Nothing’s harder than gardening. Everything’s outside your control. The deer come and raid your flowers—can’t do anything about it. A pest destroys your parsley, what can you do? Weeds invade your space with no intention of leaving. A hot summer or a cold spring can kill all your hard work. You have no control.
Yet nothing’s easier than gardening. All you do is put a few seeds or saplings into the ground, move them into the sun and give them water sometimes. Sunlight gives your plants the energy to grow. They even stretch towards it by themselves! And if you’re lucky, other plants show up that you can cultivate. In many places, you don’t have to water your plants that much because rain does it for you. The plants grow by themselves and enrich the ecosystem of your garden: Bees start to buzz around, butterflies gambol through the air. Birds even land when you’re not looking.
Those are two views of gardening. And I find them similar to what it’s like to be part of a bigger system.
That system could be a culture: Some people view it as the eternal struggle to uphold values, escape the drift towards folly and decline. Others see it as an evolving organism, excited to see new pockets of culture bubble up, expand and fizzle.
That system could also be a workplace, committee, friend group or other community. At the core, there’s always someone wanting to seize control to turn the system into its desired state. And there’s always someone wanting to let go of the reins to watch exciting possibilities manifest.
I think it’s not one side or the other that makes a system great (with the exception of things like nuclear power plants, where we clearly prefer one way). A community descends into manifesting people’s worst instincts if all control is gone. At the same time, pure top-down control kills communities by constricting them.
It’s the dialogue between the two that makes communities thrive.