Gerontocracy versus Terms?

[Anonymous]

nibbler wrote:

Funny, I just heard some old guy talking about the benefit of combining a group of old guys with a group of young guys and they said something like, “all ages and backgrounds [would] benefit from the perspective and experience of one another and of those in different stages of life.”

The guy went on to say how the older group shouldn’t just take over the younger group, how the young and old should work side by side.

Now if I could just remember where I heard it.

You must be old if you can’t remember!

hawkgrrrl wrote:

I agree with SamBee that mixed ages would yield the best results, provided that seniority doesn’t rule.

I found it interesting that Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, started out as very liberal, then for his “job” he studied conservatives. He found that some of their ideas were sound. He came to the conclusion that it is good to have a mix. Liberals are sometimes too quick to just drop tradition assuming it all needs to be fixed and conservatives often hold on to things past when they are needed.

You can see some of these thoughts over at Wheat and Tares

Haidt says:

Quote:

Complete rejection of authority leads to chaos, leads to ineffectiveness, and ultimately leads to the group disappearing.

People who identify as conservative tend to like order and predictability. They are not attracted to change for the sake of change. Whereas people who identify as liberal they like variety and diversity. We have a study where we have dots moving around on a screen. Conservatives like dots moving around in lock-step. Liberals tend to like it is all chaotic and random. Liberals keep their rooms messier than conservatives.

I think the “variety” of old vs young applies in the same way.

[Anonymous]

With combining the old and young together on the same council, I think there could be some major problems. I mean, absolutely EVERY generation since the beginning of time has ruthlessly complained about the generations before and after them. The old look down on the young for their lack of experience… and visa versa. To quote Socrates:

Socrates wrote:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

No matter what generation they are in, young or old or in-between, people will always feel their outlook and perspective is best. They will have a hard time empathizing with those who’ve had a different experience, and therefor have a harder time getting along (generally speaking). While I don’t think a theocratic oligarchy is necessarily a “good” form of leadership, I think it’s important to realize that no leadership system is ideal. If we make the switch, we’ll be trading one stack of problems for another. Not all change is good, and progress is never linear.

[Anonymous]

All systems have problems. Once an organization reaches a certain size, it becomes corporatized and bureaucratic. Human nature just isn’t well equipped to handle groups larger than about 1500 people. It’s why local LDS leadership generally works pretty well but is a trainwreck at the higher levels.

If the goal is to have a conservative church, gerontocracy is the way to go.

[Anonymous]

Beefster wrote:

If the goal is to have a conservative church, gerontocracy is the way to go.

A conservative, slow moving church that displaces those who don’t fit the rules, by all means. But the best companies figure out the right balance between centralization and decentralization, and bureaucracy versus empowerment. I have worked for (and still do) a highly centralized bureaucracy and its made is 1/3 of what we could be. There are so many ways we could improve the experience of our target group and our employees, but we can’t due to rules that aren’t capable of meeting the needs of everyone — and those needs are real and necessary.

The church is that way — like the one year waiting period for people who get married civilly — even when their entire family — the family that raised them — are entirely non-members. Or even the HC or GA’s that don’t seem to get that the church in the middle of nowhere with hardly any members needs a different set of rules than a ward in Utah where everyone lives in a city block.

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