Top-Down and Bottom-Up

It’s always interesting to me how many different aspects of society are presented one way when in reality, they are the diametric opposite. One of the areas that this is so is when processes are presented as top-down or bottom-up, but in reality are the opposite. For example:

--In most elections for Congress, Governor, or President, it is the Party apparatus that usually stands behind a small number of candidates, who then campaign in the “democratic” process. In Presidential elections, the parties’ nominees have usually already been essentially selected before most people even have the opportunity to vote in a primary. On Election night, we’re all supposed to be so grateful that we live in a land where we can freely choose our leaders from “amongst ourselves”!

--In the old USSR, there were two parts to the State: the Communist Party, and the official government. Ostensibly a bottom-up democratically-elected representative body, the “government” consisted of elected candidates hand-picked behind-the-scenes by the Party (and the Party members were always answerable to their leaders (whom they supposedly “elected”) not the other way around).

--The more channels proliferating on the TV dial give the impression of a diversity of sources through which one can receive information and entertainment. In truth, most of the channels are owned by a very small number of large media corporations who coordinate what programming goes on their channels.

--Many forums that appear to involve popular voting, such as American Idol, in truth allow that only at the tail end of the process. The auditioning of participants is a completely top-down operation, with the final picks of winners the “veneer” (making it similar to our political electoral process). Many game show and reality show contestants do not reflect the "people" but rather the image that the media corporation wants to project as "the people".

--Corporations often maintain the fiction that they are democratically run by the stockholders, who in reality do not usually have any say in the managerial operations and decisions of the corporations.

--A corporation may often hold surveys among its employees, ostensibly to give them a “voice” into the corporation’s operation. In actuality, the survey results are often selectively interpreted to affirm whatever policies that corporation’s leaders want affirmed.

--During a heated election campaign, a supposed “grass roots” political action committee forms, putting on ads attacking one of the candidates. In truth, the opposing campaign is behind the PAC, itself a creation of that campaign’s chief strategists.

It’s not whether something is run top-down or bottom-up that I object to: it’s the deception involved in misrepresenting the process that I find manipulative.