Does Someone Have to Be in Charge?

by Charity

And what if nobody wants to be in charge?

A corporation without a CEO? A class without a teacher? Or to paraphrase what [another forum member] just posted on another thread, a team without a coach?

Doesn't somebody ultimately have to be in charge? Even if decisions are made cooperatively or by a group, somebody has to chair the group. Barring fantasy fiction, a body has only one head.

We need help sorting this out.

The different ages also make it more like a family. No one has to be in charge, but older ones have to take care of younger ones, and daily life tasks have to be attended to. But still, no one has to be in charge in any kind of ongoing way, I don't think. 
--Friend

Yes. One of the guiding principles of our system is that the older ones take care of the younger ones.

When we're all honest, we admit that the adults don't want to take care of anybody.

We violate the guiding principles that we set up for our own system.

This particular guiding principle is based on the fact that aside from food, clothing, shelter, and absolutely minimal guidance, our parents didn't really raise us. We raised ourselves. Our mother acted like more of a child than we did. We needed her to be a mother to us, and she never was.

Because of this, our guiding principle that we mentioned above is non-negotiable. We will never subject our younger ones to what we were subject to on the outside.

But we don't want to be in charge. We don't want to take care of them, but we have to take care of them, but we don't want to take care of them.

And we go in circles. The feelings keep us going in circles. Our mother (or some part of her, whoever was out at the time) would say "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Another meaningless pat answer, no doubt parrotted from a memory of something her own mother told her. And don't get us started on our grandmother.
We're rambling. Sorry we can't be more focused.