The
eye-opening strategy is by far the most popular, because it tries to convert by
words. The example strategy works with deeds, a quite different game. Example
is the most basic strategy. Even other mammals use it.
A
pure example strategy may be to organize cooperatives or communes as
illuminating examples for the outside world. Example strategy could also be
used outside of these alternative working and living communes. A personnel
department that wishes to stimulate cooperation, personal growth, and the
quality of leadership in the organization can try to make its own department
into a shining example. Likewise, top management sets an important example if
it avoids the trap of do-as-I-say-but-don’t-do-as-I-do.
For
the eye-opening strategy, language is indispensable. Religions use both example
strategy and eye-opening strategy to make converts. Evangelization, literally
meaning: spreading the gospel, spreading the ‘good message’, uses preachers,
and preachers use words. What the use of words wins in efficiency over the use
of deeds, it often loses in validity.
The
most effective strategy involves words and deeds going together, right words
accompanying right deeds. But example strategy remains basic, because deeds and
facts are more basic than words. Therefore, mission is more effective than
evangelization, because mission offers facts, although usually only indirectly
related to the doctrine it wants to spread. When facts are cited only to induce
people to hear words, unbalance is present. Deeds will be exploited, even
prostituted, to serve the words. It is easy to feel sympathy and respect for
religions such as the Salvation Army that convert mainly by example, or the
Quakers who convert almost exclusively by example. This sympathy and respect
may be present despite what we think of a religion’s belief or style.
Though
writing is hard work, the relationship between words and deeds is a dangerous
subject for a writer, so I had better move on to the next subject.
Awareness
strategies often use verbal violence. With awareness strategies, people are
almost compelled to discover how something works and what they ought to want.
Such strategies assume that if people deviate from, say, Maslov’s hierarchy of
needs, they deviate only because they yet lack awareness of their own needs.
The assumption is that people would like nothing better than to realize themselves,
but they are still ignorant of that fact, and therefore they should be made
conscious.
Awareness
strategy is often relevant, and often not. Many people who have just become
aware, are then especially aware of the necessity to make other people aware,
too. However, if anything is difficult and burdening, becoming aware is. One
consequence, for example, is a realization of impotence. Becoming aware may be
so upsetting that preferably it is channeled within a stringent ideological
framework. Ideology makes us aware of answers, not of questions.
Becoming
aware without practical consequences is a favorite intellectual and emotional
infection. It leads to evangelization, the repetitive, stuck-in-a-rut kind of
awakening. We have become aware of what makes people and society tick and of
what should be done. What we do next is to make other people aware of this
insight. We become convinced that if only enough people become aware, then
everything will change. In this respect, social movements resemble chain letters.
To involve other people in liberating experiences is an addictive surrogate for
factual transformation. Movements like Transcendental Meditation solve this
problem by believing that if only one percent of people have come around, then
society already will change automatically.
Enthusiasts
of a new order of things often believe that their gospel will spread over
society like wildfire. Luckily, things go differently. When a movement becomes
large, it acquires different priorities, different interpretations, different
schools, applications to specific areas, combinations with other approaches.
There will be conferences, training centers and associations. Tensions grow
between the crystallization of an establishment and the urge to return to the
simple, original, personal source of inspiration. Tensions grow also between
orthodoxy and revisionism. Splits, compromises and new doctrines abound, and
the original innovation dissolves in the general turmoil of society, leaving
many or just a few fossil institutions.
Even
with successful movements, often very little remains that is recognizable,
precisely because success leads to absorption into society. Things begin to go
much more slowly and in a less revolutionary way than enthusiast protagonists initially
assume. In the 1920s people pointed to the success of the cooperative movement,
convinced that within several decades the whole society would be organized into
cooperatives.
Common
reactions to inevitable disappointment are impatience, frustration and pessimism.
If little progress is made, this lack of progress is due to people’s lack of
awareness or to devious conspiracies of the powers that be. This explanation
leads to incrowding of early converts. Their difference with the outside world
grows, and so does the need for scapegoats. The oasis accuses the desert of
barrenness, and invents demons of barrenness.
The
usual scapegoats are the conspicuous insiders in society, those who are as fish
in the waters of public institutions: businesspeople, magistrates, politicians,
religious authorities. Frustrated outsiders paint these insiders in glaring
colors of narrow-mindedness and power (apparently regarding themselves as
broad-minded and powerless).
Frustrated
converts may feel forced to engage in such unworthy activities as power games,
assuming that the evil world will later condone their dirty hands! Often these
people become political radicals. Such groups can intersperse progressive and
human pieces of wisdom with slogans full of cynicism and power politics.
Educational strategies are, at best,
based on a partial acceptance of the present state of affairs. Such strategies
imply a certain dissociation from the actual social or organizational state of
affairs. The image of another, better society begins to appear in the new ways
of thinking and examples shown, in the new experiences gained. Some educational
strategies are based on dissociation without taking distance or judging
normatively. I call these approaches deconditioning strategies. Classic examples
of such strategies are Taoism and, partially inspired by Taoism, Zen Buddhism.
Deconditioning
strategies liberate, making us participating outsiders who observe participants
of the organization or community we are in. We participate, but with inner
freedom, both serious and playful, almost aesthetically. Simultaneously within
and outside the situation, we find ourselves free of worry.
To
what does Zen lead? A Western student who had been training in Kyoto for seven
years answered: ‘No parapsychic experiences, as far as I am aware. But you
wake up in the morning and the world is so beautiful you can hardly stand it.’
This remark reveals not a cultivation of sentiment, but a getting rid of
filters and dampers.
Deconditioning
is a lively and personal experience that can be effective as a change strategy,
but with obscure and unpredictable consequences. It is perfection, but in terms
of Transactional Analysis, it contains more of the Child than of the Adult.
Chang-Tzu wrote beautiful poems about the easy, natural perfection of life.
Especially recommended for busy people is Active
Life.
A
deconditioned person brings about changes as does leaven, without care, without
doubts, without intentions, contagiously. Zen is a combination of example
strategy and awareness strategy, without putting up examples to reach
awareness. In contrast to (Confucian) conditioning, (Taoist) deconditioning is
a strictly personal process, although other deconditioned people can stimulate
it. Apparently this stimulation can even be done methodically, although this
approach remains, as evidenced by Zen Buddhism, precarious and paradoxical.
Precision
with ease gives a ‘dancing’ impression. Next to Zen in the Art of Archery and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there will be Zen
in Social Change. Why not? According to Gary Zukav, even the natural scientists
dance.
The
main lesson of deconditioning strategies for people who want to improve things
is to avoid inflated pretensions. Change without wanting to change too much.
Find the natural points of access, the natural leverage points. Be yourself.
Stay oriented on society and others, with goodwill, but without intentions.
This attitude may create an atmosphere of inner freedom and ease in all social
activities - perfect freedom, free perfectionism.
A
Zen-Buddhist would suggest: ‘Do not entertain ideals, do not present precepts.
Liberate without telling people what is good for them or how the world is or
should be. Create breathing space, open air, freedom, vitality, light-footed
seriousness. Undefinable, light, without any negative emotions, without fear or
hate or jealousy and, above all else, without guilt.’ Such an attitude is wise
but innocent, and surely dancing.
From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book
