• States and other large organizations require synoptic approximations of the real world in order to make decisions, exert influence, develop organizational capacity to address problems
• Synopses of the truth inherently miss many local, contextual details that differentiate individuals, communities, geographies, and ecologies from one another.
• Synoptic representations of reality have a self-fulfilling capacity, often bending reality to match the synopsis rather than enlarging the synopsis to better approximate reality — e.g. imposing permanent surnames on peasantry for the purpose of consistent taxation, allocating land through cadastral maps that over time begin to reflect real ownership through their state legibility
• "High modernism" is an idealogy that believes central application and administration of a technocratically designed system will provide superior results for society. For instance, high modernist city planners tend to believe that cities wholly designed by a single planner will offer superior quality of life or productivity relative to organically grown cities; high modernist agricultural scientists believe that mechanized, large-scale, consistently developed agriculture will provide greater yields than small scale, heterogeneous agricultural practices.
• High modernist states are unified based on their faith in technocratic, top-down solutions to societal problems. Schemes developed based on this worldview often fail due to unappreciated variation in local and individual context, elided over in synoptic representations used by the state. Many high modernist schemes, spanning city planning, agricultural communalization, and rural to urban redistribution failed fundamentally due to failures of the synoptic representation and a failure to appreciate individual capability.
• Metis, a type of knowledge that can only be learned by doing, is too often unappreciated in high modernist schemes to remake society in the state's image. This failure leads high modernists to ignore local, contextual information like the suitability of crops for individual patches of land, or the optimal way to work in a factory. "Work to rule" strikes where workers stop production by simply adhering exactly to their rule books are a perfect demonstration of this concept. When individuals fail to use their metis, most complex, high modernist systems collapse.
• High modernist systems often persist due to metis-laden adaptations outside the formal system. High modernist cities like Brasilia often depend on informal economies and housing districts and high modernist collectivization of Soviet agriculture depended on off-the-books small plot farming for most fruits and vegetables.