Comments on USGL Strategic Plan IV:xv

Fr. Αληθέυω

Introduction

It has become a bit of a joke over the last two and a half years that by the time USGL actually finished its five-year strategic plan, it would have run out of time to implement it and would instead have to immediately begin working on the next five-year plan. However, at long last the USGL Strategic Plan IV:xv is here, with a helpful introduction by Sabazius X° in the new issue of Agapé.

Now John Crow can stop posting monthly reminders of how long it is taking USGL to produce the plan and instead critique it— as I am sure he will, and others as well. What follows are my immediate reactions to the document; I am basically just making notes as I read, so it may be that some of the questions I raise are answered later in the document. I may have to modify some of these thoughts once I have read the whole plan and taken some time to consider its various aspects.

The plan is divided into five initiatives derived from the USGL Vision Statement. Each initiative is divided into a set of objectives, each of which, in turn, is subdivided into goals. Each goal, finally, has one or more strategies, and responsibilities for execution and time frames are specified for each strategy.

How substantive these objectives and goals are seems to vary quite a bit. Some are clearer than others; in some cases the time frames seem inadequately defined; there is usually no indication of how progress or success will be measured. I do not think, therefore, that these can be considered SMART goals, which is unfortunate.

Initiative 1

The first initiative is entitled “Promulgate Thelema and Great Principles of the Order.” These being the core tasks of the Order, it is obviously quite appropriate that they should be listed first.

Objective: Fully implement Liber 194 to the extent possible and practicable. There seems to be no indication of exactly what “extent” is “possible and practicable.” Perhaps Sabazius could write a companion to his Memorandum Regarding Liber CI detailing what parts of Liber CXCIV are to be considered outdated, illegal, discomforting, or otherwise unwanted? It would probably be going too far to simply assume that any aspect of CXCIV that is not mentioned in this Strategic Plan is considered impossible or impracticable by USGL, but some clarification on this would be helpful.

Goal: Establish at least one Profess House within the next decade. We could debate whether a decade is the right time frame (no doubt the Strategic Planning Committee has done so), but at least there is a time frame. Considering that the Order currently owns not a single Lodge facility, any statement of intent to develop real property holdings is a good thing. Except the plan doesn’t actually say that GL will own the Profess House building; one could be rented, or set up in a facility owned by a member, and this goal could be said to have been attained. All we are told about how this goal will be achieved is that the Executive Committee will “Form a committee to develop standards and strategies for Profess House development.” A time frame of Spring 2008 e.v. is given, but whether this applies to the formation of the committee or its finalization of standards and strategies is not completely clear. Two years to develop standards and strategies seems a bit much, but it may simply be realistic, considering that it took USGL over two and a half years to develop this Strategic Plan.

Goal: Fill both IXth Degree Revolutionary positions. I understand there is one Revolutionary already, and has been for a while, so this job was half done before the Plan was even written; yet the time frame is given as “ongoing,” with no deadline at all, and the only strategy offered is to “Publish a notice in Agapé to encourage eligible IXths to volunteer.” Have past notices in Agapé encouraging people to volunteer for things like paying local dues been notably successful? I don’t think so. Why should this one be any different?

Another problem here is that filling an office with a warm body is not, in and of itself, all that interesting in the absence of the critical quality of knowing what the office is for and how its business should be conducted. As I have noted in the past, the indications are that the O.T.O.’s current leadership has no intention of giving their “Revolutionaries” any real teeth; the office has been fundamentally undermined by either failure or willful refusal to understand how it is supposed to work. This being the case, it hardly matters whether anyone serves as Revolutionary or not; in practice, the title is pure formality without substance.

Goal: Retain four members of the Man of Earth to represent the feelings of the general body. There are two strategies for this: “Establish a YahooGroup to facilitate communications between Grand Master and representatives” and— wait, here it comes— “Publish a notice in Agapé to explain the position and encourage volunteers.” The second we have already considered in regard to the Revolutionaries, but the first deserves some comment. Getting in touch with Sabazius is not difficult. He has an email address at oto-usa.org, and he has at least three LiveJournal accounts that I know of currently (a fourth was deleted just recently). How many more ways to get in touch with him are needed? In any case, his usual reaction to criticism seems to be to cut off contact. On LJ, he removes you from his friends list; in email, he stops replying. How will yet another avenue of direct contact change this? Did anyone involved in crafting this Strategic Plan even consider this question?

On the plus side (if you can call it that in this case), these two “strategies” have already been completed— not that it was any great challenge to set up a YahooGroup and publish a statement in USGL’s own newsletter. But is there a Plan B if nobody volunteers? If so, the Strategic Plan does not mention it. And if there are volunteers, what criteria will be applied to choose among them? What sort of person is best suited to represent the MoE? The plan says nothing about this. My guess is that this is another purely pro forma creation with no real teeth. The four members (assuming four volunteers can be found; maybe I’m optimistic, but I imagine they can) will probably be selected for passivity and party loyalty (which USGL seems to mistake for “fraternity”) first and foremost, with little if any consideration given to sanity, intelligence, critical thinking skills, familiarity with the Thelemic Holy Books, and so on.

Goal: Implement meditative retreats for Electoral College members. I must admit, it surprised me to see this in here at all. But there’s a catch. Here’s their strategy: “Mandate that Electoral College members absent themselves from all but absolutely necessary O.T.O. participation and communication for 3 months every 2 years.” So the “retreat” consists simply of taking a break from “O.T.O. participation and communication.” This is a far cry from the plain language of the referenced paragraph of Liber CXCIV, which says, “They must each live in solitude, without more than the necessary speech even to casual neighbours...” In other words, the idea in Liber CXCIV is that EC members should in large part absent themselves not just from the O.T.O., but from society in general, including family, friends, and co-workers of any sort. Nor are these periods of solitude necessarily “meditative” as the Strategic Plan describes them; the members in retreat are to “serv[e] themselves in all respects,” whether that means meditation, study, intense yogic or magical practices, or whatever they may see fit to do.

It may well be argued that very few people in the O.T.O. at any level can afford to take a three-month sabbatical from their jobs every two years (nor, in the case of most married members, would their families be likely to stand for it), but for CXCIV’s retreats to serve their clearly-intended purpose, that is what would be necessary. Anything less than that is just another pro forma show without substance. To really do this right, the Order would have to first implement the vow of poverty mentioned in CXCIV, paragraph 30. Without that, the three-month retreats would be practicable only for the unemployed.

CXCIV requires that appointees to the EC must show “first-rate ability” in “some branch of athletics” and “some branch of learning,” and must further “possess a profound general knowledge of history and of the art of government, with some attention to philosophy.” This is far more important to the quality of the EC than the so-called “meditative retreats” (in fact, without such excellence, the retreats are arguably worthless), yet the Strategic Plan never even mentions it. I suspect this will not be the last time that we find that the plan completely ignores aspects of CXCIV that might raise the dangerous prospect of USGL officers being chosen or evaluated on grounds of actual merit.

The time frame for this, again, has no actual deadline. “Phase in beginning 2008 e.v.” tells us when they have to start implementing this, not when it actually has to be fully implemented.

Goal: Implement Vow of Poverty option for Electoral College, Supreme Grand Council, and Grand Treasurer General. The vow of poverty is to be an option? Is that what CXCIV says? How many of these people will actually take the vow and honor it in the breach? Would any EC or SGC members reading this critique care to volunteer?

Their strategy for this is to “Research relevant U.S. law on religious poverty.” Has no one done this in the eleven years of USGL’s existence? Not even out of personal interest, if not as part of any official USGL project? In any case, history indicates that the O.T.O.’s reading of the law tends to be highly opportunistic. I have heard it said that the reason our IX° members do not hold all their property in common is that U.S. law does not allow a non-profit religious corporation (which is what the O.T.O. legally is in this country) to hold such property on behalf of its members. Yet even if that is the case, it is hardly the end of the story. One way or another, it could surely be done if they wanted to do it, by means of some sort of trust or separate corporation owned collectively by the IX° members. Or even on a less formal basis than that. They don’t do it because they don’t want to; that’s really the only explanation. I’m sure they could find a way to implement Vows of Poverty; but do they really want to, or are they really just looking for an excuse not to?

Objective: Increase exposure of O.T.O. and Thelema in alternative and mainstream press. This is not a bad idea at all in and of itself, ignoring all questions of time, place, and the state of the Order. I think the real question is whether the O.T.O. has its act together well enough that it should want more exposure at this time. If the mainstream press in most big cities were aware of us at all, our problems would get a lot more publicity than they do now. Would we really want our drug and sex-predator scandals getting more attention from the mainstream press than they do now? Did anyone on the planning committee even consider this question? Shouldn’t we be working on cleaning up our act before worrying about looking for publicity? Does the Strategic Plan address this issue in any concrete, meaningful, effective way?

Goal: Publish NOTOCON proceedings. This is a good idea. It would show the world just what the O.T.O.’s members can produce. It could be a double-edged sword, but that’s a question for another time.

Goal: Publish a “best-of” anthology drawn from local body publications. Also not a bad idea, though I suspect it sounds better in concept than it would actually be in print. Aside from David R. Jones’ articles on Enochian magick in the Sekhet-Maat newsletter, I’ve seen very little of any substance in O.T.O. local body publications. There are some that I would really like to read that I have not been able to, but that’s because the originals are in Norwegian.

Goal: Encourage and coordinate publication of articles, interviews, reviews, etc. This is vague enough that it could mean nearly anything. What is the problem? How will encouragement and coordination help to solve it? The strategy is equally uninformative: “Form a committee to develop this function.” Well, I suppose that’s no worse than asking for volunteers in Agapé.

Objective: Support Thelemic speakers, authors, artists, musicians, filmmakers, etc. Sounds nice, but who is “Thelemic,” and who isn’t? Does Jimmy Page count? Kenneth Anger? David Tibet? Genesis P’Orridge? Daryl Hall? Is it the “Thelemic” quality of the person, or the relevance of their work to Thelema, that matters most? No answers here.

Goal: Enlist talent within the Order to help promote O.T.O. and Thelemic culture by the strategy: “Use Education Committee’s list of available speakers/teachers to recruit presenters for more public or specially targeted venues.” In theory this sounds reasonable. I don’t know very much about what the Education Committee has accomplished to date. I’m not quite sure what the Spring 2008 e.v. time frame refers to, though. Perhaps that’s the time by which they want to have an ongoing process in place for this recruitment of presenters. More clarity on this would be helpful.

Initiative 2

The second initiative is entitled “Develop and Strengthen Local Operations.” This is something I’m sure we all agree is very important and much needed.

Objective: Establish new local bodies in needed areas. Good idea, but (echoing what I wrote earlier about the goal of increased visibility in the press) I think the O.T.O. should be more concerned with cleaning up what it already has than with growing. We have new bodies opening and existing ones closing all the time. There is considerable instability in this regard, and I think an effort to increase the number of local bodies would simply lead to more instability unless the Order first examines its history and learns a number of crucial lessons that they seem not to have learned. We do not just need more, we need better. We need to know that the people we are putting in charge of local bodies are sane, functional, honest people of good will and administrative competence. We have had far too many local body masters who have been anything but that. This needs to change before we put effort into a growth initiative, or it will just get worse. That no such change is intended is made clear by the Summer/Autumn 2007 e.v. time frame attached to nearly all of this objective’s strategies.

Goal: Begin development of study groups and camps-in-formation in areas with initiates but no local bodies. This is sensible, but I see no indication that USGL has ever asked itself why its members seem (by and large) uninterested in moving to be nearer to local bodies. People really do move across the country or around the world to join groups (especially religious groups) that they really care about. Why does the Strategic Plan never mention this possibility or address ways in which it might be encouraged?

The first strategy under this heading says, “Provide a report to the Electoral College on the geographic distribution of membership.” Good, but this sort of information ought have been available already, not just once, but on an ongoing basis. And why not share this information with the membership at large rather than just submitting it to the EC?

The next strategy is to “Clarify the camp-in-formation program and promote it within the membership.” Greater clarification (of this as of many other things) would be good.

Last we have “Contact senior and high-degree initiates in identified areas and offer encouragement, mentoring, etc.” I’m not sure what the difference is between a “senior” and a “high-degree” initiate, but that’s a minor point. More importantly, this is quite vague. Are the “senior and high-degree initiates” to be given “encouragement, mentoring, etc.,” or are they to be asked to give it to others? Common sense suggests the latter, but the rules of grammar suggest the former; yet, isn’t it indicative of other problems if our “senior and high-degree initiates” need to be mentored? Of course, it might help if we knew what they were to be encouraged and mentored about, but on this point, the Strategic Plan is silent.

Goal: Begin development of membership in areas with no local OTO initiates. Taken in isolation, this sounds good but could mean a number of things.

Let us see what specific strategies are proposed. “On the basis of geographic membership report, prioritize unserved metropolitan areas.” This is an interesting point because it is the first time in this Strategic Plan document that any dependency between strategies, goals, or objectives has been indicated. This is a very important part of planning, because it determines the sequence in which various tasks must be carried out. If your plan is simply a long list of things to do with deadlines but no indication of natural dependencies between the tasks, then you will be likely to run into problems during execution of the plan. Glancing down the page, I see that in addition to encouraging the formation of bodies in new areas, the plan also addresses improvements for existing bodies, including better training for local body officers. This is exactly the sort of natural dependency that the Plan’s time frames ignore. We should develop and validate improvements in training local body officers before trying to grow into new geographical areas. Yet the time frames given do not reflect this.

Next: “Appoint USGL development teams to do Minerval and First Degree initiations in unserved areas.” What for? If someone wants to join the O.T.O., they should travel to a local body and be initiated there. This idea that the O.T.O. will come to you for your initiation is truly appalling, and indicative of a preference for quantity over quality, appearance over reality, form over substance. USGL, I think, just wants to be able to say that they have more members and better geographical coverage. They aren’t considering what kind of people they’re going to get this way, nor how little oversight they will be able to provide when these initiates out in the middle of nowhere start forming local bodies. Oversight of local bodies is already one of the O.T.O.’s weak spots; it should be improved before we start worrying about forming them in areas where we lack an existing presence.

Last: “Create advance publicity for initiations using targeted speaking/teaching engagements.” I’m not sure what the point of this is. Is USGL trying to increase the number of applicants for initiation by scheduling public events to coincide with initiator visits? If so, it’s not a bad idea in itself, but it suggests, again, a desire for sheer quantity without regard for quality.

Objective: Support growth of existing local bodies. As a matter of presentation, I would have put this before the above objective of establishing new local bodies. The maintenance of what you have is usually more critical than getting more of the same, and the strategies applied successfully to the improvement of existing local bodies will tend to have a beneficial effect on newly-chartered bodies as well. This is, of course, a statement about the written plan document rather than about the plan itself, but the document and its presentation are important too.

Goal: Encourage local bodies to develop their own strategic plans. This is a good idea, but before USGL can do this effectively it needs to learn more about strategic planning itself. The plan under consideration here is hardly a model example; many task descriptions are vague, metrics and intermediate milestones are largely absent, dependencies are rarely indicated, and overall a real understanding of the actual problems to be addressed seems lacking.

Two strategies support this goal: “Publish an article in Agapé on local body strategic planning” and “Develop a Kaaba module on local body strategic planning.” These are good ideas, but they cannot be executed properly until USGL itself has competence in strategic planning. I would suggest, as one step towards that end, that USGL should pay to send some of its senior officers to professional seminars on strategic planning and project management.

Goal: Increase expertise and proficiency of local officers. Strategy: “Provide instruction via Kaaba Colloquia.” Now, of course it’s sensible to leverage existing tools such as Agapé and Kaaba, but one must consider the limitations and existing deficiencies of these tools before employing them everywhere as if they were the hammer to every problem’s nail. Agapé is limited by its format (generally less than 20 pages, many of them taken up by regularly featured columns) and publication frequency (quarterly when the planets are favorably aspected; highly irregular otherwise). It is therefore ill-suited for in-depth instructional essays. Kaaba is also limited by frequency; since few members actually travel across the country to attend a Kaaba except for the presenters themselves, in practice the Kaaba has a very limited audience, usually more or less local to the facility hosting it at any given time. Most members, and probably most bodymasters, have never been to a Kaaba. As an instructional tool for the Order at large, it is basically a failure. USGL’s strategic planners, however, seem not to have realized this.

The time frame given for this is “ongoing,” which is to say, there is none. Nor are any metrics for the measurement of progress given. This is, consequently, not really a goal at all, but a wish unsupported by any concrete steps towards its fulfillment. It should be clear now why I have said that USGL doesn’t seem to know very much about strategic planning.

Goal: Improve Mentor Program. Strategy: “Increase pool of mentors by directly (i.e. personally) recruiting immediate past masters.” No indication is given as to necessary qualifications of mentors other than that they should be “immediate past masters” (of O.T.O. local bodies, I assume). Why only immediate past masters? Why no indication of additional qualifications? Again we see hints of USGL desperately reaching for the appearance of progress without seeming to consider the real substance of the issue.

Goal: Promote local body membership. There are five strategies here. That in itself is a good sign; too many of these goals have only one, with nothing to fall back on if that one strategy fails. But then again, it seems that good intentions count for more at USGL than bad results.

The first strategy is “Revise initiation application forms to ask for local body membership.” This is typically ambiguous phrasing that could be read in more than one way, but I think the meaning is that the initiation application forms will be revised to ask what body the applicant belongs to or wishes to join. This is a good idea; but there is no indication that the form will be rejected if this information is not given.

The second strategy says, “Revise online dues payment system to ask for local body membership.” This has the same ambiguity as the first strategy, but I assume, parallel to the above, that the idea is to ask the user what local body he belongs to. Again, it’s a good idea, but there is no indication that the information will actually be required.

Actually, these two “strategies” aren’t really strategies at all; they are small tasks that might be components of a strategy. What these two items (and the third, “Collect and report local body membership statistics to Executive Council annually”) really imply is a single strategy of gathering information about local body membership as input to USGL’s planning process. It’s a good idea, but one that should have been done from the beginning. O.T.O.’s basic problem here is that it considers membership in O.T.O. to be defined by Grand Lodge membership. Local body membership has historically been optional in practice. This was a fundamental mistake that absolutely must be corrected to solve the local body funding problem. Typically, the Strategic Plan never even mentions it.

The last two “strategies” are “Educate local body officers regarding membership provisions in local body bylaws” and “Educate local body officers regarding use of local body membership incentives.” These, again, are not really strategies, but items in a larger strategy of educating local body masters about the tools that are available to them to discourage free-riding and encourage unaffiliated local members to join. Properly speaking, these should be under the strategy “Increase expertise and proficiency of local officers” above, which was completely lacking in details. Both are good ideas, but they are indicative of the unfortunate state of the Order. If our members care so little about the Order’s work that they need to be carrot-and-sticked to get them to pay local dues, and the leadership is unwilling or unable to make local dues mandatory for good report status, then the Order is ultimately very weak at all levels. The Strategic Plan, of course, does not recognize this, and implicitly assumes the contrary with its emphasis on growth. As Crowley once wrote, “When Civil War rages in a nation, it is in no condition to undertake the invasion of other countries. A man with cancer employs his nourishment alike to his own use and to that of the enemy which is part of himself.” (Magick in Theory and Practice, Introduction, illustration of Theorem 8.)

Goal: Encourage support of Man of Earth bodies by Lover and Hermit Triad membership. Strategy: “Publish an article in The Pelican to encourage such supprt.” No other strategies. No fallback plan. Why do they expect articles in The Pelican to be any more effective than articles in Agapé?

Objective: Support acquisition and maintenance of dedicated space for Lodges. This is a terrific objective. Let’s see what they plan to do about it.

Goal: Assist local bodies to build and maintain funding levels required to support dedicated space. Again, only one strategy, with no fallback plan: “Solicit funding strategies from Lodges successfully maintaining dedicated space and make these available to local bodies.” I thought the Bodymasters mailing list was intended as a forum for local body masters to share information? But of course, it’s been shut down. In any case, there are precious few local bodies successfully maintaining dedicated space (especially if we limit it to bodies with 24/7 control of their facility, as opposed to day rentals), and most of them seem to be perpetually hovering on the edge of financial disaster. And those bodies that seem successful at one point in time often look much less so a year or two later. In 2005, Scarlet Woman Lodge would have been an obvious candidate, but they subsequently lost their rented facility and had to go without one for a while. In 2006, Therion-Babalon Oasis was the new star, but it has since lost its space and currently operates out of its master’s house. What does that leave us with? Sekhet-Maat and LVX Lodges and Knights Templar Oasis are the only ones that spring to mind. Before attempting to replicate their models elsewhere, one would be well-advised to study them carefully in situ to discover why they work in those places in the first place; simply asking them how they do it is insufficient as a strategy, though it is reasonable as one step in an overall data gathering and analysis strategy that is not mentioned in this Strategic Plan.

Goal: Establish at least one Order-owned local body facility within the next decade. It’s refreshing to see this after all the excuses that have been put out in the past about property ownership being unnecessary. On the one hand, I wish the time frame were less than a decade, but I have to admit that it’s not something to rush into. If the time frame were six months, I would have to denounce the Strategic Planning Committee as lunatics. Still, ten years seems a bit much. Three would have been aggressive; five or six, more reasonable. But still, the goal exists. Let us see how they plan to achieve it.

There are, incredibly, only two strategies for this most ambitious of goals. The first is “Develop due diligence template for local bodies for evaluating costs vs. benefits of property ownership.” In other words (I think), real estate acquisition is a big step, and local bodies should have tools available to help them decide when the time is right. This is quite sensible, though it will be interesting to see if the template itself is also sensible. The time frame attached to this is Autumn 2007 e.v., which strikes me as rather aggressive unless a fair amount of preparatory work has already been done (the plan does not say, but I would guess it has, given USGL’s past statements about property ownership). The second strategy is “Investigate alternatives to property acquisition: e.g. financing, investment, partnership, donation, bequest.” Financing, of course, is the most likely route to property ownership. I’m not sure exactly what they mean by “investment” here; are they referring to putting money into non-real-estate (or at least non-local-body-facility) projects to build up capital, or are they hoping someone will invest money in the O.T.O.? Owning property in partnership with someone else is a possibility, though it has risks too (as all strategies do). Waiting for someone to donate or will property to the Order (otherwise known as the “rich man from the West” strategy) strikes me as the laziest approach possible, and the most likely to fail. Waiting for a huge gift is not a repeatable strategy; it’s blind luck, like winning a million dollars at a slot machine. It is critical that a property acquisition strategy be repeatable. The goal may be only to have one Order-owned local body facility, but ultimately the greatest value of that one facility is as the herald of a future in which the Order owns many such facilities. We may conceivably be lucky enough to get one building given to us, but that won’t help our other Lodges. A strategy by which we obtain property through our own efforts, with our own money, in a way that other local bodies can emulate successfully, is the only worthwhile kind of strategy.

It is also worth noting that the time frames on these two strategies shows that they should both be completed within the next year. What happens after that? Why are there no milestones between Spring 2008 e.v. and the achievement of property ownership by 2017 e.v.?

Objective: Support development of Rose Croix Chapters. No doubt this is a good idea, but as a member of the Man of Earth Triad my ability to address the current state of the R.C. and its needs is limited.

Goal: Evaluate current state of Chapter development. This is surely a good first step, but it is a bad sign that it needs to be done at all. The state of the R.C. should have been monitored and guided by the leadership from the start. There should be no question about what the state is at this point. The one strategy here, “Implement annual reporting of activities by Chapters,” is so obvious that any well-run organization would have had it from the day the first R.C. Chapter was chartered. Nor is it enough. No mention is made of actually overseeing R.C. Chapter activities. Reading an annual report is not oversight.

Goal: Increase membership and participation in Chapters by current R+C members. I don’t doubt that this is a good goal, but again, the lone strategy, “Promote regular meetings (at least annual) to maintain activity,” is both obvious and inadequate. While I have no direct experience of R.C. Chapter activity, I do know people who are currently R.C. Chapter members or who were so in the past. From this, I feel confident in saying that one of the major problems of the R.C. in general is the people in it. The O.T.O. has for many years promoted people of highly dubious quality, in direct contradiction to the requirements of Liber CXCIV. It is my suspicion that some R+C members decline to participate in their local R.C. Chapters out of sheer disgust with the other people involved. To really fix this situation, there would have to be some serious house-cleaning; but this is extremely unlikely to occur under the current administration.

Objective: Support development of Mystic Temples. This seems reasonable.

Goal: Expand geographic distribution of Mystic Temple facilities. So far so good, but the only strategy merely says, “Establish an additional Mystic Temple facility on the East Coast.” This is not a strategy; it’s just a more specific restatement of the goal.

Overall, the objectives and goals in this section of the Strategic Plan seem less clear than those in the first initiative, and often they are not really objectives or goals at all in the sense of actual measurable accomplishments. Too many of them say they want to “begin” or “encourage” or “support” something. To begin is easy; to reach an end takes real work. To state an intention to encourage or support does not suggest clear standards for success or failure. If you encourage something, but it doesn’t happen, have you failed?

Initiative 3

The third initiative is entitled “Improve Effectiveness of Grand Lodge Programs”— a worthy project, undeniably.

Objective: Improve initiation standards. While my own initiations have generally been competently performed, there is room for improvement. To the best of my knowledge, full memorization of the rituals is currently required only for the Minerval, though some initiators have, to their credit, taken the initiative to memorize their parts for some or all of the degrees for which they are chartered. From my own experience as a candidate or witness at Man of Earth initiations, I can say that there have also, at some facilities, been problems with poor-quality or poorly-maintained temple equipment and equipment or tools that by shape, color, or some other property failed to convey the proper symbolism. (Obviously, I cannot go into details in a non-tyled forum.) USGL has not been ignoring these issues, but there is still progress to be made, so this is an entirely appropriate objective for the Strategic Plan.

I am not a chartered initiator myself, so my ability to comment knowledgeably in this area is somewhat limited.

Goal: Improve proficiency of initiation officers. This is a fine goal, though some indication of concrete requirements, the attainment of which would clearly define success, would have helped. I also wonder whether this might have been better stated as, “Raise minimum standards of performance for initiation officers,” with a clear statement of what the minimum standards are to be. But let us examine the strategies, which presumably will give some indication of the level of proficiency that USGL intends to require.

The first strategy is “Appoint initiator training program coordinator.” I am not familiar enough with O.T.O. initiator training to know offhand where they are starting from in this regard; I gather there is training for initiators, but whether it amounts to an actual program or simply informal mentoring, I do not know. In any case, this seems like a good idea.

The second strategy says, “Implement requirements for memorization of degrees.” This is something I have supported since my own Minerval, at which the lead initiator not only had to read from a script but frequently lost her place in it. (At that time, it was not required that initiators memorize even the Minerval ritual.) The time frame indicates that the memorization requirement will creep up through the degrees, starting with I° in 2008 e.v. (and so, presumably, II° in 2009, etc.). No upper limit is indicated, so one could be forgiven for assuming that the X° initiation ritual will be required to be memorized as of 2017 e.v., but this may simply be an oversight.

Next: “Encourage attendance at initiator training sessions by already-chartered initiators and other local team members.” This seems sensible, though I cannot tell whether the principal point of this is for the chartered initiators to assist with the training of others or to refresh themselves. USGL may have either or both of these purposes in mind.

“Form a committee to create sample training materials and supplemental resources for initiation officer training workshops.” The main surprise here is that such materials do not already exist; but given that they apparently do not, this is a good thing to work towards. Note, however, that this strategy is expressed in terms of forming the committee, not actually creating the samples and supplemental resources. It would have been more decisive and proactive to write it as, “Create sample training materials and supplemental resources,” and then indicating that responsibility for this would be delegated to a new committee chartered for the purpose.

One issue that I do not see addressed here is the improvement of USGL’s oversight of local body temple equipment planning. To reliably choose appropriate temple equipment requires a more profound understanding of their symbolism than should be expected of III° to V° initiates, those being the degrees most often held by the masters of Oases and Lodges.

Another, perhaps more subtle issue involves improving the initiators’ level of understanding of the rituals and the mysteries taught therein. To have legal authority to conduct initiations is a simple matter of obtaining a piece of paper called a “charter to initiate” from the appropriate USGL office, but to have the true spiritual authority to initiate is another matter. Beyond the charter, one must also truly and profoundly understand the ritual and its lessons. The level of understanding of the Order’s mysteries among the membership in general seems to be quite poor; nor, in my experience, are chartered initiators really all that much more advanced than the average member. This is a problem that sorely needs to be addressed; most disturbingly, it leads me to wonder whether those responsible for initiator training (if we are to judge them by their fruits) are really qualified either. Who trains the trainers? But, typically, the Strategic Plan completely ignores this problem.

Objective: Improve ecclesiastical standards. As with many of these objectives, a statement of what USGL sees as the main problem areas would be helpful to establish context for the objective and its goals and strategies, but the plan document never provides this.

I am currently only a lay member (confirmed) of EGC, so I have no direct experience of the training currently given to clergy or novitiates.

Goal: Implement training program for all clergy. Strategy: “Form a committee to develop a training program.” This committee is to be formed by or during Summer 2007 e.v., but no indication is given of any deadline for the completion of its work.

Goal: Encourage Bishops to teach in their local areas and in areas where they have supervised clergy. Once again we see the weasel-word “encourage” used in place of an actual goal. Strategy: “Require Bishops to report their educational/training activities to Primate semi-annually.” This is better, though it is remarkable that such reporting was not in place already.

Objective: Improve educational standards. In regard to what? I’m sure many of us would agree that the O.T.O. would be better off if its members (and officers) knew more about various things, but what in particular does USGL intend here? This section is utterly lacking in specifics.

It would probably be a reasonable assumption that these “educational standards” pertain to the Law of Thelema, the Thelemic Holy Books, the foundational and governing documents of the O.T.O., the works of Aleister Crowley, and the classics of the western hermetic tradition generally, but is that all? So many of our members are inadequately familiar with fundamental issues such as formal logic, scientific method, philosophy, or even basic university-level study skills. Will these be taught?

Goal: Provide educational resources for local body use. Two strategies: “Create and maintain a list of expert presenters” and “Create ready-to-use curricula and class plans.” Again we see a lack of specifics as to the domains of knowledge to be addressed. A list of subject areas, even if not comprehensive, would have been helpful.

The time frames given for these strategies is “ongoing,” which translates into English as “no deadline for anything,” or in technical terms, “no way to determine success or failure by comparing actual achievements to specific goals with planned completion dates.” This is not how strategic planning is done.

Objective: Increase use and usefulness of Grand Lodge library. “Increase,” like “encourage” or “support,” is another word that helps the planners avoid committing to anything concrete. Increase by how much? Increase to what standard of usefulness? The Strategic Plan does not say.

Goal: Develop online library catalog. Strategy: “Specify and implement catalog storage format usable by librarian and a webmaster-supplied web display application.” This obviously needs to be worked out by those individuals, so the lack of details here is appropriate, though some information about the range of purposes for which the catalog is envisioned to be used would have made the purpose of this goal more clear. This is a general problem with the plan document; it tells us, more or less, what USGL wants to do, but it rarely tells us why.

Goal: Implement library lending program. Strategy: “Allow physical circulation of books by mail.” This is not a strategy at all; it’s merely a restatement of the goal that specifies the mechanism by which books will be lent out. A real strategy would tell us how they plan to go about designing and setting up the lending program. The Strategic Plan does not address this at all.

Goal: Develop agenda for accessions. In less stilted English, this could be stated as, “Develop a list of books that need to be added to the library.” It’s certainly a good idea. The only strategy offered for it is, “Compare existing holdings to USGL Study Guides and to O.T.O. Curriculum in Book Four.” These are both good places to start, though I would suggest Appendix I of Magick in Theory and Practice, the book list in Liber E, Gerald Yorke’s Crowley bibliography, and the book reviews in Crowley’s volumes of The Equinox as sources of additional titles to be acquired. There are also many books not mentioned in these sources that clearly deserve a place in USGL’s library (though I do not know which of them may already be there): the works of Paschal Beverly Randolph, for example, and those of various Gnostic Saints, along with the writings of Crowley students such as Charles Stansfeld Jones, Austin Osman Spare, and C. F. Russell, and others active in the O.T.O. such as Jack Parsons and Phyllis Seckler.

Goal: Provide electronic access to key public-domain texts. This is something that I have already been working on by creating and populating the USGL web library. At present, it contains only a small selection of texts, focusing on those of the most direct relevance to the work of the O.T.O., such as the Thelemic Holy Books and Crowley’s early epistles about the O.T.O. and the Law of Thelema. We have already discussed creating a section for writings by the Gnostic Saints, and one document (Noa-Noa by Paul Gauguin) is in preparation for that section.

The Strategic Plan says nothing about what documents are “key,” so really there is no specific goal here. The only strategy given for this non-goal is, “Coordinate online file storage with online catalog.” This is rather obtuse language; the only meaning I can devise for it is, “Scan our public-domain books, put them online, and link to them from the online catalog.” I would suggest first checking Google Book Search to see which of those texts are already online in complete form. Linking directly to those books that Google has already scanned is less work than scanning them again. We should scan only those texts that are not already available from some other reliable source.

The time frame for this strategy is again “ongoing,” with no metrics for measuring progress.

Objective: Improve communications between Grand Lodge and the membership. The single biggest problem in this area, which of course the Strategic Plan never mentions, is that Grand Lodge doesn’t like to listen to displeasing truths, especially about itself. Communication does not work well when one side puts its hands over its ears and screams, “I CAN’T HEEEEEAR YOU!” It approaches low comedy for that party to then write a Strategic Plan that attempts to address the problem of communication as if the problem lay somewhere else. It reminds me of an episode of the ’60s sitcom Gomer Pyle, USMC in which the Sergeant organizes a male choir among his men. He spends most of the episode trying to identify the one glaringly bad voice in the group, which is audible whenever they all sing together, but is nowhere to be found when the Sergeant listens to the men one by one. Of course, the viewing audience knows from the start that the bad voice is the Sergeant himself, but the Sergeant has trouble figuring this out because he takes it for granted that he is a good singer.

Goal: Facilitate communication between the Electoral College and local body leadership. Strategy: “Create new online discussion forum for local body officers and Electoral College members.” Didn’t the Bodymasters list serve this purpose before USGL shut it down? Having never been a bodymaster myself, I was never on that list, but I would think at least some EC members would have been on it to keep an eye on what was happening out in Local Body Land. If they didn’t, perhaps they should have.

Goal: Increase member knowledge of Grand Lodge activities. Strategy: “Publish USGL Annual Report.” An annual report to the membership might be useful, depending on what they decide to report, but it’s hardly adequate. Agapé already contains regular reports from Sabazius, the President of the EC, and the Secretary of the Grand Tribunal, along with occasional reports the EGC Secretary, the Secretary of the Education Committee, and other officers. If this is not enough, then is the problem that these reports don’t say enough, or that USGL isn’t actually doing enough?

Goal: Ensure local body access to SGIGs. Strategy: “Individual bodymaster mentors should make sure that current bodymasters each have the ability to directly contact at least one SGIG in event of emergency.” This is good, if somewhat belated, but the Strategic Plan says nothing about getting SGIGs to take their responsibilities seriously. Without that, the ability to wake them up in the middle of the night is of questionable value. SGIG “investigations” are notoriously lazy and careless. I have known of situations in which an SGIG claimed to have “investigated” a complaint when he had not directly contacted anyone who knew anything about it, and another in which an SGIG claimed to have “investigated” a problem at a local body, but during subsequent conversation obviously did not even know what city the local body’s facility was to be found in. I have heard of still another situation in which an investigation passed from one SGIG to another, but the new SGIG was not given copies of the records of the investigation and somehow did not understand that this was a problem. How are these “investigations” in any meaningful sense? How is greater access to SGIGs worth bothering about when the Strategic Plan completely ignores the fact that at least some SGIGs are obviously not doing their jobs either due to disinterest or sheer incompetence?

How are SGIGs trained? Are they required to take courses or even study texts in how to conduct investigations of any sort? Does anyone competent in that area advise them or review their work, or is being an SGIG just a game played by amateurs who don’t know the rules, or even that there are rules?

Goal: Increase understanding of the role of second triad members in comprising “Grand Lodge.” Strategy (only one, as usual): “Convocation of the Agape Senate per se, with individual invitations.” Whose understanding are they trying to increase? The Strategic Plan does not say. How will holding a convocation of the Senate achieve this? The Plan does not say. What will be done at that convocation? The Plan does not say. What is the problem, and how is it to be solved? The Plan does not say.

Objective: Improve communications within Grand Lodge government. Not being a member of Grand Lodge government, I am limited in my ability to comment in this area. I am a member of the USGL web site team, but in this capacity I have little if any interaction with anyone other than the other members of that team. I have also been a board member of an O.T.O. professional guild, but there, also, I had little contact with anyone outside of the Guild itself. (I suppose it could be argued that I have just demonstrated the point that communication within the O.T.O.’s government needs to be improved.)

Goal: Establish comprehensive internet security policy. It is interesting that this should come up in this context. Originally, one of the ideas behind the formation of the IT Guild was that it might work on standards of this sort. Unfortunately, it turned out that the Guild had no authority to set standards, and it seemed that nobody was interested in having the Guild even recommend standards. USGL’s sudden interest in this subject thus arrives a bit late, as the IT Guild is basically dead in the water at this point; last I heard, the Areopagus was going to be asked to revoke the Guild’s charter because it seemed that the Guild’s membership was completely apathetic.

In this context, the lone strategy for this goal, which begins with the words, “Consult with IT Guild members,” is somewhat comical, particularly considering that one member of the Strategic Planning Committee is also a member of the IT Guild’s governing board and is quite aware that the Guild is effectively dead.

Still, the rest of this strategy is interesting simply because it is one of the few strategies in the Strategic Plan that actually is a strategy. In full, it reads, “Consult with IT Guild members, Executive, and membership at large, along with recommended standard practices from industry. From these sources, synthesize both rules and recommendations for GL officers and local bodies.” This is actually reasonably informative and states something approaching a measurable end product and the means for generating it. That this, of all the items in the Strategic Plan, should be stated so clearly should not really be surprising given the heavy representation of technology professionals among the Order’s membership and leadership. What does it suggest about the rest of the Plan that the part of it that comes closest to the work that many prominent O.T.O. leaders do professionally is the only part that actually addresses a real problem in a clear, direct, fairly detailed, even almost measurable manner?

Goal: Improve Annual Report Form preparation and submission process. The biggest problem with the ARF is that the data gathered from it is kept secret and not released to the membership even in anonymized or aggregated form. But doing that might make USGL accountable for understanding and using the data in meaningful ways. It would obviously be embarrassing for USGL officers to make public statements that were flatly contradicted by ARF data if people outside of USGL had that information themselves and could point out the contradiction.

Anyway, the strategy here says, “Design and develop a new secure online Annual Report Form submission capability (including the ability to save entries completed and in progress).” Again we see that a strategy related to computers and the Internet gets a clear explanation that even includes non-obvious functional requirements (the ability to save partially-completed forms for later completion). It is really a shame (and an embarrassment) that such clarity could not be applied to other kinds of tasks.

Goal: Streamline initiation reporting. Two strategies. First, “Create a single form for reporting initiations to both Grand Treasurer General and Initiation Secretary.” I suppose there have historically been two forms because the GTG and IS independently developed their own forms. Things like this happen in bureaucracies, though one might have hoped that in a government as small as the O.T.O.’s, it would have been possible for officers to work together on something like this without the impetus of a formal goal in USGL’s Strategic Plan. It is, after all, sort of obvious (to the bodymasters and initiators if not to the GTG and IS) that filling out two forms with largely overlapping information is an inefficient use of one’s time and energy.

Second strategy: “Design and develop a secure online initiation reporting capability.” This is the way software engineers write; to design something is separate from actually developing (or implementing) it. Without the latter, the end product would just be an idea for a thing, not an actual thing that really worked. Once again we see that USGL is quite capable of being clear, concrete, and specific when they want to be, at least when something falls within the domain of competence of any of the people who wrote the Strategic Plan. What does this tell us about all those other items that aren’t clear, especially the ones that have no real strategy at all?

Goal: Develop secure Grand Lodge file sharing system. Strategy: “Determine requirements and propose design and development path if needed.” This is less clear than the last few, but I can understand why. It reads as if someone who wasn’t a software engineer had a vague idea about being able to share files more easily than by sending out emails saying, “Could whoever has this file please mail me a copy?”, but couldn’t really explain how it would work. A software engineer on the Strategic Planning Committee then suggested a preliminary project with the goal of figuring out what was really needed and proposing possible solutions. As such, this strategy actually is clear; as clear, at least, as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

Objective: Improve Grand Lodge financial stability and growth. A quick glance over this section reveals some sensible ideas and some that aren’t exactly bad but have little to do with stability or growth as such. Nothing, however, about dues; nothing about getting “inactive” members to re-activate; nothing about studying the question of why members of long standing, some well beyond V°, go inactive at all; nothing about the relationship between USGL’s finances and the way USGL discourages trust by running a secret star chamber, placing copyright notices on potentially-embarrassing Grand Tribunal documents, and railroading productive members of long standing out of the Order, meanwhile stating untruths to the membership at large when discussion of these embarrassing subjects becomes difficult to avoid.

Goal: Establish multi-year projected budgets. Good idea. Strategy: “Develop budget document based on past years’ income and expenses.” Sounds reasonable, as long as those elements of future income and expense that can be foreseen are also taken into account.

Goal: Establish investment policy. USGL has money to invest? That’s news to me. Strategy: “Develop investment policy document.” Now that we’re not talking about software, we’re back to “strategies” that just restate the goal.

Goal: Encourage bequests from members. This isn’t exactly a bad idea (in theory, it’s a good one), but how many people give USGL anything beyond their dues money and perhaps some volunteer time? There are people who have given IHQ substantial amounts of money for special projects such as the restoration of the Frieda Harris Tarot paintings, but supporting that truly worthy project is very different from believing so strongly in USGL that you leave it a significant amount of money in your last will and testament. How many people have ever done that? This idea, again, isn’t bad, exactly, but it does not suggest a firm grasp of reality. The strategy, as one might expect, is simply to have the GTG “Publish an article in Agapé on Estate Planning.”

Goal: Implement independent audit of USGL books. This is a fine idea. Strategy: “Select and retain outside auditing firm.” Not terribly informative, and almost just a restatement of the goal. How does one go about selecting such a firm? Ask for recommendations or references? If so, from who? If not, then what?

Objective: Strategic planning. Well, that’s one area in which USGL definitely needs to improve drastically.

Goal: Review and revise strategic plan annually. Assuming that USGL actually had a Strategic Plan (there have been rumors lately, but upon investigation I find no evidence of one), I would argue strongly that someone needs to be tracking progress much more often than annually. Progress needs to be monitored on an ongoing basis, assuming that you actually have measurable goals, sensible milestones, and other metrics that make tracking the plan possible at all.

USGL has a few strategies for this. The first is, “Appoint a Review Committee (include a mix of previous and new members).” Without metrics, I’m not sure what basis there will be on which to “review and revise the plan.” It sounds like a great opportunity either for USGL to pat itself on the back, or to suddenly change direction and blame unforseen circumstances. They can’t really do a meaningful review without the aforementioned measurable goals, sensible milestones, etc.

Second: “Review and revise plan.” Time frame: “By February 15, annually.” This simply restates the goal, and again, annual review is not frequent enough if you actually have a Strategic Plan and are not merely pretending to have one for the sake of form.

Third: “Communicate pertinent revisions to officers and leadership.” This may mean bearing bad news, which historically is not good for your career at USGL. The safe approach would probably be to define any bad news as “not pertinent.”

Fourth: “Communicate pertinent revisions to membership via Agapé, Pelican.” Same comment applies, but moreso, since communicating bad news about USGL to the membership at large is apparently considered “perfidy” these days.

Initiative 4

The fourth initiative is entitled “Build Stronger Fraternal Community.” The real difficulty here, which underlies many of the O.T.O.’s problems, is that the Order’s current leaders and their closest associates seem to have a warped notion of what fraternity is. Like the “Fraternal Order of Police” in a corrupt town, they seem to equate fraternity with hiding unpleasant truths and covering up for each other. They want to gain respect dishonestly by saving face, not honestly by having nothing to hide. Real fraternity, on the other hand, is about truth and substance, not false fronts. It is also not an end product; if your goal is simply to have fraternity, you won’t get it. Fraternity comes about as a side effect of working for a common cause. In the story of the Round Table, King Arthur combats the malaise that settles over his knights by inspiring them to seek the Holy Grail. He doesn’t just say, “We should be more fraternal;” he devises a quest worthy of them; and it is the best kind of quest: one can that can never truly end.

The Holy Grail of the O.T.O. is supposed to be the universal acceptance of the Law of Thelema. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of conflict within the Order over just what the Law of Thelema is and even how important it is. Despite Crowley’s repeated insistence that “Do what thou wilt” does not mean “Do as you like,” for many O.T.O. members it seems to mean exactly that (their own denials notwithstanding), probably because they don’t really understand Will and therefore can’t grasp the distinction. Others seek to set limits to what may be willed, effectively raising other moral principles or laws above pure will, implicitly denying that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” We have members of the VII° who make statements in public such as, “If you get right down to it, I just don’t dig the Book of the Law very much. I’ve studied it, worked with it, spent a lot of time with it, and in the end, it’s not really one of the most useful or pertinent texts for my work.” How can people like this come together in the task of establishing the Law of Thelema as the principal rule of humanity? The answer is simple: They can’t. And as long as a significant percentage of the O.T.O., especially at leadership levels, are in this problematic position of being oathbound to work diligently to promulgate a Law the principal document of which they “don’t dig very much,” that isn’t “the most useful or pertinent text for my work,” then the lack of unity of purpose inherent in this situation will prevent the Order’s “fraternity” from ever being anything but a sham.

Objective: Increase effectiveness of conflict resolution. My own experience with the Path of Mediation has been, if not entirely satisfactory, at least passable. I have not yet had occasion to communicate with the current Ombudsman, but the immediate past one was responsive and seemed to take his duties seriously. No doubt the process can use improvement; most processes can. I understand that some people have had far less success with the mediation process than I have.

Goal: Increase involvement of Chapters in mediating disputes. I have not had to take any problems beyond the Ombudsman and my bodymaster, so I cannot comment from experience on how well the mediation process works at the Chapter level or beyond. Obviously it depends not only on process and policy, but on the kind of people in the local Chapter. As I noted in my notes to Initiative 2, the tendency of the O.T.O. to promote people of dubious quality has had detrimental effects on the functioning of the Chapters Rose-Croix.

There are two strategies for this goal. The first is “Communicate directly with Chapters to emphasize their role.” What is their role? Is it changing, or have the Chapters misunderstood it? The Plan is typically unclear on this point. The second strategy says, “Establish geographic jurisdictions for Chapters.” In principle, this is a good idea, and it should probably be extended to VII° members (in both their SGIG and Bishop aspects) as well. The danger is that in establishing clear boundaries, complainants might have little recourse in a dispute involving a member of the local Chapter or someone close to such a person. The system needs to take possibilities of this sort into account if it doesn’t already.

Goal: Provide formal mediation training for local body masters and Chapter members. This is a good idea; so much so that it is hard to believe that anyone ever seriously thought the Path of Mediation could work well consistently without it. Strategy: “Form a committee to research options and make recommendations.” As I have said before, it would have been better to express this in terms of actually doing the research and making the recommendations rather than having the sentence’s principal clause be “Form a committee.” As it is worded, it is not clear whether the time frame (Summer 2007 e.v.) applies to the formation of the committee or the completion of the committee’s work.

Goal: Evaluate conflict resolution efforts through centralized statistical tracking. Also a good idea, but whether it turns out to be helpful or actively harmful will depend on the type of statistics tracked and how they are collected, verified, analyzed, and interpreted. A cynic could be excused for thinking that this will ultimately be just another tool for USGL to insist that everything is going well whether it actually is or not. Strategy: “Develop a form to implement anonymous reporting of conflict resolution problems and outcomes to the Supreme Grand Council.” This seems very strange. How can a report about a failure of the mediation process be anonymous and contain enough information to be verifiable? Or is the point simply for the SGC to be aware that there are problems without being able to identify the cases in which the problems arose? Without an explanation of the purpose of these anonymous reports, this strategy simply makes no sense.

Objective: Encourage and strengthen fraternal bonds. Nice slogan, but I’ve already addressed (above) USGL’s misconceptions about fraternity. You can’t develop strategies to encourage and strengthen something when you don’t know what it is.

Goal: Clearly communicate and model expectations of fraternal behavior. USGL has been quite fond of the slogan “Model the behavior you want to see” for a while. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the behavior they have been modeling is what they think it is. How clearly can they model the behavior they want to see when they seem to be in denial about what they have done? Anyway, their strategy for this is to “Review and, if appropriate, strengthest, [sic] and enforce standards of conduct for all official Grand Lodge online venues (and encourage their adoption by official local body online venues).” These written standards of conduct should make interesting reading, assuming that they are published openly so that everyone can know what is expected of them. Will they be vague enough that USGL can enforce them arbitrarily, or will they be clear and specific?

Goal: Clarify actions which constitute “abuse of membership privileges” and “actions greatly prejudicial to the Order.” I would be very interested to see USGL clarify exactly what behavior constitutes these offenses (and others such as “perfidy” and “treason”) such that they apply in any sensible fashion to the conduct for which John Crow was expelled from the Order, without being a gross and obvious violation of the most basic principles of liberty. I don’t think it’s possible, but I’d like to see what they can do along these lines. Strategy: “Submit revised list of punishable charges to Areopagus for approval.” Will this list be published openly once the Areopagus approves it?

Goal: Increase member participation in NOTOCON and other conferences. Strategy: “Develop a ‘sponsorship’ program to fund travel expenses for members who cannot afford to attend.” Is that really the main reason that people decide not to go to NOTOCON? It’s not my reason. (The intelligent reader, if he reads this series of notes carefully, should have no trouble understanding why I choose not to attend NOTOCON.)

Goal: Encourage and facilitate mutual aid among members. Strategy: “Provide local bodies with instructions on how they can legally take up collections for distressed brethren.” I certainly agree that bodymasters should understand what they can and can’t do under the law; but I don’t think a lack of understanding of the law is the real problem here. In cases I know of in which bodies have requested donations for specific, current cases of this sort, collections have generally not been very good. The reason for this has more to do with the membership than anything to do with civil law. The Order suffers from a lack of unity because, as I described above, its membership at all levels is largely confused about what the Law of Thelema is and has not really accepted it. It is just silly to try to address problems with “fraternity” when the fundamental issue that ought to unite us actually divides us.

Initiative 5

The fifth and last initiative is entitled “Develop Constructive Relationships.” It is the shortest of the five sections. (I’m sure there’s a cheap shot lurking in there.)

Objective: Establish dialogue with academic community. What is the real objective here? Establishing a dialogue is not usually an end in itself; one enters into a dialogue for a purpose— often to learn, to teach, or both. One possible objective would be to encourage more (and more favorable) awareness of the O.T.O. in the academic community. If that’s what USGL means, why didn’t they just say it?

Goal: Represent O.T.O. positively and provide accurate information to academic researchers. Given the dysfunctional, often rather deluded nature of the O.T.O. as it exists today, representing it both in a positive light and accurately is a real challenge. What we have here is an organization that more than thirty years after its revival by Grady McMurtry is still microscopic (about 3000 members worldwide, possibly) and has basically no influence on the world at large. It was charged by Aleister Crowley with the task of promulgating the Law of Thelema in a variety of ways, many of which it completely ignores (except for the fun parts, like performing the Gnostic Mass). It owns no real property and has no one who works for it full-time (not even the OHO or the any of the National Grand Masters). It owns the copyrights to an extensive collection of Crowley works, the vast majority of which are out of print. Most of its members do not understand its fundamental principles or the Law which it is supposed to promulgate. How can this be represented both positively and accurately?

Another problem here is that “representing” and “providing information” are trivial goals. You just write up some material and make it available, and you’re done. A greater challenge would be to see some number (even just one or two) favorable articles about the O.T.O. (in peer-reviewed journals of the social sciences) that result from relationships that the O.T.O. has cultivated with academic researchers.

Objective: Establish relationship with broader charitable community. Some people may find the phrasing here a bit jarring; “broader charitable community” might make people wonder if the O.T.O. is a charity like Goodwill or UNICEF. This is a misleading impression, but I think the phrasing is actually correct in a legal sense. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, the O.T.O. can receive tax-deductible charitable donations. I believe that is the sense in which USGL considers itself to be part of the “charitable community.”

Goal: Take advantage of benefits available to 501(c)(3) organizations. The weird thing here is that this “goal” is really more of an objective, and the “objective” that contains it is really more of a step towards that end. As I read this, USGL wants to take advantage of benefits that are available to us because of our legal status, and to that end wants to establish a relationship with the broader charitable community in order to share information with (learn from, really) other 501(c)(3) organizations. This makes more sense than having “establish relationship” as the objective.

That said, the idea of finding out what our 501(c)(3) status can do for us is worth investigating, but it ignores the larger question of whether we really should be a 501(c)(3) in the first place. If it were true, as it has been said, that the reason our IX° members do not hold all their property in common is because U.S. law does not allow a 501(c)(3) corporation to hold personal property in trust for its members, the obvious answer would be, “Then let’s change our legal status and become some kind of organization that can legally do what our founding documents say we should do!” (Of course, as I noted in my remarks on the first initiative, if the IX° members really wanted to own all their property collectively, they would find a way, either with or without the O.T.O. corporation. They don’t do it because they don’t want to.)

Conclusion

Having considered the new USGL Strategic Plan point by point, what else can we say of it by looking at it as a whole?

The first and most obvious thing about the Plan as presented is that the document itself is severely inadequate. It is a bare outline with no explanation of the rather terse statements that make up each item. It has no introduction to provide context, explain its intention or scope, or describe the process by which it was created. This presentation is simply amateurish, and unworthy of any organization that wants to be taken seriously. The outline should certainly have been provided, but only as an appendix or table of contents to an essay giving a detailed explanation of the Plan. My guess is that this essay could not be written because (a) Nobody at USGL really knows much more than what is in the outline, and (b) Nobody at USGL really cares enough to go to the trouble of all that writing. I find it hard not to suspect that I have spent more time writing about the Strategic Plan in the last week than USGL collectively spent developing it.

Taken collectively, the Strategic Plan’s goals and their time frames are an interesting, if problematic, mix. There are a number of goals with time frames of a year or so (2007–2008 e.v.); there are two in the relatively distant future (to have one operational Profess House and one Order-owned local body facility within a decade); and there are some that are simply not defined. The only strategy in the entire Plan with specific time frames beyond 2008 e.v. is the progressive memorization requirement for initiation rituals. That one item aside, the Strategic Plan really only covers the next year or so, but it also looks ten years into the future for two major items without giving any indication of what milestones will need to be met after next year.

There are also goals that seem ill-understood by the Strategic Plan’s authors, such as the reference in the first initiative to “meditative retreats” (a phrase neither used nor implied in Liber CXCIV); dependencies between goals are not indicated, nor were they taken into account in determining time frames; and several goals show no sign of being anything more than pro forma attempts to address some formal requirement without understanding the underlying issues. USGL’s collective inability either to criticize itself or to accept criticism from outside manifests itself not only in the Plan’s superficial approaches to various objectives (e.g., wanting more publicity for the Order without, apparently, realizing that the Order’s scandals would therefore get more publicity too), but also in the ominous fact that the Plan classifies the approval of a “revised list of punishable charges” under the objective “Encourage and strengthen fraternal bonds,” reminiscent of the military use of the word “pacification” as a euphemism for extermination. It seems likely that this revised list will lead to more show-trials and purges of brethren who dared to look at the man behind the curtain and speak aloud, without fear, of what they saw.

Another interesting property of the Strategic Plan is that although the first initiative references Liber CXCIV for several items, there is not one direct reference to Liber AL or any of the other Thelemic Holy Books anywhere in the Strategic Plan or any of the related statements that USGL has issued in the last few years (the Mission Statement, the Program Synopsis, the Vision Statement, and the Values Statement). One might have thought AL III:41, at least, worthy of note in the context of a Strategic Plan. Even the general idea of promulgating the Law of Thelema plays a rather less significant role in these statements than one might have hoped. It is mentioned, without explanation or even reference to an explanation, in the Vision Statement. The Strategic Plan’s first initiative is entitled “Promulgate Thelema and Great Principles of the Order,” but its objectives are limited to implementing Liber CXCIV “to the extent possible and practicable” (though this “extent” is not defined), getting more publicity, and supporting “Thelemic” (whatever that may be taken to mean) speakers, authors, and artists. No mention of simple, straightforward, low-cost activities like having our own members distribute copies of Liber AL (with the introduction from the 1938 O.T.O. edition, please) or concise introductory documents such as The Message of the Master Therion. No mention of various possible “new-media” approaches, such as setting up an official podcast or an Internet radio station, or having the USGL website redesigned by professionals and regularly creating new content for it to attract repeat visitors. We could even enlist the help of our visitors in creating content by implementing message forums. The “best-of” anthology of material from local body newsletters could easily be implemented inexpensively as a monthly or quarterly (the more often the better, but it would likely be limited by the availability of quality material) update to the web library. Why didn’t USGL think of anything like this? Their lack of imagination is astounding.

Considering how many times I have found it necessary to describe items as “vague,” “unmeasurable,” “not a goal/strategy at all,” having “no time frame,” having an unrecognized dependency on another item, being ill-considered, et cetera ad nauseam, I cannot really call the complete package a Strategic Plan. It looks like one superficially, but the substance is sorely lacking. USGL seems to have tried to adhere to the letter of the definition of a Strategic Plan, but they knew not the spirit.

I do not think this is intentional on USGL’s part. From what I know of some of the individuals involved, if they had been aware of the Strategic Plan’s flaws, they would probably not have published it in its present form. I believe they sincerely made their best effort to create a Strategic Plan. Unfortunately, they have failed, and this cannot but call into question their ability to lead USGL, or any organization, in an effective manner.

7–14 June 2007 e.v.