PARTING SHOT

We still give lip service to the individual, but we live in the age of the group. More and more our talk is about what large masses of people- Hispanics, Jews, women, blue-collar workers-want and fear and resent. We believe in group thinking, group characteristics, group entitlements, even group guilt.

Here is how groupthink works in practice. Groupthinkers believe that white people- whether educated or illiterate, married or single, alcoholic or abstinent, rich or penniless-have more in common with other whites, merely because of skin color, than they do with blacks or Hispanics of similar social and demographic type. Same goes for black people. According to groupthink, a black orthodontist from Rhode Island has more in common with a black barge worker on the Mississippi, merely because of skin color, than he does with a white doctor down the hall.

Dr. Don Beck begs to differ. “It’s our values that count, not our genes,” he says. Beck, an intense, florid man who runs the 15-year-old National Values Center in Den-ton, has developed a system of understanding people, and how people change, that does not rely on skin color as a defining characteristic. He and his partner, Christopher Cowan, present seminars to business and education groups interested in “managing change” among employees, but their greatest success so far has come in South Africa, where Beck has made a name as a bridge-builder between black and white extremes.

Expanding on the work of his mentor Clare Graves, a New York psychologist who died in 1986, Beck has designed a developmental “map” of the human mind and the eight “Deep Structures” of our thinking. “The focus is not on types of people, but types in people,” Beck says. He stresses that these stages do not represent “higher” and “lower” phases of development, but greater or lesser degrees of complexity. The values and behavior of what he calls first-level thinkers are right for them, as the values and behavior of eighth-level thinkers are right for them. Imagine waves or spirals, not ladders.

At Beck’s first level. Survival Sense, people focus on little more than basic biological needs-food, sex, shelter, etc. SurvivalSense values are found in hunter-gatherer societies and under various conditions of extreme stress. At the level called PowerGods, the focus is on wresting power from others, by brute force if necessary. In the StriveDrive phase, Beck says, we find the kind of thinking that builds industrial societies-a belief in progress and a desire to create economic abundance.

Beck believes we are all mosaics of the eight thinking patterns, with certain patterns dominant depending on life circumstances. To make his audiences understand, Beck asks how many of them plan to steal food that night. Quizzical looks, nervous laughter. Then he asks how many would steal rather than watch a child starve, and most hands go up. The point is that SurvivalSense thinking is dormant in all of us, and could be reactivated in a crisis.

So what’s this got to do with Dallas? Maybe a lot. Beck believes that minority neighborhoods ravaged by crime and drugs will be saved only by the emergence of fourth-level or TruthForce thinking, characterized by rigid moral codes and “crusades against evil.” The interest in African culture and the Islamic faith among many young blacks, Beck says, is born from “a thirst for reasons, for a cause for living. That’s what makes Malcolm X and Farrakhan so popular.”

Three years ago, Beck and Cowan put together a paper specifically tailored for Mayor Annette Strauss, showing her how to be mayor of all the people by understanding the eight thinking patterns. Among their first pieces of advice: Don’t be fooled into an overemphasis on race, which often “masks” the truly important differences among people stemming from economic level, moral values, etc. The deep structures of thinking, not superficial skin color, are the real causes of conflict, and therefore a valuable study for anyone seeking to lead Dallas. Beck thinks that some of his ideas might have filtered into the formation of Dallas Together, but he’s not sure. “She’s always under so much pressure,” he says of the mayor.

The pressure won’t go away, of course, but the next mayor and the members of the new 14-1 council should spend some time pondering Beck’s ideas. In these days of group-think it’s easy to forget that color-coding people is not enough. It’s short-sighted and arrogant to assume that the mere presence of a number of black and brown faces tells us much at all about what the new council will do or fail to do. The key is the type of thinking the new faces bring to the council. African-American candidates such as Don Hicks, Charlotte Mayes, and Gloria Hogg are not ideological clones of Diane Rags-dale. Why should they be? Glenn Box is white. Lori Palmer is white. Now find something else they share.

Beck’s ideas might help Dallas. They’ve helped in South Africa, which he’s visited 39 times since 1980, starting as a consultant to large companies and growing into a respected problem solver who’s not afraid to take on “bigoted Boers” as well as “the anti-apartheid industry.” He’s a frequent voice on the op-ed pages of the country’s large newspapers, and his ideas have been debated in Parliament. This month, Beck and South African journalist Graham Linscott will publish The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future.

I visited South Africa in the mid-Eighties, just before the first state of emergency was declared. As a guest in the homes of numerous Afrikaners, I saw the vast gulfs of prejudice and ignorance that separated these whites from the blacks they knew mostly as servants and illiterate tribesmen.

At the time, it seemed that nothing but a blood bath could purge the land of apartheid. Now there are bright rays of hope that South Africa can, without violent revolution, create justice and equality for all its citizens, If the country makes that peaceful transition, the big names-Mandela, De Klerk, Biko, Buthelezi-will deserve most of the credit. But there will be many smaller names, proud footnotes to history. Don Beck will be one of them. With those credentials, he has much to tell us here at home.