Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Top Down vs. Bottom Up

I can't write it now, but I promise a piece on top-down social (and political) organizations versus bottom-up organization. Meantime I hint at part of it: pk's ideals basically tend to favor bottom-up organization. Certainly. My leanings are and have been lower-case libertarian (a term I haven't used much) and anarchist (a term I have). But I am not altogether uninterested in results. And sometimes, it must be admitted, that a centralized, top-down authority can do good as well as evil: can do it better than waiting for the grass to grow.
Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, for example. Rich people were squatting their mansions in the national forest: he bulldozed them out. China has a bear of a population problem, related to all their other (dealable) problems: China hasn't reversed its population growth, but it has hobbled the acceleration.
This anarchist used to joke that he sometimes wished some not altogether stupid tyrant would conquer the world – and then act intelligently selfishly: a parasite instead of a pathogen. I wouldn't care if it were the Mafia so long as they did something to keep their livestock alive.
Food for thought.
The trouble with historical attempts at dominance is that they've never finished the job. Even Hitler might have done some good if his Reich really had endured: as a one-world hegemony. Even Stalin might have gotten tired of murdering his best friends. I don't believe Idi Amin would have eaten all of his people.

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