I just finished reading one of my textbooks for my organizational communications class. in the epilogue, as in most of the chapter introductions, I found statements I found so highly biased that I could tell the writer was totally blind to any bias whatsoever, it was so thick. Apologies for a long paste below, but I found it fascinating that if you are an individualist (such as libertarians), you naturally fall on the side of domination and control, and are very focused on magnifying group identity antagonisms, as opposed to the communal people who don’t care a bit about group identity issues, who are all about encouraging meaningful representation for everyone.
Here is the quote:
It is also clear that social and organizational power relationships continue to privilege the interests of some groups while failing to meet even the minimal, basic needs of others. Indeed, with globalization and worldwide deregulation, these gaps seem to be growing rapidly. None of this is especially surprising, because it results from the fundamental tensions described in Chapters 1 and 2.* The problem – and the challenge — is that societies and their organizations can deal with these fundamental tensions in one of two ways. They can focus on individuality, domination and control, and become more competitive and divided, with one group of members turning against another and magnifying long-held antagonisms based on organizational rank, nationality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Or they can focus on creating a meaningful global community that represents the interests of multiple stakeholders and meets the needs of all its members. But “societies” and “organizations” do not make choices – people do. Human beings are, after all, choice-making beings. It is our choices that will determine the road our society and our organizations take. The strategies that all of us choose will determine the kind of organizations that we live in the rest of our lives, and the kind of society that we create for ourselves and for our children. Make good choices.
*Note: the fundamental tensions mentioned above are people’s needs for autonomy, creativity, sociability, stability and predictability versus the organization’s need for control and coordination.
It is just that I know a lot of individualist libertarian types whose whole goal is to “take over the world and then leave you ruthlessly alone.” These people would strenuously disagree with being fixated on domination and control. They would agree with the final need — to make good choices — but would disagree, as I do, with how the choices are defined above.
I have to put forth a question for class discussion based on the reading. Does anyone have a good suggestion based on the quote I had above. I’m ready to be thoughtful and contrary to the authors’ point of view.
At The Rainbow 
The “problem” is that some (many?) are unwilling to compromise. Inherent in Human nature is the desire to “control.” Random chaos is bad, for many reasons, but needed in “small” amounts. IMO, a “truly adult” person, recognizes and suppresses the desire to “make everything work right.” Only the “small child” wants everything to always be “fair, just, and absolutely predictable.” Only the insane, want total unpredictability.
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As you say, given the false assumptions of control and domination being a quality of individualism and _not_ a problem of “A meaningful global community” the solution to the problem will not be forthcoming.
In order to form a “global community” the government (at whatever level) _must_ control and dominate at all levels. On the high side, they must tax the successful, and on the low side they much control the distribution of largesse, else they’ll have petty dictators using the money/food to reward their own and punish the outsiders.
Individualism, at the most foggiest soft focus, looks brutally cruel. But zoom in, and you’ll see people who had their hands out for charity getting off their butts and getting to work.
Even at the national, not global, level the government, by taking money out of the economy (to feed both a bloated bureaucracy and a large number of young healthy adults who _could_ work) and imposing multiple layers of ever more burdensome regulations, is forcing the economy into a downward spiral. Only by removing the cost and frustration of hiring workers will we see the start of a cascade of _positive_ reactions that will lead to increased economic equality as the lower economic segment benefits.
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I’ve read this passage multiple times, in part because at the moment the author declares that individuality is the side of domination and control, he either illustrates that he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or that he’s trying to show how to frame an argument. If he was trying to do the latter, he didn’t win any argument before it began, he simply shifted what the argument will be about.
Personally, I’d argue that any attempt at trying to make a society that “meets the needs of all its members” will automatically fail unless the term “need” is defined in such a way to set the bar for success sufficiently low. The bare essentials and nothing more? That’s relatively easy, and our society does a fair job of doing just that. Remarkably few don’t have those needs met, and often that is because they aren’t taking advantage of the mechanisms already in place (both governmental and private charity).
The truth is, the smallest minority is the individual. Division based on “organizational rank, nationality, class, race, ethnicity, and gender” have nothing to do with the individual. Those are all group associations. Individualism takes a person from such groups and forces them to confront that they are not “white” or “black”, “male” or “female”, but are a combination of such a wide and diverse set of groups as to make then unique.
Meanwhile, the way the other identifies individualism is by putting it together domination and control, which can only exist within a group. As an individual, who can I dominate? Myself, and only myself. Yet, when I join an organization and assume leadership, I can then dominate others. I can then seek to control their actions.
Now, I suspect the author is alluding to the possibility of an individualist putting his needs above the group’s. That is a fair point, but it only works if members of that group are willing to be subservient. A group of individualists, for example, simply won’t permit themselves to be dominated or controlled by an outside party with very good reason, and at that point it’s not domination or control, but people who voluntarily go along with whatever because they reached a rational decision. It may be a bad one, but they made their bed so now they must lie in it.
I apologize for the length here, and I don’t know if I provided anything of interest to your discussion, but it kind of touched on a nerve. 😉
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