Community organizing is the means through which small, local groups collaborate to, often through what’s known as politicial jujitsu, implement incremental change. You might recall hearing it mentioned in connection with Obama, who learned it working with activist groups in Chicago. There is a deep connection between Alinsky’s tactics for community organizing and how strategy plays out over the internet.

His first tenet is the community part. Resource poor, community organizers are forced to rely on existing infrastructure. In other words, you need to intimately know the terrain and makeup of the community you’re working with. This seems obvious but it happens to contradict the operating procedure of nearly every political or social organization of any prominence – groups run by outside money, represented by leaders from different economic backgrounds, all speaking condescendingly about the “little guy.” Victor Davis Hanson illustrated Alinsky’s principal nicely when he much of the morale problem in Vietnam came from the fact that not enough leaders were dying with their troops. Alinsky thrived by noticing undervalued opportunities and then using the momentum to invigorate long disillusioned groups. The intimate knowledge of a group’s traditions was not just a way to know what a community needs, but also what assets they have available to use. People, he said, are the terrain.

The second most important Alinsky principal is what he calls “mass political jujitsu.” This is the concept of using the weight of something against itself. Alinsky once advised a group of students fighting against an archaic university administration who infringed on the rights of its students. So he asked, what is one thing the school does allow you to do? Chew gum, they said. He instructed each student to buy as much gum as they could possible chew and to discard it all over campus. A month later, the school called a meeting: ‘Alright, alright! We’ll change the rules but whatever they are, no more gum.” In jujitsu, one finds an opponents center of gravity and attacks that point to throw them off balance. In community organizing, a leader sniffs for weakness like hypocrisy, reputation, bad press, shame, embarrassment, and picks at it until it bursts.

The third is to abandon pretense, idealism and the notion of nice, neat solutions. Think about what the first two tenets require. First, you have to combine disparate and often competing groups into a coalition. Thus, a great deal of compromise. Second, you’re attempting to use your lack of resources as a weapon, essentially exploiting the humanness of your cause for attention, anger, pity or acquiescence. You can do this only if you’ve accepted that things are not only desperate but that the ends justify the means. If you’re a David attacking a Goliath, you’re not after a clean victory. Community organizing is about an honest awareness of what you’re after and being willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

Alinsky summed up the proper mindset of a community organizer this way:

“As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working within the system.”

To recap, community organizing is a way for leaders to use their expansive knowledge of local terrain to take on causes much bigger than themselves. By thinking of media and emotional pressures as a weapon, a community organizers get real world, tangible solutions. They work within the system in the sense that they understand the restraints it puts on their opponents and use it to bring them to account.

This is Part 1 of our series What Do I Need to Know?. Further recommended reading on this topic:

Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky

Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy by Sanford D. Horwitt

1972 Playboy interview with Saul Alinsky

For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone (MSNBC)

Democrats and the Legacy of Activist Saul Alinsky (NPR)

Rules for Radicals: Working within The System (RyanHoliday.net)

Agasicles, king of the Spartans, despite his fondness for intellectual discourse, would not entertain the sophist Philophanes. When someone expressed surprise at this, he declared: ‘I want to be the student of men whose son I should like to be as well.’

Plutarch, Saying of Spartans

People haven’t quite understood my feelings towards Penelope Trunk. But that’s sort of what it’s about.

We should take advice from people who have their own life together. We should read writers who write because they have something to say, not because they are desperately craving validation and will do or say anything to get it.

As I slowly realized how badly she fails in both those areas, I went from anger to a sad, deep pity.

The Stoics had an exercise called Turning the Obstacle Upside Down. What they meant to do was make it impossible to ever not practice the art of philosophy. Because if you can properly turn a problem upside down, bad is constantly a new source of good.

Suppose for a second that you are trying to help someone and they respond by being surly or unwilling to cooperate. Instead of making your life more difficult, the exercise says, they’re actually directing you towards new virtues; for example, patience or understanding. Or, if something important is stolen or lost; a chance to be less dependent on material things. Marcus Aurelius described it like this: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Does this sound familiar? It should because it is the same thinking behind Obama’s “teachable moments.” Right before the election, Joe Klein asked Obama how he’d made his decision to respond to the Reverend Wright scandal. He said something like ‘when the story broke I realized the best thing to do wasn’t damage control, it was to speak to Americans like adults.’ And he what he ended up doing was turning a negative situation into the perfect platform for his landmark speech about race.

Remember that the common refrain about entrepreneurs is that they take advantage of opportunities. Well, this is something much different. The Reverend Wright scandal, the Special Olympics gaffe, a frustrating case where your help goes unappreciated, none of those are “opportunities” in the normal sense of the word. In fact, they are the opposite. They are obstacles. What a hustler does, or what a Stoic does is turn the obstacle into an opportunity.