So, a couple months ago I was going to give a talk to a group of youth from several organizations when a close friend and associate of mine, Delafruz Nasimova, suggested that we invite them to a LazosLearning course “A Discourse on Social Action.” Now I’ve been a follower of the FUNDAEC and LazosLearning courses for some time and had wanted to participate myself in such a course, so I was all thumbs up.
Now before I go on I should tell a bit about FUNDAEC and LazosLearning. FUNDAEC (which is an acronym in Spanish for “The Foundation for the Application and Teaching of the Sciences”) is a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization that has dedicated over 30 years to fostering processes of learning, training, and development in the rural areas of Colombia and an increasing number of countries in Latin America. LazosLearning offers online courses based on materials from FUNDAEC, these learning materials are focused on developing the capacity in individuals to work together to contribute effectively to social change. These materials are quite paradigm changing and very intense, to say the least.
At the talk, after the usual discussion about Traveler’s Coffee and the role in the business community here in Novosibirsk that I hoped to play we got on to the subject of social action. I did a brief introduction about what DSA (Discourse on Social Action) was and went into an what turned out to be a very well received discussion about “discourse” and “understanding” of the problems of general society and the internal conflicts that exist in us and our approaches to social issues.
I wrote on the flip chart the word “addiction to narcotics” and asked, “What can you say about drug addiction?” They proceeded to say things such as, “a killing disease”, “death”, “a social problem”, “destroyer of families”, “mafia business”, etc. A whole list of negative realities. Then on the other side of the flip chart I wrote the word “narcotics” and again asked, “What can you say about narcotics?” The answers were very interesting, “stress relieving”, “illegal business”, “helps creative thinking”, “entertainment”, “bad for your health”, etc.
After all that was done I asked if they saw any difference between the two lists. They began to say that one list was filled with negative concepts whereas the other list was more positive and almost acceptable concepts. We discussed how these two perceptions were in conflict with each other and that addiction to narcotics was unacceptable where as narcotics were almost acceptable. Then I asked, “If we were going to make a social program, wouldn’t it be good to have our ideas about narcotics and addiction to narcotics in harmony, this is why we need a Discourse on Social Action.” Then I said let me make this even harder and wrote on the flip chart the word “alcohol”. Then said, “Now we are in a mess of trouble…” Our opinions about all these words are in such sharp contrast and conflict that real social action and change is very hard to achieve. To find the true causes of such deep-rooted social ills is not easy and to cure them even harder…
So, after all that I invited them to the “Discourse on Social Action” course and we started almost two weeks later…
