This is a continuation of quotes from Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, along with my commentary.
This is part 3 of 6 parts. Also see:
- Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 1
- Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 2
- Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 4
- Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 5
- Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 6
On with the quotes:
People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience. Further, communication is a two way process. If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget the whole thing. I know that I have communicated with the other party when his eyes light up and he responds, “I know exactly what you mean. I had something like that happen to me once. Let me tell you about it!” (Page 81)
When you are trying to communicate and can’t find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then you must create the experience for him. (Page 85)
Taken together with the quotes from pages 64 and 68, the above quotes show Alinksy’s method of programming people: Find an experience that has affected them, interpret it for them in light of an ideology, and then project emotions and memories as needed in order to manipulate a desired response.
“In mass organization, you can’t go outside of people’s actual experience. I’ve been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister or a rabbi in terms of Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their church, even its physical property. If I approached them in a moralistic way, it would be outside their experience, because Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity are outside the experience of organized religion.” (Page 88)
Communication for persuasion, as in negotiation, is more than entering the area of another person’s experience. It is getting a fix on his main value or goal and holding your course on that target. You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue. (Page 88)
Moses did not try to communicate with God in terms of mercy or justice when God was angry and wanted to destroy the Jews; he moved in on a top value and outmaneuvered God. It is only when the other party is concerned or feels threatened that he will listen. (Page 89)
But Moses kept his cool, and he knew that the most important center of his attack would have to be on what he judged to be God’s prime value. As Moses read it, it was that God wanted to be No. 1. All through the Old Testament one bumps into “there shall be no other Gods before me,” “Thou shalt not worship false gods,” “I am a jealous and vindictive God,” “Thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain.” And so it goes, on and on, including the first part of the Ten Commandments. Knowing this, Moses took off on his attack. He began arguing and telling God to cool it. (At this point, trying to figure our Moses’ motivations, one would wonder whether it was because he was loyal to his own people, or felt sorry for them, or whether he just didn’t want the job of breeding a whole new people, because after all he was pushing 120 and that’s asking a lot.) (Page 90)
In the above quotes, Alinsky takes a Bible passage from Exodus 32 – a passage where God Himself is teaching Moses about justice and mercy – and wrongly interprets it to imply that God is not God, or that at the very least God is stupid.
Much of the time, though, the organizer will have a pretty good idea of what the community should be doing, and he will want to suggest, maneuver, and persuade the community toward that action. He will not ever seem to tell the community what to do; instead he will use loaded questions. (Page 91)
Every weakness of every proposed tactic is probed by questions. Eventually someone will suggest tactic Z, and, again through questions, its positive features emerge and it is decided on. Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less, even a Socrates. (Page 92)
The organizer knows that it is a human characteristic that someone who asks for help and gets it reacts not only with gratitude but with a subconscious hostility toward the one who helped him. It is a sort of psychic “original sin” because he feels that the one who helped him is always aware that if it hadn’t been for his help, he would still be a defeated nothing. (Page 93)
The above quote is a fascinating look into how Alinsky viewed those he was helping.
I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual….I remember discussing it with the then Catholic Chancellor. By then the argument was no longer limited to questions such as, “How much longer do you think the Catholic Church can hang on to this archaic notion and still survive?” I remember seeing five priests in the waiting room who wanted to see the chancellor, and knowing his contempt for each one of them, I said, “Look, I’ll prove to you that you really do believe in birth control even though you are making all kinds of noises against it,” and then I opened the door, saying, “Take a look out there. Can you look at them and tell me you oppose birth control?” (Page 94)
“…Samuel Adams, at the time when he was allegedly planning the Boston Massacre; he was quoted as saying that there ought to be no less than three or four killed so that we will have martyrs for the Revolution, but there must be no more than ten, because after you get beyond that number we no longer have martyrs but simply a sewage problem.” (Page 96)
Note: I have never heard the above story except for Alinsky’s book and one other book written in 1994 where the writer borrows the story from Alinsky almost verbatim.
If the organizer begins with an affirmation of his love for people, he promptly turns everyone off. If, on the other hand, he begins with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants, he is inside their experience and they accept him. (Page 98)
Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. (Page 99)
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him, as a “dangerous enemy”. The word “enemy” is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people, to identify him with the Have-Nots, but it is not enough to endow him with the special qualities that induce fear and thus give him the means to establish his own power against the establishment. Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith.” (Page 100)
The City Council of Churches, representing the Protestant churches, approached me and asked me if I would be available to help organize….I replied, then, that the churches had a right to invite us to organize their people in their neighborhoods, but that they had no right to speak for, let alone invite anyone into, the…community. I emphasized that we were not a colonial power like the churches who sent their missionaries everywhere whether they were invited or not. (Page 101)
The organizer’s job is to inseminate an invitation for himself, to agitate, introduce ideas, get people pregnant with hope and a desire for change and to identify you as the person most qualified for this purpose. Here the tool of the organizer, in the agitation leading to the invitation as well as the actual organization and education of the local leadership, is the use of the question, the Socratic method: ORGANIZER: Do you live over in that slummy building? ANSWER: Yeah. What about it? ORGANIZER: What the hell do you live there for?… (Page 103)
Note: Alinsky is advocating agitation because he believes the only morality is that which furthers taking from the Haves and giving to the Have Nots.
Something else that comes with experience is the knowledge that the resolution of a particular problem will bring on another problem. The organizer may know this, but he doesn’t mention it….He knows too that what we fight for now as matters of life and death will soon be forgotten, and changed situations will change desires and issues. (Page 106)
Organizing, one must be aware of the tremendous importance of understanding the part played by rationalization….On a mass basis it is the community residents’ and leadership’s justification for why they have not been able to do anything until the organizer appeared. It is primarily a subconscious feeling that the organizer is looking down on them, wondering why they did not have the intelligence, so to speak, and the insights, to realize that through organization and the securing of power they could have resolved many of the problems they lived with for these many years- why did they have to wait for him? With this going on in their minds they throw up a whole series of arguments against various organizational procedures, but they are not real arguments, simply attempts to justify the fact that they have not moved or organized in the past. (Page 109)
Remember that according to Alinsky’s method of programming, the organizer is trying to create a subjective reality and experiences for those being led by projecting emotions onto past events in order to manipulate a desired response. If the people push back against a plan, Alinsky is saying the organizer’s response should be in reference to the people’s place of wounding and should belittle them, even if only in the organizer’s mind, so the organizer can push them into accepting the plan anyway.
The organizer’s job is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves….It is almost like taking a prize-fighter up the road to the championship – you have to very carefully and selectively pick his opponents, knowing full well that certain defeats would be demoralizing….An example occurred in the early days of Back of the Yards, the first community I attempted to organize….we staged a cinch fight. One of the major problems in Back of the Yards in those days was an extraordinarily high rate of infant mortality….about ten or fifteen years before I came to the neighborhood the Infant Welfare Society had been expelled….After checking it out, I found out that all we had to do to get Infant Welfare Society medical services back in to the neighborhood was to ask for it. However, I kept this information to myself. We called an emergency meeting, recommended we go in committee to the society’s offices and demand medical services. Our strategy was to prevent the officials from saying anything; to start banging on the desk and demanding that we get the services, never permitting them to interrupt us or make any statement. The only time we would let them talk was after we got through. With this careful indoctrination we stormed into the Infant Welfare Society downtown….All the time the poor woman was desperately trying to say, “Why of course you can have it. We’ll start immediately.” But she never had a chance to say anything and finally we ended up in a storm of “And we will not take ‘No’ for an answer!” At which point she said, “Well, I’ve been trying to tell you…” and I cut in, demanding, “Is it yes or is it no?” She said, “Well of course it’s yes.” I said, “That’s all we wanted to know.” And we stormed out of the place. All the way back to the Back of the Yards you could hear the members of the committee saying, “Well, that’s the way to get things done: you just tell them off and don’t give them a chance to say anything.”
In the quote above, Alinksy is arrogant and boastful about the way he is able to deceive members of the community and manipulate his followers.
…if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community. The first step in community organization is community disorganization….The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. (Page 116)
An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations….When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an “agitator” they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function- to agitate to the point of conflict. (Page 117)
Click here to continue on to Marxism, the heart of Community Organization: Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals Part 4
