Global Research Centrum: Chicago, G.M., Social Methods
School 121374
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