## Metadata - Author: [[Saul Alinsky]] - Full Title: Rules for Radicals - Category: #books ## Highlights - In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=332)) - It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where “reconciliation” means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation; a world of religious institutions that have, in the main, come to support and justify the status quo so that today organized religion is materially solvent and spiritually bankrupt. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=334)) - They insist on a minimum of three aces before playing a hand in the poker game of revolution. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=412)) - They function as blankets whenever possible smothering sparks of dissension that promise to flare up into the fire of action. ([Location 421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=421)) - History is a relay of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by the revolutionary group until this group becomes an establishment, and then quietly the torch is put down to wait until a new revolutionary group picks it up for the next leg of the run. ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=455)) - A major revolution to be won in the immediate future is the dissipation of man’s illusion that his own welfare can be separate from that of all others. As long as man is shackled to this myth, so long will the human spirit languish. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=457)) - The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=508)) - The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=512)) - The opposition’s means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. ([Location 564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=564)) - It’s true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. ([Location 629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=629)) - There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. ([Location 634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=634)) - The same means employed with victory seemingly assured may be defined as immoral, whereas if it had been used in desperate circumstances to avert defeat, the question of morality would never arise. In short, ethics are determined by whether one is losing or winning. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=636)) - It has been pointed out that Gandhi, who was born in 1869, never saw or understood totalitarianism and defined his opposition completely in terms of the character of the British government and what it represented. George Orwell, in his essay Reflection on Gandhi, made some pertinent observations on this point: “… He believed in “arousing the world,” which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly it is impossible, not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.” ([Location 720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=720)) - In organizing, the major negative in the situation has to be converted into the leading positive. ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=727)) - In short, knowing that one could not expect violent action from this large and torpid mass, Gandhi organized the inertia: he gave it a goal so that it became purposeful. Their wide familiarity with Dharma made passive resistance no stranger to the Hindustani. To oversimplify, what Gandhi did was to say, “Look, you are all sitting there anyway—so instead of sitting there, why don’t you sit over here and while you’re sitting, say ‘Independence Now!’” ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=728)) - The Haves usually establish laws and judges devoted to maintaining the status quo; since any effective means of changing the status quo are usually illegal and/or unethical in the eyes of the establishment, Have-Nots, from the beginning of time, have been compelled to appeal to “a law higher than man-made law.” ([Location 734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=734)) - Eight months after securing independence, the Indian National Congress outlawed passive resistance and made it a crime. It was one thing for them to use the means of passive resistance against the previous Haves, but now in power they were going to ensure that this means would not be used against them! ([Location 738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=738)) - Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means. Machiavelli’s blindness to the necessity for moral clothing to all acts and motives—he said “politics has no relation to morals”—was his major weakness. ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=747)) - All effective actions require the passport of morality. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=752)) - In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that “Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.” ([Location 756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=756)) - A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be “compromise.” ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=961)) - The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The leader is driven by the desire for power, while the organizer is driven by the desire to create. ([Location 976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=976)) - An infection of egotism would make it impossible to respect the dignity of individuals, to understand people, or to strive to develop the other elements that make up the ideal organizer. Egotism is mainly a defensive reaction of feelings of personal inadequacy—ego is a positive conviction and belief in one’s ability, with no need for egotistical behavior. ([Location 978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=978)) - Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. ([Location 995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=995)) - The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tensions, the hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1019)) - If one thinks of an organizer as a highly imaginative and creative architect and engineer then the best we have been able to train on the job were skilled plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, all essential to the building and maintenance of their community structure but incapable of going elsewhere to design and execute a new structure in a new community. ([Location 1028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1028)) - Labor union organizers turned out to be poor community organizers. Their experience was tied to a pattern of fixed points, whether it was definite demands on wages, pensions, vacation periods, or other working conditions, and all of this was anchored into particular contract dates. Once the issues were settled and a contract signed, the years before the next contract negotiation held only grievance meetings about charges on contract violations by either side. Mass organization is a different animal, it is not housebroken. There are no fixed chronological points or definite issues. The demands are always changing; the situation is fluid and ever-shifting; and many of the goals are not in concrete terms of dollars and hours but are psychological and constantly changing, like “such stuff as dreams are made on.” I have seen labor organizers almost out of their minds from the community organization scene. ([Location 1034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1034)) - Among the organizers I trained and failed with, there were some who memorized the words and the related experiences and concepts. Listening to them was like listening to a tape playing back my presentation word for word. Clearly there was little understanding; clearly, they could not do more than elementary organization. The problem with so many of them was and is their failure to understand that a statement of a specific situation is significant only in its relationship to and its illumination of a general concept. Instead they see the specific action as a terminal point. They find it difficult to grasp the fact that no situation ever repeats itself, that no tactic can be precisely the same. ([Location 1049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1049)) - All of us have faults. I know that in a community, working as an organizer, I have unlimited patience in talking to and listening to the local residents. Any organizer must have this patience. But among my faults is that in a teaching position at the training institute or at conferences I become an intellectual snob with unimaginative, limited students, impatient, bored, and inexcusably rude. ([Location 1063](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1063)) - I have improvised teaching approaches. For example, knowing that one can only communicate and understand in terms of one’s experience, we had to construct experience for our students. Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1066)) - There is meaning to that cliché, “We learn from experience.” Our job was to shovel those happenings back into the student’s system so he could digest them into experience. During a seminar I would say, “Life is the expectation of the unexpected—the things you worry about rarely happen. Something new, the unexpected, will usually come in from outside the ball park. You’re all nodding as if you understand but you really don’t. What I’ve said are just words to you. I want you to go to your private cubbyholes and think for the next four hours. Try to remember all the things you worried about during the last years and whether they ever happened or what did happen—and then well talk about it.” ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1070)) - The area of experience and communication is fundamental to the organizer. An organizer can communicate only within the areas of experience of his audience; otherwise there is no communication. The organizer, in his constant hunt for patterns, universalities, and meaning, is always building up a body of experience. Through his imagination he is constantly moving in on the happenings of others, identifying with them and extracting their happenings into his own mental digestive system and thereby accumulating more experience. It is essential for communication that he know of their experiences. Since one can communicate only through the experiences of the other, it becomes clear that the organizer begins to develop an abnormally large body of experience. ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1080)) - Curiosity. What makes an organizer organize? He is driven by a compulsive curiosity that knows no limits. Warning clichés such as “curiosity killed a cat” are meaningless to him, for life is for him a search for a pattern, for similarities in seeming differences, for differences in seeming similarities, for an order in the chaos about us, for a meaning to the life around him and its relationship to his own life—and the search never ends. He goes forth with the question as his mark, and suspects that there are no answers, only further questions. The organizer becomes a carrier of the contagion of curiosity, for a people asking “why” are beginning to rebel. The questioning of the hitherto accepted ways and values is the reformation stage that precedes and is so essential to the revolution. ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1111)) - Actually, Socrates was an organizer. The function of an organizer is to raise questions that agitate, that break through the accepted pattern. Socrates, with his goal of “know thyself,” was raising the internal questions within the individual that are so essential for the revolution which is external to the individual. So Socrates was carrying out the first stage of making revolutionaries. If he had been permitted to continue raising questions about the meaning of life, to examine life and refuse the conventional values, the internal revolution would soon have moved out into the political arena. Those who tried him and sentenced him to death knew what they were doing. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1119)) - Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, “Is this true?” “Just because this has always been the way, is this the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?” To the questioner nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search for ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest. As with all life, this is a paradox, for his irreverence is rooted in a deep reverence for the enigma of life, and an incessant search for its meaning. It could be argued that reverence for others, for their freedom from injustice, poverty, ignorance, exploitation, discrimination, disease, war, hate, and fear, is not a necessary quality in a successful organizer. All I can say is that such reverence is a quality I would have to see in anyone I would undertake to teach. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1124)) - Imagination is the inevitable partner of irreverence and curiosity. How can one be curious without being imaginative? ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1131)) - There was a time when I believed that the basic quality that an organizer needed was a deep sense of anger against injustice and that this was the prime motivation that kept him going. I now know that it is something else: this abnormal imagination that sweeps him into a close identification with mankind and projects him into its plight. He suffers with them and becomes angry at the injustice and begins to organize the rebellion. Clarence Darrow put it on more of a self-interest basis: “I had a vivid imagination. Not only could I put myself in the other person’s place, but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering, and the poor. Realizing their sorrows I tried to relieve them in order that I myself might be relieved.” Imagination is not only the fuel for the force that keeps organizers organizing, it is also the basis for effective tactics and action. The organizer knows that the real action is in the reaction of the opposition. To realistically appraise and anticipate the probable reactions of the enemy, he must be able to identify with them, too, in his imagination, and foresee their reactions to his actions. ([Location 1137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1137)) - The organizer, searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. One can change a few lines in any Greek tragedy and it becomes a comedy, and vice versa. Knowing that contradictions are the signposts of progress he is ever on the alert for contradictions. A sense of humor helps him identify and make sense out of them. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline or organization. I now begin to understand what I stated somewhat intuitively in Reveille for Radicals almost twenty years ago, that “the organizer in order to be part of all can be part of none.” ([Location 1147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1147)) - Much of an organizer’s daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with “What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The hell with it, I quit.” What keeps him going is a blurred vision of a great… ([Location 1157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1157)) - The organizer must be well organized himself so he can be comfortable in a disorganized situation, rational in a sea of irrationalities. It is vital that he be able to accept and work with irrationalities for the purpose of change. With very rare exceptions, the right things are done for the wrong reasons. It is futile to demand that men do the right thing for the right reason—this is a fight with a windmill. The organizer should know and accept that the right reason is only introduced as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved, although it may have been achieved for the wrong reason—therefore he should search for and use… ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1161)) - The organizer in his way of life, with his curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, distrust of dogma, his self-organization, his understanding of the irrationality of much of human behavior, becomes a flexible personality, not a rigid structure that breaks when something unexpected happens. Having his own identity, he has no need for the security of an ideology or a panacea. He knows that life is a quest for uncertainty; that the only certain fact of life is uncertainty; and he can live with it. He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity. Because of these qualities he is unlikely to disintegrate into cynicism and disillusionment, for he does not depend on illusion. ([Location 1206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1206)) - This is the basic difference between the leader and the organizer. The leader goes on to build power to fulfill his desires, to hold and wield the power for purposes both social and personal. He wants power himself. The organizer finds his goal in creation of power for others to use. ([Location 1216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1216)) - These qualities are present in any free, creative person, whether an educator, or in the arts, or in any part of life. In “Adam Smith’s” The Money Game, the characteristics of the desirable fund manager are described: It is personal intuition, sensing patterns of behavior. There is always something unknown, un-discerned…. You can’t just graduate an analyst into managing funds. What is it the good managers have? It’s a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer. One would think that this was a description of an organizer but in everything creative, whether it is organizing a mutual fund or a mutual society, one is on the hunt for these qualities. Why one becomes an organizer instead of something else is, I suspect, due to a difference of degree of intensity of specific elements or relationships between them—or accident. ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1218)) - 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. The episode between Moses and God, when the Jews had begun to worship the Golden Calf,* is revealing. 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—in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication. ([Location 1329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1329)) - Communication on a general basis without being fractured into the specifics of experience becomes rhetoric and it carries a very limited meaning. It is the difference between being informed of the death of a quarter of a million people—which becomes a statistic—or the death of one or two close friends or loved ones or members of one’s family. In the latter it becomes the full emotional impact of the finality of tragedy. ([Location 1412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1412)) - It should be obvious by now that communication occurs concretely, by means of one’s specific experience. General theories become meaningful only when one has absorbed and understood the specific constituents and then related them back to a general concept. Unless this is done, the specifics become nothing more than a string of interesting anecdotes. That is the world as it is in communication. ([Location 1437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1437)) - People can make judgments only on the basis of their own experiences. And the question in their minds is, “If we were in the organizer’s position, would we do what he is doing and if so, why?” Until they have an answer that is at least somewhat acceptable they find it difficult to understand and accept the organizer. ([Location 1460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1460)) - Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together. ([Location 1670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1670)) - Power is the reason for being of organizations. When people agree on certain religious ideas and want the power to propagate their faith, they organize and call it a church. When people agree on certain political ideas and want the power to put them into practice, they organize and call it a political party. The same reason holds across the board. Power and organization are one and the same. ([Location 1671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1671)) - There is no such animal as a disorganized community. It is a contradiction in terms to use the two words “disorganization” and “community” together: the word community itself means an organized, communal life; people living in an organized fashion. ([Location 1701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1701)) - The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displaced by new patterns that provide the opportunities and means for citizen participation. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new. ([Location 1710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1710)) - To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced. ([Location 1744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1744)) - The simple fact is that in any community, regardless of how poor, people may have serious problems—but they do not have issues, they have a bad scene. An issue is something you can do something about, but as long as you feel powerless and unable to do anything about it, all you have is a bad scene. The people resign themselves to a rationalization: it’s that kind of world, it’s a crumby world, we didn’t ask to come into it but we are stuck with it and all we can do is hope that something happens somewhere, somehow, sometime. This is what is usually taken as apathy, what we discussed earlier—that policy follows power. Through action, persuasion, and communication the organizer makes it clear that organization will give them the power, the ability, the strength, the force to be able to do something about these particular problems. It is then that a bad scene begins to break up into specific issues, because now the people can do something about it. What the organizer does is convert the plight into a problem. The question is whether they do it this way or that way or whether they do all of it or part of it. But now you have issues. ([Location 1747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1747)) - A single issue is a fatal strait jacket that will stifle the life of an organization. Furthermore, a single issue drastically limits your appeal, where multiple issues would draw in the many potential members essential to the building of a broad, mass-based organization. Each person has a hierarchy of desires or values; he may be sympathetic to your single issue but not concerned enough about that particular one to work and fight for it. Many issues mean many members. Communities are not economic organizations like labor unions, with specific economic issues; they are as complex as life itself. ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1759)) - To organize a community you must understand that in a highly mobile, urbanized society the word “community” means community of interests, not physical community. ([Location 1764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1764)) - Through all this the constant guiding star of the organizer is in those words, “The dignity of the individual.” Working with this compass, he soon discovers many axioms of effective organization. If you respect the dignity of the individual you are working with, then his desires, not yours; his values, not yours; his ways of working and fighting, not yours; his choice of leadership, not yours; his programs, not yours, are important and must be followed; except if his programs violate the high values of a free and open society. For example, take the question, “What if the program of the local people offends the rights of other groups, for reasons of color, religion, economic status, or politics? Should this program be accepted just because it is their program?” The answer is categorically no. Always remember that “the guiding star is ‘the dignity of the individual.’” This is the purpose of the program. Obviously any program that opposes people because of race, religion, creed, or economic status, is the antithesis of the fundamental dignity of the individual. ([Location 1785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1785)) - The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.” ([Location 1873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1873)) - Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.” By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck. In these times of urbanization, complex metropolitan governments, the complexities of major interlocked corporations, and the interlocking of political life between cities and counties and metropolitan authorities, the problem that threatens to loom more and more is that of identifying the enemy. Obviously there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks. One big problem is a constant shifting of responsibility from one jurisdiction to another—individuals and bureaus one after another disclaim responsibility for particular conditions, attributing the authority for any change to some other force. ([Location 1875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=1875)) - The one problem that the revolutionary cannot cope with by himself is that he must now and then have an opportunity to reflect and synthesize his thoughts. To gain that privacy in which he can try to make sense out of what he is doing, why he is doing it, where he is going, what has been wrong with what he has done, what he should have done and above all to see the relationships of all the episodes and acts as they tie in to a general pattern, the most convenient and accessible solution is jail. It is here that he begins to develop a philosophy. It is here that he begins to shape long-term goals, intermediate goals, and a self-analysis of tactics as tied to his own personality. It is here that he is emancipated from the slavery of action wherein he was compelled to think from act to act. Now he can look at the totality of his actions and the reactions of the enemy from a fairly detached position. ([Location 2206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=2206)) - Accident, unpredictable reactions to your own actions, necessity, and improvisation dictate the direction and nature of tactics. Then, analytical logic is required to appraise where you are, what you can do next, the risks and hopes that you can look forward to. It is this analysis that protects you from being a blind prisoner of the tactic and the accidents that accompany it. But I cannot overemphasize that the tactic itself comes out of the free flow of action and reaction, and requires on the part of the organizer an easy acceptance of apparent disorganization. ([Location 2318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=2318)) - Recently I was at a luncheon meeting with a number of presidents of major corporations where one of them expressed his fear that I saw things only in terms of power rather than from the point of view of good will and reason. I replied that when he and his corporation approached other corporations in terms of reason, good will, and cooperation, instead of going for the jugular, that would be the day that I would be happy to pursue the conversation. The subject was dropped. ([Location 2449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=2449)) - The middle classes are numb, bewildered, scared into silence. They don’t know what, if anything, they can do. This is the job for today’s radical—to fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame to fight. To say, “You cannot cop out as have many of my generation!” “You cannot turn away—look at it—let us change it together!” “Look at us. We are your children. Let us not abandon each other for then we are all lost. Together we can change it for what we want. Let’s start here and there—let’s go!” It is a job first of bringing hope and doing what every organizer must do with all people, all classes, places, and times—communicate the means or tactics whereby the people can feel that they have the power to do this and that and on. To a great extent the middle class of today feels more defeated and lost than do our poor. So you return to the suburban scene of your middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs. The job is to search out the leaders in these various activities, identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle-class life. Tactics must begin within the experience of the middle class, accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off. The opposition’s reactions will provide the “education” or radicalization of the middle class. It does it every time. Tactics here, as already described, will develop in the flow of action and reaction. ([Location 2702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=2702)) - The human cry of the second revolution is one for a meaning, a purpose for life—a cause to live for and if need be die for. Tom Paine’s words, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” are more relevant to Part II of the American Revolution than the beginning. This is literally the revolution of the soul. The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society. Our way of life is symbolized to the world by the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it. ([Location 2728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003T0G9GM&location=2728))