World of Love Sess15 - Social Justice in the Age of the Spirit

Mankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental brotherhood and in the unity of knowledge. The new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscious articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assumptions of Christianity, or to the beginning of the scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. -Erech Fromm ¹

We are talking of a war, a struggle that is just beginning to heat up. Since the arms race is an institution that must be actively torn down, peace-making is a call to action. But remember that you are marching into battle to the beat of a different drum. It is a battle to change the rules of human communication. We cannot change the rules through playing by the old ones. When I speak of strategy I am also speaking of tactics that are revolutionary. Yes, the hawks, the merchants of death, the blasphemers, are all targets, but they are not our enemies, they are our beloved. It is not just a matter of wooing them. The keystone of the strategy to win this war is community, and the weapons can only be those of love. -M. Scott Peck ²

In this session we address the interlinked questions of the social goals of the divine love in our time, and the strategy and tactics which are appropriate to these ends.
The wholistic perspective of Kohlberg's stages 6-7 and the god-self give us an especially rich and effective view of ethics and morality and a basis for social action belonging to the age of the Spirit.

This is true, as we have seen, because the demands of the reign of God on earth -- the holy, just and loving community --coincide with what is necessary for individual salvation, for our divinization. And both of these coincide with what is required to struggle lovingly and effectively for social justice for all.

There is also no necessary or natural contradiction between these and mystical contemplation, personal piety, ecstatic aesthetics, playful fun and sensual pleasures.
This coming together of various conflicting aspects into a wholistic individual personality and the new society Erech Fromm called a "sacramental brotherhood,” remind us again of Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point. What supports health in society also makes for health in the individual. What serves the advancement in wholeness of one people of the globe serves the long-range well-being of us all.

There is a synergy which comes into operation as we transcend narrowly focused family, ethnic or national self-interest. Synergy means that divergent social forces are brought into a dynamic system of mutual reinforcement.

Such synergism takes on a changed character and new intensity in our time. As more persons reach higher stages of development, all peoples are drawn more and more powerfully upward. As the institutions of society come to reflect stage 6-7 values with their comprehensive synergistic vision, then individual growth is also accelerated.

A prime example of the institutional: The United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights. If our Constitution is a stage 5 document, this is clearly a stage 6 document which advocates treating all persons of whatever nationality and condition as equal before the law and deserving of just and humane treatment. This is true also of the UN covenants concerning women and children. The documents bring a new plumbline into international conflicts and negotiations and apply a steady pressure on all nations to improve their structures and practices.

But above and beyond these long-term trends and more immediately relevant are specific political and social forces for change in our present situation.

Push and Pull

There are powerful forces, both positive and negative which can be made to work in rough mutual reinforcement of one another.

There is the positive, magnetic forward pull of the vision of a new world of peace. This vision seems nearer and more practicable because of the reconciling forces at work in international politics. This inspiring new hope is a powerful impulse for change. But, idealism alone is inadequate to produce the new.

There are also the negative pressures of dangerous national and international crises. These add their push for change, negative in the sense that they feed on fear of the consequences of not acting.

Threatening crises -- outlined below -- increasingly dominate the headlines and all our national agendas. They are pushing the nations to begin working together rather than competing with and fighting one another.

Crises propel us from behind while the vision of a peaceful world of plenty draws us from ahead in the right direction.

New frameworks of internationalism are helping. Liston Pope, my professor of Social Ethics, used to say that the way to overcome national sovereignty with its competition and wars was not by direct assault. He said this in his critique of the world federalist movement. It is impossible, he thought, to move soon to world government and have nations turn over sovereignty to such a body. What is possible, he said, is to erode national sovereignty from underneath until it crumbles away. This can be done, he believed, by getting the nations to working together in new organizations set up for the solution of specific common problems, so that of gradually trust and the habit of cooperation are formed. Nations will then no longer fear to move closer together in other ways.

We can see this taking place today in United Nations agencies such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization. We also see it in negotiating instrumentalities such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and in the new economic community in Europe. These oblique and practical attacks on national sovereignty are the ones which are working and which must be encouraged and increased.

These already successful structures provide examples, paradigms for modeling other new organs of international cooperation and mutual security. Of course, there is evil in the working of these new institutions as well as good, particularly in the way in which GATT and other structuring of international trade, like NAFTA, work against the interests poorest of the poor and in some places even accelerate the environmental destruction.. It is the long-range trend of greater cooperation of which we are speaking here.

More Immediate Impetus

The collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War provide both a great opportunity and tremendous dangers.

The opportunity is to really achieve something in the abolition of weapons of mass destruction and the settling of regional disputes such as we see in the former Yugoslavia. These, plus new trade agreements can help create the trust and the habit of cooperation in international decision-making which could see us safely through the crises of the next two decades.

The great danger is that out of fear or hesitation we may miss this window of opportunity and inadvertently strengthen reactionary forces in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and China. We must read the signs of the times with great accuracy and act with appropriate boldness.

What is new and important right now is the extraordinary opportunity for break-through solutions. Its hope of success rests upon our ability to bring into a synergistic relationship both the negative push and the positive idealistic pull at the same time, to get them operating in the same direction.

If we can manage a real, long-range retreat from cold war mentality, a genuine reversal of the arms race and appropriately large reduction in weapons and troops, then humankind may be able for the first time to turn vast resources of money and brain-power to solving the other perilous problems relating to environment, local wars, dangerous disparities of wealth and poverty and human rights.

This double movement of resources out of war and into healing is probably the one set of actions which could get the nations of the world working together to the extent needed.

We are at a unique cusp of history; there is a good chance that we and our world can be saved after all.

What are the prospects and what must we do?

It is simple to project a utopia where equality joins hands with plenty to the fulfillment of harmony. It is easy to develop a checklist of things which need to be done. It is much harder to show where the consensus, discipline and passion to achieve such ends will be found, how we will overcome the enormous backlog of cynicism around the world.

Such cynicism is not without logic and good reasons. The problems are immense, far more complex and intractable than any of us fully can comprehend. Many feel that they cannot be solved. They have thrown up their hands and retreated into personal and family concerns.

Seven Crises

We can list at least seven serious and worsening crises in our national and international life. Any one of these, if not dealt with decisively, will lead to social disorder, loss of life, and the possible end of progress toward real quality of life and individual freedom for most people. These crises, listed in no particular order, are:

1. Population explosion, which, if unchecked, will make all the rest of the attempts to improve life like sweeping back the tides with a broom. When you hear otherwise, keep in mind what will happen as the people in developing countries get automobiles, refrigerators, TVs, washing machines and driers and so on and on.

2. Ecological destruction, the combined effect of pollution of air and water, greenhouse effect, the destruction of the rain forests, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, other trends. Within fifty years or less the combined effect of these trends threatens to put population growth in disastrous collision with diminishing food production, quite apart from other related disasters.

This crisis threatens to wreck cooperation between the have and have not nations. The intense longing for rapid development in the developing nations leads them to take the same disastrous ecological shortcuts the developed nations did.
This reflects also:

3. The rising expectations of poor and oppressed people all over the world and the frustration of their hopes by international economic systems rigged by the rich nations for their profit and the enrichment of a tiny wealthy class in the poorer countries.

William Greider in his book, One World, Ready or Not, shows convincingly how giant international corporations and financial institutions range over the world without restraint by any power, national or international. They are, he points out, recreating some of the worst abuses against people of the first Industrial Revolution, and these little people have no governmental instrumentality to which they can appeal for help.

These tensions are in turn exacerbated by:

4. The depletion of irreplaceable natural resources and the growing competition for them.

5. The continuing proliferation of arms and the danger of increases in production and use of weapons of mass destruction. These impede the development of trust and mutual cooperation and divert resources needed for food, environment and economic development, thus causing every other crisis to become worse.

6. The continuing resort to war rather than negotiation. The tragic inability of ethnic groups and nations to settle their disputes peacefully is also fueled by the cynicism with regard to solving any of the larger problems through trust and common negotiation.

7. The deterioration of a sense of community and responsibility to the larger societies around us, symbolized by increase of both violent and white collar crime, use of drugs, family breakup and the collapse of personal and public morality over the world. The lack of long-range hope helps create simultaneously cocaine-supported dictatorships in Latin America and a resurgence of fundamentalist extremism in Iran and elsewhere.

We should probably list an eighth crisis: the way in which these different dynamics interact with one another to make the solution of any one of the larger crises more complex and unlikely.

Given this enormous complexity of problems and the related cynicism, is it not hopelessly utopian to talk about growing into loving godlikeness and creating a community infused with that love?

It is not. The unrest which leads to evil arises in part from the deep yearning for a transcendent healthy being and society. The human spirit responds again and again to the least scent of this goodness.

Axioms of the Synergistic Society

We know what kind of society we want to see, one offering large doses of freedom, equality, justice, opportunity, plenty and adequate provision for the poor and weak.
This kind of society also best protects and advances the forces which make people godlike, which give them inner freedom, unity, cosmic expansion and empathy/compassion.

Clearly, such a society puts people and their welfare ahead of profit-making or production or superficially defined social order. The Sabbath is made for the person and not vise versa. So also are the factory, the market-place, the corporation, the government and all the more minor bureaucracies which step on and stifle individuals.

The following are several middle axiom principles which help guide us in political and economic objectives and strategies. They help us put things in order of importance.

1. The synergistic society of agape considers every person entitled to protection of his or her full dignity as a human being beloved to God and of not less importance than any other human being. This goes beyond assuring that every person has food, shelter, work, education and medical care. It is a society which works at eliciting creative participation of all and utilizing it.

2. This synergistic society provides that all persons will have a voice in the decisions which affect their lives, locally as well as nationally.

The problem to be solved is how to empower them in the face of corporate and governmental policies which favor the rich and increase the gap between rich and poor. William Greider suggests a number of practical steps we need to take:

Restore national controls over global capital. Tax wealth more, labor less. Stimulate global growth by boosting consumer demand from the bottom up. Compel trading nations to accept more balanced trade relations and absorb more surplus production. Forgive the debtors, especially the hopeless cases among the very poorest nations. Reorganize monetary policy to confront the realities of a globalized money supply, both to achieve greater stability and open the way to greater growth. Defend labor rights in all markets, prohibit the ancient abuses renewed in the "dark Satanic mills." Withdraw from the old labor-capital battleground by universalizing access to capital ownership. Reformulate the idea of economic growth to escape the wasteful nature of consumption. And, in the meantime, defend work and wages and social protections against assaults by the marketplace. ³

These steps are illustrative rather than definitive and would, in any event, be difficult to take. But they are the kind of measures which societies found it necessary to take to restrain early unbridled capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now that communism is really dead we can talk seriously about this once again.

These give people a stake in society and some power over all levels of their lives. They then feel they belong to the social order as valued members of a large family. They are much less likely to violate its laws or trash it.

Human need and human dignity should be the criteria which determine the directions of national policy rather than what is good for the rich, the powerful, or corporate profits.

One of the biggest snow jobs in history is the systematic brain-washing to which Americans have been subjected, to the effect that the rich and corporations must not be taxed very much because their profits are needed for developmental capital and, hence, the creation of jobs. This involves an economic analysis beyond our scope here, but I would only suggest that one analyze where development capital actually comes from in our society and what the super-rich and corporations are actually using that untaxed income for.

This principle of meeting human need systematically and justly is foundational for all progress. Recall how Maslow's study of personality development showed that if basic physical and security needs of the child are not first and adequately met then the whole psyche is twisted by the pressure of this unmet need for all of later life. The overwhelming amount of child abuse in our society is done by adults who were abused as children. A huge percentage of the criminals behind bars were such abused or neglected children.

But this means that the need for being co-creators, full contributing members of society, must then be addressed also. Maslow's meta-needs must be appropriately met.

3. The synergistic society provides that the weak and vulnerable are protected always and everywhere. Just as national government needs checks and balances, so do all concentrations of power. This may be called the ombudsman principle.

There is great need for expansion in this field of intervention and protection of individuals, need for employment of many more workers, both professional and para-professional, and the creation of new categories of jobs.

Partly, for now, this is a matter of making up for past neglect, of transforming what are holding operations and ambulance services into genuine healing ministries.

In summary, these principles involve designing society so that it makes each individual a center of creative power and a beloved family member. It means shaping the institutions of such societies so they are hospitable to such strong people, create them and honor them.

It is a society which encourages growth in all the four dimensions of the wholistic personality:

freedom/autonomy
empathy/compassion
inner unification
universal scope and concern.

I used to like to put it this way: We must create a just society, which is to be followed by establishment of a compassionate society, and then a creative society.

After working with the implications of stage development theory and the sub-selves, I came to realize that, while justice has a kind of immediacy in priority because all the higher builds upon it, compassion and creativity must also be operating all the time, at every level and with every person. These have their own unique and necessary contribution to synergism.

Spending time in several prisons I have been privileged to see how a calm, compassionate and even humorous demeanor on the part of police, judges and guards help to lower the level of anger and heal all those involved. This is one example of compassion at work within a framework of justice. As we saw earlier, the eliciting of creativity also has its own kind of power to arrest the affects of abuse and overcome evil.

This is not an appeal for individual compassionate action though we need that badly. Those of us who went to jail were part of a community trained in nonviolence, schooled to make our every word and gesture gentle and loving. It is an appeal, rather, for new institutional examples. I have seen, for instance, what programs of training for the police and correctional officers can accomplish. While these train in specific skills they also involve teaching officials that every person is entitled to dignity and respect.

The just society, compassionate society and creative society intersect and reinforce one another, though it is ultimately creativity which rescues us from the boredom that could destroy all our efforts for justice and compassion in human relationships in the long perspective.

The Social Psychology of Change

At this point, we draw on the stages of development for insights into the strategy and timing of social action and social change.

Lawrence Kohlberg suggested that the United States Constitution is a stage 5 document, yet the American people operate mainly at stages 3 and 4. We do not know how to cope with the far-seeing prophetic paper on which our democracy is based. That is one reason why we tend to treat it like scripture rather than as a blueprint. Since people are stretched all across the six stages of moral development, consensus on direction of change is difficult to achieve, and we all fear what may happen if we start to tamper with it.

Any individual adult will tend to act out of different stages at different times, to be stretched out across several stage levels in uneven fashion. The levels which have not been fully transcended and integrated at each stage movement tend to become fixed in separate sub-selves which continue to be influential. When we say a person operates at one stage, we are saying that there appears to be a kind of center of gravity for each individual set in one stage level at a time. It is by this value system the person does most of her living and deciding.

Understanding how people think and react socially and politically at each stage level should help us in the difficult and complex task of responding to the positive and negative challenges of our present situation.

The following can only be an outline with a few relevant comments.

Stages 1 and 2

I worked with young men in a reformatory who seem mainly oriented to stage 1 and 2 morality. They had little sense of inner worth and an enormous suspicion and hostility toward the world beyond them. They were restless, self-centered, and sought instant gratification of their desires. Underneath, I found them to be terrified and hungry for attention and love.

It is inevitable that such people, emotional and social dropouts, unable to cope, will subsist through low level jobs and many will engage in crime.

Socially, they are a restless, seething force which can be recruited to any cause. They are fodder for gangs, and tend to gravitate to a leader like Hitler and to be easily persuaded to do his torturing, terror and murder.

In passing, we should note that the United States seems to have a larger supply of such people than any other developed country because of the way political freedom without economic democracy has increased the suffering and abuse of the poor and minorities throughout our history. We have allowed the cost of economic development to be regularly taken out of the bodies and psyches of the poor.

Slavery destroyed families and so did the Great Depression. War has left thousands literally mentally ill and contributed to family breakup and child abuse. The abused and neglected children of hunger and war reproduce themselves and become a permanent underclass which threatens to tear our society apart. Abused children grow up to abuse their children.

Instead of meeting the needs of these people and assisting and healing them, we have instituted social policy in the last decade which has increased the gap between rich and poor. For instance, instead of adopting universal health insurance as every other developed country in the world has done, we still have forty million people who are without any health insurance at all. In other ways as well we are tearing more holes in our already tattered social net.

I am not suggesting that all the poor and oppressed people operate at stages 1 and 2, but rather that stage 1 and 2 people tend to be poor and oppressed and that involuntary and grinding poverty and abuse tend to retard psychological growth severely.

Stage 3

Stage 3 adults, who have outlived the age-appropriate expressions of this level, also tend to be leader-infatuated. They are dragged along in the wake of a Hitler or Ayatollah Khomeini. They fill the plazas as teenagers fill the concert halls. They have an spiritual orgasm as they lift their fists and chant responses to the liturgy of the power figure. They merge themselves into an ecstatic mystical union with his glory and achieve through him their temporary illusion of immortality and meaning, as Ernest Becker has so eloquently described.

Some years back, there was a vivid example of a stage 3 phenomenon. On the first anniversary of the death of Elvis Pressley the White House was inundated by calls from adults who wanted the President to declare a national day of mourning for the star of rock and roll on the anniversary of his death.

Stage 4

Stage 4 "law and order" people are supposed to be the great center of gravity of a modern culture. They are the ones who believe in the morality, rationality and effectiveness of the total system. They really believe America is the greatest country on earth, on any and all counts. If they are forced to question the underlying morality or rationality of the system over a period of time then this either propels them upward toward stage 5 or throws them into enervating confusion. They may then join the many in stage 1 through 3 who do not vote because they believes all politicians are crooks.

Many who seem to have comfortably reached stage 4 prove, on careful testing, not to have really integrated fully and consistently at that stage. They attempt to fix parking tickets, cry unfair when touched by the law and in the next breath condemn the police for not shooting looters. They defend bribes and kickbacks on the grounds that if they did not do it, others would.

Whereas stage 1 and 2 people usually opt out of the larger system and look after themselves, stage 3 and 4 people in our time tend to be conservatives. They have a compulsion to over-simplify issues because they need to live within fairly narrow tightly controlled boundaries. They are frightened of rapid social change. It was such a disoriented middle and lower middle class in Germany which propelled Hitler to power and kept him there. They were also the ones who reverted to their stage 3 demonic self-systems participating orgiastically in the scape-goating and persecution of the Jews, projecting on them their own fear and anger.

In order for an individual to stay at stage 4 in our society the defenses of the self have to be strengthened, today more than in any previous generation. There are tremendous pressures on the walls from the in-rushing news of contradictory events and opinions.

People choose vapid entertainment and sports on TV over news and public affairs, not because there is such a need for constant entertainment, but because they are suffering complexity fatigue and need to avoid invasion by threatening alternative truth and morality systems. As a terrified child may roll up into a ball and suck her thumb, so an adult, under constant pressure, may choose to escape into the demonic self-systems embodying the memories and orientation of less threatening childhood days. The cost, however, to society and personal development is enormous.

The positive side of this phenomenon, as suggested earlier, is that the pressure of the complexity and the example of people at a higher stage of development demand and make possible change. If directed creatively, this shattering of the old can enable the birth of the genuinely new.

Stage 5

Because of the disorientation of stage 4 people, the defense of the American center and stability rest increasingly on the comparatively small percentage of stage 5 people. Most of these are what we like to call liberals. It is in this new role that liberals become, in effect, the true conservatives.

Stage 5 people also stretch across a spectrum, from neo-liberals like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and neo-conservatives such as Michael Novak all the way across to democratic socialists like a Michael Harrington.

The restlessness of stage 5 people is different from that of the others. It arises from the fact that they are cut adrift from the answers of the past and do not yet clearly see the shape of the future.

They are interim people.

In part, their uncertainty rests in what Daniel Bell called the death of ideology. Ideology came into disrepute because of the failure of all the leading contenders for the faith of humankind. Communist societies failed to produce either freedom or plenty and the so-called capitalist countries built their wealth on the suffering of the poor and then refused to share power and wealth with them. No cause or ideology of like historical power to these two has emerged on the scene. The most promising socio-political alternative, the democratic socialist societies of Europe, are too much lukewarm variations of the welfare state to inspire passionate loyalty.

No modern society in a developed country has any longer a cohesive culture united by religion or ideology. They are all collections of minorities. This is increasingly true also of the less developed nations, as well.

Such confusion is dangerous, yet it also incorporates the hope of our salvation at this stage in history. It reflects a malleability, an openness to the genuinely, redemptively new.

Stage 5 people tend to gravitate into positions of leadership in all kinds of organizations and institutions. As mentioned earlier, they are not immobilized by complexity and social change. They tend to be more intelligent and better educated because our society pushes intelligent people into higher education and because families which produce stage 5 people tend to be educated, to value education and to teach a modern form of noblesse oblige.

Liberal and moderate stage 5 people tend to come into leadership also because they have been nurtured in liberal churches, colleges and other institutions. In a sense it is that "Catch 22" we call grace as it operates in the Kohlberg realm: One can't get to the next stage without experiencing an example of that higher stage.

Liberals are not a conspiratorial cabal about to, as some conservatives imagine, take over the country. They are far too divided and disorganized. They lack a cohesive vision, in somewhat the same way conservatives are divided and in conflict with one another.

Liberals continue their important maintenance function in society. They run the Boy Scouts, the PTA and the League of Woman Voters and even the political parties to some extent. They are driven psychologically to run things and to keep them going.

Some say that the McGovern campaign of 1972 was the last good shot of the liberals politically. It is true that since then they have lacked a national candidate to group around so have scattered into support for a wide variety of causes from environmental to anti-nuclear.

A more important trend, other experts suggest, is the so-called conservatism of the younger generations, below middle age. They are, the theory goes, both more conservative politically and more self-centered. This is one sense in which the demonic institutions of a society tend to reinforce the retarded demonic self-systems within us and to hold back the advance of people to higher stages. There is no reason, however, to think that this is more than a temporary trend.

Many of these young people will, in later years, move on to stage 5 and a few to stage 6

Stage 6

There is not much point in trying to say a great deal about stage 6 people. There are too few of them for them to be a direct political force. There are more who will on testing, as I did, appear to be poised permanently on the cusp between stage 5 and stage 6, a sort of stage 5 1/2. But for us, as in others, the lower stages are still powerful within.

Stage 6 people, the few I know, tend to be radicals, in the sense that they are dedicated to achieving longer range societal change and have a style of life which is more loving, open and creative. They are more distanced from existing causes because they dream beyond those limited goals. This is their great contribution to society, but it is also their weakness. They are unwilling to push their own leadership, even to defend themselves. They don't believe in charismatic leadership and won't be anyone's cat's paw. They will tend to walk away rather than fight to control.

Now, last, what does this listing of crises, visions of a new society and social psychological analysis of individual imitation and potential suggest for the strategy and tactics of those of us who seek to live out a stage 6-7 life style and yet also struggle passionately and effectively for the new society?

Strategy of the Community of Love

As with the reformation of the church, there are two possible postures for today's loving revolutionaries: We may choose to participate in the institutions of society to try to change them from the inside, or else, to work largely outside through the demonstration of alternative possibilities. In either case, however, we still have one foot inside and one outside. We are always living to some extent as an example of the new and to some extent trying to change the existing institutions.

A good example of an organization which tries to do both is the style of operation of the Quakers. They often engage in civil disobedience and are radically critical of the existing institutions. But at the same time they maintain an effective national lobbying organization, The Friends Washington Office, and try to throw their weight to one side on legislation. They attempt responsibly to effect small changes in the direction they seek to move society. At the same time, they try their best to keep before society by example a community which practices the highest and best in mutual love and justice.

A secular example is seen in the Democratic Socialists of America. They participate in practical electoral politics, supporting progressive candidates at all levels. They operate at the left wing of the Democratic Party ordinarily, although some DSA members regularly support third parties. At the same time they are engaging in such conventional politics they are attempting preach and live before the nation a vision of what life might be like in a more just, egalitarian and compassionate society, one not organized to encourage competition, greedy selfishness and violence.

As with Jesus, both the Quakers and the DSA refuse either to withdraw from the world of political action, on the one hand, or to engage in methods which would poison the long-range vision and example they seek to live, on the other. The ends, both would say, do not justify unworthy means.

I strongly suspect there is no such thing as a total outsider or utterly committed insider. Even the most cynical supporter of our society must at times get sick at his stomach, for instance, if he knows any of the details of American CIA experts teaching right-wing military counterinsurgency specialists in Latin America how to torture scientifically, knowing these skills would be used not just on rebel soldiers but also to terrorize journalists, labor leaders and nuns. Almost all of us have some nausea potential. On the other hand, most of those of us who work mainly outside the institutions still feel compelled to vote, write letters to congress and pay taxes which support the system.

In Conclusion

In this session, I have attempted to describe the principles underlying a truly synergistic society. I've also sought to show how levels of personality development affect social change with the expectation this understanding may assist us in directing that change more effectively.

In Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan taught that the road to the Heavenly City can be entered or left at any point along its length. We are separated from our holiness and goodness by the thinnest of membranes. The thundering beat of God's loving heart is a constant rhythm in the depths of each person challenging without respite all the arrhythms of evil, keeping us in turmoil until we choose to take the way of love. As we saw in session 6, this restlessness and constant threat from new and strange kinds of being explain both why we still plunge into the irrationalities of Hitlers, Stalins and Ayatollahs, and also why we recover from these forms of social madness and move on to again risk seeking greater complexity and a higher harmony.

Questions for Thought

Given that individuals are spread across all six stages and it is more difficult to reach a consensus today than ever before due to the complexity of both issues and communications, how can those dreaming of a world of peace, justice and plenty
get it together and be effective? What would your strategy be?

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. To Have or to Be, Harper & Row, NY, 1976, page xv.
2. M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum, Communmity Making and Peace , A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987, page 330
3. One World, Ready or Not, The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon and Schuster, NY 1997, page 472

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