Friday, September 24, 2010

Tea Party Movement Compared to a Living Organism

American politics has never seen anything quite like the Tea Parties, though few appreciate the revolutionary organizational principle powering the movement. A major reason why the Tea Parties have been so successful, why the political establishment has found them so difficult to combat (and one that explains, among other things, why I've chosen to use the plural in referring to them), lies in their organization.

The Tea Parties comprise a distributed network -- a non-hierarchical system of autonomous nodes with no central control point, and with all nodes possessing the same value and freedom to act independently. A distributed network can be compared to a beehive. All the bees know their particular task and complete it autonomously, without directions from a central authority. If a threat appears, the bees overwhelm it not by direct confrontation, but by swarming, driving it away with sheer force of numbers.

The rest of this article can be found at American Thinker.

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