Saving the world and the paradox of urgency

[Bud Weiss]

Sociometrizing the world is a noble and ideal thought. Once, Ghandi was
asked what he thought of Civilization and he answered that he "thought it
would be a good idea."

Finally, It is actions that count. The fact is that power comes from
the barrel of a Gun and who holds the gun determines which way the wind
blows, if you can  entertain that mixed metaphor, AND FURTHER:  holding a
gun creates the wind and its direction.

I had spoken to Dr. Moreno on several occasions about making an example of
an organization of those involved with the Psychodrama/sociometry movement
or community, as a group or organization, though somewhat loose at that
time, that would have the courage to sociometrize itself. Naturally it meant
 that the creator of that organization has to call upon the members to do so
and the members have to trust the leader enough to actually respond
truthfully. Then the sociometric structure can be ascertained and more
importantly, movement begins to take place and the structure of the
organization using the other action tools can begin
to strengthen itself encorporating the gifts of the isolates and rejects and
grow more and more creative and capable of delivering it's purpose to the
world.  He agreed that it was a good idea.
While this is no easy task and previously, I have proposed some aspects of
beginning it on this site for a previous ASGPP conference, It has yet to be
done!

To me and many thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions now
who have examined the concepts, the myth of scarcity remains as powerful as
ever and controlling everyone. Without breaking down that myth, I cannot
imagine any real progress, only more and more extremes of poverty and
wealth. I do believe that once the Scarcity Myth is sufficiently unmasked to
demonstrate the abundance of resources we have which can be employed in the
immediate future both externally and internally, Then and only then there
will be a chance for all of the tools that Moreno and others have developed
especially in the spiritual realm to make that shift we have all dreamed
about since our childhoods and those dreams have continued through the ages
since people began to think for themselves.

If you have not yet joined or looked at the following, please check them
out: The Zeitgeist Movement  http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com and Barbara
Marx Hubbard
http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#search/Barbara+Hubbard/1221385ac0daa399
though
her connection with the SECRET movement is troublesome to me, still she has
so much that is valuable. Bucky Fuller once said that she had much to say
that was very important and in my mind, Bucky is the for runner of much of
what the Venus Project http://www.thevenusproject.com/ is about and proved
it to many of the government agencies in terms of the quality and fiscal
economy of his proposals for universal high quality housing and much more.
His organization continues to pioneer solutions to the issues confronting
all in our world today. see http://www.bfi.org/
ONe community in particular that is astounding and has been in existence
growing in its capability to export its techology for fully sustainable
ecological living is Gaviotas in Columbia see
http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org/Friends_of_Gaviotas/Home.html    and the
latest version of the film about Gaviotas
http://web.me.com/giocondaperezsnyder/Site/Paolo_Lugari.html   ( it is very
difficult to get in and out of Gaviotas as it is often unreachable due to
climate conditions and is in the middle of a war zone and even dangerous to
do so.  Thus a far better video is needed and may soon become available.
Pualo's lecture with slides may soon be available and it is wonderful. His
energy and charisma can inspire anyone.
Using the power of sociometry and action technologies in the streets could
lead to some shift and once that shift gets to the critical point, how do
you stop the gun holders and there are quite a number of them--THE
CORPORATIONS-- from shutting you down? This was the mistake that Marx simply
ignored and I think it is simply a fact. What is needed and may occur if
sufficient information is distributed to enough people is a paradigm shift
as described by Thomas Kuhn in *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.*
A large contributer to that shift will be the percentage of people who are
aware of the myth of scarcity and the answers to it like those above and the
tools to begin to take their power back from those who have always
maintained the control of their outward lives since the beginning other than
in the smaller indigenous villages which have remained close to nature and
in their own way totally communal with their lives devoted to their
community and each of the members of that community having purpose that
supports the community. These communities have been devestated over and over
as their example puts a lie to the notions of scarcity.

Beginning to teach sociometry in the schools to me would be the place to
begin again as well in preparation for the shift. Doing action techniques in
the streets regularly as well similar to what Augusto Boal was about and
with even more powerful tools that we have to supplement his scenarios.
Axiodramas and Sociodramas as well of all creative kinds challenging people
to come to terms with their beliefs toward the end of some rethinking of
what we are about and can do.

In social work schools, there are at least two directions you can take as
you obtain your masters degree. 1 is clinical which leads to at best a
lucrative private practice if you are good and of course possible teaching
of courses and writing successful books. The other is community organizing..
Most people who even begin with the Community organizing direction end up
becoming clinicians to earn a decent living and retreat from the revolution
to make their private family lives.  These are some of the places where
Sociatry and all the tools need to be taught and there are simply too few
such courses in these schools. Joe Hart was about bringing that forward in
Arkansas, and I know of few if any other schools across the country where
anyone has made it as much of a priority as he did.

So enough from me as the street cleaner said to the horse. Best from Bud
Weiss


On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Edward Schreiber <
edwschreiber at earthlink.net> wrote:

>  What would JL have to say?
>
>
> POLITICAL SOCIOMETRY by J.L. Moreno
>
> Sociometric revolutions do not promise violent and rapid results. They dig
> deep and their success depends upon a new learning process applied to small
> groups. Similar to the infant, mankind will mature only step by step and to
> the degree to which sociometric consciousness will refashion our social
> institutions, the structural readiness of mankind for a world society will
> ripen.  Many wars and social upheavals will torture its sick body. In this
> transition the doctor may be more important than the engineer.
> (pp 167)
>
> *Sociometric Thesis*
>
>
>    1. Human society has a structure of its own which is *not* identical
>    with the social order or the form of government currently in power. Its
>    structure is influenced but never entirely determined by the instrument in
>    charge of its affairs, for instance the state. The state may “vanish” but
>    the underlying sociodynamic structure of society persists in one form or
>    another. It is into the structure of the socius therefore, that a
>    revolutionary effort has to put its teeth if a lasting and true cure of
>    social ills is to be effected.
>
>
>
>    1. Sociometry has developed two types of instruments, instruments for
>    diagnosing social structures and instruments for changing them. The
>    sociometric test, psychodrama, sociodrama and axiodrama among others can be
>    used for diagnosis as well as for social revolution.
>
>
>
>    1. The oldest and most numerous proletariat of human society is the
>    sociometric proletariat. It consists of all the people who suffer from one
>    form of misery or other, psychological misery, social misery, economic
>    misery, political misery, racial misery, religious misery. There are
>    numerous individuals and groups whose volume of attractions, or role
>    expansion, of spontaneity and productivity are far beneath their needs and
>    their ability to consummate them. The world is full of isolated, rejected,
>    rejecting, unreciprocated and neglected individuals and groups.
>
>
>
>    1. The sociometric proletariat cannot be “saved” by economic
>    revolutions. It existed in primitive and precapitalistic society, it exists
>    in democratic societies, and in socialist Russia.
>
>
>
>    1. Sociometry is the sociology of the people, by the people and for the
>    people.  It teaches that human society cannot be changed by indirect,
>    mechanical manipulation or by the arbiter of force. Whatever the type of
>    government or social institutions coerced upon the people, whether they are
>    cooperative communities, communistic, democratic, autocratic or anarchistic
>    types of government, sooner or later they lose their hold upon the people.
>    The people discard them, if they do not root in the productive will of the
>    people and if they are not created with the full participation of every
>    individual member.
>
>
>
>    1. In order to change the social world social experiments have to be so
>    designed that they can produce change; in order to produce change the people
>    themselves have to be included in its operation. You cannot change the world
>    ex-post-facto,  you must do it now and here, with and through the
>    people.  Marx had not the slightest intention of developing an
>    experimental method for the social sciences but he has been the only
>    pre-sociometric sociologist who came close to solving the problem. It is
>    true that the social revolutions which he instigated ended in failure –in
>    their major aims—but this does not contradict the fact that his
>    revolutionary theory was the nearest to an experimental method in the social
>    sciences before the advent of the sociometric method in our own time. How
>    could governments and responsible statesmen ever take the world of social
>    scientists seriously, considering the triviality of their findings and the
>    aimlessness of their experimental designs. They took Marx, Engels, and Lenin
>    seriously because they tried to change the world.
>
>
>
>    1. The dilemma of Marxism can be summed up in one phrase: its ignorance
>    of the dynamic social structure of human society. It ascribes the deep
>    resistance to change and revolution to the property owners, the capitalistic
>    class. It is not aware *that this deep resistance comes directly from
>    the social structure* and if the true cause for it simmers in the mind
>    of some of the flowers of Marx, they do not make an adequate effort to take
>    it into account.
>
>
>
>    1. Sociometric investigations suggest the existence of residual social
>    structures which are traceable to the following phenomena: a) an embryonic
>    social structure which can already be noticed in subhuman societies; b)
>    every social order, after it has had its reign, does not disappear entirely
>    but leaves its mark upon the social structures which it has shaped. The
>    cumulative effects of these “hangovers” plus the above-described embryonic
>    development produce a total impact which explains the resistance against
>    change.
>
>
>
>    1. The social experimenter cannot know all the factors entering the
>    situation nor all the changes in these factors which may take place between
>    the time he considers the experiment up to the time he executes it, and he
>    cannot know of new factors which may enter the situation in the course of
>    the experiment itself.  The sociometric experiments escape this
>    dilemma, they are the experimenter and the experimental subject in one.
>    Even if they do not know of all the factors entering their situation it
>    is inherent in their feelings, their actions and interaction-actions and it
>    must come out in their experimental designs and revolutionary transaction.
>    It may be at times imperfect and unprecise but it is an experiment in
>    vivo, consciously and systematically carried out by the whole group.
>
>
>
>    1. *Social nature has a sociometric character, that is why sociomtery
>    works.* The solution is to replace the experimental method of Bacon and
>    Mill which was constructed to meet the requirements of physics, by an
>    experimental method which is able to cross examine the reality of social
>    change.  The idea of setting up control group in the realm of social
>    action is pregnant with artificiality and abnormality and bound to distort
>    the results or make them trivial.  Spontaneous control groups are
>    possible, but never outside, only within a sociometric atmosphere. The
>    replacement is accomplished of reversal. Mankind itself, in a literal and
>    concrete sense of the word becomes experimenter and the former autocratic
>    experimenter becomes one of its two billion co-thinking participants.**
>
> * *
>
> (pp 167-169)
>
>
>
> *Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society*
>
> J.L. Moreno
>
> 1951
>
> Beacon House, Inc.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>


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