Wednesday, September 26, 2001

People On Their Own

Win Wenger writes: "The fact that declining civilizations fail to solve their problems, which Toynbee attributed to other causes, might very well be attributed instead to that very tendency to try to work through central arrangements.

"In rising civilizations, people on their own, at "grass roots" level, take on the problems and issues. People are enough in communication to imitate each other's successes and avoid each other's failures, but for the most part are working free of central direction, and usually aren't the people who had been expected to be the source of the answer.

"It also seems intuitively correct that people who work with what they have, including themselves, on the problems, are more likely to find effective solutions than either the central authorities or all the masses of people standing around waiting for their direction or for resources which are controlled by someone else."

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