In this blog post, Orrin Woodward shares his Power Pendulum. This concept describes the force/freedom movements within society. LIFE Leadership recently released a full DVD where Orrin outlines Western Civilization's Power Pendulum moves throughout history. Few men can create and teach complex concepts in such a simple fashion as Orrin Woodward. Below is a description of the Power Pendulum from his blog post.
Here is another snippet of the introduction I am working on for a future book on freedom. I received 10 copies of the final version of the LeaderShift book yesterday and I am so pumped. It looks great and it is going to have such an impact. I am loving LIFE and ready to help move the Power Pendulum back into concord! Here is a couple of paragraphs describing the Power Pendulum.
Sincerely,
Mankind’s quest for concord (peace and harmony) within society is as old as human civilization. Concord, the ideal balance between force and freedom, lies between the extremes of chaos and coercion. The freedom and force movements in every society between chaos, concord and coercion is remarkably similar to a pendulum’s trajectory. As a result, the author developed the Power Pendulum to track the trajectory between force and freedom within society. Society is defined as a community of individuals who combine together to pursue common objectives. However, within any working society there must be a power strong enough to ensure justice internally and externally. To meet this responsibility, society forms a government (State) to apply force when any of societies members attempt injustice upon other members. While free societies secure the cooperation of most of its members through persuasion, the State is the watchman provided to protect its peaceable members from those who attempt to plunder others for personal gain. In other words, the state is given the power of coercion to ensure disobedience to laws is punished. The question becomes how much coercion is necessary to ensure internal and external peace without the government itself becoming the plunderers of its people.
In healthy societies, the Power Pendulum moves away from the radical edges (either chaos or coercion) into the center position of concord. The Power Pendulum measures the State force applied within society, ranging from too little on one side (leading to chaos) to too much on the other side (leading to coercion). The quested for resting spot of the Power Pendulum is concord – limited force applied only to maintain internal and external peace and justice. Indeed, society thrives when the pendulum is balanced in concord because sufficient power is present to ensure order-liberty, but not enough to drift the pendulum towards coercion and loss of liberties. Although the State is part of the Society, society is a voluntary organization while the State operates through coercion. The State and Society can be summarized in the following way. The State is part of society and they overlap in many instances. However, society uses the principle of voluntary cooperation, working through good will of its members. The State, on the other hand, uses the principle of compulsion, working with force or threatened force upon its members. Paraphrasing historian Ernest Barker, society’s method is elasticity while the State’s method is rigidity. But, if society is divided between methods of force and freedom, how can it remain free, especially when part of society (the State) is given a force monopoly? Isn’t this force just as likely to be used against society as for its benefit? The answer to this State/Society paradox is the key to resolving the Power Pendulum. Through ending the trajectory swings between chaos and coercion, Western Society can finally complete the 2500 year quest for concord.
