The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Saul AlinskyRead
The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns.... All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Community organization requires dismantling existing structures before new ones can be built.
Saul Alinsky's quote emphasizes that effective change in a community starts with the dismantling of established, perhaps outdated, organizational structures. To foster new growth and improvement, the current system must first face disruption, allowing for innovative ideas and methods to take root and flourish, illustrating that change is inherently messy yet necessary.
Themes
CommunityOrganizationChangeDisorganizationStructure
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting, this quote could be shared to encourage members to embrace necessary changes.
More from Saul Alinsky
All quotes →Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer.
Saul AlinskyRead
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Saul AlinskyRead
The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself.
Saul AlinskyRead
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul AlinskyRead
An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing.... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.
Saul AlinskyRead
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