Re: [sudo-discuss] Spiritual analysis of last weeks Meeting

Yo's- Re. what happened: For the most part we're coming from geek/nerd/hacker culture, which is inspired by building stuff that makes peoples' lives better, and ideally that changes society in positive ways. Geeks/nerds/hackers, don't generally enjoy dealing with political & administrative detail-work. So when the time comes to do that kind of stuff, it feels like "doing chores," and of course that brings down the energy level a bit. Though, in any social group, there are always some people who _do_ enjoy doing political & administrative work. More so in any group that is engaged at any level with social & political issues, which we are, by nature of the kinds of projects we're working on. The nature of "building stuff" is "convergent," in the sense that, given a technical problem, there are convergent solutions that are empirically correct, and there are other possible outcomes that are not. So while there may be some debate about _which_ correct solution to use, in the end there's convergence around something that actually works. The nature of political and administrative decisions, is "divergent," in the sense that there is not a range of "right answers" that can be discovered empirically and everyone can agree on. Instead, the answers that appear right to each person, depend on where each person is coming from ideologically and philosophically. So far we appear to cover a pretty diverse range, from liberal to vaguely socialist to left-libertarian to anarchist (left-very-libertarian;-). Some might even debate whether those words are the right words to use or whether they cover the whole range. Within each of those and many other shades of belief, there are ranges of "right solutions," but between ideologies & philosophies, there's much room for debate. Things can bog down when differences in ideology and philosophy haven't been dealt with in depth before they come to a specific issue and get stuck. We need to talk more about our underlying philosophies and ideologies. We need to make room for each person to describe their core beliefs that bear on how a group should organize and operate. And in that process we might find that we end up agreeing on a set of core principles, even if we disagree about other things. Personally I'm in favor of something like representative democracy, where we choose a set of individuals to take care of the administrative tasks, and empower them to do so. Thus the people who are eager to do those tasks will do so, and those of us who want to stick to science & technology and not deal with admin tasks, can do so. In the end there's always recourse to putting things up for a direct decision of the members, so there's not much risk in designating roles and a scope of power or capability for each role. Though, I find the use of language such as "ruled by a police system" to be unhelpful. I'm in favor of designating one or more people to be able to moderate disagreements that may come up, and handle other tasks of that nature: after all, in the end they're our friends & colleagues, and if they misuse their delegated roles, we can recall them. As for egotism, it seems to me that egotism occurs when someone puts themselves ahead of the group and causes everyone else to have to expend energy. Yes that includes some instances that begin as a principled block, _but_ I'm not taking any position on whether the present instance is one of those. To my mind the ability to defer to someone else's judgement or to their delegated role, is an exercise in overcoming the desire of the ego to "have it my way." Ideally each of us has a value of respect for the group as a whole, and can come to debating issues with an outlook of being sensitive to the mood in the room and what would enable the group to move forward constructively. And that includes asking ourselves what it is that we're asking others to do, and how much effort we're expecting others to make in any given situation. -G. ===== On 13-03-18-Mon 3:00 PM, Patrick Schmidt wrote: