Pressure Points and Whistle Points
THE 9 PRESSURE POINTS
Five of the Pressure Points appear in the Cultural Triangle, three in the Political and one in the Economic. These nine points are the focal points upon which the New Social Vehicle will be built. The NSV is being hammered out:
- in Inclusive Mythology, creating a story, a new mythology, a way of talking about what it is to be a human being in society;
- through Formal Methods, discovering a new form of social responsibility and new modes of effective action;
- in Community Groupings, where people are redoing local community and giving new significance to engagement in the local;
- in Basic Roles, where people are engaged in society;
- in Knowledge Access, giving people the instruments needed to make decisions;
- in Deliberative Systems, where people are inventing new ways of making decisions, of forming consensus, of creating grassroots polity.;
- in Bureaucratic Systems, where people are looking for ways to act effectively in society, where they are breaking through the morass of bureaucracy.
It is being built wherever people are doing, planning and daring to anticipate the future.
~~ From the Social Demonstration and the Pressure Points
THE 9 WHISTLEPOINTS
I want to deal with the whole issue of the social avalanche. . . . We came up with the image that we were looking for the place you could stand in a field of snow and blow a whistle to unleash an avalanche. . . . In the midst of resurgence there is a weighty sense of being unable to move. How do you name the sign which will release motion?
We pushed one step farther, however’ and came up with the whistle points. These are the universal dynamics of practical social change. They are the nine isnesses without which society never has and never will be changed. The myth, the action, the order force, the cell force, the guild force and then the four systems: demonstration, interchange, impact and training are these nine whistle points.
THE SHAFTER COW
At exactly 0513, the 18th of April, 1906, a cow was standing at 123 degrees 20′ West longitude, 37° 20′ North latitude — somewhere between the main barn and the milking shed on the old Shafter Ranch in California, minding her own business. Suddenly, the earth shook, the skies trembled, and when it was all over, there was nothing showing of the cow above ground but a bit of her tail sticking up. For the student of change, the Shafter cow is a sort of symbol of our times. She stood quietly enough, thinking such gentle thoughts as cows are likely to have, while huge forces outside her ken built up all around her and within a minute — discharged it all at once in a great movement that changed the configuration of the earth, and destroyed a city, and swallowed her up. And that’s what we are going to talk about now; how, if we do not learn to understand and guide the great forces of change at work on our world today, we may find ourselves like the Shafter cow, swallowed up by vast upheavals in our way of life — quite early some morning.
— “Dynamics of change” Kaiser Aluminum News