Saturday, December 3, 2011

The Committee

Jesus said, where two or more are gathered there too am I. The implication here was that where two or more gathered in God's name and in service of God then God's presence would assist in decisions.
Democracy says that the more involved in a decision then the better that decision is for everyone involved.
It's important, considering that people are dying for the idea of 'democracy'.
They aren't against 'spirituality' or the individual and community relationship with the holy and sacred.  They don't like authoritarian religion much and call it rigid and having invested interests that are long overdue for review and renewal. The very political structures that are derived from democratic institutions are themselves in doubt.
The committee is an interesting entity. The best joke about it's decision making is to say a 'moose was a horse designed by committee".  As I've been in many comittees I've seen that there's a serious amount of dead weight in them and understand that they delay process and interfere mostly with progress. They are the principal reason for the well know adage that the best government is by a 'benign' dictator.  It's just that benign dictators are in gloriously short suppy where as tyrannical dictators are a dime a dozen.
But people like committees, partly because they can 'hide in a group'.  Indeed people in groups as group psychology studies have shown have distinctly scary tendencies to bias that the average committee is usually unaware of.
Alot of people on 'committees' are pretentious and government by 'committee' has historically resulted in the worst of the worst abuses.  The anonymousness of the committeee allows for this.
And yet the 'committee' as an institution serves to go beyond individuals and even generations to provide an orderly progression.
Yet individually committees must be wartched like rabid dogs. Committees are the playground of psychopaths and sociopaths and need to be carefully monitored over time because they usually have the powers of 'numbers' when they might only reflect the views of a few.  Bullies love committees.
And yet we need them like toilet paper and mouthwash.

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