If in my early days I organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, which was 95% Roman Catholic, I have always believed that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual. 59īirth control and abortion are personal rights Source: Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky, p. If I had to define a free and open society, the word would be compromise. A society devoid of compromise is totalitarianism. A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromise- which then starts conflict, compromise, and infinitum.Ĭontrol of power is based on compromise in our congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. If you start with nothing, demand 100%, then compromise for 30%, you're 30% ahead. It is making a deal, getting that final breather, usually the victory.

It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. The word is often regarded as beingīut to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. In the old culture, when virginity was a virtue, one offered to a woman's being compromised. 24-5Ĭompromise isn't surrender it's the basis of free societyĬompromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of ideals, surrender of moral principles. The ethics of means and ends can be recognized by one of two verbal brands: 'We agree with the ends but not the means,' or 'This is not the time.' The means or ends moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. To say that corrupt means corrupts the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. He asks of ends only if they are achievable and worth the cost of means. Resources and the possibility of his various choices of actions. He has no other problem he thinks only of his The man of issue views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises.

What you want, and means is how you get it. That perennial question, 'Does the end justify the means?' is meaningless as it stands the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been 'Does this particular end justify this particular means?' Means-versus-ends is meaningless real arena is bloody Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky

Rules for radicals by saul d alinsky