminded on many occasions that even Doc Savage, Buckaroo Banzai, and Sherlock Holmes needed the knowledge and skills of other people to accomplish things and get things done.
One of us is pretty amazing. A whole lot of us is pretty damned awesome. I don’t need to know everything, I just need to know the right person to get the thing from the next right person to get the stuff from the next right person to finally get things done. It’s the Chain of Deals (or the Great Material Continuum) done right.
(And hopefully without the comedy of allergies, somebody welshing on the deal, etc, etc, etc…)