1999
Strategic Briefing for the Messiah
Based on professional insights from preemptive news and image management
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- Promote a wide variety of new initiatives,
clearly establishing their relationship to complementary approaches, especially
those that oppose them. Question assumptions regarding production of more
goods, concepts and people, or alternatively their incorporation or entrainment
by such initiatives.
Advantages: Highlights any implications of irresponsibility
on the part of "developers" or researchers -- and draws attention to longer-term
impacts and wider effects. Facilitates healthy social and environmental processes,
including their coexistence with some that may, if necessary, be seen as "outdated"
or "unproven". Reduces the possibility of undermining existing initiatives
with a track record of long-term sustainability, whilst avoiding premature
dependency on new and unproven processes. Dissociates the values of production
and reproduction and ensures understanding of their wider consequences. Counteracts
the marginalization of vulnerable initiatives, ensuring their coexistence
as part of the meme-pool of any emerging larger undertaking. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote exploration of new approaches
to working with challenging differences. Carefully establish their relationship
to those common understandings of reconciliation, harmony and agreement that
tend to be simpler, more widely understood, and less relevant to the wider
dimensions of a complex social crisis. Stress the importance of understanding
challenging new forms of peace and solidarity on the occasion of any
conflict between factions with intractable differences. Advise vigilance and
the need for urgent initiatives in support of those in fear.
Advantages: Stresses that the peace that people seek is not
viable or sustainable as a simplistic absence of violence for which most appeals
are usually made. Directs attention to the challenges to understanding of
any peace "which passeth all understanding" as opposed to simplistic focus
on education for tolerance. It effectively calls for understanding of the
higher dimensionality of any meaningful peace and consensual agreement. This
is not an easy strategy since it challenges the identity and assumptions of
both parties and consequently evokes patterns of defensiveness and denial
through which you will be condemned and rejected. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote understanding of values and
how appeals to them can be distorted and abused. Clarify conditions under
which appeals to apparently constructive values may become inappropriate,
and those under which apparently destructive values may become appropriate.
Advantages: Inhibits simplistic understanding of values through
which polarization is reinforced. Counteracts value reductionism, highlighting
the role of values as strange attractors for psycho-social behaviour, whose
nature and function are beyond easy definition. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote vigilance with regard to the
security of individuals, groups and cultures. Highlight ways it can be undermined
by those most enthusiastic about it. Encourage understanding of the dilemmas
associated with confidentiality as a safeguard for security and the development
of new initiatives.
Advantages: Highlights the value of criticism in increasing
the robustness of any security system. Inhibits tendencies to condemn those
conveying insights that question the integrity of any enterprise. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote excellence through understanding
of its many forms. Highlight the valuable roles performed by those who do
not (or cannot) aspire to it but who may nevertheless trigger higher orders
of understanding in others and in the wider community. Emphasize the challenges
(welcome or unwelcome) that excellence may create for wider society, especially
amongst those effectively marginalized by it.
Advantages: Avoids simplistic approaches to excellence that
lead to various forms of triumphalism, elitism and exclusion. Through diversifying
the nature of excellence, promotes self-esteem in the the largest number of
people. Ensures that the majority, without hope of certain advantages,
experience some sense of their special value to society. Encourages the efforts
amongst many ordinary people to evolve new forms of organization not dependent
on competition for leadership or excellence. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Encourage specialized focus on isolated,
obvious, soluble issues, whilst clarifying (to the extent possible), the larger
pattern of checks and balances that protects the social and environmental
context from any excess. Emphasize the precautionary principle in the absence
of hard evidence of for inadequately understood, complex relationships.
Advantages: Draws attention to the valuable complexity of
any systemic perspective, that interrelates the many possible partial perspectives,
making it easier to accept the importance of subtler links as yet "unproven".
This provides wider access to the degrees of freedom required by those needing
to maneuver across specialized boundaries, and increases the transparency
of such movement. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote tolerance, equality, and fairness
by clarifying the richer patterns through which subtler and more viable forms
become possible, notably where dependency on simpler forms has proved unfruitful.
Emphasize that understanding of appropriate justice is continually challenged
by complex situations unforeseen by the law and common understanding.
Advantages: Inhibits tokenistic approaches to justice and
facilitates identification of systemic patterns of miscarriage of justice.
Highlights higher forms of justice inadequately guaranteed by more simplistic
approaches to law and order. Encourages efforts to identify the subtleties
of justice and mercy. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote action on both extremes of
any polarity, whether labelled as "positive" or "negative", to ensure that
the traps of dualism are transcended ... rather than reinforced in patterns
of denial and oversimplification.
Advantages: Develops insights and skills in working with both
poles of any polarity in order to enable people to transcend them through
sustainable new patterns of unforeseen behaviour and understanding.
Develops the capacity to respond to surprises emerging from blindspots, including
hostile initiatives disguised in friendly clothing. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Encourage celebration and remembrance
by clarifying how they sustain the social fabric over time, counteracting
its dismemberment and providing a reminder of the lessons of history.
Advantages : Focuses hopes and creative energy productively
to sustain people through periods of discouragement. Reinforces beliefs weakened
by the apparently insurmountable challenges of life. Increases expectations
and builds up a sense of meaning and fulfilment and efficacy. Usefully refreshes
the meaning of cultural symbols, opposing any tendency for them to degrade
into meaningless tokens. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Focus visibly, vigorously and pragmatically
on immediate concrete responses to issues, ensuring that these responses are
always set within a larger context whose coherence it is vital to clarify
and sustain.
Advantages: Highlights responsibility for sustaining initiatives
over the medium- and longer-term, inhibiting tendencies to erode their effectiveness
and render them toothless once attention is drawn to other priorities.
Encourages development of subtler arrays of response, including strategic
alternation and policy cycles, to engage dynamic challenges with the
level of complexity they merit. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote benevolent universal plans,
declarations and manifestos in a variety of forms, ensuring that they (and
their specific provisions) always highlight a larger pattern of concerns,
evolving over time, through which such instruments are all interrelated.
Advantages: Provides an integrated framework for the variety
of concerns, especially when new ways (song, music, etc) of articulating
the relationships between the identified concerns can be found to render the
subtleties of the relationships memorable. As such they then become instruments
to enhance social memory which can increase effectiveness of action
on their purported focus of concern. Failure to subscribe to such declarations
should then be seen as a creative challenge to their adequacy and to the forms
through which they are expressed. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
- Promote sensitivity to youth, health
and beauty, especially in their subtler forms beneath apparent age, ill-health
and ugliness, as a challenge to understanding the larger dilemmas of a life
in time.
Advantages: Sustains a sense of well-being and self-esteem
amongst people endowed in different ways and over the entirety of their
lives. Fruitfully confronts people with challenges to understanding concerning
their place in the scheme of things and the nature of their relationship
to those who may appear more favourable endowed. [Transpose]
[Dialogue guideline]
*******************
The art for you is to do as little possible,
providing opportunities for many different approaches to greater understanding
as people explore and learn from the interplay of their own interests with
those of their wider communities.
These strategies will create viable, and essentially undetectable,
contexts from which you and the forces supporting you can act freely and
with most effect. Each strategy benefits from both strengths and weaknesses
in particular types of people who, through acting on their limited understanding,
will be your allies in advancing your strategic intentions as they learn
their own limitations.
It is essential that you support every effort to recognize
the double nature of these strategies – and especially how their complementarity
provides the key to understanding what you offer.
Consistent with your expressed requirement, these strategies
will enable many people to experience the transcendent reality of your
presence, although they will never be able to articulate their understanding
with sufficient credibility to enable others to oppose them effectively.
The challenge is always to position you so that, in despair
at the ineffectiveness of their actions, people will perceive you to be
their saviour
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