Narz
keeping it real
No idea what this sentence means
Is the accumulation of power a moral imperative?
- Thread starter Hygro
- Start date
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
And yet the success of the organization rises and falls with the quality of the organizing individuals...
There was a 20 year campaign to change my street from 2 lanes each way to 1 lane + bicycle lane + shared turn lane. Pedestrian deaths per year went down, accidents went down, noise pollution went down. Real change for the 1000 of us or so who live on this street and all the kids who cross it.
It wasn't a coincidence that it changed months after my parents moved us to this street from another. The same people who built the town newspaper in the 80s, got on the council/mayor's seat, grew the town festival from 10k to 100,000 in a year, fought off the mall developers on the waterfront etc, aimed their power on the street. It's not an accident nor a coincidence it took that short amount of time after decades of wanting. Everyone was waiting for someone else to pull the all nighters and have the mental obsession to push it over the edge.
"Someone else" had to research what laws were available, what impact studies needed to get done, what examples to get everyone to latch onto to believe in precedent, do the graphic design for the literature campaign, deliver much of the literature and organize others to help, write and edit the letters to the editors, concentrate the tired disparate voices all at once into an excited chorus, delegate the waiting-but-motivated as officers in the cause, etc.
"Someone else" had to out-rhetoric the rich opposition who liked that the road was basically a highway to the freeway for the next town over.
That's power, power some individuals had to take a mass of wants and turn it to a movement and then a reality. There were lots of people who wished it would change, who occasionally said and asked for change.
But one couple, who suddenly had the same incentive, took all of that and then outworked, out brainstormed, out contacted, out presented everyone on every category and got others to bring their best to the shared movement. How can you not call that power? People behaved and believed differently and the consequences have endured for the better for 20 years since.
Change happens this way all the way up and down. Sometimes anonymously to run a company and get lobbyists to protect and expand that company's interests. It's a big sacrifice to fight inertia and make things real, a sacrifice some will make and most won't even try.
So what is the power that one must accumulate to be a community organizer? Obviously not regal title. The trappings of power are not power. If you become the grant writing expert, you keep your group funded. If you speak charismatically, you keep people engaged and focused. If you are healthy and can work more hours, you win over those who oppose you who cannot. It keeps going.
Lexicus
Deity
Up yours, woke moralists!
Narz
keeping it real
Effort, intention, intensity & immediacy underlie all change like this. And there always needs to be the first individual to take initial initiative on their own.
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Akka
Moody old mage.
The polls options are, sorry to be frank, pretty terrible.
The obligation if you "know best" is to inform and convince people, but after that it's their own choice and responsabilities. The "force people to be happy against themselves" is the definition of the perversion of morals, and it just totalitarism in denial.
The muddy waters happen when their choice affect your own well-being (for example, climate change deniers ruining the planet not just for themselves but everyone else), or when ideologies compete over what kind of society they want to build, which is pretty much all the time, but it's a close but different thing.
The obligation if you "know best" is to inform and convince people, but after that it's their own choice and responsabilities. The "force people to be happy against themselves" is the definition of the perversion of morals, and it just totalitarism in denial.
The muddy waters happen when their choice affect your own well-being (for example, climate change deniers ruining the planet not just for themselves but everyone else), or when ideologies compete over what kind of society they want to build, which is pretty much all the time, but it's a close but different thing.
That's a very happy video
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Hah he low key is if you watch the full version
Lexicus
Deity
I don't know, I guess my model of organizing comes from the world of labor unions which is a bit different from what you're describing here. Union organizers put in work but their job is not to lead or to exercise power, it's to allow the bargaining unit workers to lead and to exercise power collectively.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2010
- Messages
- 28,269
Did he find the right situation to be the weird bum instead of Karen'd?
I doubt there are many people who seek power so that those more prone to do bad things lack it. It was already a lofty ideal in Aristotle (If you don't take part in politics, you are destined to be ruled by those who are worse etc), but certainly not something one can aspire to do in today's world.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
The sad thing is the literally named Karens I've known would have been early to that crowd.
Yeah I mean early adopters of psychedelics at a Santagold show are in the right place. I've been that guy, but rarely as persistent. BTW despite the TED talk, it's not the "first follower" who made it pop, there were quite a few of those. It was the second follower who focused on the first follower when it became a party.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Power
I can't get over how great that video is. It's a perfect example of a point I'm trying to make (when I finally pull it out to make my point). It might not be the point that someone ends up using it for, but it captures .... something ... very nicely. The other video I like is the beach scene from Dunkirk.
I think one guy in this video is making a correct (if not 'perfect') choice, and everyone else is failing by not following his lead.
I think that there's a bit of a barrier to the discussion, because power can be delegated after it's accumulated. I think that's obvious, but people might be leaning too heavily into or against the truthiness of that statement. Starting a union definitely is trying to accumulate power, and you need a swath of the trappings of power to have any success. And the de facto attributes of power.
There's also a bit of a presumption that accumulating power also then requires wielding that power. Technically, it's inevitable that you do, but oftentimes the accumulation of power is done mostly to deny the same power to someone else. You can help start/protect a union and never vote, after all.
Voting is the attempt to impose your preferences on the minority and the non-voter. But we too-often vote in order to stop someone else more than we're trying to further our own agenda.
Spending literally determines who gets employed and whose bankruptcies are delayed.
We have this weird dichotomy where we pretend that natural evils are different from socially imposed evils. But if you want to stop harms, you need the capacity to do so. And if you don't want to stop harms, then it's a separate question as to whether we're talking about morality. There's no reason why the capacity has to be wielded directly rather than delegated.
There are also multiple dimensions to 'moral imperative'. Just because we have the moral imperative to accumulate power to help people, doesn't mean that we don't also have the moral imperative to 'be correct' in how we wield it.
I think one guy in this video is making a correct (if not 'perfect') choice, and everyone else is failing by not following his lead.
I think that there's a bit of a barrier to the discussion, because power can be delegated after it's accumulated. I think that's obvious, but people might be leaning too heavily into or against the truthiness of that statement. Starting a union definitely is trying to accumulate power, and you need a swath of the trappings of power to have any success. And the de facto attributes of power.
There's also a bit of a presumption that accumulating power also then requires wielding that power. Technically, it's inevitable that you do, but oftentimes the accumulation of power is done mostly to deny the same power to someone else. You can help start/protect a union and never vote, after all.
Voting is the attempt to impose your preferences on the minority and the non-voter. But we too-often vote in order to stop someone else more than we're trying to further our own agenda.
Spending literally determines who gets employed and whose bankruptcies are delayed.
We have this weird dichotomy where we pretend that natural evils are different from socially imposed evils. But if you want to stop harms, you need the capacity to do so. And if you don't want to stop harms, then it's a separate question as to whether we're talking about morality. There's no reason why the capacity has to be wielded directly rather than delegated.
There are also multiple dimensions to 'moral imperative'. Just because we have the moral imperative to accumulate power to help people, doesn't mean that we don't also have the moral imperative to 'be correct' in how we wield it.
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