The ganging aft agley of those plans

A nice real world example of why those grand plans for society never do quite work:

Fewer than one in five people experiencing symptoms of coronavirus between May and August self-isolated for the required seven day period, research suggests.

A team from King’s College London, University College London (UCL) and Public Health England (PHE) surveyed more than 30,000 people to find out if they were adhering to the test, trace and isolate system.

They discovered that although seven in 10 people said they intended to follow government rules, just 18 per cent of people had actually stayed at home.

In the face of a pandemic - you know, something that might actually kill - fewer than one in five follow the government plan. Which is why, of course, so many of those government plans gang at agley. Because we humans out here don’t follow them.

It might even be true that the effects of the pandemic would be lesser if those plans had been followed - for the purpose of this argument we are agnostic on the point. The point itself being that the same is true of oh so many other bright plans. That we should all be more communitarian and less individualistic. Eat organic not cheap. Shop locally not pluck from the produce of the globe. Expend out efforts for the good of the nation, the society, rather than merely ourselves and family.

Perhaps - again we are agnostic - these all would result in a better world. Even if government has to really, really, insist that we do these things. The thing being that we don’t do these things. At which point all those bright plans fall apart. Not because the outcome is undesirable, necessarily, but because the insistences are being applied to the wrong species.

Humans don’t do what they’re told. Therefore plans which assume they will are doomed to failure. This is true of economic plans, social ones, plans about pandemics and health care and concerning society in general. Humans are often biddable but not controllable.