I wish Mark Satin had picked a different title for his book New Age Politics. It would be too bad if only the already-convinced bought the book, because here is a plain-spoken, pragmatic vision of a new politics that transcends the old political “isms,” borrowing what it needs from conservatives and liberals, and showing us that there’s nothing incompatible about personal growth and social change; in fact they’re different sides of the same coin.
In an introductory note to New Age Politics, Mark Satin writes:
“Until last spring, I’d been a draft resister in Canada for nearly twelve years. I’d come to Canada convinced that I hated the United States and everything in and about it, but after many adventures, petty and grand, I began to realize that l was engaged in a lover’s quarrel with my country. It was so fine on paper, and so awful in practice. . . .
“I spent my last eight years in Canada trying not to wish I was back in the United States — in other words, wishing I was back in the United States. And in the meantime . . . I paid close attention to political developments. . . . One fierce winter’s day in Montreal, over a cup of steaming cocoa and the New York Times, it dawned on me that the ideas and energies from the various ‘fringe’ movements — feminist, ecological, spiritual, human potential, and the rest — were beginning to come together in a new way that was beginning to generate a coherent new politics.
“I realized then that living in Canada had been good for me in a way. It had given me exactly the perspective I needed in order to see the new politics whole. Beyond that, it had given me perspective on my ‘hatred’ of America. It had given me exactly the perspective I needed to grow.”
The first edition of New Age Politics came out in 1976 as an 84-page pamphlet, which Mark sold by mail. The second edition, 240 pages long, was published by a Canadian friend in 1978. It sold 10,000 copies in less than a year, with no paid advertising and no American distributor, except Mark.
In Canada, he ran the Toronto anti-draft program and before that was active in civil rights and organized labor. He returned to the U.S. after getting his amnesty and began travelling around the country giving talks. He sent a 21-page questionnaire to hundreds of people involved in personal and social growth, asking what specific policies and programs could be fostered by a new “transformation-oriented” political organization. That was the groundwork for the New World Alliance, formed in December, 1979. Mark is now editing the Alliance’s bi-weekly newsletter, Renewal. (The Alliance’s address is 733 15th St., N.W. #1131, Washington, D.C.; subscriptions to Renewal are $15 a year from Box 3242, Winchester, VA 22601.)
When Delta offered to publish New Age Politics, Mark was in a quandary. “Did I really want to give up my book to a big corporation that would do it all for me — to a ‘monolithic institution,’ to use my own terminology?”
He went ahead with Delta for three reasons, he says: there were changes he wanted to make, and he couldn’t see typesetting the book by himself a third time; he wanted New Age Politics to reach a wider constituency; and he “very much needed the sense of accomplishment that people are able to feel once their work has been accepted and approved by a ‘monolithic institution’. . . . I am telling you this because I want to make it very clear that this is a book of self-criticism and not just social criticism. I am not writing this book from ‘on high’ and I need to make real a lot of what’s in here just like anybody else.”
“Don’t trust anybody,” Mark continues, “who tells you they have all the answers, for self or society. You’re liable to end up in Canada, too.”
Our thanks to Mark Satin and to Delta for permission to reprint these excerpts from New Age Politics ($4.95 from the Dell Publishing Co., 245 East 47 Street, New York, N.Y. 10017).
A word on Mark’s oft-used metaphor of “the Prison”: to him, it’s not so much the institutions of the society as the prevailing cultural values that trap us. The Prison is “the culture of things and of death that we carry around in our minds” and is made up of patriarchal attitudes, nationalism, the bureaucratic mentality, egocentricity (thinking the world exists for our benefit), scientific single vision (looking at life purely rationally rather than intuitively) and the big city outlook. “Basically, the Prison is a way of seeing the world, a mental construct (as sociologists would put it) or an illusion (as Eastern philosophers would) that we create anew every day. And because we create it in our minds, we can undo it in our minds.”
— Ed.
This book is based on a simple premise. It’s that we don’t have a usable politics any more — and that the politics we need, in America today, will not and cannot come from our old political “isms.” Not from capitalism, not from socialism, and certainly not from just “muddling through.” Muddling along, we won’t get through.
The situation we’re in is so new, so unprecedented, that we need a whole new way of looking at the world, a whole new way of seeing and thinking about things, especially political things — one that comes out of our own experience for a change, as distinct from the experience of Europe in the nineteenth century (which is where “modern” capitalism comes from, and Marxism and anarchism).
The point of this book is that a new way of seeing and a new politics is arising already in bits and pieces, here and there, across the country, but that we (and especially our intellectuals) have been so desperately set on pretending that nothing is fundamentally wrong, or that socialism is fundamentally the answer, that we’ve missed the coming together of these pieces, right before our eyes.
The new politics is arising out of the work and ideas of the people in many of the social movements of our time: the feminist, environmental, spiritual, and human potential movements; the appropriate technology, simple living, decentralist, and “world order” movements; the business-for-learning-and-pleasure movement and the humanistic-transformational education movement.
The new politics is also arising out of the work and ideas of a couple of hundred sympathetic economists and spiritual philosophers, businesspeople and workers’ self-management people, systems analysts and psychoanalysts, physicists and poets.
To create a haven for the “expanded person” without state power is to create a subculture, one that is admittedly nice and warm, but it is not to create a culture that can heal this country.
Each of these movements and each of these writers has something to add to the new politics. Their contributions come together like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
More and more of us have, over the last ten years or so, become deeply involved in one or more of the movements mentioned above. At the same time, though, the radical political movements of the 1960s seem to have collapsed.
Could there be a connection?
I believe that the radical political movements declined as soon as they began to promote a doctrine of us-against-them, of “we have all the answers,” of separation rather than healing; as soon as they began to promote a dogmatic Marxism that overstressed our need for things and tried to make us feel guilty about our deeper needs, which are emotional, psychological, and spiritual (and which are what got us into the radical political movements in the first place). And I believe that the spiritual, feminist, environmental, etc., movements rose partly, at least, because they did contain a politics that did speak to our deeper needs. To all our needs.
But it was only an implicit politics, hard to see at first. And it was doubly hard to see just because it was so new and different from the politics that had gone before.
This book does not attempt to speak for the social movements of our time in the same way that, say, The Greening of America attempted to speak for the counterculture. The basic approach to politics that this book takes has always been with us here in America, in bits and pieces at any rate. The beauty of the social movements of our time is that each of them represents one of those pieces — and if you put them together, you are able to see clearly and coherently, maybe for the first time, what I like to call the perpetual “third force” in American politics. It is a force that can be traced all the way back, not to Roger Williams or John Cotton, but to Thomas Hooker; not to Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, but to John and John Quincy Adams; and so on. It will certainly survive the social movements of our time.
Third force politics is a radical politics, not so much in the sense of radical versus liberal as in the sense of going to the roots of things. Specifically, third force politics goes to the psychocultural roots of our problems. It does not concentrate exclusively on the institutional and economic symptoms of our problems.
It is a radicalism that is neither of the left nor right — a radicalism that is modest enough to borrow what it needs from each of the old political “isms” but bold enough to transcend them. (It is not a wimpy “mean” between the so-called “extremes” of American power politics.)
It is a radicalism that is more interested in healing society than in championing the exclusive claims to rightness of any one faction or segment of society; a radicalism that is more interested in reconciling people to each other’s needs and priorities than in winning people over to its side (and in doing so, producing a losing side, poised for revenge).
It is a radicalism that is less interested in blaming groups and governments for our problems than in attempting to work out new and viable solutions to our problems.
It is a radicalism that is less interested in standing up for alternative ways of doing things than in standing up for appropriate ways of doing things. Jim DeKorne, a New Age builder, puts it well when he says, “The emphasis must shift from ‘difference for difference’s sake’ to the concept of appropriateness — the idea that time, place, and circumstances are all factors pointing to specific, useful solutions.”
It is a radicalism that traces our problems not to economic poverty (as was done between 1960 and 1966) or even to political powerlessness (1966-1972), so much as to a more general kind of purposelessness — to our lack of sustaining and believable ethics and values; to our lack of community; to our lack of inner strength.
It is a radicalism that acknowledges and accepts complexity, irony, paradox, and ambiguity — a radicalism that acknowledges the richness of life even when aspects of that richness are not particularly politically “correct.”
It is a radicalism that recognizes the existence of a force in all things that is God or Truth or Love, and that derives its guiding ethics and values from that recognition or worldview or sensibility — or from a passionate commitment to life in all its forms, which amounts to the same thing.
Above all, perhaps, it is a radicalism that understands that the real problem is not how to get people, groups, and governments to agree on the “one best way” to do things, but how to get all the different ways, all the old political “isms,” to agree to live and work synergically together (“synergically” means: so that people, groups, and governments can get more by cooperating together than they can by competing against one another). It is a radicalism that asks: what are the specific ethics and political values that must be shared by everyone in order for everyone to survive, flourish, grow?
It is a radicalism that says, with social philosopher James Ogilvy, “Let the Birchers have their enclaves, let the Marxists have their communes, let the moderates have their modest communities and the utopians have their experiments in living. . . . [And let each group come] to recognize the others not only as Other but also as a projection of what has been repressed in our selves.”
I have begun to call this politics “New Age politics” — partly because so many members of the movements mentioned above have begun using the term “New Age” themselves in their work, partly because the term “New Age” is broad enough to encompass all these other definitions, and flexible enough to be constantly open to redefinition, and partly because it suggests that the years since World War II represent the beginnings of a radical break with the past, or at least, with many aspects of the past. It implies that the world is being not just changed but transformed, and it implies that we had better see to it that it’s transformed in a life-giving manner.
Another thing I mean by New Age politics is a politics that recognizes that the concept of the person is expanding. In this view, New Age politics seeks to speak to the needs of that “new person.”
I like to say that our concept of the person has been expanding both horizontally and vertically. Vertically, our concept has expanded to take in our higher or “spiritual” natures and needs. In the other direction, our definition has expanded to take in our emotional or “subconscious” natures and needs. In the new definition of the person, our “higher” and “lower” selves are as real as our visible selves, with needs that are equally vital, equally real (in fact, Erich Fromm thinks that our need for love is even more pressing than our need for food).
Horizontally, we’re “people” now, not “men.” And if we want to think of our selves historically or sociologically or anthropologically, we can no longer think of our selves as isolated individuals. The smallest unit of inquiry is, or should be, the person plus the environment. (For family therapist Dennis Jaffe, the environment is the rest of the family. For poet Gary Snyder, it’s the natural world. For anthropologist Gregory Bateson, it’s the entire immediate natural and social surround.)
In this way, spiritual, human potential, feminist, and environmental movements have created the social and perceptual context for a New Age politics.
Another defining aspect of the new politics is that it would link us here in America with the Fourth World rather than the First World. The First World consists of the overdeveloped capitalist countries, the Second World of the overdeveloped communist countries, and the Third World of the insufficiently developed countries. The Fourth World consists of all those native and natural peoples who like being who they are and where they are, and it consists of all those countries (and communities and regions) whose people prefer the pleasures and responsibilities of “voluntary simplicity” to the spiritual sacrifices and ecological irresponsibilities of trying to keep their seats on the poverty-prosperity merry-go-round. They have enough for their needs — which are primarily to lead lives of rich personal experience and to be of service to others.
By the term “New Age” I mean to convey a dual sense of possibility and responsibility. The sense of possibility is captured nicely by Dionne Marx, a brilliant young instructor at the California Institute for Asian Studies, when she says that many traditions are reflecting growth into a “new age of wholeness, synthesis, and unity.” The sense of responsibility is suggested by political scientist William Ophuls when he speaks of our “new age of scarcity,” and by world order theorist Ervin Laszlo when he mentions the fact that the “new age of global community” is upon us whether we like it or not.
By “politics” I definitely mean to include the struggle for power. To create a haven for the “expanded person” without state power is to create a subculture, one that is admittedly nice and warm, but it is not to create a culture that can heal this country.
I believe that the radical political movements declined as soon as they began to promote a doctrine of us-against-them, of “we have all the answers,” of separation rather than healing.
But the struggle for power is only part of what I mean by politics. For me, politics is all the ways we treat one another, as individuals, as groups, and as governments; and all the ways we treat our environment; and all the ways we treat our selves. And so New Age politics is a politics in which we learn to assume personal and collective responsibility for the ways we treat one another, and nature, and our selves. A politics in which we assume this responsibility not out of a sense of grim duty, but out of a sense of real, virtually untapped possibility.
You can’t say that New Age politics is “left wing” or “right wing.” It is perfectly compatible with public or private ownership of the means of production, and it speaks equally to rich and poor, young and old, white collar and blue. Still, New Age politics does stand in a definite relation to other political ideologies. From the perspective of New Age thinkers, there are two defining political choices that every society must make — and neither of them is covered by the old political categories “left” and “right.”
The first choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to encourage us to seek rich individual experience and to be of service to others — or do we want our society to encourage us to seek material riches in the form of possessions and status?
The second choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to extend state and institutional control over our lives (for whatever reason) — or do we want our society to encourage us to be self-reliant and self-determining?
What gives us the authority, what gives us the right, to ask people to live differently? What gives us the gall to ask people to live lives in which work and consumption would matter much less to them than love and play, spirituality and service?
There is, of course, the ecological doomsday answer — if we don’t cut down on our consumption, then . . . — and it is a powerful one. But I am looking for an answer that would be true under any circumstances.
The question cuts deeply, I think, because those of us who do favor love, play, and creativity — those of us who are oriented to life rather than things or death — are in such a minority. It takes much of our strength just to keep on believing in our own values and priorities (or even in our sanity). It doesn’t occur to most of us that an entire society can be insane.
Certainly most of us don’t try to push our values and priorities onto others.
Marxists, on the other hand, are only too eager to tell us what our values and priorities should be. That’s because they’re “true believers” in a system of values handed down by an authority that transcends the individual. History, Das Kapital, and the top-down state are common examples of such an authority.
The New Age approach is different from self-effacement and from “I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong.” It starts from one simple premise: that we can’t help wanting to live. Many New Age writers have pointed out that it’s our deepest inner nature to want to live, and it’s this that defines us when all else fails.
But wanting to live — being alive — is a dynamic concept. It’s the nature of all living organisms to develop or die, and people are no exception to that rule. If you want to live, you’re not going to want to stand still or regress, you’re going to want to evolve. Being alive and developing our potentialities are, then, one and the same thing.
So — to return to our original question — what gives us the right to ask people to live differently is the fact that we aren’t developing our potentialities by working in order to work, and consuming in order to consume. Life is stagnant under these conditions, and the fact that nuclear or ecological disaster threatens simply bears out the rule that if we cease to evolve we die. Most of us have ceased to evolve. Therefore, all of us might die. And that’s not fair.
Moreover, I want to be able to develop my potentialities no matter what the rest of us might want. And that means having some options in society — more than there are right now. But I won’t have those options until a lot more of us are turned off of the work ethic (work for work’s sake) and turned on to love and play, spirituality and service.
Finally, though I don’t want to sound like a good samaritan, I’d like people to develop their potentialities because it’s the only way they can get to know themselves and life. I think they’d like it better here if they did that. I know I would.
But what are our potentialities, exactly? And how do we develop them? Could there be any agreement here?
In the dynamic process of being alive, each of us goes through (or attempts to go through) a series of seven stages of self-development. Many New Agers have referred to the seven stages as a hierarchy of potentialities — a hierarchy of human needs. The idea is that we can’t go on to the second stage until we’ve met our needs on the first, and so on.
Perhaps it is enough, for our purposes, to say that we have to at least begin to meet our needs at each of the seven stages before we can feel whole. If we fail to meet our needs at any one of the stages, then we’ll leave that part of our selves undernourished and stunted. We’ll feel frustrated and anxious, and we’ll take our frustrations out on self, on others, and on society.
Stage one: physiological needs. According to many different systems of Eastern philosophy, the invisible but very real “psycho-physiological” energy for this stage is centered at the bottom of the spine, and no wonder: it’s the stage where our physiological needs — for food, shelter, warmth, etc. — are most important, and also our need for sex, to the extent that our sex drive is physiologically motivated.
If we’ve met our needs at this stage and we keep on meeting them many times over without even trying to meet any of our other needs — then we tend to be unwilling to talk about our selves, close relationships tend to seem dangerous, we try hard not to pay attention to our feelings — and we don’t want to change our selves, either. We tend to obey rules only to avoid punishment.
Stage two: security needs. Those of us who are able to gratify our physiological needs reasonably well come to be motivated by our security needs — for safety, order, and so on. The energy center is at the navel, naturally.
If we’ve met our basic needs at this stage and we “go overboard” with them, meeting them many times over without even trying to meet any of our “higher” needs then we tend to speak only about things that don’t concern us personally (“the weather”). When we do speak about our selves, we tend to speak in the past tense, and our feelings are described as objects and aren’t described clearly. We tend to conform to authority to get rewards, have favors returned, and so on. We tend to become concerned with dominating people and with increasing our wealth and our pride — with a million different forms of hierarchy, manipulation, and control. We tend to become overly dependent on things that are safe and familiar; we tend to fear change. But we can never quite get enough security — ironically, we tend to spend much of our time feeling bad.
Stage three: love needs. At this stage, whose energy center is in the heart region, we’re motivated primarily by our love needs — for friendship, belongingness, and affection, and also for sex, to the extent that our sexual feelings are motivated by love.
At this stage we tend to express our selves more freely, though if we never move beyond it we’re never really willing to accept our feelings. And we still tend to think of them as shameful, bad, or abnormal. We tend to conform to authority in order to avoid the disapproval or dislike of others. We tend to choose our food according to nutrition (books and charts). We mean well, we really do.
Stage four: need for self-esteem. The energy center for this stage is also in the heart region, for here we’re motivated by the need for self-esteem — for a sense of mastery and competence in the face of the world and for a sense of ego control.
We still tend to describe our feelings as objects, but as objects in the present. Sometimes our deeper feelings break through against our wishes, and then we try — not very successfully — to accept them. Mostly, though, our feelings center around our fear that we should be “doing more” — for anyone but our selves, usually. We tend to feel genuine compassion for all those “caught up in the dramas of security, sensation and power” (Ken Keyes, Jr.). We tend to conform to authority to avoid censure and guilt. If we get stuck at this stage we tend to lose our selves in veritable orgies of self-condemnation.
Some families can lead joyful and fulfilling lives on $5,000 a year and others feel deprived with five times as much.
Stage five: need for the esteem of others. At this point, some of us will pass directly on to stage six. But others of us will come to be motivated by a need for the esteem of others — for recognition and prestige that is honestly earned.
At this stage, whose energy center is still at the heart, we tend to experience and express our feelings fully. There’s still more fright than pleasure in this but there’s also a desire to be these feelings, to be the “real me.” And as we become more loving and accepting, the world begins to seem more loving and accepting to us (up to a point of course). We tend to conform to authority to maintain the respect of an “impartial spectator” judging in terms of community welfare — “the law” (if it’s fair) or “the masses” will do. If we become stuck at this stage we tend to become obsessed with comparing our selves to others.
Stage six: need for self-actualization. At this stage, whose energy center is at the throat, we’re motivated by the need for self-actualization — by the need to be true to our own nature. We try to become what we can be, whatever that is. But as a matter of fact, our basic values and priorities at this stage are remarkably similar.
We tend to see reality clearly and to be at ease with it. We tend to be open to new ideas, new data, new experience. We tend to be spontaneous, simple, and natural — to live fully in each moment. And we tend to work at some activity (it may or may not be our job) that allows us to feel competent and self-reliant. (We aren’t waiting to have our needs met for us by our husbands or wives or by other monolithic institutions.)
Emotionally, we allow our feelings to flow, and we experience them with great vividness. Our relationships are deep and profound. We obey authority — when we do — in order to avoid self-blame (which isn’t the same as guilt); we operate by the morality of individual principles of conscience.
Stage seven: the need for self-transcendence. Not all of us who reach stage six feel impelled to go on to this stage. Those of us who do are motivated by the need for self-transcendence (or “self-realization”) — the need to achieve a serene or contemplative state of being. “It is ‘dying to oneself,’ ” says E. F. Schumacher, “to one’s likes and dislikes, to all one’s egocentric preoccupations. . . .”
The energy for this stage is centered between the eyebrows or on top of the head, depending on the degree of transcendence. I like to distinguish three degrees. In the first we learn to impartially observe our social games “from a place that is free from fear and vulnerability.” In the second we learn to activate and express all of our buried potentialities — selfless service, aesthetic creation, deep mystical love, access to the collective unconscious. In the third we learn to feel at one with everything — we are love, peace, energy, effectiveness, etc.
Like those of us at stage six, those of us at stage seven operate by the morality of individual conscience — but we also have a sense that our personal morality fits a larger design.
There are two disadvantages to being at stage seven. First, many of us find it difficult to be at this stage and function competently in the material world. Second, many of us are prone to a kind of cosmic sadness. But it is always possible to return from stage seven to stage six. In fact, six and seven may be thought of as complementary dimensions of a whole self.
Why is it so important for us to at least begin to meet all our needs? Why is it so important for us to feel whole?
A number of New Age people have recently shown that we think from a ground of scarcity or a ground of wholeness — and that this profoundly influences the way we see things, and the way we act.
If we’re out of touch with our needs, or if we’re not able to meet our needs, then we’ll always think from what Werner Erhard calls “a condition of scarcity.” We’ll act as if love is scarce, time is scarce, etc. (whether or not we actually believe these propositions). Our motto might be, “I’m gonna get mine and to hell with everyone else.” Or, conversely, “I’m a selfish, bourgeois oaf, and I’ve got to learn to forget about my self and ‘serve the people.’ ”
If we’re not able to meet our needs, says David Spangler, “if we despair of ever being fulfilled, if our consciousnesses have become wholly focused on lack, then our attention and energy are not freed to help others.” In other words, “We do not meet the needs of a hungry world because we are all hungry” — if not physically, then emotionally, psychologically, and/or spiritually. On the other hand, “There is a willingness to meet other people’s needs if we feel our own needs are being met or that the possibility of their being met exists and can be manifested if we choose” (emphasis his).
The fact and the promise of wholeness, says Spangler, “offers me a reason for self-development beyond personal needs: that I may become a source of nourishment for my world and a co-creator in the project of the Whole Earth.”
One of the most important political questions of our time is, how can we get the United States out of the Third World so that insufficiently developed countries can develop their own resources and industries, diversify their economies, and become self-sufficient?
Three answers have been offered.
Liberals would have us get out of the Third World by appealing to our guilt, to our feeling that we don’t really deserve all those resources.
Marxists would have us get out of the Third World by coercion, by fomenting a violent revolution here in America and then by insisting that we make do without the resources.
New Age people would have us approach self-development as — in part — a political strategy, the idea being that we would no longer need or want a disproportionate share of the world’s resources if we were fully at home on all seven stages of self-development. We would simply have too many other things to do: love and friendship; arts and crafts; psychic activity, intellectual activity, political activity; spiritual and religious development, appreciation of the world, grounding of our selves in our bodies; community, regional, and planetary service; sex, play, rituals.
Why do we need more and more? The reason we seem to be primarily “economic people” has nothing to do with human nature, as the liberals would have it, or with the notion that we’re economically deprived, as the Marxists would. Beyond a certain minimum point, beyond the hard-core poverty level, the feeling of economic deprivation is a relative and subjective thing, and has a lot less to do with our economic assets than our emotional and psychological and spiritual ones. Some families can lead joyful and fulfilling lives on $5,000 a year and others feel deprived with five times as much.
The real political question in the United States today isn’t how can we bring everyone up to a standard where no one feels economically deprived? Since the feeling of economic deprivation is relative and subjective, that’s an impossible task by definition. The real political question is (or should be) why do most people live in such luxury and still feel economically deprived? An answer to that question is desperately needed because the world simply hasn’t the resources to give everybody even an American cat’s standard of living (let alone an American dog’s).
The answer given by New Age politics is that in most cases the deprivation isn’t really economic at all. In most cases the feeling of economic deprivation comes from the fact that the monolithic mode of production, and the Prison that’s behind it, inevitably blocks our needs for love and esteem — the needs that are important at self-development stages three through five. And that throws us back into stages one and two, onto our physiological and security needs, onto our needs for material things.
So the reason we need so many things — the reason we “need” maybe ten times more than we really need — is simple. It’s that our needs for material things are the only needs that most of us are able to meet in Prison society.
And there’s another thing. By blocking our needs for love and esteem, the Prison makes us feel lonely and worthless, weak and inferior. And so we produce more and more in order to win back our dignity, and consume more and more in order to buy back our humanity.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately!), meeting our material needs isn’t enough to keep us happy, or even healthy. For as we’ve seen, we need to meet our non-material needs if we want to feel whole, and if we want to do more good than harm.
The most meaningful class analysis that we can make today is one that distinguishes among life-oriented, thing-oriented, and life-rejecting people. These psychocultural classes cut across traditional social and economic lines. At the same time, they appear to underlie many of the differences among people that we’ve noted in this book. Above all, perhaps, they underlie the context out of which we see things. For example: if we’re life-oriented, seeing a sunset might make us dwell on the beauty or poignancy of life on Earth. If we’re thing-oriented, we might wish that we’d taken our cameras along or complain overmuch about the cold. And if we’re life-rejecting, we might not want to look out at the sunset for long. We might be afraid of seeing ourselves as “impractical dreamers,” or self-indulgent.
A psychologist friend of mine calls these the “being,” “having” and “denying” modes, respectively.
For many of us, says Kat Kinkade of the East Wind Community in Missouri, “power is a dirty word.” And no wonder. If asked to define the word “power,” most of us would probably say something like “being able to tell other people what to do.”
Storming the Pentagon or shooting some corporation executive will not help to end the culture of things and of death.
We are all familiar with that kind of power. It is what the boss has; it’s what our parents had before the boss took over; for women, it’s all too often what their husbands have. Most of us are locked into power struggles at home and at work, and, if we have strength left over for it, in society, too. The Biblical injunction to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” has become translated to “do unto others before they do unto you.”
The choice seems either to be power-full or power-less — and nobody likes to feel powerless. At best we hope for some kind of uneasy truce where the power is “equalized.”
New Age people have begun to realize that there are a number of different kinds of power, and that power doesn’t necessarily mean coercion or manipulation. To Jean Baker Miller, feminist psychologist, power is basically “the capacity to implement.” To Leroy Pelton, psychologist of non-violence, it’s “potential social influence.” To Rollo May, it’s “the ability to cause or prevent change.” To David Spangler, it’s “the capacity to act.” Patricia Mische sums up the thrust of these definitions very nicely when she tells us that, “in point of fact, power is neither good nor evil, although it may be an instrument of both.” And power is absolutely necessary to us; “power is essential to all living things. . . . We need power to live, to survive, to stay healthy, to love, to create, to become who we can be. . . .”
But power of a special kind. In their book Synergic Power, which is an attempt to synthesize many New Age ideas about power, James and Marguerite Craig call our commonly accepted notions of power, “directive power.” According to the Craigs, directive power “includes any form [of power] in which the initiator intentionally makes people act against their will, their judgment, their interests, or leads them to act blindly without considering their interests or those of others.” This is not the kind of power Patricia Mische has in mind.
The emerging New Age definition of power, according to the Craigs and others, would mix the concept of “synergy” with the concept of power-as-the-ability-to-cause-or-prevent-change. Synergy is another awkward but indispensable New Age word; to the Craigs it means “working together to benefit myself and others at the same time” or “the working together of unlike elements to create desirable results unobtainable from any combination of independent efforts.”
Synergic power, then, according to the Craigs, means “the capacity of an individual or group to increase the satisfactions of all participants by intentionally generating increased energy and creativity.” And they add: “Synergic power differs radically from directive power in the concern it expresses for other people and the roles it affords them. Any application of synergic power accords with the will, the judgment, and the interests of the other human beings, and it is fully effective only when no energy or creativity is wasted in domination and resistance to domination. For example, we will have exercised synergic power if other people’s behavior becomes more in tune with ours after we have shared information and feelings with them in non-manipulative, non-coercive ways, and have creatively cooperated with them to discover new solutions to problems or conflicts. . . . The more synergic we observe [a person’s] power to be, the more fully does [he or she] seem to display the same positive attitudes toward his adversaries as he does toward his followers and allies.”
That’s probably the key to seeing if a person is wielding (trying to wield) directive or synergic power. Watch how he or she handles those who disagree. Patricia Mische puts it well when she says, “ [Synergic power] is aware of and responsive to the other. It is not men versus women or women versus men or women versus women. Nor is it surrendering self or values in a false cooperation. The identity and the dignity of all parties is respected — one’s own and that of the other. [Synergic] power is non-harming, even when the other stands in opposition. . . .
“[Synergic power] is a caring form of power. It is power aligned with love. It is the combination of both power and love that makes a good marriage or family life workable. . . . [And] it is this alignment of love and power that is essential to shape a humanizing future — on a personal level and in the world.”
The Craigs give a nice example of using synergic power. If I want to plant a vegetable garden and you want to plant a flower garden on the same plot of land, how do we settle the matter? The “fair” way, according to the directive power approach, would be to split the land 50-50 between us. But that wouldn’t really satisfy either of us. From a synergic power perspective, say the Craigs, “every initial request or demand is seen as a proposed solution to a usually unstated problem.” And the point is to explore that deeper level.
With regard to the garden, we might find that behind my desire to plant vegetables is really a desire to do anything creative, and/or that behind yours is a desire to grow the most luxuriant flowers possible. So I might end up writing New Age Politics and shopping at the local health food store. Or you might end up growing even more luxuriant flowers in a greenhouse on the roof. Or we might find a neighbor who might let one of us plant our garden in his or her yard (because he or she liked flowers, or in exchange for some of the vegetables). As the Craigs put it, “The search for new solutions becomes an adventure in openness and creativity that is far more satisfying than attacking or resisting each other’s initial proposals.”
As we begin to get free of the Prison — as we begin to heal our selves — we will naturally want to change our lives and life-styles from thing-oriented to life-oriented, from status-oriented to personal growth-oriented. A number of New Age people have begun to do this already. They call their new lifestyle “voluntary simplicity.”
“The essence of voluntary simplicity,” say Duane Elgin and Arnold Mitchell (in Stanford Research Institute’s most popular report ever), “is living in a way that is outwardly simple and inwardly rich. This way of life embraces frugality of consumption, a strong sense of environmental urgency, a desire to return to living and working environments which are of a more human scale, and an intention to realize our higher human potential — both psychological and spiritual — in community with others.” In other words: voluntary simplicity is at least potentially an embodiment and expression of the New Age ethics, and of many New Age values.
Even the nonviolence ethic is an integral part of voluntary simplicity. Richard Gregg, nonviolent strategist and activist, says, “The concentration of much property in one person’s possession creates resentment and envy or a sense of inferiority among others who do not have it. Hence, the possession of much property becomes inconsistent with principles of nonviolence.”
According to Ernest Callenbach, “Penny-pinching is bad for the spirit,” and voluntary simplicity is not a “kind of trim-here and squeeze there” approach to life. Instead, it “recognizes that buying (with all the cost-consciousness and calculation it involves) is not the central question. The central question is how to organize your life. If you decide to organize it by your own standards and desires and needs, you will . . . come to know what your necessities really are. Obviously these will include food and shelter and clothes — possibly on a more modest scale than you tended to think. But they may also include music or flowers or a southern-exposure window; privacy or an open-door policy; lots of heat or lots of fresh air. . . .”
Charles Wagner, a French pastor and educator, is even more insistent on the fact that voluntary simplicity is — above all — an inner condition. In his book The Simple Life, first published in 1895, he states, “This outward show [“plain dress,” “modest dwelling,” “slender means,” etc.], which may now and then be counterfeited, must not be confounded with its essence and its deep and wholly inward source. Simplicity is a state of mind. It dwells in the main intention of our lives. A [person] is simple when [his or her] chief care is the wish to be . . . honestly and naturally human” (emphasis his).
Robert Gilman, a New Age-oriented scientist and builder, feels that the term “voluntary simplicity” is much too narrow. In CoEvolution Quarterly (Spring 1978) he writes, “A less catchy but more accurate description would be ‘voluntary de-emphasis of the cash economy,’ which often leads to a life-style that is more complex, as well as more rewarding, than the one-dimensional existence of the full-time marketplace specialist.”
According to Planetary Citizens (in One Family, Sept. 1977), voluntary simplicity “is the appropriate stance in the light of the lacks suffered by two-thirds of the human race. . . . Energy, materials, inventiveness, creativity and peoplepower can be freed in large amounts by voluntary simplicity, and can be reoriented toward raising the level of well-being and self-respect of Third World people. . . . At the same time, voluntary simplicity sets a model of creative self-reliance which may assist the ‘other worlds’ in avoiding an unthinking adoption of the acquisition, competition, complication and consumerism models of Western society.”
It is important to understand what voluntary simplicity is not. It is not a back-to-the-land movement, though many people and eventually some communities may choose to lead a more agrarian existence. It is not limited to the counterculture; by now probably most “simple livers” would say they were not countercultural. It is not a passing fad — it is rooted too deeply in people’s needs and in the emerging new ethics and values for that. Finally, it is the very opposite of poverty: poor people tend to want the material goods that they can’t afford.
As an idea, voluntary simplicity is not new; it was practiced and preached by a number of early American advocates of New Age politics. “Historically,” say Elgin and Mitchell, “voluntary simplicity has its roots in the legendary frugality and self-reliance of the Puritans” and the Quebecois fur traders and the native North Americans and in “the teachings and social philosophy of a number of spiritual leaders such as Jesus and Gandhi.” What gives voluntary simplicity a uniquely modern aspect is the fact that it is no longer merely one way of choosing to live one’s life; it is, rather, a rational and altogether necessary response (though by no means a sufficient response) to a number of serious social problems. Elgin and Mitchell list them: “. . . the prospects of a chronic energy shortage; growing demands of the [insufficiently] developed nations for a more equitable share of the world’s resources; the prospect that before we run out of resources on any absolute basis we may poison ourselves to death with environmental contaminants; a growing social malaise and purposelessness. . . .”
Some New Age people have begun to advocate voluntary simplicity for just that reason: that sooner or later we will almost certainly “have to” live that way. To which I answer, true enough. But I would rather point out how much more satisfying a simple life-style might be than try to “guilt” or frighten people into exactly the same behavior. The simplicity must be voluntary, after all, if it is not to become gray and mean-spirited; and by stressing the positive aspects of voluntary simplicity we may be able to educate people out of the Prison and its institutions, rather than merely to the fact that the United States is losing its power in the world.
Social action that is not based on a firm sense of self can only be based on guilt or rage.
No one is really sure how many Americans are already living lives of voluntary simplicity. Elgin and Mitchell estimate that 2½ percent of the adult population — five million people (!) — are “fully and wholeheartedly” living in voluntary simplicity with another 7½ percent or so living lives of “partial voluntary simplicity.” However, Michael Phillips (in CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer 1977) argues that these figures are about a hundred times too high. He defines voluntary simplicity as “the rejection of ‘making a lot of money’ as a personal goal,” and he says, “almost no one wants to earn less next year than they earned this year. If a public opinion survey asked the question: ‘Would you like to make a lot of money?’ you would not find 5,000,000 people saying ‘No.’ ” He concludes, “I personally think the growth of [the] real simple living movement will parallel the spread of Eastern spiritual practices,” and in this I think he is close to the mark: simple living is implicit in and a result, not of “Eastern spiritual practices” per se, but of all our attempts to break free of the Prison.
If it isn’t possible for there to be an evolutionary transformation of society until a significant number of us have at least begun to heal self and society, then what hope does it have, really? And therefore what hope do we have? What is there that can keep us from despair?
Psychologists tell us that we’re born with hope, and when we lose it we become corrupt and harden our hearts. The only apparent alternative to hope is despair, and I believe it is to ward off this despair that liberals continue to fool themselves about the nature of Prison society, and Marxists continue to dream of violent revolution in the United States, and academic intellectuals like L. S. Stavrianos continue to believe that the Third World will show us the way. We need to get to a point beyond hope and despair that transcends both, and by doing so allows us to see things clearly enough to be able to survive as ethical and compassionate and vulnerable persons.
In order to survive with integrity we must begin with the fact that we are Prisoners. But we must never allow our selves to believe that we are only Prisoners — a mistake that the trans-material worldview can help us avoid. In order to survive with integrity in a world that seems bent on self-destruction and in which we seem to be our own best jailers, we have got to learn an important lesson from Eastern philosophy (and from our Puritan and transcendental heritage): to be in the world, but not of it. We have got to learn to do things for our own reasons, to measure our selves by our own standards, to live by the ethics and values that emerge effortlessly from the process of healing ourselves.
One of the consolations of the liberal and Marxist philosophies is that their practitioners sometimes get to “act like heroes.” New Age politics sees that the descent of the Prison is not an event but a part of daily life, and in these kinds of circumstances the old kind of heroism is dead — as dead as Patty Hearst’s friends. Storming the Pentagon or shooting some corporation executive will not help to end the culture of things and of death. We need to develop a new concept of heroism that recognizes that in the United States the struggle to evolve in a New Age direction, as individuals and as a culture, may be more valuable than trying to inspire Prison-bound people to fight for more things.
Robert Lifton sees heroism in the person who “out of courage, refuses violence.” Robert Theobald sees heroism in the act of taking personal responsibility for one’s life and one’s immediate situation. Kate Millett sees heroism in doing to make our selves personally vulnerable. And Jane Roberts sees heroism in daring to “fully be” — and daring to allow “doing” to emerge as a “natural characteristic” from fully being, wherever that might lead.
A number of leading academics and activists have decided that trying to heal our selves at this late date can only be seen as narcissism or self-indulgence. (Curiously, trying to get psychiatrists to do the healing for us is still considered legitimate.) What these people tend to forget is that social action that is not based on a firm sense of self can only be based on guilt or rage — and guilt or rage do not allow us to see clearly; they render us, in fact, extremely susceptible to manipulation by demagogues.
Moreover, by refusing to work for a traditional revolution we would not be “giving up the struggle.” We would be struggling — nonviolently — against the Prison and its institutions, which are more responsible for the sterility of our lives (and our society) than “human nature” or “capitalism.” But even if we can’t do any more than embark on the stage of self-healing, even if we can’t get a strong group together, or if all our group efforts fail to heal society, we would still be learning to preserve our worth as human beings. And that is an essential part of the political process today. For without life-oriented people there can be no New Age evolution. And only New Age evolution can take us off the production-consumption continuum and out of the Prison.
Prison society celebrates material growth, speed, power, revenge; New Age evolution celebrates wholeness.
To Herb Kohl, wholeness “means being conscious of the different components of one’s existence; means keeping social and historical awareness present along with personal and psychological need and insight; means attempting to bind together the internal and external, physical and spiritual, conscious and unconscious, cultural and personal, communal and individual aspects of one’s life no matter what pain or conflict is involved. This last means breaking away from the dichotomized life that is one characteristic of [our current] way of living. Wholeness also means utilizing what one knows about the self and the world instead of filing away whatever knowledge might lead to conflict and change.”
Along with wholeness, New Age evolution celebrates life-as-a-learning-experience. E. F. Schumacher tells us that our social problems can usefully be seen as “a strain-and-stretch apparatus to develop the Whole [Person].” Jonas Salk tells us that “the development of wisdom, or acting as if [we] were sagacious, could become a game through which [we] could reach fulfillment.” (“Such a challenge . . . could give purpose to all interested in playing the game of life for what can be given to it and received from it, [as distinct from] how much can be taken and how little can be given.”) And Ken Keyes advises us to use “every uncomfortable emotion” as an opportunity for consciousness growth. He says, “Everything and everyone around you is your teacher. If your washing machine won’t work, [imagine that] you are being checked out on your ability to peacefully accept the unacceptable. . . . If someone does something that ‘hurts your ego,’ you will grow fastest if you consciously regard him or her as your teacher who is enabling you to discover which addictions you will have to reprogram.” He concludes, “Your moment-to-moment stream of consciousness becomes interesting and real when you experience everything as a step in your growth toward higher consciousness.”
New Age politics is based on the assumption that, as E. F. Schumacher puts it, “Nothing is worth having in this sphere unless it comes from the inside of you.” Schumacher draws an essential political point from this assumption: “I believe that it is everyone’s personal task to try and demonstrate in some way, by word or deed, what [he or she] considers to be true, adequate, right, etc., and not look over [his or her] shoulder whether people follow [his or her] example or believe what [he or she] says.” If people then start ridiculing you, or criticizing you, “you say, ‘Yes, thank you very much. I hear what you say.’ You just carry on.”
Schumacher adds, “It is not so easy to maintain this sturdy attitude. In India they call it ‘karma yoga’: you just do what you consider right, and you don’t bother your head with whether you are successful or not, because if you don’t do what you consider is right, you’re wasting your life!”
Bill McLarney, of the New Alchemy Institute, puts it this way: “Well, I don’t suppose any of us is fool enough to think that we can save the world. But if each of us were to look at some of the directions we’d like to see the world go in — and then to put our own little bit of force behind one of them — and to have a hell of a good time while we’re doing it, well then, that’s what we should do.”
Beyond hope and despair, then, there is something absolutely essential to do, and that is to live. To live with simplicity and intensity, gentleness and generosity, so that the idea of a freely self-developing humanity does not die out, no matter how comfortable or “happy” or obedient the mass of people may become.
©Copyright 1978, 1979, Mark Satin
