Care doesn’t scale

Harm scales trivially

And it’s not a question of “not everything needs to scale”

If there’s anything that needs to scale its care and there are thermodynamic limits to that because singular individuals need magnitudes more care than any specific individual can provide

For example I had to go to the emergency room last night and the number of people who were involved in my care was at least 7 people

So let’s say you have millions of individuals with zero care and support networks who need more than a single individual can care for them

That means you need some multiple of individuals who have access energetic capacity to care for all of the individuals who do not have support or care structures for the ability to do it individually

The fact of the matter is of the 8 billion people who live on the planet, there does not exist another 16 billion people who are servicing them to make sure that they have the care that they need

But thermodynamics requires those 16 billion excess people to provide inputs to care for the 8 billion

Turchin describes this as elite overproduction theory. And I’m not saying it is correct and I’m certainly not saying it’s normative, but I do believe that there is a level of descriptiveness here that makes the mathematics of “care” impossible to solve with the atomic unit of human.