Lew: Good blog. I am reminded of the comment made by the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Shirin Abadi. Speaking of feminist groups in Iraq, she said: “They are very strong. Their approach is unique because they have no leaders. They do not have a head or branch offices. . . . This movement is made even stronger by not having leaders. If one or two people lead it, the organization would weaken if these leaders were arrested. Because there is no leader, it is very strong and not stoppable.”
The leaderless nature of the black civil rights movement was noted by one activist who said “the leader was whoever happened to show up that day.” The power of decentralization is what has made it so difficult for farm workers unions to organize employees: the farmers have no central jugular vein to attack.
The decentralizing nature of organizations finds expression throughout our world. The vertical is collapsing into the horizontal. Plato’s pyramid is being transformed into interconnected networks. The mainstream media — whose function it is to tell us what the established order wants us to know — are being replaced by many autonomous Internet voices — such as LRC — that express a variety of opinions to which tens of thousands of autonomous readers can respond and communicate to one another. It is this decentralization of authority — otherwise known as “individual liberty” — that poses the “terrorist threat” to the vertical power structures. It is the specter of human beings directing their own lives for their own purposes — and not the spectacle of airliners being crashed into skyscrapers — that makes the “war on terror” a permanent feature in our brave new world order!
