Chicago Centrum, JW, Social Methods School 3/13/74

This time is a time of the practics. This time is the time of creating the community. This time is a time of the nitty­gritty rebalancing of the social process. Now is not the time for flights of fancy, off into some abstract abyss, or of some Utopian dream of society. It is time to roll up sleeves, to stick hands deep into local life, wherever it shows up, and to begin the task of recreating local life, recreating the future of humanity.

I would like to suggest, though they may not be fully understood, that there is a relationship between the economic process and the process of problem­solving; there is a relationship between the political process and corporate action; there is a relationship between the cultural process and human motivity; there is a relationship between the times and this thing called the guild. We are in the midst of a cultural revolution. We are in the midst of a breakloose of consciousness, and part of that breakloose is methodology. At every point in time man has had an image of the world in which he lives, and out of that image of the world in which he lives, has had some sort of a methodology, or way of interacting with the world in which he lives. I suppose the earliest man lived in a world totally given over to the supernatural. When that first quasi­human being stood up and became conscious, he found his life caught up in dread and fascination. I suppose he did not know what was going on the first time he grunted at another being like himself and it grunted back in reply. He was confronted by utter mystery. The effective method in that human society was the methodology of magic: to say sacrifice and supplication. You did whatever you could to talk those spirits into doing what you wanted them to do. That was a practical, scientific methodology. It was the way you practically interacted with the world in which you lived.

Then along came some people called the Greeks and the Hebrews, and I suppose a lot of other people and they said, "No, the world was not just supernatural." There is the supernatural in the world, there is a spirit in the world, but there is also "stuff" not all mysterious powers, but raw stuff. And they began to grasp that there were two kinds of realities. Plato talked about the divine forms in heaven, and that on earth was this stuff, manifesting the divine forms. It was not the same, however, because it was dross, it was filled with temporality, it was filled with contingency. It was a little different from the primitive world. A man had to choose, he had to have a way of discerning the divine forms, so he could seek after them. In ancient times, if you were walking along the desert and found a place where there was water bubbling up out of the ground, and trees and bushes growing, that was seen as a divine place, and you stayed there. You worshipped, or you set up a shrine. But in the newer times, man had to choose. And that was a brand new methodology for humanness ­­the methodology of choosing.

Then someone like Newton came along. And he said that is not really right. The world is not made up of the supernatural and stuff. The world is just made up of stuff. Now it might be that there was a supernatural, but, if so, then the supernatural just kind of got things going and then left. So there is just stuff; and this stuff kept on interacting. So a new methodology came along, and it was a methodology of manipulating. When relating to stuff was what you had to do, in order to be a successful human being, what you had to do was to manipulate the stuff and get what you wanted. Henry Ford manipulated stuff to get what he wanted. In the economic revolution, men got permission to manipulate stuff. Then along came a man by the name of Albert Einstein. He said, there is not stuff. Now, how is it you create a methodology in a world like that? That is what we are up against, it seems to me. By the time you get out of this building, that thing we call society could have disappeared!

In a community where you think that there is some kind of substance called an establishment going on giving you permission to be the disestablishment, it is all right for the students in the sixties to walk around and carry signs and complain and be cynical. As long, as there is something, solid and something real called the establishment, it is rather neat. But one day when you wake up and realize that the thing called the establishment is as much a sham and illusion as whatever it is you call the disestablishment, then you have a whole different situation on your hands. That's the kind of world we are in. That is what I mean when I say that if you have another picture of this thing called the world, that makes sense out of the way in which human beings interact, good. But if you do not, then you better be operating out of the kind of a world in which we really live, for that is the kind of situation in which we find ourselves. We are no longer over against stuff.

These are the discoveries of our century; that is what it means to be a human being. It is to grasp the fact that life is not a fact; to grasp the fact that at the core of life is nothingness, unanswerability. That is what is at the midst of life. The fact is that what a man is (not what a man has) is freedom. An unbelievable kind of a sense of awareness was expressed by existentialists like Sartre and Camus. I remember reading the book, The Stranger, by Camus, where, for no reason whatsoever, a guy started shooting people. And he felt no remorse, he felt no guilt. If he got killed for it he did not care; if he did not get killed for it he did not care. I was sick to my stomach for a week and a half after I read that book, because it threw me over against what I had assumed about every human being and how they would act.

There are simply agreements human beings have with one another, nothing more. First, that life is all about care and responsibility. It is not that human beings could care or ought to care but that human beings walking around experience themselves being thrown over against being attached to things. They show up in situations where the situation lays a claim on them which, for some reason, they grasp as a real claim on their life. It is not because they are socially conditioned, but just because of the happening that happens.

I suppose, for me, the source of this is that my life itself defines happiness. If I stand over against the abyss there is nothing out there to solve my life. Happiness is not obtained by getting from where I am to there. My life is happiness, and what defines happiness is my life. Do you want to know what it means to be a happy human being, watch me. It is not because I am so exceptional, but because there is no alternative. Those are the fundamental "over­against­nesses"; those are the fundamental weird happenings.

But, let's go beyond that beyond what is happened to all those human beings who live in what we thought was a rational universe. In the sixties, all of a sudden what happened was that we were propelled out beyond the edge of what we thought was reality. We had to face stark irrationality, stark absurdity of the way life is. I suppose it happened for me after I spent the first twenty years of my life consciously and unconsciously wanting to be like my father. My father started working at a steel corporation when he was seventeen years old, and he stopped working six months before he died at sixty-two years or age. He spent his whole life working there for one reason: so that he could provide his wife and three children with a little better house, a little better food, and a little better education. When I was a Junior in college it dawned on me that I could have all the money, all the housing, and all the food I needed within two years after I got out of college. But that was only the beginning of the collapse. I will never forget my father looking at me with tears in his eyes when I got out of the university and saying, "We sent you and your sister to school because we understood that if you went to the university you could get a little bit better kind of a job and make a better living after you got out. And now neither one of you is even interested in working."

It was that kind of a collapse, that kind of a shift that happened once a man had caught on and confronted the irrationality at the center of existence, and returned. Then he has only two choices: he decides he has to build civilization, or he destroys civilization. Actually, either one, you see, is building civilization because he is the man who understands there is no thing called civilization out there that shapes my life. My life shapes civilization. That is what he understands. Hitler was thrown over against the irrational edge of existence and he came back. There was no way that people who lived out of the illusion that there was something called civilization and some rules in life could cope with him; there was no way they could match his creativity. Because, you see, when this happens in life there is no more content. There is no right and there is no wrong to the man who comes back. There is no principle that determines his life; it is just his life and his response to his life. That is the kind of a world in which we showed up.

And the only two questions for him are: what is the vision he creates day after day after day after day of what he has decided, and therefore what the world is all about. And secondly, what is the plan by which he intends to implement that vision. These two realities are what I want to talk about: the vision and the plan, under the rubric of Problem­Solving.

Life is pure problem. All there is in life is solving problems. All there is in life is starting from nothing and creating a new solution to the question. People in our time have said that the only responsibility a human being answers to in our day is the responsibility that comes to him out of his image of the future. It is only as I project in front of me a picture of what I see the future to be about that I have any way of grasping the fact of my responsibility. There is emerging today in the world a brand new common image of the future out of the experience of the peoples of the world. I read a science fiction story a few summers ago. It was set in the year 2369 which fascinated me. Imagine, 2369: four hundred years from now! And I wondered: what would life be like 400 years from now? So I went around asking people, "What do you suppose will be going on if you showed up 400 years from now on the planet earth?" The first person I asked said, "Well, I suppose nothing. There'll just sort of be pieces there." I thought to myself, "poor fellow, he doesn't have a very visionary vision of the future." The next person I asked said, "There won't be any life 400 years from now. We will have destroyed one another by then." Somebody else said, "The planet will be filled with garbage; men will be reduced to the status of animals." I asked another person and I got the same kind of an answer. I laughed about that until it dawned on me that I was afraid to answer that question myself. But the point of that story is that all those people supposedly responsible­were living out of an image of the future which was utterly destructive. Whatever else they were doing with their lives, you knew that they were contributing to what they assumed was a fact: the eventual destruction of this invention called the planet earth.

We get ourselves the task of attempting to think through, to discern a practical vision of the future. How do you go about creating a practical vision? In our times, you start out with people's life experience. That is all there is, with whatever way they interpret that life experience. When you overlay the presuppositions about an adequate scope of life they must be inclusive. There was nothing incorrect with Hitler's vision of the future. Nothing he said was wrong about the Germanic peoples being a fine race. The only thing was that his vision did not happen to include certain people. You saw what happened. So you create the presupposition to make inclusive that vision you're trying to deal with. Then you take the wisdom out of the past, and overlay that situation with your best grasp after the consciousness which has been developed over the last two thousand years about what holds society together. Then you take your intuitions about the times in which you live. We live not in an economic time, nor in a political time, but in a time when consciousness has broken loose. So you inject that perspective in.

If you're going to discern, in the midst of the theoretical articulation represented by the social process triangles, where the real contradictions in society are, you cannot do that save you stand on the rational pole. Let me give you an illustration. Anyone in our times who makes his predictions about the future of our globe looking simply at natural resources has a very simple answer. Our globe will not go on for the natural resources cannot possibly sustain us much longer. Yet if he looks at the unbelievable growth of the human resources, the same conclusion will come to him. Neither of those pertain to our century. It is only the man who points out the fact that the only issue is our ability to invent a technology capable of supporting the masses of people on this globe with the resources available. I would suggest that is the only issue. Likewise, no man can ever grasp the contradiction in the political process save he stand in the dimension of welfare, and so on.

It is necessary to create the kind of presuppositions about the underlying breakloose­­ not in the economic, not in the political­­ but in consciousness itself, before he could begin to grasp a practical vision. With those kinds of overlays on life itself, then human beings can have a way to begin to look through those screens to see what is actually present in society. Without those screens you can only grasp your immediate relationships to life. It is only with this overlay of raw creative rationality that people begin to have a way to grasp the underlying relationships going on in our time, the underlying distortions in the process in terms of the imbalances, the relationship between the master processes and underlying processes in every dimension of the social process. They have a way to begin to predict.

Let's talk about the concrete future that has to come into being so the societal distortion can be dealt with. There is coming into being a new kind of secular mythology, a new story of humanness built in a universe in which there is no spirit and no stuff, a universe in which man has come of age to give meaning once again to people's lives. There is coming into being a new kind of human education that once again would give men the capacity to decide, to give man the possibility to get practically tooled to live valuable human lives. There is coming into being a new form of basic human community, of primal community. There is coming, into being a localized polity, one in which human beings can have a say in their destiny. In a time when there was a real universe out there that could be understood and known, you were after the most well­educated person you can find to make decisions for you because he knew about the world. But when you live in a world like the world we live in, there is no such thing as somebody who is more educated in the world than somebody else. So it is necessary to find a way to let every unique perspective be represented, to be involved not in making decisions but in creating decisions, for that is what it means to make decisions in our times. It is to create over against the future. What is coming into being is some form of global economics, some way in which concretely and practically all of the goods of the earth can be shared with every human being.

It is not a utopian picture. It represents the concrete trend being set into motion in order to deal with the practical disjunctions in the social process going on in our times. We have been working to find a way to grasp the underlying dynamic of that. It is only with some image of the future that it is possible for human beings in local communities, in factories, and industries, or whatever to deal with the practical situation in which they find themselves, to be able to grab hold of this picture of the new. What has happened to human beings so that they have dropped out of the structures of society, is their awareness of the injustice or the innocent suffering that goes on in the old social vehicle. It has become clear that they have become disrelated, be it established adult or rising adult. It is only the vision of the new that now becomes clear which allows people to see how it is they can now move through the old social vehicle ­ not be detached from it, not running away from it, but moving through it ­ to grasp the new. That is what we have been working on. There is a new decision by human beings across the globe to pick up the world and have a future before them.

We have been working to create our own practical tactical vision. We began by looking, at the globe, at the strange configuration of trends and unbelievable complexity beginning to take shape, and a future for people to move into. Our presupposition is that once that vision begins to become clear, then there is a transparency which happens between the global context and the local situation, such that to plumb to the depth the global situation is to end up with the situation in the local. And the man who encounters the local inclusively, in terms of the complexities of the social dynamic, finds himself having to deal with the whole globe. And so we gridded; we devoted ourselves to that specific kind of geography.

Then we began with the 5th City model. Our presupposition there was those 5 arenas, 15 programs, and 45 operations represent the concrete local delineation of the social process; it represents the way in which the social process must operate for a limited geographical area. That model is meant to be an inclusive practical picture of the social dynamics in any local community.

Then we stepped back to do a problemat. Now the word "problem" comes from two Greek words: one of them means "throw" and the other means "ahead." When you throw ahead your particular vision of the future, and then look hack to your present situation, what you call a problem is the degree to which your present situation does not measure up to your future vision. When you are doing a problemat what you are doing is articulating your practical vision of the future for that given geo­social area. When a practical vision emerges at the most inclusive level, then and only then does implementation of a battleplan become an issue.

In terms of battleplanning, in terms of taking the inclusive vision of the new and devising the practical steps whereby you move forward in that vision, there are five components. The first component is that you have to have a practical vision of that specific limited geo­social local arena: your union, your school, your family, your block, whatever it is. Your vision of how it is that the local you show up in is related to the inclusive new you sense is coming into being.

I had an experience about a year ago in which I was riding an airplane. I like to get to the airplane a little early so I can get a good seat especially now that they are so crowded. I don't like to talk to people so I sit and stare out the window, look down and pretend I'm asleep or slouch down so people won't sit next to me. I was thinking about spring. I had flown from Chicago to New Orleans. It was getting on in March and March in Chicago is different from March in New Orleans. Being a young man I was experiencing the difference between March in Chicago and March in New Orleans. All of a sudden I heard this noise coming from the front of the airplane. Though I kept looking out the window, I could hear a sort of a swish­swish­swish. I thought it was the stewardess. The swish came closer and all of a sudden it sat down in the next seat to me just like that. I kept looking out the window, determined to keep looking out the window. Then I started shifting my attention and noticed a certain nice scent. I looked out and the trees were getting green like they weren't getting in Chicago. I took another whiff and I started thinking, "Well!" I started creating a practical vision. Here I was all by myself in this airplane in New Orleans. I sort of glanced over and looked back and my practical vision got a little bit clear. And I started to think, "Well, this could not be a bad ride at all. I don't really have to work on a lecture between here and Atlanta. We cou1d just have a fine time. But then all of a sudden I started to think, "Yeah, but when you get there an hour after you get off the plane you have to stand in front of the group to do a lecture." And I thought, "Well, I'd better not do anything; I'd better just go on writing my lecture and be concerned with that sort of thing." Then I looked down and I noticed my suit needed cleaning. And I thought, "Whoever that is over there can't he very impressed with all these spots on my suit. Then I started thinking, "Well, that's all right, get out your sheet of paper and start working on this thing. You know, whoever is over there, that should immediately create a sort of interest." I started to think, and I started to read, and I was reaching in my pocket for my pen to work with. When the stewardess comes by instead of getting root beer I'll order something sophisticated. I just began to plot off my whole time there on the airplane. Well that's the sort of process I'm going to talk about.

What it means to be a human being is that as soon as you get a vision of the future, what happens is that you begin to sense what the contradictions and blocks are which will keep you from reaching that future you would like so much. Out of that you find yourself beginning to think up proposals, and those contradictions and blocks are then no longer contradictions and blocks. And almost as soon as you start thinking up proposals, you find your mind on tactics. Then as soon as you start thinking of tactics you immediately start thinking of when we will do it? Then you begin to lay out your specific timeline. This is nothing, other than a 2Oth Century life methodology, a way to turn your dreams, your vision, your practical image of the future into concrete deeds.

The first step in any practical planning methodology has to do with getting clear on the vision. First of all, it is clarifying the delimited social arena with which you are dealing. Secondly, it is a close analysis gathering every bit of practical data that comes your way, and with your whole being respond to every little bit of wisdom that comes your way . It is to know where every little agency dealing with some little aspect of community life is. Your inclusive image of the future in your practical local geography sets some perspective on all the little particular achievements that come at you. As you begin to do that, you deal with all the blocks. However, it is not dealing with all of the blocks, because in the complex 20th Century you could deal with the blocks one at a time for the rest of your life and never "get to the grocery store." For the issue is in contradiction discernment. It is determining the primal contradiction: the contradiction underneath all the rest of the contradictions. What is the block behind the blocks, which are blocking the block, blocking everyone of the blocks, and blocking me from acting effectively?

That is what you strike; that's what you focus your attention on when you create your proposal. You create your proposal to deal with that primal contradiction, to deal with that underlying complexity. In Summer '71 as we began to work with analyzing the Social Process triangles, we began to work in the economic in terms of production. In dealing, with Production and the demands the rest of the social Processes were placing on Production, we began to see that the underlying contradiction of the Production Processes had to do with the fact that there was no way for Knowledge ­­ the concrete information needed to make intelligent decisions in the production processes ­­ to be realized by the production process. That falls over in Welfare within the Political. For the human being the Knowledge having to do with living life was not being honored. We found that if you deal with that contradiction then you would somehow release the productive processes to be effective in terms of the whole social process! So you are faced with a problem. My solution was very simple, "Well, pass out the information!" I would get up and pass out the information and be done with it, but that is stupid in the social analysis. If it was that simple to type up and pass out the information, then the problem would not be the contradiction. That would not be blocking humanness. If that were the issue, what would be blocking humanness would be stupidity. You begin to wonder, why isn't this information available? We do not have enough space satellites up in the atmosphere to count all the motor car factories and gasoline stations in the world, and so there is no way to gather the information. You begin to see that the proposal you had to create had to do with creating new methodologies whereby you could get the kind of information and if you had the information it could be very easily disseminated. This is what is called Indirect Action.

In the local community, I used to teach school on the west aide of Chicago. I had a boy in my class who every afternoon about 2:30 used to stand up, pick up his chair, and hit the kid next to him. It was a deprived school, and I discerned the contradiction and said, "Hey, stop throwing your chair at George." That was my proposal and the implementation of my proposal. So the next day the kid picked up a chair and Wham! That time I stood up and said, "I thought I told you yesterday not to throw your chair." So I started to think about an indirect approach. I called up the principal and said, "I have this boy in my class." And the principal said, "Oh yes, well, let's talk about this boy in your class." So I went down on lunch hour to talk about this boy in my class, and he said, "Have you filled out a pink slip on him?" and I said, "No, I haven't filled out a pink slip out on him." You see all I did was to move from Basic Roles to Symbolic Leader. Now I had to go down someplace in the bureaucratic system to fill out a pink slip of paper. So I filled out the pink slip of paper and I turned it in to the school counselor and I think that was somewhere in Basic Roles. I turned it in to the school counselor and I waited and I waited and every day the boy would pick up the chair and WHAM. So I went to see the principal again and I said that the other kid's mother was complaining that he was not learning because he kept getting bumps all over his head. So I went back to the Symbolic Leader area again and the principal said, "Well, why don't you call the kid's mother?" I said, "Fine idea!" So I called the kid's mother up in Procreative Schemes. I decided to deal with her as an Established Adult in Cyclical Roles. I said, "Can you do something to stop this situation?" She immediately said that since our school was a white­racist school, she felt that her kid had the right­­(that is in Welfare)­ he had a right to do anything he wanted to do. (That is in Individual Integrity). I did not know what to do, so I went back to the Symbolic Leader,(that was the principal) and told him, and he told me to fill out a white slip on parent visitation. The situation had nothing to do with bureaucracy; it had to do with Common Defense in order to maintain some kind of Domestic Tranquillity, so that the Natural Resources and the Human Resources (the natural resources being the chairs and the human resources being the kid), merely for the sake of getting some reading done, in Wisdom.

So it is that kind of complex interaction of the social processes you run into when you show up in concrete local geography. I could have stopped and dealt with the block which said, "My principal isn't very effective." The way I could have done that is that I could have written a letter downtown to the Board of Education. I might have gotten a letter back in ten months saying they couldn't do anything, and as a teacher I would probably have been fired by then anyway. I could have dealt with any one of those blocks along the way. In fact, I not only had George who threw chairs, the reason he threw chairs is because the kid next to him was always sticking him with his pencil and he was getting graphite poisoning; and the reason he was doing it was because I kept trying to break up fights and his girl was setting on the other side of the room, etc. That kind of complex interaction in the processes means that you do not dare to deal with blocks in your local area one at a time. You spend your whole life dealing with blocks one at a time when what you need to do is deal with the block, the primal block: that which is underneath every dimension. If you begin to work that situation through ­­­ it became clear that what was behind all those contradictions in that classroom was very simple. Those kids who lived on the west side of Chicago had no way of grasping going to school as a significant endeavor, in which they would need to be responsible. When I got clear on that, then I moved over into Formal Methods. I had each child create for himself his four goals and his basic problem and we pinned them up on the wall. From then on, when George picked up his chair, I would say, "Is that one of your goals?" And he would put his chair down, say "No," and go back to work. I had gotten hold of the underlying contradiction.

The key to proposals is that they be strategic. People's prevailing belief is that there is some abstract solution in life that works, like calling the principal's office. When I was teaching in school there was a mindset that calling the principal's office was something that would work. It did not work, though you were sure in your mind that it would work. Not only did the teachers not get anywhere, but the principals did not get their work done either with all those blue and white forms to fill out. It has to be strategic.

There was a military philosopher back in the 19th Century who said that what it means to go to war is to "do battle with your enemy." Anything else you do does not matter; it is only when you are out there spilling blood and killing people. You read the history on warfare and you find out that that has never been very effective. This military philosopher created an abstract proposal which created the unbelievable horror and suffering begun in W.W.I, because people did not have another image in their mind except, "We'll just keep sitting in our trench and keep shooting over there until they are all dead." Indeed, we got sucked into that to the extent that some clowns over there in Viet Nam made a joke of the biggest military power in the world because we had some distorted abstract images of what it would take to be effective over against that situation. That is the type of creativity which comes from being over against proposals. A proposal is only worthwhile when it deals with the contradiction blocking the vision.

Then the question is, "How am I going to get this proposal implemented, in order to get the vision done?" You have to ask questions like WHAT is going to be done? WHO is going to do it? WHY is it going to be done? (If somebody doesn't know why he's doing something, he doesn't usually do it.) HOW will it be done? WHEN will it be done? You have to think about how many troops you have, how late it is in the winter, what motivation do the troops need, what they are trained for, etc. These have to do with tactics.

I call the process you have to go through to do that kind of Indicative Battleplanning, the PSU dynamic, or the Workshop dynamic. There may have been a time in history you could read in the encyclopedia how to solve a problem, but not in our time and not in the parish. First of all, you must deal with brainstorming, to objectify the relevant data dealing with the situation: population figures, the kinds of social structures, boundaries, streets, the kind of problems people experience, etc. to get on top of that concrete situation. Then comes the whole process of Gestalting, or of taking that universe and creating from that data a rational picture, a holding image which allows you to grasp the underlying dynamics of that situation. Then there is the process of swirling whereby you discern the underlying connection in a body of data. Then you articulate the insights, spelling out the context which makes that decision. That is what recreating consensus seems to me to mean. When a group of people go through that indicative process, moving toward a practical resolution to each one of these problems, some kind of inclusive practical action in a community is possible. In gestalting you are creating the rational pattern that holds that data together, therefore, when you are gestalting you are always interested in hearing two or three different gestalts, simply because when you are dreaming the future it is helpful to have as many insights and creations as you can possibly get. A sign of having a good gestalt is that you feel like you "got hooked." You feel like somebody tricked you into committing yourself to something you had no intention of committing yourself to. When that sort of sensitivity comes over you, you can be sure that you have a good gestalt.

Gestalting is grasping the simple organization in rational categories of their immediate relationships; but the underlying relationships need a different kind of manipulation of data. Fundamentally, the category we use to talk about that is the swirl or the cross gestalt. This is when you take data that is organized according to one set of rational categories and look across these rational categories in order to discern a brand new set of relationships. To go back to that situation in school, after you chase around the social process you begin to discern that those contradictions are related to one another. That the block of no one having a story that education in the inner­city is relevant shows up in teacher­absenteeism, like it shows up in classroom disorder, like it shows up in the schools bring torn apart, like it shows up in nobody wanting to spend any money on school. So this process of cross­gestalting of moving through rational categories and data ­ creates out of the data new inter­connection in some kind of a form. This is a crucial methodology.

Another way we come at that is the methodology of polar­gestalting. This is where you take a bunch of data and plot it relative to some valencing system into a circular graph with the most effective, relevant data toward the center. The next most important data stays more toward the outside. This discloses some irrational kinds of relationships in terms of possibilities, which expose other different kinds of inter-connections. These processes take seriously the intuitive dimension of man's rationality.

Rebalancing the social processes is based very much on intuition. Out of this intuition comes the methodology of Corporate Writing. That has to do, first of all, with having some kind of an orderly rational structure which holds all of your intuitive analysis in some kind of consistent form. Secondly, it has to do with using the methodologies of brainstorming, gestalting and swirling to create the paragraph and spell it out clearly to propose your basic insights. It is only here in the step of writing, that your insights begin to get themselves articulated.

When you are trying to deal with problem­solving, or Indicative Battleplanning, these methodologies are helpful but they are only helpful insofar as they enable you to actually deal with the problem. How do you know when a group is on the right track? When it had managed to hold, in its work, every insight, that is, it is inclusive; when it is rational "it makes sense;" or is consistent; when it is open-ended. These are some exterior indices. The interior indices are more difficult. First, it is when everybody is confused, that is if everybody experiences himself as having jumped onto the edge of a cliff and the cliff, rather than made of granite, is made of angel food cake. In the world out there where there are answers all written out for you, that will never happen. We live in a world where the future is only what you create. Second, there is anxiety, an underlying sense of anxiety in the group. It is a sign that people are self-conscious of the fact that they are standing over nothing, that they are freedom, that they have created the radical new. As long as there is a sense of anxiety in the group then you know that you are dealing in the right arena in the PSU. Third is the sense of burden. Nobody is going to sleep when you are doing a workshop. There is a sense of seriousness. Fourth is vitality, a sense of surging. If you are aware of fellowhood, of unbelievable power and wonder, then you are solving the relevant problem.

What it means to run a PSU is to have one eye on the brainstorming, the gestalting, etc., and the other eye on these interior indices. You watch that level of anxiety, making sure it is there. And when it begins to get too high, you turn around and start telling jokes, you trip on the cord and the overhead projector falls down. There is the maintaining of some kind of balance between the sense of the burden, the absurdity of the problems, the absurdity of a crummy bunch of people creating the globe, and the allowing of people to maintain a sort of external and internal balance through that kind of process.

Problem­solving (PSUing) is the recovery of radical human integrity. Nobody engages themselves like you have engaged yourselves in analyzing society and planning the future of society unless he has been thrown over against how to be a self. Problem­solving is the recovery of vocation. When a man understands he has ahold of the social contradiction he does not have any question about meaningfulness whatsoever. Authentic problem solving is the key to the indicative recovery of the ontological deeps of humanness. It is when you are up to your neck in ambiguity, of trying to discern the underlying contradiction in this wild field called the Parish, that you begin to appreciate the ontology of sexuality and phasiality. And it is only then that you begin to appreciate the ontology of rationality­­indeed people think differently; some people think abstractly and some people think in a more practical way. Authentic problem-solving is the rebalancing of the social process triangle. It is taking the unbelievable effectivity of the economic process, pulling the tyrannical aspects out of it, and recovering its effect in the rebalancing of the social process triangle. That is what's ahead of us. That is what I mean by resurgence.

James Wiegel