Society expects us to be better than the average
Society expects us to be better than the average

Society expects us to be better than the average

By Paul R. Swanson, MSM

June 29, 2024

The surveys are not yet done. With just over 100 surveys from District 7, mainly from 3 participating lodges, what do we know that we didn’t know before?

Executive summary:

  • More Fellowship, less of the boring business meetings
  • More personal betterment divesting of vices and superfluidities
  • More Self-improvement in leadership and organizational skills
  • More inclusive family events, selling the family on the fraternity

We learned several things that may be of value locally to individual lodges, but more importantly, we learned that North Florida districts are not in the same mindset as the rest of the nation or even the rest of the state of Florida regarding membership building.

We in Masonic District 7 expect new members to just walk in, get a petition, and pay up, which is an unrealistic expectation in our society today.

We learned that what brought most members to discover and join our fraternity was friends and family. This path of membership was highest just after WWII and has been steadily dropping since the 1964 social shift from “we” to an “I, me, mine” mentality documented in the book by Robert D Putnam, The Upswing.

I see no “we”; I hear no “we” and I speak no “we”, I only hear “I, me, and mine”. This reflects our society currently and it greatly impacts our fraternity when seeking new members.

Fraternal, civic, and veterans groups returned to popularity from the roaring 1920s to the 1950s when one of several books commenting on society like Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, challenged the value of the “we society” and proposed the libertarian concept of “rugged individualism”,  a term coined years earlier by Herbert Hoover and espoused by Mason and actor John Wayne after he defeated fellow mason and actor Roy Rogers in the market of making western movies. Art follows reality and John Wayne saw the tea leaves pattern better than Rogers did and prospered for his insight.

The consequences of the radical shift in society towards the “me” mentality are the source of the membership issues we see today.

Robert D Putnam says that fraternal groups can’t continue to operate as they used to if they want to survive. I agree. The answer lies in the Marines’ motto, we must improvise, adapt, and overcome our issues or we will fall by the wayside.

The surveys we conducted reflect what recent past surveys of ten thousand brothers have already identified in 2019, that Masonry in general is not providing what the current membership wants, nor what the younger petitioners want.

What do they want? We asked and they replied. They want more fellowship. They want esoteric Masonic learning. They want self-improvement opportunities and programs. They want more family events with their brothers.

They don’t like the boring meetings of opening, paying the bills, and the usual sick and distressed conversations, followed by closing the lodge. They want fewer meetings and more family events, with a few options for charity engagements as well.

The bottom line is that our members who participated in the survey want their lodge experience to be a family experience where possible and to be mentally stimulating rather than the same old, same old.

If we don’t give them what they want, they will continue to vote with their feet and many have already with the decision to go NPD, a very immoral thing to do for anyone who took an obligation on their VOSL.

Disregarding their obligation for proper behavior, that is by using demits is a strong indicator of how those past members feel about our inability to give them what they expected, based on our claims of “making good men better”. They seem to feel we failed them, and they are showing how they feel about that pattern of behavior with both inactivity and leaving or failing to answer a summons.

The answer to this issue is to start meeting our membership’s expectations with programs of self-improvement. The already available podcasts and videos are mostly free and number enough to keep any lodge busy for many years. This is a simple solution that is not going to burden the individual lodges with a high cost and should be a good return on time well spent for each member who participates.

There are also books, but that runs into the adage, “Masons don’t read”, something that is not historically true but in large part is true of our members today. If material is beyond a tweet in length, it’s more effort than many are willing to read.

Masonry reflects society as a rule and our surveys reflect this. Currently, many of the survey respondents reflect the rule of three, they see no “we”, they hear no “we” and they speak no “we” in their fraternal life, they only have an “I, me, mine” mentality.

“I” thinking is shown by members wanting services from a group, but only if it is free of cost or any participation burdens from them.

Many members don’t want to participate in anything the lodge is doing. They won’t even return surveys with a SASE when asked to by their WM. Over a hundred members were mailed a survey at one lodge simply ignored their WM call to return the survey, despite their obligations requiring them to do so.

This is not proper masonic behavior, but it shows how those who are “I” centered feel when asked to respond to a survey. The small number of surveys that were returned were mailed using the SASE by members who lived outside of the district or the state of Florida.

It is up to every lodge officer’s leadership to find creative ways to address these wants while balancing the resources of the group members who do participate and contribute. Nearly everything a lodge can do costs either money or work from a portion of the group so the non-participating members can be free of both burdens.

This often leads to resentment if the two burdens are not shared over time equitably between the members. The 80/20 rule is very hard to overcome, where only 20% of the members do the work and 80% of the members are knife & fork members, expecting an unburdened experience with little or no cost to them in money or work. The 80% set up unrealistic expectations for themselves.

Masonry is a “we” group ideally, not a group made up of isolated individuals who won’t work as a team.

Being a Mason is bucking the social trend of “me, me, me” that has structured our society for several decades and with no identifiable end in sight. Everything masons traditionally do is group-oriented, with committees, lodge chair progressions together year by year, degrees put on by a team, and family activities in the form of youth groups and associated groups like the Scottish Rite.

There is the potential for individual stress in a society ruled by selfishness when you join a group that promotes fraternity! New members need reasons to offset bucking social patterns, and rewards for their time away from their families.

The rewards are a fraternity that is making good men better!

Fraternity is defined as, the state or feeling of friendship and mutual support within a group: the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity”. Friendship and mutual support are “we” concepts, not the “me” concepts that our society at present is promoting.

The surveys didn’t resolve two things.

1. They don’t address whether the membership is willing to share the burdens of cost and work to get the things they say they want.

2. It also doesn’t resolve how much self-improvement and personal betterment they expect or want. I suspect the answers will vary by individual lodge.

We must innovate beyond the “each one, reach one” bumper sticker path, namely through advertising. This is being addressed through the Florida Grand Lodge program for advertising on Facebook. The program’s success is still being calculated for the wide variety of districts we have in our state.

When we passed the Bourne of the EA, FC, and MM degrees we were supposed to be changed in our minds and our hearts, assisted by the education of the 7 liberal arts and sciences that ready us for maturity, that of a Master Mason, ready to travel in foreign lands and earn masters’ wages. This is a worthy goal.

We can and should give our current members what they want, fellowship, personal betterment, and self-improvement opportunities with the family activity options they are craving. This is what the survey responders wish from us.

With the resulting happiness generated from addressing their wants and needs, we can go about seeking new members with confidence that our fraternity’s foundation is properly reset, and our future will be bright.