About the World Conference and Our Guidelines
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Northwest USA Teachers’ and Leaders’ Workshop, September 2022
I want to talk about the World Conference. At the World Conference we are trying to think about us. We gather people who have had enough experience with our ideas and the RC Community that they have a good chance of thinking freshly about who we are, what we are trying to do, and what we will be facing in the next period.
The 2022 World Conference was different from any other because it was on Zoom. We’d postponed the conference for a year hoping we could meet in person, but that didn’t work out. So we had ten Pre-World Conferences and a World Conference all on Zoom.
One of the important things about getting us together is that we get together—we get to see each other, we get to have Co-Counseling sessions, we build our relationships. The Community exists because of relationships. They are what let us keep using and developing the theory more fully; they’re what let us grow.
THE COLLAPSE OF OUR SOCIETIES
What was so different about this conference? One thing was the collapse of our societies. The great inequalities, especially economic inequality, keep increasing. Whatever the conditions are for everyone else, the wealthy keep getting wealthier. And that is a very basic contradiction to anything that can function long-term.
The basic contradiction of our societies is that they continue to get more unjust as we go on. The economics is what drives it. And the economic system is irrational enough that it doesn’t stop no matter what the conditions are. We are in a period when this is getting extreme enough to threaten the very existence of our societies. I don’t have to list examples of that for you, I am quite sure, unless you have dug yourself a very deep hole with no Internet connection. What’s happening is inescapable.
Over the years a lot of us have tried to interrupt some of the irrational functioning of society. But society itself is unworkable—it will collapse whether we do anything or not.
Along with the collapse of society is the accelerating damage to the climate. Both of these are very different from what we have had to face before. I will talk about the climate emergency tomorrow.
The question is, how do we prepare? How do we think well enough to guide both the collapse and the building of different societies?
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are using RC ideas and having regular sessions. Probably close to a million people have been exposed to RC ideas enough that they retain them. We are trying to change the functioning of our species. We see that it’s possible because we have figured out how to make it happen individually—we have all changed our own functioning significantly. So we have these ideas, and we’ve developed a practice to make them work. What we know can have large effects if we can reach enough people.
At some point we can replace the irrationally functioning societies. We can think, try new things, not act out old hurts, and make fresh decisions. Our goal is to get our minds liberated, to get your mind liberated, to get every mind we know liberated, and to make RC ideas accessible everywhere. If we can do that, it will have a gigantic effect. And we’re trying to do it quickly enough that the collapse of society is not as destructive as it might be.
The World Conference took place in this situation. We get to think about what to do in this new circumstance. Society is more and more desperately trying to distract us from the real situation and the actual problems—distract us from the economic exploitation of almost everybody and the oppressions that manipulate us to keep the exploitation happening. In times of collapse, societies get even harder on people, get more vicious. People act out their distresses more fully and more openly. And society uses this to scare people about each other.
ATTACKS
More and more people are being attacked. There are different kinds of attacks, but the intent is the same: to restimulate people so they can’t think and so they’re increasingly scared of each other and about functioning together. It then becomes more and more difficult for people to form a united front with a common platform to change society. But we have to function together to change society. We need a lot of people thinking together for it to happen.
It is likely that both individual Co-Counselors and RC will be attacked. You may be attacked. Attempts will be made to scare people about us and about you. It has happened several times before. It consistently happens at a low level, but it is likely to balloon up bigger in this coming period. How do we get in shape [in a condition] to handle that?
All of us can get restimulated. We wonder, “Are we evil? Have we hurt people? Have we misguided people? Are we a cult?” We need to understand what’s happening, but we don’t have to take it personally. Someone knowledgeable has not picked you out, thoughtfully analyzed you, and decided that you are evil. It’s about restimulation.
THE GUIDELINES
This means a couple of things for our Guidelines for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities. Until this point, almost everything in the Guidelines we were saying to each other. They were just for us; they weren’t for anybody else. We weren’t trying to impress them on others and tell them how they should handle things. We wrote them using our language and our understanding, and we expected people who read them to have our same understanding.
In the current period, people are more likely to notice us and look at our Guidelines. And what has guided us until now is not easily understandable and could restimulate people.
We understand that difficulties and mistakes don’t happen because somebody is “evil.” They come from the restimulation of distresses, and we know that distresses can be discharged. We can also eliminate the conditions in which mistakes happen so that they don’t happen again. That’s what we want. There are other people who are also trying more human approaches; but in general, society’s solution is to punish people—to hurt them so badly that they dare not act out their distresses again. Some people are crushed by the system. Some become quiet and meek, and we never see them again. And many are hurt in ways that make them more likely to act out distresses that damage other people.
We know that punishment doesn’t solve problems, and we don’t use it. This can look strange to people who feel like revenge or punishment is needed. They can’t tell [perceive] that we take the difficulties seriously. They aren’t aware of how we try to solve them—by not inflicting more hurts on people but rather helping people discharge what was already inflicted on them and made them act that way. It’s a hard thing to make clear, but we have tried to do that in the 2022 Guidelines.
We have also tried not to use our specialized vocabulary in these Guidelines. Every group develops its own vocabulary, its own shorthand, because that makes communication go more quickly. But our Guidelines can’t be in shorthand now because more people are going to be looking at them. We must be explicit about what we mean. This means that the 2022 Guidelines are longer than ever before. They also include a resource document to further explain them.
The 2022 Guidelines are a great achievement. They were hard work, because we had to question so many things. We had to question what and how we communicate. We had to look at how society treats people and find ways to communicate our ideas while staying who we are.
We have always corrected mistakes and solved difficulties informally. That doesn’t mean that we’ve always done it perfectly or even well, but we’ve always tried to interrupt distresses when they were being acted out. We have tried to give people enough resource that they could discharge and get through a difficulty, whether they were the perpetrator or the target. We have known to do that. And now, in our Guidelines, we are trying to make what we do clear to everyone.
(Present Time 210, January 2023)