Global Research Centrum: Chicago
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 malaises, 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 wlll 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
dlsestablishment. 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 "guildsman" 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 guildsman 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 guildsman 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