Jeff Thomas
New member
Please pardon my long post, but this is an important article regarding the process by which our adversaries, the anti-self defense crowd, damage the RKBA. The incremental erosion of our self-defense rights is not a happenstance – it is a carefully planned, psychological method employed by groups such as HCI. The term and concept of 'change agents' is also legitimately used in business circles as well, but it can take on a sinister tone when used to damage or destroy personal freedoms, IMHO.
While the article is targeted to the health care industry, I hope you will agree with me that it is directly applicable to the RKBA as well. {Please note, I have made a few relevant comments below re: the connection with the RKBA.}
Is there any reason why pro-self defense activists cannot use this technique as well? For that matter, do we?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHANGE AGENTS
By Dr. Jane Orient, Tucson, AZ
Reprinted with permission, from the AAPS News, Volume 55, No. 3, March 1999
Physicians are frequently exhorted to have "the courage to change". Or they are told that "change" is inevitable and they will be forced to accept it. But what does "change" mean?
Change in this context is not a force of nature but rather is that which "change agents" are trained to bring about.
In an AAPS brief supporting a motion for summary judgment in the case against the illegal secret activities of the Clinton Health Care Task Force (AAPS v. Clinton), it was stated that: "large, well-heeled non-profit foundations invented the bureaucratic yet secretive means of achieving 'change' in [American medicine] by directly influencing the government decision-making processes from the inside to achieve their goal of promoting their own well-planned agendas, a goal which they unsuccessfully attempted to achieve from the outside." {JT comment – sound similar to the gun suits?}
While state legislatures as well as a Republican-controlled Congress continue to implement pieces of the Clinton Health Security Act of 1993, and hospitals and managed-care organizations continue to infringe on the practice of private medicine, it may be useful to examine the "process" as well as the "outcome" (to borrow some terms) of "change".
If you have attended meetings of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Turing Point project, or public or staff meetings at which you are invited to give "your input" (perhaps concerning a "proposed" Physician-Hospital Organization), you will probably recognize the elements of the process.
The methodology resembles that worked out under contract with the United States Office of Education in the 1960s and 1970s and described in a book entitled The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education. The second edition, with the broader title The Change Agent’s Guide by Ronald G. Havelock with Steve Zlotolow, published by Educational Technology Publications, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995, is available from http://www.amazon.com/ for about $40. {JT comment – Dr. Orient tells me the book is almost chilling in its message.}
Note that many of the innovations in health care involve school-based clinics and expanding cooperation between public school and public health officials. {JT comment – consider the cooperation between some members of the health industry and the anti-self defense crowd.}
The foreword to the Guide states: "[N]ot until the late 1940’s, when American behavioral scientists began exploring and developing the ideas of the emigre psychologist Kurt Lewin, did we really have anything like a systematic science and practical craft of planned change in the kinds of social systems that matter most – families, small groups, organizations, communities." For the first edition, Havelock reviewed 3,931 studies on how planned change proceeds most effectively.
One of the "marvelous extra bonuses" touted in the foreword is a small paragraph on p. 20, headlined: "If you are a defender (intending to block a change, slow it, blunt it, or transform it into something more benign)." The Guide helps you "know better what the promoters of the change are up to and … how you can challenge them more effectively." {JT comment – perhaps ideas for pro-self defense / RKBA members.}
Although the Guide is concerned with the "how" of change, it will not surprise the reader to see that the authors propose that systems are changing for the better as they grow larger, more integrated, and more differentiated.
One of the prototype examples, a model of success change, was "Mike's" story of introducing sex education into a community in which “involvement with SIECUS is like holding a lighted firecracker." He started with a pilot project in his own secondary science course, described as an effort to "aid the students in developing their ability to use logical reasoning to make responsible value judgments about social issues which affect them personally."
The outcome, shown by before-and-after attitude testing: "students had become more permissive in their thinking on the issues of sex and drugs and … their value judgments had a more humanistic foundation." The next step: expansion of the program into all levels K-12. Vocal community opposition, sparked by the "puzzling finding" that students had a more favorable attitude toward marijuana, was muted by a newly organized citizens’ group. These collaborators paved the way to acceptance with newspaper ads and public meetings, "quell[ing] the irrational doubts and fears which the extremist groups had been able to exploit."
The basic modus operandi of the change agent is to (1)unfreeze the system by catalyzing recognition of a need for change; (2) move toward change, by tolerable, incremental steps; (3) refreeze the system after change becomes integral. {JT comment – I think all of us will recognize a great deal of anti-self defense gun control legislation fitting into this formula like a glove.}
Useful methods: a partnership of insiders and outsiders; starting with a small, doable if seemingly unimportant change that will have a "multiplier effect"; knowing the "influentials"; cultivating the "gatekeepers" such as the boss's secretary; building relationships with ethnic communities, church groups, etc., as by helping to meet their needs; "managing initial encounters" with "friendliness, familiarity, rewardingness, and responsiveness"; developing "'trust', in the literal sense of knowing where the other person stands"; finding and neutralizing "resistors"; and eroding existing bonds.
There are probably change agents at your hospital, who have recruited respected insiders to help promote their agenda. The ultimate goal may be seen only in foggiest outline, and the immediate goal may be quite limited and difficult to oppose. The process moves from "item change" to "system change": redoing the organizational chart and changing the rules.
Change agents believe that there is a "crying need for change everywhere in our society." The changes are radical: "We are interfering with ongoing linkages and arrangements that may have been in place for centuries … [How] do we know we are not tearing down a bearing wall that will threaten the collapse of the structure?"
They don’t, and they make no promise to “do no harm.”. {JT comment – IMHO, this warning is particularly relevant to the RKBA issue.}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Indeed, the anti-self defense crowd is quite willing to tear down the bearing wall of the RKBA. And, unfortunately, they don’t appear to give a damn about the collapse of the structure. Perhaps it is time we gave them a little of their own medicine?
Regards from AZ
[This message has been edited by Jeff Thomas (edited March 03, 1999).]
While the article is targeted to the health care industry, I hope you will agree with me that it is directly applicable to the RKBA as well. {Please note, I have made a few relevant comments below re: the connection with the RKBA.}
Is there any reason why pro-self defense activists cannot use this technique as well? For that matter, do we?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHANGE AGENTS
By Dr. Jane Orient, Tucson, AZ
Reprinted with permission, from the AAPS News, Volume 55, No. 3, March 1999
Physicians are frequently exhorted to have "the courage to change". Or they are told that "change" is inevitable and they will be forced to accept it. But what does "change" mean?
Change in this context is not a force of nature but rather is that which "change agents" are trained to bring about.
In an AAPS brief supporting a motion for summary judgment in the case against the illegal secret activities of the Clinton Health Care Task Force (AAPS v. Clinton), it was stated that: "large, well-heeled non-profit foundations invented the bureaucratic yet secretive means of achieving 'change' in [American medicine] by directly influencing the government decision-making processes from the inside to achieve their goal of promoting their own well-planned agendas, a goal which they unsuccessfully attempted to achieve from the outside." {JT comment – sound similar to the gun suits?}
While state legislatures as well as a Republican-controlled Congress continue to implement pieces of the Clinton Health Security Act of 1993, and hospitals and managed-care organizations continue to infringe on the practice of private medicine, it may be useful to examine the "process" as well as the "outcome" (to borrow some terms) of "change".
If you have attended meetings of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Turing Point project, or public or staff meetings at which you are invited to give "your input" (perhaps concerning a "proposed" Physician-Hospital Organization), you will probably recognize the elements of the process.
The methodology resembles that worked out under contract with the United States Office of Education in the 1960s and 1970s and described in a book entitled The Change Agent’s Guide to Innovation in Education. The second edition, with the broader title The Change Agent’s Guide by Ronald G. Havelock with Steve Zlotolow, published by Educational Technology Publications, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995, is available from http://www.amazon.com/ for about $40. {JT comment – Dr. Orient tells me the book is almost chilling in its message.}
Note that many of the innovations in health care involve school-based clinics and expanding cooperation between public school and public health officials. {JT comment – consider the cooperation between some members of the health industry and the anti-self defense crowd.}
The foreword to the Guide states: "[N]ot until the late 1940’s, when American behavioral scientists began exploring and developing the ideas of the emigre psychologist Kurt Lewin, did we really have anything like a systematic science and practical craft of planned change in the kinds of social systems that matter most – families, small groups, organizations, communities." For the first edition, Havelock reviewed 3,931 studies on how planned change proceeds most effectively.
One of the "marvelous extra bonuses" touted in the foreword is a small paragraph on p. 20, headlined: "If you are a defender (intending to block a change, slow it, blunt it, or transform it into something more benign)." The Guide helps you "know better what the promoters of the change are up to and … how you can challenge them more effectively." {JT comment – perhaps ideas for pro-self defense / RKBA members.}
Although the Guide is concerned with the "how" of change, it will not surprise the reader to see that the authors propose that systems are changing for the better as they grow larger, more integrated, and more differentiated.
One of the prototype examples, a model of success change, was "Mike's" story of introducing sex education into a community in which “involvement with SIECUS is like holding a lighted firecracker." He started with a pilot project in his own secondary science course, described as an effort to "aid the students in developing their ability to use logical reasoning to make responsible value judgments about social issues which affect them personally."
The outcome, shown by before-and-after attitude testing: "students had become more permissive in their thinking on the issues of sex and drugs and … their value judgments had a more humanistic foundation." The next step: expansion of the program into all levels K-12. Vocal community opposition, sparked by the "puzzling finding" that students had a more favorable attitude toward marijuana, was muted by a newly organized citizens’ group. These collaborators paved the way to acceptance with newspaper ads and public meetings, "quell[ing] the irrational doubts and fears which the extremist groups had been able to exploit."
The basic modus operandi of the change agent is to (1)unfreeze the system by catalyzing recognition of a need for change; (2) move toward change, by tolerable, incremental steps; (3) refreeze the system after change becomes integral. {JT comment – I think all of us will recognize a great deal of anti-self defense gun control legislation fitting into this formula like a glove.}
Useful methods: a partnership of insiders and outsiders; starting with a small, doable if seemingly unimportant change that will have a "multiplier effect"; knowing the "influentials"; cultivating the "gatekeepers" such as the boss's secretary; building relationships with ethnic communities, church groups, etc., as by helping to meet their needs; "managing initial encounters" with "friendliness, familiarity, rewardingness, and responsiveness"; developing "'trust', in the literal sense of knowing where the other person stands"; finding and neutralizing "resistors"; and eroding existing bonds.
There are probably change agents at your hospital, who have recruited respected insiders to help promote their agenda. The ultimate goal may be seen only in foggiest outline, and the immediate goal may be quite limited and difficult to oppose. The process moves from "item change" to "system change": redoing the organizational chart and changing the rules.
Change agents believe that there is a "crying need for change everywhere in our society." The changes are radical: "We are interfering with ongoing linkages and arrangements that may have been in place for centuries … [How] do we know we are not tearing down a bearing wall that will threaten the collapse of the structure?"
They don’t, and they make no promise to “do no harm.”. {JT comment – IMHO, this warning is particularly relevant to the RKBA issue.}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Indeed, the anti-self defense crowd is quite willing to tear down the bearing wall of the RKBA. And, unfortunately, they don’t appear to give a damn about the collapse of the structure. Perhaps it is time we gave them a little of their own medicine?
Regards from AZ
[This message has been edited by Jeff Thomas (edited March 03, 1999).]