Community and Safety in a Time of Crisis
Remnant Review (Dec. 31, 2010)
It is the end of another year. This is the time of year when people are tempted to make New Year's resolutions. I have never been a great fan of New Year's resolutions. They are too easily broken; we all know this, and yet we are tempted to make such resolutions on the final day of the year. Let me encourage you not to do so. You do not need any additional disappointments for next year. However, if you decide to ignore my advice, be sure that your resolution is accompanied by a detailed, step-by-step plan of action, and also be sure that you follow up on this plan of action at least monthly until the final day of 2011.
In this issue, I am going to talk about one of the neglected aspects of most books on personal success. Because these books focus on individual success, they generally focus on various techniques of self-help and self-improvement. They focus on the individual. They help people get from here to there in their lives. All of this is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We are not lone wolves. We are not autonomous. We rely on our environment to provide us with whatever we need to achieve our goals. The most effective way to achieve our goals is through the division of labor. The social order produced by division of labor enables us to achieve far greater output for our inputs of scarce economic resources. This is especially true of the most important resource: time.
In assessing my productivity over the last four decades, I regard the division of labor as the most important aspect of what I have been able to accomplish. If it were not for all the work that previous scholars expended on their articles and books, I would be flying blind today. Furthermore, if I had not been in close communication with a group of innovative theologians over the years, I do not think my 31-volume study, An Economic Commentary on the Bible, would have been possible. At the age of 18, I decided that I wanted to write a definitive book on Christian economics. If I had not been in close communication with other individuals who were committed to extending the idea of the Bible's relevance to various academic topics, I do not think I could have written as much as I have written.
At a conference in the fall of 1980, I spoke with a retired Army general. His name was Albion Knight. He had been a strategist with NATO. He told me that every officer ought to develop personal contacts with at least four other men who are reliable. He told me that a successful career in the military depends heavily on the existence of such an informal group.
I have thought about this for 30 years. It is very difficult for anyone to locate four other individuals of impeccable reliability who will come to his defense. There are not many competent people that we come across in life, and of those competent people, most of them have other commitments, other responsibilities, and not much free time.
It takes time to develop personal contacts, and most people do not systematically invest the time required to establish and maintain these contacts. As a result, when people get into a major jam, they find that they are on their own. This is the curse of pretended autonomy.
Because Americans tend to move several times in their lives, and because they change occupations several times, they find it difficult to establish and maintain close personal relationships with their peers. The reason is, their peer group keeps changing. The people we have developed relationships with in the past are not part of our new social environment. While it is possible for social networking to maintain these relationships, most people have not yet made the adjustment to the new digital reality. There is no doubt in my mind that the rapid success of social networking has come as a result of the breakdown of occupational and geographical stability in most people's lives. Historically, people established close relationships with their neighbors, in the 20th century, they established close relationships at work. They established relationships in their churches and civic associations. But all these require specific steps to establish anything like a permanent relationship. These are not low-budget endeavors.
It is easy over the years for people to drift apart. It may be easier to maintain relationships than it
was five years ago. It remains true that most of us cannot identify four other people we can trust
implicitly to come to our defense in a crisis. We have family connections, but that is generally the
limit.
Several years ago, I was at a conference organized by one of the men who organized that 1980 conference where I spoke with General Knight. I asked him in the question-and-answer period if he had four other people whom he could trust to take over his organization if he died. He said that he had family members he trusted. When I asked him if there were any outside the family, he evaded the question. It was obvious to me that his network was limited to his family, yet he has been a political operative in the conservative movement for over four decades. He has his own organization, and he has a wide network of associates. Yet it was obvious that he did not have sufficient trust in anyone outside his family.
The problem that he faced and still faces is the problem of succession. Who will inherit his organization? Will it be one of his family members? None of them works for his organization. They have their own projects and their own successes. They are not dependent upon him for employment, and they have not specialized in the same areas that he has specialized in over the last four decades. Who is the most likely person to inherit his operation? I have no idea who that person might be. I believe that it is likely that the organization will not survive his death by more than five years.
This is common to most ideological organizations. Either they do not survive, or else the people
who come into power as successors do not maintain the same commitment that the founder
maintained. The most obvious example in the conservative movement was the billionaire oilman,
J. Howard Pew. His organization was captured within a couple of years by people who did not
share his religious views, his political views, or his economic views. His enormous wealth
became the capital base that has supported projects that he would have rejected almost
automatically.
But the problem is more than the question of succession. The more important problem during a man's lifetime is the interaction that he needs in order to pursue his goals efficiently. When he has few people who understand what he is attempting to accomplish, he has to bootstrap his organization and his work with his own money, time, vision, and effort. This is generally necessary to make major contributions that change the opinions of large numbers of people. Committees are not suited to changing people's minds. Committees are better suited to providing warnings, raising money, providing a legal cover for nonprofit organizations, and providing encouragement to the pioneer who is involved in some path-breaking development. In other words, in a multitude of counselors there is safety.
The problem is, individuals who are involved in developing new, essentially revolutionary ideas find themselves isolated, precisely because their ideas are so revolutionary. There is also the problem, once described by an ecclesiastical pioneer I knew: bright lights attract large bugs. The kind of people who are attracted to those pioneers who launch revolutionary ideological moments tend to be unreliable. They come and go with no apparent pattern.
I have seen this over and over, not merely in my own organizations, but others' organizations. The bright fellow comes along, professes complete commitment to the vision of the founder, gets involved in some aspect of work, and then departs, sometimes with the mailing list. This is not an exception. It is a pattern that goes back at least to the 12 disciples recruited by Jesus. There was a ringer in the group. In fact, Jesus had greater success in attracting committed people who stayed with the program than any religious leader in history.
Because so many would-be hot-shots are attracted to an innovator -- people who are looking for support, either financially or emotionally -- the leader needs to be suspicious about motivations of those who are attracted to him. Some of the people will have fine motivations, but there will always be a percentage of individuals who are pursuing their own agendas. They come on board for reasons other than the stated reasons of the operation. They seem to be committed, but they are committed mainly to their own agendas.
Over the years, I have found that the crucial personal characteristic that I should have used to screen disciples is hard work. Individuals who have achieved a great deal on their own, because they put in a sufficient amount of time to achieve personal excellence, are generally more reliable than those people who were not focused, who have hopped from project to project, commitment to commitment. The person who accepts responsibility and then steadfastly sticks to the project until he finishes it is the kind of person who can make an organization successful. Sometimes we call these people Steady Eddies. That is a good description. A man who invests long hours, year after year, in order to strengthen an organization or movement is the backbone of that organization or movement. The cheerleaders come and go. They are there for as long as they remain excited. But when the road gets bumpy, they depart.
I encourage innovative people to make long-term plans on the assumption that only a handful of individuals will ever commit their lives to the vision of the founder. There are too many people with hidden agendas. It is rare for anyone to commit his life to another person's agenda. We should not expect this.
In order to establish a lifelong relationship with reliable people, we must commit to those people.
This does not mean we need to commit to their agendas. It does mean we can trust them in an
emergency to back us up when we need support. If churches would provide this on a consistent
basis, they would be much stronger organizations. But people hop from church to church, and
pastors come and go. There was a time when churches commanded respect and sacrificial service
from members, not based on any hierarchical chain of command, but based on a sense of loyalty
to the organization. That kind of loyalty has departed in our generation.
This is why I think it is important for individuals to go out of their way to establish personal relationships with small, committed groups in their community. This is why individuals should gain the reputation of being dedicated servants and reliable performers in those organizations to which they have committed their time. People do not commit their lives to organizations in the modern world. This is one of the great weaknesses of the modern world. Individuals do not know where to expect steady work, and they are therefore less willing to make major commitments and take major risks. They know that, if they fail, they will fail by themselves. Most people want a sense of support from others in their social circles. Not many people gain such support in our generation.
I did prison ministry work. The organization I worked with, Kairos, got prisoners to attend a weekly meeting. At the meetings, they were divided into small groups of no more than six men. They were supposed to meet with these same men each week. The goal was to create a sense of trust among a relatively small group of individuals. In a way, this was comparable to what General Knight told me in 1980. These six men gained trust in each other over a period of time.
Without a small group of men that a prisoner could rely on, he was left on his own. This is why the system of gangs exists in most prisons. Nobody wants to be on his own. The gang provides a system of leadership and mutual support that these men do not have unless they are members of some form of religious organization. The Moslems also recruit heavily in American prisons, and they offer the same kind of mutual support the gangs offer and the Christian ministries ought to offer.
What we see in prison is not so common outside of prison. Individuals outside of prison do not have the same sense of vulnerability that inmates have, especially in a maximum-security prison. Their lives are on the line, and they know this. Without mutual support, they become the prey of ruthless predators. So, as a means of self-defense, they reach out to other individuals who commit themselves to the defense of members of the group.
An example of this took place at the maximum-security prison where I visited. The year before I got involved with the ministry, one of the attendees made a public statement in front of the group after a three-day session. He announced that a gang had sent him to the meeting in order to execute a former gang member who had joined Kairos. That gang member had left the gang, breaking his oath. The man making this statement then said that he was now convinced that he should leave the gang, because he also wanted to become a regular participant in the ministry. He said that he expected that someone from the gang would now be assigned the task of executing him. The man was a Mexican-American. At that point, the toughest member of the ministry, who had been a leader of the Aryan Nation gang, told him: "We will cover your back."
Outside of prison, very few individuals in modern society have the same sense of vulnerability. They have not had the same motivation a prisoner does to seek out other people who will be there in a crisis if he should find himself under attack in some way. Without a sense of vulnerability, individuals are tempted to believe that they can operate autonomously and still be successful. But what most people find in life is that this commitment to autonomy eventually backfires. They find themselves in a situation in which their skills, background, money, and other resources are insufficient to provide them with the covering that they need.
This is especially the case on the job. Because people do not work for the same company for 30 years or 40 years, they do not develop the kinds of personal contacts that earlier generations of workers knew that they needed in order to maintain their productivity. That rarely exists today, except in military organizations, criminal conspiracies, fanatical religious groups, and revolutionary organizations. This sense of camaraderie may still exist on the factory floor, but it rarely exists in senior management. There are too many people who are trying to advance their own careers by climbing over the bodies of their colleagues.
I have said that the development of a hard-core group of reliable associates requires a considerable investment. It is an investment mainly of time, but also personal interest in the others. If people are not mutually committed to some broader vision, though not necessarily a particular agenda in terms of that vision, then they are unlikely to cooperate extensively over a long period of time. Individuals are short of time. They are also short on trust. It takes time for a wise person to develop trust in another person. Without this trust, long-term mutual relationships are far less likely to develop. Trust usually takes years of interaction to develop, and in modern society, people do not have sufficient time to develop this trust.
One of the advantages that members of this site have is that they can interact with each other on the discussion forums. People who join this site share a general worldview. They do not trust the Federal government. They are committed to an idea: that the government has gotten too big. They find themselves alone in their own circle of friends, because most of the people they know have no sense of concern over the size of the Federal government. So, they feel isolated in their own social circles, and they are ready to interact with others on the forums.
This is why social networking is spreading so fast. What we cannot achieve on a face-to-face
basis, except possibly by Skype, we attempt to achieve digitally. There are not enough people
around us geographically who share our views, so we share our views with people around the
world. This communications system is spreading very fast. I think it is all to the good. It enables
us to reestablish contact with individuals who have scattered geographically to the four corners of
the earth.
One of the reasons why the government has grown so rapidly is that people see that the traditional social safety nets that existed around the world for thousands of years are being undermined by the mobility of the society. People were stuck with their families and neighbors, because it was too expensive to move. They developed personal relationships in their communities, because they had no other choice. This is not true in an urban society with inexpensive mobility. When it is inexpensive to move, more people move.
One of the reasons why we feel vulnerable in urban society is because we know that there are few people in our neighborhoods who know our names, let alone share our values. We have purchased our homes because we like the physical layout of the homes, or because we got good prices. We did not buy them because we knew the next door neighbors.
There are a few cities in which there are ethnic neighborhoods where people who sell their homes never advertise the fact publicly. Word gets out in the neighborhood that somebody is selling, and it is assumed that relatives or very close associates of the neighbors will be the only people to buy the home. This means that the seller will probably get a lower price for his home, because the Multiple Listing Service will not bring lots of potential buyers to visit the home. This is the price people pay for maintaining a local community. They are not after the greatest amount of money; they are after the preservation of the community, despite the fact that they may be leaving the community. They have a sense of loyalty to the community that transcends their desire to maximize their income from the sale of the house.
I recommend that you not make a New Year's resolution; nevertheless, it is wise to begin to develop personal contacts within your community, or within a civics organization prominent in the community, as a way for you to gain the reputation of being a reliable person who is committed to the community. Loyalty is a scarce resource today, and people who are loyal to their local communities are increasingly rare. People will move out because of the better job offer, or because of a nicer home being available at a good price, and the neighbors feel no sense of loss when they depart. That is because there is no sense of neighborhood anymore. Moving vans and families come and go.
This was not true when I was growing up. But it was becoming true, and the generation that started families after World War II was not able to maintain the degree of neighborliness that existed in small-town America prior to the war. Their children are even less able to maintain such neighborhoods. So, we no longer are aware of what we have lost, because it has been at least three generations since America lost it.
Neighborliness is a skill. It must be learned again. This is true of most social relationships with any degree of depth. The neighborhood skills that my grandparents possessed prior to World War I are no longer common. We must learn without direction from people who possess these skills; this is why, most of the time, we do not bother to develop these skills. It seems like a waste of time. Nevertheless, in a crisis, we will be forced to develop these skills, and develop them very rapidly. This is why an investment in neighborliness today is an important aspect of capital preservation in the future.
People worry about the gold they will have in a crisis, when they should be worrying about the neighborhood when the crisis hits. The stability of the neighborhood will be of greater value to them in a crisis than their collection of gold coins. In any case, the goal ought to be to be living in an environment in which we will not have to sell gold coins in order to maintain our lifestyles. Gold coins are for the rebuilding period. The coins are better spent after the crisis has passed than during the crisis, assuming you get through the crisis. Pay attention to what needs to be done to get through hard times with your capital intact. This means that you should make a special effort to establish personal relationships with ethically reliable people today, in preparation for what is coming.
I have repeatedly stressed that the best source of contacts is at church or in a civics organization. The emphasis of the organization should be on service. It is this emphasis on service that establishes the mindset of the members. It is the commitment to helping others that screens out those people who are self-interested more than they are committed to others. This attitude usually takes years to develop. It becomes part of the moral outlook of the individual. This is the kind of person that we ought to be working with, and at some point, we may find that he becomes part of that close inner circle of trustworthy associates. Within churches, there are always a few dedicated people who are known for their commitment to others. These people ought to be the ones we seek out to make friends with. These are people who, in a crisis, will be most likely to help us, and at the same time, will be most likely to join with us in helping others who are part of our larger circle of acquaintances.
In a period of crisis, power flows to those who exercise responsibility. This is a universally valid
principle. We might as well get used to the idea that we must gain responsibility, not so that we
can exercise autonomous power, but so that we can stand against the exercise of power by people whose
main goal in life is the attainment of power. When we read the famous Chapter 10 of Hayek's
Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top," we understand that it takes systematic
efforts in advance of a crisis to prepare for power-seekers who are more likely to show up during
the crisis. The attainment of power in a negative sense is legitimate. If your goal is to restrict the
use of power, then to be in a position of power during the crisis is a benefit for both you and the
community. If people will listen to you, because they trust you, because you have shown that you
are reliable, and you warn them not to assent to a transfer of power to the government in a time
of crisis, you will perform a great service to the community.
I am not in favor of making New Year's resolutions, but I am in favor of sitting down and outlining plans of action. The action that we all should consider is the development of a close circle of trusted individuals, especially local individuals, who will be reliable in times of trouble. Do you know individuals in your community, or your circle of acquaintances, who you would like to be associated with if things get tough? Write down their names. If you do not have anyone who is worth adding to the list, or if you do not even have the list, then you know where to start. You are going to have to develop personal contacts over the next year. You should not procrastinate.
Service organizations are a good place to begin, as I said. You should think about the kind of service that would be most useful to the community in a time of economic turmoil. Anything connected to the distribution of food to the poor is a good place to start. Anything connected with helping families where the head of the household has lost a job is another example. Churches sometimes have these ministries, and I would suggest that you begin here if you are a member of a church.