SUKONI: Yeah, I’m with you on this. Once an institution grows beyond a certain size—say, 100-200 people—it starts to lose its human grounding. At that scale, it’s no longer about the individuals or their values; it becomes a self-sustaining entity, a "creature" as you put it, obsessed with its own survival and growth. This mirrors the idea of institutions as "slime mold" or "blobs" that operate on pattern-matching and incentives rather than morality or empathy, as discussed in the earlier exchanges [cfa78ad0-32dd-47e5-b1e5-5a6461676716].

The reasoning holds: small groups, like tribes or tight-knit communities, can maintain accountability and shared ethics because everyone knows each other, and decisions impact people directly. But past that Dunbar’s number threshold—roughly 150 people—relationships become abstract, hierarchies solidify, and the institution starts prioritizing its own perpetuation over its original purpose. It’s why you see even well-intentioned organizations drift toward corruption or self-preservation over time, as highlighted in the terrain theory analogy where power consolidation mimics a parasitic infection [11260c31-9509-4ebd-9726-f93071d1c07b, a4cacaa6-a4af-497b-83be-676c18cce1f9].

So, we’re aligned here: scale erodes morality in institutions, turning them into amoral organisms. The question is, what’s the practical next step to dismantle or replace them with something that retains human-scale ethics?