Cooperative Commonwealth Community Principles, Procedures, and Values
Along with planned occasions of dialectical interchange in training and decision-making, members of the community encounter one another in everyday conversations and interactions of many kinds. All these encounters, it should be noted, are marked by extraordinary directness, harmony, candidness, cooperativeness, and openness--the result of the training and dialectical interchange that Diotima and Elbridge helped to establish in the community enterprise from the beginning. As a result, the members' encounters never degenerate into the idle blathering and meaningless "small-talk" of ordinary conversation among the general populace.
All this is not for the purpose of creating invidious distinctions between community members and the larger society, but to ensure that all interactions between members possess the essential qualities that enable such interchange to be most productive and transformative.  One of the distinguishing marks of community members is their unceasing interest in learning and personal development.
We have decided from the beginning that our communities will be thoughtfully and deliberately created, since we understand that attempting to reorganize and re-educate already formed,
haphazard groups--small or as large as the entire nation--is counter-productive. We form (screen and train) entirely new communities because we recognize that members of the general American populace are unprepared for cooperative living, having been corrupted by cultural values and patterns imposed by predatory capitalism.
"They will take the city and the characters of men, as they might a tablet, and first wipe it clean--no easy task. But at any rate you know that this would be their first point of difference from ordinary reformers, that they would refuse to take in hand either individual or state or to legislate before they either received a clean slate or themselves made it clean."
Plato, Commonwealth VI |
We recognize that ongoing interpersonal interaction in untrained groups automatically produces over-emotionality and delusions of effectiveness, unity and affection--what Bion calls "valency."
To understand these phenomena we include in our training curriculum--among many other sources--a study of W. R. Bion's Experiences in Groups.
Our study of Bion's Experiences in Groups in the CCC training program serves additional purposes:
- Training members to be able to identify and overcome negative elements in CCC group interaction
- Training CCC members to use Bion's processes to enhance decision-making and dialectical interchange sessions
For an explanation of why only this one book of Bion's is used in the CCC training program, go
HERE.
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