SNAPSHOTS OF THE NEW SOCIAL VEHICLE
        April 11, 1972


        INTRODUCTION

        Sartre tells us that the revolutionary totally caught up in the present situation transcends it by his view of the whole of the world and by his future plan.  Summer '71 was our view of the whole social process (our Das Kapital); our concrete social plan (our Manifesto) has not yet been done.

        A concrete picture of the new social vehicle in operation is necessary for three reasons:
        1) To keep our particular tactics aimed at a complete societal reformulation rather than a tune-up and lube job on the Western social vehicle;
        2) To provide the vision concrete enough to keep people slogging away over a 40-year march;
        3) To rationalize our tactical system so that, for example, tactics geared to the value of globality do not conflict with those geared to the value of grassroots power.

        The few paragraphs following do not represent such a picture of the entire social process.  They do present some snapshots of the social vehicle in action as an example of what concretion means.  Varying as they do in size of field and in sharpness or fuzziness of detail, they represents a triangular montage of snapshots of the new social vehicle, a promise (in their very incompleteness) that Order Base can, if it wills, complete a picture of the new social vehicle by June.

        Economics, as the most recently revolutionized process, presents simultaneously the least difficulties and the greatest temptations.  Futuric economics is easy to picture because the present models began recently enough to be seen not as eternal and because the changes are less drastic.  Sticking to present models is most tempting in this process because the corrosion is slightest and one can easily believe that one more improvement will really bring off the economic revolution; but that economic revolution was brought off.  Hopefully these snapshots (though well embodies in present trends) represent radical structural overhaul rather than liberal refurbishing.

        RESOURCES

        Resources is the process in which the transestablishment position most nearly approaches the disestablishment position.  Of course we must have a history long plan for the use of mineral resources; of course all people must have the opportunity for using whatever gifts they have on behalf of all; of course technology must set itself the task of accommodating the cultural demands of all societies as well as the blunter demands of physical laws.
But this will be the last prowess to be renewed simply because it requires so much change in terms of consensus-forming structures and broad scale imaginal re-education.

HUMAN RESOURCES         TOTAL UTILIZATION

Present Demand
        The present image of work in our society is that work is something extorted from a person in exchange for the means of living.  Either one achieves his living through his ability or through his disability; and this encourages those unable to compete through their ability to cultivate their victim image with predictably dire consequences.  Imagine work as an imposition has prevented us from realizing that it is a right and has allowed the creation of a great aggregate of unutilized and under-utilized classes; the young, the old, the untrained, together total a clear majority of our population ((and relatively little of our workforce).  Through all this, he Chinese experiment holds a promise: "A work position within his abilities for every person."

Futuric Vision
        In the new society human beings fall participation in the social process will be enabled by two major things.  One is the necessities of life provided for all by the society.  With sustenance guaranteed, work is done because it is human and not because it is necessary for subsistence.  It also can be done for a lesser wage since subsistence is not at stake, and thus everyone including the "unemployable" can participate.

Guaranteed Work
        Every human being would be guaranteed work, guaranteed productive participation in the social process.  If employment does not come from private enterprises, the governmental network would take responsibility for employment.  This will be done so that every human being can participate and so that production, or the creation of society, could benefit from even marginal workers.

Constant Enhancement
        Along with his a large scale, ongoing, training program is necessary.  With the rapid change taking place in society today, a refocusing of skills is required several times for each human being.  Benefits from skill enhancement would result for the entire community.  Better products would be produced, wages and therefore also government revenue would be increased, and human beings image of themselves would gain in vitality and fullness.  Thus, the government will support skill enhancement and probably create major training facilities which are necessary if every man is to participate in the social process in the fast changing world in which we live today.

        Although production is the tyrant of the tyrant in the social process, saying "SLOW DOWN!" is inadequate for cutting over against it.  One must design a production dynamic which serves the social process with the bounty of the present one while yielding the right of way to the other processes. In particular, production establishments must be of small enough scale to avoid overshadowing political structures; the business reward system must reinforce a societally consensed value screen; the Internal polity of economic institutions must honor social priorities and conform to more general polity designs.  Thus, the economic prowess must not only produce, but also support the rest of the social process.

PRODUCTION INSTRUMENTS: SMALLER SCALE ENTERPRISE

        The production establishment in the future needs to include more small scale enterprises than now exist.

Past/Present Trend
        Before 1700 the size of a production operation had no important bearing on its efficiency.  After the invention of the steam engine, however, a whole factory could run off a single power plant, and thus industry began to develop a larger and larger scale.  Now a large scale is assumed in every aspect of the design of a plant, and consequently much industrial machinery in turn requires large scale plants.  That is, present day tooling (as well as other dimensions of the production process) in inherently committed to a large scale.

New Need
        New needs, however, are emerging in production throughout the world today.   The first is a need for local control, which also implies a non-concentration of production operations.  The new developing nations in particular need operations which are small enough to be run with the capital base they have.  In addition, they need operations which are small enough to be run by the leadership at hand, granted that top-flight, "large scale" leadership needs to e available as a first priority.  Secondly, there is a new need for flexibility.  In the complex times in which we live we cannot have just one element, such as the central government of General Motors, as the decision maker in relation to production.  Smaller scale enterprise would produce more decision makers as well as create possibility for new businesses to be initiated in response to new needs.  In conjunction with the vision of complex community for social structures (see Style: Social Structures), levels and aspects of production need to belong to particular geo-social units and have significant positions in them.

        Production Instruments: Smaller Scale Enterprise

New Possibility
        Trends of responding to these needs are already visible.  With the invention of the electrical motor, which is more efficient than the gear-box, machines are independently powered.  Computers allow products of small firms to be more easily available to the consumer by allowing the distributor to keep track of many small productive operations more easily than was done earlier.  Small scale enterprise could be built on the model of Swiss watch makers.  There, industry goes on in the home and tiny subcontractor establishments, and each performs a different operation for the watch part which is assembled in a coordinated system.  Jane Jacobs points to a fourth trend in her book Economy of Cities.  Miss Jacobs says that mass production has been an invention that has gone beyond individual creation of every product, but that it is being superseded by diversified but coordinated small scale production.  She points to the clothing manufacturers and small electronics firms as examples of this and says that the trend within this is an emphasis on the style and quality of the articles.

Significance of Tools
        One key to the developing of smaller scale enterprise is the particular tools that are available.  When large scale tools and machinery are the only tools and machinery  produced, plants are forced to be large scale.  This is true of assembly line operations and blast furnaces as well as other kinds of production.   When is needed is a large variety of types and kind of tools which allow the large scale processes to be broken down into diversified but coordinated schemes.  Tools, however, are a function of what the designer sees it pay to create and what he sees he can create.  They are a function of the designers' rewards and his possibility screens.  Thus, the designers and their educators must be re-motivated.  When designers are freed to create the right sized tools, production can become smaller scale.

        Distribution is so complexly structured that no one snapshot can do justice to even a third of it.  In property claims we foresee that ownership of toothbrushes will remain the same but that ownership of business enterprises will become devastatingly complex, with workers, customers, and surrounding communities having claims even in those cases where formal cooperatives and socialism are not involved.  In consumption plans, some attempt is made of envisioning the accounting system which must replace profit when production is displaced as the prime value.

CONSUMPTION PLANS:  BEYOND THE PROFIT SYSTEM

Disestablishment Position
        In the last few years profit as a motive for sparking the economy and undergirding the purpose of life in general has come into serious question.  To have the predominant criterion of consumption be the proceeds of production is irrational when one understand that all the earth  belongs to all the people.  In addition to that, side effects of the drive for profit are harmful.  Natural wastage occurs as short-term benefit often preclude the possibility long-term usefulness (for example, when strip mining takes away valuable farm land).  More important than that is the social damage that occurs.  People around the world are dying because the principle of profit keeps proceeds in the hands of the owners and producers.  In addition, investments are made on the basis of profit rather than need.  Finally, profit baptizes individual selfishness as a way of life and consequently perpetuates that stance.

Pro-Establishment Position
        The worth and roots of profit as the driving force of the economic system - whereby the profits of production belong to the producers, who generally reinvest it for profit - must be examined also.  Profit is a positive accountability.  Whoever does the work gets the benefits: profit is a reward for accomplishment.  Nor is it a reward for trivial or irrelevant accomplishment or for something that someone thinks he did.   It is a reward for what he actually did.  Furthermore, the value is decided by society itself, not by some group  in an ivory tower or the White House.  Society decides the value.  In addition, it is only reasonable that those who produce should get to decide what is to be done with the surplus of that production (what they have produced minus the cost in producing it).  They have shown wisdom in providing what was needed.  Finally, the profit system benefits production itself.

        Consumption Plans: Beyond the Profit System

Trans-establishment Stance
        In going beyond these two positions to what is needed today, it is helpful first of all to look schematically from a historical perspective.  In the Middle Ages, when goods were regarded as fixed (there was only so much available and the question was one of portioning it out), the way that all the goods belonged to all the people is that everybody got a subsistence share, and any surplus was held for the community by the symbolic leadership.  In the Modern Age when production began to explode the surplus, surplus was put into the hands of those who on past performance were most likely to invest it successfully to increase production - that is, those who had just made a profit.  But in the present age, production has ceased to be the chief social benefit.  In addition we are becoming clearer and clearer about the social costs of production which producers fail to pay.  Thus, what is demanded is a system of accounting which is sensitive to social values and costs, and yet which is as responsive, simple and automatic as the profit system was.  The foundation of this is a clear articulation of the present values in society in terms of real social benefits and real social costs.

Approach
        In analyzing the real costs and gains that are present in production and society as a whole, a system must be engineered into the economic structure whereby social cost accounts affect one's ability to do business as automatically and directly as the profit and loss accounts do today.  The beginning of this has already been grafted into the old system in terms of workman's compensation and unemployment compensation laws.  Once we have a consensus on what social benefits and costs we are pointing to, the economists can be trusted to harness such a system.  The question of "how" is the only question which the experts can be trusted with.
        POLITICAL

        The political arena is somehow the locus for new social vehicle visioning that is both concrete and radically new; the economic is mostly minor improvements already envisionable; the cultural revolution has either occurred (at least in signals) it is still in the cream pie lurking up God's sleeve.  The unborn polity, however, is kicking for its own form.

        ORDER

        Within the political process, corporate order is the arena of unclarity, but not the unclarity of unenvisioned structures.  Rather it is the struggle of competing visions, of contradictory essential human values struggling with each other.

        Within common defense sheer scale re-images the whole question.   What external enemies does a global society have?  Certainly not Martians.  Is it perhaps entropy? Doe the common defense call for a defense against such rigidity as could bring all of humanity down with the society as i inevitably topples?  If so, common defense and domestic tranquillity achieve an enmity far more basic than when Machievelli debated arming the citizenry.

        Within domestic tranquillity itself the new potentiality of human control raises questions which the most vicious armed police could not.  Tyranny begets hatred; hatred, resistance; and resistance, liberty.  Conditioning begets cooperation; cooperation, reward; and reward conditioning.  Calling Skinner a Fascist is not going to make him go away, though eminent scholars are currently trying.  He offers us peace without pain.  Is it petrification for society? And even if it is, can we buy the alternative of a lively society at the expense of guaranteeing pain to dissidents without that society's becoming sadistic at its root?

        The legal base must balance the conflicting claims of individual and society.  But beyond that, society demand individual liberty to keep its circulation going, and the individual demands social sanctions (not only against others behavior in order to keep a secure existence but) against himself to allow him to identify the arena of allowable social behavior and to maintain that essential part of a human being which Freud called the super-ego.

               LEGAL BASE: A BILL OF SOCIETY'S RIGHTS

        Any society must protect itself against ossification by limiting the power of the state to protect society against change.  This truism becomes truer the more democratic a society is (and therefore the more supported the state is by the power of public opinion).  The more integrated a society is, the less alienation an individual feels from his society, and the less outside competition there is.  Thus, a colony ruled by the military has a guaranteed rumor net and opposition in exile.  A national electoral republic must grant the press freedom of publishing facts, and a consensually governed globe must bar any criminal laws against the exchange of ideas and must radically limit any civil restraints to provable damages directly assignable to misstatements.

        In addition, the basic covenant must restrict the regulation of covenanted bodies within society to the regulation of particular activities of it members.  The word "conspiracy" must disappear from legal theory.

        What else is needed in the basic covenant to protect humanity from being encased in the carcass of the society we design will have to be envisioned from a more concrete view of the society as a whole.  But as Christians we know that flexibility is not enough; fragility is also needed.  The Lord has already decided that the coming social vehicle will die; all we can decide is whether our descendants can use it as a step up or must be dragged down with it and start over again from the barbarian.

        The corporate justice pole is where our first image of "political" resides.  It is where structures are most clearly visible.  The legislative structures must be revamped to hold truly global and truly local operations together in a communal consensus.  The executive must go through comparable reshuffling; but the hardest demand on it will be to include representatives of the government at the action level of government.  (A few presentiments of this occur in students and welfare recipients' demands for voices in the administration of their respective services.)

        LEGISLATIVE CONSENSUS: LADDER OF POLICY FORMATION

Geo-Social Given
        Ladder of policy formation is based first of all on the structure of complex community outlined in Style: Social Structures.  Every human being will belong to a primary community which is related to the globe through a ladder of communities (...micro, sector, metro, region...).  This structure is key to the polity dynamic of the future.  It allows local man to have a continuous role in shaping the destiny of the globe as each sub-community has a part in shaping the next larger community.  In order for this to come into being we must "bind the ladder together vertically," that is, intentionalize the relationship between each community and the larger ones of which it is a part and the smaller ones which make it up.  What that would look like is that in each neighborhood there would be meetings of all the adults in the neighborhood--around 100 adults.  Council gatherings at each of the higher levels would consist of three people from each unit of the next lower level.  That would make 18 present for each council, although there will be some exceptions as the rule of 6 x 6 x 6 conflicts with the requirement for 100 people in each community.

Representative (Consultative) Activity
        One method of policy formation will be through problemats.  Problemats will be done for each neighborhood by the 100 adults of the neighborhood.  Problemats for the next larger units will be made by gestalting the problemats of its sub-units.  This gestalt will go (upward) until the world problemat results.  Then (working downward), each unit on each level will work out (1) how the world problemat is actualized there, and (2) how the problmat of the next highest unit is actualized there.  The gestalt of these two with the original problemat constitutes the working problemat of each unit.  Each unit will then create strategies for its working problemat.  Strategies for the global problemat will be created in each neighborhood and gestalted (upward).

Legislative Activity
        Particular governmental activities will take place at various level depending on the activity.  For example, the Chicago metro water purification is logically a metro activity; traffic planning, a regional activity, etc.  (Call this the level of actualization)  Guidelines for governmental activity will be set at each level in relation to both the strategies suggested there, and guidelines of higher levels.  At the level of actualization, the guidelines will be expanded into high  policy decisions, which are issued to executive bodies which carry them out.

Polity vs. Law
        Although the present system of criminal laws will probably continue, the predominant kind of legislative activity will be done on an ongoing basis through the policy decisions.  The kind of complex law system that currently guides the executive dates back to the struggle between the king and parliament and the political process was shaped by the parliament's jealous guarding of its rights.  From today's standpoint, however, the complexity paradoxically surrenders power to the executive.  In the complexity of laws today, the only ones with the ability to write the laws are those carrying them out; for example, the tax laws are written by the Internal Revenue Service.  The only general exception to this are the lobbies which present their own laws.  Simple plain guidelines would be given to executive bodies (which can really be trusted to carry them out).

        The most recent revolution is a revolution of welfare.  Begun by the Reformation with access to the Gospel, continued by the French Revolution with access to the political process, completed by the Union movement with access to comfortable living.  Yet the New breaks into this dimension in terms of access by all to more: and by a demand to arrange the goods, decision, and images so as to make access a possible choice rather than a random possibility.  Specifically this means that the means of living (especially including medical care) be available to all; that the public ear is available to all; that examples of life styles be available to all.

        SIGNIFICANT ENGAGEMENT: STYLE PARADIGM AVAILABILITY

Past Models
        How does one choose his style?  Up until recently the style a person lived out of was fairly specifically determined by his age, his birth and his situation.  In the medieval era of the West, for instance, the pattern was set and you knew exactly where you fit in.  In India in he era preceding this one, the caste system provided a style mold so that you knew what to expect and what your role was to be.  If, however, the options that have come to us from the past are both outworn and few, the visions of paths in the present are chaotic and misleading.  With the infinity of components that can go together in a style, is there any warning of what components "fit together" easily and which do not?  Inadequate images of available styles and of what they require in terms of other aspects of style results in people putting off deciding on their style.

Demand
        What is needed in our time is a set of images of possible life patterns in which relation between one's work, ones' residence, and one's family life are spelled out (which combinations are compatible and which are not).  One method of doing this is through a multiplicity of "paradigmatic biographies" which describe lives of people who lived out of various life patterns.  Another approach is to list as many occupations as possible with family and residence styles which are excluded from each one.

Major Approach
        The major thing that will be required, however, is a diversity of competing "full-time" movements, each holding up a style of life, saying "This is how we work, live and bend history."  These will be either life-time or short-term movements, and they will be intent on: radical change, depth embodiment of a single task, or demonstrating, "This is the way to live."

Trends
        Trends along these lines have already begun.  The Peace Corp is a beginning.  Nader's Raiders is another.  Even if the majority of the world does not join these groups, these movements will blaze trails, and people will follow at their own rates.  They will set out images of style over against which people will decide their own.

        CULTURAL

        The cultural arena is so surely the key to our strategy that our visions there tend to become strategic techniques rather than standing on their own bottoms.  Education (in particular) is the servant of society and cannot even be sketched until society is more clearly delineated.  In both style and symbol two out of three boxes lit up for snapshots.

        STYLE

        Style is the social gene with which the human is engendered in the bi-ped.  One structure which must exist in the new society is a dramatic rite of passage that would welcome children into adulthood: every person in the world born on the same day spending their 16th year together in work, study, celebration and initiation will be that rite.  Another need is for a structure of community and loyalty to hold all of society together.


        SOCIAL STRUCTURE: COMPLEX COMMUNITY

Present Need
        The social structure which must come into being is a system of community where every man is part of a neighborhood where he can be known, where that community is part of a "unit" in which its stances is recognized, where that unit is part of a unit in which its stance is recognized and where every man is ultimately related to the entire globe.

Primary Neighborhood
        The primary neighborhood where every man has his foundational relationships will be small enough to be gatherable, small enough for him to be known as an individual, and large enough to be powerful as a corporate group - perhaps 100 adults and their children.  The basis of the community will be geography, as opposed to profession, interest, mission, or blood relationship.  Geography is the only grouping that finally and most easily can include every man.  And more importantly (as we regard the family as the essential unit of society), geography is the only grouping that will insure holding the nuclear family in the basic unit.

Ladder of Primary Community
        The primary neighborhood will be part of a ladder of primary communities up to the globe.  Here is a picture of a human being's global primary relationship and an estimation of the number of people involved, taking someone living in Chicago as an example:

        Ladder of Primary community

                           Globe      3,000,000,000 people
                                Continent  250,000,000 people
                                Area         45,000,000 people
                                Region      20,000,000 people
                                Metro        7,000,000 people
                                Sector       1,200,000 people
                                Micro          200,000 people
                                X               30,000 people
                                Y                5,000 people
                                Z                  800 people
                                Neighborhood        30 people

In breaking geography down into six-es (apart from the globe into continents), each of the six has an important role at the next level.  For instance, the six micros in a sector are each an important aspect of the sector (contrast this to the precincts in a ward or the 50 wards in a city).  Adjustments will have to be made in regard to the number of levels and of units er level between the micro and the neighborhood, depending on the population of the micro, in order to have neighborhoods of around 100 people.  The ladder of primary community is not something that is in existence automatically, although in one sense it is there already.  In order for it to come into being, each level needs to be invested with reality.  A person will have selfhood at each level, similar to someone sensing himself coming from Birmingham, Alabama, the South, and the United States.  The ladder of primary community is the basic structure that will ground every man in a corporate thrust and allow him to relate to every other human being in the globe.

Complex Secondary Relationships
        In order for this not to develop a neo-parochialism, the complex web of secondary relationships in which a person is involved need to be intensified - for example, vocational, avocational, extended family, and ethnic relationships.  Teachers in Chicago will be related to teachers in Calcutta.  Chess players in North America will be related to chess players in Europe and miners in Africa will be related to miners in Latin America.  The inter-locking of secondary relationships which can be built on natural interest through movemental symbology gives needed roots to a society in which people move quite frequently.

        Communal symbol is the gyroscope of society.  On it society depends to keep its course true, and every misplaced tap in setting up symbology results in society's procession through all possible perversions.  In language we must resist but chauvinism and oversimplification; and the trend toward English must be honored in balance with the trend toward road signs and other ideograms.  In art, the new image is one of local man the artist: where some create skillfully and some unskillfully, but all grasp themselves as creating art.

        CORPORATE LANGUAGE: COMMON LANGUAGE

Language Need
        In the fast unifying world of today the demand on corporate language is that language be corporate.  Fragmentation of language limits the relationships people can have and puts up barriers for almost every other dimension of life.  Common language will play a key role in forging global relationships as Spanish has done for the molding of Indians and Europeans into Latin Americans, as English has done for Sub-Asia, and as Arabic did for the Middle East.

Current Trends
        Several trends, in addition to continental unification, point to the birthing of a common global language.  English is spoken all over the world.  In some locales it is not spoken by very many people, but it is spoken throughout the world and is frequently used as a common language by people with various mother tongues, even if all are Indians or all Africans.  Science and technology also have developed a language which is common throughout the world and which points to that particular area of life.  Another current trend is the development of road signs which use pictures and other visual symbols which are easy to learn.  They are used in bi-lingual Canada, multi-lingual Europe, and partially literate places in the Orient as a common designation of highway information.  Finally, the Chinese character reform, simplifying the language into 1000 characters, points to a trend of making that language, already familiar to the educated of half the world, accessible to more people.

Common Language:  (1) Spoken English
        The common language that is coming into being has two aspects: spoken and visual.  The spoken language is going to be some form of English because of the extent to which English is already being used throughout the world as a common medium.  The first danger that might block that development is the demanding of finesse in speaking of English - "correct" pronunciation, "correct" grammar, "correct" sentence flow.  This would inhibit the use of English and prevent a global language as "Ciceronianism" killed Medieval Latin.  On the other hand, there is also a danger that the various vernacular forms of English which have already come into being, will continue to split apart.  Today English in India is different from English in East Africa; is different from English tin West Africa; is different from English in America, etc., yet they can be understood by one another.  To cut over against the danger of their splitting, commonality must be stressed.  The development of English as a common spoken language will help to make all the communication available to all people.  Of course, written English is easily accessible to all English speakers.

Common Language:  (2) Written Signs
        The second aspect of the language that is coming into being is written signs.  Road signs and mathematical signs, such as numbers, inequalities, etc., already are used in common by people in different parts of the world.  The major form of signs, however, is going to be Chinese characters.   Chinese characters are used in multi-dialect China, in Korea, in Japan, and in Indo-China.  Although they are pronounced differently depending on the spoken language, they have common designations in all those areas.  Thus, all of these peoples can "read Chinese" although they speak their own languages; and once someone learns to read Chinese it can express his own language.  Thus, Chinese characters form the basis for the new ideographic language coming into being (even among Westerners).