“As long as you carry them along, they move, but once you put them down, all signs of life diminish. Many do not come to the local center unless they are picked up by others, despite the fact that walking is and has been the primary means of transportation for people in the area. The institutions adapt their workings in such a way that compliments rather than challenges the local community members in their attitudes”.When we started attacking this problem head on, we found it was only possible when we actually gave it a name (“PATERNALISM”) and a comprehensive definition (“doing for others what they could do for themselves”). It is based on the belief that the receiving party is incapable, unskilled, unmotivated, etc., and that the giving party has all these things in abundance and must therefore share them with others.
Whereas traditionally paternalism referred solely to what the giving party did, we learned to hold both the giving and receiving parties responsible, as it is a mutual relationship or “homeostasis” that both parties must work together to change.
From the viewpoint of the receiver, we all tend to doubt our own ability to do something new, until having tried it several times and found ourselves successful. So if apparently successful people come along and show through their paternalistic actions that they also doubt our ability, this confirms our belief.
And if they furthermore offer to do it for us, then we develop a distinct sense of our own inferiority and their superiority, resulting in a relationship of DEPENDENCE, which has become a social disease that atrophies the potential of a great number of people.
From the point of view of the giver, there is no dark, ulterior motive involved, but rather a sincere (albeit somewhat mislead) desire to “help”, often combined with a certain “missionary zeal” that wreaks havoc with one’s patience and long-term vision. If I may generalize just for clarity’s sake, we have identified two distinct patterns.
One is the typically “western” eagerness to “get the job done” right and now! If I have to do it myself in order to make sure it gets done right, I will, and if I have to do it alone, the important thing is to avoid delays.
This leads us to impose a momentum (as well as our own ideas regarding HOW things should be done) on the community’s development, which few if any are willing or able to keep up with. The result is much heel dragging and “wheelbarrowing”. As Covey puts it, in order to be truly EFFECTIVE with people, you have to stop trying to be EFFICIENT with them.
The other pattern is a typically “eastern” eagerness to give one’s life in love and “service” to others, to the oft-seen extreme of actually competing with others and with oneself to “serve” more, wearing oneself to a frazzle like a true living martyr, and not wanting those “others” to do anything for themselves, much less for us.
The underlying assumption seems to be that this will set an example that others will follow automatically, but in fact, more often than not, the result is that the “others” relax into a comfortable receiving mode and learn that this is the way things should be, period.
Empowerment
I put the word “service” in quotation marks, because we have learned that true service is not paternalistically doing things for others that they can do for themselves, but rather finding ways to EMPOWER them (develop their ability to decide and act for themselves).
To empower means to free and develop the ability to make decisions and act; to make appropriate decisions and take appropriate action based on those decisions. What is it that enables people to decide and act for themselves? The answer is three–fold: knowledge, love and governance.
Knowledge provides the guidance necessary to ensure that decisions will be appropriate to each situation, and the skills needed to ensure that action will be effective. Ignorance, superstition and prejudice are enemies of knowledge and lead to undesirable decisions and ineffective or damaging actions.
Love provides the degree of self–sacrifice necessary to ensure that decisions will not center on short–sighted, self–centered actions, but rather on what will serve the interests of the whole on a long–term basis. With love, actions become acts of service to the general weal.
Governance provides a structured forum for consultation as collective decision–making, and the authority necessary to achieve collective action. It enables a community to reach unity of thought, purpose and action, which are essential to its progress. Lack of local governance has led to the inability of the people to make their own decisions and initiate their own actions.
Mind, Heart and Hand
Here in Ecuador there was an assumption that not arising on one’s own initiative was a sign of not wanting to serve, which in turn was due to a lack of love, conviction or commitment. So we would pound away even harder at “deepening”, to little or no avail.
Meanwhile, we had had some positive experiences where “inactive” friends were carefully trained to carry out acts of service, followed by guided practice, who arose with great joy to use those new skills. We learned from this that the will was already there, but what was really lacking was the skills, along with the confidence in our own ability to use them.
At about the same time, the Moral Leadership program fell into our laps, enabling some 60 individuals from all over the country to acquire the knowledge, attitudes AND skills necessary to start initiatives effectively in service to their communities. The results after that year-and-a-half were unbelievable!
Self-centered lives turned around 180 degrees, projects were begun and completed, schools were started, degree programs were entered and new careers forged, institutions were transformed, families were strengthened, and on and on. Even a great number of the people that the Moral Leadership students trained as part of their coursework practices were transformed and uplifted!
This confirmed our suspicion that training was the key to overcoming paternalism, both in givers and receivers. Shortly after that, the Universal House of Justice, which doubtless had its fingers on the pulse of this and countless other similar experiences worldwide, began to promote the formation of “Training Institutes” throughout the planet.
Now some people, recalling our old “Teaching Institutes”, which were more knowledge–oriented than anything else, saw nothing new in this. However, the change was more than name deep, as the idea of systematically training people in the skills needed to serve their communities had not been institutionalized on a global level before.
Prior to this change, in many communities practically no individual deepening was taking place and often when deepening meetings were held, the majority was really not interested. This hampered their personal growth and showed a distinct lack of personal motivation, although it was unclear which was the cause and which the symptom.
In studying this phenomenon, we found that people are attracted to participate by one or more of three routes: knowledge, love or action. Each culture seems to have a preference, but rarely did it occur to us that other cultures had different approaches from ours, so we treated them all the same way and then wondered why the response was so lame.
Let’s use East, West and South as figurative names to identify three distinct culture types. The East runs eagerly, on the passionate path of love, intuitively recognizes the Source of Knowledge and is moved to give up its life in acts of service. The West enters coolly on the reasonable road of knowledge, is set ablaze like a torch with love, and arises to act, systematically, planning each step carefully.
But the South is enticed by a clarion call to join others in joyous action, hastens to acquire the knowledge needed to keep pace with one’s companions, and soon finds oneself wrapped in the warm, tender embrace of love.
I think that a majority of people in South America and Africa belong to the latter type. Book learning is a drag, and they would rather employ their time to better ends, like socializing (a preferred source of information). Love is reserved for what makes a real difference in their lives: their family, their closest friends, their home, and their prized possessions (materialism of the poor?).
But once they commit themselves with others to a joint project, they will eagerly seek out the knowledge needed to act. Sooner or later, what they do, who they do it with, why they do it, etc. become so much a significant part of their lives, that they never want to give it up.
This is achieved by offering people, from the wealth of issues the community can make a positive contribution to, whatever they have already felt as a need, something they are already acting on it, instead of trying to interest them straight out in something foreign to their day-to-day lives.
Achieving Unity
The whole purpose is to enlist “troops” of human resources who are willing to work towards the transformation of society, not just “masses” of sponges who soak up other people’s time and energy. Otherwise, what you have is a community in name only: isolated individuals calling themselves a community because they live in close proximity, but not working together in unity.
In the past, whenever this lack of unity would come up in community meetings, the invariable response was to hold a party, a picnic, or some such idea of unity as “getting together”. Unfortunately, these events often ended with individuals getting angry at each other over some silly misunderstanding.
Things went on like this until we finally decided to study what exactly “unity” meant in a community development context. What we came up with was three types of unity, none of which meant “getting together” as an end in itself. These were unity of PURPOSE, unity of THOUGHT, and unity of ACTION.
We interpreted this as meaning: (1) having the same central MOTIVATION and coming to an agreement on what that required us to DO; (2) using the process of frank but courteous CONSULTATION to decide collectively HOW to achieve our purpose; and then (3) arising of one accord to WORK TOGETHER in groups to execute it and LEARN together from our action.
This action-oriented approach to unity sounded easy, but when we attempted it by the traditional route of “deepening” and “con¬sultation”, it didn’t produce much change. However, when we attempted it by TRAINING, for example in new (to us) methods of planning and execution, the results were amazing!
(Tuesday, December 8, 1998)
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