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I was talking to a friend who's a Quaker recently: the Quakers call themselves The Friends, and I was interested because the name suggests a community which is organized around horizontal (friend-friend) relationships. Freud theorized all group relationships as passing through the leader as ego-ideal of the group, so that all horizontal relationships were mediated by the vertical one (his ideal models were the Christian Church, headed by Christ, and the Army, headed by the Commander-in-Chief).
Apparently there is debate among the Friends as to whether their organization is mediated thru a relationship to Christ, or whether it is based on horizontal friends-relationships.
Most of the examples you cite seem to be the Freudian sort - certainly both Scientology and the AA have a belief in a 'higher power' thru which member-member relationships take form.
Who is the leader of Barbelith? Tom? GM? The word 'Barbelith'? Or is the basis of the group entirely horizontal (though with some degree of hierarchy, ie Tom putting his money where our mouths are)? Is this board an attempt to create a rhizomatic group structure? |
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