Global Research Centrum: Chicago, G.M., Social Methods School 12­13­74

UNDERLYING CATALYSIS

Today the lectures are about strategic designs. This morning we worked on the external frame, or how you get your demonstration with political and economic limits and possibilities of the total global situation. This afternoon the lecture concerned structural dynamics, or how you organize your community in the midst of bringing off your key tactic.

Tonight, still focusing upon strategic design, the lecture is on "Underlying Catalysis." 'Catalysis" answers the question, "What is the mode of approach to effective change?" That is all I am supposed to explain tonight; just that one point. Tomorrow, the lectures will deal with effective methods that must go on inside the strategic designs that we have discussed today. So the question tonight is the approach to deal with the crisis of our time.

It is mind­boggling to even attempt to get hold of the crises of our time. Whole nations are without adequate food systems. I understand that, if the population is controlled, it will level off at about 12 billion. We do not know how to deal with 12 billion people. The transportation system in the city and the globe is obviously in need of radical rethinking. Energy, air, water and waste pollution; these are fundamental issues. It is necessary to list them sometimes just to emphasize that although you do not have clarity on any of them, this really is an unusual time. We have mass­meaninglessness and vocational dislocation, racial and cultural clash. These are some things that make me very angry. Listen to the news: huge industries operate without consulting anybody, local man is not prepared to answer even though he is consulted, dictatorships torture people who try to consult with them. All of these can cause atomic wars in the attempts to solve them.

This is a time of crisis. We have also said that this is a time of resurgence. Incredible possibilities exist in the midst of this dangerous time. Many people are trying to respond to all this and there are many ways in which to respond. I sat next to a British business consultant on an airplane trip some months back. He was a very clear man, a very able man, and I am sure a very competent man in his field. He ran consults on how to run a better company. I knew that all he did for those companies would make no real difference. He was going to help them do a better job of reaching their reduced goal. He was going to do that well; and those companies are going to be very grateful to him. They are going to be better companies, and they will not go bankrupt. He was making a valuable contribution; but he was not catalyzing a response to the events and issues of our times.

Many others are out to find ways of participating in the reform of society or of introducing better educational methods into the educational structures. Nobody could complain about spending your whole life on that. You throw out some crooked politician and put one in that has a little bit more chance of being meaningful. We are glad that people go out and do these kinds of reform. But we know that doesn't make any difference because of the mass catastrophe that lies ahead of the human race unless something extremely more massive takes place.

Perhaps we should decide to do some really direct action and pick out something like birth control and organize a whole movement around it. We could choose conservation of air and water and organize a movement to deal with that particular problem. Our whole lives can go into one of these things and that is needed. These approaches are not wrong; they are just not responsive to what is going on. They are minuscule responses that reach out a few inches, then end. Most people think there is no way to deal with the whole. Either you do what you can before you die and quit worrying about it, or you don't do anything. You have yourself a ball. It is all going down the drain and with so little time left, why worry about it? This is a common possibility for mankind as they get lucid about the approaches they are taking.

There is only one way to deal with the whole world at once if you are serious. It has to do with taking this concept of catalysis, and thinking it through until it makes sense.

I remember being introduced to the word "catalyst" in college chemistry. I remember that there was a big beaker of some sort of red fluid. They added an eye dropper full of something they called a catalyst into this, and all hell broke loose inside. This big blue­green precipitate fell to the bottom, and the liquid remaining turned yellowish. You said, "My God, one little drop of whatever did all that." It didn't really do that because they say the catalyst didn't even enter into the thing. It was still there like it was, but it had created a set­up situation for that particular little drop and blew it into an avalanche of activity. That is the image of catalysis. That is why we are using this term.

Somehow, civilization is ready. You have to do a good bit of thinking to figure out how it is ready, where ready and what kind of a dropperful goes in at what point. Thinking of doing 5th City or Majuro, from our perspective, seems immense. It seemed, at many points along the way, just impossible to pull off 5th City. But from the perspective of the massive crises of our globe, 5th City is very small. You get 5th City on one hand the slums of Calcutta on the other, and there is literally no comparison. The immensity of one city's problems compared to 5th City is simply overwhelming. You take the little nation of Majuro and set it alongside all the tremendous development necessary in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and you come up with exactly the same impression. These are meaningful demonstrations only if they have the proper qualities to be catalysts, to instigate massive change In all of the other places you can name.

We have to resist the temptation to engage in "direct action." Direct action is finding some malady in our society, and doing that. It is simply futile to operate that way. It is easy for anything we do to be watered down into one more piece of direct action that catalyzes nothing at all. Catalytic action has indirection built into it.

After much thoughtful planning, you stick your fist in over here and create an avalanche over there. It seems like that was not even your intent.. But that went into your planning. You had thought through to the bottom that in moving here, activity would take place over there.

The catalytic approach begins, therefore, by building a model, a catalytic model, that applies to the whole social reality at this point in human history. The social process triangles defined for us what the whole social process is about. They also provide clarity on what you mean when you say "the whole globe in our time." The next step, after defining the social process and working through your knowledge of the whole globe, is to think through the malaise, as we did in Summer '71. You move to contradictions and write proposals on those.

This immense heap of data still doesn't give you a very good idea of what to do. It took a whole year after that to discern the relationships within the data, to refine it and to create the vision in which our proposals began to cluster and coagulate into what we call pressure points.

The malfunctioning of the entire social process in our time can be dealt with by proper focusing of action at the nine pressure points. You can act in a lot of other arenas, but the nine pressure points are the strategic spots. If you focus your energies in those nine places, all of history will move in a new direction. So, let's go do that, right? Wrong! You still face the problem that it takes massive energy and massive forces to push those pressure points. It takes massive energies even to think through how those pressure points might be pushed. None of us know and none of us are going to know this side of about a generation of thinking. I'll call these massive forces an avalanche of social forces.

My image is that an avalanche of social forces will be pushing at each pressure point. Maybe you need nine avalanches, or an avalanche that goes past nine places. I don't know exactly how tints is going to work but I am clear that you and I will not be the ones pushing all nine pressure points.

We still have to work this catalysis through. I have no idea how large the force will have to be in order to do this. It involves a lot of people even thinking in terms of 1% to 10%, of the population of the globe. In this country alone, 1% of the population is 2 million and 10%, 20 million people. Globally, perhaps 40 million or 400 million people will have to push at these pressure points in order for chance to happen.

How do you catalyze an avalanche of social forces to do this? We have a story that maintains our sanity while talking about this. The story tells of an experience in the mountains. Snow piles up in curious and unstable fashion in the valleys and ridges of the mountains. If you stand at the right spot, and blow a whistle with a very shrill noise, some of the snow in the mountain begins to jump. That little bit of jumping snow causes another little bit of snow to jump. All of a sudden, tons and tons of snow is rocking down the mountainside.

With this story in mind, we have a tremendous image of whistlepoints as the places to go and blow the whistle. If you blow the right quality of sound loud and strong enough, this avalanche of social forces occurs and pushes these pressure points.

We call these three whistle points the catalytic forces. Creating the catalytic forces is the first critical thing to do. This is where you and I come in. We are the catalytic forces. There are three types of you and me. I will come back and explain those later.

We also have two factors: the myth factor and the action factor. These two are the hardest to understand, so I will come back to them as well. Circling around the forces are four programmatic thrusts: Demonstration, Impact, Training and Interchange. Demonstration is one place where the forces are being quite directly stimulated. Impact, Training and Interchange also involve engagement with the avalanche of social force.

If all nine forces are done with proper quality and produce a loud enough whistle, then this avalanche takes place, the pressure points are pushed, and the whole global social process moves into an entirely new world of wholesome potentialities and exciting new contradictions. If this is not done, we may not have avoided the annihilation of man. We are talking about something relatively serious here.

Let's look more carefully at what doing this means. You begin by building your catalytic forces. It is helpful for me to call these your New People. This is where the universal becomes apparent to me. Any massive social change any time in history always came about by creating catalytic forces­­always came about by initiating a new people.

I would like to substitute new piety for the myth factor. I don't like the word 'piety' too much, but it is shocking enough to get us down the road a little ways.

For the action factor, let me use the phrase new social practices. The following statement is probably true for any time in history: radically new social change involves the creation of a new people operating out of a brand new piety in the sense of a new way of holding what it means to be a human being, and a brand new set of social practices related to a brand new way of Interacting with one another and a brand new way of doing methodologies in relation to the society of their time.

Confucius brought about a new piety and a new kind of social practice. Any great movement in history brought about a new way of grasping the deeps of man­what it means to be man­­brought about new kinds of practices in relating to one another and in relationship to all the fundamental issues of that time.

The old piety, if you like, is still around. The old myth factor is still holding in being the old way of operating society. You might characterize the old way with many words. Just to sense the immensity of what we are talking about here, the old piety and the old action factor of the modern world and the western part of the world dealt primarily with breaking individuals loose to be thinkers and intuiters in the concept of the nations.

Being a nation, or radical individual for that purpose is over in history. That piety is over. In its place has come a new piety which we have pointed to with phrases like "global corporateness" or the "secular­spiritual" reality present within the mundanity of life today. These phrases attempt to explain this new factor, this new piety and these new practices that make these new people new.

I have been shocked by this myth factor. I did not think it would take so long to get it into being. We are clear that this new myth will articulate man's relationship to the Mystery and man as freedom. This new myth will spell out how man is care and how man is serenity. I kept thinking the mythology would solidify and be published in a year or two. I'm beginning to think that the very nature of the secular world of which we are a part is changing.

I thought at first this new myth was going to set rid of the Old Testament, the Bhagavad-Gita and things like that. I realize now that this new myth factor is a profound dialogue with the Old Testament and the relatively stable images it has of history, and with the Bhagavad-Gita and every other heritage of man. The new articulation of what it means to be human is going to be a profound dialogue with all the wellsprings of man's experience since the beginning. The primordial nature of this rocks me. It is also going to have a radically futuric nature to it. I am just saying a few words to indicate that getting this whistle point blown is in itself awesome.

The action factor is equally awesome. In this school right now, we are working on the new social practices. I thought we could complete our social methods curriculum in one or two quarters. I am shocked again at how many things to do we have conceived, and how far from the end of the road in social methods we actually are. We have come a long way from where we were several years ago. But this is just another immense arena.

The new practices of being the new society for the next thousand years is a whistle point with profound depth to it. The social methods of Confucius are no longer adequate. Aristotle's are not good enough either. We are making a fresh start on fundamental social practices, on how to think, how to build models, how to form practical responses, live together, think together, and work together. We will be working this through for a long time into the future.

So what are the whistle points? The whistle points are a new people who embody new piety, and nine new practices driving into the snowbank with four effective arenas of programming. Demonstration means Majuro, 5th City and our Image of 24, powerful specks of social miracle encircling the globe. All of that is catalysis. LENS, RSI, thousands of town meetings, all point to impact. Training involves the courses held here, academies, and all the courses in your local communities. Interchange means research. It means information flow among us. It means commonality and PSU's in thinking through what information ought to flow among us. It is really a polity dynamic that characterizes the activity of these social forces pulling other forces into it and in ways that are also hard to calculate.

What are the forces that do all this? One is carted the guild. A guild is an amorphous fury of PSU's and task forces. I thought at first that the guild was something highly organized. But the guild is sort of wild. It is a common understanding of various things; a common understanding of our times. All kinds of people are drawn In and pushed out Into action. The middle part of this is called the cell.

Each metropolitan part of the world, each community of man, must have those in it who assume responsibility for knowing what the whole war is, in that sector, and catalyzing the guilds needed in that sector. This is the local nail­it­down revolutionary part of these forces. The third aspect, the global servant force, has to do with the fact that all this work across the globe must be related, served, cared for, brought up­to­date, and has to be given assistance from the experimentation that all the other local forces around the world are doing.

The global servant force, the cell and the guild are dynamics needed to catalyze these social forces. It is a whistle point for somebody to be. The guild is an open model. We do not know what it is in every possible way that will avalanche these forces. The cell and global servant force are experiments in motion by us but they are also unfinished symphonies.

What the symphony needs to be is told to us by kit story, by whatever it takes to catalyze change in our time. The whistle points are nine unfinished symphonies to be written and played by people who care.

What are the qualities that make a demonstration truly catalytic? We ought to do some more thinking on that one. The piety and the practice, the myth and the action factors need to be pulled into it. The pressure points need to be that toward which the demonstration is aimed. it needs to be reduplicable across the globe. A demonstration is not catalytic unless it has universal qualities that literally can take hold of the minds and imaginations of men throughout the world. Finally, a demonstration has to be timely to be catalytic. Building a tent would not be catalytic in our time. It was catalytic perhaps a few million years ago.

We know what symphonies we need to write. We know that the myth and action factors must be like blood flowing through the veins of these forces. We knew we must create people imbued with the new practices and the new piety, who project this new myth and new action factor into the bloodstream of a huge social force that avalanches down on these pressure points and creates a new global situation which irreversibly gets us down the road in human history. If there is a state of being called confused confidence, that might describe where we are. We are arriving at a confidence of knowing what we are doing, yet in everything we do, we are still experiencing openness and a demand for observation and creativity.

Now, one last question. What kind of life is going to be required of these forces if they are to catalyze change? Style is how you organize your time and how you organize your space. Style is a kind of poem that bubbles up out of the deep truth of humanness which you write with your own body and blood. What kind of poem do you need to be? I think of Kennedy some days as a poem, and I am glad the poem was written. You can think of the lives of people who stand in some relationship of honor to you, as poems; great poems for which you are grateful.

What kind of poem are catalytic forces being called to write with their being? What kind of order into their space and time is being required? The qualities of this are clearer than the particulars in some instances. They will be a people who care, who are going to embody love for the whole world, who care for all being. This is a transestablishment care.

We have spoken about transestablishment style before, so I will just talk about this briefly. Established forces are preserving heritage from the past and that is valuable. However, something beyond the style of established forces is needed to catalyze change. In the 60's we experienced the style of disestablishment forces, using mass power to negate the style of the establishment in the name of the future. This negation of values is a powerful reality always present in history.

But a style which is beyond both, yet honors both the establishment and the disestablishment is what is needed now. This is the transestablishment. When someone says establishment, the transestablishment stands up and holds up its hand. When somebody says disestablishment, the transestablishment stands up again. This shocks the establishment and the disestablishment both. It dramatizes how different it is to be the relationship that catalyzes both without losing its soul to either. The transestablishment always stands somewhere other than in the establishment or the disestablishment. Yet, it lives in the midst of both and brings its entirely new approach to the future into that dynamic. These catalytic forces are going to be practical guildsmen. That is a style category­­ transestablishment ­­ I am putting up there.

The word "guildsmen" emphasizes that a worldly competence will be required of these catalytic forces if they are to catalyze. We will have to out think, out live and out die anyone. We must have a tactical success mentality present here. We have to create tactical systems that literally win concrete victories. It seems like the style required is one of hitting the right nail on the head with the right hammer at the right time into the right board­­ all the time. Creating miracles amounts to taking one turtle step down the right road every day; that kind of lifestyle.

The guildsmen will be a corporate man. He will know that he cannot do this alone. He will develop a style of never doing it alone. He will develop a style of taking a whole avalanche with him whenever he does anything, in his imagination, if not in his actual walk. The guildsmen will have to be the one who assumes total responsibility for the globe and for all the colleagues who are working with him.

This catalytic force is going to be a profound guru. That, again, is a style category. This style of life has the quality of beckoning others; knowing that other men are out there waiting to adventure with their whole lives­­ if they are beckoned to be there. This guru is going to have the quality of a primordial dialogue taking place within him all the time, with every other heritage of humanness as well as with his own time. He is going to be a man sensitive to symbols. He is going to see the humanness expressed in symbols or not being expressed in the symbols. He is going to be a creator of motivating fellowship. I think of living in the spirit and mastering the means of helping others to do so.

I'll put a circle and a question mark around the final style category. I started to put "oddball" and decided that was not sophisticated enough. I thought of the word "outsider." That is a bit more sophisticated. Invisible might be a good word to use. But the word I like the best is discontinuity, or the "discontinuous one." I like the word discontinuous because it points to the style of always giving form to the new, of always being the embodiment of surprise.

These catalytic forces are going to be the embodiment of God's surprise to mankind at any particular moment. People who see this style will say, "Who are you anyway?" Your answer to that question would be, "Well, if I told you, you would not believe it." But you can't really answer the question that way. You might respond by asking another question. But I don't really know how to get hold of a way to talk about the depths a catalytic agent has in history. It is someone who cares in a way that reaches beyond what care normally reaches, to a fellowship with the radical discontinuous In history. Perhaps you say that these forces are those who have discovered that service is just the secret of life; what life Is all about. I gained some clarity on this through the Tillich paper awhile back, when I realized what the alternative to servanthood was. The alternative to being a servant is to be a mixture of selfishness and self­hate. So, to find your servanthood is to find your life. Being a servant is the secret of life. That style is present here these forces are indeed doing what we have talked about­­ being a catalysis in history.

I wish I had a good conclusion. I thought up several and threw them all out. This is, for me, one of the most exciting strategical issues we have to deal with. Just what does it really mean to be the catalysts of massive change in history. Underneath that, do we dare? And, do we not dare? Both questions are very much there at the same time

Gene Marshall