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Institutions now, and the needed change
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Organizations in the old pattern make nearly all of their members passive, only acting in some minimal role, which is far less than they are capable of. A small executive committee, by whatever name, is highly active and deplores (sometimes sincerely) the apathy of the members. Why don't more people come to church? How can we get the patients in the mental hospital into activities instead of sitting around? The teacher wonders how to " motivate" the students. Chain stores have suggestion boxes for the customers to participate in running the store. Political parties, even new movements, wonder how to get more people moving, the people whose interests they seek to advance.
It is clear now, however, that organizational structure and roles make members passive. The goings-on don't enable the members to live there, rather they must come and sit quiet and listen, or behave in some appropriate routine. There is no living process issuing into words or action, to be lived there.
The question is not that the members don't participate in " the decisions", so-called. If they were asked whether the meeting should be on Monday or Tuesday, or whether this speaker should be invited or that one, things would be no better. Hospitals will not change if the patients are permitted to decide if the TV is to be turned off at 10 or at 11. School isn't better if the kids are asked what they're interested in, and then made to prostitute that into writing a paper on it.
The question is how to make an organizational structure in which one can live. For this to be true, the activities the structure offers have to have something to do with people’s living. It isn't enough that they make decisions about what the organization should do, if that is quite distant from their life needs, and from what must next happen for them in living. Sitting and listening to speakers is not usually one’s next life step, nor is deciding which speakers should come. Neither are political abstractions, no matter how incisive, an immediate life step for anyone. Similarly, " work" while it pays and enables us to eat, is alienating for most people; what they do and make at work is not directly from or about their living. And even where the work is with people, and its very essence could be a living together, the roles so structure the work that there are narrow and forced limits and false fronts, behind which one must remain non-living.
Because of this, many people today can find no role that they can live in, and yet many of these old roles contain necessary dimensions of living. One doesn't want to go to school, but one wants learning. One can't stand it in church, but one may feel infinity. One doesn't want to work in agencies, but loves to relate to kids and work with them when they can be met on the street. One feels politics as a dimension of oneself without which one is truncated and locked into oneself, but no available action makes sense. One wants love and work, but the patterns for them don’t do that which love and work should - they leave us alone within relationships, and without fruit despite much labor. All these are dimensions of anyone’s living, and so these roles must change to lead these dimensions of people’s living forward, instead of being separated from that. How? We have a few leads.
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First of all, within an old type institution, the roles are divided, the division of labor assigns some people some role, others another role. People who could do all of these things are supposed to settle for just one. Now everyone may not be able to do each thing, but most people can do more than one. There is a way to let everyone do everything they wish and can.
Secondly, the institutions are divided from one another, so that one is a school and another a church, and a third is a work place. That way only just certain things are fitting in each place, and living cannot go on anywhere, because living involves more than these.
But you get to the same wish to combine and tear down the walls also on another road: what would be a really good school? It would not be the kids sitting and being told about something (by someone who hasn’t actually seen it, either). There would be a chance to see directly what you are supposed to learn, and to relate to people who are doing it. So, you would have to have the adults who are doing it, and whatever they’d be doing would make the place not just a school.
What is the worst thing about a mental hospital? The isolation of the people in there from life, from work, from other people not just then troubled. To have such other people present would mean having the patients in a place that wasn’t just a hospital.
In a summer camp for teenagers, the problem was that the kids liked none of the activities very much. Everybody was freaked out and depressed and nothing appealed. There was only one trip they took that they liked, that was to the old age home five miles away. Kids kept on getting permission to go back there and talk more with the old people.
How would you run a good old people’s home? Obviously by making it a summer camp for teenagers so the old people would have someone to talk to, and some impact and function in fresh living now happening.
So, to do any of these institutional functions well, you need more than just that one function. No person is really living forward by just one role. You'd have to be a doctor and a preacher and a farmer and a mechanic and a politician. These each take a lot of knowledge and experience, so that is obviously impossible, but let me talk a little longer about needing that.
People have a political and social dimension to them, and if they can't sense it something is missing for them. But this doesn’t mean they need the sort of thing that goes on in political groups, it means that to change and build a world is something that’s part of a person. To do that isn't only to take part in some social action we think may be effective (but it is that too), it is really to build the world, to act in a lot of ways to do that: to be able to organize some space around ourselves, to express ourselves into the way things are built around us, to build structures and institutions (not just come into them as they are already fixed forever), to help build a community and society.
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Human beings are world-builders, the forms of space, sound, movement and interaction are the forms by which living is carried forward and into further living, because living is very largely interacting with others, with nature, with sound, and space and things that become made under our hands.
So both we, and our institutions, need to open the divisions between the different functions and to have more than one thing go on in one place. And we need it so that people make new patterns and structures, not merely get slotted into them. This is again the process of making forms from sentient life feeling, forms that carry it forward so that a further making can ensue from sensing into oneself. Life is structuring, not just structure.
But what now is a different way of being a church or a school or a hospital or a work place, so that some of the above can begin to go on there? So that living can be carried forward there?
Of course, there have to be some people who know, or can come to know, how to do some of the specifics you need, but if you have that, then there can be other people doing other things. It's vital that those who know something are willing to share that knowledge with anybody that wants to try it (and also, that not everybody be required to learn it - see later). It's true that you might have to limit something somewhere, but maybe not along the old lines of doing only this and not anything else, or having only people who are specialized in that and nothing else, only doing it in one place and nowhere else, and so on.
It is true that you aren't likely to have every function, but even four or five important ones are very different together, than separated. Room can be made for the living of the people there. But it wouldn't be only adding these slots one next to the other, it would be to let them all happen in that different way in which people are able to live forward in them.
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