Management: Delphi Politics (Updated)

Good evening, readers. Tonight’s lesson falls under the headings of Organizational Theory and Systems Analysis. (I offer a Christian spiritual version of this same material on my other blog. Edit: that blog has been shut down.)
Every collection of humans involves politics. Politics can be defined as the leverage to persuade others toward an objective. That objective invariably means power and/or wealth for some favored person or group within the larger body. Fundamental to human nature is every group will always manifest certain trends, in that a tiny minority will be leaders, with a coterie of supporters, then a larger group of followers, and a few outliers on the fringe.
This is immutable. It makes no difference what personality types are involved under any other frame of reference. Bring a bunch of bridge engineers together and they will manifest that structure after a short time.
The Delphi Method builds on this basic principle of human social interaction. It is designed to leverage whatever constitutes political power in any given setting to reach a predetermined end. That end inevitably means power and wealth for whomever is pulling this lever.
Absolutely essential is the secrecy of the group. All politics is conspiracy, and every government is by definition a conspiracy to rule. In all cases, the Delphi Method is a conspiracy, even in the more popular sense. The objective is to hijack something before the others involved realize it.
The second most essential ingredient is training for the members of the conspiracy. This is the most expensive part of the whole thing. Even when the knowledge is free, the investment of man hours is necessarily high. We assume the members are committed, as is usually the case with socialist/communist activists. The primary figure in pressing this agenda is called a facilitator in current manifestations.
The methods vary with the leverage sought. The original Delphi method was aimed at leading a panel of experts to consensus in a foregone conclusion. Essential was keeping them isolated so that no one of them felt strong enough to object against the threat of marginalization. Where the subjects actually know the issues involved, it’s essential to make them dependent on the false sense of inclusion. Only a tiny minority of this panel is likely to stand firm in resisting, and they can be discounted by weight of numbers.
If the target is any broader population, there is a strong reliance on the same principle that only a few really understand what’s going on, and the rest are fodder for manipulation. The political momentum of majority rule shuts down the handful of experts. Critical to the effort is identifying them first. Most people can be cajoled into revealing entirely too much about themselves in the presence of a skilled facilitator.
From here, there are two tracks. If the conspiracy is small, herd the resistors into a single group and marginalize them as a whole. This is risky, but can be done. Less risky is a method requiring more trained facilitators. Then the larger group is broken into committees, with each being led by a facilitator, and opponents scattered out thinly among the small groups. Each one becomes isolated and marginalized by the facilitator manipulating the small group.
Within any small group, the method is a mix various ways of disabling and discrediting the strong opposition leader. The facilitator does their best to make the opposing leader seem flaky, weird, an outsider. Everything of substance is challenged according to a prepared script of talking points. There is a heavy reliance on drawing false distinctions, using loaded phrases and emotional appeals. If at all possible, the opposing leader will be forced into any number of impossible corners using semantic games, false dichotomies which exclude real answers, and hopefully getting the opposition flustered or otherwise agitated.
It’s a rare leader who can withstand this sort of thing. It requires the opponent be smarter and better trained than the facilitator. It also requires a powerful sense of structure regarding the agenda under discussion and some debate experience to prevent letting the facilitator dodge any critical items. It requires pointing out the head games, yet remaining clearly in charge, so the rest of the group realizes what’s happening.
But if only one small group is rescued, the whole thing is lost. When the forum is a large town hall type setting, you’ll need near parity of leadership in opposition to the facilitators, carefully working together in secret with even better planning to counter a good Delphi operation. You’ll need several very astute and reasonable sounding leaders each seeming to rise individually in opposition with their own particular issue, not accepting any form of dodging the question. Each one has to be a debate champion and a good actor, with a pleasant voice and demeanor. In other words, effective opposition is pretty rare.
The best defense is mysticism. That is, never have anything which can be hijacked in the first place. This is why leaderless resistance is encouraged, because all it needs for effectiveness is a unity of purpose and commitment. There is no objective or target, per se, but something rooted in human nature itself. Everything else is left to the individual, as to tactics and methods. Even the target of opposition is soft and conceptual, so that there is never a repeating pattern which can be analyzed for infiltration and interdiction. When what you care about most is something fundamental to life itself, no one can stop you. Resistance to evil must be organic in the self.
Mysticism does not require ignoring all the tactics of politics, but requires not being trapped by politics and political concerns. Indeed, I highly encourage a full course of study in logic, rhetoric, history, and all the social sciences. We should know what makes other people tick because that’s the only way we can set them free to pursue things which really matter.
Addenda: I left out the bare bones outline of Delphi procedure:
1. Identify strong opposition to the agenda. (Hint: This is where you play reserved and avoid self-disclosure.)
2. Dilute their leverage by isolating and marginalizing them.
3. Overwhelm residual resistance in others by incrementally creating a wholly, fundamentally different perspective on the questions at hand. Create in their minds an entirely new narrative and background using propaganda methods. (Hint: If working alone, and you see this coming, here is the best point to shut down a Delphi maneuver by pointing out unspoken assumptions, what the propaganda hides, particularly in terms of philosophical shift. They’ll probably escort you out under some pretense of being unruly and disruptive, and you’ll be marked forever afterward.)
4. Once the majority have embraced the new understanding of things, play the two sides off against each other, where the opposition can’t get a fair hearing. (Hint: If you have a good organized resistance, this is where you all rip it to shreds.)
Obviously the single most important objective is political fracturing. Recently, with political consensus so hard to gain, the Delphi method has expanded to introducing multiple fractures into numerous small parties in the opposition bloc.
Update: The original author of the article on the Delphi Technique, Lynn Stuter, has closed her old site. In case the other copies around the Net disappear, I have archived a snapshot of the link above in PDF format. I can share if you need it.