[Dialogue] Social Process Triangle Pop Quiz

[Lawrence Philbrook]

This is from the cd

With respect, Larry

*SOCIAL DEMONSTRATION AND THE PRESSURE POINTS
*

For a long time, we have said we were about three things: Penetration, 
Formation and Permeation. The categories were always a little vague to 
me but Penetration, it seemed, had to do with geography, Permeation with 
the social and Formation with the Movement. Whatever else we were about, 
we knew we were concerned with covering all the earth and, in the 
process, with making sure we touched all of the people. That we did by 
being a Movement. Our Penetration strategy has taught us to find our way 
through the geography of the earth. Now we must learn to find our way 
through its sociology and that is the function of the Pressure Points. 
The Pressure Points have to do with the "socio," with taking the 
complexity of the social vehicle we live in and giving it new form.

I want to talk about four things: first, that this is a time of 
demonstration, second, we can be of help in demonstration; third, what 
is needed for demonstration; and fourth, what are the criteria for 
demonstration.

Every time a new social vehicle has come into being, three things have 
been involved. First, there is a _piety_, or a vision or a mythology 
which freights the Mystery. In Tillich's speech on the significance of 
the history of religions for the systematic theologian, he talks about 
the symbols one holds before the presence of the Mystery. He says these 
symbols allow civilizations to be open to the future.

Second, a social vehicle always involves a people. If no people had 
decided to be the United States*, *then this social vehicle would never 
have come into being. Furthermore, if that people had not created 
symbols and a new vision to hold the reality they were over against, 
their vehicle would not have survived.

Third, they needed a method, or mode of action to effectively engage in 
the world.

It is clear that the old social vehicle is going rapidly out of being. 
The Church is collapsing. However, that collapse is a sign of 
possibility because it means the end of a piety that froze human beings, 
preventing them from responding to the new world we live in. The church 
is not going to pass away. Its old form and symbol system are going to 
be replaced by a new form and symbol system. The passing away of the 
piety of the old social vehicle means that a new piety is coming into 
being.

We are in the midst of a political collapse. I have lost count of the 
governments that have fallen by the way side since the beginning of this 
year. In this country at least, the populace took a turn some time after 
1968, but those who were running the government did not see the people 
take the turn. All of a sudden, in the midst of Watergate, the people 
realized that the leadership was not enacting the will of the people and 
the leadership realized that the people were in no authentic way related 
to what was going on. That was underneath the governmental collapse in 
this country, which demonstrated that a dimension of polity is going out 
of being and a whole new set is coming into being. The collapse in 
vocation, the crisis of engagement, the deep sense of inability to deal 
relevantly with the world we live in all point to the collapse of 
relevant modes of engagement.

The New Social Vehicle has no moral content. It is not ''right" or 
"wrong"; it is simply coming into being. It is not anything you or I are 
creating, but something new emerging. God is working a new creation 
right in our midst. We did not predict that the economic dynamic would 
mature nor that the economic community would become the first global 
community. We may not like what has happened but that is the way it is. 
Our only question is how to relate to what is. How do we impact what the 
Lord is bringing into being to allow it to be worth it, to be creative? 
How is the word "creative" defined? Creative is not simply doing what we 
want; that is not the way God acts. A new social vehicle is coming into 
being and our job is to expend our freedom to allow it to happen, to 
allow it to be human. At the same time, we know that is not finally in 
our hands to decide. This deep shift which has taken place in the 
emergence of the new social vehicle is like the shift we describe in the 
God lecture in RS­1. Social transparency has happened. The Mystery has 
again intruded in the midst of the world and called into question every 
dimension of the social vehicle that freighted humanness until this century.

The time of awakening is over. People are no longer shocked to realize a 
new social vehicle is coming into being. I believe we have even passed 
the pause that occurred after the disestablishment began to collapse in 
the late '60's. We are in a time of Resurgence, which means the question 
has become a practical one. It is a question of how: how do you go about 
building this new reality?

It is a time of demonstration not of carrying signs to awaken people but 
of showing them the way. It is not that we are starting demonstration 
projects but rather everything we do is now demonstration. Now, even 
RS-I is a demonstration, a demonstration of the church renewed. I think 
we used to feel audacious when we read Kazantzakis the first time: "Burn 
your houses, smash your ideas." It is not like that anymore. The Church 
is falling apart and reaching out for help. We can be of help. We have a 
very personal sense of involvement. What we have on our hands is not 
weight, but immensity­-the immensity of possibility.

If we had any real idea of what we are doing in the new social vehicle, 
we probably would fall into pride. Our very confusion protects us from 
that fall. What is required is what we learned this summer about Love in 
I Corinthians 13. We are required to stand in the midst of that which is 
and to operate. That is how we can be of help.

There are several things helping us to help. First, we understand 
globality. We are past the romanticism of thinking that globality has to 
do with going somewhere or with showing up in a number of places. We 
know that globality is commonality. A global RS­I is not one with black, 
white, red, tan and yellow people in it; a global RS­1 is one taught in 
the nearest small town in a way that could be taught in any small town 
in the world. RS­I is a global course because you know that when anyone 
in the world goes through the course, his life will be changed. That 
does not depend on the particularities of any pedagogue, either. In the 
same way, 5th City is a global experiment because we know that exactly 
what happened on the West Side of Chicago can happen all over­ not 
because 5th Cities are showing up around the world. This insight is one 
we have to share with the world. The New Social Vehicle is a global 
social vehicle, which means it is one vehicle; it is the same. If 
something we do in North America cannot be duplicated anywhere in the 
world, then it is of no help to the global social vehicle. Whatever deed 
we do, to be a global deed it must be duplicable anywhere on earth; it 
must be relevant to every human being. That is one of our gifts. An 
inescapable Xavierism overcomes you when you realize that to succeed in 
your post in a way that is not replicable anywhere in the world, is not 
to succeed at all.

Second, we can deliver. We not only have created reduplicable 
instruments, we have created a global network which gets things done. 
The revolution only happens in locale after locale after locale. A LENS 
course at the United Nations will not bring the NSV into being. We have 
learned how to do miracles in one locale so that they can be delivered 
to every other locale in the world.

The Local Community Convocation this past year was an unbelievable 
miracle. In two meetings during the year, we decided to hold 50 Local 
Community Convocations. We held no collegiums on it, had no major 
discussions, wrote no proposals about it, and held no special Panchayat 
meetings to decide about it. In the fourth week of the quarter, several 
of us were assigned to call around and remind everyone we were going 
ahead with the Local Community Convocations. We did not even talk to 
first Priors in most places because they were out doing other things. A 
few days later, we made another round of phone calls and two nights 
before Week II of Week 9, we tapped 50 people on the shoulder and the 
Penetration Office wrote airline tickets. Then, the 50 met together for 
two nights and the next day they took off to lead the convocations. The 
next morning 50 convocations took place across this continent. It is 
phenomenal that possibility like that is available to us. We have a 
global network that can deliver.

Third, we can sustain. We are going to stay. The nurture fortresses we 
have created are spread all over the globe. They will work anywhere. 
They allow human beings to stand and create charisma. The sociological 
reality we have created does not depend on any prior or any individual 
gift. It does not even depend on people's training. It seems we can get 
people to run Religious Houses quicker than we can get them to teach 
RS­I. We have created a structured, sociological way of standing as 
human beings living in the new world. I believe that is the reason we 
can be of help over the next twenty or forty years.

Fourth, we are thought­through. We are not a body of people who fall off 
on the intellectual pole. As soon as we get enough clarity on an issue, 
we move. In reorganizing my notes recently, I found that over half my 
notes are research, even though that has not been our emphasis. We are 
thought­through. The reason we know 5th City works is not because we 
have followed intellectual presuppositions, though we did that. 5th City 
works because we have done it. The reason RS­I works is not because it 
is theologically correct, though we have done everything to insure that 
it is. RS-I works because we have gone out and done it. The complexity 
of the New Social Vehicle demands that we continue to think everything 
through. We will not find answers but we will need guides to help us get 
through the complexity.

The guides are the Pressure Points. Everything is not demonstration, 
just because someone may want to paint a chemical factory orange does 
not mean that would be helpful to the New Social Vehicle. When you have 
to decide between painting a chemical factory orange and a supermarket 
blue, how do you decide? How do we avoid a new activism? Through 
adhering to the nine Pressure Points, we will have our guides. The 
Pressure Points are the way in which we impact the social processes. 
After Summer '71, we took the 385 proposals we wrote and related them 
again to the Social Process Triangles. We discovered that most of the 
problems in the Economic Process were healed either by the process 
called Anticipated Needs or by the process in the Political called 
Bureaucratic Systems. That is, what the economic needed to get itself on 
the track was very simple: Long­range planning and some way of 
controlling its immense power.

Five of the Pressure Points appear in the Cultural Triangle, three in 
the Political and one in the Economic. This relates to our insights 
about the imbalances in the social processes. The Pressure Points are 
our map, our wave chart. These nine points are the focal points upon 
which the New Social Vehicle will be built. The NSV will be built in 
Inclusive Mythology, creating a story, a new mythology, a way of talking 
about what it is to be a human being in society. It is being hammered 
out through Formal Methods, discovering a new form of social 
responsibility, in people hammering out modes of effective action. It is 
being built in Community Groupings, where people are coming together to 
re­do local community, where people are giving new significance to 
engagement in the local. It is being built in Basic Roles, where people 
are crying that every human being participate and be engaged in society. 
The NSV is being built where people are looking for Knowledge Access, 
giving people the instruments they need to make decisions; it is being 
built when the Washington Post is exposing or not exposing what is going 
on in the world. It is being hammered out in Deliberative Systems, where 
people are inventing new ways of making decisions, of forming consensus, 
of creating grassroots polity. The New Social Vehicle is being hammered 
out in Bureaucratic Systems, where people are looking for ways to act 
effectively in society, where they are breaking through the morass of 
bureaucracy. It is being built wherever people are doing, planning and 
daring to anticipate the future.

The Pressure Points are our guide to audience. They tell us whom to 
impact, to deal with, to formulate, to break loose for the sake of 
breaking loose the whole of society. Our intuition was to start with the 
audience at the top of the triangle, with the Church, with Myth, the 
body of people who come together around a piety; people who at least had 
symbols which told them life had deeps even though the symbols had lost 
their ground. Intuitively, we saw we had won with that decision and it 
was now necessary to turn to the people who were guardians of piety the 
Religious, and break them loose to a New Social Vehicle. If this could 
be accomplished, then it would serve as a sign that it was possible to 
create the New Social Vehicle.

Now we are moving to local communities, with 5th City and with the 
Ecumenical Parish Experiment. With LENS, we have begun to address the 
global business community, the people who are planning the future of the 
globe, the managers of huge corporations.

These people are not just audiences; they represent the crucial 
structures of society. Again, we started on top with the local 
congregation. We went to the heart of that which was sustaining the 
piety which maintained the old social vehicle. We demonstrated that it 
could metamorphosize into a new piety that would release human motivity, 
allowing people to engage in the world and in the local parish. The nine 
Pressure Points are internal keys for us, in terms of our own systems. 
When the RS ­I hostess stands up on Friday night and says, "Would you 
please pass things to the right so everyone can be fed," she is pushing 
on Anticipated Needs. When the course is held at a camp or in a church 
and everyone stays overnight, you are pushing Community Groupings. When 
you have Daily Office, you are pushing Inclusive Myth. Those are key to 
what is catalytic in any program

Finally, insofar as we are a demonstration, we have to care for our 
Spirit Life. We do so not to sustain ourselves and not because we are a 
religious order that ought to have a good spirit life, but because we 
are a demonstration of the new mythology, the new piety, the new set of 
symbols that society today requires. Collegium is not just what we do in 
the morning; it is a demonstration. This council is a demonstration of 
Deliberative Systems, the new form of decision­making.

One group worked hard this summer on deciding how we do catalytic 
demonstrations and not just good deeds. After great deliberation, they 
came up with four demonstration signs under each Pressure Point. Under 
Inclusive Myth, for example, the key demonstrations include the Local 
Church Experiment, the Human Resurgence Mission and the Global Cabaret 
Troupe. These are not considered final listings but they represent the 
best wisdom of a group of our colleagues on which demonstrations are key.

What has become clear is that any demonstration that does not impact one 
of the Pressure Points is not a demonstration. It is not going to break 
loose anything besides itself. Sitting on top of a flagpole for forty 
days and nights may have been a demonstration project in another time, 
but not now. Recopying the Bible by hand may have pushed a pressure 
point in the Middle Ages, but probably is not what is needed now.

The first criterion for any demonstration project is that it push a 
Pressure Point. Likewise, any demonstration in Community Groupings, like 
5th City, would need to push every one of the Pressure Points. In this 
way, we can talk about the role of creating a community story, the role 
of the /5th City Voice/ or the community Guilds, as Community Groupings 
within 5th City. We can see how all the Pressure Points can be pushed in 
one social demonstration. The same holds true for the Local Church 
Experiment. Liturgies re­create mythology, training addresses social 
morality, and the emphasis on the congregation serves to recover Basic 
Roles by including people of every age group.

The key to making any project a demonstration is pushing every one of 
the Pressure Points in terms of their presuppositions. This brings us 
back to 5th City's presuppositions. First of all, the project must take 
place in a delimited geo­social arena. There is no such thing as an 
abstract or general social demonstration, like making Chicago a better 
place to live. A social demonstration must be delimited in geography and 
in sociology. This means demonstrations take place in the midst of the 
establishment, in communities which already exist, or in factories or 
whatever else already is in the midst of this world not in some special 
situation. A demonstration must deal secondly with all the problems and 
thirdly with all the people. It must push every Pressure Point wherever 
it is and at the same time deal with every human being engaged in that 
geo­social reality. Also, it must be reduplicable anywhere in the globe. 
Fourth, it must deal with the depth problem, whether that is a victim 
image or a paralyzing set of symbols. The key to this is symbol, which 
is the fifth presupposition. The little park we built in Uptown was that 
kind of symbol. It was not just a little park, but it began to shift the 
story people worked out of and therefore shifted their reality.

In a formula the Guild developed this summer, you can determine the 
social thrust of a given project. The method takes into account that you 
must consider ( 1) the symbolic power of the geography. No one looks to 
Frankfort, Illinois, as a key place; they look at Calcutta. Therefore, a 
project in Calcutta would have a far different symbolic value than one 
in Frankfort. (2) Perceived difficulty is another factor. If people 
think it is easy to do X, Y or Z, then no one will be much interested in 
your having done it. (3) Recognized need also must be considered. It 
would be a tremendous demonstration to get violets to grow in the 
cities, but compared with combating poverty in urban ghettos, violets do 
not have much recognized need. (4) The number of people a project 
affects is also important. A community reformulation project which 
directly affects twenty thousand people is more powerful than a Cabaret 
with an audience of one hundred. (6) A demonstration's power has to do 
with how it primarily and secondarily hits the Pressure Points. A 
demonstration's power also has to do with repetition. The first project 
has great power. So will the second and maybe the third and fourth. The 
more there are, however, the more the power diminishes. By the fifth or 
sixth repetition, you begin doing something already done by someone 
else. However, in massive replication, like in the Local Church 
Experiment or the Ecumenical Parishes, the demonstration again becomes a 
first­­ the first one project in 50 cities, or whatever. Through that 
massiveness, people can see a sign of the future coming and through that 
project they can know it has arrived. A demonstration's power is also in 
its timeline. Is it something which happens once and is over, or does it 
go on and on through the years? (8) Power is also in its geo­social 
location. Is it located in an urban ghetto in the Third World or in an 
exurban part of Nova Scotia? That makes a difference. (9) It also has to 
do with the absolution it pronounces on social guilt. Does it absolve, 
does it break loose, indirectly, people's guilt over innocent suffering? 
What kind of symbolism does it have? (10) Also, a demonstration's power 
lies in its proximity to other projects. There is a greater cumulative 
social thrust when**a Galaxy, a Social Methods School, a Student House 
and a Religious House are all operating in an Area. The thrusts begin to 
feed off one another.

The formula also ranks the social thrust of any project on a scale of 
between 1,500 and 9,000 points. We have more to learn about the criteria 
for such ranking, and we have yet to include the whole category or 
viability. That is, if a new project takes 50 full­time people and you 
only have six, then no matter how great your project is in theory, it is 
not viable.

The Whistlepoints help us in launching social demonstration projects 
across the globe. We have available a global servant force. One can pick 
up a telephone and call upon colleagues across the globe to assist in a 
demonstration project. We know how to sustain projects locally; that is 
the function of the Religious House. The Houses will become the locus of 
sustaining, nurturing, and enabling hundreds of people to stand. The 
question now before us in demonstration is: Is it possible to engage 
hundreds of thousands of millions of people, right in their own local 
situations, in building the New Social Vehicle? That is what the Guild 
is about.

We impact people; we take them and introduce them to a new set of images 
which allow them see life in a new way. Then, we train people to take 
those new images and grind them into their beings in such a way that 
they can only see the future in that new way. Then we interchange and do 
research to continue defining ways to**bring expertise into local 
situations. Then, we demonstrate. These are the systems of the Movement. 
For the present, demonstration is key.

The globe has already come upon this glorious unbelievable new. I guess 
you could call it eschatological sociology. Social demonstration or 
eschatological sociology is taking what people think will take two 
hundred years to happen and doing it next door.

There are two dimensions to the Whistlepoints. You must have something 
abstract called 'impact', but impact never caused an avalanche. The 
reason we got an avalanche going in the Church was RS­I. RS­I is an 
unbelievably specific thing, but it has the quality of a whistlepoint. 
You stand up and you whistle and an avalanche begins. The decision 
before us now is how many whistlepoints do we need? LENS is getting to 
be that kind of instrument. So is 5th City. The big task in the Local 
Church Experiment is coming now. Religious Houses are the same dynamic.

Underneath all our complexity, we are finally about one thing: releasing 
human motivity. We are going to demonstrate corporate action, tactical 
thinking or contradictional battleplanning. That is all we have to offer 
and it is nothing abstract. We simply have discovered a way of acting 
effectively in the world. It has to do with human motivity, with 
practically, in the midst of a group of people, creating a piety which 
releases and empowers human beings; and corporate action that 
practically allows people to be a people. Tactical thinking gives people 
a way of acting relevantly in the midst of the world's complexity.

What intrigues me most about corporateness, problem­solving and motivity 
is that each of them holds you over against the same thing you 
discovered in the Dark Night of the Soul. A man who has never been 
humiliated does not understand contradictions. Once you know life is 
humiliation, you lose your passion for some objective and you can 
create; all you care about is dealing with that thing you are over 
against in the midst of life. The rest of your life, you only care about 
responding to what you can never seem to get a hold of.

Once you understand the weakness that is your life, you are driven to 
corporateness in a strange way. When you are driven to corporateness, 
you find that you are weak but strong in the midst of your weakness, 
because you have the whole Order, or the whole House.

At the same time, when you discover resentment in your life, you see the 
only thing that turns people into zombies is letting their resentment 
get related to some specific thing in their lives. Motivity has to do 
with relating resentment to the unsynonomous. When your resentment is 
related to God, it turns into motivity, or raw drive. This is a profound 
happening which has no way out. To be the Religious is to be the 
Revolutionary. We are doomed as human beings to be the New Social 
Vehicle and to do the New Social Vehicle not because of what we have 
/done, /but because of the intrusion, the alien image which has happened 
in our time and in our lives.

With demonstration, we are out to show what it is to be the ones of the 
Dark Night at the same time as being the ones of the New Social Vehicle.

James Wiegel

8/30/74*
*

*
*n 1/20/2011 7:08 AM, Steve Harrington wrote:

> Can any one name all 9 pressure points&  whistle points? ( I can't )
>
> It's funny I can see the diagrams in my memory, but I can't seem to read the fine print. Grin.
>
> Marlyn I'm thinking P Senge was a student of Jay Forester who was an early proponent of systems theory along with Kenneth Boulding.
>
> Seems logical that Boulding wanted a way to explain individual behavior change: message->image&  a way to make social change too. He was a Quaker. I think we've underrated his influence...
>
> Sent from Steve's iPod in San Jose
> _______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
>
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