Global Research Assembly
Chicago
July, 1978
THE ART OF MANEUVER
I first saw this chart a
year ago. We were all so scared of it, we didn't let anybody else see it
and a lot of us are still scared of it. It deals with Maneuver and comes
from a book by a Chinese fellow, Sun Tsu, called The Art of War. I want
to read from another book, Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi. It is profound
insight on strategy. This is the introduction. The character was a swordsman,
and he wrote a book on how to be a good swordsman.
I have been in training many
years in the way of strategy and now I think I will explain it in writing
for the first time. It is now during the first ten days of the tenth month
in the 20th year of Kane (which is 1645). I have climbed Mount Hiwato,
Ovigu and Kioshu, to pay homage to heaven, pray to Kwana and kneel before
Buddha. I am a warrior of Harima province, Shin Men Musashi Nokami Fujawara
Ogenshen, age 60 years. From youth, my art has been inclined toward the
way of strategy. My first duel was when I was 13. I struck down a strategist
of the Shinto school, one Arima Kihi. When I was 16, I struck down an able
strategist, Parashima Akiyama. When I was 27, I went up to the capital
and met all manner of strategists, never once failing to win in many contests.
After that, I went from province to province dueling with strategists of
various schools and not once failed to win even though I had as many as
60 encounters. This was between the ages of 13 and 28. When I reached 30,
I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having
mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven,
or that other school strategy was inferior. After that, I studied morning
and evening searching for the principle and came to realize the way of
strategy when I was 50. Since then I have lived without following any particular
way. Thus, with the virtue of strategy, I practice many arts and abilities,
all things with no teacher. To write this book, I did not use a log, Buddha
or the teachings of Confucius. either old war chronicles nor books on martial
tactics. I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this as it is
mirrored in the way of Heaven. This time is the night of the 20th
day of the 19th month of the hour of the Tiger.
Someone said yesterday that
it had been four years since the first Town Meeting in 1974. That is not
true. The first Town Meeting was held in July, 1971 and lasted one month.
We didn't have a workbook and 1,000 people participated, but we got the
document printed for people to take with them before the end. The year
1971 changed my life. In 1971,1 was immersed in something we named sociality
several years later in the LENS course. Slicker talked about sociality
in relation to replication. Sociality reveals to people that they have
to shove into the social process, step outside of themselves and believe
they can trust living in the whirlwind of our century in order to do replication,
social demonstration and in order to create a new world. In 1971, we worked
on a 432 page document relating to sociality. We also delineated the several,
pressure points, later expanded to nine, and the nine whistlepoints. Using
this thick, complex document as a guide, 1,000 people examined 77 different
arenas of society, looked at trends and ideologies, and tried to articulate
the blocks and the need;. When we drew that together, we named nine fundamental
arenas where action was needed. We asked another 1,000 people what action
should be taken. They produced a voluminous amount of work. We drew that
together and invented the nine whistlepoints. At that point we saw the
need for a system called demonstration which posited visible signs in different
places around the world. We also needed a system of impact, now called
development, which would let people see that a new world was coming into
being. There was a system of training, or formation as it is called on
the 1978 summer symbol, where we give people skill in operating in this
new world. What we now call interchange was the repository. In the middle
were three things. One was the Global Servant Force. If you didn't have
a bunch of people who would go anywhere in the world, you weren't going
to win. Second was the Cell Force. That was a disciplined core in a community.
The third part was the Guild Force, and that was local people moving.
One element of the whistlepoints
was the Myth Factor. People had lost their direction in the world in terms
of consciousness and symbolism. There was no way to grasp the profound
significance of being a human being, and spirit, piety, meaning or mythology
had to be reinvented. Another element of the whistlepoints was the
Action factor. In the midst of the transitions of our age, people had lost
the capacity to do what they said they were going to do. If you are willing
to do what society will let you do, you can win. But this doesn't have
anything to do with what is needed in the world. People weren't responding
to the needs. The Art of the Maneuver Chart is a first attempt to draw
together six years of research on the action factor. Three years ago we
produced the Superweb, the result of efforts to get more clarity on the
Action Factor. The Superweb drew 9,386 miscellaneous actions into 17 distinct
components.
Before Summer 1974 we were
smart enough just to do 39 Local Community Convocations. We didn't realize
they were Town Meetings at that time. The 2,543 people involved in these
were amazed at what happened. In September, 1974, some of us flew to Majuro
to do something called a "consult." We didn't know what a consult
was, but we gathered some people knowledgeable in construction, medicine
and education and we figured out what to do in Majuro. It wasn't until
a year and a half later that we discovered it was possible to write the
document right at the consult. We brought the Majuro document back to Chicago,
compiled it and sent it back to Majuro. A week later, we said, "Now
on page, 93, is this done or not? What about this action on page 98?"
Through this events, we discovered that the time of doing had arrived.
One of our earliest struggles was the decision to name these places around
the world social demonstration projects. We realized that the word "demonstration,"
after the turmoil of the sixties, was no longer relevant. People needed
solutions demonstrated. What do you do? We began with eight social demonstrations.
Next we said we were going to do 5,000 Town Meetings in the United States.
Today we have completed more than 6,200 around the world.
As I travel around the world,
I have heard many people who work with us ask the question "Who are
these people? Why do you let them do the crazy things they do?" They
always have one answer: 'These people do what they say they are going to
do." It is that simple.
It was a treat for me this
evening to look at the document from the Sudtonggan Human Development consult,
held in May, 1976. Hidden in the back of these documents, is a section
called "Anticipated Benefits." It opens with a brief statement:
"Sudtonggan intends to be a signal village which people will visit
as a demonstration of what can be done in any community. It is important,
therefore, that an imaginal picture be drawn that describes some of the
anticipated results of the project. The variety of things that a visitor
might see on a Sudtonggan tour in three to six months time from the time
of the consult are presented in a series of six sketches." The people
in Sudtonggan took their "Anticipated Benefits" section and rewrote
it. In case anybody had a question, they put a map on the front. They did
what they said they were going to do.
I avoided this chart for
a long time because the last thing I am interested in is another nifty
way for us to do battleplanning. In the past, we brainstormed and gestalted
problems, and turned them from negative to positive statements which became
our goals. We listed four strategies, four tactics for each strategy, timelined
them, then did them. When maneuvers came into being, I wasn't interested.
But as I studied this chart, I began to see. We have done something in
the world with Town Meeting. We have done something with Social Demonstration.
But far more important than the residue remaining from these is that a
body of people stood up in the 20th Century, said they were going to do
something, and they did it. That is significant. Anwar Sadat said, "We
are going to have peace with Israel." But he hasn't succeeded. Jimmy
Carter, who is in a fairly powerful position, said a lot of fine things
about balancing budgets, trimming bureaucracy and listening to local people.
His track record hasn't measured up either. He is not doing those things.
Youth in the sixties promised to change many things but they haven't accomplished
much of what they said. Something happened around the world this year.
Some people stated what they were going to do and they got it done. This
is an important moment in history. This chart is important because the
job we have now is to spell out and draw together the Art of Maneuver,
the art of absolute creativity, of radical effectivity, of significant
action, the science of historical action, the transparentization of doment.
I like that best because I don t know what it means.
We have maneuvered. Something
has happened that released us to action and allowed us to focus our corporate
style towards a Job that had to be done We were able to bracket excuses
and reasons for not doing anything in this life. Maneuver has given us
the resolution to win. It is a joke to start a Human Development Project
because everybody already knows what is going to happen. There is no surprise
left. You have the consult, publish a document, and people are going to
do what is in the document. In two years, you have a glorious place. There
is no doubt in people s minds. They can do consults in India in three days
simply because they already know they will do it in Mill Shoals, Illinois,
we had trouble with our tactics. The mayor had his people 1isten to the
team meetings. We would say the bridge needed repair, and they would fix
the bridge while we wrote the tactics. The fire station needed a sign,
so he had someone put one up. It was unbelievable.
This chart is about radical
effectivity, not busyness. It does not tell you how to do all 700 tactics
in a week. In fact, quite the opposite. Those of us who spend a lot of
time intellectualizing think you can take action and gestalt it. Have you
ever tried gestalting how long it takes to paint a house? Or gestalting
painting four houses into house painting? All you have is the category
of house painting. This chart is designed to guide and direct your thinking.
Your busyness is not important. What is important is whether you change
the situation. That's my first point.
My second point is that the
chart does not tell you how to accomplish everything. It does tell you
how to figure out the thing you have to do. The most successful maneuver
in Vaviharsh this year was planting papaya trees. There were six other
maneuvers more complicated than this. At first, planting papaya trees was
too complicated because there were 50 trees. They reduced it to ten, but
they planted those trees and it changed the whole village. When I heard
this story I remarked, "It is humiliating to realize how competent,
trained people like us can be consumed the whole quarter with planting
ten papaya trees." And the person who had been so consumed in this
way, agreed this was true. A maneuver is out to find some way to bring
something off within the limitations of human energy and time to think
through what is needed. It is a gift to our age in terms of the comprehensive
demand.
The ground of maneuver is
related to THE ENEMY. It has to do with THE VOID; it is related to THE
GENERAL. It is action, not in the context of your company, your family,
or your town. It is related to the context of history and what is happening
in our age.
Universe II, The Theoretics
of Maneuver, is what you say you can do. The world today does not need
another good idea or another idealistic "maybe." The world needs
to see the things you can do. The morning goes extremely well in the Global
Women's Forum. In the afternoon, when the question of engagement is raised,
everything goes fine until they reach the nitty gritty of "What should
I do?" Suddenly it isn't very clear. The same thing happens in Town
Meetings and Youth Forums. It is difficult to become clear on what you
can do. The Practics of Maneuver is concerned with doing . What you say.
I call those categories three
universes. One universe is the universe of ambiguity, of relativity in
which you and I live. That has to do with the void, with your selfhood
and your being in the midst of knowing there is nothing to hold onto. It
is related to the enemy or the protagonist that prevents humanness from
happening and the void is the way. Creative Tension is life at the bottom.
If you don't live in the midst of creative tension, you are not living
as a human being. It is that simple. It is Historical Necessity. I like
the expression "savage justice." This is similar to the poetry
of Kazantzakis who says. "My God is not allholy. 'That means
he isn't nice. He picks, chooses, beats and shoves. I appreciated the pictures
of the massacre in Zaire. It reminded me anew that life for most people
on this planet is a vicious thing, very directly vicious. Life is vicious
to the little kids in India and Africa who were born without a chance.
It is vicious to local people in the United States and Canada who have
lived their lives without a chance to think, to know the world that you
and I know, to get out and see places. If you are going to live, it will
be in a vicious world. We live in a world of historical necessity where
the only : issue is what is needed. However politely you say that, the
world and history is not run, in the first instance, by human values. Humans
are put here to put human values into it.
Radical Xavierism: the void
means knowing there are no boundaries. What you do has no limits in terms
of space, time, or your being. Inclusive Unity: I am tired of hearing about
people who want to do things. You know that is true. Here we all are, sitting
on this dinky little planet, and from the perspective of anywhere but here,
it is all one thing. We are the ones who divide it up. But the void is
an Unknown companion. Being human is knowing the mystery in life, knowing
the presence of that which is not the same as you, the other worldliness
that you can trust is present.
Formal Reductionism is an
enemy and you reed to watch out for it. The broadest definition of the
85% of the world would include the statement that they are the people who
don't belong to anything. The Lutherans of the world take care of the Lutherans
They do a tremendous job of feeding the hungry, preaching the good news
and taking intermediate technology to other Lutherans. The problem is that
many people aren't Lutherans. The Methodists, I've noticed, do a good job
of taking care of other Methodists. The Philbrooks take care of Philbrooks,
Wiegels take care of Wiegels and Indians take good care of Indians. But
if you happen to belong to something that doesn't belong to anything you
are left out and forgotten; this is the 85%. Because of formal reductionism,
you are overagainst an eternal contradiction. If you are in the realm of
profound action, you encounter something related to more than our movement
in history. At a Town Meeting you suddenly discover that you did something
related not only to our time. It was a happening that in some way related
to all space and all time I'll never forget the first Human Development
Training School. Most of the faculty was Christian and most of the students
were Muslim or Hindu. We saw people's lives being changed by Maliwada everywhere
and all the time. Our only way to interpret what was happening was to sneak
off and share stories from our sacred literature. We whispered because
we didn't want people to hear us; we were trying to pretend we weren't
Christians. One day I was walking behind the school building and found
a group of young students together. I asked somebody what they were talking
about. They were telling ancient Hindu stories, trying to explain what
had happened to them in the school.
Then, THE GENERAL. The general
is the Historical Nobody. He is the elected self, the one who maneuvers.
He is the being of profound action. Detached Creativity: by maneuver, we
don't mean doing something that you are attached it. it is good to use
military terminology. There are stories of generals who were yanked out
and sent somewhere else right before the battle. Then they are thrown back
into generalling. Profound action involves Detached Creativity and Fanatical
Doment. It is always being on the road, going for broke-moving, moving.
moving-involving a Transparent Posture.
Sun Tzu says that the general
is a man of the Tao. If a person doesn't care profoundly, he is not going
to act effectively. This is obvious in my being but I can't explain it
philosophically. You see somebody who cares just a tiny bit and that's
how effective they are. You see somebody who allows himself not to care
about anything and, finally, he s not effective. However. a man of the
Tao is a disciplined servant and he is willing to be the Rational Intrusion.
He is the one filled with victorious resolve which is related to that other
worldliness.
Somebody asked me yesterday
if it would be wise to do replication in his country? My first response
was "How can anybody want to be in the same situation as the people
in the State of Maharashtra?" On second reflection, I'd say, 'Sure.
if you are willing to spend the rest of your life with no money, until
replication is done. Go ahead." The issue of replication in India
right now is very simple: something is going to happen in every village
in the State of Maharashtra, period. All the rest is details. When you
fall into the realm of profound action you realize your life is on the
line. When you say you are going to do something, you take the first step
towards accomplishing it. You become aware that it will be completed. It
will be done because you are going to be there as long as necessary.
I attended the Local Convocation
in Rapid City, South Dakota several years ago. There were no other Town
Meetings in South Dakota until this past spring, when everybody went in
and did them despite all of our troubles there in the past. One colleague
who insisted that a certain town be done said, "I just wanted to go
to make sure that Town Meeting came off.." In the realm of profound
doing, you experience your being as the guarantee that what you say is
going to happen. When you fall into the realm of transparent domeet
or radical effectivity, this awareness comes to you.
Sun Tzu says that both advantage
and danger are in the realm of maneuver. Whenever you act you take a risk.
At the bottom, that means you risk when you go to Maliwada, do a Town Meeting,
engage in replication or go on a development call. You know you can win
in terms of advantage. I like Don Clark's category of "flimflam."
You know you can operate like the rest of society and flimflam the
situation to arrive where you want to go. Advantage and danger in the void
means daring to take upon yourself responsibility for history by entering
a town and holding a Town Meeting. In that town, you take upon yourself
whatever happens. knowing that something will happen and knowing that the
situation will change. We knew before we went to each of the 24 social
demonstrations, including Fifth City, that we would encounter all of the
ambiguities of history. We knew, and yet we said we were going to do it.
That is the problem with pulling out of projects. How could we ever leave
Kelapa Dua? What would be the meaning of leaving Kelapa Dua? The people
there have walked a whole new world with us which most people don't understand.
That is the void of historical action.
The second universe is about
estimates Sun Tzu talks about temple deliberations. This relates to the
last 25 years of our work, trying to build a consciousness which would
allow effective action to take place in the world. As you know, the pitfalls
of that consciousness are many It is not intellectual knowing or abstract
philosophy. It's consciousness. it is knowing that effective human development
happens when you deal with the delimited geography. You can't explain that
philosophy to somebody. All you can say is that we have found in 29 nations
that when you delimit the geography, something will happen. You have to
deal with all of the problems and all ages. You have to deal with the depth
human problem and the key is symbol. You can illustrate those as much as
you like. You can try to justify them as much 25 you want. That is not
the kind of knowing they represent. They are just fact. If you walk out
that door, take a few steps and go left, you will find a stairway. That
is just fact. The theoretics of maneuver is about fact. It is not theory
in terms of putting abstractions together or gestalting. It is the residue
of what we have learned from our doing.
THE CONTEXTUAL LEVELS: the
appropriate military term for this would be intelligence. You have to have
an intelligence system. If I were redoing this chart, I would flip the
column so that primal consciousness was at the top. You must tap the primal
consciousness of an age to deal with the total aspects. Understand the
Historical Trends. you need global maneuvers that tell you what needs to
happen in the whole world. We used to say they should be printed on the
front of your forehead. This is old wisdom. If you ever plan theatre maneuvers
across an area or a state, or do battlefront maneuvers, you need to do
this. Now, the reason for all those levels is more related to Universe
111 because radical effectivity is not based in philosophical thinking.
It is not based on thinking in terms of problems or anxieties you might
run into. It is based on focusing on the job that has to be done and bracketing
everything else. You deal with Primal Consciousness, Tonal Aspects, Historical
Trends, Global Maneuvers and Theatre Maneuvers so that you can put all
those things aside. Only then can you see the garden you need to dig this
afternoon as the thing you have to do, which is the only way to do almost
anything. Even then, you need to trick yourself and flim flam yourself
with symbols to force yourself to do something as direct as that. We need
to spell these out in more detail, obviously, from the blank spaces on
the chart.
The next one, CALCULATED
DEFINITUDES, gives practicality to our work. We painted all these countries
gold because five years were spent developing an instrument, a weapon called
Town Meeting. We know how it works, what it does, we can do it in any language,
with paper, without paper, backwards, forwards, in three hours, ten minutes,
twenty minutes, in a store, in a school. walking down the street with young
kids. Weapons like that don't come out of the sky. Yet, we have these kinds
of weapons.
The most important weapon
we invented last summer was a yellow magic marker. Five years ago, we targeted
5,000 towns for Town Meetings. We wrote maneuvers, battleplans, manuals
and workbooks in every language. Then someone thought of using a yellow
magic market, and things really took off! That's weaponry! It is not something
abstract, like brainstorming and gestalting the set of weapons you need
and building them. A lot of us have tried that. Our weapons are related
to our social philosophy, our disciplined methods, our public prowess,
our profound humanness, and our ability to move in the midst of society.
Timing is when; weaponry is the how and forces is the who. This is the
tenth year anniversary of our houses but we have been deploying forces
a lot longer than that. We know a lot about this.
We have become familiar with
the terrain. Everyone thinks that Ray Spencer and Neil Vance are two of
the experts on maneuver in our group. They go on crazy trips and talk to
important people. They write up what they are going to do and don't. Therefore,
they must know a lot about the maneuver method. They know a lot more than
the maneuver method. For ten years they have been visiting important people.
They have had some wins, made some mistakes and they have done a lot. That
way of knowing the terrain is necessary if you are going to write maneuvers.
After you do one Town Meeting, you are trained. Someone trained in social
demonstration is someone that has done one. That's where the gap in training
lies in Maharashtra. When more people have done social demonstrations,
and this will take time, more leadership will be available. The enemy must
be pinpointed. The enemy is not all the left side of the chart. This is
an analysis of any time and place in history. It is as present in you as
anything else. You have to locate what you are aiming for and you are determined
to win them, not kill them. You are out to be indirect and to look for
vulnerability.
Then the Self: you need to
know yourself. You need to know what you have decided to do. It was helpful
when someone told me I probably would not like Development. That kept me
going because I wasn't surprised that I didn't like it. You must know what
you can and can't do and what you will do and won't do. You operate out
of that. This allows you to decide your spirit mood. Only in recognizing
your capabilities can you decide to bracket them and do what you need to
do. If you are not clear, you cannot do this.
Universe III is fundamentally
concerned with deployment of troops-The Practics of Maneuver. If the Theoretics
of Maneuver is the invisible consciousness that gives you direction, allowing
you to walk into a situation and see it differently, then the Practics
of Maneuver are the invisible visible. It is the interior nobody sees that
allows a sucre factory to happen. SITUATIONAL DISCERNMENT is the first
of its two parts. This is reconnaissance or thinking in relation to the
situation. That is dealing with the indicative. It is not dealing with
what you want to happen, but with what is there. The purpose of a consult
is to focus trained eyes on seeing what is in the community and what is
possible with the givenness there.
Radical Empiricism is
articulating the actual situation, knowing the battlefield, continuous
homework and simple charts. Tactical Obsession: What would I do? At a consult
you notice that there are two different kinds of people. One group says
things like, "Boy, this is a nice place. I really like all those great
people!" and "Hey, do you know what we could do? We could level
that whole mountain and put in an airport-turn this into a great tourist
attraction-after I leave. The day after tomorrow." The second group
of people doesn't say much. They walk around and look, taking in all they
see. They make phone calls, they frown and gulp and then come up with a
list of ten things they would do if they were going to live there. Tactical
Obsession is a way you discern the situation by asking yourself what you
can do. Transrational Schemes: you keep thinking, multiplying, dividing,
subtracting and adding until you come up with a number of things that you
can do-what must be done.
I call Box 34 Futuric
Reflection Backwards. In other words, you go to Anticipated Benefits
and think back through the situation from the end to the beginning. You
see the steps clearly. That does not happen automatically by programming
your mind. It takes work every time it is done. Imposted Finality:
It is easy to do replication in Kenya or the Philippines as long as you
decide you are not going to leave until it is done. If everybody else quits,
you will do it. After that, it is simple. To do it, you must put yourself
on death ground and be willing to give your life. Intuitional Confidence.
Again, that's returning to that victorious resolve next door. You know
when you fall into the realm of maneuver that there is nothing standing
in the way of victory though everything stands in its way. When you fall
through the realm of your own action into the Way, into the realm of profound
action, you know what will get done is what will get done. It doesn't make
any sense. You know that you bet your life on history.
That word on the chart should
be ants. When you realize you have a situation that you
cannot solve, ants means you don't worry about solving it. A lot of us
could be awfully consumed with how we are going to do 10,000 Town Meetings
next year. No ants means that you put into brackets something like this
which you can't deal with. You don't let it eat you up while you do what
you can. You wait until there is a way to move and then move.
As you look at the chart,
where would you fill holes to make it usable as a practical tool?
There's a question about the void. I'll illustrate this with a story. Many years ago, a man was walking through the desert one day and saw a bush on fire. But what appeared to him in the bush was not exactly a fire, because the bush wasn't consumed. After that encounter, he went out to do great things in history. His experience there is what I mean by the void. People in theological circles use GOD. The experience of the final mystery of the almighty, is the void, Now, where did you learn something about maneuver this year? What are the names of some of the maneuvers?