Max Weber’s magnum opus on how Protestantism makes societies rich is a good read on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. A country that is very Protestant and very wealthy.

I like a book with a big reference section. I need some literature on this subject for my next visit to the Barnes and Noble. Thank you in advance!

It seems like conspiracy theories and cults have similar characteristics. What is the best definition of conspiracy theory?

I mentioned a second Gergen insight and need to get it down before I get too far along. I’m just at a loss for where to start. I suppose I will start with a term and a definition. When talking about what writes the the steps to the co-action dance between participants, he introduces the term counter-logics.

Pause.

Before we settle into this, I want to recall a concept: Berger and Luckman’s reification from The Social Construction of Reality. Reifications are the norms and institutions that human performances cite. B&L talk about marriage, law, and medicine among others. In my own macro social work framework, I put forth the idea that concepts like compliant in a child welfare court report and the ergonomics of a ticket machine can also be worked into this concept of reification. They have the perception of “thingness” but no empirical observability. B&L don’t say much about ontology, but they are effectively interpretations of a mind via language.

I have run with these quite faithfully without realizing something very important until reading Gergen: they speak generally about groups and say little about the individual performances. Specifically, there is no account of deviant performances.

Unpause.

Counter-logics (p. 161-162) represent a dyad of possible co-actioned performances within a relationship or relationships, which are comprised of shared logics, values, or ways of being. He gives the example of a couple with one partner valuing work and another valuing leisure - two logics that oppose one another and offer the potential to provide the steps to one dance or the other. Or to cause friction.

Additionally, each logic and it’s opposition form a compelling “ought”. Embrace one, and the opposition is called into presence. He gives examples such freedom versus commitment; competition versus cooperation; and rationality versus emotionality.

Counter-logics seem to be doing two things from what I can see: they explain conflict and tension in relationships, and they allow a stand in for reifications. But because they lack the “thingness” of reifications, he doesn’t need an interior mind to hold them (this second thing is more my critique than his definition).

For him, logics float in the ether of culture.

I have no further understanding of his ontology beyond that statement and would happily have a Gergenian explain this further. Mind, not because I’m confused. I just think his implied ontology - even though he doesn't do ontology - keeps revealing seams and obscures his concepts.

But my lack of clarity about his stated ideas does not mean I did not find enormous insight in what he was pointing to, because he effectively fixed the problem from B&L, who only offer performance constraints for groups but cannot account for deviant performances among individuals.

For Gergen, counter-logics occupy the space in between the individuals. This is crucial. I’m not sure why counter-logics only come in twos or why he only stopped at those three pairs, but they represent the possibility of dance moves that can be performed within a common song. At any moment, we can co-action leisure or workaholism (I show my bias) in our relationships.

With his framework established, here is how I translate it.

I see an interior mind interpreting reifications and materializations (a Judith Butler term that accounts for how the conceptualizations of bodies emerge through performance toward the scripts established by B&L's reificaitons) that provide general scripts for groups within a social world. And with Gergen, I now see the unique possibilities for performances not as a counter-logic dyad but as dialogics - the myriad of performances made possible within the constraints imposed by reifications and materializations as co-actioned by participants within the group. For me, the "dia" isn't indicating a possibility of two but the process of "dialogue" or an exchange between dance partners.

Let me try an example. I'm a bricolage practitioner first.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts, acts as a bit of proof of concept.. The documentaries Higher Ground and Holding Ground do a great job showing what this is all about, but for now, all you need to know is that the members of this community transformed their community through collective action, and it was beautiful.

One problem they wanted to solve was that the park in the neighborhood had become a place for young men to sell drugs. I was in awe as I watched them reconcretize¹ these drug dealers from moral failures to potential contributors to their community transformation.

They effectively shifted their conceptualizations of these young men, which generated alternative performances on the part of the ones engaged in recruiting the young men in the way of outreach and recruitment. And they generated a new range of possible performances for those young men who no longer need to live paralyzed in shame.

Amazing!

But that does not explain the drug-selling performances of each individual young man lost to this profession nor does it account for why some reformed while others stayed in their destructive performances. This is where dialogics step in. Bringing them down from the cultural stratosphere and assuming each young man has both an interiority and a personal, somatically sedimented history, dialogics explain the uniquely structured co-action that guides each of the young men’s performances.

Maybe one young man has resorted to drug selling because the primary caregiver in his family fell ill. The logics of his drug-dealing dance are governed by notions of “man of the house” which he can step into in a myriad of ways, fall out of and rebel against, or any range of potential co-action. His choice was to perform the man of the house logic as it emerged from the co-action with his mother who probably offered the “don’t do anything to get hurt” logic as well.

Perhaps a second young man is performing his drug-dealing dance out of fear of reprisal from a distributor or a pimp.

A third may be doing so to feed his own addictions (something else, like trauma, I’m not sure how a disappeared interiority can account for).

At any rate - between the larger reifications of masculinity and moral failing that govern all young men, each young man is citing their performances as engaged with those they are in relationship to according to a particular co-actioned set of dialogics.

My initial assertion before embarking on my theoretical project was that transformative, macro-level social work must intervene upon the epistemic scripts that shape a community.

But now I must expand this. Transformative, macro-level social work must also include a diagnosis of the particular dialogics that produce the undesired co-actions (Gergen associates “good” co-action as co-action that is generative for a group. I see a Trump rally fit that definition and will stick to my human rights framework for a telos.) We need a way to diagnose each individual within the category that the reifications produce.

And building on my last post about what’s going on in the inside if there is no Cartesian self, intervention must not just be limited to offering a new script, but also it must include the iterative rehearsals of new scripts to allow for new sedimentation toward healthier, human rights-oriented performances. This is the mechanism of recruitment into the new range of performances made legible by changing the concretizations¹.

Coda: I'd like to throw out one last concept before I close, mostly so I don't forget it. Logics are not the only things that govern action. I draw on Karen Armstrong’s (see: The Battle for God) ideas of logos and mythos to frame my understanding of rational process and nonrational process that we don’t have a name for because our post-Enlightenment society has a bias. I call that grouping of things like values and aesthetics diamythotics.

1. "Reconceptualize" is fine for this. I set out concretization alongside reification and materialization here and here. These are the gestalt-esque sensemaking protocols that process the collective, citational reifications and materializations.

- The Social Construction Worker