I'm picturing a preposterous (but painfully precedented) play of political posturing:

The liberal party submitted a bill:

"For the well being of the state, the youth of our nation need a healthy society. In addition to existing programs of contraception and family planning, additional social services will provide food, shelter, and care for children in need."

The conservative party was outraged. "It stinks!" the senator shouted, "Your slimy scheme should slip us into Socialism!" A poll was tallied, and totaled: A tie.

The conservative party submitted a bill:

"For the well being of families, the youth of our nation need a healthy home. In lieu of existing programs of contraception and family planning, additional family services will provide food, shelter, and care for children in need. In God we trust."

The liberals fumed with indignant frustration,
"You propose to impose your persuasion!"
The conservatives chided, "Your sinister quarrels
Are attacking our nation's high morals!"

Both bills were shot down, the first and the latter, and the debate rages on to this day.
Though principles come with a cost, both parties agree:
It's a price that the people can pay.

Revolution Post-Hierarchy

I've been listening enthusiastically to the Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series, and over the course of days have been able to connect ideas that were presented over the course of years. A lot of interesting common themes seem obvious with you have the luxury of consuming such an enormous number of ideas in an compressed time scale. It's like school but more efficient and less productive.

Two speakers that I relate right now are Clay Shirky and Paul Hawken, who respectively presented the talks Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories and The New Great Transformation (Hawken also presented a talk called The Long Green which was effectively the same subject). If you have the chance go listen to those talks and then the other 130 or so in the series because they're all really worth listening to even if some of them show their age.

Anyway, the connection I think is interesting is that Clay Shirky explains methods of categorization, and he ends history as we know it on the notion of tags, which on the internet are user-selected short description that, with complex algorithms, are extremely effective tools for searching for and grouping similar and related items. Traditional hierarchical systems are highly arbitrary and come with peculiar biases.

Paul Hawken identified the Green Revolution which he later generalized more as the Social Justice Movement which he identified as an enormous cultural movement spanning the entire world with no single ideology, no hierarchy, and only loose organization that none the less shares common humanitarian and dignitarian goals and are very involved on a local level.

I think social justice activism can be aptly described as a single movement but it's impossible to group them without treating their similarities as tags. Individual groups may recognize their common goals between one another but they don't see each other as existing under a hierarchy because a hierarchy hasn't been defined.

This does raise the question though, can a non-hierarchical movement be described on the same terms as traditional movements? If we describe movements through common tags, could other groups be out there that just haven't been defined yet? Would the overlaps then build up past the point where it even makes sense to describe them as groups at all?

Either way, I'm all in favor of this, at least so far. It's a wonderful movement to be a part of.