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Creating Change without Riots:
Fifteen Essentials of a Social Change Movement
By John Jensen
Credible people increase in numbers, communicating reasonable ideas with
integrity until systemic changes occur.
Table of contests
Preface……………………………………………………………………………2
Chapter 1. Change is choosing………………………………………………….2
Chapter 2. Invite people one at a time………......................................................6
Chapter 3. Develop an argument…………….....................................................13
Chapter 4. Get people articulate …………….....................................................22
Chapter 5. Plan for group action…………………..............................................27
Chapter 6. Provide group support ………….......................................................38
Chapter 7. Unite around the Good of the Whole.................................................44
Chapter 8. Dedicate to a purpose.........................................................................53
Chapter 9. Learn what is needed..........................................................................60
Chapter 10. Question yourself................................................................................66
Chapter 11. Reason with evidence.........................................................................75
Chapter 12. Develop a long-view narrative............................................................84
Chapter 13. Multiply numbers................................................................................88
Chapter 14. Elect a creative minority......................................................................93
Chapter 15. Remedy society’s problems ..............................................................103
Chapter 16. Avoid pitfalls.....................................................................................120
References.............................................................................................................129
Recommended Reading.........................................................................................134
Appendix I. Organizational flyer...........................................................................136
Appendix II. Introductory talk outline..................................................................137
Copyright. John Jensen 2015
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Preface
This is an appeal for your help, not just to write a letter or contact your
Congressman, but to make it your hobby to try to save civilization.
The job is big enough that we cannot lay it entirely on you alone, but on you
and others working together. People together brought the world to its present state,
so altering its course should not be impossible.
You may feel that this request comes at an inconvenient time. But then, if
an earthquake slices off part of California, an asteroid hits, Yellowstone erupts, or
the international financial system caves—these also will be inconvenient. The
question is whether we prepare to handle an inconvenience, or wait for it to impale
us and merely suffer it.
You yourself may not be the one this book should address, but if not you,
then who?
John Jensen
October 2015
Chapter 1. Change is Choosing
You are free to aim your life as you wish. A fish is also free to follow the
shiny thing in the water that might be a meal. You are free while you decide what
to do, but if the shiny thing has a hook inside it, you quickly cease being free.
What you freely chose takes you where you did not choose to go.
The many free choices you and others have made have resulted in the
society you now experience. If you are not satisfied with it, the same means that
brought it on can alter it. What you and others choose to do cannot fail to affect
your society. Some impact is from your action but other from your inaction, some
by your ideals and other by your indifference. It all adds up.
If you want a different society, the broad outlines of the path are clear. You
must understand the effect of what you do, and then choose constructive actions
alongside those of others. If you choose to stand aside, do the destructive, or
ignore and allow it, your society will draw you, like a fish with a hook in its
mouth, to go where you do not want to go.
As we proceed here, the problem that will recur is that, as simple as a step or
action may be, it will not come about by accident. It will require you to think
about it. Change means not coasting with the familiar. To lever yourself and your
social world out of the familiar, you must think about it.
The ideas posed here are a beginning to add to your leverage for creating
your world. Five conditions invite a movement.
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1. Serious problems continue unaddressed.
2. Most in the U.S. want substantial change.
3. A minority co-opt government for their own interests.
4. Elections alone have not achieved inclusive values.
5. A movement by the majority can regain equitable management of
society.
Common evidence establishes the first four conditions, but the fifth is less
clear. Can we do anything about the situation?
Despite the challenges humans have surmounted, we have not mastered
change. Exciting resources have stimulated hope, but all taken together have turned
out inadequate: extraordinary communications technology, big data,
comprehensive polling, an antiquated electoral process, an arcane law-making
system, and millions with good will trying to improve conditions. Efforts of
organizations plateau despite armies of members. Effort is undertaken toward a
bad condition, a national organization founded, publicity secured, money collected,
numbers of members increase, and then stalemate settles in. Gains remain in a
niche, progress slows, and public attention shifts. Is change just random, or are
there reasons we can affect?
A single ideology is not the answer. Competition between theories often
boils down to, "If we (powerful people) apply this theory, it will turn out best for
us." Society needs a comprehensive view: "We (all) live in an interdependent
world and can allow it to evolve by accident till it crashes or can apply good
thinking to it."
If the answer is so complicated that we must think differently about it, that is
a problem already. When we ask people to change, they assume we want a
different activity, and if results are not what they hoped, they give it up. But what
if the action must align with human nature in order to succeed? What if
understanding human nature must come first, and that we cannot even recognize
the best action without altering our perspective?
We propose here that elusive aspects of humanity--our thoughts, beliefs, and
feelings--hold a key, and that we will not fashion optimal responses unless we
master them. The following chapters hold brief syntheses for solving common
human problems--how to think for the whole instead of the part, how to have an
intellectual life, how to work in groups, how to balance one's emotions, how to
convey an idea, and so on.
But good thinking begins only after we believe that it matters. If we are not
clear about this, we excuse countless bits of damage from low quality views. Add
up enough of them and conditions worsen. Many key zones are obvious such as
scope of message. Changing people's minds, what do we want them to change to
and why? If they are committed to a niche and our message does not address it, we
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have nothing to say to them. Either we expand our sights or address their niche.
The scope of our message matters.
And our demographic target? If we talk to a few economic interests, what
about everyone else? Will our message appeal to the self-interest of a few or
benefit all? And how do we deliver our ideas? Is it through expensive advertising,
or do we enlist people’s efforts? We may run out of money though never tap the
depth of their energy. Relying on technology and funding, we are stuck when they
give way.
New people must fire up and become articulate, suggesting ongoing
training and development. And even with numbers involved, an effort can easily
lose its way. Someone must plan for everyone's efforts. A Special Forces team
does not enter enemy ground to defeat the enemy but rather to execute one clear
step toward it.
People need tasks even at the beginning that engage their energy and afford
enough progress to encourage them. Political campaigns may have limited
objectives. We can expand them. Poor public thinking may hamstring progress.
We can improve thinking. People go in and out of activity. We can help them stay
active. Leaders may not act in the best interests of all. We can choose better
leaders. To improve, we address salient factors. Systems advance as credible
people increase in numbers and communicate reasonable ideas with integrity. More
doing this become a movement.
People usually allow issues to languish till they explode, as in the American
Revolution or the World Wars. Some public figures prefer chaos as their force for
change, and would sacrifice many human needs for the chance to implement their
ideology. Others trust passive resistance, like non-violent protest for the
independence of India or our own Civil Rights Movement. Yet stopping a bad
thing does not start a good one. India may be the most unequal country in the
world, and the U.S. still faces endemic racism, injustice, and economic inequality.
Here we suggest fifteen avenues for effort, tools for a movement. Several
aim at the most destructive force in human history, arguably mediocre thinking. In
several contexts we examine communicating ideas, while other chapters explain
the single factor that most determines many social conditions.
For change to occur, enough people must want it badly enough to work to
obtain it. We elicit their desire and effort with vision, learning, action, and mutual
support.
Vision. An overall plan must come together that people can commit to; "it is
a good thing to know what you are doing." The entire book rounds out a vision but
especially chapters 2, 6, 7, and 11. The bottleneck is not in organization or
technology but rather in how to develop the collective will to do what is possible.
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Learning. People must learn both for personal change and action toward
society. They carry out what is in their mind to do, and to change society must
think accordingly. See Chapters 8, 9, and 10.
Action. The main activity is communicating ideas in effective ways.
Chapters 3, 4, 12, 13, and 14 explain.
Mutual support. People's bonds sustain them day to day. Without support
and direction, they lose their way. The teamwork outlined in chapters 1, 5, and 15
keeps their effort on target. A rough time sequence organizes the chapters.
1. Invite people one at a time. Two people become four by inviting two
more. If we want people to come to a party, we ask them. Our interest in
each other is the basic glue of society.
2. Develop an argument. People need a common view about their purpose,
the means to achieve it, and the reasons why. Without a rationale they agree
on, their effort dissipates.
3. Get people articulate. They must be able to explain the why and how of
change to opponents and the undecided. Mass media fall short because
people screen out what they do not want to hear.
4. Plan for group action. With many outlets for their activity, people can be
led into dead ends. Careful planning puts limited numbers and resources to
best use.
5. Provide group support. Action for social change can tire and confuse
people. They need inclusion in a supportive group.
6. Unite around the good of the whole. A common value guides what to do.
“Good of the whole” incorporates the efforts enabling the entire biosphere to
prosper.
7. Dedicate to a purpose. It is not enough for people to subscribe to a value.
Applying it in society requires dedicated reorganization of thinking.
8. Learn what is needed. To enhance the good everywhere in society and
the physical world, we need continued learning to understand it.
9. Question ourselves. It is nearly impossible to become an adult without
adopting narrow assumptions about the world. Unless we question ourselves,
we impose our mistakes on society.
10. Reason with evidence. Social policy depends on evidence available to
anyone. Without commitment to it, we float among unverifiable opinions.
11. Develop a long-view narrative. Conditions affecting the most people for
the longest time play out over generations and centuries. Good solutions
account for these time spans.
12. Multiply numbers. The good of the whole includes all venues of society.
Only super-majorities may alter critical policies, so action must aim to
multiply numbers.
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13. Elect a creative minority. Civilizations rise as their leaders are creative
for the good of the whole and fall as they are not. Elections from
neighborhood to nation are a key arena of effort.
14. Remedy society’s problems. Activists knowledgeable, united, and
numerous can address society’s problems by group planning and action.
15. Avoid pitfalls. Complex systems are vulnerable to pitfalls that
sabotage progress. We need to recognize and avoid them.
This book invites you to help create the society you want.
Chapter 2. Invite people one at a time
The big change is for people to become active and effective. With fewer
than one in twenty active, effort needs to increase, but the larger problem is being
effective. A million can show up for an occasion and change nothing.
We distinguish between effectiveness for civilization as a whole and toward
a part. The former, which is our special concern, can fail while the latter succeeds.
Faulty air conditioning on the Titanic might beg for repair, but on a boat heading
down, the part is irrelevant. The phrase "arranging deck chairs on the Titanic"
reminds us to notice the centrality of our effort.
The part is usually easy to attend to because it affects our personal wellbeing. We go to school, marry, and work as individuals. A track opens just for us,
and we follow it assuming, "If everyone does his part, the whole will be fine," that
it needs no frontal effort; that we can count on the stability of society, purity of our
air and water, employment opportunity for all, justice before the law, and the
quality of children’s education. We think, “What do I need?”, and turn to “What
does the whole need?” only later if at all.
Yet no one awake takes these things for granted now. The human race kills
off life on the planet and changes the climate enough to guarantee severe
dislocations. In America, economic inequality generates two societies, while
criminal justice, health, education, and security lag.
You may regard effort toward the whole as someone else’s gig, however,
not on your to-do list. You're concerned but leave the fate of society to others. And
if your own activity is marginal to its survival and you're concerned, what about
those not concerned? They not only do nothing to save it, they fail to grasp any
threat to it, and casually support policies that damage it more.
To appreciate the extent of the problem, stand on a downtown sidewalk at
noon, look at pedestrians one by one and make a guess: “Does this person ever
direct a single action toward the fate of their society?” In fact to bring the problem
closer to home, can you yourself think of any action you can take that could affect
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the fate of your society? If you can't, and you also answer "no" about the others, it
signals why civilizations can disappear quietly without their population
understanding why. Invisible but powerful factors can operate in our own.
Efforts toward the whole depend on three changes: 1) Increasing numbers of
people who 2) share a comprehensive vision of how to improve society and then 3)
apply it. Even to address the whole, a body of people large enough to affect it need
a common vision. We need to increase in numbers, develop a plan, and put it to
work.
How to start. We begin with a vision. Ideas for change usually disappear as
fast as they emerge, but they are the beginning--preferably something easily
understood like, “No taxation without representation,” “The vote for women,”
“Civil rights for African Americans,” “Stop the war,” or “Farm workers organize.”
If your theme were “Raise the minimum wage,” what do you do first?
A solid beginning is to double your number. Vision + numbers = progress.
One other person needs to cooperate with you. If you cannot influence one, you are
unlikely to reach thousands, and influencing one is not complicated. Someone you
know finds you credible. If you were to express an idea to them, they would listen.
You might reach strangers by handing out flyers on a street corner, but you can
start with your friend Evan.
“Evan, could I talk to you about why we should raise the minimum wage?”
If you guess his interest accurately, he answers “Sure.”
What do you say?
Like a salesman pitching a product, you notice what he is ready to absorb.
You explain to him the importance and urgency of the issue and how personal
action could help. You have a plan, explain it, and incorporate Evan into it. But
even the two of you agreeing do not comprise a movement, not even with many. A
poll may reveal 75% of the country favoring a policy Congress refuses to enact.
People become a movement when they deliberately multiply their numbers.
Compare two experiences. In the first, you explain to Evan why he should
support raising the minimum wage. He agrees and you are done. In the second, you
ask him, “Could you talk to anyone in your family about this?"
“Yes,” he says. “My brother would like to know.” The extra sentence marks
intentional movement, an idea passing on further.
Ask for what you want. The principle actually applies broadly. A motto
suggested by legendary businessman W. Clement Stone was “Tell everyone what
you want to do, and someone will help you do it.”
What if that is true? If you and some friends set out with a clear message on
how to change society, and in a city of a million people go door to door asking
everyone if they would like to help, how many might answer, “It’s worth a try”?
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Estimating one in a thousand pessimistically, a thousand say yes and help spread
the message.
They need why and how. They pass on the conditions to be changed and
how united effort could do that. The more who do this, the faster changes mount
up. Many people need only a single reason to change an opinion.
Build by personal contact. We accomplish this best by talking face to face,
a development that enabled our ancestors to survive in groups on the African veldt.
Such contact is particularly important now for two reasons.
One is the depth to which we must reach others for them to alter their lives
to help us. Acting differently means being motivated differently. Facing them we
can convey feelings of urgency absent in impersonal messages. Think for example
how little highway billboards have changed your life though you have driven past
them hundreds of times. We need to reach people more deeply than impersonal
messages can accomplish.
A second reason for personal contact is how it affects the initiator. In him or
her, an idea becomes strong enough to propel activity. Meaning and urgency
combine into a force in the one passing it on.
Massed activity, on the other hand, can bond allies around a common
purpose and deliver a fresh sense of urgency to society. But it can also inhibit
individual initiative and generate undesired outcomes like violence, turning off
potential supporters, misrepresenting an issue, and confusing people. Its benefit is
also its downside. People subordinate their personal qualities to the current group
need--march, shout, or wave placards. The group shields them from
embarrassment, and does not ask personal competence from them, but others
usually need their competence most. After massed activity, their personal effort in
an individual assignment obtains the specific gains desired.
Personal contact for better or worse relies on the design of the brain. Its
general state is to try to make life simpler for us, so that when not deliberately
focused, its default activity is to screen out the irrelevant. Before we are even
aware of it, our mind has bundled up most of what our senses receive, stamped it
“Disposable,” and left behind only a drip for us to examine. And even about the
drip, we employ heuristics--shortcuts or rules—to think more efficiently.
Assigning a meaning to a whole category lets us process it faster, such as “The
homeless are not my problem.”
Imagine a businessman on a big city sidewalk passing a kiosk that displays
headlines like “Starving child found...” and “Poverty increases...” He has often
walked by and dismissed the headlines, but a homeless man approaches one day
and asks him, “Sir, do you have a dollar?”
He has much more than a dollar and feels uncomfortable. Personal contact
interrupts his heuristic. From the messages striking him, his programming tells him
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to pay attention to this one. When his rule doesn't cover a novel experience, his
brain puffs it up, which undoubtedly helped homo erectus survive predators. And
changing the situation slightly--the businessman has a girlfriend on his arm--his
heuristic wobbles more. As she watches, he becomes intensely aware of the event
and later recalls it in detail. Personalness inflates its impact.
These two tendencies—automatic screening out and exaggerating fresh
perceptions in--point both to a movement’s problem and its solution. By their habit
of screening out, most people do not even notice challenges to their beliefs. They
habitually avoid contrary-leaning media and avoid listening to public figures they
disagree with. Evidence that could change their view flits past them, they seek
protection in dispersed housing and gated communities, and their social niche
screens out divergent thinking. If Will figures out one part of a problem and Jerry
another, they solve it by combining their pieces, but stuck in alienated groups they
do not.
To reach insulated people, we use the second tendency, drawing on the
novel and personal. Imagine a Congressman leaving his gated community in a
window-shaded vehicle. On the sidewalk where he turns into traffic, three people
wave signs reading, “Congressman X voted against food stamps,” “He receives $1
million in farm subsidies,” and “Congressman X is a hypocrite.” Later we may try
to change his mind but first just want him to recall the moment, and the signs do it.
He imagines his neighbors' reactions upon passing the corner.
When people are receptive, on the other hand, personal contact moves them
quickly. A friend named Jack lives in my neighborhood. We meet rarely but when
we do, we talk ideas. If Jack came to me fired up about something, I would think
about it because Jack is thoughtful and credible. He could offer me a personal
connection and involve me in an action.
“Tonight there’s a meeting at Barry’s about that issue you and I discussed,”
he might say. ”It should be interesting. Can you come with me?” Knowing no
more than that, I am on track to follow Jack as far as he can lead. My curiosity has
been aroused, thinking stimulated, and I then need inclusion in a group taking
action.
At the meeting, I hear ideas, offer my two cents, and perhaps tell my own
experience. When they divide up activity for the week, they offer some to me.
Leaving the meeting together, Jack and I talk about it. I link it further with my own
thoughts and focus on my upcoming responsibility; perhaps to march, visit the
newspaper, make placards, man phones, research an idea, or distribute door
hangers and talk to people. Action follows from the personal connection Jack
initiated. He leads me gently, I do the same for others, and more follow from us.
We multiply as we infect others with an idea.
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Direct contact surmounts barriers not negotiated any other way. We would
like to send ten thousand Twitter messages to speed progress, but behavioral
changes usually occur face to face. Thousands hearing a public speaker have many
steps to go before they engage in effective action.
If we lack the advantage of such a kickoff, we approach people personally.
From their response we can tell how they are assimilating our idea. Then we help
move them to want to take action ("Here’s what we might accomplish"), prepare
for an imminent event ("Next Saturday morning") and finally they await the word
“Go!” With everyone personally included, informed, thinking together, committed,
organized, and poised, we send the Twitter message and everyone goes. But even
large groups may influence only a limited niche when they ignore individuals'
development.
Changing to action. The main challenge is people's shift from interest to
action. Though you may subscribe to a dozen important values, you apply your
time to the one most present to you. Imagine before-and-after photos. In the first, a
man holds up a sign with a message on it. In the photo after, people pack the
National Mall holding the same sign. Between the two, a means of involving
people made that action important.
We achieve such a change best through a particular kind of activity. People
may do things once because we invite them, but an added feature helps them claim
it as their own. We involve them in activity that invites others’ attention. Throw a
football to a boy and he is likely to throw it back, instantly owning half of a game
of catch. We act toward him in a way that elicits his own action. Give him a soccer
ball as he stands with his friends, and he kicks it to one nearby. We give people a
tool to engage others and place them where that will occur.
You and Evan write out an idea, stand on a street corner together, and hand
flyers to passers-by. They take aim at you. What is this all about? they ask, and
why this and why that? Now on the line, Evan quickly learns the points he
explains to others, and realizing how much more there is to absorb, welcomes the
study group you suggest (cf. Chapter 4). His key activity is offering information to
people one by one. It awakens him to his need and the movement fills it.
Knowledge changes when linked with action. His own activity affects Evan.
In applying an idea by changing his behavior, he alters its inner substance. He
firms it up, engraves it into his consciousness. In the study group, he learns the
issues, finds support, and begins to think as a leader--that acting on good ideas is
the transforming power, that society corrects itself as people do not ignore critical
knowledge.
Some might assert that we need more research, best practices, model
programs, or a Blue Ribbon Commission. But compared to any other time in
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history, we are afloat in good ideas. Today's elephantine deficit has been ignoring
what's known. We just need to act on the obvious.
Bridging. In explaining ideas, you and Evan bridge to others across
sameness and difference.
Sameness is our safe zone. People to whom we offer ideas may already be at
our elbow while we gather as neighbors, seniors, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, police,
military, union members, teachers, firefighters, or churchgoers. Attending a
gathering and standing by the refreshment table, we notice the person next to us,
taking in hair style and clothing, and listening for code words. We hear voice
modulation and pace, physical movement, and how murmurs, nods, and gestures
synchronize with our own. Matching categories mark us as the same kind of
people, eligible to connect.
The other condition is difference, leaving us uncertain where we stand,
facing distance we must overcome, and resolving to create a bridge anyway.
Encountering a contrary view early on, we look for similarities instead of reacting
negatively. We dismiss appearances, inquire about the other's life and concerns,
and seek out the real person.
Two attitudes help us. The first is that this person is valuable. If we do not
remind ourselves of this, we may inadvertently appear to value our ideas more than
our listener, yet the person is primary.
The second is fascination at how they construct their mind. We usually can
analyze another's thinking easily with a few labels. The hard part is preventing our
own inner state from turning oppositional and cueing the other to oppose us. We
need a frame of reference under our control, easy to step into, that opens a fluid
exchange of ideas. For this, sheer interest in how they construct their viewpoint can
work. The reality is that we actually don't get the manner in which they think. It is
alien to us. So we apply a little curiosity: "How the heck do they think like that?'
We follow their words patiently, absorbing what they say: "Tell me how you
look at this. Tell me how you put it all together." We assemble a model of how
they see the issue, just understanding rather than challenging. When they pause, we
summarize what we hear and check it with them: “You're saying.... Is that how it
looks to you? Did I leave out anything?" With a tone of respect, we modify as they
suggest until they are satisfied we understand them. Our careful listening
encourages their careful speaking, and being face to face spurs them to make
sense--it is harder to rail at someone who is standing right before us. As we express
ideas with moderation and reason, they are inclined to do the same, and with
positive feelings, we each may take in ideas we otherwise would not.
The value of a positive focus became clearer to me during the 2004
Presidential election when I was startled to hear an acquaintance, who usually
favors the underdog, defending the President.
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“The awful things people say about him!" she exclaimed. To my objection to
his policies, she answered, “That’s just more negativity." When I referred instead
to his strengths of confidence, enthusiasm, ability with people, and sense of
mission, our conversations smoothed out. As we look for what we can accept in
another’s view, they are better able to examine a part objectively.
Questions. Evan has some questions:
“Aren’t many organizations trying to change society? How is this effort any
different?”
1.5 million non-governmental organizations claim to act for the public good.
Each addresses an objective and appeals to a constituency, and many neutralize
others. A movement needs a comprehensive purpose that could spur thousands of
such organizations to collaborate.
“What purpose could unite such an effort? Evan asks.
The main change is shifting attention from small problems to the big one.
The larger system must improve for smaller efforts to succeed Try limiting the
ocean's rise only in front of your own seaside town, air temperature only in your
state, or income inequality only in your neighborhood. When we ignore the big
problem, the small one eludes our control.
“What generates the will to solve problems together?” Evan inquires.
We have to understand the macro-problem. The life work of Arnold
Toynbee, twentieth century British historian, concerned what made civilizations
prosper and decline. Studying twenty-one of them, he found that a minority first
emerged as creative leaders. They devised what could benefit all, such as how to
preserve order, educate, supply food, communicate, and express productivity, art,
and trade. Thinking together begins with a few and gradually extends to more who
follow the leaders. As efforts provide for the whole, the system retains the vitality
to address new challenges.
Toynbee found that decline set in when the creative minority turned
dominant. When leaders gained for themselves at the expense of the many, the
latter stopped investing in the system. A dissatisfied majority or hostiles outside
the borders brought on troubles that returned the civilization to a more primitive
state. It prospered as a minority benefited the whole and deteriorated when it
benefited itself (1). We need leaders who want to include everyone.
“Is this a political effort?” Evan asks.
It adds what makes politics work--active citizens. A society prospers the
easy way when their leaders design it that way. People in a democracy take a few
minutes to choose wise leaders, send them off, and they do the job. But the
easy/lazy way has not fulfilled our hopes, so we look for a harder way that will.
The approach detailed below can meet long-term needs.
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Chapter 3. Develop an argument
Since spreading ideas resembles sales, good salespeople offer us clues. One
especially predicts whether we are likely to succeed.
Beyond indispensable qualities of enthusiasm and sincerity, how many sales
we make are in proportion to our time spent in front of qualified customers. These
are people for whom the product meets their need, they have the money to buy it,
and the only remaining step is the decision to buy, achieved by the sales process.
The more time we spend with qualified customers, the more sales we make. No
matter how good our product or how well it meets their needs, if we do not offer it
to them personally, no one will buy it. While advertising may alert people to our
product, for any significant purchase, a sales process completes the deal.
A car salesman provided an example. A man examined a model on his lot
one morning. The salesman approached and began talking. Noticing the customer
listening, he spoke for eight hours without a break until the customer bought the
car.
Apply this to yourself. To a receptive person who might be the sparkplug
inspiring hundreds or thousands, can you deliver your plan for changing the
world? If you cannot, start there. You can convey to others only what you
comprehend. Learn how to change society and then explain it to others.
Your idea needs to have broad appeal though it can start in a niche.
Obtaining the vote for women ultimately affected every family, the Vietnam War
influenced the whole society, the 1930s labor movement has touched every
working person since, and the Civil Rights Movement addressed fundamental
features of democracy. For the current issue, imagine explaining the following
narrative to a roomful.
The argument. “The main issue is so simple a four year old can grasp it. In
Four Hens and a Rooster, a chicken yard rooster browbeats four hens to claim
more space and food for himself. The hens are unhappy but put up with this for a
long time until they finally say “Enough!” They go to classes to build their selfesteem. They exercise to get stronger. They meet to make a plan. Finally they
gather their courage, confront the rooster, scream at him, “We want our fair share!”
and take charge of redistributing the food and space. After that everyone is happy
including the rooster (2).
“Some people take more than is fair. Like the rooster, they quietly come to
control everything and like the hens, others can recognize what has gone wrong
and adjust the system.
“People may reasonably debate wages, profits, working conditions,
education, infrastructure, taxes, and the safety net. There are many ways to balance
everything. But first we need to decide who the system is for. It is for everyone or
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for a few? Is it for winners and not for losers? For the healthy and not the sick?
For the rich and not the poor? For whites and not for everyone else?
“This choice of who it's for determines whether a civilization fails. Think
about the big ones of the past--Mayan, Inca, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian,
Chinese, Japanese, and so on. Why did they fail? Why did they succumb to
problems they had already solved for centuries instead of just getting better and
better? A British historian named Arnold Toynbee spent his life finding out.
Studying twenty-one of them, about fifty years ago he published his findings in
seven volumes titled A Study of History.
“He found that everything hinged upon what he called a creative minority.
These were the few thinkers and leaders who inspired others with their ideas. They
figured out how to get people working together.
“What went wrong was this creative minority changed its purpose. From
looking out for the good of the whole, they turned to looking out for themselves.
Instead of being creative for all, they used their power for their own luxury, riding
on the labors of others. As ordinary people lost the ability to help themselves, they
lost faith in the system. Feeling oppressed, they stopped supporting what was only
for others’ benefit. Then when troubles arose such as natural disasters, climate
change, invasion, or revolt, their society’s efforts were fractured. It could not cope
with the new problems, and after ups and downs, disintegrated.
“This is happening again. Our country has clearly enjoyed the first phase
Toynbee identified, A creative minority developed a structure that benefited most
people, but we appear now to be well through the second stage in which a
dominant minority aims just to gain for itself. Economic inequality in the U.S. has
not happened accidentally. It was intended to be this way, or else national policies
would change it. A powerful minority give more advantage to those already doing
well.
“The evidence is overwhelming. Voting is purposely made hard for millions
while gerrymandering and political monopolies exclude them. Educational
opportunities heavily favor rich over poor, and half the members of Congress have
become millionaires. With money bringing political influence, the wealthy educate
their children in well-funded schools, live in their own exclusive world, shop in
their own upscale stores, and insure their favored position by money showered on
Congress.
"People well led can instead create prosperity among them. They can start
businesses, raise employment, reduce wasteful spending, provide a safety net for
all, and resolve problems in immigration, education, and the justice system. States
have done this, so what stands in the way of a nation doing it?
"What stands against it is a quality often missing at the national level, just
thinking together. Antagonistic factions exhaust the energy meant to build the
15
society. If people think as "we," and if the "we" decides to draw on itself to make
sacrifices for a common goal, anything is possible. But currently here and across
the world, no "we" has a purpose strong enough to generate the sacrifices some
must make to achieve it. To solve problems, some inevitably bear the major cost
and effort but will not do so unless they are bonded with others whom they wish to
benefit.
“After the second phase in which leaders work to help themselves, Toynbee
described how in the third phase people lose confidence in their government.
Distrust sets in, common needs are not addressed, and people withdraw their
support. About 70% of the country have little faith in the government’s ability to
solve its problems, 75% think their children will be worse off than they themselves
are, and only 5% think the system works well and needs no change (3). About 40%
do not vote, most believing that it makes no difference, which is what those in
power want them to think.
“While some show they give up on society by shootings and bombings, they
are not the most dangerous. Worse are those who do not believe in the system but
have power over it. Many have voted to shut down the government, some even
eager to devastate the international financial system by demanding the U.S.
repudiate its debts. Because they are willing to generate chaos, the public
recognizes the threat they pose and briskly buys doomsday bunkers.
“Weaker loyalty to the system matters more now because of the spreading
power to destroy. A handful commandeering an airplane can kill thousands, toxin
from a single laboratory could kill millions, and unfiltered smokestacks can pollute
air for billions. A few people with a dirty nuclear device could make a big city
unlivable. Terrorist schools in the Middle East teach people how to create havoc in
their home country, and most countries will not face the vulnerability of their
infrastructure until disaster hits. Everyone presumed Japan’s nuclear reactors were
safe until the earthquake showed differently, and Yellowstone or San Andreas
could create disaster here.
"An open society like ours presumes the good will of most people, but our
infrastructure is easier for a few to attack than it was for many to build. In April
2013, a power substation near San Jose was fired upon, a fiber-optic cable cut, and
transformers disabled by people who had nothing to gain. They apparently had lost
faith in the system so completely that they wanted only to inflict damage--like the
9-11 attacks and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. We can
dismiss such attacks as by a few disgruntled individuals, but a former Special
Forces officer said after 9-11:
“’Give me a team for three weeks and we could shut down this country.’
"Think about our air traffic, electricity, and water systems; our bridges and
railways, our chemical and oil production. How many disgruntled would it take to
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paralyze the nation? As people lose faith in our system, they refuse to work hard to
contribute to it.
“In its last phase, a civilization no longer unites people to face its challenges.
In the U.S. there are economic inequality, poverty, water and air pollution, politics
driven by money, and conflict between classes, religions, and races. In the world
are global warming, species' extinction, rainforest destruction, ocean acidification,
millions fleeing turmoil, sectarian war, ignorance, poverty, oppression, and
unstable government. World arsenals contain 17,000 nuclear bombs and lesser
weapons are everywhere. Yet diminishing trust between the dominant minority and
the majority weaken society’s ability to cope.
“Our nation’s founders inaugurated ideas that helped America for a long
time, but they knew they could not prevent greed. They tried to curb its worst
effects by ‘checks and balances,’ but these present only a low hurdle to people's
use of government for their own ends. President Eisenhower warned against an
accumulation of power:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist (4).
“His prediction has come true though few today acknowledge how the
structure of power has hurt us. Military spending and money in politics have
brought great wealth to industry while burdening the nation with incomprehensible
debt, and the U.S. has become the most unequal of developed nations.
“Our values show up in who we as a society take care of and who we leave
to chance. We take care of one economic sector and leave the other to scramble.
By plan, the first consistently does well. Each of its steps, guaranteed for its class,
builds on another to enhance its wealth. But the stumbles in the second sector leave
it consistently further behind.
“When the U.S. acknowledged in the 1960s that many of its people were
poor, the Great Society programs put muscle into alleviating poverty and made
dramatic changes for the worst off. But the Vietnam War soaked up resources, and
less went to the War on Poverty until President Reagan ended mainstream concern
about it. He sold ‘trickle-down economics’ to the nation and cut taxes sharply for
the top incomes. He claimed that as we took care of these, benefits would make
their way to others, a principle comedian Bill Maher explained: ‘Trickle-down
economics is like having three dogs and giving one of them a weiner, expecting
him to share it with the other two.’
“We are constituted to absorb ideas circulating around us and are affected by
what our peers presume is true. By this, Americans have accepted that ‘Trickledown economics works,’ ‘The marketplace meets social needs,’ ‘The poor are
17
lazy,’ and ‘Anyone can bootstrap themselves.’ Assumptions persist despite
contrary evidence.
“Ever since Reagan, society has steadily become less equal so that by the
2012 presidential election, Governor Romney, a multi-millionaire, paid a smaller
proportion of his income in taxes than did his secretary. A man with several homes
and cars, enjoying all the perks of wealth, rides on the taxes paid by his secretary.
What is wrong with this picture?
“Reagan succeeded in convincing people that government was ‘the problem’
instead of our means of solving problems in common. He framed taxes as
confiscation from producers to give to non-producers, and dismissed the idea of
spreading the benefits of American productivity equitably. Playing on the fears,
racial biases, and surface thinking of the public, he and his advisors instituted
systems that have slowly damaged the security of the middle and lower classes.
Instead of benefits trickling down, they trickle up. An increasing proportion of the
nation’s productivity goes to the wealthy through every available means, in
keeping with how Josef Stalin took over Eastern Europe after World War II.
“’If you’re going to steal a salami,’ Stalin said, ‘do it slice by slice.’
“Those in power are like the king in a children’s movie who sends soldiers
on a quest.
“’Some of you may die,’ he tells them, ‘but that is a chance I am willing to
take.’ He gladly sacrifices others for his own gain.
“To find those most likely to correct the nation’s course, we listen to what
people say they want. Do they want to help everyone or not? We listen to their
promises and examine the agendas of their backers to know their intent. Imagine a
group brainstorming how to improve the system for everyone. A moderator opens
the floor and a secretary records suggestions.
“’We insure our gains by gerrymandering and political monopolies wherever
possible,’ calls out someone. ‘That’s the only way, as a minority, we can hold out
against the majority. Reduce voting locations, toughen registration, and shorten
hours so people have to stand outside for a long time to vote, overnight if possible.
Get rid of limits on anonymous cash for any campaign anytime. Under-fund job
re-training, unemployment compensation, public transportation, and public
defenders.’
“’Instead of raising the minimum wage, let’s cut it in half so we can employ
twice as many at the same cost. Think how that would solve unemployment! Make
them all part-time so we always have a pool we can fire quickly. Privatize
Medicare and Social Security, cut back on Medicaid and food stamps, replace
pensions with 401Ks so they have to ride the market like we do. Get us out of
taking care of people in their old age and eliminate unions. Make all education
private and let people finance their own children’s. Why should I pay for someone
18
else’s kids for heaven’s sake? Lower taxes for the rich and allow only millionaires
to run for national office. Our Founding Fathers were right to limit voting to
property owners.’
“We know what we will get if we allow such people to run society. They tell
us. We can look forward to an unequal society in which the ‘haves’ receive even
more. They defend their gains by manipulating elections and do not want
democracy. If they did, they would welcome increased voter turnout and easier
registration and voting. They instead want fewer voters who reliably support an
unfair system.
“A minority maneuvers the majority to accept inequality from a destructive
aim, not from an unintended defect in method. If we aim at prosperity for all, the
wealthy prosper and the system is strong. If we aim at prosperity only for the
wealthy, the majority suffer so much the civilization eventually dies.
“The key for a society, according to Toynbee, is how to account for
everyone and encourage them to invest in the system so it can weather its troubles.
Some change and others hold onto privileges. We can choose as leaders those who
desire the good of the whole and an inclusive society, or those who use society to
benefit themselves and their class.
“These days politicians argue over minor concessions around the edges of a
skewed system. Instead, for a system that benefits all, we need creative leaders
committed to the good of the whole.”
----------------------------People can master this narrative by discussing it in terms of their personal
experience, current events, and mainstream values (cf. Chapter 4 for discussion
methods).
1. The basic issue is fair use of the resources of society.
Discuss fairness.
2. Civilization originates in a creative minority.
Discuss how a creative minority influenced the U.S.
3. Civilization declines as the minority become dominant and look
out for themselves.
Discuss evidence of leaders changing from creative to dominant.
4. The majority lose confidence in the system.
Discuss signs of declining confidence in the system.
5. The system fails to meet its challenges.
Discuss economic, political, and environmental problems left
unaddressed.
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6. Our own country has gone through the first two stages and is now
in the third.
Discuss loss of faith in the system and signs of change.
7. Greed by a minority can be restrained only by an active majority.
Discuss evidence of greed, and why others must check it.
8. People show their qualities by the goals and means they propose.
Discuss how candidates reveal or conceal their intentions.
9. Our country needs a creative minority to devise solutions to the
problems facing us.
Discuss what a creative minority needs to do now.
10. We must master the electoral process to select such people.
Discuss how to get the best from the electoral process.
With open-minded people, we can explore a few topics that have wide
implications: blame, fairness, use of power, government role, social services, and
reliance on evidence. Elicit others' views and discuss them. Follow up brief
answers by asking why.
Blame
1. Do you think it is their own fault if people are poor?
2. Fifteen million people were unemployed and lost everything in the Great
Depression. Was it their fault?
3. In the financial crisis of 2008, many Americans lost everything and were
unemployed for years after. Did you have a hard time then?
4. Was it your fault?
5. Many did well financially then. Were they better people or workers, or
did the system protect them?
Fairness
1. In times of suffering, should everyone face equal burden?
2. On a sinking boat would first-class passengers have more right to lifeboats
than others?
3. Can a system be rigged so that some always benefit? Do some do worse
because the system is stacked against them?
4. If so, how could you tell? What information would alert you?
5. Should society give more help now to those it disadvantaged before? If it
disadvantaged a father who died, should it help his son now?
6. Would you help people in poverty by taxing the rich?
7. Should the nation raise the minimum wage?
8. Do you support a wealth tax?
9. Should society subsidize the wealthy's extra homes and planes?
10.
Should high income earners pay into Social Security like others to stabilize the
fund?
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11. Should people too poor to pay court fines be jailed?
Social Services
1. Do you support year-around free school lunches?
2. Free dental and health care for children at schools?
3. Well-funded early childhood programs?
4. Free education from kindergarten through college?
5. Fund poor K-12 school districts to match the rich?
6. A nationwide single-payer system of health care for all?
Use of power
1. Do you support electing the President by the popular vote?
2. A Constitutional amendment limiting money in politics?
3. Making voting as easy as possible through voting by mail, extended
hours, and automatic citizen registration?
4. Do you oppose gerrymandered Congressional districts?
Government role
1. Has government designed an economic system so some prosper and
others don’t?
2. Do you support progressive tax rates so the wealthy pay proportionately
more than do poor and middle classes?
3. Does government have a role in reducing poverty?
4. Have government programs helped to counteract poverty?
5. Do you support subsidies for corporations and oppose food stamps for the
poor?
6. Should the nation raise the minimum wage?
Another approach is to name a topic and let candidates talk to it. The
following address allocating the benefits of American productivity, help for those
struggling, taking care of the physical world, and enhancing democracy. Each
contains a general subject and a facet of it that draws our concern. Candidates'
answers will reveal whether they think past the surface and how their values match
your own:
the discharge of pollutants into air and water
the temperature of the earth
the survival of fish, birds, and animals
the quality of food
the education of children
the safety of the community
the freedom of religious expression
the privacy of personal lives
the health of inhabitants
the fairness of opportunities
21
the protection from criminal activity
the correction of delinquent children
the rehabilitation of adult offenders
the support for the mentally ill and disabled
the security for the aging
the decency of foreign policy
the reach of military power
the justice of courts
the survival of family farms
the productivity of soil
the health of oceans
the purity of water
the safety of products
the sustainability of energy sources
the recycling of non-renewable resources
the security of ports and travel
the investment in infrastructure
the efficiency of transport
the amelioration of hostility
Candidates may divert to irrelevant aspects or change the subject. Any
unwilling to explain their views can be presumed to pander to what they believe
people want to hear. Voting records usually reveal incumbents' values.
Understanding the problem. People achieve material success by using the
means at hand--competence, relationships, opportunities, and any advantage they
possess. Doing this brings more success, and further means open up. As people
achieve to the limit of their abilities, others applaud as long as they contribute to
the culture. This strategy contains no inherent limitation, and following it ends
logically in world domination. Yet because their success depends on others'
cooperation, they must balance their self-benefit against their effect on others.
Historically, people have typically used power to solve the first problem
first. With their own position secured, they then addressed other values as they
wished. In a wagon train going west in the 1800s, heads of households looked after
their own family and then with spare energy attended to the wagon train. Primary
loyalty goes to those closest to us.
But with a small shift of attention, one takes the wagon train for granted,
dismissing the needs of those further back. And when the laggards appear to
belong to someone else, we rank them as not deserving the care we give our own.
The change within the last century illustrates. After World War II, the
country focused on shared prosperity and in the next thirty years saw advancing
living standards, national wealth, education, healthcare, longevity, science, and
22
sharing the profits of productivity. The poorest grew in income faster than any
other group so that blue collar people for the first time in history looked forward to
secure retirement and college for their children.
A shift occurred as government and management united against labor unions
that had been a driving force. Wages were suppressed and benefits slashed even as
productivity rose, so that more money flowed to the top and less to the bottom of
the economic spectrum. The value of the minimum wage fell as inflation ate away
purchasing power, and deregulation, import of goods, and globalization undercut
the value of American labor. Economic growth slowed in the mid-seventies with
the gains going to the richest.
Tax cuts for the wealthy exacerbated the imbalance, so that between 2009
and 2012, 95% of the income gains went to the wealthiest 1% (5). Congresses
made it possible for companies to evade retirement obligations to their employees
while fattening CEOs’ pay. Public investment declined in transportation, health
care, higher education, and retirement as war spending remained high.
For constructive change, leaders must use their power for those without it. If
they will not do so on their own, the majority must insist with a single voice.
Chapter 4. Get People Articulate
Changing society means changing the thinking of people who disagree with
us. Unless we bridge differences, our efforts remain stuck in a demographic niche.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, for instance, publicized the difference
between the fortunes of the top 1% compared to the bottom 99%--potentially a
revolution-inspiring perspective--but has built minimally on its initial impact. The
Tea Party proposed smaller government, which could have broad appeal, though its
support appears largely with older white males. Missing in both instances has been
a way to generate agreement with those who think differently. A movement must
develop a comprehensive rationale and deliver it to everyone.
Technology does not remedy this need. Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet
have connected people but not ignited a movement. A slogan does not supply for a
refined vision, reminding us that if we have nothing else to say, it does not matter
how many people we can say it to.
People cause change through explaining why and how but must develop the
ability to do this by actually engaging with others about ideas. When massdistribution means don’t work, we return to nature, we tell someone. For African
Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, working people in the labor movement,
and women obtaining the right to vote, the basic force was direct contact.
To learn to explain ideas, people practice best in small group discussions
where they 1) value their prior learning and experience, 2) expand their
23
knowledge, 3) improve their ability to with words, 4) understand and respect each
other, 5) unite around a set of ideas, and 6) welcome newcomers. A university
graduate seminar serves as a model. Participants read and reflect on selected
material beforehand, and then exchange and integrate their ideas.
Group size and frequency. Groups should be small enough for everyone to
talk. Five to seven are ideal with four to nine workable (the latter the size of the
U.S. Supreme Court). More limit talking time for each and fewer lack crossfertilization of ideas. If a larger group meets regularly for an hour or more, it can
divide into discussion-size units for part of its time and maintain them for a month
or so. A few weeks of continuity extend personal relationships and encourage a
common train of thought, but permanent subgroups can fragment a larger body.
A group can schedule sessions from twice a week to monthly that last thirty
to ninety minutes. People busy with daytime jobs could meet after work, in early
morning, or mid-day. Its pace declares a group's sense of urgency with a large
request representing a large value. Invited to meet twice a week, participants may
think, "We have something going!” but tell them, “See you next month,” and they
relax.
Selecting material. During the discussion, participants share their
knowledge, values, and experience; trade facts, reasoning, and principles; debate
what has gone wrong with society and how to correct it. They assimilate three
kinds of information--outside, inside, and principles.
Outside information concerns solutions to social, political, environmental,
and economic problems and assesses candidates. It may come from current events,
online sources, news media, books, articles, and papers by leading authors (6). We
apply it to society.
Inside information helps sustain the movement through group development,
leadership, communications, problem-solving, planning, supervising, and mutual
support.
Principles overlap both. Unconditional love for others and responsibility for
the world, for example, should infuse a movement’s inner working as well as color
the policies it promotes. Such common values are especially important as people
collaborate at a distance. A western rancher and an eastern social worker become a
team as they share a field of thought despite different experience. Reforming a
state’s criminal justice system could involve dispersed hearings, testimony,
research, proposals, amendments, and turf disputes. During the issue's evolution,
the group must recognize long term values, see through appearances to the
substance, and not be confused by partisan tangents. Grounded in fundamental
values, people can make progress despite tradeoffs.
Common experience is an important resource. Learning for our employment
connects to the country’s economy, our children’s schooling to national education
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issues, our food to inter-continental production and distribution, our travel to
security and global concerns. People who knock on our doors test our personal
safety, our car locks relate to local crime, municipal services reflect environmental
policies, taxes connect us to public priorities, and our values to how society treats
people. Comments arising from daily activity tie group action to the real world.
Goals for preparation and discussion. From the material selected we want
factual information, a personal connection to it, and its application to society:
1. To obtain accurate knowledge, participants might summarize a section of
the material, identify significant facts and evidence, analyze the content, and
understand its meaning. Students study material this way for a test.
2. Knowing it, however, is not enough. People next need to claim it
personally and adopt a stance to it. They might share how it has touched their lives:
“It reminds me when….” .
3. Connecting personally with the information leads to understanding how it
plays out in society and the appropriate action in response. Participants may
already be committed to an assignment from the group, so study goes at its own
pace to enlarge their perspective: “If this is true, what is the movement's action?"
Structuring the discussion. Participants agree on times to begin and end,
and adhere to them. Reliability is indispensable for a movement.
If the group chooses a book to study but participants cannot afford their
own, they might purchase one together and take turns reading a section aloud to
discuss. The leader might also distribute a summary of the day’s points, or briefly
present a theme or questions for discussion.
The leader begins by inviting a brief comment from each such as "News and
Goods." Members often arrive preoccupied with a personal event, what is new or
good in their lives, how they applied an idea from a prior session, or a timely
experience. Their sharing it in a few words allows others to appreciate their mood
and offer acceptance. An alternative is asking each to tell their high and low of the
day. With limited time, people may do this informally beforehand.
After News and Goods, the leader distributes a sheet of communication
skills and asks people to pick specific ones to practice. Making a conscious use of
skills normal in the group aids everyone's development. Participation influences
their growth, but they also must feel that their contribution influences the group,
which they base on how others connect to what they say (7). Elementary
guidelines affecting the quality of the discussion are:
1. Look at the speaker.
2. Use brief messages rather than long speeches.
3. Ask questions.
4. Include everyone.
5. Leave a brief silence after people speak.
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6. Connect with others’ ideas like a tapestry.
These quickly transform a discussion. Looking at people lets them know
they have the group’s attention. Brief messages help everyone stay involved and
minimize over-talking. Questions draw people out and enlarge the subject. Inviting
others' views enhances belonging. Brief silences let everyone weigh the prior
comment and choose whether to respond next. Connecting with ideas builds a
unified train of thought.
A few talking too much can torpedo a group while equalizing talking time
affirms the value of everyone’s participation, encourages the quiet to speak, and
gradually restrains the dominant.
The leader might encourage people to practice the skills outside the group,
discuss how the skills might help the group, and allow a minute at the end for them
to check their use of the skills. Expecting to measure themselves against a skill
later, they are more likely to use it earlier.
Leading a discussion. The aim is developing and articulating good
judgment about society.
With the selected material in participants’ hands, the leader can suggest,
“Would everyone read this next page quietly. We’ll ask someone to summarize it”
or can assign a different page for each participant to review. After a few minutes of
quiet study, the leader extends an invitation: "Jerry, would you like to begin with
that passage?"
Jerry expresses the gist in his own words, adds his observations, and others
share their comments. The leader poses questions occasionally and participants
speak in turn as they wish, help each other think through the material, and connect
to a global perspective. Participants take turns summarizing a page. The leader
intervenes briefly to stimulate and challenge thought, connect ideas, and elicit
reservations and questions, and instructs only rarely when a misunderstanding or
lack of information hinders the discussion.
Leaders’ credibility arises from the quality of their questions, which depends
on whether they think about the material. To prepare, they put their attention on the
topic and turn it over in their mind sentence by sentence. They think about those in
their group, how the theme may affect their lives, and thoughts they may have
formed. Relevant questions emerge into view that invite comment.
In our personal lives we notice what others need and think how we can
supply it. A leader’s own interest may start things off: “What struck me from this
passage was...” or “My spouse and I talked about this last night” or “This line
poses a question” or “That point assumes that...” or “What happened to me was...”
or “The author connects two things here.…" The leader avoids questions implying
he/she has a right answer and others should guess it. Questions are better openended, but leaders just need to know participants have a comment to express:
26
“Tell us more about it.”
“So what happened?”
“Would you like to say more about that?”
“You’ve had an experience with that?”
“How would those ideas apply to your work place?"
“Your thought?"
"How would your family members relate to this?”
Everyone enters the discussion by invitation or their own initiative. Leaders
talk no more than their share, a fifth of the time in a group of five. Once under
way, members respond directly to each other rather than passing issues through the
leader. When everyone knows more, summaries of the material may be needed
less, and the group can proceed to its meaning and implications for action.
A stimulating way to conclude a session is to invite a volunteer to
summarize everything said and include each one's contribution. The leader closes
by suggesting home study for the next meeting--reading the assigned material for
the three objectives above.
Allay fear. Leaders try especially to help participants overcome fear, though
they themselves may worry "I won't be able to keep things going," or "I don't know
all the answers," or "Silence means I'm screwing up," or that they must fill group
hesitance by talking themselves. Participants may devalue their own comments,
and assume they "won't know what to say."
Upon offering a question that fits participants, the leader presumes their
ability to answer. Asking, "What strikes you personally about this?" we turn the
play over to them, look calmly from one to another, and wait expectantly. Our
silence and eye contact let them know we are confident they can respond. Silence
tends to raise interest and spur even slow starters to enter. They fish around more
actively for words, and after a slow beginning, may express ideas fluidly in a few
weeks.
With the group welcoming their attempts, people realize that it is okay for
them to flounder a bit. At first a leader invites comments and thanks people, but as
participants relax, they respond directly to each other. They show they are ready to
talk by looking back at the leader, leaning forward, clearing their throat, nodding,
glancing at the present speaker, and then back to the leader. The leader may nod to
them, say their name, or “You have a comment”?
If people continue to find it hard to express their ideas, the leader may be
expecting answers too complicated. Their personal thoughts about the material are
enough. If we pose questions beyond their understanding, use unfamiliar terms, or
criticize or challenge their offerings, we may hint that the group is not for them.
The leader models the principles of the group. Many can do so without
special training. Even if participants draw straws to select one, they defer to
27
him/her for guidance. The leader stays a few pages ahead and thinks of questions
to ask.
Make presentations. For practice explaining movement ideas, participants
can present talks of increasing length to groups of increasing size.
1. A planning team member (cf. Chapter 4) can maintain a checklist for each
member’s talks of different lengths, such as ten “elevator talks” of 1-2 minutes
each, eight “dinner table talks” of 3-5 minutes each, and five “presentation talks”
of 12-15 minutes each.
2. Topics are the issues of the movement significant locally. Themes might
be the dominant minority skewing elections, manipulation of public opinion,
economic inequality, climate change, species extinction, a fair justice system,
immigration, education, a tax on wealth, sorting among candidates, how a
movement succeeds, the moral case for church involvement, the world our children
will inherit, and money in politics.
3. Their own discussion group might be audience enough for people’s short
talks, but some should be to larger numbers for the stimulation both to speakers
and listeners. A portion of a large group meeting might be used, or the talk
secretary could announce, “Tuesday night we have eight people who want to give
practice talks--three elevator talks, three dinner table talks, and two presentations.
We would appreciate an enthusiastic audience of people to come and listen.”
4. As members develop confidence, the movement can offer a speakers’
bureau. Talks in schools, colleges, rest homes, civic clubs, and on the media can
get movement ideas into mainstream conversation.
Chapter 5. Plan for Group Action
Change that does occur often seems out of reach of the average person.
Others appear to have advantages oneself does not possess--media notice,
organizations promoting ideas, donors--and an entity springs seemingly from
nowhere. We ourselves, still back on the ground, grope for the bottom rung of the
ladder. We may feel indignation and determination, have values and aspirations,
but cannot yet multiply effort.
Much of the reason is people's passivity. Most expect to cope with society as
they find it so that perhaps 85% of the resistance to change arises from people's
tolerance of conditions with 15% due to government's coercive power. People may
endure unpleasant circumstances for generations but when collectively aroused
will bend the power, or else generate civil war. Peaceful change requires thought.
At least a few must understand how the actions of many can add up to change.
A group begins with someone's personal request for another's action, and the
other responds. The request can come from literally anyone. A high school student
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can start a movement. An arthritic grandmother who never leaves home can say,
“We need a meeting on this street!” She goes on the phone, jars a few friends who
bring others, and thirty people show up. The beginning is an invitation and a
reason. Anyone willing to step in front of such activity can awaken it. More must
understand why change is needed and how to achieve it, so conveying knowledge
is key.
It is not instantly obvious, however, where planning for group activity
becomes critical. On the one hand, a small group can make a plan and all execute it
together, and at the macro scale, thousands of groups can coordinate a national
campaign. The bottleneck lies between the two pictures where action causes the
growth of the group. A dozen friends can indefinitely continue acting togther and
never change their numbers. We need to know how to pursue a larger purpose
while expanding. People customarily expect an issue's importance to determine its
support, but the internal working of the movement determines much of it.
We propose here that the optimal arena for change is in groups that have two
qualities; small enough for everyone to know and support each other person to
person, and large enough to engage in protracted, collaborative activity; conditions
that suggest aiming for a size between thirty and ninety. As its numbers grow, a
group can consider its optimal organization.
At first, everyone does everything together, but as numbers increase, defined
roles help people select an individual activity to concentrate on. A planning team
coordinates.
Choosing planners. Choosing planners is best done by those who carry out
the plan. If you welcome suggestions from one but mistrust another, you motivate
yourself by choosing the first as your leader. People are more likely to cooperate
with those they respect and helped select, and carry out plans they helped generate.
A common problem with leader selection is that drawing from people who
want the job invites ego-satisfaction (8). Those who were there first may control
turf. People attracted to power may put on their best face and say what they think
others want to hear, distinguishing how they present themselves from how they act
later. Losing an election may cause some to leave the group.
To find leaders not driven by ego, we do not wait for them to put themselves
forward because they may never do so. Small groups that know each other well
may regard leadership as a service and take turns at it, but both elections and turntaking can fail to develop leadership and responsibility in more people. We
accomplish the latter by nominating (like the Pope is chosen) instead of electing,
and appointing a team instead of an individual to guide the group. This minimizes
the impact of ego needs, spreads leadership, encourages collaboration, and
identifies leaders with the most representative thinking.
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Selecting the planning team. When the group has met two or three times
and people are acquainted, select a PT.
Previously someone explains its role and manner of selection: It plans the
activity that keeps the group going, identifies ongoing objectives, works out details
of campaigns and actions, selects learning material to aid group development,
suggests roles and tasks for each member, and coordinates with other teams about
regional issues. As the group takes on more numbers and issues, it can assign
project groups that nominate their own planning team.
At the selection meeting, everyone writes down the names of the five (or
seven for a larger group) they would like as their planning team. An independent
visitor might be asked to collect the nominations, tabulate the results, and identify
those named most without revealing the count for each. With a tie for last place,
expand the PT by one but return to the prior number when anyone leaves. When
the planning team is announced, in the same way it nominates a chairperson who
becomes its spokesperson, leads meetings of the PT and the larger group, and is the
main quality control monitoring the group’s functioning.
A group may reconstitute the PT every three to six months or annually. It
may change more often to include new members on the team, when activity places
high demands on the PT, or to invite a different mix of experience. In renominating the PT, some typically are retained while new ones enter, providing
continuity and change.
A planning team selected this way will be well assimilated into the
membership and alert to its needs and interests. Conversations between PT
members and others turn up goals that fit the group so that the PT's suggestions
often take little modification.
The PT may propose plans for the group to affirm, modify, or defer, or may
present options: “Based on our conversations with members, the PT has identified
two general directions that seem to interest most people. We could either jump
into X which has a short time frame, or take on Y that would be longer. What is the
group’s preference?” Some directions may engage many members with other tasks
individually assigned.
If the larger group needs long discussion of a proposal, the PT might
examine why. It may not have thought through its suggestion or connected
adequately with members’ thinking beforehand, but resolving complex problems
by large group discussion encourages some to over-talk while boring others, and
discourages people from attending. Members would rather spend large group time
on small group discussion or inspirational, educational, or action-oriented activity.
For detailed consideration, the PT can appoint a committee to meet separately and
develop a recommendation the PT can take up with the larger group.
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Managing size. Sometimes large numbers can be organized from the start.
Let us say you and your friends sponsor a nationally known speaker and a
thousand people show up. As event promoter you take the microphone afterward:
“Would everyone please assemble in groups of five to seven, introduce
yourselves, and name one of you as your group’s Contact? Give him or her your
name and phone number. Then take ten minutes to find out what you have in
common.” In ten minutes, a thousand people are in 165 groups averaging 6 people
each with their contact data collected.
You then suggest everyone remain where they are so their Contact can find
them again, and ask just the Contacts to raise their hand, look around for each
other, and assemble in groups of 5 to 7. The Contacts (then in groups with others
like them averaging six each) introduce themselves to each other, choose one of
their number as, let us say, their representative or Rep, make a copy of the contact
information they obtained from their own contact group, and give it to their Rep.
With ten more minutes at this, in twenty minutes a thousand people in 165 contact
groups divide into 28 organization groups, each numbering between 30 and 40 and
temporarily led by a Rep who has their names and contact information.
Organization groups can separate on site to meet with their Rep, determine a
place and time for a followup meeting, and discuss activities that interest them. If
instead everyone wants immediate action, another thirty minutes could arrange it:
1. Remaining where they are, those in contact groups listen to each other’s
ideas. Those whose Contact became a Rep select a different Contact.
2. While the contact groups are talking, the 28 Reps meet with the presenter
and event promoters for fifteen minutes to agree on a group action easily planned
that can involve large numbers such as a march, distributing information, or a time
and place for a demonstration.
3. Plan in hand, the Reps return to the 30-40 people in their organization
group and present the proposed action.
4. Organization groups talk out their support for the plan, resolve details,
and assign roles.
Meeting face to face, providing contact information, arranging themselves in
groups, and assenting to a plan let people know an action has developed, they have
a place in it, and they can expect guidance. In a few minutes a random audience
becomes an organization, and a march or activity helps to consolidate it.
We aim always for the most lasting outcome from what we do. In their own
organization group, people can arrange a next meeting time, hear people's interests,
obtain their commitment to attend, and think how to engage everyone. At each
point, someone asks others to do something they are able to do.
The Reps and Contacts have in hand the names and phone numbers of their
members, and in the time between the presenter’s talk and organization group
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meetings on later days, they converse individually with everyone in their group.
Early personal connections determine for many whether they stay. They need to be
comfortable among others like-minded, know several in their organization group,
have a personal link with their Rep, feel their involvement is appreciated, and
believe their values match the group’s direction.
Unanimity. For important decisions, the group should seek unanimity rather
than majority rule. People often join voluntary organizations specifically to
advocate particular views, and may feel it almost their duty to promote them
aggressively. While such individual convictions can carry an organization far, they
may also narrow its values.
Instead of relying on assertive individuals, the PT needs to regard the
group’s entire thinking as a resource. If it has talked out values and goals in small
group discussion, appreciated each one’s contribution, maintained strong personto-person connections, and worked together in large group meetings, activities, and
campaigns, people will find themselves already aligned on 90% of their plans. As
they examine the remainder together, they regard each objection as part of the
group’s intelligence to be weighed carefully, and they resolve conflicts quickly.
Hearing someone bring up a novel angle, the chairperson offers access: “Sounds
interesting. Could you write down your idea and go over it with Mike (planning
team member) so the team can consider it? Thanks.”
It matters most that each thing done is effective rather than its speed.
Delaying an activity briefly in order to weigh a suggestion can result in big gains
over time at slight cost, although when a deadline looms and a response is critical,
the group can agree on a majority vote. If an imminent event warrants extensive
discussion, the larger group might divide into discussion groups with each PT
member leading one. Each group talks out the issue on its own and PT members
meet later to integrate what they learn.
Planning team meetings. The planning team meets apart from the larger
group in order to think carefully about its needs and direction. Working
deliberately to improve communications helps it maintain the highest quality
thinking (9).
Duplicate a copy of the list below for each PT member. Spend a couple
minutes at the start reviewing it and discussing the impact of one or more skills.
The chairperson might also pause a discussion midway, ask participants to review
the skills, and at the end compliment each others’ use of them.
1. Check your inner activity. Notice others’ desire to speak, feel
respect and consideration, wait your turn, focus on the one speaking,
and do not interrupt.
2. Use short messages instead of long. Weave together many people’s short
messages like a tapestry.
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3. Allow a brief silence after each comment to let everyone think about it
and decide if they want to speak next.
4. Summarize the previous comment before adding your own. Referring to
others’ names, thoughts, and words encourages continuity.
5. Check your guesses about others’ thoughts and feelings. If you
do not understand what a speaker says, ask someone else to clarify and let
the speaker verify or correct it.
6. Appreciation. Thank people, give compliments, and tell what helped you.
Mirror back others’ feelings, clarify them, and focus on the positive.
Feelings have priority over thoughts.
7. Complete a train of thought. Get group consent to switch topics.
Review the progress of the discussion from time to time. Point out
similarities and differences and do not water down the latter.
8. Include everyone. Get everyone’s viewpoint and feelings, and accept
them all. Respect everyone’s right to their opinion. Draw in the hesitant.
9. Welcome correction. The quality of a discussion depends on
everyone being able to say what they really think. Welcome others’
challenges, feedback, and corrections gracefully and appreciatively.
10. Share leadership. People develop skill and confidence as they
contribute to and initiate group thought.
Participation in PT meetings. If members wish to listen in on a PT
discussion, the PT can set chairs around the outside of it in a fishbowl design.
When members have personal knowledge about an issue the team is weighing, it
can invite them to attend and comment. Meetings should be open except for
discussion of members' personal qualities related to particular assignments, or
issues involve interpersonal conflicts.
Members’ participation can affect planning team discussions, however. The
PT’s responsibility for the entire group should remain intact. When its role is clear
and the group values its suggestions, members invest more time and attention. If
instead people visit as they please and comment at random, they can weaken the
PT's sense of responsibility for the group. Members with time available might be
offered an assignment or project they can lead independently.
Supervision. A key PT activity is to focus on each group member
individually as would a coach or mentor, understand their interests and readiness,
and suggest appropriate action for them.
As numbers grow, PT members can share supervising, each taking several
group members to work with. If the group retains the contact group arrangement, it
might organize activity assignments accordingly. Supervisors become familiar with
the interests and capabilities of those assigned to them, and either offer the PT’s
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suggestion or accept the member’s preference. The assignment is put in writing-what, how, and when to return with a report or task completion.
During the assignment, the supervisor may check in with the member to
inquire “How is it going?”, whether difficulties invite extra help. At the time
agreed on, the supervisor or PT as a whole receives the report, expresses thanks
and appreciation, and listens for anything the member learned that might aid future
activities. Doing this for each assignment reinforces reliability and the group’s
appreciation of members’ efforts.
At one level we want to fit the task to the individual. A computer
programmer may build a website, organizers design events, the crafts-oriented
make signs, the sociable open a telephone bank, abstract thinkers formulate
position papers, researchers gather campaign material, and creative people stage a
flash mob.
But activities in common help bring movement ideas to the public. Everyone
can gather for a demonstration, or pair up to go door to door. Representing
movement ideas face to face helps people dismiss equivocation and commit to
their values, though certain social roles warrant exceptions. A sympathetic district
judge or police captain might offer ideas behind the scenes rather than march in a
demonstration.
Tracking results helps motivate people. Elections are feedback on their
effort, but counting progress by any measure stimulates them: “How many new
people did all of us contact this week?” or “Let’s keep track of those we’ve talked
to who are passing on ideas.” Voters registered and information distributed afford
tangible counts.
Guiding group activity. Planning translates ideas into practical action. As a
rule of thumb, spend 75% of the time making sure the activity is the best possible,
and 25% actually doing it. Five steps are helpful, with 1, 2, 4, and 5 comprising the
total planning effort:
1. Plan. Think through how everything goes together. Arrange objectives,
time, effort, coordination, and resources into an overall picture.
2. Organize. On the basis of the plan, assign who does what, and prepare
them for their responsibility. People agree to a personal action.
3. Act. Everyone carries out the actions agreed on.
4. Monitor. Gather details to determine how the action corresponded to the
plan.
5. Correct. Use the data to correct the next phase, and repeat the five steps.
The planning team uses hindsight to project foresight, looking back to learn
what the group should have done. If even knowing the results of our actions, we
cannot figure out what to do differently, we repeat mistakes. Common sense tells
us at least, “Let’s make sure we don’t do that again.”
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To organize society, we organize group effort. With muddled effort, we
offer muddled ideas to society and allow those in power to do as they please. A
corrective voice needs to be clear enough to fend off distractions. With its biggest
hindrance a limited viewpoint, the group tests itself continually, asking, "What can
help us think better about this?" A rule for samurais was, "First defeat your enemy
in your own mind." If we can't do that, what hope does our effort have?
Challenge. People grow fastest as they face what they perceive to be a
challenge and respond effectively. Early acts of courage mean the most because
they give structure to character and help people master fear. Positive qualities
flower that cannot while fear rules. Anxiousness at public speaking may seem a
minor personal limitation yet expressing ideas can be indispensable.
Leaders choose how to challenge others. It is respectful to make clear the
stakes involved and suggest a task that arouses excitement, advances a goal, and
stretches competence. We find the frontier where, in facing opposition, they
express their convictions. Handing out flyers where they will encounter opposition
helps them understand the forces arrayed against them and can strengthen their
resolve, while a sympathetic location will yield more new members.
If their assignment does not challenge them, they may conclude that it must
not be worth much. While avoiding difficulty, a strong individual cannot match his
identity with our purpose, and the group attracts the less serious. Determined
people welcome expending energy for a significant goal.
Leadership. Individuals have made a difference throughout history. You
may be the one who proposes, “This is what we should do.” Two questions clarify
your area of leadership:
1. Can you ask someone to do something and know they will do it?
Answering no means you confine actions to yourself and have no group
momentum to call on. Despite what you achieve by personal effort, you lack allies
to spread your results. You may still be learning before going out to others, or have
inadequately conveyed ways and means to them.
A yes answer means you have a toehold for changing society. You work
toward a common purpose, and can invite others to help you.
2. Will their activity result in an expanding effort? Answering no means
your efforts have plateaued or are confined to a niche that will not expand. You
evidently do not know how to enable them to grow in numbers, and could use a
change in methods. If you answer yes, you need only continue until you turn the
nation around.
Leaders help a group initiate action to meet needs. They typically care more
and love more; are more unselfish, more willing to expend personal energy for
others. They deepen their persevering strength perhaps over many years and hence
more easily invite others to join in.
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To help a group think better, leaders exert a certain kind of attention; are
more vigilant, more focused on the demands of the situation and how to help others
succeed, and do not leave to chance things that matter. They
gain credibility as others believe they understand and share their experience yet are
detached enough from the group’s current state to envision what it can become,
and communicate this to the group. They think in terms of enlarging present
potential.
Kinds of leaders. Leaders accomplish results in different ways such as by
tasks or by mutual support. Support leaders help people feel comfortable together.
They converse, make friends, use humor, take interest in others, and usually avoid
controversy. They notice what others do, are sensitive to attitudes and viewpoints,
show appreciation, and “blot up spilled feelings before anyone can slip on them."
While they may not think of themselves as leaders, they meet needs for group
harmony.
Task leaders get things done. They tend to step back a little from people's
subjective worlds in order to suggest action, propose plans, work hard, and enlist
cooperation. Because they also draw more objections, they need to be willing to
face opposition and resolve conflicts.
Many leaders have both qualities. They realize, "This affects people's
feelings” and talk it out; then later say, "Let's get down to work."
In accomplishing tasks, leaders tend to be either directive or interactive.
Directive leaders have a consistent focus, know where they want to go, and readily
ask others for specific actions. This steadies people so they can focus more
productively, and is especially welcome when the situation is already organized
like sending a team into action, or chaotic and unformed such as at its beginning.
In a crisis, groups usually prefer someone who takes charge and has clear ideas. An
interactive style works better when activity is partly organized and partly
undefined such as in much social action. This leader helps the group clarify its
purposes by listening to everyone's ideas and seeking agreement.
The discipline of group action. Each of us has a sense of what our ideal
life could be, and by our daily effort try to align our current real with our future
ideal. Yet we may also indulge in an imaginary life without noticing that that is all
it is, that we really exert no effort to refashion our direction. When personal health
problems catch up with us, we may notice that we ignored our resolutions about
food, exercise, and rest. And though social problems enrage us, we may admit we
have taken no action.
A universal principle is to do the good things we know about. This discipline
need not be rigid. Rather, when circumstances interrupt our efforts, we just do not
forget about them. Returning to them may be decisive for a movement in the long
run because personal standards become group qualities. Reliability is a prime
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marker of commitment. We do not let pressures dissipate our will to the good, but
get clear on what we will do, nurture it in our mind, and sustain our determination
until we carry it through in action. We trust ourselves to hold our direction.
And besides persevering in what we do, we accept responsibility for what
we ignore. In daily life we choose between the two or three options before us, but
doing so we make a thousand choices unavailable that we discarded earlier. Prior
exclusions narrowed our trail into our present results.
It is the same with society at an unsatisfactory pass. Its condition now is
from the pruning effect of earlier decisions leading it along one corridor after
another that rendered all others inaccessible. But today we try to shift from selfpreoccupied problems to common ones; beyond my home to all homes, beyond my
child to all children, beyond my business to all businesses, beyond my people to all
people.
Facing evil. In some situations evil is afoot. A proportion of any population
is ready at any moment to take advantage of others legally or illegally. To
minimize their influence on us, we first care for ourselves with thoughts and
feelings that leave us balanced and constructive. We refuse to permit
circumstances to poison our inner world, but maintain emotional balance, love,
strength, hope, and optimism. We sustain our character with our best values.
While this may ring as a platitude, it is not a small point. Few people face a
difficulty they solve by intentionally rising to their highest values. The reverse
instead is so common that we could ascribe all the problems of society to leaders
deliberately tending to selfish values and citizens following their example.
If we are to counteract evil, we first have to direct our own behavior: "Is this
really the world I want for my children?" Maintaining watchful self-care, our
second decision takes us outside ourselves. We try to cope with external conditions
but without reversing our first decision. Sustaining our positive attitude, we attend
to the problem before us. Encountering an unreasonable person, unjust actions, or
intractable conditions we may note our anger rising. We can become indignant,
mutter to ourselves about others’ idiocy, and chew on these thoughts, or we can
nod and deal with the facts while remaining in balance.
It is enough for us to contain the evil person while sustaining positive
feelings. We cordon off the negative and refuse to allow the other’s behavior to
infect us, do not immerse in the destructive but merely limit its influence; do not
allow our dissatisfaction with others to excuse lowering our ethics or morality, do
not call others offensive names, nor lie, attack unfairly, refuse to listen, or distort
others' ideas. While neutralizing harm, we do not lose possession of the person we
wish to be, do not write people off even while we oppose evil from them.
Hitler’s aggression is often cited against any moderate approach to a
menace, and most people agree that his war machine demanded a military
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response. But even the World Wars present a lesson. After the first one, France's
desire for vengeance guided the settlement at Versailles that generated Germany's
war debt, loss of territory, rampant inflation, and the unrest that welcomed Hitler.
Three decades later those memories were fresh and we got it right the second
time under the threat of Communism should Europe remain in rubble. With our
reconstructive aid massive for that time, Germany's recovery was perhaps the most
amazing in Europe and for decades it has been an ally. Expensive lesson: When the
fighting is over, help your enemies achieve their goals.
As we face what we consider evil, our commitment to compassion rescues
our group spirit from degradation. We are readily upset at our opponents' faults,
and may believe we cannot ignore hypocrisy, injustice, and manipulation, but such
traits in others can infect us unless we are careful. We set a boundary against
wrongdoing, and limit evil by acting on truth with integrity. If we respond with
others' qualities, we may fail our purpose and damage our values. Using their
wrongs to excuse our own, we descend morally together.
Self-examination on this issue is important for Americans due to our historic
self-approval. Though we applaud our country’s positive qualities, it continues to
crush some of its enemies—the men, women, and children it incarcerates who are
disproportionately ethnic minorities. Because we don’t like criminals and tend to
label as criminals people we don't like, our society makes life hard for them. On
completing their sentence, many are cut loose in society with the equivalent of
Germany after World War I: no resources, impossible obligations, rejection by
society, no means of legal income, and few means of self-respect. We return them
to conditions where they are likely to reoffend yet know how to restore them to
society should we desire to do so. Effective programs are not hard to find. From
sheer self-interest we might re-examine our system.
When we go by the lower road, what we send out returns. Our threat
stimulates their aggression, our boundary declares opposition. Then we assume the
resistance we receive validates our labels when actually we generated just one of
the situation’s potentials. We prophesy and others fulfill, like assigning them a role
in a Greek tragedy: “You expect me to be enemy and so I am.” Rejecting, we elicit
rejection.
When the other believes we are about to attack verbally, physically, or
militarily, he does so first so that our aggressive intent makes us more likely to be
attacked ourselves. If on the other hand our opponent believes we will begin
benevolently and match his destructiveness only if he is destructive, he has reason
to begin mildly and less to gain by attacking first. The Cold War’s mutual
deterrence was built on this expectation and kept the world free of nuclear war for
a half-century.
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Most of us have both good and bad in us, and look to circumstances to
determine which to express. Toward others, we try to elicit the good and set limits
on the bad, begin optimistically but cautiously, hopeful but watchful, “trust but
verify;" enlist cooperation but set practical limits. The higher rule is to treat others
as we wish to be treated (the Golden Rule), but we are prepared also to neutralize
any injury directed at us, to act toward them as they act toward us, which is the
middle rule. This bids people to be honest from the start and begin with the higher
rule, since they know that the lower one of injuring us first will not succeed.
Chapter 6. Provide group support
It is up to us to build on what people bring. Teams commonly become great
when great leaders elicit their capabilities. Society educates children on the belief
that we can stimulate their development, and not only mentally. We can teach them
to flee an approaching responsibility or face it, bear a burden courageously or slip
away.
Political activity on the other hand often uses up people's money and effort,
fails to develop their personal ability and numbers, and leaves them the same as
they were at the start. But for any expertise to arise, those who know have to teach
those who don’t. We aim to make activists competent with the tools of social
change with group support one means. Development does not occur randomly but
arises from what a group asks of its people. They develop capabilities as
circumstances elicit them and hour by hour orient themselves to the activity of the
moment, selecting the personal action that fits the occasion.
This tendency to adapt affords an insight into organizing. Since people rise
to do what the moment calls for, those who set it up design what it calls for. Invited
to heroic acts, ordinary people may step up, but if the call they hear is “wait and
see,” they do that instead. Leaders guide groups by the actions they declare
important, governed in turn by the concept uniting the group. Do leaders say,
“We’re helpless to do anything” or do they inspire people to further exertion: “We
can’t quit now!”? Coaches, teachers, and supervisors affect our motivation by the
meaning of the effort they ask for.
This might appear to confer too much power on leaders, yet people in group
activity are conditioned to think as “we” and align their ideas with each other.
Personal values may enable them to resist influences but a leader conditions them
to make this hard or easy, to give them courage or drain it. We want to make it
easy for people to rise to their best. Three grow to a dozen by the conditions they
offer, and fifty to five hundred by acting so others wish to join them.
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Conditions for change. First we invite people to meet briefly and then
explain our idea: “We want to start a movement with people who believe change is
critical.” We outline what a movement might do and how they could help.
This simple beginning solves a mystery--how people change. They do so
most easily when three conditions align: They 1) join with others who 2) share a
common value, and 3) act on it together. They associate with people whose
thinking they agree with, take up activity offered to them, and change as a result:
people + values + action = change.
This dynamic explains why educators are often frustrated about students'
apparent resistance to school offerings. The strongest influences on students are the
values and activities of the group they join. They often perceive instead that values
pushed on them by adults--whom they have not joined--are intended to control
them, so why should they take them seriously? Adults' power may compel them to
obey but without their heart in it.
Schools need settings where students can watch the desired values and
behaviors already at work. Entering this group, they quickly assimilate its
perspective. In many schools, a single teacher or coach may achieve the entire
school's mission with a student because they know how to create meaning and
value.
In action groups, a few with a firm grip on an idea usually provide the initial
impulse, like an acorn grips the idea of the tree it becomes. An inner design
organizes what arrives from the outside, a model you play out in your contact with
Evan. As you and he form a team, you transmit to him the plan within you so that
you double in size.
The challenge of early credibility. A possible barrier lies in people’s
impression of the value of group effort. Is this worth it?
You obtain a limited purchase on Evan’s interest, engage him in a brief
activity, and now you are each back home. When he wakes up tomorrow, his
former life beckons, twenty-four hours portioned out to his interests, but there you
are asking him to join you. He may feel self-conscious, lacking in knowledge, and
uncertain about expectations. He may not get all that as unfamiliar impressions
flow through his mind, and he may feel awkward and out of his element.
Compare his needs then with what a company offers to new hires. They
receive a work location, task training, a supervisor to solve their problems, ways to
plot progress, and resources for feedback and assistance. Add a salary and they
may keep working even if they see their effort pointless.
Evan needs similar supports though he is compensated not by money but by
his belief in what he does and his bonds with you. He depends on the quality of the
group’s activity to make his own significant and finds it hard to believe an idea
poorly supported. With many ways to spend our time, we would rather work for a
40
low value effectively than a high value fruitlessly. When egos impact group effort,
leaders make obvious mistakes in judgment, or expectations are vague, people find
other pursuits.
One activist worked for a political interest group for a long time and finally
gave it up. "The ideas were great,” she said, “but the people drove me nuts.” No
matter how impressive its ideas, a movement cannot grow if it drives its own
people nuts. It may escape us that we have a choice about this because life so often
seems programmed before we got there. Early influences were beyond our control
such as our parenting, neighborhood norms, and the values in our peer group.
Looking ahead, however, we choose those we associate with, help each other
change our ideas, and remedy the reasons people object to groups.
The early needs. At our "come and see" public meeting, we remove our
edges--our signs of preferential status, cliques, and turf control--and focus on
newcomers’ needs.
Some are self-conscious and feel vulnerable and isolated. Needs left over
from childhood may re-emerge as people recall previous rejections and do not
want others' attention ("Just checking things out," they will say). Unobtrusive
signals like meeting their eyes, our quiet nod, or a brief smile reassure them. We
let them mingle as they wish and become comfortable at their own pace.
A member introduces themselves, comments on the current occasion, and
inquires about the person’s interest. We listen carefully, respond deferentially,
“talk their language,” and draw out their ideas. “What are your interests?” we
inquire, and are ready to say, “Wonderful! Do you know others who feel this
way?"
After receiving initial attention, they wonder next if they have a place in our
group, our acceptance. Whether they fit with us tells them to go or stay: "Are these
folks my kind, or am I too different?" They sense the likelihood of personal bonds,
which are a strong reason people remain in social action. Hired into a new job, they
look for common ground, and learn gradually about each others’ families and
interests. As connections deepen, they stay longer. A study of what makes people
happy found that a primary factor was the esteem they received from peers (10), an
influence we see at work everywhere. People are deeply affected by what they
think of each other.
But reaching out to a nation means welcoming the full spectrum of personal
qualities. Our aim to benefit everyone is why we must be able to bond with
anyone. We can correct what separates us, and seek out harmony behind
differences; can reach beyond our natural constituency to those different in age,
interests, occupation, location, class, income, ethnicity, or religion. Consider:
He’s an immigrant, barely speaks English. He can take these ideas to a
whole new population.
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He’s a night owl, hardly see him during the day. He connects with people
we never encounter. He will keep the work going while the rest of us sleep.
He’s had a military career. Probably has experience in team planning and
group projects. He can remind us about discipline.
He’s a pacifist. We will listen to him especially about values and
compassion.
He’s a businessman. He understands how society operates, how things get
done, how to draw on the enterprising spirit in a community.
He’s wealthy. He has access to resources. Some will listen to him who will
not listen to the rest of us.
She’s unemployed. She has a feel for people who struggle
She’s a lot older. Probably has dealt with aging, family, and finances, and
has had illusions corrected.
She’s young and immature. We can help her develop traits she will use for a
lifetime, and we like her enthusiasm.
She has strong opinions. I’m not sure we can work together. She needs other
strong people who can guide her. If we get her pointed, she will go forever.
She’s capable but seems status-oriented. We can respect her capability and
show how we offer status to everyone.
His values seem so different from everyone else’s. From our common
purpose, we talk out a basis for working together. Otherwise we shake hands
and go our own way.
He’s Republican (Democrat, Religious, Secular, Asian, Black, Hispanic,
Liberal, Conservative, Labor, Corporate, Gay, Straight). We have met such
people before. They may have a different take on issues, and can help us
connect with others who believe as they do.
Acceptance across differences is a critical watershed because it counteracts
“otherism,” the most basic human bias that suspects anyone different from
ourselves so that we can safely exclude them. Believing they do not match us, we
easily label them undeserving and dismiss their needs. Had our ancestors regarded
African Americans and Native Americans as deserving, they would have treated
them differently.
Needs related to activity. Welcomed into the group, people wonder, “What
will I do?” They look around for how they can participate. Some are more attuned
to bursts of public effort and others to the predictable and steady, but activity in
any style can help, and some kind suits everyone. The group offers them a task.
When they do it and report back, they receive the group’s thanks, appreciation,
approval, and warmth.
Warmth is especially important but easily overridden when tasks seize
attention and the group ranks effort above the people doing it. A cold emotional
42
atmosphere depresses a group. While everyone finds this stressful, ethnic
minorities suffer from it more acutely so that they may need an extra step of
welcome. Warmth need not be hard to convey, however, nor demonstrative or time
consuming. We first let ourselves like each other. Then our smiles, timely nods,
receptive comments, respectful questions, and handshakes let others know they are
welcome.
We appreciate people's participation--"thanks for getting that done," give a
compliment, or note the effect of their help: “You really saved me some time,” “I
don’t know how I would have done it without you,” “I felt supported with you
there,” “You have an ability at that,” “You made him comfortable with that new
assignment,” or “You helped me think through what to do.” We put into words
how we notice people individually. Timely aid for their task also counts up.
Particularly when facing deadlines, people appreciate a hand.
Needs that affect group quality. In healthy groups, people talk openly
about issues, and feelings do not interfere with frankness. Working through issues
respectfully encourages genuineness and deeper ties.
Non-communication signals low trust. Conflict freezes energy and slows
group activity. When people refuse to resolve it, holding on to their own views has
become more important than the group’s momentum. When people have harbored
resentments, re-opening suppressed feelings may need careful guidance. Bonds
must limit the force of the negatives or the group fractures.
To endure the discomfort of frankness, people must believe in what they do
and trust each other's moderate response. They need to agree up front to accept
challenge to their ideas and work out differences. The more they care about each
other and their mission, the freer they are to be honest: “You're doing this and it
has this effect," confident that the other is committed to receiving the feedback
even if uncomfortable. Participants' love for each other strengthens them, but truth
moves them forward, microscopic honesty about anything affecting the group's
well-being. Soft punches make strong organizations.
Sometimes a single member impervious to feedback pulls a group down.
When that occurs, others' boundaries are more critical. It is up to each one's
personal discipline to remain positive alongside unhappy people, constructive
alongside uncooperative people. Distinguishing what is under our personal
control, we perfect it. We are solely responsible for its quality, cannot blame others
for feelings we indulge in, but instead assert our management of them. The fate of
the group depends on its ability to maintain positive direction despite negative
elements within it, just as every society must seek to advance despite its flaws.
Limitations are no reason for giving up. Those not sharing a group's common
purpose soon leave it while those remaining take on roles to carry it out.
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Positive communication does more than create good feelings, however.
Discussion generates joint purpose. When Italy reorganized its government after
World War II, researchers monitored what caused regional political entities to
prosper. Key elements were a surprise--not factories, natural resources, social
structure, nor even education. Subsequent prosperity depended on whether people
talked to each other in small groups. Settings there were often choral societies and
here might be bowling alleys, hair salons, churches, barber shops, and sporting
events. Conversation about common concerns generates positive outcomes. Not
just markets but local culture determines economic growth (11). Social connections
shape people's beliefs and values, help them understand what is happening around
them, and generate action. When people ask "How do we make things better here?"
a we becomes the actor.
Deeper personal motivators. We presume that anyone visiting our group
can become a resource for change. What do they need to learn? We can supply it.
What action will engage them? We can supply it. What support and guidance
connect them to the group? We can supply it. What teamwork, encouragement,
feedback, connection, inspiration, and accomplishment do they need? To
encourage their development, we supply these things.
As they grow in competence and confidence by group action, they commit
more to its direction. We want Evan changing from a passive observer to a leader,
and we believe everyone can become one--noticing needs and identifying the
appropriate action, recognizing what is happening and proposing what to do.
Leaders translate an idea into tangible conditions, use their eyes and ears to
absorb reality and bring to it the actions that change it.
People want to know their actions have meaning, and that effort counts up.
They are hungry for energy, so in awakening it we do not fight human nature. It
builds as a group extends its successes. Accomplishment is the group’s highest
encouragement. Saying “We did it!” affirms pride in the effort and prepares
everyone for doing better next time.
A significant motive also is that our own sacrifice reinforces our values.
Making a sacrifice we apply a subtle train of thought: We assume to start with that
great purposes deserve great sacrifice. And therefore if we can credit ourselves
with it, we conclude "I therefore have a great purpose." The fact of our effort
affirms its importance. “If this weren’t valuable,” we think, “I wouldn’t be doing
it.” We hate useless sacrifice so we tell ourselves that our purpose is worth the
effort.
The thought process works against us, however, when we do nothing.
Although we still presume that great purposes deserve great sacrifice, we
acknowledge, "I am not making a sacrifice." Since our self-image presumes that
our actions align with our values, reasoning backward we conclude, "My purpose
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must not be a great one. I must not have anything great to do because I’m not
doing anything at all.” A great deed may be rapping on our window, but as we
back away, our mind minimizes its value.
To draw on people’s dedication, we listen to what they say they believe and
ask a proportionate sacrifice of them. They may declare how threatening is global
warming, how painful the world’s suffering, and how onerous the poverty, but we
look to what they will do and arrange a task accordingly. Maybe a volunteer has
four evening hours a day to devote, we give him a direction, and he bolts away like
an Olympic sprinter.
To ask for others’ commitment, we begin in a connected heart, "Would you
like to come and do this with me?" The world's axis will tilt if enough people invite
their friends to stand on one side of it with them. Tasks and group life fuse into
action influencing the world.
Chapter 7. Unite around the good of the whole
We can plot human desires on a scale of excellence. At one end is the most
limited, selfish, material gain that even damages others, and at the other are
principles like love, truth, and harmony. A desire at any point on the spectrum can
propel activity, but even apart from its practical impact, its quality affects society.
Rudeness, for instance, propagates rapidly person to person, while an act of
kindness may generate a series of the same. People who threaten others elicit a
range of negative feelings such as anger, discouragement, and cynicism, prompting
Lily Tomlin to comment, "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible keep
up."
Since the quality of our desire affects society, it makes sense to desire wellbeing. A movement must occupy the principled end of the spectrum above not only
because the principles are why we want change in the first place, but also because
starting at the other end has failed. Struggles and threats over material goods have
not produced the society we want. When even well-meaning people committed to a
niche combine to win an election, they may still achieve only minor concessions
later as a skewed system flows on basically as is.
Understanding goodness helps us aim. Here we consider:
1. Goodness
2. The whole
3. Good of the whole
4. Right and wrong
1. Goodness. People, let us say, have an incomplete commitment to
goodness. Encountering blatant racism in another, for example, people usually
leave it alone. While changing it would be hard, even trying to do so does not
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appear important. Or a public figure speaks an outright lie, and the person's
associates who could correct their thinking but have something to gain from their
favor are silent. A lesser gain displaces a higher principle. When the very
significance of goodness is fragile and lower values dominate, society is coming
apart. Many believe we can do without goodness, that efforts such as refuting lies
and correcting racism do not matter.
Goodness refers to moral excellence, a resistance to evil, and the exercise of
virtue typically revealed in kindness and generosity to others meriting the esteem
of humankind. Such qualities separate those we jail from those we honor by
naming cities after them. Understanding the good and putting it to work engage the
great creative motor of human activity, and in the end, it can overwhelm arms.
Greeks enslaved by the Romans became their teachers and spread science,
learning, and culture throughout the Roman world. Missionaries have sacrificed to
carry virtues of human decency and service everywhere, and outstanding teachers
present a vision of goodness to guide students' lives.
It is so fundamental that we refer to it even when we are selfish, seeking
good for us. A potential suicide thinks, “I’ll be better off.” The main task of life is
to remain in goodness, and the second, to manifest it. Be good and do good. We
show we love others by the good we offer them, and the wisdom and goodness of
our effort determine the results we get.
We may assess the goodness needed in social policy by watching how its
opposite has worked, when leaders co-opt us for unworthy motives. Three big
mistakes in U.S. history have been slavery, conquest, and colonialism—all of them
errors against goodness yet presumed correct at the time. Not disclosed to school
children is that people like themselves weighed their values and did these things,
that their playground unkindness to each other parallels far greater injury their
ancestors carried out and may foreshadow injury they perpetrate as adults.
Beyond its toll in individual suffering, slavery nearly sundered the nation
and has had painful effects to the present. That so many accepted it as right for
centuries as America was forming prompts concern. Were they insane from an
inheritable gene they passed on to us? Similarly with our near genocide of ten
million or more American Indians while taking their land and livelihood.
Americans told themselves not only that they could do it but that it was so correct
as to be inevitable: Manifest Destiny. Because victors write the history, Americans
claim that period with pride.
The war in Vietnam began from our support for French colonialism. But
why should Americans die supporting wealthy people exploiting the poor? It was
justified by ideology, Communism versus Freedom, thinking so patterned that we
could not separate true from false. Our invasion of Iraq, understood now to be for
the sake of its oil, may mark a watershed in the expansion of international
46
terrorism (12). And coming generations may brand our economy the vanguard of
an era that destroyed countless life forms. We have done poorly separating better
from worse.
People learn at least to pursue the good instrumentally, being good because
they benefit from it. But to pursue it as a value, we begin by ranking it more
significant than life itself. Better a short life doing good than a long one doing evil.
We maintain moral strength by holding to the good even when it is a bother to do
so, by not taking personal offense at others’ evil deeds even as we work to
counteract them, and by not descending to the unworthy actions of our opponents.
We are compassionate toward people and rely on truth to advance the good.
Every public issue defines goodness. When previous effort did not solve a
problem, conditions evolve, new players enter, and again we consider “What good
can we obtain here?" We begin back in simple things. Leaders should not lie,
cheat, steal, and manipulate others for their own ends. Citizens should be fair and
just, keep their agreements, restrain wrong-doers, and remove oppressive force and
toxic conditions.
2. The whole. When we were tiny, our world was very narrow. We were the
center of it, preoccupied with ourselves, and slowly learned to consider others.
Even with more years we may still extend to only a few, a small circle of family or
friends, leaving to unknown others the concerns of our neighborhood, region, and
the world.
Ignoring everything except our own lives is in a sense the root problem. Do
we think actively about others’ condition? We tend not to balance care for self with
care for all, yet it is only when we do that society survives. There are times when
each of us is helpless, notably when we begin and end, but also often in between.
We survive by connectedness. Without mutual loyalty, only the strongest prosper:
some make it and some don't, so try to be among the first. As one animal feels no
responsibility for another’s rights but eats it, people’s rights seem only concessions
by the powerful who have no obligation to the weak.
Michael Bloomberg, billionaire and former mayor of New York, the most
unequal big city in the U.S., said about homelessness, “That’s just the way God
works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” probably echoing
a mainstream attitude (13). We can view homelessness and other hardships instead
as fallout from the powerful's treatment of the powerless, whether group effort
enables all to survive.
Discovering reality. To respond to the whole, we adopt interests that do not
benefit us directly. "Folks on the coast of Malaysia--their fish are in trouble," or
"The Eskimos find soot on their snow." Everyone claims a larger resource of
knowledge, a field unified by reality, the way things are before anyone interprets
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them; "what, if you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away," in Peter Robert Viereck’s
phrase.
The word "reality" comes from the Latin res, meaning the thing itself
possessing independent, objective existence. If you and I disagree about the same
res, we either refer to different facets of it or one of us fudged. It is not determined
by an opinion about it. If it seems otherwise, our information lags and not the
reality (at least the non-quantum). It is a single thing, universally coupled one part
with another, in which everything connects ultimately to everything else. Yet
because our perceptions are confined to time and place, we need to exercise our
mind to grasp its unity.
Without this effort, people seize on alternate aspects. The economist
Beardsley Ruml commented that “Reasonable people always agree when they
understand what the other person is talking about." For us to incorporate another's
viewpoint, we first must accept the possibility that our view is not the whole story.
If a sentence in a book appears out of bounds, we can pause to consider, "Am I
getting the context the author presumes?"
Greater certainty arises from what we can see, hear, and touch than from
what we surmise. We do not confirm a common reality by assuming either you or I
must be right, but say instead, "Let's replicate the experiment," or "Let's look at the
evidence," or "Is there anything we can measure or describe? What do people say
who have been there?" We shift from beliefs to data, and confirm the most elusive
principles by applying them to tangibles we can inspect.
Appreciating the res is important because its conditions maintain the
problems we want to solve. To change them, we need to understand them. Kurt
Lewin, a pioneer in group dynamics, proposed that any situation is the way it is
because contrary forces neutralize each other at that point. To induce change, we
either strengthen the forces for it or weaken those against it. Challenging social
activists, he advised “If you think you understand something, try to change it.”
That understanding may not come easily and is not conveyed by slogans.
Some issues are so complex we may not be able to step back far enough to see
everything affecting them. The farmer, fisherman, and hunter today are impelled to
think collectively, so that a key function of leadership now is to discover within a
complexity what can be acted upon.
Tasks for the whole. Jared Diamond sums up efforts needed. He ascribes
failure in group decision-making to four kinds of responses: failing either to
anticipate a problem or notice it when it comes; or when it does come, not trying to
solve it, or trying and failing. He regards the third as most problematic. Why would
people not try to resolve a threat? Many reasons parallel Toynbee’s findings, such
as the body of public thought and the actions of the powerful.
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Public thought. What is rational from a later perspective may oppose
individuals’ interests. Those who each lose only a little have minimal incentive to
stand against over-harvesting fish, water, timber, range land, topsoil, and nonrenewable resources. Some willingly use up what is common to all. Crowd
psychology may lend high status to destructive actions, while boycotts to check
them depend on difficult conditions.
Powerful individuals. Exploiters often know they will get away with their
deeds. Key individuals can swing great benefit to the few, the interests of a
decision-making elite may clash with the rest of society, and selfishness may
prevail. Mining companies may declare bankruptcy rather than clean up their
pollutants, and loggers cut down rainforests quickly and leave.
Dimond notes many problems in the res. Loss of species, genetic diversity,
and natural habitat is accelerating. Toxic chemicals pollute the biosphere causing
an estimated 130,000 deaths annually, endocrine disruption, and a declining human
sperm count. Alien species can devastate a region, and gases increase global
warming and deplete ozone.
The world’s major energy sources now are non-renewable–oil, gas, and coal.
Freshwater aquifers worldwide are dropping. The earth’s ability to grow crops and
wild plants is more limited than previously realized, and human activity reduces it.
Wind and erosion strip farm soil faster than it is created. Two billion people
depend on the oceans for their protein but declining stocks are managed erratically.
Citizens of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan consume thirty-two times more
resources like fossil fuels and produce proportionately more waste than do those
living in the Third World.
World population is expected to increase for about seventy years, posing
special problems since much growth will occur in low-impact countries turning
high-impact. Diamond believes we are on a collision course and must resolve these
problems pleasantly by planning or unpleasantly by war, genocide, starvation,
epidemics, and social collapse (14).
On the other hand, a Scientific American special issue, “Crossroads for
Planet Earth," offers hope if proactive effort is undertaken for the next 50 years.
Cyanobacteria can fight industrial carbon dioxide, population growth is slowing,
prosperity is spreading; and focused foreign aid can reduce poverty, air pollution,
and deforestation.
Many obscure species live in a few critical habitats that deserve
preservation. Increasing CO2 emissions threaten the stability of the atmosphere,
but can be reduced significantly and cheaply through greater efficiency.
Inexpensive small-scale irrigation can stretch water supplies and help small
farmers. Prevention is the top health priority for chronic problems. Commerce
needs new ways of collecting taxes, setting interest rates, and regulating pollution
49
and resource extraction. But when costs are concentrated and benefits diffuse, the
market sets priorities poorly, so economists, lawmakers, and scientists need better
approaches (15).
3. Good of the whole. People seeking change usually focus first on a part,
a value that affects their demographic or attracts their personal interest. Here we
suggest beginning with the whole where all parts need to be in balance. The
concept is not modern. Over two millennia ago, in a democracy where at least
some believed that ideas should guide behavior, Socrates addressed the purpose of
governance:
...it’s not the concern of law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally
well, but it contrives to bring this about in the city as a whole, harmonizing
the citizens by persuasion and compulsion, making them share with one
another the benefit that each is able to bring to the commonwealth. And it
produces such men in the city not in order to let them turn whichever way
each wants, but in order that it may use them in binding the city together
(16).
For Socrates the issue was whether to benefit a class or the whole city. He
believed the latter should prosper as a unit, not just a few within it. For us, good of
the whole should incorporate individuals, the natural environment, and the social
world, and balance any specific outcome against the total net of causality. It
accounts for acquisitive patterns, others' worldview, and how it might feel to be in
their shoes.
Our ability to discriminate one good from another largely determines how
well we think. As we enlarge our frame of reference, others’ information need not
fight past our biases. We let our opponents talk while we listen and affirm what we
can in their view. We cease to struggle to be right, because right or wrong we can
isolate from others’ ideas, and even being right can be destructive. Before acting
against others, we first respect any goodness in their purposes, and desire benefit
for them even if disagreeing with them on how to achieve it.
While people commonly define issues by their own gain or loss, good of the
whole encourages us to seek benefit for all, fulfill a range of values, and check for
adverse impacts within a longer time horizon.
Many grasp the good of the whole with a natural sense of empathy and
unselfishness, respond generously by giving more to others than they receive, and
steady the moral base of society. Religions may call this the care of creation or
stewardship, and believe people are called to be good and to take responsibility for
the world.
Our concern for the whole invites more vigilance now as vast changes can
begin from minor events. A wrong turn by his limousine driver brought Archduke
Ferdinand before his assassin, touching off the First World War which generated
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the forces erupting in the Second World War, which brought on the Iron Curtain
and the Cold War. Nearly a century of suffering followed a tiny beginning.
Millions eventually died because Josef Stalin learned as a young man how killing
people increased his political influence. A roiling Middle East today could spill out
on the world through the intricate fabric of global civilization.
Good for all depends on commitment to the group's success. Sports
commentators say, “They are unselfish” as teammates support each other, but this
attitude is vulnerable. Once a group is successful, any individual in it may gain
more by selfishness, so that a few can take advantage of the many. They can
enhance their own interests and leave it to others to look after the whole. When too
many do so, the group declines.
The standards of politics often casually tolerate this. Henry Kissinger
summed up the common opinion: "Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten
percent a bad name." In his campaign advertisements, a Congressman up for reelection repeated that he had “always put his state first." His state would come
before good of the whole, equity with another state, benefit to the nation, spending
federal money fairly, and world needs. These would always come second. In every
situation, he would seek advantage for his state.
Perhaps he exaggerated to be elected, but probably assessed his constituents
accurately: "In any contest of values, we want you to forget parity, equity, fairness,
and justice and just get as much as you can for us. We like federal spending here
more than we dislike inequity or an inflated federal budget."
Leaders need the courage to inform people what makes society work, that
federal money is available only because the group is successful. The nation's
productivity generates resources that deserve care instead of waste. When lesser
needs receive a lopsided boon, urgent needs go begging.
The “tragedy of the commons” illustrates. In our country’s early time when a
family might have only a few farm animals, a town fenced in a common grazing
area where everyone’s livestock could feed. Then someone would increase his herd
so that others receiving proportionately less complained. More stock added to the
commons eventually made them unworkable.
The difficulty applies today to resources of air, water, radio bands, Internet
broad band, arable land, fish, and non-renewable minerals. Some can pollute, overharvest for their own enrichment, and use up what others need. An old Alaska
fisherman declared that he and his peers regarded a fishery as “economic” if they
could make a profit at it until all that kind of fish were gone. When a minority
takes as much as it can, others must decide whether to allow it.
Everyone agrees that people can benefit themselves. We want opportunity
and success for them. But when some gain by driving others down, fewer find
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well-being. The biggest threat to the good of the whole is the abuse of it by those
able to benefit themselves most.
The implication for a movement is first committing to the stability of the
whole, safeguarding it against the predations of those who would monopolize it,
then providing individuals the tools to benefit themselves. For the world to
prosper, we need to focus on gain for the whole ahead of self-benefit.
Such an attitude is unthinkable to some people. Suggesting they have taken
more than their share infuriates them, but a psychological mechanism is in play.
The more they have, the harder it is for them to question its legitimacy. People who
just killed off an Indian tribe to take its land would be unable to recognize
injustice. As Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends on him not understanding it” (17).
In all of history, the powerful have rarely given up power unless driven to do
so. Under our democratic structure, a majority can cause change, but need to know
how society can work better. More must understand how to reverse the growing
inequality, and stand against those who would underfund education, increase
pollution, deregulate the financial sector, ignore hunger and poverty, allow the
decay of infrastructure, militarize international relations, and funnel to themselves
the fruits of American productivity.
Full employment. A vital feature of the social safety net is full employment
at decent wages but two interests compete. The dominant minority want profits and
the majority want full employment. Both are necessary, but policy makers get to
decide which organizes the other. When economic conditions shift, we achieve the
primary goal by varying the means.
So let's say a downturn hits or a competitor cuts in. If profits are the goal,
the means selected may be wholesale firings, reducing wages, exporting factories,
bankruptcy protection, cancelling pensions, sheltering funds in the Bahamas,
incorporating overseas, or a tax haven in Switzerland. The purpose governs the
response.
If the goal instead is full employment at a decent wage, profits are a means,
a stepping stone to full employment. Business might enhance both profits and job
security by stock-sharing, diversifying, introducing new products, re-training
employees, setting aside reserves, and restructuring wages. But since full
employment presumes profits and cannot be achieved without them, the most
direct route to it is an optimal climate for business success. With that, everyone
prospers. Full employment at a decent wage benefits both owners and employees.
We want workers with a stake in their company because the company has a
stake in them, profit and security sustained together amid market challenges. Many
U.S. companies have discovered the bottom line advantage in such policies, but
can select the means only after knowing the goal.
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4. Right and wrong. With goodness our central value, we recognize right
and wrong easier. We notice that doing the right thing brings positive effects and
the wrong one damage. Some outcomes are obvious--waste and inefficiency are
wrong because impractical--but moral intangibles have a longer reach. We attempt
to enlist people's broader sense of rightness. Child hunger and prisoner torture, for
instance, are wrong as violations of human dignity.
Is it right, we ask, for the U.S. to ignore global warming when rising earth
temperature and melting polar ice could eventually submerge world coasts where
nearly half the world’s population lives?
Is it right that in the next three hundred years we are likely to cause the
world’s sixth great extinction of life?
Is it right that we have the highest rates of teen death and child poverty
among developed nations?
Is it right to subsidize a few huge farms while family farms struggle?
Is it right to roll back decades of environmental protection and make
practically every kind of pollution easier in order to increase profits?
Is it right that the U.S. is the only industrialized country without a
nationwide system of childcare for working parents?
Is it right to subject poor children to inadequate diet, medical care, housing,
and education, and expose them to toxic chemicals?
Is it right that we have the world's highest rate of incarceration--two million
people, a quarter of the entire world's prisoners--yet the highest homicide rate
among rich countries? Spend billions on new prisons and short change crime
prevention and rehabilitation? Continue to lock people up for inability to pay fines
and fees, a practice outlawed two centuries ago as inhumane?
Is it right that four out of five juveniles in detention centers may have one or
more diagnosable psychiatric disorders?
Is it right that we are the last western nation to treat health care as a human
right?
Is it right that only half of minority children earn a high school diploma?
Is it right that some schools have everything they want and others struggle?
Is it right that the bottom forty percent own about a fifth of one percent of
the nation‘s wealth and the top ten percent own eighty-five percent of it?
Is it right that we spend hundreds of billions on the military while schools,
health clinics, courts, mass transit, bridges, and water works decay?
Chapter 8. Dedicate to a purpose
A purpose must be right, but much more. It must leave people no doubt that
it is worth their effort. Dedication is commitment to it, devoting time, energy, and
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resources to a goal we declare supremely important, perhaps out of love for our
fellow man and faith in higher values.
You probably already demonstrate your devotion to family and personal
security, and prioritize the energy you have left. When you can't buy everything
you want, you make cuts. Here we suggest thinking like that about society heading
over a cliff. If we declare we own the fate of others, we show how much it matters
to us by what we will relinquish for it, how big a price we are willing to pay, how
much personal sacrifice we will endure.
How we find dedication. People accustomed to a protected niche in society
may expect good things to happen spontaneously. But for those in other sectors,
this view is shallow. A man who had been a labor organizer in the 1930s advised
me that "Nothing happens without first being made necessary.” If I wished to
change society, he said, the price was causing it. Nothing would occur by luck or
magical thinking. Every single facet of what we want must be made to happen.
Dedication is a necessary proto-condition. People who accomplish a purpose
care about it. Their will is the first cause not dependent on prior circumstances.
Author Elizabeth Janeway aptly described those who wait for someone else to
move them: “Many people who want to change the world do not know what to do
with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
A first cause instead declares, “It begins with me.” We set forth an aim,
determine to pay its price, and do not blame circumstances or other people for its
absence. We weigh our values, alight on what satisfies us most and longest, and
undertake its actions.
How we transmit it. We transmit it to others first by the generosity of our
own effort. With ourselves in hand, we invite them to join us, knowing we can
sustain them until they find their own footing. Incorporated into our group, they
assimilate our standards and values so that personal bonds sustain our common
goals. We need not even like each other—personality types occur everywhere—but
we communicate respectfully about our purpose. People conceiving themselves as
a body live by a common conviction.
Inviting others to share a purpose can strengthen our own dedication. People
tend to guage worth by what they are asked to do. When a businessman sets a high
price, maybe his product is valuable. For jewelry priced at $19,000, we expect
diamonds and rubies. By asking others’ sacrifice, we affirm the value of their
effort.
Let us say a church sponsors a talk about an accused facing execution who is
likely to be innocent. When the speaker offers only concern, attendees go home
sobered, someone writes a letter to the newspaper, and others print posters and
stand on a street corner in protest. A call to arms works differently.
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“This cannot stand,” the speaker says. “This week we need to mount a
campaign to turn this around. Please sign up at the back of the hall for whatever
you can do. We want to contact everyone we know in the media or in political
office, generate petitions, call talk shows, write letters, and demonstrate Friday at
the Governor’s office. Please help as you can."
Significance rises as more is asked. The speaker declares value by the action
he requests: “An innocent man’s life deserves this." Even a few responding
demonstrate that values demand action. One cause may free an innocent man while
the next may be to eliminate capital punishment. Urgency can also arise from a
view of the world. Christians, Muslims, Communists, and Nazis have all presented
their picture as urgent and proposed what to do about it. We move others as we
convince them that our picture is real.
How we express dedication. Dedication is not just a feeling but the will to
draw on ourselves. Its depth shows up in how we change our life to act on it.
Following are several ways:
By sacrifice. An ideal worthy of dedication asks sacrifice, a word linking
two Latin words, sacrum and facere, taken together meaning “to make something
holy” or “do a holy deed.” We give up a good thing in order to do a better thing.
The summit is the gift of our life, which helps to explain Jesus' mission, and
Moslems who don a suicide belt. Humans esteem nothing above giving one’s life
for another.
If we could do that in a single heroic gesture, many of us might step forward.
We might give our death gladly and have it over with. Giving our life may be
harder, devoting ourselves a day at a time for the decades remaining to us, but the
sacrifice we make for others' well-being marks our love and dedication.
This need not imply personal struggle. We want to be so intent upon
advancing our purpose that our effort does not seem like a sacrifice. We change
our weekly hours because we want to, because our goal interests us intensely.
By responding to difficulties. Our dedication takes us into difficulties.
They are our environment. They are to changing society what physical contact is to
football. A hit is just a condition of where we work and does not mean we do
something wrong. In our own lives we proceed to where our advance meets
resistance, and find that opposition takes up any space we allow it. Weeds replace
our lawn, dirt fills our house, and rain penetrates our roof. Unless we expend
effort, what we do not want takes over what we do want. Presence of the negative
just means no one has managed it, so we welcome and cope with it.
The harder the task, the more completely we must call on ourselves. We
demonstrate our competence by the problems we handle routinely. Charles
Kettering, an inventive genius who helped develop General Motors, had a motto:
"Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble. Good
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news weakens me." He refused to allow problems to infect his optimistic
determination.
We seek not just action but excellence in it, accomplishment that exceeds
expectations. The minimum is insuring nothing wrong with what we do, like, "We
don't let anything leave our shop containing a factual mistake." But excellence
means achieving our purpose with an elegant perfection of details reminiscent of a
sign on a factory wall during World War II: Any impossible task can be divided
into 39 steps each of which is possible. We drive ourselves to the limit of our
knowledge and push to where we are stopped. With travel around the world
mastered, we think “What’s next? We did the moon but Mars is still out there.”
We proceed eagerly to the edge of our resources.
We can welcome difficulties also because they change us inwardly, even if
we cause them by our reactiveness, selfishness, or narrowness. Handed a clue to
how we might do better, we deserve to be delighted. We welcome other difficulties
because we entered a situation to remedy them, and now have them fixed in our
cross hairs.
Achieving our goal usually requires more from us than we foresee. We
cannot truly grasp our later perspective but can face at least how our present
actions do not help. We ask, “How important is this? Is it true, necessary, kind?
Do I do the work needed?” In our haste we often dismiss self-examination, yet
every campaign is also inner work. In the trade journals my father received when I
was young, I read about people who succeeded by doing more than they were paid
to do, going the extra mile in service. I thought at the time, "That sounds easy
enough." It makes our work more satisfying and successful, and becomes an
approach to life.
By unconditional love. With love, we preoccupy ourselves with the wellbeing of another, often setting aside our preferences or giving up our comfort for
their sake. Experiencing love can be especially transforming if the other is in need.
One person prizing them wholeheartedly may alter their life.
Love can be conditional or unconditional. In placing a condition on the love
we offer, we pose a value superior to love itself. We say it is okay if it meets the
other standard like, “I’ll love you if you love me,” equal return for equal
investment. Or we may love people if they are good to us, so that we withdraw it
from people who do not give us what we want. And discovering we do not respect
someone, we lose interest in their well-being so that their condition pre-empts our
condition. We let a negative in them displace a positive in us, and from selfinterest may confine our love to others of our status, race, religion, or family.
In society conditional love means placing our own needs first, spending as
little as we can to make a problem tolerable, benefiting others so it costs us
nothing. Though even such a partial good is better than none, it offers no ideal. If
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we are mainly bargain-hunters or guardians of our own kind, what standard do we
demonstrate? What kind of love do we present by telling others, “Go off with your
own people and love them. Don’t come to me”?
Unconditional love is having the will, the root force of love, to benefit all
regardless how culturally different or socially acceptable they may be. “Love even
me?” they ask. “Yes,” we answer. Loving them “regardless” says we personally
choose to issue the highest quality of love, not for its benefit to us or by how others
meet our standards. We put out the best we have, and the good (and occasionally
even the others) draw from it.
Unconditional love gives people confidence to join society. They begin to
believe they can count on even those whom they do not know to look out for them,
for others to treat them and their needs respectfully. With a cushion of safety
accorded them, they are more likely to respond in kind. Mother Teresa’s shelter for
the homeless in Calcutta was reported to have supplied food and shelter, the
elementary acts of love, to 36,000 people without charge. After only a stay at the
shelter, half regained their health and resumed a normal life.
By responsibility. Many relieve themselves of responsibility by asserting
that conditions improve spontaneously. Global trade, they say, raises incomes and
many are better off than before. Yet we are responsible also for the lingering
effects of our deeds. Today’s prosperity depletes critical resources and increases
air pollution that warms the planet. Toxic substances slowly killing off bee
colonies come from something humans say they want, and chemicals discarded
everywhere make their way to the ocean to destroy sea creatures. With the
interdependence of the global economic system, the breakdown of a single piece
may halt the whole thing. Progress is not guaranteed.
The natural cycle of life demands responsibility for others. We each begin
life dependent on the good will of others and end life the same way, perhaps losing
our faculties slowly and threatened in the meantime by injury, pregnancy, poverty,
illiteracy, and social marginality. Some live without help. Of these, a few do
surmount the odds, but they worsen with each added burden such as physical,
mental, or emotional disabilities; adults around them who abuse substances or are
criminal or missing; an anti-social primary group such as a gang-run
neighborhood; or the absence of ethical/moral training, good teaching, means of
contributing to society, and respectable employment.
We do not aim to equalize all difficulties but rather to account for everyone.
If we want two groups, a large/poor/sick/dumb population on one side and a
small/rich/healthy/smart elite on the other, we need only train and aid the elite.
Divide society, make plans for the haves, ignore the have-nots, and justify this by
saying, “Everyone is free to help themselves.” Anatole France nailed the dismissal
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of responsibility in that view: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and
poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
A reasonable response to poverty instead might be, “Let’s put a job center in
their neighborhood. Let’s have some remedial literacy classes. Let’s find out what
they can do and help them do it." A successful person might wonder at how poorly
they would function with their strategies for achieving and memories of success
erased. Beyond a certain threshold, limitations kill the spirit.
Responsibility is a readiness to respond. Upon noticing a good thing
available for another, we exert effort to make it happen. And caring for others with
small deeds, our gaze expands to notice actions that affect more people over a
longer time.
Sometimes we face a decision. The first one noticing is the first one
responsible, like having a football punted to us to carry up field. Within our
capability we stand ready, open to the call of the world, responding to what comes,
influencing what is placed in our path. We speak the truth no one else does because
it needs to be said; take the action no one else takes because we see its value; leave
the status quo to show a direction because a better life points us there. At first we
may feel confused and discouraged, but on continuing become stronger and learn
from our mistakes. We change, gather courage, and try again.
Inherent limitations check our response, of course. Confined to one place
physically, our mind focuses best on one task while moving others to the
background. Succeeding with one effort encourages us to repeat it, temporarily
narrowing our view of our world around it. Most of us save ourselves for a few
objectives and minimize our responsibility for anything else. Having one minute at
a time to allocate, spending it here we cannot place it anywhere else, so we select.
But pushing this inherent limitation too far, we discard entire swaths of experience
in the hope others will step up. When they do not, society is affected. We can plot
its disintegration by the accumulation of what we put up with. Will we accept an
unsustainable world economy, a degrading natural environment, tens of millions
confined to poverty, and millions of youth with substandard education, health care,
and work opportunity? If we decide we can, others gladly run our lives by
controlling all the conditions we prefer to dismiss. If we do not like their plan, we
can respond differently.
Our challenge is stretching beyond the given. Personal assumptions arise
spontaneously and we automatically carry out the action they imply, but this
narrow attention works against group success. Automatic thoughts and actions may
build us good habits but also limit us, and even positive thoughts displace a
universe of alternatives. Doing the same thing scores of times, our mind
remembers it as our standard response, often embedded in a familiar feeling.
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Increasing the difficulty is that our automatic responses often started when
our thinking was immature. The stance we adopted at age twelve came from
twelve-year-old thinking, which is seldom optimal twenty years later.
To express our dedication with responsibility, we take care of each other, as
in the African saying, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go
together.” Sometimes we labor just for ourselves, but for progress to affect all, we
need unity. When I was small, my friends and I cobbled together pieces of
driftwood to make a raft we could push along the shore of the channel by our
homes, but first had to keep it in one piece. Some problems like keeping the raft
together affect the existence of society. Those who dismiss this concern, who say
“I don’t want to be responsible for...”, defer to others whether civilization survives.
By government. Government is our means of coping with all the issues left
over after people benefit themselves. Asking “How do we meet these needs?' we
answer with something resembling government.
While we prefer that people solve their problems themselves, only leaders
up to the task can balance benefits to reach the most people. As sustaining life on
earth grows harder, superior thinking about it is more critical. Society that
prospered for a time as individuals pursuing their own interests has morphed into
layers of interdependent systems.
To operate a system, we steer it as a whole. A system of electricity, water,
courts, or education begins and ends somewhere, and we may need to intervene
anywhere within it to remedy its glitches. Even though we leave parts to individual
choice, someone has to decide what to leave free and what to manage. In our
markets, people are free to choose one product over another but not for sellers to
lie about them. People can freely choose a bus or plane, but not threaten the driver
or pilot.
Some habitually protest government's attempts to regulate, but ignore the
selfishness that created the problems. Of those who demand less government, we
inquire, “When things go wrong, who do you expect to help? What private sources
should have responded to the 9-11 attacks or to hurricane devastation? Who will
build the sewers?” Many expect government to remedy their own concerns but not
someone else’s.
Individuals can organize their life around a single niche of experience, like
listening for one note in a symphony, but society wants the symphony. Pursued
beyond a certain point, self-interest generates a society divided, then fractured, and
then hostile, where categories of people never talk to other categories. People
begin to expect only winners and losers competing for society’s resources, and
ignore questions of justice, economic fairness, health, and education for all.
Government is continually challenged to apply standards that maximize
benefit. In times of necessity it can be the employer of last resort so people can
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contribute while meeting their basic needs, and through the tax code can reward
companies that reduce burden on the nation’s safety net. It checks negative
outcomes from exploitive business practices, dishonest individuals, natural
disasters, unworthy special interests, repressive religion, and economic
downswings.
Sometimes to do their job the governing need courage. One can barely
imagine the determination that must have circulated in New Zealand when its
leaders concluded that people would welcome responsibility. It transformed its
schools by eliminating layers of bureaucracy and placing decision-making at the
school level. It divided up the available funds among 4,500 schools and assigned
complete authority over each one to a board elected by parents of its students. In a
few years student scores went from 15% below comparable nations to 14-15%
above (18).
By trust. An essential quality of our dedication is trust among ourselves, our
co-workers, the public, and our opposition. As people believe we are committed to
their well-being and keep our agreements, they cease to fear us. By maintaining
absolute integrity in everything we do, we let others know they can safely act on
what we tell them. Privately and publicly we say the same thing, and whenever the
honesty or integrity of our action is unclear to us, we consider it more deeply until
we resolve it. We work continually on fairness, respect, honesty, and undistorted
communication.
We build trust by recognizing how we undermine it through a near-universal
tendency: we seek to advance our interests. Americans’ ability to promote
ourselves globally is why many distrust us. We need to balance opportunityseeking by weighing others’ needs equally with our own. If instead we seek power
and the other gives an inch, we take a mile.
To increase trust, we can agree with opponents to welcome feedback about
misrepresentation or factual mistake, seek even the uncomfortable truth, and
acknowledge what we learn from our opponent. We wish to use our power as we
would welcome it used toward us, and deal with our opponent's information fairly.
Trust often depends on planning. If we don't do it, we let events be random,
do not fulfill many of our intentions, and grant others the same license. Asserting
our freedom to do as we please makes us less reliable.
Planning does not require rigid control as long as we distinguish what should
remain free. Such details are outlined in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and
our laws and contracts. We rely on foresight rather than chance to define behavior
because we know constructive outcomes seldom occur by chance. We minimize
chaos with thoughtful improvements, consensus on values, and the rational pursuit
of solutions by discussion. Inside trust relations, we solve substantial problems
quickly.
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Chapter 9. Learn what is needed.
Learning matters when it makes people better at something they want to do.
Besides how to earn a living, raise a family, and color our life with our
interests, why not learn how to save a civilization? It rises and decays for reasons
we can understand, and we can apply lessons of the past to our own.
Compare the task to a landing on Mars. We manage countless obscure
conditions as a system. Miss a key factor in the space program, and expensive
hardware sails into the void. Might turning around a nation of hundreds of millions
(to say nothing of a world of billions) involve as complex a challenge? Without
effective policies, our hard-won civilization could also fly into deep space, never to
be heard from again. The key knowledge today is how to change society, how
people alter their collective beliefs and behaviors.
Habit. A huge barrier is habit—perception, thought, and actions that occur
the same somewhat automatically--telling us to do what we did before. Habits
engulf our inner world, spontaneously supplying familiar responses. Idea instead
opens a new take. Unless ideas alter them, they continue to rule.
Habit can drive social policies. In early America, it determined who could
vote (property owners) and who had civil rights (whites) until new ideas became
strong enough to work change. When we are claimed by habit, even noticing
helpful new ideas can be hard for us--like pedaling a bicycle uphill, resting, and
gravity taking us back downhill. Previous thoughts draw us back to them so that
we need resolve even to comprehend a new one. People who wish to change
usually go to a group, school, or team where others will tug on their habitual
thought with new perspectives.
The effort to interrupt habit is important because our actions need to emerge
from our best instead of our habitual views. Once having a good idea, we then need
to wire it into our mental stream by turning it over and over, and upon grasping it,
to act on it. We might read a section of a book or article, look up, and recall its
gist. Then through the day think back to it often, tell someone about it, discuss it,
and apply it as we can. Doing this day by day enlarges our knowledge, and deepens
bonds with others about the content of the ideas.
Most people feel no urgency to think differently, which scaled up becomes
society’s anti-intellectual, ahistorical narrowness and indifference to looming
problems With no way to apply our ideas, we turn passive and continue in patterns
that will not avert hard times ahead. We put up with frustrating conditions and
presume that intransigent opponents are stronger than ourselves. (But wait a
second. You do have power if you gather the power of many. Then you can change
whatever you want).
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To respond differently we think differently. Knowing this, however, most
people would assume it means a different content to the idea. But the conditions
surrounding it have great power. Is the idea static, perhaps printed somewhere? Or
is it active, being transmitted one person to another, helping us build a bridge? Is it
about a detail, which when changed neutralizes the idea? Or is it fundamental, in
permanent need of change? We look at its intangible quality, for instance, that
should guide our priorities such as love of fellow man, responsibility,
independence, justice, or creativity. A common body of principled knowledge is a
basis for accepting each other so that learning it becomes an initiation into a
brotherhood. Believing it important to keep the planet livable, we develop bonds
around that idea.
And does the idea prepare us for effective action? Knowledge simply about
the universe is has no limit, so with our measured resources, we need to choose
what helps us most to bring essential change. Several facets of the learning
process are important, such as acknowledging what we do not know.
Ignorance All of us are more ignorant than we realize. To appreciate this,
on a large piece of paper draw a big circle to represent all the knowledge in the
world. Inside it, make a smaller circle or dot showing the proportionate extent of
your own knowledge. Note the difference between the two. The area outside your
dot is your zone of ignorance. You are wrong about it even adopting a viewpoint,
and each of us is in the same condition. What we do not know is incomparably
larger than what we do know, yet it can seem to us that we know everything
because we freely apply labels to whatever we encounter and the labels appear to
fill up our entire mind. A downside to this confidence is called the DunningKruger effect, two researchers’ finding that the less people know, the more certain
they are about their ideas (19).
We can liken this to running our car on the gas in our tank. We might
arbitrarily declare, "I have plenty of gas" and keep running till our car quits. But
knowing we have only one gallon left tells us not to stretch our distance too far,
and also that we can fill the tank with much more. Realism about the present
increases mastery of the future: "This is where I start, and this is what's possible.
Let's do it." In acknowledging our limitation we obey reality, which is the most
solid place from which to respond.
Thinking larger. Expanding scope is critical. If in addressing a problem we
don't recognize its reality, our response cannot be effective. And if we fail to
understand it up front and then apply poor thinking to solve it, it worsens. The
primary shift is to release preoccupation with the small piece we think we
comprehend to try to think with the whole that we do not.
A preschool playground offers a parallel. In one I know of, a rope ties six
plastic buckets in series. A child can play with one bucket but using them as a set
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affords more games if they play together. Any child can ruin a game by refusing to
move from a bucket, which occurs often enough that the set is little used. Some
child sabotages any game they attempt.
Society is like the buckets. People grab a benefit for themselves, plant
themselves in it, and block others’ progress. Toynbee (cf. Chapter 3) found that
this shift from care for the whole to care for self was the main threat to good
solutions. Without a community protecting the weaker individual, self-interest
unchecked has historically left the average person’s life “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short” as Thomas Hobbes put it. Throughout time, as a minority coopted the labors of others, the powerlessness of the majority eroded its investment
in society so that when troubles arose, the wealthy looked out the window to see
pitchforks approaching.
It may seem at first glance that people operate everywhere by self-interest-seizing the small piece they can--yet how they balance individual and group needs
is trained. We are programmed to catch ourselves spontaneously when we fall, but
learn to catch others when they fall. Tribes that accounted for everyone’s needs
outlasted those that did not.
This weakness in human thought is not easily altered because our narrow
focus developed over eons. The habit of taking account of novel, face-to-face
information (cf. Chapter 2) aided survival. But even such a view, constructive at
the tribal level, leaves us vulnerable because so much now affects us beyond our
sight. Waiting until we observe a threat, we may notice it only moments before it
overwhelms us.
Reasonable. Change occurs as people recognize a need, talk it over, and
settle on a response. But with a universe to draw on, our challenge is in sorting.
How can this dispersed body of knowledge elicit from itself the best thought and
translate it into social forms?
We can assess our strategies for how they answer that question. A few years
ago, after a spokesman for the LGBT community appeared on TV, a commentator
referred to him as “dangerous.” Asked why he might be dangerous, the
commentator answered, “Because he sounded so reasonable.”
People want reasonable. They want sensible ideas from credible people who
do not distort, deceive, rant, or manipulate. Such people are the primary resource
for change. We think rational, sound sensible, and because we solve problems are
also buoyant; happy about solutions we can offer, and glad to listen to others’
helpful knowledge. We hear out both allies and opponents for what we can learn
(or accommodate), and refer continually to our sense of the good to guide our
progress.
Expanding meaning. Personal experience immerses us in certain
conditions, but to understand them we often need others' help. The entire history of
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the human race can help us comprehend what happens to us, which we find out by
watching, listening, and especially reading.
We know we read well when we can explain it to someone else. We find
sentences that interest us, ponder them, speak about them, and think what it will it
take to apply them. We stock our awareness with things as they are, the real
conditions outside us, and then stretch to less tangible principles, to the mysterious
and invisible, to beliefs and dreams.
As rooted as we must be in the evidence of the world to generate a common
society, it is the meaning we ascribe to the evidence that fuels our energy. We
diminish our power when we leave the inner too quickly. We form within us the
world we wish to have later, live in it, and love what we create. This genesis
occurring subtly within us then takes expression in our actions and becomes the
world we construct.
To act on our values, we open our heart to our purpose which in turn alerts
us to the people and resources we need. A successful businessman I knew said that
ninety-five percent of his work was inward. Reflecting on his business made his
decisions habitually of high quality. We think through what we will accomplish.
Mind models experience. We enter the field of meaning that obtains our results.
When we isolate our imagined world from visible evidence, we invite an
ideology, which presents a danger. The more united in abstract thought a group is,
the more easily it can be tempted to act imprudently. Generations of religious war
between Catholics and Protestants prefigured today’s Islam-based terrorism.
Disciplined armies of any nation can usually be manipulated to serve the schemes
of its leaders (cf. footnote 34).
The meaning field also deteriorates in the opposite direction when diversity
governs. Democracies do not inherently self-correct. They may come to mean
anything people assign to them—anarchy, representative government, corporate
government (“the best government money can buy”), oligarchy, plutocracy, or
exploitive dictatorship. We balance extremes by bringing thought to them that is
Observant so it adapts to reality.
Ethical so it enlists primary human values.
Comprehensive so it acts with due proportion.
Practical so it gets positive results.
Responsible so solutions are applied over time.
Individual so effort remains personally owned.
Self-correcting to avoid self-sabotage.
Urgent so effort is timely.
Expansive so action meets increasing needs.
These are cool-minded qualities. If we build instead with conflict, anger, or
indignation, we may generate more struggle. If we build with ego needs, we may
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run our strengths out of balance or give up prematurely. If we build with special
interests or pet projects, we are dismayed when others’ priorities differ. A
movement instead focuses on what large numbers together desire enough to act on.
Activate thinking. A reason for learning relates to how our mental wiring
links to our actions. Before we act, we refer to our mental model of it. The idea
currently in our attention drives our behavior, usually the one to which we have
given the most recent interest and energy (20). So if we want to act in a certain
way, we take on the thought stream leading up to it. Saturated with thought
appropriate to our goal gleaned from books, magazines, conversations, and the
Internet, we often find the right action obvious. Our thought spontaneously turns
into the results we want.
But to guide others whose thoughts can be anywhere in the arena of human
experience, we must help them keep in mind the reasons for and means of action.
Failure at this largely explains organizational breakdown. Thought did not match
purpose.
For some goals, our thinking is so complete that we need only apply it. For
others, our ability to act far outweighs our insight. Passionate intensity does not
guarantee wisdom, so that we may need to improve the quality of our
understanding before we lift a finger to apply it.
Unite ideas. A movement connects people but not in the spontaneous way
schools of fish and flocks of birds find each other. Humans need a uniting idea, and
lacking one from education or social policy, rely on direct experience. The nation,
the environment, and the troposphere are too far away to unify our attention. We
fill our awareness instead with people whose assumptions become our own. We
cluster with the like-minded. Compassionate people value our compassion and the
competitive our competitiveness. Any demographic label can constitute our bond
but identifying with a narrow group can make it harder to think with a larger
group. A movement must try to evade capture by patterned thinking.
Experiencing. Hands-on experience enables us to connect with a reality
standing outside our personal boundary. It supplies us more than mere knowledge.
We unite this new thing with our fiber, and allow it to touch our feelings.
The effect of physical presence is partly physiological. Neurons in us
evidently fire spontaneously to mirror what we notice someone else do, which
helps explain why good models are so important (21). Presence broadcasts subtle
qualities, touches invisible boundaries, connects us to others' condition. It aids our
empathy, expanding our ability to understand others' inner state.
Pain intensifies the connection. Others' pain may move us toward them
while our own can disable us. Distresses may tempt us to close down empathy and
push away others’ discomfort, but their pain exploding on us can inform us that we
contribute to it, and help us mount the energy to overcome it.
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With problems dispersed globally, the role of our personal experience
changes. Since remote origins escape our sight, our grounded bodies mislead us.
Political arguments about climate pit people who believe only what they see
against people who collect data. That our air is a trifle grey does not inform us
adequately about degraded air quality threatening children with asthma, global
warming, or pollution in distant cities. We do not directly observe our progress
toward killing the last sea turtle and coral reef, so we have to gather summary
evidence; analyze the environmental stressors that will result in cancers a hundred
years from now, endocrine disruption from chemicals loosed into earth and sky,
the poisoning of millions of bees, and die-offs from many causes.
Because of the dispersal of problems and the limits of direct observation, we
often lack the whole story, easily mistaking the meaning of scattered
circumstances. Head-in-the-sand labeling of opponents facts as propaganda leaves
us vulnerable. Those in control generate revolutions by ignoring the obvious.
Forming ourselves. Asserting that the world needs change, we form
ourselves to help that happen. What we imagine becomes our consciousness, so we
choose carefully.
Two levels of learning invite our attention. If we were a middle school
student learning football, we would focus on changes to use in Saturday’s game.
But if we are destined for the National Football League, today’s skill matters less
that our pathway of development, our formation; assimilating the thoughts,
feelings, and actions that will play out over years. To accomplish a large goal, we
need large development.
Let's say you are 25 years old. Jump ahead 30 years. Will all problems be
solved by then? If not, will you still be working at this purpose? If so, what kind
of person will you be? Will you be applying greater competence and understanding
routinely or will you be only a heavier version of yourself now? What will you be
able to accomplish then just by deciding to do so?
From today onward you inescapably form yourself around your highest
value. The saints of history did this around spiritual realities. St. Ignatius Loyola
founded the Jesuits with spiritual exercises that transported them back to the life of
Jesus as their governing reality. Military organizations present standards of
physical, mental, and moral excellence to apply under harrowing conditions. In the
Civil Rights Movement and revolutions of past centuries, a common stream of
thought informed people’s identity, so that changes in their own thinking modeled
their actions.
Wishing others to open to change, we do it ourselves first and modify our
ideas as we receive fresh information. If we do not, we find our own resistance
mirrored back to us and wonder why others reject "the plain facts." Like us, they
prefer their own view of the world.
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In place of insisting we are already right, a more constructive attitude is
"righting," being perpetually in error yet adjusting to truth. We assume that our
mind serves up correct ideas about the information it has, that it is a healthy mind
able to absorb reality, recognize falsehood, and release rigid formulations, but that
this is a process rather than an achievement. We are constantly rebalancing like a
sailor on a rolling deck.
Self-righting becomes easier when people do it together. In a group, we can
challenge each other yet dream as one; recognize an emergent possibility, and give
it life by sharing it. With great news in our personal life, we arrive home shouting
about it. Similarly we present our wonderful vision to society, and how to achieve
it through group activity.
Chapter 10. Question yourself
Do you want to think better?
If that is not a priority for you, you can skip this chapter. It may just annoy
you by offering you ways to do something you don't want to do, which would be a
waste of time. On the other hand, if you face a situation with serious values at
stake and feel it urgent to make the best judgment you can, then read it carefully. It
will give you clues about how your thinking may be going wrong.
Improving society depends on thinking about it. Instincts guide nearly
everything insects, birds, and animals do, but they are powerless to change their
environment. Falcons cannot change the number of frogs they snatch, nor frogs the
population of insects they eat. We, on the other hand, have enormous self-creating
power over ourselves and our environment, but if we do not use this capacity, we
are done for. It is said that dogs can be trained to do anything they are physically
capable of doing, but dogs do not train themselves. Humans who wait for someone
else to tell them what to do might take a lesson.
Mediocre thinking would be less a problem if it were easily spotted and
quickly dealt with, like a bad cold. But complacency about it leaves it a perpetual
concern. History demonstrates that problems worsen with poor collective thinking
and improve when it is good. By definition, any that undermines civilization is
poor--too time-limited though humans are capable of longer, too concerned with
the part instead of the whole, too committed to self instead of others, too immersed
in ideology instead of reality.
And as governments enforce mediocre thinking, civilization turns downhill.
The warming of the planet due to human activity, for instance, was noted in
hearings a half-century ago. Congress, the few trusted by their peers to handle
common problems, ignored the warnings, and aggressive industrialization has
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swamped us with pollution since. Congress exhibited mediocre thinking about a
scientific fact, yet the same limited foresight prevails today in many sectors.
Quality of thinking suffered during the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara,
Secretary of Defense at the time, reflected later on lessons missed such as
“Empathize with your opponents” and “Surface the fundamental issue for debate”
(22). Failing these, U.S. officials spurned opportunities to talk with the North
Vietnamese and did not discover till later that they were not friends with the
Chinese, an assumption that cost tens of thousands of lives.
Empathy is often decisive. Sensitive appreciation of others must inform our
thinking. If we are to alter childhood strategies of resentment or aggression for
solving adult problems, we need to cease considering ourselves as absolutely
correct, completely rational, or entirely in control--qualities that might describe a
machine but not the human software. The malleability of our many forms of
perception, our creativity in shaping ideas, and our imagination’s ability to
exaggerate stretch us to the edge of rationality where new learning must occur.
Several common factors make our self-questioning urgent:
Emotions distort thinking. An organization avoids malpractice by
monitoring the quality of its judgment. Emotion is the most common threat. If I’m
angry, I channel my thinking into a narrower mold.
If I underrate myself, I fail to perform the task needed from me.
If I’m sensitive to criticism, I exaggerate opposition and distance.
If I’m hesitant, I don’t roll into timely action.
If I’m indecisive, I overanalyze and confuse others.
If I’m dominative, I diminish ideas others can offer.
If I’m controlling, I reduce others’ opportunities for leadership.
If I’m passive, I deprive the group of energy.
If I’m reactive, I don’t think things through carefully.
If I’m jealous, I don’t give due weight to thinking outside my turf.
If I’m loyal to only a few values, I don’t weigh other values fairly.
If I’m self-interested, I commit less to others' needs.
The stronger our feelings about an issue, the more likely they are to narrow
our thinking. Intensity may not make our idea incorrect but does block alternative
views. Negative feelings commonly arise as we encounter difficulties, but these
just signal something not yet under our control. We cannot manage this thing as we
wish, so our emotions score it as a barrier. Instead, we can gather the information
our feelings convey (e.g. fear bids us check out if the threat is real), use it to
manage the situation, and release any interfering emotional charge.
We do not vent nor suppress emotions but instead listen to their deeper
message, and bring them into balance with everything else we know. Upon hearing
thunder, our little dog runs for someone's lap and sits there shivering with fright,
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refusing to be reassured and unable to realize he is safe. People can get just as
deeply locked into believing the surface message of their emotions.
For group harmony, we first make a conscious choice to release others’
negativity. We decide first not to react at their level of negativity, not to take on
their inner state, and refuse even to let it affect ours. Once releasing their unhappy,
unbalanced feeling we can respond more objectively at our best.
This is not to suggest being neutral or cold. Emotion gives wings to an idea,
multiplying its impact. Coloring our thoughts, it helps us sort out their significance,
while a complete lack of emotion hinders our appreciation of values. In absorbing
others' energy, we may allow their emotions to stimulate ours. A few feeling
indignation at an injustice transmit it easily to others. Emotion sustains personal
bonds and a group atmosphere not so much by display as by fueling a common
sense of worth and connection. Their implication is to read their message bring
them into balance.
Indifference. We become irrational by not caring whether we are or not and
then deciding we know enough. We say, "I've seen a lot in my years" and call it
good, ignoring how tiny is the mental box we fill. One person seeing the Taj Mahal
says "Nice work," and another’s life changes. We do not get smarter until we
realize there is more to assimilate.
Because we intend to convey understanding, it needs to matter to us that
others grasp what we say, which means that overcoming our own limitations must
matter to us.
When we are indifferent to them, we invite the Peter Principle, promotion to
the level of our incompetence. Wishing to run our abilities out to their end, when
we get there we find ourselves presumptious and naive. So watching those in
power do foolish things, we need not feel superior. The spotlight has not yet turned
on us. Short of the summit of our competence, we appear smarter, asserting we
know what we are doing. To grow in understanding, we presume instead that we
are constantly searchers, hobbled by errors we do not realize we hold.
The implication is that welcoming knowledge about our deficits speeds us
toward realism and competence.
Time envelope. It can sabotage us that our physiology plants us within an
extremely brief time envelope. Embodied where we are, immersed in the
circumstances of the moment, we fail to notice causality unfolding. Future and past
evade direct awareness and from the past we keep just a few pictures here and
there.
Compare the inner breadth of your experience right now to your impression
of dinner a month ago. Do not the last thirty days collapse into a cloud of images
representing almost randomly the meaning of that period? Going back a few
months we lose chunks of time, can recall only scraps of what happened, and soon
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mistake even the year in which important events occurred. Entire years could be
excised from our experience without affecting who we are now, which means that
they did not make much difference.
Yet during each of those days, our experience felt as central then as today’s
does now. This day feels important, yet we cannot hang onto it. An irresistible
tomorrow pushes it aside and today joins an evaporating cloud of unimportant
yesterdays. The wave of significance, the crest of which is this very moment,
heightens, collapses invisibly, and moves on. Our awareness puffs up the
impression of the moment even while keeping only a tiny slice of it, gathering in
everything and discarding almost all of it, thousands of pieces of experience per
day.
We depend on defective tools to learn from the past and project plans for the
future. Our senses send yesterday's valuable and useless to the same guillotine, and
we can barely imagine what is coming. To build on prior knowledge, we need to
try resolutely to hold onto it or else our physical processes spontaneously dissolve
it. Wisdom knocks on our door, waits for a few moments to be invited in, and then
proceeds on past. In practice, these limitations mean we need explicit effort to hold
on to the lessons of the past and to imagine how the future will unfold.
Consistency. Besides our confinement to present-time awareness, we also
generalize what we think we know, correctly or not. A parallel is the blind spot
created by the lack of photo receptors in the eye where the optic nerve takes off for
the brain. Locate it by facing a blank wall and closing your right eye. Hold a pencil
before you at arm's length with the tip at eye level. With your left eye look straight
ahead at the wall, and slowly move the extended pencil to the left in your
peripheral vision. In about eight inches it disappears as it enters your blind spot.
Our visual field does not present a little black hole because our brain fills in,
drawing on the adjacent texture. What we see supplies for what we do not see, just
as with our knowledge. Our brain, working hard to harmonize the contents of our
mind, overrides our gaps. Blind spots are as invisible to our mind as the pencil tip
is to our eyes, and may lead us to ignore scores of meanings crowding upon us,
like a robin poised on a lawn listening for the sound of a worm crawling and
oblivious to cars rumbling past. Immersed in our picture of the world we make our
thinking predictable and ourselves vulnerable to whoever wishes to manipulate our
blindness.
The implication here is the need for deliberate effort to hold on to what
challenges our assumptions.
Pain and stress. Hard physical exercise draws blood from the brain into the
muscles, leaving the brain less efficient until blood flow regularizes, but other
circumstances can produce this effect as well. When we are upset we may note our
mind turn fuzzy, not moving flexibly through details and feeling stuck and
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uncomprehending. Faced with a situation reminiscent of a prior stressing event, our
brain resurrects the same fogginess it had before.
Judgment wavers when we are immersed in hurt or fear so that we generate
poor thinking in others by threats, putdowns, and rejection. Telling ethnic groups
their test scores represent their race stresses them enough that they typically test
worse. Even thinking about being shamed or embarrassed narrows people's mental
ability measurably. Physical pain, emotional hurt, and fear rigidify their naturally
flexible intelligence, so that we know how to damage others' thinking if we choose
to.
The implication is first to notice when we experience pain or stress, and then
remember that it has probably lowered the quality of our thinking.
Power and possessiveness. People’s effort for their economic well-being
may stimulate admirable qualities. Some people, however, regard possessions as
scores in a game of status. Having more brings them attention, so they presume
they should obtain more yet. But if they do not know when to ease up, their
acquisitive drive can distort their judgment. The more power they have, the more
blind they are to its fairness and the harder it is for them to question it. The more
advantage a system gives them, the greater their ethical test in weighing it.
Society adds to the problem by rewarding us for blinding ourselves to
fairness. Endowing us with more when we already have much, it reinforces the
presumption that more for us and less for others is right, warping our perspective.
When California growers tried to prevent farm workers from organizing in the
sixties, a sample were questioned about their attitude toward welfare for the poor.
The more subsidy the grower himself received, the more intensely he opposed it.
Americans by and large respect “producing," and easily overlook any
downside to ability and wealth, do not see strength as even related to, much less a
cause of, weakness. Yet history warns of the tendency of power to ignore the rights
and needs of those who lack it. In our brief national memory, we have supported
slavery, accepted terrible post-Civil War oppression and discrimination against
blacks, felt right in seizing the entire American continent from its prior ownerinhabitants and lying to, displacing, robbing, and killing millions of them.
Presuming our use of power was right led to defeat in Vietnam. Desire for power
soaks up energy we need for understanding the world. Used against the weak, it
results in oppression and alienation.
The implication is that power and possessiveness narrow our perceptions in
support of what benefits us.
Ourselves as baseline. Many believe that if they personally succeed,
anyone can. But we exaggerate the value of our personal experience, trusting it
more than the contrary experience of the human race. Many winners barely notice
that our socio-economic-political system is built for them to win, and those who
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win at any economic game always like it. Because success reinforces their
presumptions, only disaster may change their view. Resistive institutions guarantee
that conditions beyond their control eventually overwhelm them.
The error becomes apparent as we obtain for ourselves the resources that
belong to all. The first lucky one congratulates himself, but limited resources mean
the rest fail. In musical chairs, every round offers one chair fewer than people, so
someone is eliminated. Is the person to blame or is it a no-win situation?
Answering, "He could have fought harder for a chair" pictures a society where the
powerful always get what they want.
Differences accumulate as minor ones at the start are progressively
magnified. An unnoticeable difference between two kindergarteners amplified year
after year leads one to be a university president and the other a part time clerk. The
strongest at the start get stronger because society values advancing them more than
bringing up the laggards.
The implication is that we need to release ourselves as the measure of the
human race.
Roles. By adopting a role, we immerse into a ready-made habit of thought.
Even our birth language reinforces a tribal view. Saying “I am a...”, we take on
role-based thinking, don clothing that fits it, and assume its mind-set--a policeman,
soldier, judge, jogger, laborer, mailman, nurse. Our uniform discloses what others
can expect of us.
But once immersed in a role, we have less motive for fresh learning. We
may even fix ourselves more tightly to what we know, overlearn and misapply it,
develop trained incapacity, and become comfortable only when thinking inside our
label--Jewish, Christian, Moslem, Hispanic, Asian, etc. This can carve off whole
continents of information that might balance our understanding. The structure of
our mind formed by our experiences, fears, and associates flows on untouched by
divergent information. We fail to perceive what lies outside our character, and
avoid alternative thinking until someone rubs it in our face. We don't recognize our
isolation from conditions around us because our role excuses us from the effort.
Role-based group-validated thinking fails when novel information arrives.
When conditions change and the role does not, groups turn into enclaves holding
out against a changing world. Institutions with noble purposes become obsolete,
repeating gestures familiar only to themselves while insisting that circumstances
change. This appears rational for awhile because roles stabilize daily activity. For a
long time conditions obey, answering to the role’s direction.
Over a century ago, Naval gunnery illustrated the power of such thinking,
but it could apply to any organization today. Before 1898, gunners estimated the
distance to a target, guessed an angle for their cannons, waited for the ship to roll,
and fired. Aim was so bad they could go a whole day without hitting anything.
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One day a British officer noticed a gunner getting more hits by trying to aim
continuously with the cannon's clumsy elevating mechanism. A few mechanical
changes made spectacular improvements, and an American ship applied them with
the same results.
We would expect the Navy to adopt the practice at once, but resistance was
so strong that only President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal intervention secured
the change, even then fought bitterly. Studying it later, a social scientist found the
conflict in how personnel identified with aspects of their work. Some liked
handling the familiar gear and did not want to consider its limitations. Others
objected to change in their settled way of life, and others were simply rebellious.
Resistance had nothing to do with results but only with seamen’s beliefs (23).
We might inquire: Do I love my tools and the way I use them? (How many
years did it take me to switch to a word-processor from a typewriter?) Do I enjoy
my life pattern? (What could jar me out of my routine?) Do I resist anyone telling
me what to do? (How can anyone criticize what I have done for years?) I should
be able to use the tools I master, have stability, and not be ordered about.
But by resisting timely changes, we continue on our way until our world
fractures. A Latin phrase captures centuries of wisdom: Ducunt fata volentem.
Nolentem trahunt (Destiny leads the willing. It drags the unwilling). Circumstances
we fail to understand and master destroy us.
We act inside our sense of ourselves. Though assuming we can change,
much of our makeup stays the same year to year, decade to decade. Think how
predictable are people you have known for thirty years. Chunks of their thought
and attitude remain stable, and changes appearing large may just apply the same
traits in different settings. We are each captured in a system that holds us. Another
would need deep hypnosis to match our internal world; perceiving, thinking, and
feeling channeled by powerful assumptions. In helping people change, we in effect
bring them out of hypnosis, which is harder as they fail to acknowledge their
limited state.
The implication is to give special attention to the thinking of those who
challenge our judgment.
Stability. Humans seek stability for its own sake. Once coping with our
surroundings, we are wary of drastic changes. Our vulnerability to circumstances
beyond our control nudges us to keep to the proven, to think and do as we did
before. Uncertainty bids us not to question systems that meet our needs.
Encountering surprises, we return to familiar people, to the like-minded, for the
conserving influence of their views. Civilizations move slowly as a steadying
tendency reins in innovation. A movement takes a new way of thinking out to the
corners of society and affirms that new conditions need new ideas. The implication
is not to allow our desire for stability to sabotage changes we need to make.
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Views. We draw conclusions from two types of sources. One is realityoriented, certainty based on evidence. Civilizations progress mainly as parties
settle their differences by facts all can inspect.
The other type contains opinions, views, interpretations, and preferences that
stretch beyond evidence. For reasons of pride, self-promotion, fear of appearing
ignorant, or even to be creative, people may adopt a stance with little or no
foundation, and when ego prevails, may assert their beliefs even against evidence
or declare it unnecessary. Stating their view may be how they think they obtain
respect. When they assert their opinion, others think they are someone.
But if others tell them they are wrong, threatening their ego, they cannot
acknowledge it and double down on their error. Group think, a socially-reinforced
ideology, passions and prejudices, and a refusal to admit a shortcoming can blind
their understanding. And even recognizing their limitations and wanting change,
they may still find it hard; may fail to recognize how they distort evidence, seek
power instead of serving, want recruits instead of allies, and dismiss subtler values.
1. Present-time sensory impressions soak up their attention, displacing longterm concerns.
2. False memories support the conclusions they want.
‘
3. Emotional distance leads them to discard others’ ideas before hearing
them.
4. Their opinions turn into ideology.
5. Overusing their strengths causes damage.
6. Fears narrow their perspective.
7. They organize their ideas around their dominant feelings.
8. They oversimplify.
The implication is to commit to the discipline of referring to the best
evidence we can obtain for constructing important judgments. We counteract our
limitations in several ways.
Vigilance. We become more rational as the quality of our mind matters to
us more than the point we want to make. We need to be constantly willing to look
at ourselves asking, "How do I bend what I receive?" Because we do not
instinctively form an accurate model of the world, we must remove its cover, must
“dis-cover” it and then “re-member” it; conduct a deliberate, objective analysis of
our thinking. In practice, we attempt to assimilate accurately the content of
another's message and learn what they have to teach us. We release resistive
emotion and examine our deficit curiously.
We do not easily manage this alone because we act within the boundaries we
adopt. A group effort to change together usually succeeds better. Insight awaits us
when we ask others who know us, "How am I to work with?" They may suggest
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how we can connect better to others, that we hold things up, go off on tangents,
exaggerate non-essentials, are judgmental and rigid, or do not follow through.
Sustain conflicting views. Social issues seldom address just one idea.
Conflict is common even in ordinary personal choices. Imagine weighing two
policies, to help a minority catch up (such as by affirmative action) or to urge selfresponsibility. Each view is appropriate sometimes. We get past a disaster “with a
little help from our friends,” but afterward “row our own boat." Both pictures have
value.
Combining viewpoints requires acknowledging the conflict but and holding
it open until the best synthesis is clear. To help us do this, we put into words the
viewpoint we disagree with. Imagine a voter who at different times has been a
Republican businessman, then a religious Democrat, and then a skeptical
Independent and retains a sensitive memory of each experience. He can call up
each frame of reference, can recognize where common ground may lie, and how a
given emphasis might play out. Assimilating all three views, he can draw on his
full understanding at any point in a problem’s evolution.
Public policies need this breadth. If we do not have a sensitive grasp of our
opponents’ values and the best use of our own activity, our efforts more often fall
short. When others' ideas do not mesh with ours inside us, we become
oppositional. Instead we wish to assimilate their thoughts so completely that when
we say, "Why don't we do this?" they hear movement toward their own purpose.
Better maps. Our thinking improves as we ground ourselves in reality that
is never out of date and never errs. That maps err while reality doesn't encourages
us to draw up-to-date data directly from the senses. If we cannot, we are easily
confused. Floating inside a space capsule, are we up or down? Opinion does not
tell us. We have to see where we are, must use our eyes and ears. So much of the
whole remains invisible that we often do not know where we stand.
Our thinking easily goes wrong when we disconnect from reality, which is
hard on bad maps. We correct them by noticing that observation and idea differ-"That's not what I expected!"--and sustaining the discrepancy long enough to
inquire why. We experiment, collect new evidence, modify our perceptions, and
develop better responses.
To do this, we must break out of habitual thinking, discern reality carefully,
and not rely on simplistic formulas. We need a hypothetical spirit, caution, respect
for probable error, and an attitude of gentleness toward elusive data.
The hardest step may be defining a problem, because the nub of it may not
be in the open where we can see it. It may even arise from people's contrasting
intuitions about the meaning of life and man's place in the universe that reach
beyond material evidence. Problems also occur on the edge of our awareness
where tension with another system occurs. There, where our gears must mesh with
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someone else's, we especially need feedback and understanding about what we
have placed outside us as not our business. Seemingly insignificant pieces we
declare alien get back at us whenever a situation is multiply caused, like a manylegged octopus. Tie up seven legs and the last one clings to a rock and thwarts the
effort to move it.
Chapter 11. Reason with Evidence
Opening the door. Through small group discussion (Chapter 4) and
personal study, we accumulate knowledge and practice putting it into words.
Then we spread it by conversation. Approaching strangers about movement
ideas, we communicate successfully about easy topics before opening hard ones.
Sharing a similar experience lends itself to communication, so imagine yourself in
a public place like a bowling alley, bus, subway, plane, lunch room, baseball park,
or waiting room. People report a more pleasant commute on public transportation,
for instance, when they talk to those around them. You catch the eye of someone
near you and offer a comment about the immediate setting. Then:
“May I ask you a question?” We show respect by letting the other choose
whether to converse with us. If they feel reserved today, they let us know and we
pull back.
“Sure, go ahead.” A yes is an invitation to continue and tells us they have
sized us up as worthy of contact.
“What do you think of the current Congress?” Ask any question that invites
alternate viewpoints. If gridlock is the topic, it can be taken as political gain,
halting progress, denying others an advantage, or a means of stability.
.
Surroundings suggest a beginning topic: On a plane, how useful are security
procedures. At a football or basketball game, player safety and whether to regard
college athletes as employees. With a company team at a bowling alley, job
security and CEO pay. On public transportation, spending for mass transit versus
road expansion. Think about the other’s interests. How has climate change
affected local conditions, how would raising the minimum wage affect area
business, how did the recent economic turndown hit them?
“I think it’s bad, etc.” When the other answers, it may help to summarize
their feeling and content if the latter is long or any part unclear: “So you’re
concerned people will go overboard and ...”. Putting your own words to their
ideas, you understand them better, let them realize you want to, make it easy for
them to continue, and show respect.
If their answer is negative, either listen accurately, summarize what they say,
or ask them a question about the least negative part of their comment. If a person
objects to an “anti-business attitude by the present administration,” think of a
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different but positive direction on the same topic: “You must have had an
experience making a business run well.” Whatever ideology or complaint they
offer, note a respectful but positive inference. To even racial bias you could
respond, “So you’ve had good experience working with people of your own
background.” You want to show you understand them, can open communication,
and can accept a challenge yourself. Then together you might explore an idea in
common. Courtesy expands possibilities.
“So what do you think?” they may ask you. If they do not, you might offer
to talk when they pause.
“I’ve been learning about what makes civilizations fall apart, and I’m
concerned about ours.”
After you have listened to them for awhile, most people welcome your
thoughts. You might sum up the argument outlined in Chapter 3, and if you
disagree on evidence, you can suggest how to resolve the difference.
“I believe your information is not correct. If we look it up and it turns out to
be wrong, would you change your position?” If they say no, point out how a
rational society relies on evidence. If they say yes, trade contact information and
decide which of you looks it up and shares it with the other. If they have listened to
your ideas, invite them to summarize what you have explained:
“I’ve mentioned several ideas here. I’m not sure if I’ve been clear. Could
you tell me what you got from what I said?” You modeled what you invite them to
do, and if they respond, it helps them change. Putting into words a viewpoint that
conflicts with our own helps us modify our thinking.
If we do not reason with evidence, we tend simply to assert views. While
knowledge honors the objective world of phenomena, views become a lens that
distorts reality. Channeled by it, we readily deny patent facts that counter our
beliefs until events collapse upon us.
Truth. To understand truth, start with reality (cf. Chapter 7). It exists apart
from what anyone thinks about it, and has stable characteristics such as a span of
so many inches and whether an event occurred or not. To verify truth, we surround
it with evidence anyone can inspect.
Truth uses words or numbers to convey a reality to someone who does not
have the reality itself. The words and numbers agree with the reality. The true
statement is faithful to the reality rather than distorting it or diverging from it,
accurate rather than inaccurate. We can be creative forming a truth because we
must use words, but we have no intent to deceive.
Truth can be argued. There may be several ways to answer, "What’s true
about this?” Any of us might distort thinking without evil intent just by using
information to achieve a goal. Selecting what aids our purpose, we may not notice
that we misapply an idea. Even telling the truth may depend on our ability to
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perceive how others interpret our actions. A part should not warp the whole, but
just being a part, it can mislead. A single forceful fact can obscure an array of facts
not mentioned.
Because situations change constantly and truths are used for different
reasons, our words evolve. We maintain the strength of truth by attempting to
describe nuances accurately. People who assert "This is true for me!" do not
present a truth but declare their loyalty to an idea whose validity is undetermined.
Truth affects social action by guiding our convictions but also by limiting us,
spelling out where reality blocks us. If we are oppressive, unfair, or unbalanced,
truth calls us back from the injury we inflict. It hinders us from promoting our
ideology, pursuing unfair financial advantage, and defending our privileges. While
any of us may search out facts that confirm what we believe and typically find
what we look for, our commitment to truth shows up as we are honest about what
contradicts us. Truth actually matters to us when we accept the hit it implies: "I've
gotten more than my share and now must give some back," or "I've been unfair and
must acknowledge it publicly," or “My ad was distorted, and I need to set it
straight” or “I misrepresented my opponent’s position.”
We become worthy of trust when we seek the truth opposing our position, as
is expected in science. Unless we unashamedly seek out how we are limited and
admit when we are wrong, our mind quietly sets about proving we are right. Even
Charles Darwin experienced this tendency. Realizing that he often forgot
information not aligned with his thinking, he made a habit of immediately writing
it down and saving it.
In politics, admitting flaws in our stance shows integrity that enhances
respect across partisan lines. It may require confronting our allies, but we cannot
honor truth without asking both friends and opponents to live up to it. We clean up
errors among those who listen to us before tackling those who do not.
Experimenting. Government has experimented increasingly since the Fair
Deal’s attempts to cope with the Great Depression in the 1930s. By now it should
be easier every year to try out policies as data bases expand. If 91% of the time the
high spender wins an election, it's a clue about the influence of money in
government. Or has responding to crime with retribution made our nation safer?
We can find out. Experiments await to improve health, education, economic wellbeing, individual freedoms, and social stability; to welcome immigrants, trade
globally, and produce benefit without destroying value. Deductions from ideology
beg for evidence. Excellent state-level programs could be expanded, and despite
our skepticism of strangers, we are not the only nation in the world to have solved
many problems. Great Britain currently is opening new ground in using gentle
nudges from the government to help people do the right thing.
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Collective thought. The most fragile aspect of any enterprise is to think well
about it before we do it. Mistaken thinking means mistaken action. We rise past
brutes only by our intelligence. If we cease thinking, we can return to the Stone
Age in a generation. Creating civilization is our ordinary work, turning elusive
ideas into completed form. Discipline and balance help us do this, but when we
assume that we have all the evidence and insight we need, it will be only luck if we
prosper. As entropy and chaos encroach upon us, lesser motives break down our
constructions of rational thought. If we allow urges and instincts to rule us, we
continually destroy with impulse what we created with discipline.
Group activity is like an orchestra in which actions performed independently
occur simultaneously, each instrument entering at its moment. Musicians blend.
Timeliness matters in human systems where parts carry out the intent of the whole.
Technology works around a unifying aim, but in the soft tissue of social
collaboration, the parts are activity expressing common vision and values.
Organizing means drawing this whole together. We envision a movement
local, regional, national, and international; loosely organized but netted together by
multi-layered communication; pragmatically focused on solving problems by the
best long-term means available while relinquishing ideological, polarizing, and
self-interested solutions, and combining energy and idealism to create good
agreements. We foresee how our actions create effects, buoyed by enough
generosity of spirit to take interest in the fate of others and the survival of the
system.
Eliciting everyone’s best thinking, a group can integrate varied influences.
Learning as a group to welcome others’ feedback and correction improves our
ideas consistently. But if we resist others’ attempts to inform us, we make
collective change impossible and let blind spots sabotage us. As more dismiss
their part, the system grinds and bucks and slows, and when enough quit their post,
the whole thing fails.
We need the sense of proportion larger numbers provide. For those who long
for an elite to solve our problems, the Good Judgment Project advises differently.
It has confirmed a fundamental premise of democracy--that average people’s
combined perceptions can make better judgments than even experts with inside
information (24). In an experiment over a century ago, Sir Francis Galton had a
dead ox hung up at a fair and invited thousands of people to estimate its weight. He
was stunned to discover that, despite some guesses grossly too high or low, the
average of all of them was only one pound from the ox’s true weight. Everybody
thinks better than anybody if we can tap their collective wisdom. Quiz show
audiences are right 90% of the time.
Thought fields. A field is an immaterial, non-physical entity that affects
matter. Fields of thought might be love for our family or a person, concerns of our
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occupation, indignation about injustices, material acquisitiveness, philosophic
preoccupations, competitiveness in sport or business or status, spiritual
benevolence, or developing a personal quality. Our field establishes what is
important and unimportant for us, and today it is for us the way things are. It
directs our focus, carrying us from one activity to another, and anchors us in what
feels like a stable reality.
A thought field typically forms around a core intangible such as a principle
or purpose. It is the reason people do something in the first place, such as justice in
a treaty or fairness in a law. It may be harmony among neighbors cleaning up the
street, or discrimination searching for answers, or responsibility accepting the
discipline of a task, or safety from crime.
The quality–justice, harmony, discrimination, safety, or responsibility–is
what makes a solution work. Its invisibility is especially important for spanning
distance, since an inspirational quality can travel. Heart-felt values jump
continents. Religions generate common effort around their picture of God's plan
seen similarly worldwide, its intangibility allowing it to be universal. Principles of
justice, democracy, freedom, and equality before the law are similarly immaterial
and exportable.
But no principle is adequate by itself. People may agree on one but debate its
applications. Democracy, but when and how? Discipline, when and how?
Responsibility, when and how? Tradeoffs are inevitable. Columnist George Will
suggested three valuable words for politics: “...to a point." Any principle may be
helpful but only to a point. When we enter a situation and ask “What’s going on
here?”, we want to know the salient intangible--injustice, cooperation, what? If we
cannot tell, we may not notice what truly injures us, nor realize soon enough that
we really do not want something we work to obtain. Consider the tension between
justice and mercy. How exactly do we weigh justice for the injured alongside
mercy for the offender?
Or take freedom. All agree that government should use "can't" and "have to"
sparingly, that freedom depends on personal responsibility; that when possible,
problems should be solved without government or at its lowest levels, that
happiness cannot be guaranteed but its pursuit can be made easier, that people have
an innate drive to enhance themselves and provide for their loved ones, and that we
want self-interest to operate fruitfully while preserving fairness. Such issues draw
on freedom.
But we may be puzzled about attorney-client privilege, incarceration without
charges, electronic eavesdropping, mail monitoring, library searches, private
behavior, and holding witnesses. These involve other values. When we fail to grasp
where balance lies, we abdicate effort in one area and over-control in another.
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Much of our social webbing concerns the consequences of actions, holding
people accountable for what they do. Many debates boil down to who is
responsible for what. Depending on how they view responsibility, levels of
government may jockey to pre-empt some problems and avoid others. Resolving
such arguments urges us toward a refined understanding of responsibility.
Ideology vs. evidence. Ideology assumes certain conclusions correct
before we ever look at the evidence. Its usefulness declines as it blocks fresh
perception, arbitrarily affirms some categories of knowledge and discards others.
Labeling ourselves liberal or conservative, in fact, is a way of saying “This says
how I am right before you say a word to me.” A curious effect of an ideology is its
tendency to draw our thinking into a smaller base, believing we gain nothing by
wandering outside it. A sign of taking this too far is discovering that when silent
about our ideology, we have nothing left to say.
Blunt-edged labels serve us poorly, leading us to support unprincipled
behavior in allies and oppose valid ideas from opponents. Coasting in the status
quo, we readily skate past big issues like oppression and injustice, ignore how
power treats weakness, or a ruling minority abuses a disempowered majority. A
national ideology limits even what is admitted into mainstream thought. “This war
is a great idea” may compel a nation in thrall to its military while riding roughshod
over contrary evidence. Ideology reassures us, “We know how to do this. We did it
before."
Centuries of experience could guide us if we were historically minded. Back
in grade school I believed for many years that The Dark Ages were a prolonged
period of bad weather. But they were dark intellectually because people believed
they knew enough already. Churchmen said that since learning about the world
offered no spiritual gain, it was pointless. Advances by the Greeks hundreds of
years before were declared irrelevant, the world’s greatest library at Alexandria
was torched at churchmen’s orders, and a thousand years passed just to regain lost
ground.
Ideological generalities can still tell us what to do today, narrowing us so
that we fail to notice the wrong we are poised to do. The War on Terror led to such
a demand for intelligence that American soldiers abused prisoners of war with
superiors’ approval.
We can encourage each other to look at what is before us. For 1500 years
people believed that flies had four legs, but a glance at a fly counts six. The error is
astonishing because so easily corrected for so long, but it persisted because people
used an answer book instead of their own eyes; Aristotle said so. With an authority
to rely on, people ignored evidence.
So we might ask ourselves, "Do I have six of anything I count as four?
What have I lost because I failed to look?" Ideology does not tell us we are
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creating a financial disaster (“Aren’t the profits from these derivatives just great?”)
or destroying a resource (buffalo, passenger pigeon, fish). It reassures us we are
right even before we count the buffalo.
In the last century, economic, racial, and political assumptions became
ideologies. Communism and Nazism cost the world dearly, and passionate ideas
circulate today among Jihadists. A vulnerability in the human psyche awaits an
empowering force, a worst that can rule our best when we aim to reinvent others'
lives. But if negative beliefs can motivate so thoroughly, we should believe it at
least possible for positive ones to do the same.
Belief systems. Ideology can extend beyond politics and economics to our
very orientation to life. Mark Gerzon describes how. American attitudes split
generally into six "states": religions, corporations, the disempowered, the media,
the transformational, and the governing. Identifying with a state raises its
adherents' confidence, links them with allies, and limits common ground with
opponents.
We advance our state first by presuming it valid, our view and reality
matching. With its own axis as its criterion, it displaces the values in others. If our
attitudes tilt thirty degrees off balance, the rest of the world appears to lean away
from us, not we from it. Meanings find their place in the version we adopt, and our
emotions are at home where we spend time with people like us. Maybe you
remember a group that gave you acceptance and status when you were young, but
eventually you realized that the group was limited, and that your growth meant
leaving it.
As adults we need to notice how our state isolates us, then soften our
boundary and spend time with those who believe differently. Even temporarily
considering how others see the world jars loose new perceptions. We relinquish
how we see it and open to how the other sees it and defines good for himself. If
we were in his place, this is what we would want.
We balance ourselves also by recognizing each state’s special gift and
companion danger. Religions offer faith but are challenged by dogmatism.
Corporations offer ingenuity at the cost of materialism; the disempowered,
conscience versus defeatism; the media, communication versus sensationalism; the
transformationals, vision versus elitism; and the governing, leadership versus
divisiveness. To know if we offer the gift or the danger, we can reflect on how our
dominant feeling would affect the world if left unchecked (25).
Analytic tools. We understand human experience through perspectives we
apply to it like these.
1. CAUSE and EFFECT. What determines or affects what? Do we mistake
sequence or proximity for causality? Four kinds are the material cause (physical
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objects and conditions), formal cause (ideas about it), teleological cause (purpose),
and efficient cause (agents making it happen).
2. CERTAINTY. How certain are we? Healthy self-doubt gradually frees us
from past mistakes: "I may not see this fully." We seek out challenge to our current
thinking.
3. COMPARE and CONTRAST. How is one thing the same as or different
from another? A condition may catch our eye because not what we expected.
4. EVENTS. An event may comprise several causes. Is it predictable or
unexpected? How does it connect to other events past, present or future?
5. FACT. Is it based on fact or opinion, true or false? Resolved by gathering
data or weighing competing interpretations?
6. IMAGINATION. How can this be visualized? How can we picture it
differently or from another angle? Can we make a story out of it?
7. IMPORTANCE. What scale of importance do we use to judge it and
where does it stand on that scale?
8. MATERIALS. What are its components or parts? What can be seen,
touched, heard, shaped, or handled? How do physical qualities influence
outcomes?
9. MEANING. What did an author say? Quote his/her words. What did the
author mean? Check his/her frame of reference in other writings. What do we
understand it to mean? Integrate it with our other knowledge.
10. MOTIVATION. What moved the people who brought it about? What
motives did they appeal to? Which influences were major and minor?
11. ORIGIN. The first cause of something often determines its quality. What
is the source of it? What is behind it?
12. PART and WHOLE. How is this part of something larger? What are the
smallest units of it? How can it be structured or divided?
13. PATTERN. How is this ordered? Is a pattern intended, accidental, or
changeable?
14. PEOPLE. Who participates, benefits, or is affected? What are their
concerns?
15. PROCESS. Is this a "how to do" something, steps in a sequence? Where
does it begin and end?
16. PURPOSE. Who intended this for what purpose? What logical outcome
can be inferred from its conditions?
17. REASONS. Is this evidence supporting something else? What supports
it? Is evidence assembled or awaiting collection?
18. RULES. Is this a rule for understanding or doing something? Is it used
rationally or arbitrarily? Does someone use the rule to control?
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19. STEREOTYPES. Who applies general labels? What shreds of truth do
they contain, and how can others fill in their gaps?
20. SUBJECTIVE and OBJECTIVE. Is this created in someone's mind
according to their view of the world, or does it exist in external reality?
21. SUBSTANCE and QUALITY. What is the basic nature, the thing itself,
and what variable qualities does it possess?
22. VALUES. What intangibles are affected or expressed? Does a spiritual
viewpoint differ from a practical or material one? What are the priorities?
23. VISIBILITY. Is this hidden or apparent? Do appearances differ from
fact? How do we distinguish surface from substance about an issue? (26)
A task force studying a regional criminal justice system might shape its
investigation around many of these factors:
What are the causes of the present levels of criminal activity?
How certain are those causes, or are they speculative?
How does our system measure up to the best ones elsewhere?
What current events arouse interest?
What should be the aim of the criminal justice system?
What novel solutions are proposed?
What is known about the process of rehabilitation?
How do stereotypes maintain the current system?
How do facilities and equipment affect programs?
What are the values and viewpoints of the major players?
What were the founding principles of the system?
Who benefits from the current system? A redesigned system?
What objective evidence should determine our direction?
What new information needs to be gathered?
Chapter 12. Develop a long-view narrative
A movement can endure as long as needs exist, but often a few gains take
the edge off people's sense of urgency and they coast. Sustained effort may depend
on changed thinking.
In earlier times, the activity of others living elsewhere concerned us less.
All conditions were local and we hoped others would handle their problems. Yet
confining our attention to our own locality means that needs outside our experience
can languish and thresholds pass before we even learn about them.
Think of the sudden realizations about DDT, the ozone hole, and acid rain.
In the latter case, New Englanders found their trees starving, foliage dropping, and
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seedlings not sprouting, and were startled to realize that air was killing their
plants. They had to track down coal burning factories hundreds of miles away.
Many of our needs today are controlled by others who can ignore them and
promote their own interests instead. Addressing such problems means changing the
scope of our thinking. Having failed earlier to do this, we now face a moving
Antarctic ice shelf and a melting Greenland projected eventually to inundate
coastal cities.
Stretching our thinking is vital. Imagine growing up collectively concerned
about the long-view big picture. We would wonder whether there would be enough
left for everyone, how to accommodate the needs of all, how our personal actions
affect poeple in other countries and in the future--considerations that are not
instinctive. Once placing our own benefit first, we address it every day while needs
of the whole seem to be others’ business.
Systems. Long-term issues demand a little imagination from us because
systems may have long distances between beginnings and endings. We already
meet the needs of large numbers through chains of causes--as with pensions,
education, and pipelines for health care. But because systems can be sabotaged at
many points, they need careful design. An economy developing by accident and
self-interest turns out to generate severe inequality decades later. Who would have
thought? And who would imagine that U.S. industry’s pollution affects 24 million
suffering from asthma? The national minimum wage affects millions directly, and
toxins dumped in coastal waters drive out the fish.
A large context of life sustains us. And when our ideas about it are both
wrong and influential, they send out tides of negative influence while devoting
public resources to them legitimates them. If we are not careful, we are left only
with piecemeal means to meet global needs.
Vision. People's reply to many needs is "I don't see it that way." One
disputes what appears to another as solid fact. This occurs somewhat inevitably
because long-term vision escapes observation. Ask a dozen men to move a boulder
and they see the same problem, but in changing society, the whole never comes
before our senses. We see, hear, and touch only local circumstances. To grasp the
whole, we depend on our imagination to fly the world and the time line, inspect the
life of every being, and observe how our mind symbolizes it. We infer from
evidence and combine our impressions, look up and out, disengage from self- and
present-oriented concerns in order to weigh them against an indistinct future. By
our vision we frame an ideal that inspires us and project ourselves into it. As more
subscribe to it, our efforts fulfill it.
To perceive this way together, we have to be able to relinquish our hold on
personal experience. Every one of us is planted in an individual perspective.
Basing our thinking on it, we are vulnerable to claims of ego, selective perception,
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presumption, and exaggeration. Even logic and reason may be no help when they
explicate an original flaw rigorously, making an entire system of thought as faulty
as the first idea.
We need to acknowledge constantly that something is lacking in what we
know, that we reach beyond our grasp, and need to hold our existing thinking
lightly because we automatically exaggerate its objective value. Encountering
novel thought, we need a willed openness even to retain it long enough to consider
it. A characteristic of geniuses is said to be an almost childlike receptivity to
unfamiliar phenomena while resisting premature conclusions.
Most of what we want to change we cannot accomplish alone or quickly.
Pursuing a goal for generations requires group memory and persevering
imagination. When some pass from the scene, others need to take up where they
left off in numbers not known until after the change is accomplished. All we know
at a given point is that we need more. Tens of millions may vote with us in a
presidential election from similar values so a vast field of thought supports us.
We can champion the aims of all, and accrue the power of many. Those
addressing global warming, poverty, prisons, schools, food, and energy need to
achieve their interests together. We wish to think as one while drawing on all. The
puzzle we work on mutates constantly, which calls for communication between
those who observe different facets.
.
Time line. Picture living fifty years in the future and looking back at the
present. We would wonder, “What on earth were people thinking?” and “What
could have turned things around?” We wish to understand now by what our
hindsight will be then.
We aspire to bigger goals as we ally with more people, grasping an aim and
allies together. The scope of our thought depends on who we think with, so that we
need to associate with people who have a comprehensive, action-oriented
perspective.
Public figures instead often minimize: “How little can we do here to make
this politically tolerable?" or "How can others do better in a way that costs me
nothing?" Their arrow of purpose is toward avoiding rather than engaging with
problems. But when common intent takes hold, resources can combine to
international dimension. The presidents of a hundred nations together can say to
their people "It’s in the best long-term interest of all of us to do this,” asking the
same change from billions at once.
Preoccupation with dramatic events and coercive power diverts us from
chronic problems that require good thinking applied over time. The U.S. use of the
atom bomb in World War II led to funneling world resources into nuclear
programs for decades. Countries measured their power by how many multiples
they could destroy life on earth, and took up great efforts in brief time through
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technology, like sending men to the moon or going to war. National culture still
acts out movie themes in which a surge of energy settles the plot, bad guys are
shot, and hero and heroine hug at the final credits.
But issues resolved quickly in stories take a long time in reality. Pollution,
poverty, illness, injustice, exploitation, and illiteracy are not resolved in a
campaign. We check our solutions for hastiness, for expecting grand outcomes
from too limited a focus. The good of the whole invites our attention. The air that
all breathe, pure or polluted, is ours too. The clean water that supports life supports
us also. For the world to prosper, millions need to think unselfishly at least some of
the time.
As selfishness prevails, national legislation is harder to influence. The
structure of society, cabled as it is between countervailing forces, sustains things as
they are. A century of effort obtained the vote for women. Dating the Civil Rights
Movement from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a century and a half later
many of its aims still languish, such as economic and educational equity. The
environmental movement, with important gains a half-century on, faces needs
accelerating faster than its strength. International economic development outpaces
environmental protection even as the latter's urgency grows.
Excuses. And while more gain is possible from longer time horizons,
expanding scope can also perversely excuse personal involvement. Our minds
restrict us to problems matching our belief in our capacity so that we set goals
usually not much beyond our current level. A sales manager explained to me that
most of his people could only imagine earning about 25% more than they already
made, which probably applies also to social action.
This is not to say that people do not care about the world. They may notice
that their system works poorly, but with no idea how to proceed, they work at their
own interests, think about others as they must, and leave the fate of the whole to an
elected few operating perpetually beyond their influence.
These days a scant minority have the power to affect the structure of the
system, and because of people's indifference, they have disproportionate influence.
If they are self-serving, they can have practically any outcome they wish, and when
they use their knowledge for their own gain, no larger intent maintains the
system’s productivity. As more benefit themselves first, less attention goes to all
other issues, and concerns that do not afford profit to anyone receive leftover
thought. Conditions ignored follow their trendlines across thresholds of disaster.
We have passed the tipping point, for instance, at which atmospheric pollution will
affect the climate for centuries to come.
Mythus. Our most fundamental concept about ourselves drives our longterm effort. When we ask as a group, “Why are we doing this?", to answer we refer
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to our mythus, a small corner of our thought-field, our picture of our collective
identity telling us who we are, what we do, and why.
It is the version of ourselves that we sustain by disciplined effort because it matters
to us. Because of our mythus, we work harder.
Any group may develop its own mythus, affirming what it regards as valid
and urgent in its identity and actions. Americans have been defenders of freedom
against brutal aggressors, explorers establishing civilization in the wilderness, an
expanding nation forging westward, and a melting pot welcoming immigrants.
Many public documents have put words to aspects of the mythus, such as the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights; and slogans
like Abolish Slavery, Preserve the Union, Manifest Destiny, Women’s Suffrage,
the Monroe Doctrine, Remember Pearl Harbor, War on Poverty, and the War on
Terror.
Action aligned with the mythus seldom requires public justification because
its values are presumed. But weighing our present one, we might listen to George
Washington at the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “Let us raise a standard to
which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God"—words
carved into stone in the arch at Washington Square Park in New York City so later
generations would not forget them. Today we still wish for standards that attract
the wise and honest and are clear enough to be taught in schools everywhere and
ground political discourse.
But standards have always challenged the nation's mythus. During his visit
here in the early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans' overriding
value was the pursuit of wealth—a value not changed much in two hundred years.
In the 1987 movie Wall Street, character Gordon Gecko declared, “Greed is good”
and Americans nodded, regarding it reasonable to reward gain achieved by nearly
any means, although history has not found greed a benevolent force.
We assume people take care of themselves--our self-responsibility ethic--but
no common view prevails on how society raises some to success and drives others
to the margins. In maintaining slavery, our pious nation blinded itself to
fundamental injustice. And believing society can get by today with much of it
ignorant, sick, and poor, we create a disaffected population that ceases to believe in
it and eventually stops cooperating with it.
Till the development of common law in western Europe, people assumed
that the powerful would run society and the rest could only pray to hold out till an
early death. This shifted somewhat when people decided that collective power
rested upon their consent. Citizens were invited to help define conditions affecting
their lives and began to believe that the forms of society mattered, that people
deserved equal rights and justice under law.
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The premise that everyone is important, however, has always been an affront
to those committed to aristocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy. To them, democracy
is a threat, but as the majority allow them to do it, they quietly subvert its forms to
retain their privileges.
Chapter 13. Multiply numbers
While winning elections is the customary means of changing society, it may
not be enough. The reason noted earlier is our system's unusual structure that
inhibits change. To surmount this, greater numbers will need to agree on what they
want, so that a movement has to figure out how to multiply.
To make this happen faster than a century, imagine a group that patiently
goes out to meet people week by week. Their modest goal is for each member to
bring in just one new person each month, which means that their numbers double
monthly. Let's look at how this works out.
First month, one guy enlists his buddy. They talk week by week and include
others in their conversations. Second month, two join them, totaling four. Two
months in and it seems like they're nowhere, only four people have signed on, but
the key is that they know what they are doing. Third month, the four become eight
as some of the early seeds bear fruit, though numbers still seem minimal for all that
time spent.
But continuing at that pace, in nine months they have 256 members, in a
year, 2048. Numbers grow rapidly after that, so that in 18 months they have
131,042 members just by each obtaining one new person from a whole month of
outreach; 131,042 in a year and a half from a standing start.
By now everyone understands the activity that makes the difference. They
reach people deeply, deeply enough that new people jump in with the same
enthusiasm, and in another six months, two years from the beginning, they have
8,386,688 members. Four more months and they have more members than elected
the last president, 67,093,486. In two years and four months with each person
finding just one other person per month, movement members alone can elect the
president. That that sounds easy but has never happened prompts the question why.
The plan depends on a critical detail. People early into the process keep
working. They understand how essential is contact with others, and make it happen
day by day. The first person to start things off brings in 28 other people in 28
months, the next person to start brings 27, and so on. They continually reach new
people outside their personal circle, but in addition, every new one becomes an
independent source of initiative. Growth occurs as people change deeply. Steady
results even from newcomers means that their early depth generates their later
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effectiveness. Each one develops competence and motivation strong enough for
their actions to come easily, persistently, and on target.
Framing effort. The frame matters. Imagine a hundred people each thinking
“I’m doing this alone,” who accidently decide on the same day to talk to someone
about the movement's ideas. When ninety find the person unreceptive, they think,
“That didn’t work” and give up. But a we exists that did succeed. Meeting later the
hundred discover that ten had a positive response, and realize, “If we just do that
ten times, we reach a hundred new people!" A we is the actor. Random
aggregations do not draw on the strength of group purpose.
Urgency is another critical frame. It arises objectively into awareness as
problems pass a threshold. Effort today is important because tomorrow conditions
will be worse and harder to change. Melting Greenland ice is objectively urgent.
The challenge is for the threshold to matter, for people to believe they must
respond. Leaders offer reasons and a plan of action, help people grasp how they
can meet a need, and that its time is now. They weave personal tasks into a wave of
shared energy.
State-level activity can be urgent. A dominant minority can control a state by
voting restrictions, redistricting, and other means: “We don’t care if you march.
We have your district buttoned up. We don’t care if you register and vote. We
have squeezed out a sufficient proportion to maintain a majority. We don’t care if
you advertise. We can outspend you. We don’t care if you object to legislation. We
have hot-button loyalties protecting our positions.” A minority dominates not
through a single law or policy but advances its interests by varied means.
Cues close in time convey urgency best. Think when an issue enveloped
you. Perhaps 1) an activity awakened your feelings for your fellow workers or for
the needs you addressed. 2) You acknowledged that the issues were urgent and that
a response from you was fitting. Bad things were about to happen. 3) People you
respected and valued drew you in. Someone asked you to take action. 4) Even
small steps made you feel responsible and involved. 5) You felt a connection with
the need and adopted the values, thoughts, and feelings of the group; worked with
others who felt the same way. 6) Leaders removed blocks so you could act quickly,
and information flowed to you at once: “I got this to you as soon as I could,”
implying “so you could respond right away,” or “I wanted to make sure you had
what you needed.” 7) You pounced on information you received and passed it on,
kept ideas moving, involvement passing from one person to another. Every place
information stops makes a purpose less important. If you act as though time does
not matter, others conclude you are right.
Simplicity. The Cookie Principle is, “If you can bake a dozen cookies, you
can bake a thousand dozen.” When a replicable action achieves your goal, keep
doing it. Don’t complicate things. Four simple activities get steady results.
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1. Street corner information. Go to a busy street corner with a team.
Highlight an issue on placards. Prepare more detailed information you can hand
out explaining how people can follow up with a meeting or lecture, an office
offering more information, a card they can fill out if they wish to be contacted, a
website where they can register, or a phone number to call. The team on the street
corner answers questions, distributes information, and collects contact details.
2. Approach individuals. Remember the salesman's basic rule: time in front
of potential customers. Knock on doors, call people logged into your cell phone,
call the phone book, or distribute handbills: “Friday nights we meet at the church
basement at 8 p.m.”
Before a word is spoken, personal effort conveys a message: This matters. It
cuts through layers of suspicion about clever messages beamed by TV. Your
presence at their door tells a homeowner or renter, "You matter enough for me to
seek you out."
Doing this, you find your natural allies. If you are right about what has gone
wrong with society, they do not expect to be treated well, valued, helped,
defended, nor reached personally. The substance of your message stands before
them whether or not they realize it immediately. Face to face you say to them, "We
are here for you, to serve your needs and your life. We are your allies." You
explain yourself and ask questions:
My name is John Jensen, I’m with the movement for change. Your first goal
is connection, a little rapport. You listen carefully to what they say, respond
accurately, and never talk past them; notice their surroundings, the details that
reveal their world, and comment on what might be common ground: toys in the
yard, car worked on, plants, crafts, decorations, etc. You enter by the open door.
Do any issues concern you personally? If they are undecided, mention
possibilities.
Are you concerned about immigration? Economic inequality, poverty,
climate change, the Supreme Court, job opportunities? About ineffective
government? Education?
Draw out their personal experience: “So how has that affected you?"
Uncover what matters to them, what raises urgency, makes them indignant or
worried. Knowing that, you can speak their language.
When they inquire about you, ask for a little of their time: I’m not getting
paid for doing this. I believe it's important for the country and I can explain it to
you in five minutes.
Wait for their agreement. Some will be busy or uninterested but others open.
Ask for a time to talk, exchange contact information, and if they say “I have time
now,” explain the basics:
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In a study of twenty-one civilizations, a historian found that the main reason
they fell to pieces was their leaders changed. They stopped looking out for the
whole society and just used power to benefit themselves. When those without power
realized they were not included in the system, they lost faith in it. Eventually the
society ignored major problems and broke apart.
This has been happening here since the 1970s. The U.S. is now the most
unequal of the industrialized countries of the world, spends as much on its military
as the next seven countries combined, and is the second biggest polluter. Congress
is in gridlock, and ordinary people are shut out of democracy by gerrymandered
districts, big money, and voter restrictions. We need leaders who want democracy
to include everyone.
Inquire how you might involve them in action or learning.
Do you have friends who might like to know about this?
Could we get them together here, and go over these ideas with them?
Could I pick you up for a meeting Wednesday evening?
We need a captain for this block who will get information to the other
houses.
Could you do some phoning?
3. Home meetings. Anyone can start a home meeting. Call acquaintances,
present an idea, and invite them. Acquaintances are a better pool than friends
because there are more of them, and friends may feel freer to say no. The more you
contact, the more you find. Even one is a start. If two of you understand and agree,
you can approach others together.
While meetings can be of any size, consider dividing into groups of four or
five to involve people in discussion. Large group presentations may impress people
but small groups help them assimilate ideas (cf. Chapter 4). People talk through the
why and how of a movement and steadily add more numbers.
4. Development. Ultimate progress depends on people changing deeply
enough to work steadily at the movement's purpose. To help them increase their
competence, we
• keep track of everyone to whom we speak,
• sustain our relationship with them,
• expand their grasp of the issues
• ask for their help approaching others
• support and accompany them in the action
• help them develop by engaging them in study groups
• have them practice communicating the ideas of the movement
• give them assignments they can carry out and report back
• assess their success and determine subsequent direction
• take interest in their effort and support them.
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Multiple overlapping activities. Imagine five friends attending a university
lecture on a social problem, and the following week they meet to discuss it for an
hour. They contact their friends, write a letter to an agency, meet periodically to
share what they read, but have no effect on the problem.
At another university, five friends meet the next day instead of a week later,
and spend all night talking instead of an hour.
• They decide to run with the idea.
• They tell everyone they know and invite them to their next meeting, tripling
their number.
• They assign individual responsibilities for writing articles and contacting the
media.
• They prepare a handbill and enlist everyone to distribute it.
• They follow up on each one’s contacts, enlarging their group further.
• They invite new people to help with specific tasks so that all feel part of the
activity.
• They bring in speakers about the issue to reach the university community.
• They circulate a petition concerning the problem locally.
• They confer with office-holders and candidates for their influence on the
issue.
• They visit other campuses, promote seminars and talks, and initiate parallel
groups.
• They involve everyone willing to help.
• Their groups generate other groups that eventually affect local, state, and
national agendas.
Two groups are similar at the start. One takes many steps quickly, finds
more ways to express their ideas, reaches more people, and arranges for group
continuity and effectiveness.
Chapter 14. Elect a creative minority
A dominant fact determines outcomes almost by itself. The big fact today is
that the U.S. is an oligarchy instead of a democracy, government by a few (27) . A
minority with personal power have arranged for American society to benefit them.
Society has encouraged opportunity for them and helped them even surpass their
prior achievements.
If they were thinking well, they would use their influence to solve common
problems rapidly. Everyone would be happy with little interest in change or
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discouragement about government. But distort a good thing and you get a bad
thing. When the dominant do not look out for the rest of us, they degrade the entire
system.
The central issue is their use of power. Those possessing it can often decide
how much they will damage the environment, use up irreplaceable resources,
further burden near-broken individuals, and leave millions scrambling for survival-in job opportunity, compensation, education, health, or justice. While there are
many issues to argue, the prior question is who does it. When one side arrives at a
negotiation with all the chips, bartering usually turns out the same. We first reassign places at the table.
We need to employ the structure of democracy to restore its function, which
is not a small task. Many citizens stand aside because they feel helpless, lack a say
in who even runs for office, and believe their vote will not matter. Assuming their
effort is fruitless they are politically passive, so we help them understand the issues
and resume participation. Reducing stress in general aids turnout since the more
stressed people are, the less likely they are to vote (28).
A candidate with a thousand people in the streets does better than one with a
hundred, and a candidate’s own effort matters. In a municipal election in a small
city, a man previously unknown to the public led the entire slate. Asked afterward
how he did it, he said he had “knocked on about three thousand doors.”
Upon sniffing public opinion, some modify intransigent ideas to remain
electable, but those who genuinely embrace inclusive values are likely to produce
better outcomes. We identify them by examining their beliefs and actions, and
elect them by familiar steps:
• Make every campaign worker fluent with issues and reasons for supporting a
candidate, and with the story of what the dominant minority has done.
• Knock on every door to get the word to voters one at a time.
• Bring ideas into the mainstream by placards, demonstrations, marches,
interviews, and debates.
• Organize people to talk to their neighbors and speak up at meetings.
• Register everyone and help them vote in all elections.
Political workers familiar with these activities are probably the best source
of a movement. They understand delivering ideas and advancing values, and
already communicate and work as a team. They probably began when someone
invited them, the work fit them, others supported and guided them, and they felt
they might accomplish something. A movement just adds more people, a bigger
concept, and a longer time line. Satisfied that they have defended their own
interests adequately, unselfish people step up to defend the turtles, the birds, and
the children.
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Weighing candidates (cf. Chapter 3). People reveal much about their
beliefs by their affiliations. State and national positions of their party signal their
priorities even though candidates may assert that they “think for themselves.”
Because they face party pressure, they can be challenged on every policy their
party has advanced or even that influential members of their party have promoted.
The more a party enforces legislative priorities, the more individual candidates are
accountable for them. For instance:
• Your party majority supports gerrymandered districts and tighter voter
registration laws. Would you oppose them on these issues?
• Your party may select ideological candidates as judges. Would you oppose
your party?
• Your party obstructs legislation heavily supported by the public. Would you
cooperate with that?
• A wing of your party has voted to shut down the government and to refuse to
pay legally incurred government debt. Would you defy your party on those
points?
• Some in your party do not believe in the role of government but propose to
run it. Would you support them?
• Your party asserts that corporations have the same rights as human persons.
Do you agree?
• If you say you would oppose your party in these important ways, why are
you in that party?
An inconsistency strikes harder presented it person. A citizen rises in a town
hall meeting and says, “You tell us X now, but you said Y two years ago” and
remains standing until hearing an adequate answer. We highlight contradictions
between current statements, previous stands, and values important to us because
discrepancies stimulate thought. When people hold up contrasting details about
them, candidates cast about for a way to harmonize them and may admit an
uncomfortable truth. Tension between belief and behavior is an especially
appropriate question for church members because of their mandate for honesty and
other virtues.
Christians. A reason for seeking churches' help is that their people already
understand dedication. Some of the most dedicated in history were moved by
religious beliefs, the saints, but many others also made a difference. The churches'
Abolitionist effort helped eliminate slavery in England and America, and the Civil
Rights Movement drew heavily on them. Some local churches are a last resort for
people in need, giving them a natural affinity with a movement having a moral
purpose. But they may find it hard to take on the direction suggested here because
no natural criterion singles out the issue for them to focus on at a given time.
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A standard to suggest is, Work on the most important value you can actually
affect. To help them pick from that field, Christians might consult their source.
What did Jesus tell them to do about their society? We understand his answer by
noting what people took for granted that colored what they heard. They were sure
that:
• Rome was a brutal oppressor.
• The Messiah would overthrow Rome and institute a Jewish-run state.
• The scribes and Pharisees controlled every facet of their lives.
They accepted that someone was going to govern them. The question was
who. They thought Jesus as Messiah would step up, and he appeared to do so as he
called out the scribes and Pharisees for their hardness of heart, and for controlling
people's lives. He told them, "This kind of spirituality is over and done with,"
although it took a few years for them to relinquish the body of Jewish practices.
But about their relationship to Roman oppression, some of Jesus’ teachings and
example are strange to our ears though indisputable.
• Surrounded by slavery, he evidently urged his followers to accept it, so that
we read St. Paul telling the Colossians (3:22) "Slaves, obey your masters," a
text that American slave owners often cited to justify the practice.
• The government tortured and killed for minor reasons, and he ignored those
events.
• Rulers were grossly unjust but he bade his followers cooperate with them.
• The Romans practiced crucifixion, infanticide, and homosexuality and he let
these things be without comment.
Why would he do that? He had plenty of opportunity to provide succeeding
centuries with precise rules of conduct covering every conceivable evil; could have
dictated them exactly and told his followers to lay them on everyone around them;
could have instituted a government had he chosen to. That he did not cannot be an
oversight but must have aligned with his mission.
He told his followers he did not come to exert political control, the
expectation they were eager to implement. His teaching instead was so shocking,
so unbelievable, that they did not understand it until after he was gone. He came to
introduce them to a different reality. Going after political control would have given
the wrong message then just as it does now; would easily have overwhelmed the
spiritual understanding central to his teaching then just as it does now. For
comparison, think how its militarism has injured Islam's spiritual message to the
world--because Mohammed for a time promoted military objectives. Three ideas
summed up Jesus' direction about relating to a barbaric society.
1. Live in the spiritual reality I open up for you. Get right with God.
2. For yourselves, don't do the bad things you see going on around you.
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3. About other people, stop trying to control them and instead take care of
their needs.
We hear not a peep from him or his apostles that they should hunger and
thirst for social dominance, coerce others' beliefs, or wage sectarian war, but
always the opposite. He does not instruct them, when they had enough power, to
force others into their beliefs but always the opposite. Yet for centuries they
engaged in theocracy, a tendency that dismays us as we watch it emerge in Islam.
Been there, done that, bad deal. He often tried to teach them, "Don't get
preoccupied with visible power and gain, with wanting to control each other and
amass material wealth" because he had something much more important that
should absorb their apparently limited attention then as now.
Christians invite discussion of these things by claiming to apply his
teachings and not just quietly and privately. They were bidden to invite others'
scrutiny and be the light of the world, so we can ask them, “Do you do what Jesus
did? If not, why not”?
To help guide what they should look for, Jesus asked for two activities that
would demonstrate their spirituality.
First, they were to avoid love of riches, which declared today from a pulpit
would assault a beloved American tenet. Saying “You cannot serve God and
money” (Mt. 6:24), he presented the two as masters competing for influence over a
believer. It wasn't so much the existence of the money but that it ruled you. The
temptation would be so great that he compared a camel's difficulty passing through
the eye of a needle to a rich man entering heaven (Mk 10:25).
So we ask a Christian, "What does this teaching mean to you? Do you
personally experience a conflict between serving God and serving money? When
you notice the conflict, what do you do about it? If you don't notice it, what was
Jesus talking about?"
He hammered the point home. In a vivid tale (Luke 16:21-27), he described
a rich man dying and going into torment, and a poor man going into bliss, yet the
rich man apparently was not cruel and had not caused the poor man’s lot. Only his
indifference to another’s suffering weighed against him, so we ask, “Can a
Christian be indifferent to the condition of the poor? What does the story say about
social policy?”
In the judgment of their life, Jesus told them a second activity would matter
most (Mt. 25: 31-46). If they cared for even the lowliest with food, water, clothing,
shelter, and help as needed, they were doing it for him with enduring spiritual
consequences. This standard fits the criterion noted above. It is visible work
Christians can actually accomplish, and Jesus tells them there is nothing more
spiritually significant. So we ask, “How does this guide you in what to ask of
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society? How can Christians promote issues Jesus ignored, and ignore the issues
most important for him?"
Some object that “Jesus was perfect, and we can’t expect to rise to his
level.” In other words, we should pursue less demanding goals than those he told
us to aim for. But a seeker even begins to follow him by wanting what he advises
them to want. If they cannot even do this, how are they called Christian?
Others may object that they tithe, contribute to good causes, and live
virtuous lives. But this can miss the point. Jesus addressed principally a state of
heart, a primary intention propelling a whole lifestyle, rather than rules to observe
while otherwise living as they pleased. Telling them, "Where your treasure is, there
the desires of your heart will be also" (Mt. 6.21) was a way of saying that their
behavior would show what they wanted. Their focus of heart was Jesus' concern. If
his words are not clear enough, we can ask them to please use their spiritual tools:
"You must believe in praying for guidance, so would you pray about this?" Ask
them later what their prayer turned up.
From this perspective, we understand better how social change should align
with Jesus' teaching. First, approach others not through power and control but
from a genuinely spiritual heart. Second, act constructively while not losing track
of the first standard, which in fact is essential for understanding how to apply the
second: "Stay right with God yourself and don't imagine that your wealth, power,
and control gain you any spiritual advantage."
He battled hypocrisy in the Jewish authorities. They believed they fulfilled
all the rules yet they were oppressors, conditions still at work today--following the
rules and oppressing others. Two scenes mark the conflict. In one, the wealthy
shred the safety net and oppose food stamps and other programs for the poor while
obtaining lower taxes for themselves. In the other scene are Jesus’ teaching and
example (29). Many Christians need to be reminded where they belong.
A message for change. While evidence and reasoning about issues have
value, they may not change a voter's choice. People tend instead to arrive at a
general friendliness to one side comprised of softer data such as personal contacts,
stories, comments, attitudes, affiliations, labels, and an occasional fact.
We appeal to this sense first by being reasonable, thoughtful people; then by
telling stories, by clear and relevant information, and by a respectful exchange of
ideas. Little things make a difference. The swiftboating story sank John Kerry, the
Willy Horton story upended Michael Dukakis, and the 47% incident pulled down
Mitt Romney. We need to watch for stories of the day that carry our message.
Campaign workers can master discussions like the following that help define
candidates' views.
1. Capitalism. A single machine doing the work of ten men lowers the
bottom end of the economic spectrum (ten men out of work) and raises the upper
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end (more profit for the owner). More money for one and less for ten is a small
example of a big problem. Extend it through society and a few obtain great wealth
and a great number are unemployed.
Business itself cannot solve the problem because it has just cut loose people
it no longer needs. A firing says, "Your problem is no longer my problem."
Business wants efficiency that makes money. Pensions and unemployment
compensation have limits and do not cover everyone to begin with, and if other
businesses also replace ten with one, employment tightens.
Political discussion about this often skips a key point by arguing over what
to do without first deciding who to include, whether to take account of all ten. We
assume the candidate looks out for the one who bought the machine. That's done
already. The market, the bank loan, the tax write-off, the manufacturing process,
and the transportation network all brought him the machine. We got that. The
question left is, Does society figure out how the others are going to live or is the
answer YOYO--You're On Your Own? Till now society has been satisfied
accounting for most of the ten. Take care of six and their gratitude maintains the
system, but what about the other four?
The point is fundamental. Whatever the candidate's answer, find out
particulars. Has the candidate even faced that there is a problem? Have they
thought through an answer? Should four of the ten just live on relatives' couches?
Or should society have universal Social Security not dependent on age? What
alternatives are out there?
2. Inequality. The data are updated constantly, but these are a start:
• A half dozen heirs of Walmart own $90 billion, more wealth than the bottom
30% of the U.S. population, 130 million people (30).
• Between 2009 and 2012, 95% of the income gains went to the top 5% (5).
• The top 1% own 43% of the wealth, and bottom 80% own 7% of the wealth
(31).
Mention a fact and explore its meaning. What do people think it implies
about the economic system? Are the fruits of U.S. productivity distributed fairly?
Do they believe the system is basically equitable and only a minor glitch produced
those outcomes? If so, what was it? Or were these outcomes achieved deliberately
with political muscle? Do they help explain how society treats ten people out of
work? How bad would inequity have to get for it to be intolerable?
3. Meritocracy. A discriminatory system has been in place for decades
(32).
It is based on assuming worthiness in people who have money, connections,
and power, which justifies giving them more opportunity in finance, loans, tax
breaks, government favors, health services, insurance, education, and opportunity
for their children. Because their children are healthier, look better, sound better,
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and know more, they seem more worthy of other breaks, early hiring, and faster
advancement.
Those classed as unworthy share common conditions. They are more likely
to be an ethnic minority, or a single parent working two jobs. Their children are
more unruly, sicker, and talk less with adults; perform worse, receive poorer
grades, and are shoehorned through school till dropping out early. They have fewer
prospects for income and marriage, are more often in trouble or with children
outside marriage, and work for lower wages with less stability. Different policies
for the two sets cause widening inequality.
To correct this, we regard money as a poor signal of worthiness. Having
more of it should mean more rather than less responsibility for society. A humane
government does not further unbalance an unbalanced economy, but redirects some
of the wealth of the upper class into adequate wages, education, health care, and a
safety net for all. All children deserve health care, straight teeth, adequate
nutrition, a safe environment, superior education, and a marketable competence.
Wages should enable working adults to parent their children.
Discuss the meritocratic system with people. Do they recognize what is
described above? Have they experienced a pipeline in education, criminal justice,
or social services that works against those without influence? Does everyone
deserve services and opportunity? Are benefits only for the winners?
4. Advantage. Why didn't the designers of the Titanic provide lifeboats for
everyone? They must have hoped lifeboats would never be needed, but if they
were, who would fill them? If it were inconvenient to provide for all, paying
passengers would probably go first.
Too much of society is like the Titanic. But when a ship might sink, only
safety for all is morally defensible so we figure in their needs. Every newborn has
an investment in the society, and the society in the child. We can still encourage
talent, reward effort, and build on capabilities, but we account for everyone.
Maybe some life boats have cushioned seats while others sit on planks but
everyone survives. Society works when one person’s progress does not hinder
another’s, which distinguishes benefit from advantage.
Advantage means progress not by skill or competence but by starting the
race two steps ahead. One's advantage is another's handicap. Making it easier for
one to win makes it harder for another. Benefit, on the other hand, does not imply
unfairness. Rather each one takes their next step without handicapping someone
else. The system works better when all can participate rather than with a small,
well-educated elite and millions undereducated and underskilled.
Making universal participation in society our goal, we would devote first
resources to twelve to fourteen years of high quality schooling for everyone. With
minimums instead to the poor, criminal, uneducated, politically non-influential,
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and socially marginalized, they are less likely to achieve a place in society. Each
one discarded is a harbinger of civilization's disintegration.
Meritocracy implies, “Because he is behind, we can give up on him.” Preexisting conditions rule so that many more whites attend college proportionately
than do African-Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics. If we value
students’ willingness to work, we should reward it wherever it occurs so that those
of all ability help themselves by fresh effort. We move them through their deficits
rather than discard them.
Ask people how they have experienced or observed benefit, advantage, and
handicap either as givers or receivers. What were the outcomes? What do their
values and morals tell them is the right thing to do?
5. Self-interest. Once upon a time, a mother gave an end-of-school party
for her son’s friends, and wanted to encourage their responsibility. After they had
played outside for a time, she walked out to talk to them.
“It’s time for the cake,” she said, “Form a line at the table. One at a time, cut
a piece for yourself and leave some for the others.”
The biggest ran inside to the front of the line and took large pieces. When
the line was half through, the cake was two-thirds gone. Those still in line looked
at each other nervously, but as the last in line took smaller pieces, the final piece
was a quarter the size of the first ones. The last child looked at the mother
mournfully and stuck out his lower lip. The cake was gone.
The next year, the mother offered another party but this time her son insisted
they serve the cake like his grandmother did. She cut equal pieces and distributed
them herself.
Society is like the mother dividing up benefits. To fracture it, we just allot
resources of food, health, academic preparation, income, and employment
opportunity by any criterion at all—such as “the farther ahead you start, the more
you get,” or by height, weight, skin color, parentage, or connections. Keep those
labeled "advantaged" moving ahead with periodic gifts of resources, and provide
the others as little as possible. Celebrate the winners and shame the losers so they
both think they deserve what they get.
Do people you talk to want a society in which the first and strongest get
most? Does society do better by dividing up common resources equitably? Do we
arrange for some to get huge pieces and others nothing? Is there a dominant
minority that diverts society’s productivity to itself? Do we want to let them take
whatever they can?
6. Market forces. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the
1700s through the first half of the 1900s most owners of production resisted in
every possible way--politically, economically, and often with violence--nearly
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every change in pay and working conditions that could make the economic system
tolerable for workers.
Market forces free to impose their values typically widen the gulf between
the powerful and powerless. When power accumulates in one place, only matching
power in another can stand against it. Sometimes churches have been a civilizing
force, sometimes government. But the latter may be impotent when controlled by
organized crime, drug dealers, or commercial interests, and if no one limits
extremes, a nation faces breakdown.
The majority get to choose whether to expand or reduce imbalance:
“Because you have power, the rest of us give you more power" or "Because you
have money, we give you more money," or "Because you have education, we give
you more education," or "Because you have influence over legislation, we give you
more influence. Name any advantage you have, let us know, and we will give you
more of it." This thinking cannot fail to split society into haves and have-nots.
Ask people if they trust market forces to improve society. How does it feel
to be at the end of a line instead of the head of it when resources may run out
before your turn?
7. Power. The economic system somewhat parallels the game of musical
chairs. With always fewer chairs than participants, the game quickly dismisses the
least powerful and rewards the most powerful from the start. The unanswered
question is how to account for those muscled out. We want a game where all can
play the whole time.
Human development itself sets up the problem. From birth, we use what we
have until something limits us. As crawling babies we rise to our feet, toddle
ahead, and master our world. An impulse whispers “More!” but as we grow, our
concept of “more” expands. We may learn to protect more children, feed more of
the hungry, attack more enemies, or subsidize more favored groups.
One might expect inequality would force change, but culture and habit
stabilize even autocratic countries so that people seldom rebel. The one owning
little rarely looks to the government to help him survive, while the one with much
presumes it will help him prosper even more.
Seeking the good of the whole, we would say instead, “These over here are
not pulling on their oar because they read below fifth grade, so let’s get them up to
speed. Now what else? These over here need financing to start a business, now
what else? Those need a dentist so they are not in constant pain. Now what else?"
We get individuals into the boat and the boat floating before dividing up the
lifeboats; essentials to all before surplus to a few.
Ask people to think about the power they have and how they use it. Is their
agenda different from society's? Do they apply even a fraction of their power to
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help society, or is it all for themselves? How bad must conditions be for them to
act differently? What would they do?
8. Government. Some protest that government has no business attempting
to balance the system, that it meddles too much already and is too big, a cry often
code for a desire to pollute more, pay workers less, advertise misleadingly, make
unsafe products, and buy off legislators. We ask them, “If government were the
way you want, what could you get away with?” or diplomatically, “What would
change for you?”
Campaigns often argue the role of government. Within its systems social
values trade off one against another, but it reacts to social pressure and seldom
leads with initiatives not already advocated in public thought. Representing what
most people tolerate, it tends to be the most stable arrangement at the moment and
hence resists rapid change.
Policies can reinforce this inertia. By making it harder to vote, a minority
can prevent change. Even a democracy can empower a psychopath or a dreamer
preoccupied with his legacy. Many elected officials have looted their countries,
started ill-advised wars, manipulated evidence, and benefited the few. Democratic
structures do not guarantee good government but only schedule checkpoints at
which to assess its performance.
Inquire about people's view of government. What do they expect it to do?
Does it stand apart from common values and operate independent of what people
want? What does a candidate wish to ask of it and how do people plan to guide it?
9. Restoring democracy. Certain processes can help good people onto the
ballot and win elections.
1. Add a “None of the above” option. A majority selecting it would discard
the entire slate. Existing officeholders would retain office temporarily but be
ineligible to run in an election within, say, two months, when a new slate would
appear. This would let voters remove candidates seen as a body to be co-opted by
special interests, and provide an outlet for their general sense of things going
wrong without blaming any single individual.
2. Enable voters to state their first, second, and third choices for a single
seat. With first choices counted, anyone receiving a majority would be elected. In a
race without a majority, drop the lowest vote getter off the ballot and assign to the
remaining candidates the second choices of those who voted for that individual,
with a third such round if needed. This could be done with software using the first
set of votes.
Such an arrangement would let first round voters encourage candidates
unlikely to obtain a majority, knowing that their second or third choices would
count up. Especially in crowded primaries, this would advance more universally
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acceptable individuals to replace niche candidates who fail to align even with their
own party’s views.
3. Cease using party affiliation to move primary winners to a general
election. The two top vote getters in a primary, regardless of party, would move up
as California now has it. This would stimulate voting across party lines, empower
minority voters, and spur candidates to broaden their appeal since crossovers could
spell the difference. Interest group influence over candidates would diminish.
4. Direct independent state commissions to make Congressional districts
compact and stable while minimizing gerrymandering. Remove restrictions on
registration and the times and means of voting. Register all citizens automatically.
5. Elect the President by the national popular vote. Federal law authorizes
legislatures to allot state electoral votes as they wish so that individual states can
assign them to the candidate obtaining the most votes nationwide, and need not
wait for a national compact. Even Delaware or Montana with three electoral votes
each could stimulate greater turnout everywhere because even those few could
swing an election.
Chapter 15. Remedy Society’s Problems
Effort only to change national leadership would leave much energy fallow.
Local and regional issues need attention year around.
Types of tasks. Every state and community enhancement deserves thought,
from flowers planted along a street to concrete-and-asphalt infrastructure to caring
for people one by one.
When deciding on its direction, a group can invite members to present “a
commercial” to collect support for their suggestion. People will propose what they
believe they can do, and leaders can watch for how bigger needs match members'
capabilities and numbers.
Three kinds of tasks--service, issue awareness, and seeking agreements-involve people differently.
1. Service tasks. Service tasks hold a society together. Movement members
can identify the needs of every age and demographic group in their community and
address any within their capability, such as shelter and food for the homeless and
hungry, or help for the aging. They might aid the incarcerated to transition to
successful roles in society. Services for youth might be in tutoring, coaching,
volunteering for youth organizations and facilities; helping young people reclaim
streams and wetlands, and removing invasive species. Upon securing the lives of
humans, we address a sustainable biosphere.
Service tasks can aid a movement. Volunteers arrive early and arrange
rooms, chairs, and tables. They prepare food and clean up, maintain facilities and
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grounds, account for supplies, respond to communications, and make phone calls.
Some services are unobtrusive like research, and others involve presenting ideas.
2. Awareness of issues. While short-term effort often can turn a corner, many
aims rely on public awareness developed over months and years through study
groups, lectures, TV programs, marches, demonstrations, petitions, and voter
initiatives. To those willing to listen to us, we need to be able to explain our ideas
in forums, talk shows, rallies, interviews, and research papers; sort out views on
local and regional needs and link campaigns with groups elsewhere. Targets in
different states might be a redistricting commission, a Congressional primary, or
state house races.
The strongest but most labor-intensive way to expand issue awareness is oldfashioned face to face, door to door, corner to corner, street to street. For nearly
any change we pursue, learning the relevant information and getting it to people
can utilize all the energy available. One activist's long-standing personal agenda
was simply to make war on misinformation.This kind of effort is especially fitting
for a movement because the most self-giving is also the most effective. Our activity
itself declares principles of self-sacrifice, responsibility, and unconditional love.
3. Seeking agreement on issues. We discuss common purposes with other
groups, inquire if churches want to help the community, and identify common
ground. We contact local organizations and find out their programs for meeting
local, regional, and global needs, and their interest in cooperating; inventory the
Internet and follow up on contacts, seek out partisans for opposing views and
determine what we can learn from them, how they might be right, what we have in
common, and how best to respond. We can sponsor workshops that draw in people
of all opinions, aim for agreement about trends and conditions that affect life on
earth at five levels--neighborhood, local, regional, national, and global; design and
carry out ways to solve problems of any dimension anywhere.
Prioritizing. Seven questions help us select our action.
1. Whose problem is this? Who suffers from the problem and how are others
affected? Taking on their problems, we affirm connection and responsibility.
2. Where are our sympathies? They motivate us but can induce us to ignore
entire categories of needs. We want to balance our own tendency with sympathy
for all.
3. How desperate is this need? How urgent? The worse the situation, the
more attention it warrants. Someone should do something.
4. How much can they help themselves? If they can handle their own
situation, we defer to them. But misguided policies may generate disasters, such as
turning out the mentally ill to live on the streets without state services. Children in
poverty cannot be expected to improve their own school. Political decisions
especially affect the helpless.
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5. Is someone actually picking up the load? We look first to those
experiencing the need. Perhaps in theory they could solve their problem but do not
because of age, infirmity, ignorance, or lack of resources or social influence. We
expect families to meet children’s needs, but when they do not, society is the
backup.
6. How much can outside help solve the problem? If we could make matters
worse, do not know the appropriate action, or lack the resources, we back off. We
apply "the theory of minimum change," using the smallest change that can remedy
a problem.
7. Does this outweigh all other needs we could address? We monitor a
score of problems for the one we can best respond to.
Personal qualities. A long-term movement needs long-term people who
have staying power, understand patience, put up with inconvenience, stick to a
purpose, and regard difficulties as simply human experience.
A particular attitude is vital. My son was an officer on an ice-breaker
carrying tourists to the North Pole. He and other officers were assigned regularly to
go up top, scan the horizon with binoculars, and pick out polar bears among the
snow and ice. He found that he could do this for up to three hours at a time, often
remaining beyond his assignment, and as a result spotted more polar bears than
anyone else.
“It was a special kind of concentration,” he said. “You could not do this if
you were thinking about anything else or making conversation. You had to be
doing only this.” Clients on the trip would occasionally join him, look through
binoculars for a couple minutes, and leave.
Why does one person stick to a task and not another? It must be their view
of it. The patient person does not ask to be relieved of the difficulty of the moment.
Regardless what it contains, they say, “What I do now is sufficient. This moment is
okay, and because it is okay, I can plant myself in it for as long as it takes.” And if
the moment is okay, one also can constantly forgive the limitations of one's
experience.
We want to reinforce this attitude in each other, but may find among our
allies people who know it already, who have persevered at a professional career,
caretaking for others, enduring economic and familial reverses, developing a
creative skill, or pursuing a purpose to benefit others. People can learn quickly how
to conduct a movement, but the character to persist at it develops from long
internal effort.
Go to such people, tell them what you notice about them, and explain how
they might apply their ability. Suggest an issue they might like to work on, and
introduce them to your group. Because new activities are change and change is
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stress, you also need to provide support. To integrate a newcomer, train them
beyond the bare necessity.
“I’m only going to make phone calls, right?” they ask.
We explain the need. “Yes, but will you persist, make mistakes, go on
tangents, or give it the quality of effort it calls for?” Someone must lead them
caringly through how to give care. If the person cannot envision the future, others
must foresee their competence years ahead and gently lead them to achieve it.
Initiative and continuity. The number who fit around a kitchen table can
take an issue public and get a few minutes of media notice. We post handbills in a
hundred locations, or with a half dozen friends hold up signs on the outskirts of an
event, and are under way.
But soon after we obtain the public eye, others examine our substance that
may come from years of quiet work. When an outcome matters to us, we build to it
by surrounding it with causes. We practice what we need to do perfectly and
accumulate the requisite knowledge. A primitive needing to hit a fleeing animal
with a rock so he can cook and eat it prepares by diligent practice. Conditions
propel results, and we say "It's a setup" when forces flow naturally to obtain the
same solutions continually.
Two activities do this. Initiative drives the day’s activity while patience like
the pyramids carries through long-term duties. We are both sprinters and
marathoners. Quiet work may occupy years as circumstances slowly unfreeze and
change becomes possible. Then action in a period of flux crosses a watershed, and
changes are consolidated.
Action has value even if not perfect. It opens possibilities. Because of it, our
limitations emerge in sharp relief and we think more clearly. Even a symbolic
action like a small, visible protest can help us maintain continuity. A salesman said
once that the goal of every meeting with a customer is another meeting. We move
from first perception to final results in increments. Our slow start can gently build
readiness for more action, like a car increasing its speed only from its prior speed.
Action tends to increase harmony with our allies and decrease it with our
opponents. Once we declare our ideas right, we stiffen differences with others'
ideas. Deciding that we are in opposition, we find it harder to communicate, so we
need to seek resolution while we still can cooperate.
Action has internal effects. When we act on a new idea, a metamorphosis
occurs in us. The issue takes on order that helps us pursue it further. Getting new
people into action early reinforces their vision, stimulates them to learn more, and
creates the rough-and-tumble that defines the edges of an idea. If a vision engages
a group's interest but no action, the group becomes a pleasant hangout--a worthy
purpose not undersupplied in society. Action is to groups what exercise is to the
human body. Without it, groups become a shell of appearances.
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Moral energy. While we may enlist new members over a practical issue
that affects them personally, we sustain direction by our appeal to morality, to the
overarching conditions of human survival. It injures our nature when another lies
to us or treats us unjustly. People’s nagging sense of a damaged society is likely
due to an accumulation of small injustices, falsehoods, and injuries.
A poor economy may be morally wrong. The same people repeatedly
bearing society’s shortfalls constitutes damage and not just an inconvenience. A
fair society does not load its burdens continually on the shoulders of one group, but
such a moral question is not spontaneously important to people. A value needs a
level of activity upon it even to find itself and expand within the total pie of our
thinking. Speaking up for a value, we sort among the urges we call our self-image.
A personal quality advances, our words tumble out, and we affirm, "I really believe
this," defining ourselves regardless how others receive us. The unsympathetic can
admonish us, fair weather friends set us outside their circle, and the censorious
cross the street to avoid us, but when we turn to our moral strength, a vague space
within becomes solid.
When no outward action beckons, even sustaining a belief may draw on
moral energy. In turbulent times we may patiently guard the embers of the fire in
us while enduring “a learning experience" that develops us in unexpected ways.
When fresh energy dawns, we apply the commitment we have nurtured particularly
by public activity. We may have resisted this from not seeing ourselves as that kind
of person, but in a group we can discover how to be that kind of person.
Moral qualities affect legislation. When both we and our opponents are
sincere, we incorporate each other’s information and solve problems. Long-term
agreements hold up. When distortion is deliberate and power settles issues,
problem-solving is harder. An opponent feeding us falsehood is like a dinner host
serving us bad mushrooms. Even a few sicken us.
-------------Seven factors can help organizers bring clarity to a group's effort: “We’re
trying to forestall a breaking point here,” or “We need a key idea to clear up this
confusion.”
Breaking point. A breaking point is a turn for the worse portending further
damage. Runoff of herbicides and pesticides may break a fish run, and down river
they die. Air pollution boosts respiratory diseases. Skin cancer increases in polar
latitudes from industrial gases depleting ozone.
In education, a bright student could become a physician. But squirrely in
kindergarten, distracted in first grade, and his single mother not a savvy advocate,
he gets a class with an incompetent teacher the district cannot remove. This is his
breaking point, his unseen turn for the worse where his trajectory enters the low
end of the system's resources. His teacher expects the worst of him, misreading his
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attempts to define himself, and he eventually leaves school an underachiever to be
a part-time clerk. Breaking points thrust him, like airport baggage, onto a low
track.
They abound in the lives of poor people. A worn-looking man on a street
corner holds a cardboard sign, "Will work for food." We may believe in two
worlds--for survivors and non-survivors; assume that he is alcoholic, lazy, or
unbalanced, but breaking points may have preceded his vigil.
A few dollars less per month, and he lives in an abandoned car instead of a
heated room. With child care and transportation, people get to work on time or
they stay in the penniless subculture. They resolve a health problem early so that
their employment and parenting continue and their children are not removed to
rotating foster homes or kin-care. An increment of counseling and guidance
enables their marriage to endure and their children to avoid jail. Small events set
up or avert a dysfunctional life.
With thousands similarly affected in a city, we look for patterned solutions,
such as a comprehensive educational system and getting to work on time. The
historically recent development of public transportation has changed economic life,
yet some cities remain unfriendly to those without cars as land use decisions move
homes away from jobs.
Key setting. Institutions weigh factors and allocate resources in particular
settings. A setting is key when it guides subsequent actiivity, which explains why
many change efforts fizzle. Control of early key settings insures influence later.
When I participated once on a task force on legislation for needs of youth, a staff
member suggested to me that I volunteer as secretary to write up the first draft
because, he said, the first form of an issue influences it from then on. Beginnings
portend endings. Good starts attract support.
Meeting a need means shepherding it through all the settings where it could
falter, where opponents plot to obstruct it. Solutions, on the other hand, often
gather momentum in unobtrusive jumps. A key setting for an election might be
friends meeting about a candidacy for one of them. Another is detailing his/her
campaign message, then gathering allies and funding, then the campaign, and
finally the election. The few first active for the candidate influence later policies.
Personal acquaintance even once or twice removed is often key.
Legislation passes through many key settings: 1) Someone puts an idea in a
legislator’s mind. 2) The legislator converses with a few staff and friends and
decides to pursue it, 3) staff draft a proposal, 4) a public hearing occurs, 5) a
committee approves, 6) support is gathered, 7) a vote is scheduled, 8) a majority
approves, 9) the issue goes to the parallel legislative body, 10) an executive may
veto, 11) a legislature overrides the veto or not, 12) an agency defines regulations,
and 13) implements them. Opposition at any of those points may derail an
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outcome. For the second grade student, the state education appropriation and
teacher retention policies were key settings generating a breaking point. The later
we arrive, the fewer means remain. We master events in series.
Key idea. A key idea guides activity toward a solution. It could be simple,
like “Let’s work together on this” or “You have a point.” Grasping the idea key for
right now lies at the heart of social action.
Technology has made it easier to transmit ideas in globo. We can send
information nearly instantly nearly anywhere so that hundreds of thousands can act
at the same starting gun. But harder than mass distribution of ideas is placing just
one where it is most useful. There is no substitute for fitting one ideas to one
receiver. Who exactly needs to know this, for what purpose, in what context, and at
what moment?
Answering may entail spreading a single idea broadly like, “The issue is fair
use of resources.” The key may also be specific data: “On page two line twelve,
change the million to two million.” To apply a key idea, we track it through points
where opponents may derail it.
After his years as a legislator, my father as a lobbyist was legendary in
applying influence. When a key senator would oppose something his organization
supported, he never tried persuasion himself. With knowledgeable friends, he
would think carefully, “Who can get to him?” The result, passed perhaps through
several hands, would be a personal friend accosting the legislator on the street to
scold him about the issue.
Leverage structure. With leverage we obtain a big advantage with a small
motion. Leverage structures arrange actions and resources so that the least effort
obtains a continuous benefit. Energy transformed smoothly solves a problem
efficiently.
The mechanical advances of civilization are leverage structures, but human
actions also contribute, like traffic rules to reduce accidents. Center lines and
medians minimize head-on collisions. Lights, wider shoulders and longer sight
distances increase response times. Mechanical elements can interplay with human,
such as pilots' hours of rest and a no-fault system for reporting problems.
Where we place our lever may solve or perpetuate a problem. We might
assume that homelessness arises from unemployment, substance abuse, mental
illness, laziness, illiteracy, crime, or maladaptive attitudes, or that it arises from not
having shelter. In the first case we work on increasing people’s employability so
they can pay rent. In the second, we start with shelter and look at the conditions
affecting it directly such as zoning, rent levels, tax breaks for landlords, pension
levels, policing of facilities, referral agencies, and safety nets. With stable shelter,
people do better with their lives.
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We pattern for efficient outcomes in many ways: retirement accounts and
insurance for financial continuity, plumbing for water and waste disposal,
electricity for light and heat, telephones for communicating, factories for mass
production, taxation for achieving collective purposes, and representation for
drawing on citizens' dispersed wisdom. Sometimes, however, efficiency is not
effective. In a few minutes ten thousand people can sign an online petition emailed
to Congress, but as individual constituents contacting their Congressman
personally are more effective.
A recurring difficulty is balancing short and long term benefit and upsides
versus downsides. A tax cut may offer short-term benefit with long-term damage to
public services. Workers organizing nineteenth century industries often faced
violence and death. Conservationists wishing to save resources for later
generations collide with others needing them for current survival.
Articulation between actions. System is necessary where one action
impacts another, articulates as between bones of the arm. We want activity passing
smoothly between parts, automatic adjustment by transfer of information or
energy. Problems typically show up at meeting points. A 3/8 inch nut does not
thread onto a 1/2 inch bolt. A country's economy is stimulated or depressed by
another's trade policies, an industry disperses pollution into water and air, and
expanding suburbs affect wildlife habitats. Articulation is all around us.
Often we can arrange input information to feed directly into action
outcomes. Highway engineers lay a rubber tube across a road and attach it to a
traffic counter, supplying an objective basis for upgrading. Increased traffic leads
to installing turn lanes, stop lights, and overpasses. When the same solution works
for a recurring problem, a pipeline can move incoming problem-data directly into
outgoing solution-data. When input and output do not articulate, planners must
constantly re-gather familiar information and re-argue outcomes.
Since each student needs a desk, a school orders more automatically, but
when money fluctuates, students may sit on the floor. Teacher-student ratio may be
affected by salary levels, changes in the local tax base, voters’ willingness to be
taxed, and the cost of facilities. Slippage can occur where automatic adjustment is
due. Environmental protection sees many partial links between familiar problems
and standard solutions. Some criteria are strict while others fail to reflect agreed-on
values.
Evolving conditions slow progress to people’s rate of re-education. Instead
of one change from a central principle, every new person may re-open the
consensus. When the current situation resembles the previous, planning is easier:
"Points one through nineteen are the same, but twenty has changed," so we turn to
point twenty and move faster. As hard as it may be to obtain, automatic adjustment
without conflict marks a solution likely to work long-term.
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Change number. How many people does it take to change an issue? In a
problem’s evolution, the earlier its key setting and the more severely it violates
accepted standards, the fewer needed to correct it. One witness identifies a
criminal, and others carry out their roles and settle the matter.
Preventing change is easier than causing it and so requires fewer numbers, at
times just one person--an executive with a veto, the chairman of a committee to
bottle up a bill, or a Senator to filibuster. The U.S. is unusual by having four
institutions able to block change—President, House of Representatives, Senate,
and Supreme Court—while most nations have one or two. An unexpected effect of
framers' desire for stability, however, has been that the most unequal countries of
the world, such as ours, have the highest number of entities able to block change.
The reason appears to be that with several tools to employ, entrenched
interests can hold out a long time even against a majority. Change often requires a
super-majority, protracted effort, and personal sacrifice from a dedicated minority.
At other times shifting a handful of Congressional seats may drive rapid change, so
a movement monitors timeliness. With resources often stretched thin, knowing the
numbers needed at different phases of a problem helps to allocate effort.
Will to change. People vary in their will to change.
In early 1968 I was living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where
poverty and violence were common. The Poor People's Campaign was marching in
Washington in a few days, a New York group was raising funds for the poor, and
with many others I was soliciting contributions, inviting passers-by to drop coins
into our cans. Most responded politely. Near the more prosperous edge of the
district, I approached a young man wearing a three-piece suit.
"For the poor?" he said derisively. "There are no poor!" I was startled.
"No poor?" I said to him mildly. "But there are people here sleeping on the
sidewalks."
"Those people are sick!” he retorted and turned away, denying the evidence
of his own eyes.
The response is not far out of character for some people. Seventy-five years
after the gas chambers, some still deny Nazis’ liquidation of Jews, believe that
Wall Street engineered the financial crisis of 2008, and that global warming is a
hoax. Now we can add, "The poor are really sick." Corrective evidence doesn't
work because they label it part of the conspiracy.
An answer, paradoxically, is to acknowledge their positive intent: “You
really don’t want to be misled, do you?” “You’re skeptical others will tell the
truth, aren’t you?” When they agree, extend the idea: “What do you think is the
single biggest conspiracy through all of history, one that has brought down
civilizations time after time?”
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Affirm any truth in their answer, and offer Toynbee’s research: “Societies
doing well went downhill for the same reason as ours now. People in power
manipulate the system to gain for themselves instead of providing for the whole.
That's the core fact.”
In practice the will to change rises and falls with our openness to others'
thinking. Well-connected, we freely absorb their ideas and update our own. But we
can arrange our interest in others on a continuum. The remote end is self-protected,
isolated, and disconnected; where we regard the homeless, out of work, sick,
mentally ill, or on welfare as a different species. A step closer to them and they
become real, but our stereotypes free us from any response. Closer yet, we label
them a social problem, feel some concern, and wish them well, but still have no
answer for their needs. Though making a token contribution, we resist any impact
on our personal life, and associate even political solutions with bureaucracy and
inefficiency.
As our interest in others rises, we decide to support those who propose
solutions or experiments to find out what helps. Finally, from personal concern or
accepting responsibility, we involve ourselves and cooperate with others to meet
evident needs.
The lack of connection at the beginning of that scale leaves problems
untouched. Solutions result with movement toward the last stage, responsibility for
society by public and voluntary activity. The seven ideas above--breaking point,
key setting, key idea, leverage structure, articulation, change numbers, and will to
change—combine to guide social action:
With effective ideas, we engage large numbers to invest long-term personal
effort at key settings to forestall urgent breaking points and create systemic
leverage structures that work by automatic adjustment.
Campaigns. Besides electing people, a campaign--a coordinated public
effort for a limited purpose—can clean up a city, change economic patterns,
preserve historic sites and values, redirect environmental policies, bridge racial
differences, improve education, meet needs of specific groups, and welcome new
members into a movement. Because campaigns are local, they typically involve a
cross-section of people. A neighbor notices another's capabilities and interests,
invites them, encourages them, finds an activity for them, and joins them doing it.
Undertaking a campaign:
1. Success should be possible. Sometimes success is in the doing. The more
effort, the more we achieve: offer a service, impede an evil, draw attention to
wrongdoing, establish the relevance of a moral principle, or expand our team. But
even for a valued activity, efforts can bog down. When people have been scarred
by false starts, trusting the process is harder as they foresee glitches that hindered
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previous enthusiasms. Before they commit themselves, they want to know how
clear thinking will lead to results.
2. We convey urgency. The universal means is one to one contact that offers
a reason and an invitation to participate. Such contact fills people's need for action.
3. The work can be measured. Scoring their effort encourages people, even
about an abstract idea like fairness in social policy. We pose a series of questions,
go door to door collecting people’s answers and discussing them, and count up
those contacted. Voters registered and information distributed comprise specific
data.
4. Action is replicable. We want successful methods that can work
anywhere. Five groups perfecting a strategy help the next five apply it.
5. A campaign can unite related purposes. A group might take on several
conditions together that affect poverty--poor education, toxic environments, ill
health, unsupportive infrastructure, minimum wage, and local hiring practices.
Often many policies together impact the physcial environment.
6. Campaigns may overcome inertia. People's inertia helps the dominant
minority resist change, posing a challenge to all positive purposes. A basic theme
is “We can do something! We don't sit by and watch things go downhill.”
Whatever else happens, we get people moving.
7. Campaigns may burn people out. A group watches for a campaign’s
effect on its members. Temporary pressures may exhaust people so they lose track
of values that once inspired them.
8. Campaigns sustain effort. The scope of world needs calls for continuous
effort by large numbers who eventually pass on the work. Nothing happens in the
future unless there are people to do it, so an activity's effect on participants'
endurance matters more in the long run than its current outcome. We affirm the
meaning of their effort and remedy their difficulties. Political involvement alone
may not achieve this because too cyclical, distracted by passing events and hot
button issues, and reliant on personalities.
The public agreement. Agreement is the universal doorway to change, and
our objective when we talk to a city council, state legislature, public official,
opponent, or ally. Every step of progress depends on it although it carries no
assurance of wisdom. We can agree completely, be absolutely certain, and
grievously wrong.
We might give the name "the public agreement" to the perspective that
unites us. It is a belief that benefits be shared broadly. We reason to it from how
human nature prospers. A starving boy’s need for food has meaning from his place
in a group. If he has a right to food, others are responsible to provide it.
Such an agreement potentially involves everyone either as givers or takers.
Another benefits himself by using a service that I support by my taxesbut don’t
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use—an airport, a highway, an education. I support his self-benefit as I assume he
does mine. People affirm the agreement as long as benefits are broad, like a gift
each contributes to a national potlatch. We sustain the framework that makes
others' opportunities possible such as an environment where trade can occur.
Elders who completed education provide it for youth who gain from it later.
Determined to pay only for our own benefit, we convert the public
agreement into a negotiation, and carve up the pie based on power. Parents sending
their children to private schools may decrease their support for public education,
purchase what they want and resist taxes that aid those who cannot, live in a
security-guarded compound and minimize police services, travel by helicopters
and commuter planes while voting down mass transit, have health insurance for
their family while consigning others to emergency rooms. The community potlatch
ends when the pot is empty before everyone is fed. The public agreement fractures
when power expects only to take. But if others find nothing left for them and
withdraw, they may diminish outcomes for all.
Principle, process, and particulars. In seeking agreement, on three layers
of activity: principles, process, and particulars. We may say of an issue, “We agree
in principle but still have details to work out," and settle on a process for resolving
them. If we can't, we return to the most basic principle and start over.
Our choice of a principle to treat each other with civility leads us to adopt
processes like meeting physical needs, family survival, personal safety, freedom,
rule of law, talking thoughtfully about issues, and trading the products of our effort
and features of our culture.
With democracy as principle, we generate processes like the right to
advertise views, debate, and vote; organize, appeal, and persuade with education,
talk shows, and seminars. With equity as principle, a court system as process
enables thousands of solutions (particular cases). The principle of selfdetermination united the early colonists but they felt England had failed them in
taxation (particulars). England denied their effort to resolve this through
representation (process), and they concluded they must revolt.
Because principles can conflict, we must understand more than one. Safety
and freedom may clash. On the excuse of keeping citizens safe after 9-11, the
government instituted secret military tribunals that potentially affected twenty
million citizens. Suspending civil rights could threaten the freedom under law that
Americans cherish. Do we want safety at that cost, or do freedoms carry risks?
Driven too far a principle can work against us. How universal is financial
gain? Two people want an oil deposit and only one can have it. Larger profits for
us imply that when interests collide we want less for the other, but as self-interest
moderates, we want both of us to prosper.
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Ethical/moral/spiritual principles are not limited this way. We can want as
much truth, justice, and comprehensive good for others as for ourselves, but are
ethically challenged when our personal interests are affected.
In explaining movement goal we begin with principles, with why we are
doing this. We might agree on responsibility, inclusion, or the good of the whole.
With the principle clear, we devise processes that put it to work and then define its
particulars. Without a principle to guide it, a process is more readily subverted.
American democracy is threatened today as oligarchs undermine its principle and
attack its processes. People permit this because they think little about the meaning
holding a system together, and fail to stretch their mind to how their society could
be different Principles are threatened when only formal bodies administer them. A
majority must believe in them enough to keep them alive.
Problem-solving with opponents. Though we first approach the undecided
and uninformed, progress is often possible with adversaries. We reach them
personally, inquire how we can address concerns together, open to their goals and
aspirations, and affirm common experience. If we can shake hands on even a
partial win-win solution with them, we can go to the undecided together. To help
with this:
1. Get to know people sympathetically one to one. Common experience is a
social language even among those who disagree. Thrown into one arena, we
realize we can develop ideas even while uncomfortable. We can come to know as
individuals others who have contrary ideas, and learn to appreciate rather than
dismiss their values.
During my father’s time in Alaska politics, he made it a point to invite
legislators, both opponents and allies, to our home with the understanding that no
one talk politics. He and my mother served dinners of fish, moose, caribou, and
deer my father had taken himself while guests discussed hunting, travel, weather,
resources, family, and other non-political issues. The result was that in his
legislative work, he never had to talk to strangers.
Local issues where we mingle at least with people we know encourage such
communication. Understanding others better, we can make progress from pickand-shovel effort over bits of common purpose, a principle that applies even at the
national level. The President could invite all Congressmen and their families for an
annual picnic on the White House lawn. Houses of Congress could seat themselves
alphabetically instead of by party.
2. Listen to their thinking. For us to listen well, we need to change our goal
from "getting our point across" to "understanding what is possible." Usually we go
for the first goal just by declaring what we think others should understand, but with
lines already drawn it may not work. The other is set inside the framework of their
own thinking. For them to change one comma of it, we must understand precisely
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the change that is possible. We seek others understanding us by first being
determined to understand them. Often this means listening longer than we
expected for where change is possible. As long as that is not clear, we listen more
and think deeper.
We follow their thought processes, draw out their views for five to fifty
minutes, and weigh what they say. Once grasping their view in depth, we know
exactly what they can accept from us. We ask if we can summarize their picture of
the world, and doing so we inquire, “Do I understand you?” If they agree that we
capture their meaning accurately, they feel successful that they conveyed their idea
to us. When we ask then if we can respond, they are typically more willing to listen
to ours.
Asking others' permission and waiting for their nod is typically constructive:
“May I offer an angle on that?” We do not argue or insist, but by respecting their
right to refuse ideas, we avoid needless invasion. If we discover information useful
to them, we provide it and stop there. Testifying before legislative committees on
several occasions, I realized that my comments bore no fruit because I did not limit
myself to the committee's current concern. Our words appear irrelevant if we do
not respond to others' needs, which we discover by asking. We should
communicate in so satisfying a way that, even if we disagree, they welcome
resuming it. We convey every idea so as not to obstruct the next one we want to
offer.
3. Distinguish degrees of certainty. Although careful listening may not
change another's view, it can loosen it from their emotions and highlight aspects to
deal with piece by piece. Parts of their view may rest on evidence while others
express their ideology or habit. Noticing degrees of certainty teaches a facet of
rationality.
Remembering how badly at times we want to "get our point across," we can
sympatnhize when others take that tack. They may declare an idea in a tone that
cannot endure any contradiction, apparently leaving you only an option between
agreeing or ending the conversation.
A response often feasible then is to reflect back to them their degree of
certainty: "That sounds like it sums up for you the entire issue, that there is nothing
more to be said," and then, "It sounds like you mean that for all people and all
situations," and then, "Something in your life must have convinced you deeply of
that." If they once appreciate that you recognize how they emphasize their idea,
they are more willing to distinguish details: "Are you more certain about X or
about Y?" "Is your personal experience related more to X or Y or Z?"
4. Distinguish what is essential to us and what we can concede. Sometimes
we must stand, fight, and nail opponents’ errors, yet bitterness can perpetuate
problems. We want to sustain avenues of compromise. We first extend common
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ground--“Well, I agree with you that…“--and then address differences. We may be
able to ask the other for something no worse than indifferent to them that might
help us significantly, or offer them something no worse than indifferent to us that
they might value. While we commonly think of this as compromise, a frequent
mistake about it is expecting both sides to concede equally. A comic's riff
illustrates:
"Can I burn down your house?"
"No."
"Can I burn just the second floor?"
"No."
"Could we talk about this?"
"No."
"You're not compromising!"
5. Suggest conditions under which we can conceive of others being right,
even if they do not exist now. Expressing even a possibility stretches
comprehension. An environmentalist might say to a polluter, "Your discharge
would matter less to me if organisms were less sensitive to toxins," and the polluter
answers, "Your regulations would be easier to bear if their cost were more in line
with the benefit from them." A mutual direction then would be discovering how
toxins might be less lethal and improving cost/benefit.
If our research helps others solve their problem, they are likely to consider
it, so we try to appreciate their situation as they see it: "So tell me what you're
struggling with. Maybe I can help." We probe for how they experience their
problem (parts of which may be completely beyond our knowledge), and affirm
any validity in their views: "If this were true, it would strengthen your position," or
"When this happens, your view applies," or "I see that your position is based on...."
To assimilate others' ideas better, we can switch sides and try to present theirs as
convincingly as we can, though they may find it hard to reciprocate. Locked into
an ideology, people may feel they surrender even by putting words to an
opponent’s perspective.
6. Look for incremental change. When problems appear immovable, we
focus on small gains around the edges like a fair competition of ideas. In polarities
such as labor and management, left and right, white and black, we need not expect
permanent struggle. Instead of asking "Which of us is right?," we go to smaller
questions like, "Could others be partly right?" and "What is the next step for us?"
Huge changes may be needed but only small ones within reach. Perhaps a wood
frame building damaged by an earthquake should be torn down and a better one
built, but we could also jack it up, square it, patch it, and return it to use for less
cost and delay. We accomplish many purposes better by increments.
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7. See others as a source of information. Sometimes others' information
broadens our own. We site a bridge with a base in both river banks, a peace treaty
accounts for both sides' needs. Asking our opponents, "How are you receiving
me?" and "What are you wanting to send?" we remedy our ignorance of each other.
The more complex the issue, the more we depend on others' information. When
sending a staff member to meet with a Congressman, President Lyndon Johnson
would urge him/her to extend the conversation, talk longer than needed, since he
knew valuable details often emerged after business was done.
8. Search for common values. Some refuse collaboration because they
mistrust others. They think they cannot rely on their opponent’s agreements so they
resign themselves to power-based competition. But we can legitimately say, "We
seem to be stuck over here, but maybe we can make progress over there." NRA
members at a table with mothers on welfare can find similar values. The former
have children and latter want a secure society. We never embarrass or humiliate an
opponent if another way exists to avoid an evil, but hold open the possibility that
even this person could be an ally. We act to merit others' respect.
9. Reverse what we want to hear. Sometimes opposition is incomprehensible
and our visceral reaction is to avoid even listening, insuring that we do not
consider it deeply enough to learn what it has for us. The more we dislike
something the other proposes, the more we need to counteract our initial tendency
and go toward it. Such ideas may hold the greatest potential for progress; if not for
discovering common ground, then because they show where the other is vulnerable
or incomplete. We may conclude at last that they are liars and cheats and we must
struggle against them after opening to them sympathetically, but we hold out as
long as we can for mutual values.
10. Ask to be corrected. Accepting correction presumes that the other may
know something we do not, even contradicting what we firmly believe, so it takes
humility to say, "Correct me if I'm wrong here, but..." or "Do I have this straight?"
or "Is it accurate from your knowledge to say...?" We view others' experience as a
resource, and use their feedback.
11. Invite a change of perspective. To help even narcissists stuck in their
own views to be more open to others’ needs, ask them to put themselves in the
other’s place. This single shift has been found to make it easier for even selfabsorbed people to experience feelings of empathy. Whenever we want to move
people frozen in a viewpoint, we can ask them to imagine reversing positions and
put into words how they might view the issue differently.
12. Be consistent between beliefs and behaviors. A movement's fundamental
energy is from aligning its values with its actions. The discomfort of a
contradiction between the two moves us toward this, but few of us are able to
monitor this in ourselves because our minds skate over our inconsistencies.
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Opponents are usually glad to point them out, but grasping them may almost
require someone else holding them up before our eyes: "You say you're not racist,
but that was a racist remark." “You say your religion instructs you not to condemn
others, but now you do that." “You protest the disintegration of the family by
blaming those you exclude from it.” Unless another confronts us, our mind skips
between conflicting poles without noticing their incompatibility.
13. Understand that being right may not solve a problem. Believing our
analysis is already correct can limit collaboration without solving the problem.
More than one way to frame it is often available. "The problem is loss of wildlife
habitat" and "The problem is loss of jobs" may both be legitimate, but framing
differently from our opponents we stalemate. Our first concern should be how to
collaborate, and then define a problem we would both like to solve: “How can we
preserve habitat and jobs at the same time?”
14. Plan a problem-solving workshop. Our discomfort with opponents may
limit our success, so we need to allay it as much as possible. Consider, for
example, a community unity workshop:
• In a community polarized over a single issue, aim for roughly equal numbers
from each side attending.
• Ask participants up front to agree to apply the communication skills in
Chapters 4 and 5.
• Pair people with someone they don’t know well to search for agreement on
values, policies, and suggestions for the community.
• As pairs identify what they can, they join a different pair or four. The new
group adds more agreements and incorporates more people into them.
The groups continue in this way for the time available—reaching agreement
on new topics, expanding the groups, and incorporating more into the agreements.
Those appearing stuck in pairs or small groups may help by examining a single key
value deeply. When done, the small groups explain to everyone the agreements
they obtain and differences remaining. Participants determine how they wish to
follow up, and include other presentations and activities as desired.
15. Advocate for our opponents' interests. Before we remedy what our
opponents do wrong, we commit to them prospering. We want to enlist their
goodwill and help them achieve constructive goals, so we obtain their help solving
the part we cannot while we solve the part they cannot. The good of the whole, for
instance, implies populist interests to be committed to commercial prosperity and
vice versa.
16. Use our time efficiently. While contact with opponents may yield good
returns, it can also be a waste of time. Particularly when others invest ego needs or
financial gain in their position, even superb communications may accomplish so
little that we conclude our time could be better spent. We continually weigh the
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potential gain from a selected activity against all the other ways we could apply
our time and resources.
Chapter 16. Avoid Pitfalls
A movement faces subtle vulnerabilities. A common social experience is to
take offense at another's word or deed and avoid them ever after. A group's actions
may produce this effect on a large scale, so we want to recognize where we might
stumble.
Absolutes. We ruin useful ideas by stretching them too far. Better to act
today on the step we understand while still finding out where our effort should go
next based on clues from our inner world and outer conditions. Absolutes interfere
with this observant activity by assuring us we can ignore any further evidence,
conversation, or compromise. Unless we can appreciate divergent ideas, old
viewpoints restrict our thinking. Once clear on our goal, we should fearlessly take
account of all available knowledge.
Automaticity. Most of our actions are automatic. We barely have to think
about them because a prepared response arises spontaneously. Milliseconds after
sensory data reaches our mind, we label it, our brain supplying us what worked
before. By the time we think consciously, our mind has reasserted our habits and
ignored new evidence like royalty passing unseen by train through a remote
village.
We reduce automaticity as we make its process conscious, catching our
reaction before expressing it, softening comments that could come out harshly. We
achieve such a change just by slowing our reaction slightly, which frees us just
long enough for us to notice the quality of our action and direct it toward balance.
Delaying our reaction five percent per day, in a month we eliminate its negative
tone.
Bringing automatic thought under conscious control affects everything. As
an idea flies by, we resist an unthinking return to what we did before so that the
versatile in us steadily corrects the rigid. We de-automatize what we want to
change, shift gears, and supply fresh power.
Bandwagon. Great bargain ideas pull us in unless we are deliberately
skeptical. Leaders can lull us into accepting falsehoods (8). A man who had been a
teenager in 1930s Germany described to me how appealing were the mass rallies,
songs, and torchlit parades. Hitler's use of crowd psychology and a big lie turned
around even the intellectuals, who assumed they could think past the propaganda
though they were driven by it. With their moral understanding neutralized, average
Germans either cooperated when Jews were rounded up or sympathized quietly
with them. Rationalization overcame insight.
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When our thinking is manipulated, we tend to relinquish personal causality
and then blame others for using the power we gave them. Failing to notice how we
are led, we may even sacrifice our lives for a poor idea. Subduing a foreign country
that never posed a threat to their own, soldiers expected to stand aside from politics
assert, “I’m defending my country." They are required to believe that their fight
must be defending their country, but assumptions fuel bandwagons better than do
facts because they are malleable.
General Smedley Butler, awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor
during the early 1900 wars on foreign soil, wrote later that our interventions really
were for commercial profit. They generated substantial business but unobtrusively.
Butler offered a corrective. Whenever the country was mobilized, he proposed,
captains of industry should be also and receive the same $30 a month pay that
Army privates did then (33).
In a bandwagon, we choose to associate with people who agree with us, and
then expect them to confirm what we say. When they do, we have set up group
think to reinforce our assumptions. Self-selected feedback removes challenge from
our surroundings, amplifying the influence of our blind spots.
Hearing the approach of a bandwagon, we need to reassert our values
carefully. The one who understands co-opts the one who does not. The one who
presents a slogan guides the one who reacts to it.
Conflict. To resolve group conflict, we first ask, "Does this affect our
purpose?" If it does, it's the group's business, and we remedy it. If the problem is
from incomplete information, we supply it; from wrong choices, we correct our
mistakes; from opposing values, we resolve them.
With no impact on their common purpose, parties can have their differences.
Either can say, “Okay, let’s do it your way." Controversy is reasonable only when
it matters, so we can invite people to release strong opinions about inconsequential
matters. Touchiness about turf invites organizational retooling. People should
communicate as equals instead of from rank, be honest about feelings, use
reasoning rather than authority, and move toward consensus instead of control. But
sometimes even good communications do not resolve an issue when values
conflict.
Feeling somewhat adrift trying to solve a problem, our first key is to define
the type of task that leads to a solution. Do we gather information, talk out
feelings, or define responsibility? We frame the question we want to answer. “Are
two people clashing continually?“ differs from “Are two people pursuing
divergent purposes?” or “Is the structure set up for conflict?”
Our frame tells us the evidence to look for. Is the group too stretched? Is
this step too confusing? Who is responsible? How did we communicate about
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this? Did a promised resource fall through? A clue that we mis-frame is the
problem lingering even after we answer our question.
After we define the problem, we listen to views and fill in our
understanding. Maybe hearing two people is enough to orient us, and sometimes
problems evaporate with feelings aired. Correct data enables us to word a decision
that all parties agree states the problem accurately. Then together we develop
alternate responses, weigh each, choose the best, and agree on a follow-up plan.
Free enterprise. A gulf between rich and poor has been a common feature
of past civilizations, so today's is less likely due to modern capitalism than to a
human vulnerability it worsens. People have traded since the start of communal
life, so trade is not the problem. Rather it lies in a kind of trade where one side
steadily loses. When some can rig the system so they benefit by others’ loss, they
harm the system itself.
Free enterprise has contributed wealth to the society by encouraging
ingenuity and initiative. The customary thinking of its proponents, however,
contains a belief damaging for society overall--that for the greatest total benefit,
some have to suffer. They assert that 1) our economic system has been productive,
2) free enterprise is basic to it, 3) it depends on maximum profit, and 4) therefore
entrepreneurs should be allowed maximum profit. The unaddressed consequence
of this reasoning, however, is that some lose their job and pension, some have no
health coverage, some are reduced to generational poverty, and some endure a
toxic physical environment.
To balance that picture we recognize that free enterprise ignores social needs
that do not turn a profit, leaving those excluded from the economy to suffer. We
claim certain values besides profit that are essential to society's survival, and
presume society must bring competing values into balance for the greatest longterm good.
Lack of self-knowledge. Personal motivations added together comprise the
energy of the movement. Individuals' love, responsibility, and unselfishness fuel
common purpose, so we look in the mirror and check ourselves: "What are you
about?" Our deeper mind shrugs and waits for an answer arising from our action,
and our doing resolves the ambiguity. Our events today become the history that
sets up action for tomorrow.
We may note in ourselves a well-intentioned laziness, quick to promise but
slow to follow through. Must others make allowances for us? Are we touchy when
corrected? Do we understand what others have to offer? Do we esteem truth from
opponents above loyalty to allies?
Quick answers may reveal our hidden feelings, but we want to shift to our
best answers, our considered second response. We develop character as we change
from our first reaction to a better one, but we learn from the first one. When
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someone challenges us, do we examine their words to grasp any flaw in ourselves?
If we are defensive and hurt, protecting our ego is our priority, and without selfawareness we are more likely to be blindsided. New influences touch our
perceptions delicately so we need to seize them when they arrive.
Locality. The action of others elsewhere used to concern us less.
Everyone’s conditions were local, and we hoped others would handle theirs
constructively. When everyone does their part, the whole prospers.
Yet if everyone attends to local, no one handles elsewhere. We cannot
assume that those beyond the horizon spontaneously do their part. Needs elsewhere
may languish and thresholds pass before we even learn about them.
Unless we deliberately pay attention to it, everything is out of sight.
Anything we think about rarely we turn over to others who think about it
continually. Anything we ignore may topple our efforts. Locked into our own
interests we release systemic issues to those who bend them for their own
purposes.
Understanding what we are up against, we “think local, global, total, and
vocal.” The scope of the solution must match the problem. Lawmakers may pick
away at the edges of economic inequality that has been growing for decades, but
many factors are systemic—tax policy, public services, distribution of company
earnings, pay levels, educational opportunity, and the safety net. National leaders
need determination to resolve these problems.
Management errors. There is no limit to the possible forms of mediocre
thinking. A few are:
• Do you face reality, or indulge in idealistic hopes?
• Do you uncomfortably avoid others who try to give you feedback?
• When others are upset, do you dismiss their feelings without hearing their
whole story?
• Do you think reactively from one crisis to another, or plan toward future
activity?
• Do your people know what's expected of them?
• Do you think through the conditions that insure success?
• Do you take your own optimism or pessimism as fact?
• Do you avoid resolving conflict with strong people?
Pushing even correct ideas too far, we diminish others’ ability to cooperate.
Have you thought:
I can see everything so clearly. Maybe so, but wait. Do you know the whole
story? Don't expect others to share your clarity. If they know less, they must resist
your version of it. In important matters, people want the critical information
readily at hand--feel they can pick it up easily--and they hold back till they sense
they have it. Clarity is not transferable, so they must hold out against us.
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How could they see it so differently? Good for one is a problem for another.
If their position surprises us, we must not have heard their concerns, grasped their
values, or understood their life experience.
How inconsistent they seem to be! Answering to several loyalties, they may
regard change as more trouble, so our suggestion had better show them a path.
And they won't listen when I talk! Of course. We want them to agree with
us. Our pressure on them arouses their self-defense.
Why don't they take my word for it? We wonder indignantly how our
credibility could be less than persuasive. They should accept our say-so, but
changing their thinking because they trust us is a soft foundation.
They think so rigidly! Loyalty to established patterns is a pillar of character.
We need to uncover a loyalty that coincides with our mutual purpose.
Mistakes can sabotage a group or become an occasion for growth. They
occur because human beings are limited and do things incorrectly at first, are the
normal outcome of dispatching energy into an unknown. We apply effort to
circumstances we cannot fully control, yet from infancy expect heat for our
mistakes. We create more of them by fearing them, avoiding challenges, and taking
objective limitations personally.
Practically all improvement depends on their steady correction, realigning
ourselves with our purpose, as in driving. Our car left to itself goes off the road,
but our hand corrects it moment by moment. Errors are just a condition of reality
that seldom allows us unchanging certainty.
Moral confusion. Few of us even consider morality in our routine activities.
They were okay yesterday and should be okay today. When they benefit us, we
prefer not to debate their implications, so that our surface thinking deters us from
considering right and wrong or noticing damage from our actions.
But if we discount moral issues, we remain in willful ignorance and are
likely eventually to injure others. The government did this regarding “enhanced
interrogation,” a euphemism for torture. Recognizing a moral issue but wanting
results anyway, officials outsourced the practice, sending accused to nations that
would use extreme measures and deny it. They ignored moral quality, forgetting
that after World War II we tried Japanese as war criminals for waterboarding U.S.
prisoners. Even under the extreme stresses of World War II we did not coerce
prisoners but instead obtained substantial information by treating them humanely.
Allowing our own officials to evade these standards, we become complicit.
Because we become destructive unobtrusively, we have to watch out for it.
Even suspecting a lesser quality in our deed, we need to delay it and consult our
standards.
Moral issues are more about a choice of emphasis than about evidence. In
devising our social standards, for instance, we have the power to choose to imitate
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animals snarling at each other or we can choose to assert an abstraction about the
treatment humans deserve. To account for Americans’ periodic indifference to
such issues, we look to leadership and the media, though often the former do as
they please and the latter report as fact what is only propaganda (34). If we intend
to do the right thing, we weigh morality, consult our conscience and ethical
standards, and call on balance and fairness.
Even slight changes in standards can have a big effect. Imagine an
aggressive, powerful individual who can also be gratuitously destructive. Yet a
passing influence moves him not to be gratuitously destructive. Though he is still
aggressive, society might benefit greatly by his slight movement toward less evil.
Someone barely tilted against us may enable a positive outcome by barely favoring
us. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader we removed at great cost of money and life,
tolerated religious diversity and the presence of Christians in his country. That
Christians have fled Iraq and the entire region is mired in sectarian war suggests a
possible lesson overlooked.
As humans, we are invited to use our highest means because they will lead
ultimately to the best outcomes available. Sometimes our small positive deed is the
encouragement another needs to take a better direction, while our small negative
deed may finally fracture the bone.
We rarely accomplish final outcomes and may not survive to witness them,
but today we control their history. From what we do now, we make a positive or
negative future more likely. Impersonal forces such as nationalism, religious
extremes, and the profit motive may turn destructive, and services people value
now may make the planet less livable later. We help by asking, “What values are at
stake?" and reaching beyond political positioning.
.
Pressure. We want to enlist others by valid reasons that fit their life. If we
are not careful, we can employ invalid ones. Dependence on us, for example,
nudges people to conform to our views. As we become larger in their world, their
commitment to our purpose is less free. Mass group settings also present cautions.
In them people feel more anonymous and less likely to be caught at doing wrong.
The group’s morals somewhat displace their neural identification with their own
morals (35). And raised to expect simple explanations for complex problems,
having limited information, wanting to imitate leaders, being with others making
commitments, and associating with the like-minded all reduce the freedom of their
commitment.
Yet many such conditions engage legitimate energy, so the potential for
good or ill challenges our integrity. It obliges us to alert people to influences on
them and help them understand their tendency to defer power even to us. We affect
them only with their consent, and preserve their freedom by telling them, "This
situation may alter your thinking. If you agree with us, do so with your eyes open."
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Quality of effort. If our co-workers turn out to be lazy, impulsive, selfinterested, unreliable, backbiting, defensive, and controlling, our belief in our
common purpose may compensate for their deficiencies for awhile. We put up with
them and may persevere even if others make foolish decisions, claim higher
knowledge because they were there first, and leave us confused about expectations.
But once we notice how the quality of our mutual effort undermines its outcomes,
it is a short step to skipping a meeting, not answering a phone call, getting busier in
other parts of our lives, and finally telling the group secretary just to keep us on the
mailing list. Defects can sabotage a group's effort.
We wish to solve big problems with systems. We master water by
channeling it through a city water network. Even a few drops through one faucet
need a connection to a labyrinth of pipes. Delivering a resource to a need likewise
depends on supportive conditions all the way from a meeting of five friends to a
movement of thousands of groups. We recognize early a problem about quality and
head it off. A leader catches a member after a meeting and says, “Mike, could we
discuss your comment a few minutes ago?” Everyone incorporates feedback and
makes reasonable adjustments.
Reactive Self. All we do is a printout of our internal activity. Thoughts
and feelings start from what we did before, recycling familiar emotions and
desires. Many people collect such tendencies into what we might call a reactive
self. It feels impaled by circumstances, aches, pains, and nuisances; allows itself to
be pulled down and upset; lets frustration and hurt flow in and out at will. When it
predominates, people need others’ validation merely to feel okay. This “little self”
may experience moments of relief as the world supplies them and flashes of
happiness when a plan works out, but reverts readily to being mildly overwhelmed.
Its strength flags as circumstances worsen, and it retreats before pressures.
Because it assumes that outer circumstances determine its inner experience,
the reactive self is a weak foundation for serving others’ needs and changing the
world. It has minimal interest in learning, preferring to ride out ideas it claimed
before. Recycling old conclusions, it becomes intransigent unobtrusively, not by
rationally accumulating evidence but by the hidden weight of habitual thought.
Trying to solve a problem with this limited knowledge is like Gulliver waking to
find himself pinned to the ground by Lilliputian ropes.
In that state, familiar turf holds us because the effort to change is hard. Our
findings correlate with our interests, and false overwhelms valid research. Daily
events do not touch our basic thinking, and even dramatic world events affect us
little. With our thinking confined to its old stream, we see less and less into life’s
complexity.
Our reactive self affects others. We may present an idea to a group and
refuse to let go of it because we own it, while others release it because they do not
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own it; both reasons unreasonable. We should turn loose poor ideas and keep better
ones regardless of their source. Replacing the reactive self takes patient, long-term
effort at weighing the quality of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Short-term self-interest. People expect those with connections to marshal
their money, time, friends, consultants, lobbyists, and legislators to benefit
themselves. Those with power claim resources that should benefit all while they
rationalize that looking out for themselves is natural.
The public believes that abilities bring different returns but they object to
unfairness, which even offends monkeys. Arguably, it is morally offensive for a
full time worker for a wealthy corporation to qualify for welfare payments. People
mind it when they feel their hard work is unjustly compensated because they lack
political influence.
Some with large resources are generous: “I’ve got plenty, so I’ll give away
the rest.” A more common reaction is, “What I have makes me better so I should
have more.” The more wealth and power we have, the more we tend to believe we
deserve it. Lord Acton’s aphorism, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts
absolutely” may overgeneralize the effect, while Lincoln observed more exactly,
“Any man can stand adversity. If you want to know his true character, give him
power.” Power allows us more scope to reveal the qualities that do exist in us.
Exceptional power distorts this tendency, generating more errors in judgment.
Napoleon reflected on all he had conquered, felt invincible, and decided to take his
army to Moscow, and Hitler, ignoring Napoleon’s experience, did the same.
Stability. In turbulent times society is often desperate for stability, but too
much of it implies a non-self-correcting system that ignores endemic problems.
Toynbee found a common feature of civilizations to be the development of a
universal state that brought everything under control shortly before its collapse.
When everything we appear to be in complete control, we are more vulnerable than
we realize.
Subjective reality. Each of us is governed by a personal subjective reality,
what we commit ourselves to sustaining in existence. Those who devote their heart
and mind completely to a particular sport or profession, for instance, can reach
amazing levels of skill.
People’s influence on society issues from a similar commitment of attention.
Whatever they believe about their place in society, they fulfill their vision by
scores of small daily acts. Doing this for years they play out an interior plan all but
invisible to others whose minds work differently. If we wish to change their
actions toward society, we are faced with modifying their subjective reality, what
they believe inwardly to be right and true.
Tendencies. We need to understand the direction we are programmed to go
and step aside from it. We ask, "What's behind my thinking about this? Have I
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acknowledged my limits? Is there information I don't let in? Have I generalized
beyond what I know? Have I judged ideas by whether I like the people expressing
them?" We already distort knowledge by focusing on it intently so that it looms up
and affects our balance.
Accusing another of a flaw engages familiar tendencies. We dismiss
empathy for him, remove his unique humanity from our estimation, and treat him
as an opponent. Many of us are determined to be right already. Hearing a novel
point, our first concern is whether it is friend or foe. Does it fit with what we
already think or must we defend ourselves against it? We tend to label ideas long
before allowing them to find their correct place in our understanding.
We also often assume that our present understanding is enough. But if our
group knows more than any individual, our thinking is only a piece rather than the
whole. So knowing we think incompletely, we refuse to finalize a plan while any
of it remains unassimilated, cease believing that our understanding can settle our
mind against further change, or that others should think as we do.
Such a stance may puzzle activists who often are opinionated, advancing
their views decisively, so that believing less in our correctness might seem
debilitating. As both the individual and group release ego attachment, however,
common evidence gradually aligns their views. If we truly believe the group thinks
together better than anyone in it, we apply this to ourselves. We submit our ideas
humbly to the group and use every available means to purify our combined
thinking.
Violence. Encountering deeds the human race universally cries out against,
our reactive side prepares for violence, but this should be our last response instead
of our first. If we are to bring any higher moral principle to bear, we rely on the
most goodness available to us as our first weapon. We seize the person if we can,
hold him still, and cause him to face the meaning of his actions. A “penitentiary”
accordingly is a place where people might learn penitence, internal remorse for
wrong they do, while a correctional facility aims to "correct" visible behavior.
Our goal extends beyond behavior. We attempt to enlist the muted voice of
goodness in the other’s conscience that he may have ignored. Our truth-telling, our
willingness to sacrifice for a value, our forgiveness of a wrong, a resolute action on
another’s behalf may be the only influence this person can receive. The world has
not yet absorbed the lesson of South Africa, how it averted a civil war as apartheid
ended, and moved toward peace through apology and forgiveness.
Those who despair of finding effective tools for change might listen to
Martin Luther King: “Love is the only force that can convert an enemy into a
friend.”
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References
1. A Study of History, by Arnold Toynbee, abridgment by D.C. Somervell, Dell
Publishing: New York, 2 volumes, 1965. This theme runs through Toynbee’s
entire survey.
2. Four Hens and a Rooster, Lena and Olof Landstrom, R & S Books /
Macmillan, New York, 2005.
3. “Poll: Americans Have Little Faith in Government,” Charles Babington and
Jennifer Agiesta, Associated Press, January 2, 2014. For a thoughtful summary of
current poverty in the U.S. and its causes, see “9 Questions about Poverty,
Answered,” Peter Van Buren, Mother Jones (online), June 6, 2014.
4. www.eisenhower.archives.gov/farewell.htm.
5. “Some 95% of 2009-2012 Income Gains Went to Wealthiest 1%,” Emmanuel
Saez, Wall Street Journal (online), Sept 10, 2013.
6. Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jared
Diamond, Elizabeth Kolbert, Thomas Piketty, Robert Putnam, and many others
present valuable perspectives on the changes needed. The online news source
www.dailykos.com collects an array of timely articles.
7. Looking at others while they speak lets them know they have our attention.
And when addressing someone we expect to influence (such as a misbehaving
child), firm eye contact is appropriate. It informs them that we expect them to
accommodate to our wishes: “Look at me and tell me what you are going to do
now.” Determined sales people often employ direct eye contact. When our aim
instead is to persuade by means of the thoughtful information we offer, we leave
the other free to agree or not. If they think we want to dominate them, they read
eye contact as a threat instead of an offer, so as we speak to them, we glance at
them occasionally to let them know we want to communicate as equals.
8. “”The most surprising attribute of great leaders,” Jeremy Dean, psyblog.com,
August 1, 2014. The article cites several research studies identifying humility as
the factor that turned leaders from good to great, particularly in creating a climate
in which others develop leadership qualities. Also , “The irritating reason
overconfident people get all the breaks” (Jeremy Dean, psyblog.com August 28,
2014), probes how overconfident people gain for themselves by deceiving others,
and others allow them to do so.
9. Encounter Groups: First Facts. Morton A. Lieberman, Irvin D. Yalom, and
Matthew D. Miles, Basic Books, New York, 1973. Explains key qualities of small
group leadership based on careful research.
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10. “Social Status and subjective well being,” Cameron Anderson, Michael W.
Kraus, Adam D. Galinsky, Dacher Keltner, Psychological Science, July 2012, Vol,
23, # 7 764-771.
11. “Bowling Alone: A Harvard Professor Examines America’s Dwindling Sense
of Community,” Robert D. Putnam with Scott Heller, The Chronicles of Higher
Education, March 1, 1996, Volume 42, Number 5, P 10(2).
12. “Why We Did It,” MSNBC Documentary, March 6, 2014, narrated by Rachel
Maddow.
13. Daily Kos, Dec. 21, 2013. New York City, however, has made significant
strides in responding to homelessness.
14. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond, Viking:
New York, 2005, pages 421 and following.
15. “Crossroads for Planet Earth,“ Scientific American, September 2005. More
recent is How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place (2nd edition),
Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen, 2014, in which
leading scientists evaluate 39 proposals for how they would make the world a
better place. Its rankings provide a broader context than global warming. It places
child malnutrition, for instance, as the leading concern we could address
effectively right away.
16 The Republic of Plato, edited by Alan Bloom, Basic Books, New York, 1968,
page 198.
17. Sinclair's quote appeared first in his book, "I, Candidate for Governor: And
How I Got Licked," about the 1934 California governor's race. On the same point,
“Study: Rich Republicans are the worst climate deniers,” Chris Mooney, Mother
Jones (online), July 10, 2014. Among low income Republicans, 17% match the
proportions of Independents and Democrats in the belief that climate change is not
very or not at all dangerous, but 51.2% of rich Republicans answer that way.
18.“Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand,” Maurice McTigue,
Imprimis, Hillsdale College, 33 East College St., Hillsdale, MI 49242.
19. “Why we overestimate our competence,” Tori DeAngelis,
www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/overestimate.aspx (February 2003, Vol . 34, No. 2.
Print version page 60) is a good summary of the issue and notes contributions by
Dunning and Kruger.
20. “Why good thoughts block better ones,” Merim Bilalic and Peter McLeod,
Scientific American, March 2014. Explains the Einstellung effect, the brain’s
strong tendency to stick with the familiar solution that comes to mind first. Its
most potent impact is diverting us unconsciously from information that could
change our thinking. Consciously we feel open to whatever ideas reach us, but
exclude entire categories unconsciously to protect choices we assume are correct.
In “In Lieu of Manners,” Jeffrey Rosen (New York Times Magazine, February 4,
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2001) points out how confirmation bias has led to litigation as a substitute for
manners and respect for others. Upon taking sides in a contentious situation, we
tend to become more committed to our views and interpret evidence as more
supportive of them. Litigating these disputes leads to greater polarization.
21. “Step by Step, Your Brain Mimics His Moves,” Ker Than, Psychology Today,
July/August 2005, page 26. Also, “Optimization Versus Effortful Processing in
Children: Cognitive Triage: Criticisms, Reanalyses, and New Data,” C. J.
Brainerd, et al., Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, V55, N3, p353-73,
June 1993.
22. ‘The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,”
documentary by Errol Morris, 2003. Lessons examined were: Empathize with your
enemy, rationality will not save us, there’s something beyond oneself, maximize
efficiency, proportionality should be a guideline in war, get the data, belief and
seeing are both often wrong, be prepared to reexamine your reasoning, in order to
do good you may have to engage in evil, never say never, you can’t change human
nature.
23. A Case Study of Innovation,” Elting E. Morison, Engineering and Science
Magazine, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, April 1950, in The
Planning of Change, edited by Warren Bennis, Kenneth Benne, and Robert Chin,
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961, page 602.
24. www.goodjudgmentproject.com. The premise shows up in game shows that
permit contestants to consult the audience, which is right 90% of the time.
25. A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America’s Soul, Mark
Gerzon, G.P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 1996.
26. This list is adapted from a shorter version in Effective Classroom
Turnaround:Practice Makes Permanent, John Jensen, Rowman and Littlefield,
Lanham, MD, 2012.
27. "Jimmy Carter: U.S. Is an 'Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery',"
Daniel Kreps, July 31, 2015, Rollingstone.com. The 39th president said the
'Citizens United' ruling 'violates the essence of what made America a great country
in its political system.'
28. “Want to suppress the vote? Stress people out,” Chris Mooney, Mother Jones
(online), June 23, 2014. People prone to stress are more likely to skip voting when
voting is stressful.
29. “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” Bill
McKibben, Harper’s Magazine, August 2005. The author details discrepancies
between U.S. beliefs and practices on the one hand and Christian teachings on the
other. To summarize: Americans possess a “Ben Franklinized” Christianity, “God
helps those who help themselves,” replacing Christ’s emphasis on service to the
poor and love for our neighbor in need. U.S. policies have shaped Christianity
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instead of vice versa. We are the last among rich nations to feed the hungry, we are
more violent and retributive, sustain a wider gap between poor and rich, indulge in
regressive and repressive legislative policies, jail more people, lack self discipline,
act on impulse, are poor stewards of both our personal and collective financial
household, divorce more, and leave more children uncared for. Christian thinking
is preoccupied with issues peripheral to what Jesus talked about: pursuing the selfsatisfied life, inveighing against gays and abortion, and a preoccupation with the
apocalyptic. Tax cuts for the rich, the war in Iraq, and the death penalty for
offenders have been presented as Christian duties. McKibben believes a genuine
hunger exists for a true spiritual mission that Christians do not hear in Sunday
sermons, suggesting for us an informational campaign. We might approach this
issue by standing a few people at a church parking lot exit on Sunday and hold up
placards displaying only a Bible reference, without the text, on themes such as 1)
Wealth: Amos (entire book inveighs against repression by the rich), Luke 14, 12-14
(make your feast for the poor instead of wealthy friends), Luke 16, 19-31
(conversation with a rich man in hell). 2) War: Mt. 5, 9-10 (attitude toward
enemies and peacemaking), Mt. 5, 38-48 (forgiveness and love of enemies), Mt.
26,52 (put up your sword). 3) Poverty: Gen. 4,9 (brother’s keeper), Mt. 25,31-46
(serve dire human needs). 4) Sin: John 8,7 (don’t condemn others), Mt. 7,1-5
(hypocrisy of judgment). Churchgoers reading the references would be challenged
to recognize them or look them up.
30. "Bill Maher's excellent and sobering commentary on the wealth gap," Daily
Kos, BruinKidFollow, May 11, 2013.
31. "Hand-to-mouth nation; Roughly 40$ of US households living paycheck to
paycheck but two thirds of these families are not considered poor by economic
definitions," mybudget360.com, March 31, 2014.
32. A long history behind the development of such thinking in the U.S. begins with
what educators thought schools should produce. In “The Structure of Success in
America,” Nicholas Lemann (Atlantic Monthly, August 1995) summarizes a trail
of events. See also his book, The Big Test, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
1999. Two American ideas compete. One is a natural aristocracy or meritocracy
which generations of American elites have ascribed to themselves and which the
SAT test has increasingly determined. The other is the idea of universal individual
opportunity, stronger in America than anywhere else. In his article, Lemann notes
that these concepts were separate for a long time but “what seems to have
happened is the funneling of opportunity toward a smaller and smaller group.”
33. War is a Racket, Smedley Butler. This book written in the 1930s is reprinted
and available on the Internet at
http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisracket.htm.
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34. In a letter to activists December 2, 2005, Robert McChesney, the director of
Free Press that is devoted to freedom in the media, noted seven current attacks on
the media: infiltrating public broadcasting, manufacturing fake news, bribing
journalists, lying, eliminating dissent in the mainstream media by punishing
reporters, gutting the Freedom of Information Act, and consolidating media
control. Norman Solomon, Alternative Radio, December 4, 2005, in a lecture titled
“War Made Easy” traces the historical record of how government enlists the media
when it wants to go to war. Practically identical words and thinking are used to
appeal to the public from decade to decade. Solomon cited the words of Hermann
Goering, which in their more complete form are available on.
http://enominepatris.com/politics/goering.htm. Gustave Gilbert, an intelligence
officer, interviewed Hermann Goering at Nuremberg on April 18, 1946.
“We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his
attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who
bring them war and destruction.”
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why
would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he
can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common
people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for
that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have
some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United
States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
35. “Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition
predicts competitor harm,” M. Cikara, A.C. Jenkins, N. Dufour, R. Saxe,
Sciencedirect.com, June 21, 2014. Also, “Why being in a group causes some to
forget their morals,” Jeremy Dean, psyblog.com, June 21, 2014.
Recommended Reading
A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee, abridgment by D.C. Somervell, Dell
Publishing: New York, 2 volumes, 1965. Explains the rise and fall of civilizations,
particularly as influenced by the role of a dominant minority.
134
Capitalism in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty, Harvard College, Cambridge,
2014. Explains how modern capitalism increases inequality by placing ever more
wealth in the hands of the richest.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond, Viking: New
York, 2005. Describes how human activity is depleting resources and failing to
apply existing knowledge to solve impending problems.
Dedication and Leadership, Douglas Hyde, Notre Dame University Press: South
Bend, 1992. Explains to Catholic missionaries the innovations in group dynamics
that enabled the Communist Party to obtain 30 million members in free countries
around the world.
Encounter Groups: First Facts, Morton A. Lieberman, Irvin D Yalom, Matthew D.
Miles, Basic Books: New York, 1973. Careful research explains the impact of
different small group leadership styles on personal changes made by participants.
It established some essential conditions for what enabled people to benefit long
term, particularly the differential effects of commanding versus cooperative
leadership styles.
Finding Your Inner Lenin: Taking Responsibility for Global Change, John Jensen,
Xlibris: Philadelphia, 2007. Examines the troubles evident in U.S. society in the
early 2000s, how benefit from American productivity has migrated toward the
wealthy, and the organizing effort needed.
How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place (2nd edition), Bjørn
Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center: Copenhagen, 2014. Scientists evaluate
39 proposals for how to spend money most effectively to improve the world.
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Stanley
McChrystal, Random House, New York, 2015. An excellent review of the need
for high quality communication and low ego-needs in organizations.
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Naomi Oreskes and
Erik Conway, Columbia University Press: New York, 2014. In novel form,
examines decisions made today from the vantage point of a few centuries later.
See also summary and review of the book in “How Civilization Ended: Circa
2014,” by Chris Mooney, Mother Jones (online), July 18, 2014.
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The Planning of Change, edited by Warren Bennis, Kenneth Benne, and Robert
Chin, Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1961. An anthology of the best
articles about organizational behavior available at that time.
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down
Barriers, Gillian Tett, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015. Explains how
protected in-groups produce mediocre thinking leading to bad decisions.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, Henry Holt: New
York, 2014. Documents the ongoing impact of human activity on the
disappearance of species large and small.
APPENDIX I.
ORGANIZATIONAL FLYER
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Following is a template for a flyer. Adapt it to local interests, print up a
supply, and distribute them on street corners at busy times.
A Movement for Change
Are you tired of excuses from government leaders?
Do you believe they could show more common sense and cooperation to get
things done for the American people?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Are you concerned about problems unattended, such as
the growing inequality between rich and poor?
an economy working fine for the well-off but not for the rest?
an immigration policy governed by fear, bias, and self-interest?
a head-in-the-sand climate change policy?
a deteriorating infrastructure?
politics manipulated by money?
an ineffective, damaging criminal justice system?
The question is how to unite people’s effort to bring about change.
At (place and time), (person and their qualifications) will offer an answer
followed by questions and discussion. There is no charge and all are welcome.
APPENDIX II.
INTRODUCTORY TALK OUTLINE.
The goal of the talk is to generate enthusiasm among listeners for engaging
in the activities of the movement—to learn, support each other, and reach out to
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society with changes. Words to say to an audience are in quotes with suggestions
unquoted.
“Hi everyone. Let’s see how you view the present situation, okay?
“How many believe that it is urgent for the country to implement a fair and
reasonable immigration policy? ... Okay, those of you who raised your hands, how
many million people in the country do you think agree with you?”
Get several estimates, average them up roughly, and write a figure on a
white board—e.g. “20 million people.” For each of the issues on the flyer in the
prior appendix, do the same. Find out how many think the issue is important and
urgent, and estimate how many agree. The total of all the numbers should easily be
more than elected the last President, roughly 66 million people. Point this out, and
continue:
“So where is the problem? Plenty of people believe roughly the same thing,
that there is an urgent overall need for change. You would think that 70 million
people thinking that way could make some changes, right?
“The problem lies here. The U.S. has become an oligarchy, defined as a
government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and
selfish purposes. But wait, you say, I thought we were a democracy. Okay, in
structure we are. The people are said to govern through their elected
representatives. But what happens if people are lazy and let others manipulate
them? Then you have the form of a democracy taken over by a smaller number
who manipulate the rules so they stay in power. Result? The result is a
government structurally a democracy but functionally an oligarchy. There’s no
mystery how this happened. 40% of the people don’t vote, money floods the
political process, legislatures gerrymander districts to guaranteed wins and restrict
who can vote and when. The result is a minority of the people control the majority.
“So what’s the answer? The answer is right in front of us. We are still
structurally a democracy, and the structure is there waiting to be used. But use it
for what?
“Here is an important piece of information that can help focus our effort. It
came out of the life work of a British historian named Arnold Toynbee who tried to
find out how civilizations rose and fell, what made them develop and then fall
apart. In the twenty-one civilizations he analyzed, he found a simple thing, really.
The civilizations had their start in the efforts of what he called a creative minority,
people who understood how to benefit everyone by developing or borrowing what
their particular society needed to prosper.
“As most people were well off from this leadership, the society continued to
meet its challenges and advance. Then when the creative minority changed to
merely being dominant, and using the labors of others for their own luxury and
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exercise of power, others stopped believing in their society. And when troubles
came, the society could not withstand them and the society fell apart.
‘
“And that is what has happened to our society. The big marker was the
realization in 1960s that we had a lot of poverty in this country. The Great Society
programs attempted to remedy this and made great progress. Then the Vietnam
War drained off resources and President Reagan specifically withdrew backing for
the Great Society programs. He instead promoted “trickle down” economics—that
taking care of the corporations and the wealthy meant that everyone would benefit.
The problem was bait and switch. What they installed was a trickle-up system so
that money migrated to the wealthy. Inequality has grown deeper ever since, even
until now, and those in charge of the economy have the power to keep it just as it
is. .
“The bottom line is that we simply need to use the structure of democracy to
replace people who want an unequal society . We need to replace people at all
levels of government who think that society is basically for winners, and not for
both winners and losers. We master the electoral process everywhere, and
communicate to everyone that we want a good of the whole that includes everyone.
“To achieve this, we need the effort of everyone—to learn how to work
together first of all, and then to replace people who want oligarchy with people
who want democracy. And in the meantime, with any effort we have to spare, to do
what we can for specific needs in our town and neighborhood.
“The next step is inside each one of us. Do I personally want to try to
reclaim democracy in this country? Do we decide to call on ourselves, to try to
step up to the challenge in front of us?
“Let me ask you to divide into groups of 5-7 now, and discuss the direction
I’ve outlined. Nominate one of your group as a moderator. The moderator’s two
jobs are to make sure that everyone has a chance to express their ideas, and to
deliver the group’s conclusions, okay? When you’ve talked for fifteen minutes or
so, try to end with your conclusions or agreements, and the moderator shares your
group’s conclusions with everyone. Understood?”
Obtain contact information from everyone attending. When the groups have
reported back, suggest followup organizational meetings at places and times you
have worked out ahead that can accommodate the numbers present. Go through
the organizational steps described in Chapter 4 above.
------------------We find the good in others’ values, ask their permission to suggest alternate
views, and do so with humility as offering a gift they are free to refuse.
Lacking political influence, we may first have to earn a seat at the table
where dialog occurs.
One who acts on the facts contributes more than a thousand who know them.
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A plan without action is empty theory, and action without a plan insures
self-sabotage.