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textualdevianceAvoiding doing homework (yeah, I know...) and thought I'd pose this:
Groups tend to morph over time, depending on who's in them and who's running them and the surrounding circumstances. And this being the case, there will always be some faction within just about every group that disagrees with the group's leadership and/or with the stated purposes of the group at the time. Sometimes these dissenters work toward regime/policy change, sometimes they simply cut and run and go form their own group.
Efforts to change the regime are laudable in most cases, but what if the intended changes involve a significant re-imagining of the group's purposes, and those purposes have been set in stone for a long time? Wouldn't it be better, in that case, to simply go off and join another group that's more to one's purposes, or start a new one?
Say, for instance, you have a group called the Daisy Pickers. Their entire purpose is to pick daisies. A faction of daisy pickers, noting that most other flower picking groups have diversified, lobbies the daisy picking leadership for change. We should include picking buttercups, too, they argue.
Such a lobby, while dubious, has reasonable chances of success.
But what if the lobby instead was not merely to pick daisies and buttercups, but to exclusively pick buttercups, and abandon picking daisies altogether?
Not only is the dissenting faction unlikely to succeed, but there's a reasonable question in there of what the point is. If daisy picking is so passe that there's no point in ever picking another daisy, a complete re-imagining of the group might be necessary. But if not, I think it's probably better to simply branch off, and create a new group specifically for picking buttercups, or go join a group that's all about buttercup picking.
Sometimes the purpose of a given group simply cannot keep up with the changing times. An 8-track tape enthusiasts' group, while it may have been going strong in 1974, would simply be obsolete today (except as a nostalgia group.) But I don't think that it's worth the effort and anguish to try to completely re-imagine such a group to include CDs, or even abandon 8-tracks entirely. Some people will cling to old ways of doing things even until death. And sometimes, groups simply don't need to last forever.
If the world has changed so much that the platform of a given group is obsolete, there really is no logical choice but to abandon that group and pursue others. Trying to re-invent it--trying to polish it up and make it look new when it still has the same clunky internal parts--makes no sense.
This is not to say that every group needs to be abandoned every time fashions change. But limited-purpose groups that cannot change with the times are doomed to be anachronistic. Small factions of forward-thinking members trying to drag a dinosaur into the 21st century are only wasting their effort.
Groups tend to morph over time, depending on who's in them and who's running them and the surrounding circumstances. And this being the case, there will always be some faction within just about every group that disagrees with the group's leadership and/or with the stated purposes of the group at the time. Sometimes these dissenters work toward regime/policy change, sometimes they simply cut and run and go form their own group.
Efforts to change the regime are laudable in most cases, but what if the intended changes involve a significant re-imagining of the group's purposes, and those purposes have been set in stone for a long time? Wouldn't it be better, in that case, to simply go off and join another group that's more to one's purposes, or start a new one?
Say, for instance, you have a group called the Daisy Pickers. Their entire purpose is to pick daisies. A faction of daisy pickers, noting that most other flower picking groups have diversified, lobbies the daisy picking leadership for change. We should include picking buttercups, too, they argue.
Such a lobby, while dubious, has reasonable chances of success.
But what if the lobby instead was not merely to pick daisies and buttercups, but to exclusively pick buttercups, and abandon picking daisies altogether?
Not only is the dissenting faction unlikely to succeed, but there's a reasonable question in there of what the point is. If daisy picking is so passe that there's no point in ever picking another daisy, a complete re-imagining of the group might be necessary. But if not, I think it's probably better to simply branch off, and create a new group specifically for picking buttercups, or go join a group that's all about buttercup picking.
Sometimes the purpose of a given group simply cannot keep up with the changing times. An 8-track tape enthusiasts' group, while it may have been going strong in 1974, would simply be obsolete today (except as a nostalgia group.) But I don't think that it's worth the effort and anguish to try to completely re-imagine such a group to include CDs, or even abandon 8-tracks entirely. Some people will cling to old ways of doing things even until death. And sometimes, groups simply don't need to last forever.
If the world has changed so much that the platform of a given group is obsolete, there really is no logical choice but to abandon that group and pursue others. Trying to re-invent it--trying to polish it up and make it look new when it still has the same clunky internal parts--makes no sense.
This is not to say that every group needs to be abandoned every time fashions change. But limited-purpose groups that cannot change with the times are doomed to be anachronistic. Small factions of forward-thinking members trying to drag a dinosaur into the 21st century are only wasting their effort.
