It's not just a good idea, it's the law
I have always been a bit miffed at why it is that liberals who profess to have nothing but the best intentions, always wind up supporting some of the most corrupt despots on the face of this planet.
Che? Classic bully who begged to get out of being shot but loved to attend firing squad murders.
Mao, Lenin, Stalin -- just another bunch of social misfits who happened to have killed over one hundred million people.
Saddam -- known WMDs, known Children's prisons, mass graves, supporter of terrorist states, massively corrupt (thanks Kofi and Kojo). Two pathological sons who liked shredding people. Head first if they liked you, feet first (and slowly) if they didn't.
Castro -- good PR person but he treats his people like dogshit. Cuban medical care? Sure if you have US Dollars but Cuban citizens have to pay out of their own pocket for the anesthesia used in their surgeries. Otherwise, it's a bottle of rum.
It turns out that there is a term for this mental aberration.
Check out the Wikipedia entry for:
Iron law of oligarchy:
Iron law of oligarchy
The Iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies.
Robert Michels was disturbed to find that, paradoxically, the socialist parties of Europe, despite their democratic ideology and provisions for mass participation, seemed to be dominated by their leaders, just as the traditional conservative parties.
Studying political parties, he concluded that the problem lay in the very nature of organizations. Modern democracy allowed the formation of organizations such as political parties, but as such organizations grew in complexity, they paradoxically became less and less democratic. Michels formulated the "Iron Law of Oligarchy": "Who says organization, says oligarchy."
And of course, the liberals who read this will
think knee-jerk spew that Michels was a precursor to the Chimpy McBusHitler crowd but check this out:
At the time Michels formulated his Law, he was an anarcho-syndicalist. He later became an important ideologue of Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy.
About as left as you can get...
And one bit more:
Michels stressed several factors that underly the "Iron Law of Oligarchy."
Any large organization, he pointed out, is faced with problems of coordination that can be solved only by creating a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy, by design, is hierarchically organized to achieve efficiency — many decisions have to be made daily which cannot efficiently be made by large numbers of people. The effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of a few.
This process is further compounded as delegation is necessary in any large organization, as thousands - sometimes even hundreds of thousands - members cannot make decisions using participatory democracy; this has been dictated by the lack of technological means that would allow large number of people to meet and debate, and also the issues related to the crowd psychology. The delegation however leads to specialization: the development of bases of knowledge, skills, and resources among a leadership, which further serves to alienate the leadership from the 'mass and rank' and entrenches the leadership in office.
Bureaucratization and specialization are the driving processes behind the Law. These create a specialized group of administrators in a hierarchical organization. Which, in turn, leads to the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making, a process first and perhaps best described by Max Weber, and to a lesser and more cynical extent, by the Peter Principle.
And of course, under the
Peter Principle, a person gets promoted until they reach a level at which they are incompetent. They will stay there for the rest of their career.
Explains a lot...
Posted by DaveH at September 20, 2006 9:11 PM