The Ecumenical Institute: Chicago
Winter Quarter, 1973
I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to be
in India on her 25th year of Independence, because I believe India
is destined, doomed if you please, to play a signal and very concrete
role in the great human resurgence which I believe we are in the
beginning of at this moment. It is a strange experience, for I
do not know whether you are 25,000 years oldand you
have long roots, long before anybody thought of recorded historyor
if you are 25 years old. Certainly, you are far beyond 2,500 years
old. I am delighted at this moment in history to tread this sacred
land.
I am also happy to be hero because of both the present
and future role the international community, particularly the
business community, plays in the world. The role it is going to
play is the forging of a brand new civilization beyond the dreams
any of us are now capable of conjuring up.
It is almost trite even to mention the fact that
we are living in a critical moment in history. Since the dawn
of consciousness itself, which produced man and his civilization,
I do not believe anything like it has ever been. It is that kind
of a radical moment. I believe you and I are living in a moment
with which no other moment we can point to in remembered history
could even be compared. Would you not like, just for a moment,
to get into a timemachine and go into the future two thousand,
or a thousand years. Or perhaps it would only take five hundred
years or maybe only a century in which people would begin to understand
the unbelievable drama in which you and I are participating. Of
course, it is hard to grasp this, because we are it!we
are that drama. As a matter of fact, we are a rare thing, for
we lived through the collapse of an age in global history. We
have lived to ace the emergence of the New. Moat people in history
are either on the downbeat, or on the upbeat. You
and I are in one of those rare moments in history where we have
experienced the bottom and the turn moving toward a crest on the
wave.
With this kind of statement, you cannot talk about
our moment in history as sinply a cultural, economic, or political
phenomenon. It is more radical, more foundational than that. It
is an alteration in human consciousness itself. It is a8 if an
implosion in the midst of the explosion of our day has happened.
I think in rhe past there have been about five or six inventions
of an image of man which have maintained themselves into the twentieth
century. One certainly came out of our American Indians, both
in North and South America. Another fundamental invention of humanness
came out of the Arabic lands, which now are made up of North Africa
and the Near East. One came out of Black Africa, the subSahara.
One came out of the Orient, or China. And one, of course, was
invented in the West. Perhapa the most significant one of all
emerged in this great land.
Now, in our time, what ia happening i8 that man ia inventing all over again, out of the stuff of many pasts, an image of what it means to be a human being; but, for the first time in history, it is being done globally. Whether you like it or not, the function the international busineas community is playing in this process, consciously or unconsciously, is rather unbelievable. You are doomed, you are fated to play an unbelievably significant part in this breakloose of human consciousness. I can imagine many of you would like to respond, "Why doesn't that old man up there , shut up and let us keep our eyes on our tiny little jobs?" Well, one reason I ought not shut up is because even if you keep your eyes on your little job here, the impact of what you are doing will, nonetheless, go on. I believe what is happening in the business community is that it is beginning to see its inclusive effect. It is beginning to take selfconscious responsibility for the effect it is having across the world and in every aspect of our social existence. Now, if what I say is true, then this moment, as we start up toward the crest of the wave, is a moment of human resurgence. When you think of the wild breaklooses in social revolutionthe uprising of youth across the world today, the feminine revolution, the revolt of the black man, the revolt of the nonWestern world against the Western peoplethey seem to me to be manifestations of what I would want to call human resurgence ~ a new kind of drive coming into history. Many of these breaklooses have been blind; an explosion has occurred. In ancient Egypt, almost overnight a fantastic civilization was built, the remnants, or symbol, of which reside in the pyramids. I believe that behind that moment in history was a breakloose of con ciousness issuing in human resurgence. You can point to the same thing in the ancient histories of China and India. Indeed, in every civilization you can point to the breaklooses in consciousness that issue in a brand new invention of what it means to be a human being, and in a brand now construction of the social processes in which that humanness is appropriated and acted out. When I look at those pyramids of Egypt, I am reminded of the thousands of people who seemed to be more or less slaves in building them. But that is the way you and I happen to look at it from our point of history. In looking from that moment's perspective, there was the farmer who, when the Nile overflowed and he got his rice paddies in, went to work as an unskilled or skilled artisan on the pyramids and other manifestations of a new society, putting creativity into the midst of it. What was behind that fantastic breakthrough in history? At the time of Queen Elizabeth I, that little island we call England started out across this world and created four brand new nations far greater than Britain itself. In one sense, with all her mistakes and stupidities and brutalities she prepared my country, your country, and many other countries of the world for this moment of technology. England alone did that. Just what happened in that country five hundred years before Queen Elizabeth II that gave humanness such unbelievable drive? When the Aryans came through the pass and met Dravidians in India's great history, out of that meeting was created what, to me, was the greatest manifestation of a civilization the world has ever known. I am reminded also of Confucius, who articulated a brand new understanding of what it meant to be a man. He decided the way he would change the civilization of China with this new understanding was to go to the courts. He stayed there twenty years; but at the end of those twenty years, he looked around and saw that he had accomplished exactly nothing. So he went out into the wilderness, and he gathered around him a group of young local characters to train them in this fresh understanding of what it means to be a human being. He then sent them to every _ T155 ~ ~ ll Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community 3 crossroads and village and town in China. In dealing with local man they forged a brand new construct of primal community which altered the civilization of China. Another understanding of humanness reconstructed science, permeat~ng Southeast Asia, and spreading throughout all the Pacific Islands, westward into Persia, and on into the Arab lands. Quite unconsciously, this was probably the route of the sort of biproductive Western invention of man. My question is, what happened in that dim, dim past which released the vitality of these cultures? We are now at a time in which, due to various forces, the worlds we have built have been collapsing. The British Empire is only one little illustration of what I am talking about. But I mean something deeper than that: The selfunderstanding of the West has collapsed; and, in that collapse, the selfunderstanding of China, India, Africa, and Latin America have collapsed, too. But, out of the death of this age comes the birth of a new age. I believe a new civilization is now being forged, and all of us who have been awakened have the choice of participating, or getting drowned in it. This is a rare experience for any person in history. I have very little patience with people who still despair over the future. I think they are not capable of grasping that the pains we experience and the complexity of human problems are but the hirth pains of a civilization such as man to this moment has never dared dream of. Yesterday, the agonioa,which all of us who are at all sensitive were experiencing, were not birth pains; they were death pains. It was the death of what any of us had come to know as the civilizing process. Now, if you and I resign, that will not stop this happening. This focuses our attention on new horizons of human motivity, that is, human motivity in relationship to the brand new world coming into being. Often, when you bring people in to talk about human relations, they take a psychologiatic approach: How can you beat manipulate people in order to get the most out of your investment? When you live in a relatively stable mo~e.nt of history that may be all right; but when you live in a moment when civilization is exploding, then you have to drill much deeper if you are going to bring about human motivity. In the slums of West Chicago, we would not have lasted five mirlutes with the psychologistic approach to human motivity. We had to dig underneath it. One of the great things the crisis of the hour has done for us is to force us to rethink the theoretics of inclusive human relations; or, to use technical language, to rethink the sociological manifestation of the sociality of man. By sociality of man, I mean that we have to live together. By the socio ogical manifestation, I mean the forms we create in which we can operate with some degree of effectiveness and efficiency together. Hhat we have come up with in our day i8 dynamical sociality. In every social `situation, in buisiness and production, this new understanding is manifesting itself. No longer is society understood substantialistically. In the natural sciences of the world today, nobody ever saw, or will ever see an atom. The reality is the relationship, not the entity. Similarly, in the ~ocial sciences, there is no substance called management, a substance called stockholders, a substance called labor. The reality in business is not the labor force, nor the capital force, nor the managerial ~orce. The reality is the interrelationship of those. In society at large, we call this interrelationship the social process. He are discovering that these sociological m~nifestationS of ·a _ ,, T455 Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community 4 human sociality are dynamical. They are a complex dynamic, not composed of interrelaticnships or social substances or entities, but a matter of happeningsdynamics ~ that are interrelated, interdependent upon one another. For instance, the social process, as a whole, is a dynamic comprised of three major dynamics. The first is the Economic dynamic, the means in A which society sustains itself in existence. Comprising / \ the Economic process are the dynamics of Resources, of Pro / \ auction, and of Distribution. Underneath any analysis, A wnether you go to Marx or Smith, you are going to find these / \ manifestations of humanness being dealt with. Through con / \ versing raw stuff into resources, converting those into ~\\\\~\\V \ usable goods, and then building a system whereby these goods are distributed, society maintains itself in existence. The second major dynamic comprising the social process is the Political dynamic, not politics, but polity, or the organizing dynamic of society. The economic process A cannot go on if there is not some kind of polity and organ / \ izing process in society in order that man is able to live / \ and support himself. The first dynamic in that process is ~ Order. The fathers that founded my nation said, "Provide / \ ~for the common defenae sod pr~mote domestic tranquility." / \ \\\\\ There has to be order without and within. This is where we / \ ~ ~\\ ~get our domestic and international ordering forces. In !\\\\\\\\\ order to do that there has to be some kind of a covenantal relationship. He must come to some kind of a consensus, whatever its form. Our country has a written constitution. Great Britain has an un~ritten constitution; but men have consensed together or these nations could not operate. This consensus is the basis of a legal system. Even if it is a coagulation of mores commonly consensed on, without it you would not have a people; you would not have a social structure. These same dynamics define every kind of social coagulation. A family exists by the same process. If you belong to a fraternity, any other kind of an organization, the church or otherwise, or society, the same dynamics are there. You always have these dynamics. The second dynamic of the Political is Justice. This, of course, deals with the problem of equity. Though no nation is or can be built upon ideal equity, justice is a nation 'e effort to keep some kind of balance of equity within itself. The third dynamic in the political proceas is that of wellbeing, or Welfare. The founding fathers in my constitution said we were to take care of people's physical and social needs, or their whole welfare. They used that very ancient term, "wellbeing" or "happiness" in which the total man was cared for. When something happens which leaves me out, then, it is the government's job to see something happens to include me in. If Welfare is not there you do not have an adequate polity dynamic. There is a third major dimension in the dynamical social processes of any society, and I have put it at the top of the triangle. T call it the Cultural dynamic of society. By that I mean the dynamic where basic images of a society are created and transmitted from one generation to another. That is, what it means to be a human being is transmitted, along with the practical wisdom of how you go about _ spearing fish or running a nuclear laboratory, if that ig what you do. Education, .I Ll 1_ T i ~ ii ' ~T155 | Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community 5 ~d. ~ or Wisdom, is a part of the Cultural dynamic. ' ~Style is another part of that dynamic. Every culture ~\\\ has its style. Usually, the more complex the society the ~\\\\\\ more complex the style. A culture not only lives out of its ^\\\\\\\ ~rational images, but it lives out of its formulated postures A A There is a recognized style of the individual, usually / \ / \ called "mores," though that no longer quite gets at it, it / \ / \ seems to me. Every culture has to develop an individual / V \ style or it cannot exist as a culture. Whatever varieties there may be in it, there has to be a style. There also has to be a form for basic relationships. We call this "the family," but not the kind of family we created in the Westthat is just one kind of family. I am speaking of a basic community which has to do with sex, marriage, and the family, to use the jargon of the West. Other cultures might put it another way. There have to be forms which define the first community in which you wake up. It might be a multiple family. Then, there is what I call "primal" community. That is the basic cluster of social relationships in which a family exists. The family I grew up in was part of a little tiny town called Ada, in the state of Ohio in mid western America. In one sense, Ada, Ohio was more primal than our family. Our fam ily could not grasp who it was without existing in a basic community beyond our fam ily. Every society has that form. Or look at India's own primal society where you had that great social invention called the caste system. I want to come back to that for it was a creative invention. It was not, I suppose, until even as late as the twelfth century that it began to deteriorate and really become a problem. With your panchayatan unbelievable social inventionwas your primal community style. Every society has it. The third dynamic defining culture is the Symbolic dynamic. No society has ever existed or ever can exist without a symbol system. It is the symbolism whereby any society communicates to itself who it is as that society. Probably the rudimentary symbol system in any society is its Language. It is often taken for granted, bu1 we communicate who we are through our language more than anything else. Secondly, there is Art, not simply fine art but social art. Then there are what I call the transhistorical ~ymboln, or the mythology. Every society has its mythology, or its stories. Some call that Religion, though we often do not like to use that word today. For even when people do not have a religion, formally, they have some way to relate themselves to the cosmos. It may be driven down into the unconscious, but it in there. Without its story as to where it came from, what it is, and where it is headed, a society does not exist. That is to say, every society has to have a reference point beyond itself in order to have a sense of identity. Now, when I say that these are dynamical, I mean none can exist by themselves. If you took any of these away you would not see anything, because it is the relationship that enables us to posit these realities. Therefore, what I am doing today is an abstraction. It is the function of the Cultural to significate, to enlighten, give vision to the Political and Economic. The Economic, without enlightenment or visioning, turns into nothing. Now, the function of the Economic, obviously, is to maintain these. Without it, the others do not exist. If the Economic begins to tyrannize over the Cultural, the Political defends it by putting squeezes on the Economic. This is crucial in considering community reformulation. The function of the Political is to defend society. Defense delimits, but its fundamental task is tne nurluring, the fostering, the defending of a society. T155 "'? ~ Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community 6 |. ~ '~, When you move into the arena of community reformulation you have to do your cwn analysis. You have to know what you are doing. The reason I emphasize this, ~, even to the point of possible exaggeration, is that every "dogooder" in America who has a guilty conscience wants to go into the slums to do something to save his own inner being. Well, the slums do not need that kind of help; as a matter of fact, E it does harm! F. If you are going to be effective, to have something actually happen rather tnan pUt proud flesh over a deep wound, or nurture some need in yourself as you go ro work with the less privileged in the world, then you have to be extremely objecfive. In the midst of deep involvement there must be this detachment. It must be scientific. You must also be comprehensive. In other words, when you attack your concrete area to attempt to reformulate, you have to begin with a broad and deep understanding of the total social process itself. If you go into a black ghetto, or any other kind of ghetto, and pretend you are going to redo humanness without being grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the sociological manifestation of human sociality, then you had better stay out. You would be better off and so would the people. Because these dynamics are always moving and shifting by their very nature, they are not in equal balance in our day, as in any time. In every society, they shift out of balance. Sometimes the Political gets overextended and squashes the others; sometimes the Cultural gets overextended and squashes the others. I suspect for the first time in recorded history, the Economic is overextended. In previous times, the Economic processes were taken care of in the family, in the state, and in certain organizations called the guilds, or your original caste construct, rather rhan in a separate independent community. In our day, they have become an independent entity and have grown with a rapidity, a force, and a power that has made the Political and Cultural development in the world look rather ill. The Economic dynamic of society is the tyrant today. We are not talking about "nasty old businessmen." We need those businessmen, or we would not be able to live the way we do. He are saying instead that the Economic dynamic of life controls the images which define our existence. In the West and really, I believe, across the face of the globe, we are discovering that the economic images of life's significance are not A adequate to freight, to carry, the meaning of being human. ~ \ That is where the malaise and the despair of the West is / \ ~located. / \ ~When the Cultural collapsed, the Economic moved in / \ I \ to fill that vacuum. I do not mean something from outside. / \1 \ Take individual style, for instance. What are the values NL ~ that tend to rule a man in our day whether he be rich or poor? They are the Economic values, the values of success. Most families are built around the Economic wellbeing of thar family. Everywhere in the world the Economic community has moved into educa tion: the technological schools have become the most crucial dynamics in education today. What are the life symbols we live by? Take language. The jargon of tech nolo~y has consumed every language. As a matter of fact, it is the closest thing we have to a universal languege. In terms of the scientific, urban, and secular revolu tions, these values control our interior beinR. _ T155
. __ .
This dynamic has rendered relatively impotent the
political dynamic. My country, perhaps more than any other, is
an illustration of the Economic rendering impotent the Political
in order to fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the
Cultural. The Economic forces of my country run it. People in
the world criticize Mr. Nixon, and should. But Mr. Nixon is not
running our country, nor is the common man. I believe that is
an accurate analysis of our time. If you disagree, that is all
right, for what I am after is methodology.
The world coming to be is going to strike. The revolution
in the world today is Cultural. Some of us here are not going
to live to see this happen, but it is already on the move! Some
of you young ones, you will live to see this happen. The Economic
community itself is going to play a signal role in the recovery
of the Cultural which brings a kind of balance back into society.
This balance will be the new civilization, which will also get
out of balance. But it may happen in a different way, and probably
way beyond my lifetime. He are getting pretty close here to what
I mean by motivity. If this revolution is not brought to selfconsciousness
in every situation, then do not be surprised if you do not have
drive in your outfit. You can see we are down about a million
miles deeper than the psychologistic approach to human relations.
If you are interested in productivity, really, then you are not
interested in what I am saying. But I believe if you are, then
you will understand that what I am saying here is the key to motivity
in the new world emerging.
In terms of motivity in relation to the changes necessary
in our time, one thing that I have come to believe with a passion
is that the practical aspect of any such radical revolution within
civilization ix finally accomplished on the local level, not on
the top, or bureaucratic level. Civilization is not reborn from
the top down; in fact that is probably the last place you would
want to look for the birth of a new culture, or a new sociological
frame. You begin to look for it down with local man. Indeed, you
do not have a new civilization, a new social construct, until
the mind of local man is reprogrammed, basically by local man
himself. Out of the reprogramming of his mind, he begins to build
those local structures which delineate primal community, upon
the pillars of which the superstructure of any society is built.
Now, I am an old, hardened, battlescarred,
structural revolutionary. By "structural revolutionary"
I mean that I am out to occasion change within the structures
of society. I have been in Delhi talking with gatherings of the
Family Foundation, and with the faculty and sponsors of the Central
Institute of Training, Research, and Public Cooperation concerning
their twenty metropolitan areas where government and private interests,
together, are running experiments in community reformulation in
India. I suppose the reason they would have somebody like me
come is because ; am an agent of structural change in the United
States.
I really want to deal with a little hunk of geography
on the West Side of Chicago in the United States. We call these
sixteen square city blocks 5th City. It is a Negro ghetto, one
hundred percent black. The only white people who have been there
for some time are those of us in the Institute who have been working
there. It is probably one of the worst ghettoes in the country.
The crime rate is extremely high. I sometimes think there is a
sort of carryover from the gangster's period in Chicago,
for this was A1 Capone's ground. Perhaps if you are old and have
gray hair you will remember him as the gangster who gave Chicago
the reputation of being the wickedest city in the world. That
is the kind of area we live in. We moved there because we believe
if the United States of America was going to be changed it wee
rlss
necessary to move into local areas to begin to fertilize
the situation such that iocal man could begin to grow as a sign
that the future would be different.
I am not going to talk about that, except to say that the crucial
problem in the reformulation of the slums in the United States,
and I believe in the world at large, is the problem of human motivity.
Any expertise we have developed has been out of the practical
and difficult task of attempting to understand motivity in the
midst of the black ghetto of our country.
You may remember in 1968 when the blacks rebelled in our country,
they burned huge sections of our great cities. One of the ironies
of italthough it served a useful purpose I am sureis
that they burned their own communities. Our section of Chicago
was probably the worst hit of all the cities in the United Statesmiles
of flattened ground. Our government, of course, became frightened.
So did the white bourgeois suburbanites, and the business communities.
Our government set up all kinds of studies. They invited us to
come before the Senate to make a report on the problems of the
ghetto.
The first basic problem in the inner city, and I believe across
the world, is the political problem. The people in 5th City, and
any local men in a slum area, have no way of authentically participating
in the decisionmaking processes by which their own destiny
is decided. In different societies this situation arises in different
ways.
The second basic problem was that in this fantastically affluent
moment in history, especially in my country, a vacuum of social
structures exists in the ghettoes, such that there is no adequate
way to funnel a portion of that affluence into the ghettoes. Now
frequently we call this the problem of poverty; that is not, however,
the basic problem. I suspect the poor are always going to be with
us in one form or another. But there have to be local structures
whereby the basic needs of man are met in some way or another.
Grassroots man in the slums has to have a way to participate in
the master social structures for his own wellbeing. For
instance, we have some rather huge health programs going on in
the upper echelons, which are quite easily available to certain
people because the local structures allow that possibility. I
believe this inequity at the local level is the real problem.
The third, and most important, problem I tried to clarify with
our government had to do with an inadequate image of selfsignificance
of the people within our slums. Our black people, as you well
know, have been brutally illtreated for 300 years in our
country. I am sure you are aware of the derogatory term the white
man has used with the black man. That is the word "nigger,"
a bad term in our society. Now, what has happened is that for
over 300 years he has been seen as a "nigger"that
is, a secondrate human being; and he has come to see himself
as that "rigger." That is the fundamental problem.
We might try to look at the causes, but I am not interested much
in causes for we are geared toward the future. Fundamentally,
we are after resolutions. Even if all white men should disappear,
it would not solve the black man's fundamental problem, which
now has to do with having an adequate image of his own significance
in the historical process. Unless we attack that problem, we could
pour in billions of dollars in doing new housing, and two years
later, that housing would be exactly like it was before we redid
it. We should be giving him the tools whereby he can form for
himself a new image of his own significance, we are not going
to cure the problems of the slums.
Now this problem has to do, obviously, with human motivity. There
is little doubt that the slums do not need people from the outside
to come in and do anything for them except to stimulate their
own motivity. When they are motivated in this fashion, they reconstruct
their own community. External funds need to be poured into the
slums, but only like priming a pump, only like yeast in leavening
the loaf, to get the bread to rise. They then do the job for themselves.
Now, in dealing headon with community reformulation, first
of all, it is important to clarify the basic operating principles
on the local level.
First, is the precise geographical delineation of the area that
you are going to work in.
a~ ~L Congress Expressway
~ 5TH CITY
This is a picture of 5th City and its boundaries.
An expressway, which is a quarter of a mile across, is an ancient
dividing line in the City of Chicago from the time the Indians
created it as a trail. The park is about a half mile wide. The
diagonal street, called Fifth Avenue, separates sections. Within
this section of Chicago there are 5,000 people. Actually, the
area of 5th City is broader with about 20,000 people. We believe,
as an operating principle, if you mean to deal with these 20,000
you need to box off a bit of that 20,000 to get small enough where
you can develop the kind of leadership necessary to move in on
the whole thing. That is why we have divided it, and spent eight
years working with 5,000 directly and only indirectly with others.
After eight years you have a powerful local leadership that can
move in and do what we call "the flip side." They can,
themselves, bring comprehensive community reformulation to a neighborhood,
a small town within a great city. That is the first principle,
to be very clear about your geographical delineation.
The second principle is to do a comprehensive job. That is, you
deal with al1 human problems at once. Those who go in to help
the youth might as well save their efforts. If you F° in
to start a preschool you might as well save your time. You have
only one life to live. If you go in just to do adult education,
we believe you might as well save your efforts because you must
deal with every human problem all at once.
Now, how do you find out what those human problems are? You have
your abstract model already. You have Economic problems, and you
have Polity problems (I will call it polity rather than political
because you are not dealing here, at the moment, with the political
parties). But, you will soon notice that the real problem is in
the Cultural; therefore, we put three beats on itthe
Education, the Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community
Style, and the Symbolic dynamics. When you go into 5th City, using
the analysis you have made, you look for these problems. Now,
as an outsider, you do not try to tell the people of a community
what their problems are. Instead, you give them a
dynamic through which they can organize, and therefore rationally
locate where their problems are.
Then, they begin to delineate under this dynamic what those problems
are.
I remember we spent two years doing nothing but sorting out the latent hidden leader ship of the community, getting them together, and having them delineate where the problems were. The shocking thing is that they could be rationally ordered so that they made sense to the people, giving them some way to move ahead and attack. I think the first list they made was something like 913 problems. With that, you have not the slightest idea where to begin; yet you have to do them all at once. If you do not rationally organize them you stand there paralyzed. It is like going to a library because you think you ought to read, and there are so many books you do not knew where to start. That is why cataloguing came into being, to overcome that paralysis. You must attack all human problems at once. That is the second principle!
Third, you have to deal with all life phases at once. That is to say, you deal with the young ones, the youth, and the adults all the way to "Grandma." In our educational program we started with youngsters six months old. It was not just to take care of them. We have a school for them; and in those first eight to ten months they probably learned more than you and I learned in the last 40 years. It is amazing how they can identify African music. It is amazing how they identify certain kinds of symbolismthe kind of symbolism you want them to live out of when they grow up. The color black is going to be crucial to those people as they grow.
He start with the babies and then we have minischool before preschool, and pre school, and then they go on to kindergarten school. When they go to elementary school, we work with them after school. At high school level, they begin dropping out, so we have a special program for those who drop out. It is necessary to have a program for those who can go on to higher education. When we first went there, there was not a single college graduate in that area, now there are fifty. If we had not started community reformulation there would not have been anyone there for another fifty years. The leadership is coming. You also need to work with the adults in education. That is a crucial need. Those who say forget the adults and teach the children are wrong. Hitler tried that. It did not work; it destroyed him. The elders must be included in this. In a black community, the grandparents take care of the children when they come home from school. If Grandma and Grandpa have an image of selfdepreciation, they unintentionally undo overnight what you did to the children. You, therefore, get nowhere unless you change the image of Grandma. It does not do any good to have a preschool in the midst of the inner city unless education of the elders also goes on. That is what I mean by working with all phases of life.
The fourth fundamental operating principle is the image of community significance, or community symbolism. The very fact that you build a model delineating a neighborhood is the beginning of creating symbolism that changes society. To live in the ghetto, in our nation at least, is to live nowhere. You have no place. you imagine living in no place? Those people are constantly "sociospatially" lost.
The beginning of creating the symbolism which starts
community is to delineate the area in which you live, to give
it a name. "I live in 5th City." Barely had that been
named, based on one of their own streets, when the people of 5th
City began to Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community
create songs about their own streets: "I live in 5th City.
5th City is my home." Why you would not believe the enthusiasm
that came out with sensing a symbol designating where you live
in the midst of history. Then they began to have festivals. Someone
was telling me about a community here in which not long ago a
group of the poverty people found some old band uniforms, dressed
up, and had a parade. That is symbolism. The black community began
to have festivals. It was interesting in those early days. I would
not have walked twenty feet at night out in that community, because
you would rarely ever get back. But it was not long before one
could go out and walk around on the streets. When symbolism began
to flow, then the roots of community began to grow.
This was 5th City community reformulation. There was a part of
it that began to build economic structures, part of it that began
to build political structures; and a part, operating as the Cultural
dynamic, that began to build the educational, stylistic, and symbolic
structures of community. With the people and problems they delineated,
we then began to build substructuresfour major
structures under each one of the basic problems. I will not go
over them all for you, though I have some charts to hand out.
For instance, under the Economic is the problem of housing, and
that of employment or income. Also there is the problem of the
consumer. Perhaps it is not true in your part of the world, but
when some people have junk to sell they take it into the ghettos,
and charge the people there more than is paid for good material
outside. They do not know the difference. These people have to
be protected as consumers, or better yet, have to protect themselves.
That is crucial in our nation. Then there is the problem of health,
which is also crucial. We put that up under the sustaining dynamic
of society. The 5th City community built a health outpost that
relates to the health structures of the city. I suppose that about
500 people a day, coming from all over the place, go through that
health outpost. With all of these, there are four substructures.
Actually, these were also taken down to different levels, because
the housing problem is not simply one problem but many kinds of
housing problems. You try to build these structures which give
you ways to handle your local society. In principle, then, the
community was reformulated.
Now how do these operate? To run these structures, they built
a Guild system of awakened neighborhood people who took responsibility
in the community. One group was responsible for the Economic dynamic.
They were the Economic Guild. Another group were responsible in
the Educational arena. Some took responsibility to be the Political
Guild. Others were responsible for Style and Symbol, so that you
have five master guilds, manned by the awakened neighborhood people.
A second master construct to care for the whole community wee
set up, called Stakes. A body of awakened people would be the
Stake force in each Stake. Their task was to move out in the neighborhood
and care for every person who lived there. "To care for,"
meant that if anyone was sick he would be taken to the Health
Center. If anyone was not making as much money as he had to make
in order to live, he was put into the structure dealing with income.
If children were not in preschool, they were entered in a preschool.
If there was a child who needed to get into high school he would
be assisted through the educational constructs. In this was the
community cared for itself. The Guilds thus mediated the comprehensive
structures of society down to the local community. The way the
people were put into those local structures enabled all of society
to minister to itself.
They found they needed to have a Council so the interested people
in the community could meet every three months and make decisions
together. Their attention span was very short the first couple
of times they met. You had to write out speeches for those who
could read them, and with great labor they did so. Now, you may
not believe this, but now there are leaders in that community
who can give this lecture far better than I can give it, and have
been invited to universities to give such lectures. The talent
is there. What you provide are the tools, and the help to develop
the skills for using them. The charismatic leadership power of
our outcasts in America is fantastic.
Then they have what they call a Presidium, a few of the citizens
who have become leaders, who constantly watch over the whole construct.
The Presidium now has what they call a Board of Managers, which
the community supports, giving them just a minimum amount of money
to live. They spend their full time ensuring that the structures
they set up work.
One day the statistical sociologists of our country are going
to get their discipline straightened out so that it is human sociology
they deal with, and not abstract statistics. When one of them
is brought in to evaluate the work of 5th City, I am appalled
by the criteria he uses. Perhaps this is my eccentricity, but
I want them to ask whether human beings have been changed.
I am not just interested in the particular people in that particular
community. I am interested in our whole society. I am interested
in local man, in finding a way to release his creativity into
the civilizing process as a whole.
I believe that out of the experimentation in forging their own
lives, the "guts" of human resurgence is found, and,
indeed, the rockbottom foundation of a new, hardheaded,
realistic, social being.
I stopped by Ahmadabad the other day and for the first time went
to the Gandhiji Ashram there. You know the story of his life.
It is held as a museum. As I was walking through there, I asked
myself, "Where did that little man get that drive?"
He moved out into the impossible, and did it. We who are not so
forcefully driven would have buckled under the first wave of opposition.
Where did he get that motivity?
I believe that rudimentary radical motivity comes from interior
space, inter) or time, and a sense of being. I am talking about
the Negro ghetto as I coal with what is underneath it.
I am convinced that when a man's interior understanding of space
is small then his motivation is small. If I only thought in terms
of Ada, Ohio, that small town I lived in, my motivity would be
about as big as Ada, Ohio. Can you apply that to a factory? In
direct proportion to a man's interior space in which he lives
and in direct proportion to its expansion, is the intensification
of motivity. If I live simply in terms of the United States of
America, then I have motivity that size. If I begin to live in
terms of relationship to the whole globe in my time, then my motivity
expands. Where did Gandhi get his drive? All over those walls
he says, "Sure I am interested in my people, in my nation,
but I am interested in humanity, in mankind." You and I who
go around with our interest centered in our family, in our work,
in our own village, or in our own country, when the hard places
of life come, we collapse, or like a car we have sixteen cylinders
in us but they are only hitting on about two. We are mission on
about fourteen. But when our Human Motivity and the Reformulation
of New sense of interior space expands, then all sixteen begin
to hit and acceleration automatically comes from us.
When I was talking about this to a group of sociologists in Delhi
the other day one of the professors asked me, "What about
motivity in the village life one or two hundred years ago in India?"
That is a simple question to answer. Did they live in space? Certainly
they lived in spacecosmic space. Back when transhistorical
symbols had relevance and power in life, in principle, the most
ignorant, the most remote man in India had a sense of participating
in the universe. Though that may be hard for us in our urban society
to understand, it was true of rural man. I think of the early
history of my country when we were winning the West. All castes
of Europe came to our shoressome out of prison, those
their countries wanted to get rid ofthey started out
in wagon trains into the West, facing unbelievable hardships,
the kind of hardships that would make us effeminate men in the
twentieth century collapse. But, they moved on. Why? It is as
if space was opened up for them. There was the drive.
Secondly, if you want to think about how you are going to get
drive out of people, you must think in terms of expanded time.
Every man not only has a sense inside of space, where he belong.,
but he has a sense of time. If you and I are only able to think
backwards a short distance or forwards a short distances then
our motivity is just that much. The trouble in the Negro ghetto
was that they could not think beyond the space of the ghetto nor
beyond the day in terms of time. They wore concerned about where
they would get their next meal. Why, they could not afford to
think two days down the line, to say nothing of ten years. They
went through life asking where they were going and out of that
stance they developed what we call the Negro shuffleyou
would not want them to run a machine with that style.
As you begin to get a broader view of time even in your own personal
life, you begin to get a picture of what could be in ten years
from now. If you remember back to your grandfather and further
back than that, then that motivity begins to increase and the
drive comes. I like to think in terms of the whole journey of
mankind through history. There was Gandhiji. He thought of the
total journey of man, not simply this one in the twentieth century.
He thought far beyond independence from Great Britain. There was
his drive to bring about independence, the twentyfifth year
of which we are now celebrating.
The third category is difficult. I do not mean this to be abstract
philosophy. In one sense, it is no more than the intentional awareness
of the fact that to the degree that I participate in my interior
space and in my interior time, I have a sense of being somebody,
of being significant. I have a sense that my life is a manifestation
of that which is far beyond me and therefore gives me a sense
of my own worth, of my own significance. I am back to the fundamental
problem in the Negro ghetto. One way we dealt with it was to work
outside to create inside space. We took the people out of the
ghetto for visits to other places in Chicago. Some of them had
never been out of that ghetto before. Then we even began to take
them to other cities: to New York, and Washington, D.C. You do
not have to take them all. You take a few out of Chicago and they
bring back New York. They bring back New Orleans. Then though
we did not have much money we wanted to take them outside of our
country. As you know the closest one different from us is Mexico.
So, we took about 50 people from the ghetto on buses to Mexico.
They saw that there were other poor people in the world, and they
brought that back. They paid what they could on these trips so
they could really participate. We went to the community, took
up a collection, and sent three of them around the world to look
at every signal place around this world. That was expensive,
but they paid a good bit of it themselves. That did more for the
dramatic reformulation of that community, where their motivity
was released not only in running their community but in having
a social milieu which released the creativity of the individuals
within the community.
Now, in terms of motivity in the business world,
we want to talk about human relations. You may not get around
to it yourselves, but if you do not, be sure that the day after
tomorrow the business community is going to be doing something
like this. I do not pretend to be an expert.
First of all, whether you have a large corporation
or a small business, you have to engage every employee in your
master inclusive vision. The question in human relations, it seem.
to me, has not been what it very frequently looks like; that is,
common ownership. That is not your question. What I am raising
here is common participation in the vision of the company, or
the vision of its outreach. I can be a sweeper and, you
may not believe this, be relatively content. That does not mean
I would not want to get ahead in life, if I had a sense that I
was participating in a broad vision. Now, this is a bit of a problem
for some companies. Some companies have not gone to the trouble
to spell out their inclusive vision. Their inclusive vision must
be their own understanding of how what they are doing or what
they are selling is a contribution to society. Suppose I make
automobile tires. It would not take an overly bright person, in
this moment in history, to begin to relate this fact to the total
needs of the world. Without that vision, you cannot expect the
human relations in your outfit that you want. But, the last sweeper
in the place must be given an opportunity to participate in that
vision.
This means that business has to reorganize
themselves on, I suppose, your caste system. Back in the early
days of this you had team operation. If you have a sales division,
that whole division would grasp itself as a team down to the lent
sweeper in it. And there needs to be, obviously, teams within
it. I do not mean anything sentimental by teams. This is not a
psychologistic understanding, trying to manipulate the person.
This reorganization is built around the discernible activity
which has to go on in the total enterprise. The vision is then
filtered on down to the next levels.
I believe that any moments you take away from actual
production to communicate the vision of your total enterprise
will be more than made up in increased production I know of places
where, when a unit comes to work they spend the first fifteen
minutes looking at the whole vision of the task and the immediate
jobs that have to be done. Every person there feels they are participating
in their division,
Now this means you are going to need to create new
kinds of methodologies, which have to do, first, with brainstorming
sessions. By brainstorming sessions I mean these units on some
level would get together and identify the primary contradictions.
Suggestion boxes hinted at this. They are not adequate because
you do not have a sense of participation. He have discovered that
when even the most unlikely person within a group has had an opportunity
to get his wisdom in, something happens to the whole production
scheme. Without this method, I do not think you can operate in
the future.
Then, there is the workshop methodology. A workshop
methodology takes the contradiction and rationally pulls out the
wisdom of every single employee relative to the resolution of
that particular contradiction.
A third methodology is consensusmaking. Suppose
I am a foreman and I have ten men working under me. If I am going
to do something about radical motivity, I have to find a way to
get those men together. Together we have located the contradiction
and its possible resolutions. He have sent it on up the ladder
and the solution sent back is based on our research. Now I have
to have the team believe that their creativity got into this decisionmaking
process. When I do, I never have to go around and say, "Push
on here, push on here!" I have built that motivity inside
those men.
The last method is proposal writing. You can put quotes around
"writing," because you do not even have to be able to
writesomebody else can do that. I have discovered
that in the Negro ghetto. Those people are capable of beginning
to draw pictures of the future for their community. The whole
business world is going to be surprised by the janitor of a factory,
who is capable of articulating the vision of the whole plant.
I believe this is a moment of resurgence in history, such as has
never been before. It will not come by magic. It will only come
when bodies of individuals on this globe of ours today finally
decide that what is coming is going to come; and not only that,
but that they may now be, in their presence and in their action,
the kind of a world they believe is coming. In my opinion, I do
not think there is a dynamic in history that can play as important
a role in this creation of a new civilization, this release of
human motivity, as the international business community. I think
the place where you begin is with the new horizons of human relations
emerging in our time.