I've met a lot of people who've been really into one ideology before moving towards the other, and a Maoist friend was recently telling me that even Mao used to be libertarian socialist. What's been your personal experience and journey with socialism?

    • pooh [she/her, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      We need the right combo of bottom-up and top-down dynamics. Like, the human body does a pretty good job managing the chaos of all its zillions of proteins and sugars and other molecules by combining bottom-up and top-down dynamics.

      Related, I listened to a podcast recently about Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom, and at one point they talked about how he rejects the usual framing of centralized vs. decentralized, and instead viewed the real conflict as autonomy vs. cohesion, which I thought was interesting in terms of how organizations need the right mix of those. Really makes me want to read his work. This is the podcast: https://youtu.be/Qm1W29Ryc2U