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What would JL have to say?<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><!--StartFragment--> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">POLITICAL SOCIOMETRY by J.L. Moreno<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Sociometric revolutions do not promise violent and rapid results. They dig deep and their success depends upon a new learning process applied to small groups. Similar to the infant, mankind will mature only step by step and to the degree to which sociometric consciousness will refashion our social institutions, the structural readiness of mankind for a world society will ripen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Many wars and social upheavals will torture its sick body. In this transition the doctor may be more important than the engineer. <o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">(pp 167)<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><i>Sociometric Thesis<o:p></o:p></i></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="1" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Human society has a structure of its own which is <i>not</i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> identical with the social order or the form of government currently in power. Its structure is influenced but never entirely determined by the instrument in charge of its affairs, for instance the state. The state may “vanish” but the underlying sociodynamic structure of society persists in one form or another. It is into the structure of the socius therefore, that a revolutionary effort has to put its teeth if a lasting and true cure of social ills is to be effected.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="2" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Sociometry has developed two types of instruments, instruments for diagnosing social structures and instruments for changing them. The sociometric test, psychodrama, sociodrama and axiodrama among others can be used for diagnosis as well as for social revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="3" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">The oldest and most numerous proletariat of human society is the sociometric proletariat. It consists of all the people who suffer from one form of misery or other, psychological misery, social misery, economic misery, political misery, racial misery, religious misery. There are numerous individuals and groups whose volume of attractions, or role expansion, of spontaneity and productivity are far beneath their needs and their ability to consummate them. The world is full of isolated, rejected, rejecting, unreciprocated and neglected individuals and groups.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="4" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">The sociometric proletariat cannot be “saved” by economic revolutions. It existed in primitive and precapitalistic society, it exists in democratic societies, and in socialist Russia.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="5" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Sociometry is the sociology of the people, by the people and for the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It teaches that human society cannot be changed by indirect, mechanical manipulation or by the arbiter of force. Whatever the type of government or social institutions coerced upon the people, whether they are cooperative communities, communistic, democratic, autocratic or anarchistic types of government, sooner or later they lose their hold upon the people. The people discard them, if they do not root in the productive will of the people and if they are not created with the full participation of every individual member.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="6" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">In order to change the social world social experiments have to be so designed that they can produce change; in order to produce change the people themselves have to be included in its operation. You cannot change the world ex-post-facto,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>you must do it now and here, with and through the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Marx had not the slightest intention of developing an experimental method for the social sciences but he has been the only pre-sociometric sociologist who came close to solving the problem. It is true that the social revolutions which he instigated ended in failure –in their major aims—but this does not contradict the fact that his revolutionary theory was the nearest to an experimental method in the social sciences before the advent of the sociometric method in our own time. How could governments and responsible statesmen ever take the world of social scientists seriously, considering the triviality of their findings and the aimlessness of their experimental designs. They took Marx, Engels, and Lenin seriously because they tried to change the world.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="7" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">The dilemma of Marxism can be summed up in one phrase: its ignorance of the dynamic social structure of human society. It ascribes the deep resistance to change and revolution to the property owners, the capitalistic class. It is not aware <i>that this deep resistance comes directly from the social structure</i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> and if the true cause for it simmers in the mind of some of the flowers of Marx, they do not make an adequate effort to take it into account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="8" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Sociometric investigations suggest the existence of residual social structures which are traceable to the following phenomena: a) an embryonic social structure which can already be noticed in subhuman societies; b) every social order, after it has had its reign, does not disappear entirely but leaves its mark upon the social structures which it has shaped. The cumulative effects of these “hangovers” plus the above-described embryonic development produce a total impact which explains the resistance against change.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="9" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">The social experimenter cannot know all the factors entering the situation nor all the changes in these factors which may take place between the time he considers the experiment up to the time he executes it, and he cannot know of new factors which may enter the situation in the course of the experiment itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The sociometric experiments escape this dilemma, they are the experimenter and the experimental subject in one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Even if they do not know of all the factors entering their situation it is inherent in their feelings, their actions and interaction-actions and it must come out in their experimental designs and revolutionary transaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It may be at times imperfect and unprecise but it is an experiment in vivo, consciously and systematically carried out by the whole group.<o:p></o:p></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <ol style="margin-top:0in" start="10" type="1"> <li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1;tab-stops:list .5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><i>Social nature has a sociometric character, that is why sociomtery works.</i></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> The solution is to replace the experimental method of Bacon and Mill which was constructed to meet the requirements of physics, by an experimental method which is able to cross examine the reality of social change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The idea of setting up control group in the realm of social action is pregnant with artificiality and abnormality and bound to distort the results or make them trivial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Spontaneous control groups are possible, but never outside, only within a sociometric atmosphere. The replacement is accomplished of reversal. Mankind itself, in a literal and concrete sense of the word becomes experimenter and the former autocratic experimenter becomes one of its two billion co-thinking participants.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></li> </ol> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">(pp 167-169)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><i>Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society<o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">J.L. Moreno<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">1951<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Beacon House, Inc.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></div> <!--EndFragment--> </div></body></html>