Top Down – Quotes

[Ella Baker]’s second defining

[Ella Baker]’s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership… ‘She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge’. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. Gail Collins

Read any of the

Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It’s not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power. … Read more

Unlike solidarity, which is

Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. Eduardo Galeano

The inherent non-linearity of

The inherent non-linearity of the digital allows for more input from others, including the subject and reader as collaborators. The top-down, bedtime-style story is of limited use. A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital … Read more

I hate intellectuals. They

I hate intellectuals. They are from the top down. I am from the bottom up. Frank Lloyd Wright

Oppression or systems of

Oppression or systems of oppression operate as a shorthand terms in much writing and speaking so that we do not have to list all these systems of meaning and control each time (i.e. racism, ableism, xenophobia, etc.). I needed a term like that, but oppression implies a kind of top-down understanding of power that is … Read more

The traditional view of

The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, No, … Read more