Tenuous powers

Democracy is a fragile thing. This was learned yesterday on a variety of fronts for me. Democracy is a great freedom to have, but it can’t go without strong checks and balances. If we don’t show intolerance for the intolerant, we lose our freedom of democracy.

The group I spoke about yesterday was created by me. I spent over 2 years growing it, creating a community and eventually, a group where rules, directions, decisions, etc, were voted on and derermined by the group as a whole, majority based. The mods were present just to resolve issues and problems that fell into grey areas.

It grew as a community built on trust and respect. Flourished in a lot of positive ways. Unfortunately, as expressed above, the democracy was not protected and the intolerable were not just tolerated, but their opinions and thoughts were taken into consideration by mods who decided to not follow the rules of the group and let the group decide. The fragility of the democracy created broke and the group became corrupted.

It took a small group of people and cooersion of being ostracized to take a democratic group and make it into something intolerable and only fair for a small, select group of people. It stopped being the safe community and started becoming a place for tribalism and “otherism” to happen. More importantly, it did not take long for it to happen.

I read somewhere that every great civilization has only been able to successfully survive for 200 years before it crumbles under its own failures. The group I mentioned, a small metric to the larger picture, seems to agree with this saying. Great civilizations can only survive so long under their weight before people come a long and take away supporting columns for their own interests. Destruction isn’t far behind, unless drastic changes are made, mistakes aren’t bandaided over but replaced competely with new working parts. That the old, no longer relevant or functioning pieces are removed and replaced with more relevant hardware and software to fit with what is needed now.

The group I created is sinking due to lack of movement, change and suppressing intolerance. It will continue to sink. Like a rat, I have left it, realizing that there is no way to fix it, change it, or produce positive results. It is alreay corrupted from the top down. I made mistakes, like everyone. It makes me sad to see, but, this is what lessons are made of.

We are part of a group all over the world. We are the group of humans. Until we put intolerance of the intolerable as a priority, as long as we make sure the power structure isn’t horrifically imbalanced due to wealth, power, ego, race, class, gender, etc., until we realize that each of us are here to support each other and not in it just for our own benefits, we will continue to remove those supporting pillars till everything crashes around us.

Can we change course? I hope so, but I admit, I’m not hopeful. If this group experience has taught me anything, no matter how you try to create a space for everyone, some shitlord is going to try to do what they can to claim it for themselves, even if they have no desire to do anything more with it than own it. I don’t understand this mentality, but it is something deeply engrained inside us. Something we need to learn to identify and overcome. Until then, we will continually repeat the same patterns and wonder why it failed again.