Chapter 13

The View of the World

by Hugh M. Lewis

There exists a gap between the perceived situation of the present reality of humanity's common existence, of the world "now" as a product of a multitude of past influences and the professed abstracted conceptual reality of humanity's situation in the "official" sense. Obsolete anachronisms yet exist from which unrealistic whims and nonfunctional influences are directed into the future. Change is affecting our lives at an ever accelerated pace in many subtle ways. The world is becoming ever more complex and fast paced. The pace of transition quickens while the human channel capacity and basic regenerative period remains relatively unchanged. Human channel capacity for handling new information and for making functional decisions is becoming increasingly limited in an ever more complex world society.

The gap between the present operative forces influencing the future course of humanity and the situation as it is conceptualized by world society's total consciousness, the collective world mind, becomes increasingly greater. This widening of the gap has been the source of social shock, a generalized type of shock psychologically and sociologically similar to the shock of defeat in war and illustrated differentially as culture shock or future shock, it is a depressed condition of total consciousness affecting subtly each individual's behavior. It threatens to make society in general, the human as a statistical average, non-functionally maladaptive to the current trending, undermining his past vehicles of future existence and possible alternatives of evolution. It leads to outmoded, past oriented, reactionary modes of response to changing conditions. An attempt to recreate a better condition of peace by the return to nonexistent or obsolete methods and behaviors. The individual's form and means of achieving stability in his changing environment fractures beneath the strain of this widening gap.

Modern institutions and a common modern view of the world and of the individual's relationship to it suddenly become obsolete without the symptoms of erosion which signal the need for readjustment. The amount of influential perceptual signals bombarding a person's consciousness from day to day sky rockets, confusing and shocking him into a condition of lonely despair, neurotic mistrust with the "system" and eventuating in rejection and retreat into nonexistent illusions of more stable moments past. The gap becomes more critical as it becomes ever more difficult to obtain substantial current information. Society becomes the victim of over dependent on the shallow super fluidity of the mass media. Society in general is able to be manipulated into virtually any course of action from diminutive moment to ever more diminutive moment. The authoritarian power structure has forged its cold war, forcing feeding lines and propagating convenient prejudices and whims. The world of 1984 is not too far away.

The increasing complexity of modern civilization has also eroded society in the very fibers of cohesion. The past objective criteria of professionalism has become a case of retardant over specialization, and the ineffectual contribution of any single component of the system. Social man has proven adept at specialization into a diversity of separate fields of expertise, affording greater linear acceleration and projection yet in the long run fragmenting the social consciousness of the individual into a wide diversity of separate unrelated niches. The system as a whole is bogging down in its future evolution under the weight of its ever increasing interdependency of its components, isolation and dependence threaten to cripple forward progress. Specialization the result of differentiation of social relationships, has developed without the prerequisite transcendent integration of the comprehensive schemata. The result is an unhealthy and dangerous degree of over specialization. There is a generalized scientific conclusion of the cause of extinction of a species. Extinction is a consequence of over specialization as a necessary means of maintaining its unwarranted continuance of selfish and nonfunctional influences as a means of maintaining security and insuring conformity to its past oriented policies.

The ever widening communication gap and the fragmented over specialization of the human social consciousness has created a condition of social myopia, the inability to forecast into the future precisely and comprehensively enough to enable the formulation of any competent strategic course of action. A collective world mind is virtually nonexistent. A wide variety of future forecasts have been made. They have generally been linear projections based on the trends of specific, unrelated processes. Such linear forecasts often presume exponential, unlimited influence of certain presumed specific governing factors of change. They prove restricted and incorrect by the very basic presumptions due to a failure to view the world comprehensively and generally enough to enable competent prognosis. To determine logical conclusions one must start with empirically validated and theoretically generalizable principles of human behavior. This is the premises of accurate forecasting. Specialization without integration has resulted in the lack of comprehensiveness to correctly distinguish the possible and the probable. A sociologist failing to adequately integrate "outside" influences such as biological functions or psychological theory. A biologist will tend to observe only purely biological functions to the general exclusion of other equally important factors.

The range of forecasts varies between the extremes of doomsday criers to the Pollyanna fantasies of paradise. Of this range of visions within futurology the viewpoints fall generally into two classes each originating and propagating from distinct origins within world society. The first class is by far the most predominant one within world society, and the most dangerous in its consequences. It is the pessimistic class stinking of the symbolism of dark evil forces of mankind. It assumes the disguise of authority and statistical accuracy of forecasting. It is the negativistic school of pessimism within futurology following the tradition of Malthusian articles of faith. It is founded on the premises of limited resources for development and prophesizing the inevitable extinction of the human species despite its so far unaccountable success through civilization. These viewpoints assume the uncontrolled geometrical rate of population growth, the ever more limited resources of industrial growth and productivity, the ever widening gap between the majority of have-nots and the diminishing minority of haves, the eventual self induced extermination of humanity in nuclear holocaust or by a gradual regression to a lower form of civilized existence, entailing the degradation of social values. This pessimistic school assumes that warfare is natural, innate in man's nature and is therefore unavoidable and inevitable. Such forecasting plays on the fears and ignorance of humanity, generating unfounded fears of a world police state and total behavior control by clinical technicians, projecting into the future all connotations of death forces viewed to be operational at present. Generally this same pessimistic school tends to support the status quo, evolutionary stagnation, zero economic and zero population growth. These viewpoints paradoxically enough are promoted by the very same sources of its negativism, the piracy of humanity. It is an act of treachery by the authoritarian power structures which inhibits human progress and seeks its selfish propagation by the exploitation of ignorance. The fact remains that the future will most likely be foreshadowed in the way humanity expects it to be, whether in a dark pessimistic fashion or in a more hopeful optimistic manner.

"In political life I see two opposed tendencies at work, locked in struggle with each other. The first, optimistic tend proceeds from the belief that the free unfolding of the productive forces of individuals and groups essentially leads to a satisfactory state of society. It recognizes the need for a central power, placed above groups and individuals but concedes to such power only organizational and regulatory functions. The second, pessimistic trend assumes that free interplay of individuals and groups leads to the destruction of society, it thus seeks to base society exclusively upon authority, blind obedience and coercion. Actually this trend is pessimistic only to a limited extent, for it is optimistic in regard to those who are, and desire to be, the bearers of power and authority. The adherents of this second trend are the enemies of the free groups and of education for independent thought. They are moreover the carriers of political anti-Semitism." Why Do They Hate The Jews? By Albert Einstein, 1938 in "Ideas and Opinions". Page 195

authoritarian power structures remain in tight control of present socio organization and seek by every means available to maintain that control over the individual, resisting revolutionary changes which threaten to remove that power while continuously seeking by these very same evolutionary changes to attain ever greater degrees of control. Stability without revolutionary change is the goal of such power structures.

The authoritarian power structure, derived from the psychological authoritarian personality of the socialized individual becomes the institutionalized power of the system which assumes a life and character of its own detached from the lives of its individual constituents, whom are no longer completely whole humans in their social relationships but are merely dehumanized subservient components of the "system". The authoritarian structure is backward, hind-sighted, being extremely myopic in its future visions and very pessimistic, over concerned in its past illusions of tradition and dogmatic prejudice. The authoritarian power structure is an essentially unhealthy, pathological condition of society, symptomatic of a collective social neurosis and eventual psychosis. It is founded on a fear motivation of death and threat of terrorism. It is wrapped up and insulated in its own dark symbolism seeking to distort and destroy all that does not conform. Militarism is only one of its own most prevalent and most dangerous symptoms. Nationalism, racism, politics and religious fanaticism are other symptoms. The history of human civilization has been one of continuing revolution against the authoritarian power structure, best represented by the blatant symbolism of the eternal conflict between left and right, between radical and reactionary, between the forces of life and the forces of death in which humanity is caught in the middle.

Instead of the linear type of projection the evolution of civilization ought to be viewed as an all encompassing process of cyclic regeneration attaining an invisible transcendent growth process resembling a pyramidal hierarchy of upward and outward growth. Any realistic prognosis of humanity's future must attain an adequate degree of comprehensiveness to set all determining factors in proper perspective, neither exaggerating nor ignoring any specific determinant. It must also allow a wide margin for the element of unpredictability arising from human nature and its unforeseeable consequences. It must neither view exclusively the optimistic not the pessimistic trends but the total perspective. The optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints must not be dichotomized but integrated and transcended. Such a completeness of comprehensiveness of view will at first require abstract generalizations yet once these generalizations of humanity are understood in proper context they should eventually allow specific decisions to be formulated in regard to the world future.

Often theories fail to look not only latitudinal at the cross section of world society and organismically at the interactions of a whole wide variety of social institutions, fragmenting the longitudinal dimension of the individual human's subjective outlook and his whole life when viewed as a product of time and growth and the interaction of many diverse influences. It often fails to include in calculations the individual matrix of human needs and desires. It fails to view social organization in the depth of its collective unconscious, to search for untapped potentialities and scope for alternative possibilities. The statistical majority of humankind, the mainstream of humanity, exists from day to day on a very down to earth, temporary, immediate, concretized level, only casually looking future ward and usually only in a very personal and intimate manner. They deal more with their perceived physical reality being most influenced by the immediate concerns of the present, rarely influenced by abstracted levels of realization. The influence of change in their personal lives occurs very subtly and usually unnoticeably, only occasionally traumatically. The finer tools of measurement of changes are unused by most people. This bulk of humankind represents both the inertia--an immovable mountain resisting change, on which the authoritarian power structures erect their thrones--and also a deep source of unused potentialities--the source of uncommon resistance to the negativistic influences of humanity. Predictors of exponential growth patterns often fail to take into account human self regulatory measures and the innate ability to creatively adjust to changes. At the one extreme of the mainstream exists authoritarian power structure which has so far exerted undue and unwarranted control over humanity, keeping human potential locked in the death grips of the past, relying on ignorance and propagating prejudice among the masses, keeping them satisfied and too caught up in struggle in their day to day existence of patterned behavior, to be the eternal consumers of quantitative materialism in an industrial economy of waste maximization or the eternal toilers for a barren existence. At the other extreme is the lonely revolutionary, who, independent in action and thought has creatively initiated reform and provides the impetus of the revolution of technological civilization. One of the crucial problems of maturity in the post industrial society, in our Brave New World is to relearn how not to be consumers of materialism but how to live qualitatively and productively in context to craft tools. The authoritarian power structures ensure the conformity of its constituents by keeping them in a continuous state of temporary satiation, of patterned behavior, without foresight of the future.

"The revolutionary character is a highly individualistic nonconformist. He is the future visionary who not only foresees the future but makes it in his personal life."

Revolution summons from the imagination visions of violence and temporary instability. The revolutionary character is more realistically a pacifist type in a relatively permanently stable condition of self being. He has always proffered change to have it thrown back in his face, rarely to live long enough to see its operational efficacy. This simplistic version of the "system" requires other generalization. Both extremes are socially "abnormal". One is the typical conformist, the other the atypical nonconformist. Most people are a blending of these two opposing character types, to a negating and often frustrating degree. Their lives are caught up in a dichotomic struggle between tow influences--of a top dog and an underdog, seeking leadership in either direction. So far the authoritarian character type has had the predominant amount of influence in both personal and social spheres.

There exists in society both regressive tendencies of the authoritarian and progressive tendencies of the revolutionary, in every aspect-lattitudinal, organismically, longitudinally and in depth of potential. The many progressive forces tend to balance and counteract the regressive influences. A comprehensive view would reveal the overall imbalance of the final equation. The course of the future is determined not by the authoritarian nor the revolutionary but by the amount of influence that can be obtained over the mainstream of humanity. Influencing factors are relevant only relative too the type of response they receive. It is usually neither completely optimistic nor pessimistic, usually affecting traumatically only the lives of a very small minority or affecting in a small way the lives of the majority. The authoritarian has retained control over society. The mainstream has only back stepped and sidestepped into the future, often falling, only by chance gaining new high ground, usually looking backward and sideways, rarely forward. The revolutionary character has arisen only by the process of natural selection in which chance was the prime determinant in the educational development of the individuals values. Evolution is as much a product of mutual cooperation as it is a product of cooperative antagonism. Despite the continuing oppression by the authoritarian power structure, the forces of regression have been at most temporary. Growth is the healthy state of humanity and individual behavior. Regression is only no growth in relationship to progress. Too much change and too much progress is only relative to the authoritarian state of no growth. Growth is natural and self regulative. Growth is accelerative but not exponentially unlimited by external environmental circumstances. It involves the intensification of its inner margins of its integration prior to its extension in geometrical margins. Growth involves wealth, knowledge, generalized abstractions, metaphysical reality, a priori truth, normative decision making and subsequent rational behavior. Growth involves living, not dying.

With such generalizations it is possible to attempt a cursory forecast of humanity's future. Humankind if rapidly approaching a critical decision period in the evolution of its technological civilization and of militarism. The evolution of civilization in its pyramidal hierarchy of the cyclical regenerative feedback loop has produced historically interrelated chains of critical nodal points. Each critical point in progression has been more intensely profound and comprehensively effectual in relation to all the preceding ones. These decisive nodal points are supplementary to a mainstream of indecisive conjunctions which heretofore have exerted a tidal, cumulative influence. Up until now these critical periods have been revolutionary in character with the cumulative interim periods exerting a greater, predominant net influence.

"Previous civilizations flourished and perished but there was always another to succeed it. There is no succession for us earthlings into the space age."

Unless humanity blindly opts for species suicide--controlled by the degenerative regressive forces of the authoritarian power structures, a feasible possibility in the contemporary state of the evolution of militarism, it as the choice of one of two general possible futures. A negativistic one consists of an ever widening gap between the professed metaphysical reality and the truth, between the haves and the have-nots, between population growth and energy consumption and the resources of the earth, until a catastrophic fracturing of present authoritarian power structures occurs in an unrivaled bloody upheaval from which new power structures will arise and revolution will start from the beginning at a very regressed level of potentiality.

The other possibility is a positivistic future in which the mainstream of humanity gives up its hold with the past, confronts face to face the authoritarian power structures and replaces them with an unprecedented revolutionary structure, in which peace and progress become the predominant influences in civilization. Civilization has reached the doorway to maturity, to become either a mature healthy progressive humanity or a pathological immature regressive system of institutionalized dehumanization.

"Time is a three fold present; the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation." St. Augustine.

The course of humankind's future starts now. It can either be left alone to allow the system to control humanity or it can become a bright future in which humanity establishes itself in control of the system and its destiny. The future perspective, like it or not, has become the all important perspective for humanity.

I propose a teleological strategy of revolution tapping the latent potentialities from the great collective unconsciousness of the mainstream of humanity, bringing to the metaphysical consciousness a quality of intensity as yet  not experienced by humanity, I propose to make of every individual a revolutionary personality type minimizing the authoritarian stranglehold. It is not merely a mere violent political revolution to rearrange the organizational apparatus, but a cultural revolution of as yet unfathomed depths, fully affecting the totality of human culture, profoundly influencing the lives of every human being in the full matrix of personal influences, to make their whole selves one of revolutionary purpose and individual self fulfillment. It is to wake up the unconscious portion of the collective world mind, to creatively apply design science and art in every aspect of living, to remake a better world, to reorient the mainstream into a direction of comprehensive futurism, to make planning objectively for the future the predominant instead of the diminutive part of every individual's life. It is a world social and cultural strategy of productive economy, of efficiency maximization and of conscious concession of the material to gain a larger metaphysical possession of life. This revolution will achieve success by scientifically reforming the human environment to fit human nature and by educationally reforming human values.

The authoritarian power structures will attempt to prevent this revolution, utilizing its primary tools of violence and coercion in the process. To be successful such a revolution must never resort to bloodletting, for it will then become temporary, self defeating form of authoritarianism. This revolution must not be temporary one after which authoritarian power structures might resume control. It must be a permanent revolution founded on the ideal of world peace. Before it can be successful it must be viewed from the stand point of a collective world mind, be based on world unity of values, achieve world peace through the devolution of militarism, and aim at world objectives of utopia and individual fulfillment of all humanity. It is a choice between a permanent state of peace with temporary intermittent and diminishing warfare, or a state of continuing warfare with only temporary intermittent and diminishing periods of peace. It is a choice between authoritarian militarism founded on mutual mistrust and the fear of death or of revolutionary pacifism founded on the permanent power of trust and valuation of human life.

It is an extremely idealistic strategy, yet is not an unachievable and unrealistic strategy. It can be successful. History leaves few credible principles and truths from which to initiate such a strategy of peace. Certainly the predominant over reliance on force strategy has lead to the indecisive stalemate of nuclear deterrence and to the general conclusion of its incapacity to achieve a permanent peace. The only alternative direction to which we can focus strategic attention are to the power and value strategies. If the trending of the evolution of these strategies is extrapolated into the future, it is possible to view humanity as arising gradually from a condition of confusing diversity and self limiting adversity, in which differences and weakness were greater controlling factors than were similarities and strengths. Power has been gradually extending its domesticating, pacifying, organizing and controlling influences toward ever widening and more prolific political states, while it has achieved this primarily by the direction of forces. Despite frequent stagnation and sporadic regressions, value strategies have been on a course of ever more gradual integration and blending, derived from humanity's ever increasing consciousness of the world, an unintentional development of a collective world mind from the gradual displacement of force strategy. Neither force nor value strategy occupy a vacuum. Neither can coexist simultaneously in control of one and the same entity. One must inevitably displace the other.

It is upon these past trends that a future strategy might construct a successful state of peace. Strategy must continue the evolution of power primarily to its utmost limits and become based on derivation of power primarily from the blending of values. The divisive and entropic influence which is the nature of force may adequately be displaced by the unifying and viable influence of value. We exist in a period of subtle transition which can easily confuse our strategic attempts at future clarity. It is wishful thinking to believe that humanity's worst problems--war, starvation, poverty, ignorance, dehumanization can be solved before the more elemental problems of inter-human communication and differences of thinking derived from social prejudices inculcated in man's and society's subconscious being. Humanity's elemental differences must be resolved and coped with before unity of action required for strategic success can be achieved. Unity of value and power must be attained as a prerequisite to success. Such unity must not only be shallow superficially of limited scope but must encompass comprehensively every aspect of human living with a depth of understanding as yet unattained in civilization.

A strategy of peace must begin from the perspective of a world viewpoint with the cultivation of a collective world mind, in terms of the whole of humanity. This view point must be both primarily futuristic and optimistic, not exclusively so. It must be founded on universal integration of values and the power of human valuation. It must initiate from each individual's total assessment of himself as a member of world humanity, looking future ward not only theoretically but operationally in day to day living, integrating and incorporating small changes which lead toward self improvement, with initiation of private individual revolution against prejudices, the norms and conformities, against the "usual" and the "right". Comprehensive coordination of such individual revolutionizing is only of secondary and subsequent importance, possibly spontaneously self adjusting. The individual must learn to think and then to behave from a world viewpoint, that of the collective world mind.

It is the individual's responsibility to initiate this strategy on its course. Upon it rests the final determination of human destiny. Once the stumbling block of initiation has been overcome it will achieve a growing momentum of its own that will aid humanity in applying it to an ultimately successful conclusion. Its very foundations are constructed in terms of success. It is a strategy that can attain permanent success. Once initiated it cannot fail. We must be prepared to relinquish some of our deepest and most cherished values and dependencies on the efficacy of destructive force. We must sacrifice those values derived from our nationalistic sense of existence. We must precondition our minds to think on more comprehensive and general terms of the world perspective. We must abandon past biases and prejudices in consideration of and empathy for all humanity, not just part of it. We must achieve understanding of a more total world view.

Such a world view of peace might seem to many a grand strategy of behavior modification achieved through inhuman application of clinical psychology and antiseptic science. A Brave New Perfectly Conditioned world in which humans are mere automations of an ant colony without that nebulous spirit of creative individuality. Yet in the face of such bleak alternatives it is time to critically reevaluate and clearly define this so intangible an element of humanity, to assess its truth and its actual operating influence on humanity. We must be prepared with courage to accept whatever substantial and seemingly contradictory evidence arising from such an investigation.

It is the time for honest soul searching. Human dignity is at best a pretentious and greedy quality we can ill afford in the face of eventual extermination. Communism is not our principle threat to survival. At the practicable realistic level this danger is rather Soviet, Chinese and third world nationalism, very much the same as our own cherished nationalism. Militarism an all pervasive enemy, is our principle threat. Our perceived dignity might better be deliberately sacrificed in the acceptance of supposed automation and apparent dehumanization for the sake of more virtuous qualities of being such as individuality, happiness, peace and liberty. In the end dignity might yet be fond to survive in a more transcendent form--that of a common human dignity.

In the world of human half truths, what is now apparently bad might prove to be indispensably and undeniably good in our future. We must not alienate our potential allies and strengths in the definition of out enemies and their intentions. We must proceed with care. We are confronted with elemental differences in ideology and in world perspective. The weakness of our perspective is that we have never been without, on the other side so to speak, to fully appreciate the truths we profess to live by. We must not be confined by these elemental differences and limitations which tend to bias and pervade all our strategic formulations. We must test all that we presume to be true empirically in our personal and collective experiences, to the total human experience, before its efficacy can be proven. It must be successfully applied to all our strategy to ensure its continuing validity. Current beliefs all too often prove to be temporary illusions. Belief must have continuing validity before it can be successfully initiated. We must have faith in the efficacy and importance of out strategy. This faith must be honest and of a dynamic sense, not hypocritical and transient to emotions. It must be a limitless source of inspiration to succeed.

The world view requires thinking in terms of world unity. It is only through world unity that world peace can be achieved. Maintaining world unity requires world objectives of evolutionary improvement before world peace can be guaranteed permanent stability. More complete definition of world unity, world peace and world objectives based on a comprehensive elementary grand strategy maximizing value and minimizing force is a necessary prerequisite to the initiation of a successful revolutionary strategy of peace.

1. "Ideas and Opinions" by Albert Einstein, edited by Carl Seelig, Dell Pub. Co. 1973

2. "The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture" by

Erich Fromm, pages 137-155. Fawcett Publications Inc. 1955

3. "The Future: edited by Gerald Leinwald , Pocket Books 1976

Military Dimensions