Essay: "Things That Shouldn't Work But Do"

My first experience with Wikipedia was when I was doing research for a novel about seven or eight years ago. I was looking for information on the Cleveland Street scandal, a late Nineteenth Century brou-ha-ha where the head of the Prince of Wales' stables had fled England in order to avoid allegations he was a regular patron of a homsexual brothel. Interesting stuff, I thought, only I wasn't good at research and I couldn't find anything in the library beyond vague references that assumed I knew the whole story. Frustrated, I just tried googling it one day and lo and behold, an article on the subject popped up, with the complete story and footnotes and everything, provided by a website I'd never heard of before: Wikipedia.



At the time, electronic encyclopedias either came on a CD (I still have my 1996 Grolier, in case I ever need it) or you had to buy subscriptions to them online. The idea of a free encyclopedia was, well, ridiculous. I mean, how would that work? Who would write the articles? If you'd said people will write them for free, that anyone online could change them in any way they saw fit, and that, essentially, no one would be in charge, people would have laughed at you. More specifically, I would have laughed at you. I wouldn't have believed it possible. And yet, here we are. Despite the doubters, whenever anyone does a study comparing Wikipedia to traditional encyclopedias, it's found to be just as accurate. Not only that, but it has more articles; not only that, but it's free.

Another thing in this life I've recently been learning about (although not firsthand, fortunately) that shouldn't work, but does, is Alcoholics Anonymous. It is non-hierarchical, non political, and totally not-for-profit, and yet, the evidence seems to be that it helps people stay sober as well as anything else. Unlike virtually every other organization of human beings in the world (from the Catholic Church or the parents running a midget hockey team) AA seems to be immune to the poisoning effects of power. It has been called a cult, but as Roger Ebert (who attended meetings for thirty years) wrote, how can it be a cult when no one profits and no one's in charge? Think of it - wherever you are in the world right now, whether it's Seattle or Seoul, there is an AA group near you and a meeting is starting in a few hours. You can attend free of charge. Once there, no one will attempt to pressure you into accepting their beliefs beyond peppering you with certain cliches. Instead, they'll tell you their stories and listen to theirs. This whole system, so successful it spans the globe, has nothing approaching a hierarchy. It does not advertise, it does not lobby. It seeks to help and asks nothing in return. It has never been the centre of a significant scandal.

Once again, if you'd described AA to me, if you'd said you were thinking of starting an organization that didn't ask for money, that didn't push a political agenda, where alcoholics just met and talked themselves sober and then sat around and waited for other alcoholics to find them so they could help them too, for free, I would have simply not thought it possible. It doesn't jive, on some fundamental level, with how I understand the world to work.

I guess the point is that I (and maybe we) don't know how the world works as well as I (we) think I (we) do. In particular, I wonder if we shouldn't have a little more faith in ourselves. I keep coming back to the lack of control in both Wikipedia and AA, and how on some level I just assume that a lack of control will necessarily result in anarchy. Only it doesn't. And I can't help but wonder what implications these two things that shouldn't work but do might have for politics. I'm not saying we should just let everyone tinker with our laws the way they tinker with the articles on Wikipedia, but I'm not so sure they shouldn't either. And when one of our political leaders, whether it's Ferdinand Marcos or Jack Layton or George W. Bush, tells us that we can't survive without them because we need someone to protect us from ourselves, I sort of have my doubts.