Bottlenecks and Free Enterprise
Source: Life in the Twelve Tribes Messianic Community
Posted: January 22, 2012
The twelve tribes communities in different countries displayed various degrees of tolerance to independence, free will and self autonomy of the individual.
Bottleneck-style government is typical in many communities, where all decisions must go through just one person. Everything from borrowing a car to go shopping to asking if it’s a good idea to have your children’s tooth ache looked at by a dentist or even just to go for a walk with your family in some cases!
If you went to someone with a question they would simply pass the buck telling you to go and ask someone else. This was indicative of fear being used as a formative factor. Nobody wanted to make a decision and be liable for it. Everything would default back to the Household-Head and other “elder” who hated responsibility like anyone else, and to be safe would just say “NO”.
So, on one hand you have those who just loved the position of responsibility and did it well, and nothing happened without their approval (and woe to him who did something out of coordination of his all-knowing eye) and then you have those were all too scared to actually make any decisions at all for fear of retribution from the almighty Elders or Community leaders.
Free initiative was discouraged, not openly, but through the lengthy process of chain-of-command style decision making. It just took too much effort wading through red-tape to get something approved for it to be worth pursuing. And more often than not, after you got a preliminary green light to go ahead with a directive you may just get a crushing appeal from a rank and file concerned citizen who considers it their duty to call to attention the fact that God spoke a word of reservation to them about your initiatives. Or even more typical; having something approved by one elder, only to receive a cease and desist call a week later from the higher ranking elders when they finally catch wind of it.
So, at the end of the day it was easier to just have no initiative at all, and simply do what you’re told rather than try and do something original which god evidently doesn’t approve of.
This wasn’t the case in all communities. Some tended to lean the other direction and had more wiggle room for the enterprising young disciple who wanted to just put their energy and talents to doing something beneficial and industrious for their community. However, ultimately these type of communities would be exposed for their relaxed approach and their leaders would eventually be brought to justice in the form of a governmental elders meeting where they were ridiculed, defamed, belittled and humiliated to the point where they too would come to fear doing anything out of co-ordination with Yoneq and his Moses-style communication with god.
All things being equal, if you zoomed out and saw the greater picture this phenomenon wasn’t exclusive only to the lower ranking disciples; I have seen this many times where even Nun himself, one of the chief of staff of the inner circle and one of Yoneq’s right hand men was given a reprimanding for taking initiative in an area which wasn’t pleasing to Yoneq and his wife Ha Emeq. The poor man would quickly be reduced to a spineless blubbering mess believing he wasn’t approved of by god.
The knee-jerk reaction would be to take immediate action at any cost to please god and Yoneq: dissolving the enterprise, destroying any evidence that could be regarded as trying to salvage or retain anything of worth from the project. Therefore money would literally be thrown away, burned and disposed of in the form of tools, materials, plants, baskets, food, paid services etc.
We can conclude that this abusive use of ridicule and humiliation is to instil fear and used to enforce the directive of Yoneq and his wife Ha Emeq. This fear is passed down through the ranks to the lowliest of disciples through the chain of command to ensure everyone has a proper fear of god and ultimately no initiative of their own.
