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April 25, 2006
Top down verses Bottom Up
The other half of the "We aren't the Democrats" conversation was the debate on the best approach to handle the Republican cancer consuming our country. There is some concern at some levels about what approach is better...to do it completely top down or bottom up. My first thought when I heard the discussion was one of my notorious eye rolls followed by "Put three smart people in a room and you come out with 7 different solutions to a problem and no consensus on which one is best!"
It reminds me in college psychology. We were given this team work task. Basically you're given a list of things to prioritize...first you do it by yourself and then you do it as a group. In a perfect world the group should come up with better answers than any one member of the group. It's sometimes called Collective Intelligence. It also has another name when it goes wrong Group Think.
Now when I did this exercise, I fell back on my knowledge and experience about such things and created a listing. Then when I got into a group I presented the same cases for my decisions to a group full of smart people. The problem is that when you work as a collective, there is an assumption that all peoples knowledge and experiences are equally good, but that leads you down a dangerous road. The long and short of the story is that while everyone has something to contribute to the process, ultimately someone among the smart people has to sit down and decide who's more right than everyone else.
Which brings us back to politics and organization. I'm a big fan of the grassroots outreach programs, but the reality is that we are working against an enemy that moves as one mind. So to protect ourselves we need to defer some portion of the decision making process outside the grassroots. To put it more simply, the debate is a version of the Rural verses Urban debate that separates Republicans and Democrats. Rural/bottom up thinkers want everything to be done at a local level with local interests at heart. Urban/top down thinkers want strategic decisions made on a larger scale to make sure that the decisions of one locality doesn't harm another.
As you can guess, I'm a top down thinker on a grand scale. I love the statement "Think Globally, Act Locally". And I think ultimately the right answer is to have the two mindsets working in concert. The problem is that in between now and then you've got people that support one or another and they don't want to lose the power. I mean the founding fathers worked against this in the Constitution. Ultimately Rural/bottom up thinking doesn't work on a grand scale...too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the soup. But at the same time if Urban/Top down thinking does respond to the bottom quickly it becomes disconnected from the realities on the ground and does more harm than good.
Smart people can work together to bridge this gap between to the two mindsets, sacrifices for the greater good will have to be made, but I think we will all be better in the long run. Because without a combined approach our hate filled enemy will march over us all and destroy our nation. It's not a fact that we can take for granted.
Posted by ManDrake at April 25, 2006 11:42 AM
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