Global Priors Council

Chicago

July 29, 1976
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While the war that we are about fighting is not one of guns or bullets, it is a vicious, violent and devastating war. If you do not believe that you need to go and walk down the streets of Maliwada, Kawangware or Oombulgurri. You need to look at the children and see the disaster that in their mouths and the infection that is throughout their bodies. Have you ever had a period in your life where you had diarrhea one week, flu the next, toothaches the next and went back to diarrhea the next week? Eighty­five percent of the people of the world live like that their whole lives, with 100 temperatures and their bellies full of hookworm. That is what we are into. It is a vicious war that takes more lives in one month than ten years of Viet Nam. There is more violence and horrible death associated with this than you can ever point in terms of some kind of shooting war.

If I thought that bombs or bullets would do any good I think I would join up, but after the Israelis got the people out of Amin's hands they had not changed anything for the refugees in Palestine. Somebody like us is going to have to go in there one day sooner or later and do a job, just like we are having to do in Egypt this year.

Fifty percent of all the Aboriginal children in Australia suffer permanent brain damage because they don't have enough protein in their diet. That is the economic surface of the problem, not the depth. We are dealing with what I call double despair. Not only do Papa and Mama not see any hope for themselves but they do not see any possibility for their children. If it was just no hope for themselves that would be a different thing. Many of our papas and mamas didn't see any hope for themselves but they worked unceasingly so we would have a chance. With double despair you don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. They just see that their kid is going to live for 35 to 50 years, die and never have come to any kind of fruition. That is what our war is about.

All those people need is just a little hope and they run. In Maliwada when we went aside to write the document the villagers thought that we had left. They said, "Well, they left us these things," and they began. When we came back from writing the document, the people had already started. All they need is a little ray of hope and they are going to march.

The war is just as violent in the suburbs of this country. The kind of suburban collapse in vocation, family, etc., is more subtle and harder to see but just as vicious.

When you touch the bureaucratic you find yourself in a buzzsaw. Somebody sat down with his computer and figured out that there is just so much fertilizer, so much seed and so much arable land in the world according to his statistics. He came to the conclusion that some people just had to starve in this world. That is the kind of viciousness I'm talking about. We are in a war and the enemy is hard to get hold of. It would be convenient if we could just put a bullet through the brain of some bureaucrat who happens to stand in the way of our program ­­ move him out of the way and have something happen. But then you just wake up one day and find that there is a whole line of those bureaucrats. And the amazing thing is, when you take him out for cocktails you find out he sounds just like you. He cares as much as you do but is trapped in that same red tape. The enemy is more like a virus or a cancer.

The enemy is in the terrain. You go to Majuro and you become very clear that part of your enemy is the terrain and that it can whip you. It is in the mindset. the distance, the days, the seasons.

Paul was right when he said that it was the principalities and the powers of this world that you have to do war with. They do not reside in just one body or one voice. You find that enemy and it jumps around from voice to voice. Sometimes you find it in a bureaucrat, sometimes it shows up in yourself. You have got to whip it and beat it if you are to move on to a new kind of victory.

You can't hate this enemy. You get angry and you just become stupid and do stupid things. As soon as you get angry with it, it has won and beaten you. You have to learn to respect it. You have to learn to see how it operates on a community and eats it up, so that you can anticipate it. This enemy is clever and is one for whom you need to have deep respect.

Sun Tzu talks about troops. You have got to see that your house is not your troops­­it is your generals. Your troops are the whole community. It doesn't really matter whose troops they are, you can use them. They may be of the "liberal­racist­conservative" mindset, but you can still use them. The whole community is your troops.

This is an invisible war and that is why transrational models are important. You are going to have to have a new set of eyes to see the community in order to know how to strategize and move. The old way of looking will not help. It is going to take new sets of tactics that we haven't dreamed of yet. We have to talk about the keys to determining victory and how to decide the victory before you engage. That is the transrational model. If you do not have that before you engage, you are whipped already.

I want to talk about how you get the victory out of the situation. You don't finally get that by making an assignment and beating somebody up because they didn't do it. You get it out of the situation. That is a new way of thinking for me and it has two parts. The first is catalytic management. This is what drove Patton up against the wall. He always wanted to be out on the front helping his troops, going into action. It killed him when he had to manage a whole front, because he couldn't be everywhere at once. He went nuts for a while, until he learned a new way of being a general. I imagine this is the same thing that happened to the people who did Town Meeting and became generals. It just drove them nuts when they could not be everywhere at once. They had to learn a new way to be a general, to be an Xavier over a whole region or an area, to do catalytic management.

The second thing is how you keep moving it, which is a very, very crucial part of any kind of winning. It is very clear that it does not matter if you have few or many troops. Catalytic management is still the same. It is just a matter of organization. Sun Tzu uses the term "formation and signals". You have got to get the formation, for if you don't have the formations laid out you don't have forces that can move.

Then there are the signals. The Order Report that goes around the world once a week is great. Signals are glue. On the local level, regional or areal level, you have got to have such pieces of glue to keep things moving. The signals are there so people can know when and how to move.

To intensify effectiveness you don't work harder. You see places where people are just whipped down and can't do anymore, they are worked so hard. I don't believe that working harder always creates effectiveness. Sun Tzu points out that the way you get effectiveness is by combination o£ your forces. We know how to do the grassroots. Give us half a moment and we can go into any local community and start renewing it right away. There is no problem doing a social demonstration. You know what to do and you hit it. We know how to do bureaucratic back­up. We know how to raise money and to get authorization. Where our difficulty lies is how to get these forces working together so that there are electric sparks flying that change the whole area. I imagine this is what this year is going to be about ­­combining forces. It is more than just combining us ­­ somebody working in Town Meeting with somebody who works in development ­­ we are going to see new combinations of Forces.

That is what excited me when Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, came to Maliwada. She got to talk to local people. Can you imagine if we combined the forces of enlightened local leadership with the regional and national leadership who want to move it and cut right through the bureaucracy? You are going to empower people like Mrs. Gandhi and the regional leaders, like the chief minister in Maharashtra, in a way they have never known themselves to be empowered before. They are as frustrated and trapped as anybody else trying to move through the guys who have the bureaucracy tied up. When those two forces (the grassroots and the regional and national leadership) come together you better watch out. Maybe our gift is finding a way to structurally combine those forces. Sun Tzu points out, "there are more ways to combine forces than you can imagine." I imagine that the solution to a lot of our difficulties will be working out new combinations of forces that we have not yet thought about. That's where our generals are going to come from in the future ­­ by finding out those new ways of combining forces so that things happen.

Next, Sun Tzu talks about the keys to acceleration. Moving things faster is not the same as acceleration. It is like learning a musical instrument. You do not learn to play a musical instrument by just going faster. You set the stage and you rehearse all of the pieces. He talks about the cross­bow, you draw it back and set it. You wait until the right time and then you pull the trigger and you usually have more than just one arrow.

You go into Maliwada to get things done. You line things up. At the right time you pull the trigger. All of a sudden lights come on and tractors arrive, water wells are dug, etc. That is acceleration and people lift off. It is like an airplane at the end of the runway. The pilot gets the engines going, the wings vibrating and at the right moment lets it loose and the thing takes off. That is the way you have to think about acceleration ­­ how to line things up, set a stage and then at the right moment do it.

How do you get victory from the situation? You do not get victory by assigning all your subordinates in the house to make more calls or to do something harder and better, and then beat them up because they did not get the victory. Usually that is not what is going to produce a victory anyway. The way you get victory is by shifting time and space. If you want to shift the time of a community just hit the street at 7:00 and work all day. That visibility will change things. People start to move. Get your meeting schedule out where everybody sees it. The excitement will come ­­ people's time will be changed and reclaimed.

Get signs up in a community. Build new roads, set up rocks, or set out sod like they did here in Uptown. When you begin to change people's notion of space you open up their mindset. Have songs, slogans, celebrations, town meetings. We have a whole arsenal of weapons to begin­to fight the enemy with in order to alter a community's mindset.

Create local leadership. Select the troops. Get some of the dregs, the people who do not know any better and whom people do not expect anything of, and make great human beings out of them. When they stand up at a Congress everybody falls over. "How in the world did ole Joe do that?" That is the way to whip the enemy. The enemy has no defense against it.

Rearrange the circumstance. People have a notion that in order to start small industry you had to have big money, a loan from a bank or this or that, because that is what the circumstances tell you. That is wrong. Change the circumstances. Get the people together and out of their sweat, blood and tears begin to produce things. Begin to sell things and off of proven production you will get your loan from the bank. Turn that circumstance so that you can rearrange it to a victory. Then tell the story, that if you want to start small industry, the way to do it is to start with nothing. Loans from the bank create failures if you get them too early. Rearrange your circumstances and it is as if somebody pushed away the ground enough to see the vein of gold. And all you have to do is go get it. Rearranging the circumstances, shifting time and space, opening up mindsets, creating local leadership ­­ that is the checklist which is helpful for me. Instead of just trying to do things harder when you get stopped, get this little list out and see how you could begin to capture victory.

Retain control of the context. That means get there first with the most. Always get out there and set the context before anybody else gets the chance. There is no way the "liberal­racist­conservative" mindset can whip those Social Demonstration documents or Town Meeting materials. It is like selling motherhood and apple pie. They are beaten. What you want to do with a mindset which is your enemy's is to force it to move, to do something. As soon as it moves you have beaten it. If it moves on you that is fine. You have won. If it gets angry, you have won. If it retreats, you have won. It does not matter which way it moves, as long it moves you have it whipped. If you put out a document and let some guy criticize it, all you have to do is point to Maliwada and everybody else gets excited. You do not have to take that guy on. You do not have to fight anybody. You just deal with what is.

Give the enemy an advantage, and the "liberal­racist­conservative" mindset says, "Why don't the poor people do something?" Alright, give it to them. It wants good things done, so here are good things being done. That is a crevasse the mindset is going to fall through, intrigued by methods and tactics, etc. You can offer the advantage to trap that thing.

That goes on in local neighborhoods too. People are cynics. They do not believe. Cynicism is deep among people who have been beaten and have been in despair all these years. Give them the advantage of seeing that and you trick them. You win them. You win them through your discipline, style and corporateness. That's the key to the control of your context. If you have got somebody who can't move, you have got a liability. It doesn't have anything to do with being a liberal. He needs to go to mama, or something else.

Wearing down the enemy is the next thing. Work where you aren't resisted. You don't have to fight, for there is no reason to fight. You are never going to win a fight. In Vietnam, they used to find out where the Vietnamese went and haul all their tanks and armor there and point it at a little four meter square patch of ground where the enemy was going to come out, but the Viet Cong didn't come out there. What they did was sneak around to the barracks and plant bombs so that when they went back home, they didn't have a place to sleep and had to sleep in tents. That's smart.

If you walk through the door when the gun is loaded, you will be blown out of the water. If you never show up for a showdown, there is nothing to fight. What are they going to shoot at if no one is there to respond to the criticism? You never have to respond to criticism. It doesn't help. And, that is what wears down the enemy. His criticism doesn't do any good, but if you are smart, you might listen to criticism from time to time. You never respond to it directly but you go and create a miracle. That renders it void.

You do the "easy" impossible. It is easy. You pick the worst neighborhood to go into. It is a lot easier to do an Oombulgurri than it would be to do a suburban community; the world thinks the opposite is true. We know we have the methods to do it. The liberal hasn't got any defense against Social Demonstration. He has no defense against self­sufficiency and self­dependence. That is going into the enemy's territory where he hasn't got any guard. He hasn't got any way to defend himself against it.

Firm up the advantages of your grassroots. Never take the grassroots for granted. Nothing can beat stakes and local economic miracles. Again and again that is the way the war is going to get won, releasing local man to his own creativity.

Victory is created. It doesn't just happen because somebody has more troops or more money than the other does. Victory is created out of the imagination. It is invented.

Your transrational plan is the key. If you do not have that transrational plan under your belt, even if it is wrong, before you hit the situation, you are beaten. And, it is not enough to have a fine set of things that you are going to do; you have to determine the enemy's plan. It is more than just doing the LENS methodologies, although those contradictions are your key, it is grounding those contradictions and seeing how they fit together. That is your first picture of the enemy. You have got to figure out how he is going to respond to your moves. What is going to move against you when you begin to move? Where are the moves going to come from? How are you going to turn them, move with them, or move around them?

Sun Tzu points out that you need to make a positive move. You send out a feeler and watch what happens. You do a Town Meeting over in Xville and watch who runs to the door and what happens. You learn patterns. Sell produce in a local village and watch who buys it and where the flack comes from. We sold produce in Majuro and they said the local people wouldn't buy it, but it was sold before you got it on the counter. A government agency made an offer to buy all of the produce at twice the price. Something is not quite right there, especially when somebody out of that department was the one who said we couldn't grow it. Learn and keep your eyes open. Smell and sniff and learn how to anticipate and find the patterns.

The most important thing of all is the studying of the shapes. Sun Tzu says that he did his plans by studying the shapes, and out of the shapes he invented his plan. You make your plan according to the shapes, the shapes of the community. If you want to alter the community, you alter the shapes. You create stakes, guilds and a congress. You create new kinds of shapes for that community to operate out of. They are really invisible and kind of fun and innocent. You do all of your imaginal education through the rituals and rites. You fill them full.

Sun Tzu says you win the victory, and nobody understands how you did it. That is right and very important, for finally you do not want the enemy to understand how you do these things. You create local grassroots people who rise and begin to work fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day and you confuse the enemy.

The way you organize yourselves is also important. It is very difficult for the world to defend against us. If they wanted to get rid of people like us the ordinary way, they would cut our salary off, get us fired from their agency, etc. That's a way you get people out of a community. Where is the faucet to cut off for us?

Or you find out the key to their motivity. Where is ours? It is historical and beneath their view. You study the shapes and you plan according to the shapes and forms.

You don't become rote. That is what is great about those Social Demonstration books and the Town Meetings documents. None of them are the same, although it's the same method. They come out of each particular community. Tactics are not rote, each one is fresh. You start over and over again. That is crucial to get into our beings and to watch for in ourselves. Last quarter's contradictions are seldom this quarter's contradictions in the actual manifestations and the practical way that you engage them, although the overarching ones are probably the same.

The real wisdom that we have known for a long time, is that you keep fluid, loose in the saddle. You have got to keep free to respond to what is. Those Social Demonstration books or whatever else you have got are crucial and you have always got to keep your eye open to responding to what is. What you are really talking about is keeping yourself awake and alert to respond to God, to respond to what God is doing in this world.