Dear RCers,
I am very excited about leading this discussion about this pamphlet. It is one of my favorites and so full of great ideas that our discussion could go on for a long time.
Given the depth of ideas presented, I'd like to discuss one section at a time.
Harvey begins this pamphlet with a discussion of the "Present Situation for Wide World Changing." Although written in 1981, this article still captures important ideas that bear discussion and discharge. The first 50 pages of this work concentrate on a history of recent wide world change, leadership, strategies and tactics.
One of my favorites at this time in my life is the section on "Keeping Leaders Straight" (pp. 28-29). Harvey's advice has been to, "trust your own thinking." The trick here is to notice when I am actually thinking freshly and when I am acting out of restimulation. As I have assumed a more visible role of leadership within state government in the US, I am continually challenging myself to keep my leadership clear and my thinking my own. I would love to hear from others how they have met this challenge.
When I asked Tim Jackins for guidance upon getting elected to the Maine Senate, he said, "Do the human thing". This has been a good guide as I make decisions throughout the day.
What are some other ideas that have been helpful to you in keeping yourself straight as a leader?
Looking forward to hearing from all of you.
With appreciation,
Beth Edmonds
***
Dear Beth and all,
Thanks for asking for helpful ideas. Here are two of my recent favorites:
(1) Everything is an experiment. I do not have to "be right" to have rights. I can fight for my own best thinking at any time, whether or not anyone agrees with me, and without wasting a lot of time checking out the probability of "complete success."
Now that I write it, it sounds like I am recommending being reckless or thoughtless. That's not what I mean. I came from a background that said it was important to say and do the right thing all the time, and that anyone who made mistakes "had no right to complain." For me it is a big contradiction to hear Tim say that young people, who are interested in learning by trying (even when an adult has assured them that it won't work), have the correct perspective. If I were in government, how would this translate? I'd get as clear as I could about my own thinking, then announce calmly, "Here's something that could make a big difference that we haven't tried before. Let's try it." If it didn't work as expected I would say, "Here's what we learned from trying this" and not spend a lot of time looking defeated and apologetic. People would be attracted to my showing that I don't feel bad about myself for having tried something bold and not gotten perfect results.
(2) I am the gift. Nothing is more important than my own self. I get to take my own liberation right along with that of any constituency for which I am working. Sacrificing my own well-being is never the best way to achieve permanent good results. If a job is too big, train more trainers. Delegate. Let my thinking lead a larger number of willing workers if their thinking is not ready to take charge. As Tim says, there are more people who can recognize good thinking than people who can come up with it on their own. As Diane Balser says, "Don't waste me!"
Jennifer Kreger
***
During my 1987-88 efforts to organize women and women's organizations around a common agenda of legislative goals in North Carolina, the leader of one of the major state organizations began spreading lies about me and this new initiative which confused people. I had phone calls from people all over the state whom I didn't know telling me what they had heard and how it didn't make sense to them. They needed to check it out with me. Each of them identified the single source of the lies.
The person leading this attack met regularly with our task force and always acted pleasant and cooperative at the meetings. I called Harvey about how to handle it. He suggested some rather dramatic approaches such as plotting to get this woman promoted to the national level in her organization so we would no longer have to deal with her at the state level. To this day I am not sure if he meant it or was trying to get me to laugh. After a good deal of discharge on my part he said the one guideline he could suggest was to always keep what I was doing out in the open so everyone knew our objectives, strategies, and plans.
After discharging a few weeks I asked to meet with the woman who was spreading lies. I told her about the calls I had received and that people told me they heard these lies from her. She cried hard and I thought things were going very well. Then she denied all of it. I had to think some more, but finally I wrote a letter to our task force (about 24 people) explaining what had been happening, and that the source of the lies was a member of our task force. Several people called to ask who it was. I said that was not important. The person spreading the lies found a face-saving way to drop off the task force 6 weeks later, and as far as I know the lies stopped.
The Women's Agenda Program is now 18 years old. It has evolved from a small poorly funded group struggling to achieve tax exempt status, to being co-opted by a well-funded agency that did not always have this policy of openness (which finally collapsed three years ago). At the time of the collapse, a small poorly organized coalition of 16 groups asked to adopt the program and has now grown to 40 organizations with exciting committed young leadership.
I think the program survives because it makes sense to people, but also because people trust the leadership to be open and above board about everything we do. It was my instinct to do things this way, but with Harvey's confirmation, I have consistently communicated the importance of this policy to new leaders in the program now. It matches their best sense of how things should be done too.
Sometimes people leading wonderful organizations get confused into thinking they have to adopt the sneaky strategies used by oppressive forces of society, but we are far better off leading in straightforward honest and publicly open ways. Leading people depends on building and maintaining trust especially when so much leadership in the oppressive society is untrustworthy.
Anne Mackie
Cary, North Carolina, USA
***
Thanks for starting this discussion Beth.
One time when I was struggling in a session about some piece of my leadership and "what I should do" my co-counselor said to me something like "Your love for people has always been a good guide for you" (which of course made me cry). It made it so clear that "the right thing" is something from within the goodness of myself and not some set of rules imposed from the outside, and I often remember that when I'm trying to decide "what I should do" and it makes the choices much clearer than the "should" guide.
Cynthia Phinney
Maine, USA
***
Dear Beth,
One thing that has helped keep me straight as a leader is being rigorous on policy. By being rigorous, I mean examining new ideas and proposals for their consistency with RC's core postulates.
For example, some time ago, a co-counselor, under the guise of "trusting her own thinking," had advertised a gather-in during which she planned to present her "alternative" approach to a particular issue. She had taken the "trust your own thinking" guideline as permission to abandon some core RC postulates. She defended her position by saying that RC encourages members "to do their own thinking." The leader in her area did not want to deal with the situation. He asked me to speak with her and cancel the gather-in, which I did. I was criticized heavily for doing this. But over the years people have come to rely on me as someone who can think through thorny issues and bring some clarity to a situation. In this instance, I had to go back to the basics, trust my own thinking, and even though I didn't do as elegant job of handling the matter as I wished, I did handle it.
Even terrific guidelines such as "trust your own thinking" have to be distinguished from confusions in the dominant culture such as "liberal permission to do your own thing," as you so helpfully point out. Thanks, Beth.
Judith Kay
Tacoma, Washington, USA
***
Dear Friends,
After attending my first International Working Class Liberation Workshop in 1979 led by Harvey Jackins I decided to make working class liberation my life work, and, further, to use a point from the Draft Policy for Working Class Liberation, stating that workers in the basic industries are a key strategic element of the working class, to decide to be a Blue Collar (manual labor) worker for the foreseeable future and chose a job close to the economic base of the area where I lived. My most concise statement of the work of working class liberation I borrow from the working class commitment : "I will unite with all my fellow workers everywhere around the world to lead all people to a rational, peaceful society." So that has been my work for 25 years.
I ended up finding a job in a shoe factory sewing shoes by hand for 16 years. My idea was to use the factory as a laboratory in which to test what we think we know working class liberation and RC. For the last nine years I have worked in the Returns Department or the service end of the business in the same company. During the 25 years at this company the economy of my area has made a sharp turn from being based in manufacturing to being based in the service sector of the US economy. The work that I and others used to do in the shoe factory is now done in other countries where the labor is cheaper.
The above paragraphs illustrate a few ways that I keep myself on track as a leader. One is that I follow the thinking of the best leader available. Second is the use of logic. I was attracted by the logic of Harvey's talks on working class liberation and still find the distinction between acting on logic and acting on feelings a daily principle and discipline. Choosing to work in the shoe factory was totally a step based on logical thinking about how I might affect change and not based on what field of work I was attracted to. Most likely without oppression I would be a musician, artist, horticulturist, woodworker, writer and naturalist (which in fact I am in my "spare" time). I certainly never thought that doing fine detailed work with my hands was an aptitude or skill that I possessed or desired to acquire but my decision required learning and perfecting this skill. But the idea of acting on logic was very attractive to me.
Third is that I use policy. Fourth I set goals and persist with them.
Other things I do is have lots and lots of sessions in which I examine and re-examine my choices, my thinking, the thinking of others, and the policies and programs of RC and any other movement that I encounter. I unload feelings and try to keep my actions directed back to logic. I try to be very disciplined in my thinking and in my actions if I can manage it. It is easier to know that logical thing to do than to do it. The re-iterative decision outlined by Harvey is hugely useful in this. You set a goal, you fall short of it, you decide to pursue it again, you fall short, you decide again (as long as the goal seems sound and logical). Persistence is not to be underestimated. Intelligent persistence is even better and discharge and re-evaluation is a great way of keeping goals and actions intelligent.
I make every opportunity to learn everything I can through every opportunity I have. Mostly this learning comes through people and I have developed the discipline of overriding my shyness and embarrassment to pursue the goal of making friends with as many people of as many backgrounds as I can. This is a great way of keeping oneself on track as a leader. One's viewpoints are constantly challenged and changed by the experience of meeting people of all backgrounds.
I make almost no major decision without asking advice. Sometimes lots of advice. I seek the advice of the smartest people I know. Sometimes I push people whose thinking I respect past what is comfortable for them until I am sure that I have the best of their thinking that I know will be of use to me.
I make every opportunity to get the best counseling I can and to support the RC communities and community leaders as best I can. Not only is this a good thing to do in general but I understand that it improves the counseling that I will get as a client.
Working close to the economic base of capitalism—in a factory—is great for keeping one on track. The daily pressure to produce, while oppressive, has a way of driving out irrelevance and complacency and fostering a more general mental discipline and efficiency as well. The constant need to work with other people also tends to force patterns out of your functioning and to end isolation. Being so close to the economic base keeps you quite connected to the economic and political events of the world. I often say: When capitalism hiccups we feel it in the factory. So the overwhelming reality of the influence of economic oppression on human society is very easy to see and is put before you daily. As a small example, the appearance for the first time at our company of garment tags with Arabic characters and "Made in Jordan" on them speaks loudly to economic and political changes in the US and the rest of the world and foreshadows future events as well. (Previous tags have overwhelmingly been from Central America, South and Eastern Asia, and more recently from Central and Eastern Europe and you can read a whole history of US economic, political and military policy in those tags.) And again all of this comes from an initial choice of work based on logic.
Lastly I have lots of discussions with people about the reality of the situation which we are facing. I do this in every avenue of my life. The discipline and skills of counseling and listening well to people are very useful because people feel respected and safe to talk about things that they would not risk discussing with other people for fear of ridicule or invalidation. That is one great thing about the pamphlet Logical Thinking About a Future Society—Harvey's encouragement to have these discussions with people about the true nature of things wherever we can.
Those are my thoughts for now.
Love,
Dan Nickerson
Freeport, Maine, USA
***
Hi Beth,
I was interested in a comment you made in your recent posting on the RC List:
"The trick here is to notice when I am actually thinking freshly and when I am acting out of restimulation."
I'd love to hear you say more about exactly what you mean by the phrase 'thinking freshly'.
Lots of love,***
Hi Alan and everyone,
We know in RC that we define thinking as responding to each situation with new and fresh thinking, not settling for old responses. I have noticed hat without discharge on any particular topic, I am likely to respond in the most familiar and often comfortable way instead of applying logic and discharge to the topic. I wonder what others have found to be their "fresh thinking"? What do you think?
Love,
Beth
***
Hi Beth,
The reason your phrase '.....when I'm actually thinking freshly.....' interested me is that over the last couple of years there have been a very small number of occasions when it has felt to me as if I've been thinking 'freshly'. It all still feels a bit confusing but let me try to explain.
I was thinking about this in a session the other day with Micheline Mason and I realised that I don't struggle to think about 'practical' things (e.g. fixing a problem with my car) - using what I've learned from past life experiences, bringing them to the new situation (which may have some similarities to past situations but has some new elements too) and coming up with appropriate new responses, however, when it comes to the business of thinking about what feels to me like 'theoretical' issues (e.g. working class liberation, classism, eliminating racism, etc) it feels like a very different matter.
Micheline asked me two useful questions:
When I was younger: 1. How often was I labelled an intellectual? 2. How often was I asked to solve theoretical problems?
These questions made me notice: a) the extent to which I undervalue my practical abilities b) that it has felt like only 'cleaver' people solve 'theoretical' problems.
Micheline went on to ask me, "What contradictions had allowed me to overcome the barriers (in my head) to access my thinking about 'theoretical' issues?" (on the occasions when I was aware I was doing it). I thought of three things - which I think are important:
1. Having lots of time to think (not being rushed and being able to discharging my way through the 'I can't think' feelings 2. An absence of external pressure (nobody putting demands on me to do other things) 3. My counsellor's confidence and belief in my ability to think - about anything I choose to think about.
So, good things came out of this session: i) I have a good brain ii) I CAN think and, perhaps most important of all, iii) my thinking MATTERS.
When I have had the time and space to think with some supportive attention my brain comes up with good thoughts - sometimes articulating existing understandings, sometimes getting new insights. This is something I find really exciting - I don't think there's anything to match it. That's what I think of as fresh, new thinking. I'd like the opportunity to do a lot more of it.
Lots of love and admiration,
Alan
***
Harvey asks the question,
"What are the effective tactics in the transformation of society?"
He puts forward 15 proposals. I'd like to hear from readers about their successes with any of these proposals. The first one is:
"The achieving of individual, personal friendships by each conscious wide world changer as the only dependable enough contact between individuals."
I have found this one particularly helpful in my present job as president of the Maine Senate (an elected government position within the US state structure). I have been working hard to make individual friendships with the governor of the state, the speaker of the House (another elected government position within US state structure equivalent to mine) and the minority party leader in my Senate. So far we have been able to move policy forward with greater success than in the past.
I also had a success in that I was able to publicly defend the minority leader against a public attack on a website of my own party and call for the removal of the negative ad from the website. This has allowed us to work much more closely even though my "political" advisors are worried that I am not being tough enough. Being human with others is providing much encouragement to the public that we are trying to work together to find solutions to our state's problems. Making friends has been integral in this process.
What have you found as you read this pamphlet to be an effective tactic in the transformation of society. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Beth Edmonds
***
Dear Beth:
The quote of the day on the RC website is:
The human's essential nature is one of flexibility, but all present and past societies, even though they have been constructed by humans, are essentially rigid.
It is exciting, and challenging to think about how human intelligence could pre-dominate moment by moment in the constitution of society.
What moves me first in reading Harvey's pamphlet is his once-again commitment to take on the biggest challenges in regard to our natural feeling of responsibility for the whole universe. Additionally, he trusts that we can do as he did.
Recently, I have come across the work of Jim Rough. His break-through insights came in working with mill workers to creatively solve certain problems in a fully democratic and intelligent way. His article on "A Rebirth of ''We the People'" is succinct, logical, and practical (available on the website - wisedemocracy.org).
He is so clear (as RC is) that the individual is intelligent, creative, interested in the good of the whole and of each individual within the whole, and well able (at every level of education and in spite of patterns) to address problems elegantly and cooperatively. He writes, "Our system forces us to direct our attention, energy and talents to serving competing interests, letting it take care of the big picture."
He lists six characteristics of a legitimate "We the People" -: (1) Inclusion (of everyone), (2) Unanimity, (3) Autonomy (i.e. free decision-making and action), (4) Authority (we are ultimately in charge), (5) Intelligence (we have all we need), (5) Creativity ("at least one elegant solution to every real problem" - Harvey).
Unanimity is one of the most amazing possibilities. We Quakers (and others) call it "consensus." A group's intelligence (i.e., the intelligences of individuals meeting each other) emerges in such a way that agreement on the most basic values and directions occurs. When this happens, there is a shared experience of intelligence (Quakers call it "light") breaking through.
As Harvey notes in his articles, certain structures work better than others in eliciting all these characteristics in group process. It is exciting to learn about these and experiment with them. I am living in a "co-housing" community right now of about 60 people. It is interesting to watch (even here where consensus and inclusivness and authenticity and freedom are deeply valued) what a huge demand it makes on the human spirit (mind) to not get caught in patterns of hopelessness, settling for "less than everything", and de-valuing each other.
Warmly,
Mel Snyder
Vienna, Virginia, USA
***
Dear Beth,
Thanks for moderating this discussion and for all your work in the wide world.
Before adding my contribution, I would like to offer my specific appreciations to you, the people around you in your wide world organization in Maine and the people of Maine.
You and that organization have played a key role in providing leadership to the entire United States. While those accomplishments have been overshadowed by some of the downward trend current developments at the national level, your organization pioneered and passed into law a series of changes which have inspired the entire nation.
You passed a system of full public funding of all your state elections in Maine. This means an ordinary person can run for the state legislature or governor of the entire state without going to wealthy people and their paid staff (the corporate lobbyists) to raise the money needed to pay for their election campaigns (TV advertising, mailings and the like.) We were able to follow your example here in Arizona and there is now a national movement for fully publicly funded elections, inspired by your model.
You also passed into law a system of price controls on prescription drugs — the main force driving up the cost of health care and the outrageous profits of the drug industry. The people of your state took on a major industry and forced them to take smaller profits. Once again, your example has inspired a national movement in that direction.
Finally, you created a system of quality, affordable health care covering every person in the entire state. This means that the health care corporations and the insurance companies cannot pick and choose only the wealthiest and the healthiest.
Again and again over the last decade, I have been in national discussions where the focus has been "how can we do in our state or in the national Congress what Maine has done."
Maine is not a large state in terms of population, but thanks to you, a committed group of leaders of which you have been a key part and your willingness to go to the entire people of the state and ask their opinion and their support, Maine has been able to make what Julian Weissglass has called significant "reforms" within the collapsing oppressive society. Those reforms have both made millions of people's lives better, but also helped them realize their own power, challenged the assumptions of the oppressive society in key areas — and provided leadership to the rest of the nation.
From a distance it looks to me that you have played a key role not just as an individual political leader, but as a thoughtful ally and strategist in building that organization of people around you who have pioneered these more rational policies.
Jim Driscoll
Tucson, Arizona, USA
***
Dear Beth,
April Fools, you thought your job as pamphlet discussion leader ended on March 31st. I just finished rereading "Logical Thinking About A Future Society." Or maybe it's April Fools on me for sending you this after the deadline, but I did want to reflect on what I got from this rereading of our basic RC work on wide world change.
My general rule about Harvey is that the more social change organizing that I do, the smarter he gets.
In the past, I have been more impressed with some of the details of running a social change organization based on RC insights which I summarized in my Present Time article last year: self-estimation to encourage self-validation and learning, Wygelian leaders' groups to empower individual initiative, etc. As Harvey said at the Montreal World Conference in 1984, each of us in RC really does possess the tools necessary to build our own wide world organizations — one, I would add, that is potentially far more effective than those we are currently using.
Indeed, inspired by Harvey's urging, last fall, after 23 years of doing what Julian Weissglass would call "reformist" wide world change full-time — helping stop nuclear testing by the U.S., winning fully publicly funded elections here in Arizona, U.S.A., helping register large numbers of Latino/as to vote, etc., I set up a training and networking nonprofit organization specifically to bring more of those transformational RC insights into wide world change work. As Harvey used to quote the guy (does seem like it was a guy) who passed by the fifth floor, after jumping off the top of a ten-story building, "so far, so good."
However, in this pamphlet Harvey impressed me more with his big picture thinking. He talks more about the need to read the classics of political analysis, e.g. Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and to do large scale strategic analysis and goal setting, all before taking action. For him, that always meant a priority on organizing the working class in the basic industries, bringing all workers into unions and reclaiming control of their existing trade unions.
When talking about the actual process of organizing, he also stayed pretty general, emphasizing the need to offer hope and confidence to people; to offer them meaningful lives and not just narrow economic gains. He quite proudly noted the importance to social change work of RC's understanding of the role of the distress pattern in blocking social change, betraying gains after we win them and turning groups against one another — and the potential positive role of RC's insights about paying attention and discharge in avoiding those pitfalls. He returned several times to the importance of the RC practice of having various groups caucus separately and agree on their own draft program as a necessary step in building unity with other groups. He emphasized our theory about leaders and leadership as key to social change.
Finally, he urged us to assess our progress not just in specific results which can always be taken away by the oppressive society, but in the organizations, relationships and individual capacity we build in the process.
Of course, he emphasized the need for us to keep doing and building RC even as we take on larger roles in wide world changing — and the need not to parasite off the RC community in the process, as a substitute for reaching new people outside RC with our thinking.
I was struck at how close many of Harvey's suggestions were to some of the guidelines of the major U.S.-based, wide-world, reformist organizing network I have worked in for the last twelve years. Like Harvey, that network (and some others) emphasize the importance of working with labor unions and analyzing each situation strategically before selecting specific tactics (unlike so many of us who know how to do one thing well, say small demonstrations, and always do that thing, regardless of the situation.) This wide-world network also emphasizes the need to set goals in terms of developing new leaders and strengthening an organization, rather than focusing only on the particular policy objective. Lately, this network has even begun to recognize the importance of defining goals in broader, more meaningful language about values, rather than narrow self interest exclusively.
However, some of the pieces Harvey saw so clearly in this pamphlet — and in his life — are still well beyond the reach of this network — and most of the wide-world efforts I have seen in my 23 years. The most notable shortcoming is the amount of unaware distress in non-RC social change work (not that the RC Community does not still have our share.) Outside RC, wide-world changers constantly criticize each other and attack our leaders. Indeed, the joke is that "we set up our firing squads in a circle!" And, in fact, most of our social change leaders do tend to develop elitist habits of leading and thinking. In reformist work in the U.S., we also have very few multi-racial or cross-class organizations. We tend to rely too frequently on painful emotion and urgency — and all too often burn out, not just ourselves, but those who follow us.
As always, it was a joy to have Harvey's clear thinking shine out of this pamphlet, like a bright light illuminating some of the areas for improvement in my own work and those I have observed in others over the last two decades--and pointing the way to some things I can do differently in my new project.
Beth, thanks to you, Tim, Diane and the Community for reminding all of us, especially those of us who spend our time on larger-scale, reformist change, to pay attention to this key piece of what Harvey thought and wrote. This pamphlet applies his forty years of co-counseling to his two previous decades which contained both disciplined theoretical study of social change and hard practical experience in one of the most dramatic periods of wide world change organizing in human history. His perspective reflects, for now, a unique combination of RC and wide world change and one well worth reading and rereading. Not, however, that he would have any of us trade all of it for a single minute of trusting our own thinking!
Jim Driscoll
Tucson, Arizona, USA