The Ecumenical Institute: Chicago

Winter Quarter, 1973

HUMAN MOTIVITY

AND

THE REFORMULATION OF NEW COMMUNITY

(Lecture given to businessmen in India during global visit)

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  _
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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


Human Motivity and the Reformulation of New Community 7

. __ .

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.