You won't be disappointed if you approach this stuff thinking "People will do whatever they think they can get away with" China will invade Taiwan when then think they can get away with it. The corollary is also true: Guys don't attack the world heavyweight boxing champion, they think they won't get away with it.
And if you find someone not pushing their advantage to dominate and hurt others rejoice in tiny treasures and simple pleasures.
Rules for Radicals was originally conceived by Saul Alinsky as part of a larger war against politicians who got in his way, the tactics and techniques have been formalized and disseminated in colleges and universities and are now used against pretty much anyone that one disagrees with.
From Rules for Radicals, seventh chapter: Tactics:
Rules for Radicals #13
The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck. In these times of urbanization, complex metropolitan governments, the complexities of major interlocked corporations, and the interlocking of political life between cities and
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counties and metropolitan authorities, the problem that threatens to loom more and more is that of identifying the enemy. Obviously there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks. One big problem is a constant shifting of responsibility from one jurisdiction to another — individuals and bureaus one after another disclaim responsibility for particular conditions, attributing the authority for any change to some other force. In a corporation one gets the situation where the president of the corporation says that he does not have the responsibility, it is up to the board of trustees or the board of directors, the board of directors can shift it over to the stockholders, etc., etc.
And the same thing goes, for example, on the Board of Education appointments in the city of Chicago, where an extra-legal committee is empowered to make selections of nominees for the board and the mayor then uses his legal powers to select names from that list. When the mayor is attacked for not having any blacks on the list, he shifts the responsibility over to the committee, pointing out that he has to select those names from a list submitted by the committee, and if the list is all white, then he has no responsibility. The committee can shift the responsibility back by pointing out that it is the mayor who has the authority to select the names, and so it goes in a comic (if it were not so tragic) routine of "who's on first" or "under which shell is the pea hidden?" The same evasion of responsibility is to be found in all areas of life and other areas of City Hall Urban Renewal departments, who say the responsibility is over here, and somebody else says the responsibility is over there, the city says it is a state responsibility, and the state says it is a federal responsibility and the federal government passes it back to the local community, and on ad infinitum.
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It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy — purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival — on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.
I remember specifically that when the Woodlawn Organization started the campaign against public school segregation, both the superintendent of schools and the chairman of the Board of Education vehemently denied any racist segregationist practices in the Chicago Public School System. They took the position that they did not even have any racial-identification data in their files, so they did not know which of their students were black and which were white. As for the fact that we had all-white schools and all- black schools, well, that's just the way it was.
If we had been confronted with a politically sophisticated school superintendent he could have very well replied, "Look, when I came to Chicago the city school system was following, as it is now, a neighborhood school policy. Chicago's neighborhoods are segregated. There are white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and therefore you have white schools and black schools. Why attack me? Why not attack the segregated neighborhoods and change them?" He would have had a valid point, of sorts; I still shiver when I think of this possibility; but the segregated neighborhoods would have passed the buck to someone else and so it would have gone into a dog-chasing-his-tail pattern — and it would have been a fifteen-year
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job to try to break down the segregated residential pattern of Chicago. We did not have the power to start that kind of a conflict. One of the criteria in picking your target is the target's vulnerability — where do you have the power to start? Furthermore, any target can always say, "Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?" When you "freeze the target," you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all the others to blame.
Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the "others" come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community's segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system....
....MUCH MORE (this is the version of the book at archive.org)
For an interesting take on Alinsky's methods see:
An Analysis of the Alinsky Model
And more generally:
Saul Alinsky: Playboy Interview (1972)
For More on Social Sadism:
- Social Sadism and the Sadocratic Impulse
- Always, Always Remember That Control Freaks Are Mentally Ill
- Social Sadism: The Woman Who Studied Cruelty (a lesson for today)
- "The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness"
- Tips For Doing Business In Totalitarian Countries
- Did the CIA, Rather Than Germany's Scorpions, Compose the Power Ballad "Wind of Change"?
....Coming up, Did Helmut Kohl secretly write Neunundneunzig Luftballons to counter Reagan's desire to base U.S. missiles in Germany?
That's next on:
Analyzing German Songs
"99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger"
