Recently I was elected to the board of directors of my home owners association (HOA). In my view, the HOA is a "team", and the purpose of the board of directors is simply to represent the team. The board should not attempt to BE the team by creating (or enforcing) policy that the HOA has not authorized. Within days of being elected, I discovered that some of the directors do not share my view. I am not bothered terribly when I am criticized by a director for a stand that I have taken for the rights of the entire HOA. However, I do have to work with the board. The Different Drum—Community Making and Peace (© 1987) appeared to be exactly what I needed.
Although my sole reason for reading The Different Drum was to learn how to function as a director, as with every M. Scott Peck book that I have read, it changed my view of the world.
According to Peck, "If we are going to use the word [community] meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to 'rejoice together, mourn together,' and to 'delight in each other, make others' conditions our own.'" Community is and must be:
- Inclusive (not exclusive)
- Realistic
- Contemplative
- A safe place
- A laboratory for personal disarmament
- A group that can fight gracefully
- A group of all leaders
- Have a group spirit (but NOT a competitive spirit!)
I quickly realized that I have probably never been part of any true community in the past. Some groups that I was a part of (family, religion) never were communities at all. Until I was well into my 50s, I would not have allowed any other group with which I was associated (school, employment) to include me as "community".
My best shot at community should have been my marriage. Initially, my wife was much better than I at living authentically, realistically. We were bound by the same religion, and she was sometimes quite open about voicing disagreement with our religious doctrine. Because I was a black-and-white thinker, I was not so open...not even with my wife. (Even when we both agreed on the error of a doctrine, we sometimes sharply disagreed on how it should affect our lives.) Primarily, it was my own lack of realism that prevented us from becoming what Peck calls "a community of two".
I was well into my 50s when I finally gave myself permission to be real. Now, finally, I have the potential to become a part of community.
Some interesting quotes from The Different Drum:
The world "radical" comes from the Latin radix, meaning "root"—the same word from which we get "radish." The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees. It is good to be a radical. Anyone who thinks deeply will be one. In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist." Which only makes sense. Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to the fundamentals. (p. 25)
I dreamed that somewhere there would be a girl, a woman, a mate with whom I could be totally honest and open, and have a relationship in which the whole of me would be acceptable. (p. 28)
Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time. Seeking joy in and of itself will not bring it to you. Do the work of creating community, and you will obtain it—although never exactly according to your schedule. Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community. (p. 40)
Most, to a greater or lesser degree, fail to individuate—to separate—ourselves from family, tribe, or caste. ... But in light of all we understand, this failure to individuate is a failure to grow up and become fully human. For we are called to be individuals. We are called to be unique and different. (p. 54)
We are called to wholeness and simultaneously to recognition of our incompleteness; called to power and to acknowledge our weakness; called to both individuation and interdependence. (p. 56)
In genuine community there are no sides. It is not always easy, but by the time they reach community the members have learned how to give up cliques and factions. ... Just because it is a safe place does not mean community is a place without conflict. It is, however, a place where conflict can be resolved without physical or emotional bloodshed and with wisdom as well as grace. A community is a group that can fight gracefully. (p. 71)
Another of the essential characteristics of community is a total decentralization of authority. ... Community is a group of all leaders. ... Committees are virtually never communities. (p. 72)
Competitiveness is always exclusive; genuine community is inclusive. If community has enemies, it has begun to lose the spirit of community—if it ever had it in the first place. (p. 74)
Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving. (p. 88)
The basic pretense of pseudocommunity is the denial of individual differences. The members pretend—act as if—they all have the same belief in Jesus Christ, the same understanding of the Russians, even the same life history. One of the characteristics of pseudocommunity is that people tend to speak in generalities. "Divorce is a miserable experience," they will say. Or "One has to trust one's own instincts." Or "We need to accept that our parents did the best they could." Or "Once you've found God, then you don't need to be afraid anymore." Or "Jesus has saved us from our sins." ... Another characteristic of pseudocommunity is that the members will let one another get away with such blanket statements. (p. 89)
Underlying attempts to heal and convert is not so much the motive of love as the motive to make everyone normal—and the motive to win, as the members fight over whose norm might prevail. (p. 91)
Organization and community are...incompatible. ...an organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure. (p. 93)
Fighting is far better than pretending you are not divided. (p. 94)
One reason to distrust instant community is that community-building requires time—the time to have sufficient experience to become conscious of our prejudices and then to empty ourselves of them. (p. 96)
My most basic motive when I strive to heal is to feel good about myself. But there are several problems here. One is that my cure is usually not my friend's. Indeed, offering someone my cure usually only makes that person feel worse. (p. 97)
An extraordinary amount of healing and converting begins to occur—now that no one is trying to convert or heal. And community has been born. (p. 103-4)
Myths are myths precisely because they are true. Myths are found in one form or another in culture after culture, age after age. The reason for their permanence and universality is precisely that they are embodiments of great truths. (p. 171)
All myths are about human nature, one way or another. (p. 172)
Since we believed that the Germans were "just like us," the only way we could account for their atrocious behavior was to assume that somehow they had been enslaved by the madman Hitler, the evil ruler. Erich Fromm's seminal work, Escape from Freedom, was so important precisely because it exposed this illusion. In it, Fromm compellingly demonstrated that insofar as they had become enslaved, it was because the German people had sold out to Hitler. (p. 173)
Perhaps because it would be a much simpler world if we were all alike, it is the tendency of human beings in all cultures to err dreadfully on the side of severely underestimating our differences. (p. 176)
The reality of human nature is that we are—and always will be—profoundly different, for the most salient feature of human nature lies in its capacity to be molded by culture and experience in extremely variable ways. (p. 178)
What distinguishes us humans most from other creatures is not our opposing thumb or our magnificent larynx or our huge cerebral cortex, it is our dramatic relative lack of instincts—inherited, performed patterns of behavior that give other creatures a much more fixed and predetermined nature than we have as humans. (p. 179)
Psychotherapists, who are in the business of "adult-making," know that many people who look like adults are really emotional children in adult clothing. That is not because their patients are necessarily more immature than the average person. To the contrary, those who genuinely assume the humble but honorable role of patient do so precisely because they are the ones who are being called out of immaturity. ... True adults are those of us who have learned to continually develop and exercise their capacity for transformation. (p. 181)
I would define the idealist as one who believes in the capacity for transformation of human nature. ... It is the idealists who are the realistic ones. (p. 183)
The personality—whether that of an individual or a nation—inherently resists change. Patients come to psychotherapy, on way or another, asking to change. But from the moment therapy begins, they start acting as if change was the last thing they wanted and often will fight it tooth and nail. Psychotherapy, designed to liberate, shines the light of truth upon ourselves. The truth will set you free—but first it will make you damn mad—is an adage that reflects this resistance. (p. 184)
Our political and spiritual leadership has declined in inverse proportion to the increasing amounts of money and effort we have expended to manipulate other countries. (p. 185)
Gale Webbe wrote in his classic work on the deeper aspects of spiritual growth that the further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and the fewer and fewer people one likes. (p. 186)
One of the two greatest sins of our sinful Christian Church has been its discouragement, through the ages, of doubt. (p. 200)
Erich Fromm once defined socialization as the process of "learning to like to do what we have to do." It is what happens when we learn to feel natural about going to the bathroom in the toilet. (p. 202)
Aldous Huxley labeled mysticism "the perennial philosophy" because the mystical way of thinking and being has existed in all cultures and all times since the dawn of recorded history. (p. 202-3)
The number of people entering the mystical stage of development and transcending ordinary culture seems to have increased a thousandfold in the course of a mere generation or two. (p. 205)
Meditation can probably be best defined as the process by which we can empty our minds. ... The virtue of meditation is that whatever comes into emptiness is beyond our control. It is the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new. And it is only from the unforeseen, the unexpected, the new that we learn. (p. 210)
If you continually ask questions of life and are continually willing to be open and empty enough to hear life's answer and to ponder the meaning, you will be a contemplative. (p. 211)
Emptiness requires work. It is an exercise of discipline and is always the most difficult part of the process that a group must undergo if it is to become a community. Like any discipline, it can become easier if we make it a habit, as I have suggested Jesus did. But even if habitual, it is still painful. For emptiness always requires a negation of the self and the need to know, a sacrifice. (p. 217)
Mystics of all cultures and religions speak in terms of paradox—not in terms of "either/or" but in terms of "both/and." (p. 220)
Perhaps the best known and most telling of all Christian paradoxes was Jesus' statement: "He that saves his life shall lose it; and he that loses his life, for my sake, shall find it." By this Jesus did not mean that each and every one of us is called to be victim to bodily murder as he was. He did mean, however, that death of the psychological self is required for salvation. This same sacrifice of self is required for emptiness. Such sacrifice usually does not mean actual physical death. But it always means some kind of death—the death of an idea or ideology, or a traditionally held cultural view, or even at the very least simply an entrenched pattern of "black or white" or "either/or" thinking. (p. 220-1)
All change is a kind of death, and all growth requires that we go through depression. (p. 222)
What are the criteria for discerning religious integrity? Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole. (p. 240)
Heresy is destructive only when it dictates behavior. As an idea alone it has no importance. Behavior is the key. ... While all forms of thinking should be tolerated, some forms of behavior should not be. ... There is no such thing as a belief or theology—no matter how false, incomplete, or heretical—that cannot be accepted in the inclusiveness of true community. Conversely, the attempt to exclude individuals because of their beliefs, however silly or primitive, is always destructive to community. (p. 245)
Our heritage of religious freedom is one of the greatest blessings of this nation. The requirement for government to restrain itself from imposing a particular religious-belief system on its citizens is both a cornerstone of democracy and an evolutionary step in the history of civilization. Yet if this separation also obliges citizens to refrain totally from seeking to express their religious views within political and economic spheres, it will inevitably lead to utterly "privatized" and superficial religious practice. ... No separation means the demise of religious freedom. Total separation means the demise of genuine religion. (p. 246)
"People want peace so much that governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."—Dwight D. Eisenhower, London Sunday Times, 1960 (p. 260)
This country refused to join the League of Nations and has done its best to emasculate the United Nations. The reality is that, like Christianity, world government "has not been tried and found wanting but hasn't been tried at all." ... As Golda Meir once put it, "International government does not mean the end of nations any more than an orchestra means the end of violins." (p. 274)
Eric Berne taught us something else about psychological games: the only way to stop playing them is to stop. (p. 277)
When he left office more than a quarter of a century ago, President Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex. (p. 279)
People frequently fail to grow because they retreat from the pain of depression and are unwilling to do "the work of depression." (p. 281)
Remember the early Christian theologian Origen, who said, "The Spirit stands for progress, and evil then, by definition is that which refuses progress." (p. 281)
A will unsubmitted to anything higher than itself is, or will inevitably become, evil. So it is that capitalism, in and of itself, has a profound tendency to "refuse progress". (p. 284)
It is because it resists change that we say "pride goeth before the fall." (p. 285)
In Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril. (p. 287)
Recently a man representing a potential source of funds attended a community-building training conference conducted by Foundation for Community Encouragement. Toward the very end this man said with visible agony, "I feel torn apart. On one hand this has been a most moving experience for me. I have personally benefited from it more than I dreamed. I am very glad that I came and surprisingly sad to be leaving. But as I think about what has happened here, about the essence of the experience and what you are trying to do, I cannot help but conclude that it is really about nothing more than love. And how on earth can I go back to my board of directors and sell them on love?" That man's problem is ours and yours. It is our task and yours to sell the world on love. (p. 334)
If you continually ask questions of life and are continually willing to be open and empty enough to hear life's answer and to ponder the meaning, you will be a contemplative. (p. 211)
Emptiness requires work. It is an exercise of discipline and is always the most difficult part of the process that a group must undergo if it is to become a community. Like any discipline, it can become easier if we make it a habit, as I have suggested Jesus did. But even if habitual, it is still painful. For emptiness always requires a negation of the self and the need to know, a sacrifice. (p. 217)
Mystics of all cultures and religions speak in terms of paradox—not in terms of "either/or" but in terms of "both/and." (p. 220)
Perhaps the best known and most telling of all Christian paradoxes was Jesus' statement: "He that saves his life shall lose it; and he that loses his life, for my sake, shall find it." By this Jesus did not mean that each and every one of us is called to be victim to bodily murder as he was. He did mean, however, that death of the psychological self is required for salvation. This same sacrifice of self is required for emptiness. Such sacrifice usually does not mean actual physical death. But it always means some kind of death—the death of an idea or ideology, or a traditionally held cultural view, or even at the very least simply an entrenched pattern of "black or white" or "either/or" thinking. (p. 220-1)
All change is a kind of death, and all growth requires that we go through depression. (p. 222)
What are the criteria for discerning religious integrity? Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole. (p. 240)
Heresy is destructive only when it dictates behavior. As an idea alone it has no importance. Behavior is the key. ... While all forms of thinking should be tolerated, some forms of behavior should not be. ... There is no such thing as a belief or theology—no matter how false, incomplete, or heretical—that cannot be accepted in the inclusiveness of true community. Conversely, the attempt to exclude individuals because of their beliefs, however silly or primitive, is always destructive to community. (p. 245)
Our heritage of religious freedom is one of the greatest blessings of this nation. The requirement for government to restrain itself from imposing a particular religious-belief system on its citizens is both a cornerstone of democracy and an evolutionary step in the history of civilization. Yet if this separation also obliges citizens to refrain totally from seeking to express their religious views within political and economic spheres, it will inevitably lead to utterly "privatized" and superficial religious practice. ... No separation means the demise of religious freedom. Total separation means the demise of genuine religion. (p. 246)
"People want peace so much that governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."—Dwight D. Eisenhower, London Sunday Times, 1960 (p. 260)
This country refused to join the League of Nations and has done its best to emasculate the United Nations. The reality is that, like Christianity, world government "has not been tried and found wanting but hasn't been tried at all." ... As Golda Meir once put it, "International government does not mean the end of nations any more than an orchestra means the end of violins." (p. 274)
Eric Berne taught us something else about psychological games: the only way to stop playing them is to stop. (p. 277)
When he left office more than a quarter of a century ago, President Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex. (p. 279)
People frequently fail to grow because they retreat from the pain of depression and are unwilling to do "the work of depression." (p. 281)
Remember the early Christian theologian Origen, who said, "The Spirit stands for progress, and evil then, by definition is that which refuses progress." (p. 281)
A will unsubmitted to anything higher than itself is, or will inevitably become, evil. So it is that capitalism, in and of itself, has a profound tendency to "refuse progress". (p. 284)
It is because it resists change that we say "pride goeth before the fall." (p. 285)
In Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril. (p. 287)
Recently a man representing a potential source of funds attended a community-building training conference conducted by Foundation for Community Encouragement. Toward the very end this man said with visible agony, "I feel torn apart. On one hand this has been a most moving experience for me. I have personally benefited from it more than I dreamed. I am very glad that I came and surprisingly sad to be leaving. But as I think about what has happened here, about the essence of the experience and what you are trying to do, I cannot help but conclude that it is really about nothing more than love. And how on earth can I go back to my board of directors and sell them on love?" That man's problem is ours and yours. It is our task and yours to sell the world on love. (p. 334)
