Choosing a Goal for the RC Community

From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Western European Pre-World Conference, May 2017

We have had goals for a long time in the RC Community. At the beginning they were a list of twenty or thirty wonderful ideas—all something on the order of world peace—and most people never looked at them. So we changed the idea of goals a little. Now a goal in RC is not just a good idea. We make a goal with a purpose. The purpose is to help us focus on a particular area of work in the next period.

How do you choose a goal? One factor is that we need it, that we have trouble keeping our minds working in its direction without it. Another is that there has to have been enough work done that people understand the work. We have to have prepared in order for a goal to be effective. This means that people who want a particular goal need to get other people thinking about it and working on it long before it can become one. Sometimes we haven’t been ready to have a goal, even though we know that an area is one in which we need to work.

The most recent example of this is class. We live in class societies. They destroy people and now are destroying the environment. We’re confused about class societies. We have trouble thinking about them. Clearly we need a goal. But four years ago at the last World Conference it was clear that we hadn’t thought enough about or done enough work on class to have an effective goal on it. Everyone was willing to say yes, a goal is a good idea, but that was all that most people could think of doing about class. Clearly we hadn’t yet done enough work.

Much more has been done in the last four years. We’re still confused about class. Have we done enough work that a goal on it would be an effective tool? If so, how do we write the goal? How do we make it sufficiently clear to enough people that they can adopt it as their personal goal? It’s only if it is adopted by a large number of us that it will be effective.

There are many possible topics for goals. Not every good idea needs to be a goal. We could have a goal of everyone discharging more. Are you going to argue against it? Well, I would. We don’t need that goal. We are not confused in that area. The goals we need are the ones that can guide us going forward. They are not to prove things to the outside world. They are to keep our minds focused on the work we’ve agreed we need do.

Tim Jackins

(Present Time 188, July 2017)


Last modified: 2022-12-25 10:17:04+00