Renewing our energies 2

Mother Teresa is supposed to have said: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

The book Made To Stick cites a research that tested her idea, and which confirmed that people give a bigger charitable contribution to a single person e.g. a poor African child with a name and a face, than to an abstract cause like poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the early days of community organizing or CO in the Philippines, we read something similar from Sol Alinsky. In his conflict-confrontation approach to organizing people for power, he said that the organizer should agitate people around “issues,” rather than “problems.”

So what’s the difference between an issue and a problem? Aren’t they the same?

Paraphrasing Alinsky, every issue is a problem, but not every problem is an issue. A problem becomes an issue when people think or feel that it affects them personally, and also that they can do something about it.

Correspondingly, he advises organizers not to agitate people around an abstract target, like “the unjust system.” Instead, “personalize” the target, and “polarize” the people against the target.

Activists from the religious and the radical traditions felt uncomfortable with the tactics advocated by Alinsky. After all, we believed that we need to change the system, and not just persons in power. Also, we sought to develop a sense of solidarity among the people we were organizing. We asked them to think of the interest of their groups and communities, rather than their personal and self-interest.

Still I couldn’t help but smile at one of Alinsky’s argument about self-interest. “When you look at a group picture that includes you, whose face do you look for?”

Later literature about the need to appeal to people’s self-interest use the acronym WIFM (What’s in it for me?) or WIIFY (What’s in it for you?).

The authors of Made To Stick comment that 1) Self-interest should not be narrowly defined as wealth and security, and 2) Self-interest cannot explain why soldiers serve in the armed forces. We can add also those who serve in guerilla armies.

They revisited the 1954 survey of Abraham Maslow who distilled existing research into what motivates people, and drew up this list of the desires and needs people want to fulfill:

Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort

Security: protection, safety, stability

Belonging: love, family, friends, affection

Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status

Learning: know, understand, mentally connect

Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance

Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experience

Transcendence: help others realize their potential

Their list is longer than what I have read in other articles about Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” And they reject the interpretation that these needs are arranged like a ladder, to be climbed rung by rung from the bottom (physical) to the top (transcendence).

They quip that in such a hierarchical arrangement of needs there is no place for “starving artists.” And while they concede that starving people would rather eat than transcend, they argue that various research has established that people pursue all these needs pretty much simultaneously.

I agree with this last point. That has been my personal experience and also my observation about people I have known through the years.

Hence my proposition that a sustainable spirituality (because more grounded) is based on 1) Recognition of many motives – multiple, but not mixed, and 2) Organization of our motives, but not in a hierarchy. Our many motives are not co-equal; some are more dominant, and “lead” the others, without subsuming them.

But I also add 3) Re-organization of our motives. Over time, some motives become more influential, compared to others. But not one goes away completely.

Looking back at the beginning of my social involvement, I was driven by a desire to write original Filipino theology, to be accepted by the other activists I admired, a sense of shame and even guilt at being privileged but not involved, etc. But at some point, I think that my “lead motive” was “righteous anger against injustice.” The language probably reflects the influence of my seminary studies into the prophetic tradition.

Many years later, starting sometime after 1986, I still feel agitated whenever I see injustice and oppression; the fire continues to burn. But I feel most fulfilled when I see and experience the development of grassroots leaders, especially those whom I have helped in some way. I still consider myself a political activist, but even more as an educator.

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