Posted on 02/15/2004 3:52:23 PM PST by farmer18th
Perhaps some of you who are veterans at planning issues have seen this, but the other night I witnessed my first community plan meeting that was moderated in the "Assets, Issues, and Solutions" format.
Here's how it works. Community members don't get three minutes to address the meeting. A moderator stands in front of the room and asks questions such as "What do we like about our community?" (The assets column) Another question is "What problems do we have in our community?" (The issues column) and "How can we solve our problems?" (The solutions column).
Community members raise their hands and the moderator has complete control over who is called upon. The moderator's side-kick gets to summarize complex issues into two word descriptions that are written with magic marker on butcher paper in front of the room. No vote is taken. No discussion ensues except between the moderator and the member of the audience. If one person rises to say "parking" is an issue, there is no chance for that observation to be moderated by a vote on the matter, or even a show of hands. In our case, I noticed that the person wielding the magic marker was writing down whatever tickled her fancy, whether it had anything to do with an audience members observation.
A member of our extended family observed that "Living History" was a community asset, since we perform American Revolution and Civil War Reenactments. The Magic Marker person translated this to "country living." An apple farmer said the expense of agriculture was a community problem and the magic marker person scribbled down "organic farming" in the solutions column, even though it had never been mentioned.
At one point, my brother stood up and said, "is this an Oprah Winfrey show or a community meeting?"
When I spoke with the moderator afterwards, a retired planner, he defended the process on the grounds that community members won't be interested in the details of the planning process. He said he had a pretty good idea about what the community was interested in. I asked him how he would quantify that, since he never took a vote.
"I have a pretty good feel for it," he said.
Hegelian Dialectic & the New World Order
For the benefit of those who have not yet heard of the Hegelian Dialectic, let me briefly run through it as taught by Authority Research Center president, Dean Gotcher. The Hegelian Dialectic or "Consensus Process" is a 200 year-old, three-step process of "thesis, antithesis and synthesis", developed in the late 1700's by a German named Georg William Friedreich Hegel that results in what we now know as "group-think". It is a system Dean calls "Praxis" that Socialists have used for centuries to seduce, seize and control mass populations without warfare. It is also in full operation here in the United States under such names as: "Outcome Based Education", "Goals 2000", "Sustainable Development", "School To Work", "DARE" and many more. It's all about embracing "tolerance, diversity and unity" for The New World Order. To put it in layman's terms, it's brainwashing.
Here's how it works: A group gathers, and has agreed beforehand that each in attendance will ultimately surrender his or her own personal position on any given issue to the will or "consensus" of the group after *processing to consensus* through dialog. In a Christian setting, the presupposition is that the group's will determines "the will of God". The group's "facilitator", whoever that may be, mediates between sides, be they "good and evil", "for and against", "republican and democrat", "liberal and conservative", etc., whatever the case may be, often instigating heated confrontations between the opposing sides for the purpose of suggesting compromise as the perfect solution to restore and maintain the peace and the relationships of everyone involved.
The resulting outcome or *consensus* is then re-introduced if necessary, at the next meeting for more "Praxis", more dialog and more compromise until another "consensus" is reached. Then the "process" repeats all over again...and again...and again until the facilitator's desired outcome is achieved. Over time, the convictions and concerns anyone may have had originally are processed away beyond recognition or relevance leaving one and all to accept the facilitator's pre-determined outcome as the consensus of the group. It's no longer a question of what is right or wrong, good or bad, lawful or unlawful, but rather HOW WE ALL FEEL ABOUT IT...no absolutes, no conscience, no convictions, no laws, no Constitution, no Bible and NO GOD!!!...only consensus....and a contrived consensus at that. That's the Hegelian Dialectic.
That's exactly what "facilitator" Bill Hybels accomplished the other day between church leaders attending the Willow Creek Conference and his friend Bill Clinton on ABC's Nightline. Protesting evangelicals (thesis), demanded socialist Bill Clinton (antitheses), answer for his lies and sexual indiscretions at the meeting. Hybels, as the "facilitator" voices their protests and then injects that Clinton HAD confessed to them by saying he publicly admitted: "I have sinned". Yeah, well...we ALL have sinned Bill. The Bible says it in Romans 3:23. That's not news. That's not a confession either. Nor is a politically expedient appearance in front of a church full of evangelical Christians before the Democratic Convention a demonstration of repentance.
The good reverend just wants us to forgive his pal Clinton so we can all be one big happy family. Thesis + Antitheses = Synthesis...the Hegelian Dialectic. Sounds like the perfect formula for an Apostate Church to me. I wonder if Hybels has sent everyone personal invitations to "The Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders", meeting at the United Nations later this month as well? I hear they're all getting together to create a great big One World Religion for us here on planet Earth. ...A WORLD CHURCH!
One thing I learned in the Navy, was that ANY planning meeting that attempted consensus without open debate and open notation of final opinion is phony. Moderators start by telling you what you will be allowed to discuss, when you will be allowed questions, and state that the consensus opinion will be reported "later"; is an invitation to walk out, or even better expose them for what they are doing in a calm voice.
In the early 1960s the Rand Corporation developed a procedure the called "Delphi." It was to be used with groups of experts who NEVER MET TOGETHER. The idea was to extract expert opinion from the group in an efficient mananer.
Delphi as developed at Rand had three characteristics:
(1)anonymity: the participants do not know who else is in the group;
(2) iteration with controlled feedback: the process consists of several "rounds" of questionnaires with written responses; on each round the participants are given a summary of the responses on the previous round, such as written reasons for or against something, with duplicate or irrelevant responses omitted;
(3) statistical feedback: the questions are always phrased such that the respondent gives a number -- a date, an amount, a percent, etc.; the feedback consists of a statistical summary of these numbers, usually the median and the two quartiles. This is in addition to the summaries of written responses.
Several experiments at Rand showed that this form of Delphi was often more accurate than conventional meetings. This form of Delphi is still widely used in technological forecasting, and has a long history of testing and improvement. There are frequent articles on it in the professional literature.
When you are in a meeting such as the original poster described, and are told that what you're seeing is Delphi as developed at Rand, you're being lied to. The manipulators have hijacked the term and used it for what amounts to a brainwashing scheme. As a long-time practitioner of genuine Rand-style Delphi, I object to this hijacking, but there's nothing I can do about it except try to inform people.
My wife is out of town this week and the kids are at Grandmas and my idea of a fun day of freedom was stacking 2 cord of wood and window shopping at the gun show.
I even have a beer in the fridge I may drink later.
OK, then let me re-phrase: it has the capability of being an "above board" technique for examining positions and arriving at the good position PROVIDED that the facilitator/coordinator/whatever-to-call-him is HIMSELF above board. It's weakness is the ease with which the facilitator can rig the results. As Stalin noted: "Who votes doesn't count, it's who gets to count the votes".
In the Leftist Delphi Technique, essentially the facilitator is trying to give the impression that the participants are engaging in a fair and unbiased process, while the process itself is as rigged as a Chicago election. This leads the participants to accept the results, or at least not fight the results. The technique is as old as politics: isolate the opponents and make each think he's in a minority
I thought I was the only 'nutcase' to mention Agenda21 on FR?
Do any others believe it is actually happening? WOW!
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