How to develop outside the will of dictatorship?

[Asolsutsesvyl]

The discussion of the nature of leadership and alternatives to hierarchical control brings to mind Gerald M. Weinberg's book Becoming A Technical Leader, which contrasts the usual linear threat/reward model with organic models of leadership. Organic models are less popular, but actually more suited for quantification for scientific purposes, whereas the conventional models rely upon subjective estimates of "effectiveness" of "influencing" in a variety of contexts.

(As an aside, the quote in the first post is a strange point of departure. The idea there is the contrasting of freedom to exist as an individual entity with being possessed by, basically, a mind-control demon which drives its opponents to their deaths. It's certainly better to develop outside that kind of dictatorship, basically no matter what.)

Is there a need for any system of governance whatsoever in a world where such "imperfections" don't exist in people, though? I would argue that there isn't. Any and all systems of governance exist for the sole purpose of protecting and controlling. The former won't come without a certain degree of the latter. This is the key difference between governments and my previous meditation analogy. Governments don't offer us a way of being that we can follow by example, they don't allow people to follow them (or not) on their own free will. They impose certain rules and conducts upon us, and they exert force upon us when we don't comply. This is a key difference between the negative and the positive polarities. The positive polarity offers its love and acceptance; it is patient and will be there offering what it has to offer, accepting any free will choices by the other entity, even if it's a rejection of the values of love. The negative polarity imposes itself, it calls itself to conquest, and will force the other entity to do what is considered to be the best way of doing things, all under the justification that it's "for their own good".

A path to seeing a larger range of related things and alternatives is to explore how things (including people) work together as systems. Feedback loops come in two kinds: positive (meaning: self-reinforcing) and negative (meaning: self-dampening). Systems thinkers model how each thing may depend on many other things, so that it is usually not the case that you can change one thing and have the rest remain the same. Conventional leadership models, by contrast, simplify away everything except assigned roles/labels, and pretend that each effect has a single clear cause.

In the absence of a centralized order, people will influence one another in complex ways, which can be modeled. In the presence of a centralized order, it remains the same, except that everything is also tangled up in the hierarchical order. Weinberg simplifies things for purposes of simple systems thinking, and divides individual and collective abilities and dynamics into three categories:
- Motivation.
- Organization.
- Ideas or innovation.

Influence is always going on, in these terms. Environments may have positive (amplifying) or negative (dampening) effects in these categories, and be shaped by people to change in those regards. It's easy to think of examples of people with strikingly uneven skills. Technical people are often the strongest in the third category, and usually have relative problems of personal disorganization and/or being poor at motivating others.

The conventional threat/reward leadership approach is based on simplifying away as much as possible, leaving mainly the assigned roles imposed by the authority, the use of threats and rewards to motivate, and a centrally imposed paradigm shaping ideas and innovation. To make it work, the authority must also have under its control those who get the needed organizational work done, to fill in that category.

Attempts to sabotage, or prevent the growth of movements, etc., threatening an existing or potential order can also be analyzed in those terms. Motivation is targeted through psychological warfare. Social forces of inhibition can be deliberately cultivated in order to stifle ideas and innovation which goes against the grain. Means to get things done in an organized way can be made much more accessible to those favored by an existing authority than those at odds with it.

Look at really small societies, or groups whose functioning is unrelated to the work of a centralized government, and you will see dynamics play out in which people play individual roles difficult to fit into tidy labels, but where leadership is continually going on, in ways which may look very different from those usually brought to mind by the word "leader". The usual ideas of "the leader" and how such things are supposed to look can become wildly misleading in technical work contexts, Weinberg shows through examples.

At an extreme, organic leadership can make for an exploring, choosing, and discovering, without fixed goals beforehand, where people feel as if they serve the same basis of life, with spiritual overtones. The opposite is a view of the world as containing a limited number of ideas, and the deliberate fueling of ruthless competition and limiting of necessary resources in order to prevent new systems from growing to the point where the status quo is threatened.