The Institute exists to develop the tools and the climate to assess and fundamentally change traditional and contemporary cultural institutions which form our thoughts and feelings, our behavior and desires, our environment, our understanding, our attitudes, our values and our methods of governance.
IDCAC is founded on this conviction: The quality of human experience, not market forces or ideological imperatives, ought to determine individual and social values, patterns and institutions. The goal of the Institute is to generate a climate of cultural awareness which can support efforts to make meaningful, humane social and cultural change. The work of the Institute, through organizing, analysis, education and activisim is to discover, recover and develop grassroots ways to alter the cultural and institutional root causes of individual and social problems.
The Instiute publishes the magazine Culture and Change, produces and distributes video and radio modules, conducts grassroots symposia, sponsors conferences, provides a speakers bureau and, of course, maintains this web page.
IDCAC is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization financed through grants and contributions.
Since the mid seventies there has been a concerted effort on the part
of authoritarian and free-market forces, religious and secular, to influence the thoughts,
attitudes and behavior of the American people. Through mainstream media as well
as by religion-funded networks there is a constant flow of authoritarian
propaganda attacking not only progressive issues and agendas but also ways of
thinking and seeing which break away from models supporting authoritarian
values.
Even more significant is the fact that authoritarian values are
usually
presented as normative while other ways of thinking are presented as deviant and
aberrant.
Repressive and authoritarian paradigms draw strength from the cultural
clichés, values
and beliefs which are embedded in us through our authoritarian upbringing, whether
of a liberal or conservative stripe, whether the authoritarianism was effective
or
not, and
reflect the format of the institutions we have been taught to respect and
conform to.
The Institute for the Development of Cultural Awareness and Change
exists to counter this onslaught of rightist culture creation. The fact is that
the way people think and the values they hold generate the kind of institutions
they develop and inhabit. In turn, the institutions define people who in turn
reproduce those institutions. In order to break this circle, it is important to
dissolve these institutionalized beliefs, values and patterns of thought,
feeling and reaction.
The Institute attempts to do this by developing serious critiques of the
fundamental axioms upon which our social institutions are founded and by
generating axioms which can engender non-repressive, truly democratic, just and
liberating patterns of culture.
