We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar

8. A Holarchic Approach to
World-Organization

As one approaches the problem of suggesting guidelines for the establishment of a new type of world-organization, one should try to avoid several pitfalls. The most common is that which consists in projecting into the future what one finds valuable in our present society, hoping that somehow the negative aspects of this Western society will disappear because a new and wiser type of human beings will be born or programmed by, wise biologists and social engineers. Another danger is taking just the opposite approach and wanting to discard everything which our society has produced, as one emotionally dreams of some transcendent Millennium with paternalistic gods, masters, or space-people bringing to mankind glorious projects which mankind will at once devotionally work out under the close supervision of these superhuman beings.

What I am attempting to do in the following pages is simply to establish a few basic principles which, if sincerely accepted and earnestly applied, would gradually transform a global society in which all men and women would participate in terms of the optimal use of their innate capacities. This society would perhaps not fit the "Aquarian" ideal of many enthusiasts aglow with utopian hopes; much evidently would depend upon the way society would develop after a large-scale crisis which seems impending, and what this crisis would have done to those living through it and to their progeny.

It is valuable to dream of utopias, for we will never be able to accomplish what we has not first imagined in our waking dreams. But utopias are valid only to the extent that they are founded upon fundamental realities inherent in what I already spoke of as "human nature" — provided these two words are freed from the negative implications which have been so long attributed to them. Some philosophers and religious Seers would no doubt prefer to keep their pessimistic opinion of what constitutes the "human situation," and speak of the more or less gradual rise of a superhuman kingdom that would in due time supersede our present day mankind. I personally feel that the possibilities for such a superhuman development are already inherent in the human organism. They are inherent as archetypal potentialities which so far have not been actualized, except in rare instances, because the vast evolutionary tide operating within the total organism of the Earth has yet to reach such a planetary level of consciousness.

I believe that this tide represents a kind of dialectic process, and that mankind — the carrier and actualizes of the archetype of planetary (or eonic) consciousness — is now passing through a phase of "antithesis" after having gone beyond the phase of "thesis" of which I have spoken earlier in this book and elsewhere.

If, therefore, we seek to establish a basis for the development of a world-society of mankind that would at least give us a foretaste of what the final state of "synthesis" might be — leading to some sort of Omega state of spiritual consummation — we have to try to understand the relation between the preceding stages of thesis and antithesis. We have to pierce through the confusion and conflicts of our perhaps closing Age of Scarcity (antithesis phase), and to discover those basic principles that are structuring the entire dialectical process of human evolution.

The word, principle, comes from the Latin root, princeps (prince), which implies the idea of "being first." I am using this term to refer to a set of structural potentialities inherent in any organized system of interdependent activities — whether this system exists at the macrocosmic or the microcosmic level. These structural potentialities can be called "archetypes", but they are not external to the system. They are inherent in it from the very moment the system is projected into existence; or — some may prefer to say — it emerges as an "organism" of one kind or another. This organism has its own boundaries in time and space; it is a unit — a cycle of time and a field of space. It is a "cyclocosm" with a definite structure — using this term structure in its most basic sense now familiar to scientific thinking.

At any particular moment of the existence of this whole, the inherent archetypal-structural potentialities which constitute its essential nature are at least partially actualized. A fundamental pattern guides the formation, development, self-maintenance, and the capacity for self-transformation (when need arises) of all the component parts of the whole, and of the entire cyclocosm (the organism-as-a-whole). It acts as a "guiding field." In this evolutionary sense, the archetypal character of the future global society of mankind during the coming phase of synthesis pre-exists today. It pre-exists only as a set of structural potentialities. If a human mind could be totally open and operative at the level at which these archetypes exist as structural potentialities, it would be able to envision the "form" which the future society will take. But form or structure should be clearly differentiated from "contents." Archetypes refer to form, but not to the contents of the form.

This is an essential point. What people have spoken of as "human nature" in most cases refers actually to the contents of human consciousness at its present level of development, but not to the structural potentialities inherent in archetypal Man. If one opposes "essence" to "existence," then the essential nature of man refers to these structural potentialities; what we mistakenly and pejoratively take to be human nature concerns only the existential contents of the Man-archetype. These existential contents change constantly and so does the cosmic environment of the Earth, as the entire solar system (or "heliocosm") speeds along, revolving in some 200 million years around the galactic center, which is the ultimate point of reference for Man and all the component parts of the galactic Whole.

The mind that would be able to get at least some revealing glimpses of the dynamic structure of this galactic, heliocosmic and planetary process has to be a "holistic" mind. It is the mind of the seer, rather than that of the cogitator and intellectual analyst. It certainly cannot be a mind swayed by emotions or a passionate sense of wrongs that must be readjusted, or escaped from in glowing millennial dreams. It cannot take for granted the idols, the tradition-sanctified ideas and the so often repeated words or slogans of our present Western society. It must become an empty surface upon which the new vision may take form, reflecting at least the outlines of the archetypal structure. But, I repeat, these structures are inherent in Man. If they have been "seen" as if located in the celestial sphere, what was seen was simply their projection upon the conveniently distant screen of the sky. Man can recognize and study the order manifested in the sky or embodied in some divine world far above the Earth, because these regions are so remote that human beings are not involved in their activities. This structural order is everywhere. Galactic space pervades every cell of our being. It is not above, but within — as Jesus tried to teach us, apparently in vain.

There is order everywhere, because all fields of activities are structured. We do not realize it, any more than we can normally see the full grown oak in the acorn — or the so-called Superman in everyone alive today. The only sound and sane goal of any future society is to provide the best possible conditions for the actualization of the structural potentialities inherent in Man; and I do not mean here any particular individual human organism considered at any particular time, but mankind as a whole functionally operating within the planetary field of activity which we call the Earth.

This should not be taken to mean that I disregard the importance — the "worth and dignity" — of the individual person. Its importance resides essentially in the fact that consciousness has to become focused in and through an individual mind (mind, overmind and supermind) in order to become formed and communicable; and in times when a culture has perverted or frozen into dogmas the consciousness of human beings, there are men who, by releasing from their unconscious cathartic or catabolic messages, act as transforming agents of the greatest value. Even psychotics have a message to give to their society — as ancient and Asiatic cultures well knew. Their insanity may be a crucial challenge to the validity of our concept of sanity.

Every individual person may have something important to communicate to mankind, because in that person the Man-archetype is just as real — even though it be hidden under a mountain of existential refuse and social poisons — as in a poetic genius, a saint or a great scientist. But to say this is not to condone sentimentality, and even less to become obsessed and distraught by mere symptoms, at a time when it is the deepest causes of unrest, suffering, starvation, torture and genocide which have to be faced, understood and squarely met. One of the great dangers today is to be carried away by a sentimental distress over social injustice, absurd wars and ecological poisoning, when the real issue is to formulate and promote a truly honest and meaningful concept of justice, a viable approach to world-organization, and a new feeling of the close functional connection between mankind and the whole Earth. To promote may not always be easy; but we are still free to formulate and communicate what we have thought or envisioned.

Because we are today in a period of transition and of urgently needed transformation, the value of our thinking in most instances will be measured by our capacity to question what seems unquestionable, if not obvious to society and its Establishment — and by our mental, spiritual courage in doing so. In the first Part of this book I have already dealt with the very delicate issues of individualism, freedom, Equal Rights, and with our worship of quantity and analysis. As a prelude to outlining what I see as a valid and significant structure for our future global society, it seems necessary to discuss further the basic concept of "equality." It is a very ambiguous concept, and much will depend on how the 18th century abstract ideal it normally embodies will be understood and applied in the future.

The Meaning of Equality

It should be easy to see that the emotional appeal to equality is the result of unbearable personal and/or collective experiences of social inequality. Such an appeal is entirely justified in terms of what is to be done to change what today is obviously a hypocritical and inherently destructive situation. In this chapter, however, we are looking toward the future, and we are seeking to establish concepts of world-organization on an objective realization of the basic factors which must be unemotionally considered when one thinks of the spontaneous behavior and of the deepest feeling-responses of all human beings. It is therefore essential that we should ask what we precisely and honestly mean by the term, equality.

To start with, let us consider various types of human beings living two or three centuries ago in these regions of the globe: a Pacific Island, the jungles of Africa or Brazil, villages in Czarist Russia, Western cities like London, Paris, New York, and a New Mexico pueblo or an Eskimo village. If we say that these human beings are all "equal," we have to ask the question: equal with reference to what? Certainly their feeling-responses to everyday life, their approaches to intellectual, moral and religious values, and their modes of participation in their communities were all basically different. If you say that they were equally valuable, then you have to state precisely in reference to what you define value.

It could be argued that all these people’s ways of life and feeling had an equal value in reference to their own cultures; the Siberian shaman had as much value and meaning in his culture as the priest had in a small Medieval European village. But are all cultures equal? If we believe in human evolution and "progress" it would seem evident that the shamanistic cultures of "primitive" tribes and the Catholic European culture of the centuries which witnessed the building of Gothic cathedrals and the birth of great universities represent two different levels of human evolution. The tribal level can be called a "lower" level in the sense that it manifests earlier in the evolution of life on this planet, Earth.

However, the term, lower, does not have to be given a pejorative meaning, with various emotional connotations attached to it. The lower steps of a ladder are just as necessary to the concept of the ladder as the highest ones. Without them the latter would have no meaning. It is only as one thinks of the process of climbing the ladder that lower and higher acquire the sense of value, because they imply that the person who has reached the higher levels for the concept of success here means that an individual entity — either the same individual, or an abstract image of the individual — has exerted himself to ascend from one level to the next. A human being, in terms of such a type of evaluation, has reached a level of evolution which is therefore called superior to the one reached by communities of men at an inferior stage of development.

One may then bring out the point that when one speaks today of equality in a metaphysical, moral or civic and legal sense, one does not speak of cultures but of individual human beings — individuals who are all equally "human," all members of the genus homo sapiens, and who, regardless of their external differences and of their cultural or social environment, are united by their common humanity. Religiously inclined people would state such a fact by saying that all human beings were created by God in His image and likeness; and thinkers with an occult background would say that within every human being a spark of the divine Fire burns which may be fanned into a light-giving flame.

Such statements refer to an evident fact: but they also do not sufficiently take in consideration the most important differences between potentiality and actuality. We may be all "sons of God," but some may be babies or confused adolescents, others mature persons. Besides we have to recognize the fact, essential in any kind of organization, that equality in essential being is only one of the two poles of existence, the other being functional differentiation.

This can be illustrated by considering the cells of a human body. We know that they were all the products of the division and multiplication of the one fecundated ovum. They have all a common origin and we are told that each contains at its very core a replica of the genetic pattern in this original seed-cell, the "Adam-Eve" of the entire body. This does not mean, however, that in the developed human organism they are performing the same function. Each cell, or group of cells, fulfills a definite function. Some of these functions are indispensable: the body can live without a foot but not without a heart. There can be no conscious thinking without a brain, and while most cells can be regenerated under certain conditions if destroyed, we are told that the nerve cells cannot be regenerated. They are irreplacable. All of which means that a hierarchical order in terms of the functional character of the units within an organic whole is indisputably in evidence — a functional type of hierarchy.

Hierarchy in terms of "doing" quality in terms of "being"; these two principles exist wherever there is an organized system of activity and a structured field of existence; and this means everywhere. Here again we see a kind of Yin-Yang bipolarity at work. The fundamental question is how does it work — or should it work for optimum results — in terms of the organization of a future worldwide society including all human beings? Could such a society work if it did not operate on an "organic" basis, that is, if the functional activities of its constituent groups were not structured and organized — if every individual human being insisted on acting as an individual unrelated to the whole and refused to play it a functional role? Such a state of affairs would be anarchy. What I am trying to describe is holarchy — a holistic, structured type of social organization.

The holarchic principle leads neither to pure and unconditioned collectivism, nor to any absolutely planned type of society, because it recognizes the operational necessity for both individualism and functionalism — for equality in "being" and differentiation of level in "doing." For this same reason it finds unacceptable the anarchy of rugged individualism, however disguised it may be under the cover of legality and majority rule. The issue is one of relative emphasis: more or less of individualism and equalitarianism, more or less of functional structuralism and de facto hierarchy. Each of these two social polarities are operative to some degree in any society and each has a sphere in which, at least in theory, it reveals its true and unadulterated character. But each culture or civilization determines the relative importance of these spheres. In our Western society, since the political revolutions of the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution that followed after a few decades, the confrontation between the two spheres has taken the form of a tug-o-war between representatives of the civic sphere and of the business sphere. In other societies, and until the late 18th century in Europe and in the United States, it has manifested in other ways.

A few remarks on the characteristic features of the adjustment between the two polarities sought, theorized about and often misapplied or ignored in other societies, as well as in our own, should help us to better understand the meaning of a truly holarchic approach to the future global society.

The Balancing of Polarities

In archaic tribal societies, there actually is no question, strictly speaking, of the equality of individuals, because there are no true individuals, in the modern sense. There is root-identity — if not in terms of actual common descent from a Great Ancestor, at least in a psychic sense. The tribe constitutes a multipersonal psyche, just as a living organism is a multi-cellular body. The integrative principle that unifies the tribe's psycho-biological organism operates actively in every member of the tribe. For a tribesman to repudiate his normally compulsive allegiance to such a principle, usually personified as a tribal god or totem, is to be cut from the common source of vitality; that is, from the tribal soil and the tribal ceremonies — thus exile or excommunication, both of which in ancient days practically meant death. If the allegiance-repudiating and taboo-disobeying person were allowed to live normally within the tribal psychic field, he would act as a cancerous cell, claiming independence from the whole and able to survive only by perverting other cells and eventually destroying the tribal whole.

Nevertheless, in an "organic" sense, all tribesmen were equal. Their voices could be heard. They could experience "great dreams" which if duplicated by another member would be respectfully considered. On the other hand, there were functional differences — probably the origin of clans within the tribe — and the difference of sex was clearly marked, particularly in rituals, not in terms of inequality but of functional differences.

In the more complex and extensive Aryan-Hindu society whose institutionalized forms we find described in the Laws of Manu, functional differences were established in a particularly significant manner because they were given a cosmic meaning. The caste system may have been a practical answer to the need of giving precise forms to the relationship between the Aryan conquerors and the original races inhabiting India, but there was a time when belonging to a caste was not in principle at least, a hereditary status.

The four-fold caste system was considered to be the expression of a four-fold cyclic pattern which corresponds to the present stage of development of the Earth and of Man — probably because the number 4 is a symbol of concrete physical manifestation (for instance, the square, the cross). It paralleled an analogical division of the life of man into four periods, each representing a phase of the actualization of the human potential for growth and self-realization. The four life-stages are (1) the child and student stage (Brahmachari ashrama), (2) the householder stage (Grihastha ashrama), (3) the stage of concentrated and unrenumerated public service to the community (Vanaprastha ashrama), and (4) the stage of spiritual consecration and preparation to the transition that is death (Sanyasa ashrama).

The Brahmana caste is linked with the student stage because the men of such a caste are essentially the teachers of youth and the custodians of revealed knowledge, as well as the men in charge of the ritual aspect of communal living — rituals being group-activity which give form and cohesion to the community and link its activities with those of the many devas and cosmic Powers.

The Vaishya or "merchant" caste is the one in charge of the production and distribution of goods. It is therefore related to the household or married stage of life during which children are produced which maintain the existence of mankind; and it is said to be the most basic and eldest caste as it "nourishes and supports the others" (Manu III 78).

The Kshattriya or "warrior" caste deals with the problems of administration and forms of government as well as with the defense of the community. It represents the factor of dedicated "service."

The Shudra or "laborer" caste is the polar and earth-bound reflection of the Sannyasa stage, because while the Sannyasi lives selflessly for and in the spirit, the Shudra-worker is supposed to live in a pre-individualized ego-less state where he deals directly and instinctively with matter; and spirit and matter are two aspects of the same undifferentiated and non-individualized reality. Spirit is super-mental activity; matter is compulsive, sub-mental and unconscious activity.

According to this Aryan concept "all men all over the earth naturally fall into one or another of these four (categories) according to their inner and outer characteristics . . . they are differentiated by difference of function, occupation and vocation." It is stated that during much earlier and homogeneous stages of human evolution, there had been no need for such caste differentiation; but that the need arose when the human race reached the stage which the Hindu called the "Age of hand-power and sex-differentiation." Such a fourfold differentiation may be no longer valid in the future, because each new evolutionary stage calls forth a new principle and pattern of social organization. A presumably later interpretation of the four castes relates the Brahmans caste to the head of the human body, the Kshattriya to the arms and hands, the Vaishya to the trunk and its organs (the body's metabolic functions) and the Shudra to the feet, because its labor sustains the whole organism.(1)

Such a system of organization is of course strictly functional. It is functional just as the organization of a human body with its hierarchy of organs and glands is strictly functional. The individualistic and "equality" aspect is nevertheless not absent, for it is assumed as an absolutely unquestionable fact that all human beings, to whatever caste they belong — in terms of aptitude, character and temperament at first more than of ancestry — are essentially spiritual beings and reincarnating souls. The four castes represent four rungs of the ladder of spiritual evolution and the individual Soul passes from the lower to the higher during a series of incarnations — a series which of course can also contain temporary regressions.

In other words, the individual pole of existence was established as a transcendent level — yet not so transcendent that a man of any caste could reach that level if he became a "holy man," a liberated Soul even here and now. He achieved thus a status above and beyond caste; and even kings would pay homage to him. Thus this totally planned and more and more ritualized Indian society actually considered its many wandering holy men, free from all caste functionalism and living totally spontaneous and unplanned lives, the supreme achievement a human being could reach — a most significant paradox entirely lacking in our present-day Western civilization in which persons totally consecrated to spiritual realizations were cloistered in rigidly structured monastic communities, and even its greatest mystics were looked at with suspicion by the organized Church.

Collectivism and functionalism also were dominant features of the long-lasting Chinese society, especially perhaps after Confucius; but even there a certain kind of basic equalitarianism was operating. According to the system of scholarship and examinations for the administrative positions — positions reserved to scholars — any male Chinese of superior intelligence could theoretically have access to the highest social positions — not including, of course, the Imperial position.

It is only since the Revolutionary era of 18th-century America and Europe that the concept of equality has become theoretically concretized and applied to the political sphere and considered the basis for interpersonal relationship — but not all interpersonal relationships! Slavery is, of course, the most extreme form of inequality in interpersonal relationship and we still have to cope with what it brought to America. Moreover, the aristocratic past of European culture was reborn in the 19th century as an aristocracy of business, and of wealth through business success. Thus we have seen developing a bitter conflict between the business and the civic sphere, between a theoretical and constitutional equalitarianism, and the actual enjoyment of special privilege by a wealthy minority controlling more or less hypocritically formulated social and national policies. These policies are not even truly functional; and this is the tragedy of our social situation. We have neither real equality — as the treatment of minority groups amply reveals, even in the sphere of legality and justice nor sound and efficient functionalism. It certainly cannot be called sound and efficient when it is leading mankind to suicidal possibilities and to the poisoning of all planetary resources. Some radical change is therefore imperative. If mankind is able to pass through the imminent world-crisis and is reborn at a new level of global integration, the two polarities which must exist in any wholesome social system have to be redefined and harmonized in a new way.

At the Threshold of a Global Society

The most obvious problem confronting mankind as it expands the national image of society into an all-inclusive global picture is the tremendous increase in the scope of the integrative and administrative functions required for a wholesome and effective global management. The problem is made more acute by an equally massive increase in population. We have seen how these two expansive processes have affected human life in the United States and in other large countries. Our society has become ever more complex, and bureaucratic processes more unwieldy and extremely resistant to change.

Any very large organization system must be centralized to some extent so that decisions affecting the whole can be made quickly and with determination whenever needed. The larger the organization, the greater the responsibility placed upon the Executive. One man finds it impossible to cope with all the problems requiring his attention, especially in times of crisis and transition; thus he must surround himself with assistants of various types, or there must be some kind of joint leadership or committee to handle the departmentalized structures of the managerial process. The situation becomes particularly complex in organizations where a democratic process and a more or less effective feedback from the people at large — or more realistically, from special groups wielding financial power or an emotional kind of prestige and influence — are at work.

Democracy is based, in principle at least, on the concept of equality. It has very little to do with functional values. These values no doubt are recognized, discussed and defined through parliamentary procedures and acted upon by the various managerial and regulating agencies of the government, but the distinction between the spheres of equal, civic rights and that of functional management of production and distribution is not a clear-cut one. Representatives who are (theoretically) elected by "the people" voting according to majority rule may not have any valid concept of, and experience with, functional processes. Thus they tend to be manipulated by pressure groups and special interests which operate at the functional level, but rarely in terms of the welfare, and especially of the long-range welfare, of the entire society.

When the American democratic system was established, it was conceived in relation to small states with a population distributed mainly in villages or small cities. Functional problems of management of production and distribution were easily defined and in most cases on an individualistic basis — the laissez faire and market economy system. But we have seen the social and economic picture change drastically since 1789, and the bicentennial celebration of the adoption of our American Constitution is likely to witness another type of social organization at work, or being formulated in an atmosphere of crisis — if we believe predictions based on cycles affecting the whole Earth.

When we pass from the level of large nations to that of global organization all difficulties will inevitably become intensified, not only in the political and economic sphere but in terms of what such an immense expansion can do to individuals who in some way become personally related to the global operation of society. One can readily see how being President of the U.S. affects the character as well as the life of the individual person in the White House, or even how the competitive pressures and managerial responsibilities faced daily by the executives of large firms with international operations affect the mind and health of their executives. More or less the same thing happens to a writer whose works have given him a great national and international fame, and to men or women who have become popular idols in some artistic field.

The massive impact of international fame upon individuals would, of course, increase in a global society filled with a vastly more numerous population. Think of what would happen if two billion Asiatics would write letters to some famous American personage on top of what is already flooding the study of such nationally acclaimed men or women! What this means is that in a world monstrously overpopulated and with a global system of distribution, the individual person who is affected by this over-charged global network of stimuli and responses must tend to become collectivized. The world-famous person may have to be "incorporated" in order to handle the global response; he will have — and often already has today — a group of secretaries to handle his mail, and managers to organize his every move.

The same will be and is already true of the more average person who, through increased TV coverage and jet transportation, finds himself personally involved in world-events and perhaps in the unmanageable mass of new technical-scientific data, or even of cultural development. The question is: what will this do to the individual character of human beings in a world-wide technological society, and how will an average person stand the impact?

The spreading use of computers may help us to select, retrieve and organize information, but may it not also have the effect of denaturing man? It certainly will tend to "quantify" human response, to develop a binary type of mental process — the true-or-false questionnaire mentality already so prevalent. It may indeed computerize human beings who already are so easily programmed by the media, business and political propaganda, and are craving to feel and act according to fashion — unless a new type of men and women is evolved. Such a human being would have to develop the ability — and the will — to use an even more complex technology while remaining not only free from its pressures but uninvolved in its operations, somewhat as man today is able to let his autonomic nervous system handle the complex operations of body-growth and metabolism and can train his mind to drive a car in traffic automatically without thinking about it, thus releasing mental faculties for conscious and individualized thinking. But whether this can be done without altogether transforming our present-day technology and our entire system of education and interpersonal relationships is another matter! And this is the crucial issue which will have to be decided before 1989.

What is at stake obviously is whether or not the momentum of the present socio-technological trends can be checked sufficiently to allow for at least a temporary reversal of motion and for the operation of new principles of world-organization. This possibilty will depend on what our "below thirty" generation is willing, ready and able to do within the next ten years — and whether the older generations of people born before 1936 (a crucial year) will allow them to remain true to their youthful revolt and as yet imprecise ideals, or force upon us all a civil war and the tragic alternatives of Fascism or chaos.

Whatever will happen and how it will happen — whether initiated by men or by the Earth itself inducing a wholesale process of planetary catharsis — I believe that one hundred years from now there will be far fewer human beings on the globe than there are now, and that they will be differently distributed. In spite of Teilhard de Chardin's concepts of the constructive value of the "complexification" process and of a constantly increased massing of human beings, I can see no other way in which a wholesome global society on a healthful Earth.

It would be premature and conceited to present a definite plan for the organization of a global society even after more wholesome conditions may prevail on the globe, if only — I repeat — for the obvious reason that so much must depend on the way the impending crisis, or crises, have then been met, and how powerful the ghosts of the still past are in the collective consciousness (or sub-consciousness) of man when new principles of formation are allowed to operate.

Nevertheless these principles can already operate today in some manner. They may not do so very effectively in terms of the outer organization of long-lasting groups, though there may already be a very few such groups on the borderline of our society; but they may become always more powerful forces in the mind of men and women who, here and there — and perhaps as inconspicuous as small seed hidden with the fallen and decaying leaves — are attuning to them their consciousness, their faith and, whenever possibilities arise, their steady endeavors. It is for such men and women who not only dream of a change but have become individually ready for it that I am writing. They may not see this future which they are envisioning and working for; but the real creative spirits rarely see during their lives what their efforts have summoned forth. What counts are not the results — the fruits of the action, as the Bhagavat Gita states — but the total consecration of the agent to the greater whole of which he is a part: Humanity.

Two Levels of World-Organization

When I discussed the nature of the many cultures which were born on various continents, I said that they were rooted in the particular regions in which they developed, almost as definitely as the trees of the regions were rooted in the soil. Human beings, of course, say words, perform many rituals, sing songs and write books, build artifacts and the institutions of these cultures, but these collective human manifestations and achievements are in answer to generic and regional needs, using the products and forms made available by the region to create symbols and consciously devised techniques of living. All cultures have a local character; they are the products of men who "extract consciousness" from their collective experience conditioned by the local environment. The consciousness extracted from these men's activities and inner responses to particular living conditions is given form in language, tools, art-works, group-rituals, monuments, books. The culture has a cycle of growth, maturity and decay; but it also produces transferable mental seeds which can then be sown in other lands, and its institutions or art-styles may be imitated by other human collectivities or digested by them and assimilated to their own cultures.

The human mind, however, can function at an abstract level at which it becomes at least theoretically free from the attachment to, and the dependence upon, a particular locality and cultural environment. A universalistic type of consciousness emerges out of the particularistic forms, myths and rituals of the culture-bound and tradition-worshiping mentality. Where this type of consciousness asserts itself powerfully a different set of values and a new type of relationship between man and nature — and also between individual persons, and between individuals and society as a whole — develop. As the potentialities these new relationships imply and contain in seed become gradually actualized, what I have called "civilization" develops.

Cultures operate largely — and in archaic eras almost exclusively — in terms of a bio-psychic, nearly compulsive, deeply emotional and exclusivistic type of consciousness binding the participants through traditional forms which have a great deal of inertia — i.e., they resist stubbornly change and therefore do not easily adapt themselves to new local conditions. By contrast, civilizations operate mostly at the level of the conscious mind, emphasizing the analytical processes of the intellect and a rational-objective approach to the data furnished by any kind of environment, and theoretically — but today not actually — at any level of activity (not necessarily at the level of physical activity).

Culture-man deals essentially with the near-at-hand and the familiar, with earth-products and existential cycles which form the basis of his existence, not only at the physical and biological, but as much at the psychic and emotional level. Civilization-man, on the other hand, seeks to discover universal laws applicable everywhere; and his intellectual, restless search for universally valid knowledge and principles of action impels and often compels him to probe conditions of existence in the most varied environments. Nature for him is not a "great Mother," but a means to satisfy his passion for a new and mentally stimulating experiences, which also means, at least in the types of civilization mankind has known so far, for ego-satisfaction and a lust for power.

Culture-man is "thinking-feeling" in concrete terms and acts normally in at least basic attunement to the rhythms of nature — as Earth-nature reveals these rhythms in his environment. His outlook is basically regional; even if he leaves his homeland, he still feels subtle biopsychic threads which bind him to it. He is usually proud of his culture which to him seems unquestionably the best, as he takes for granted the validity of its Tradition. For culture-man at the tribal level, his village or town is the center of the world; in later periods the capital of his country is the world-center of Culture (with a capital C; and he is impelled to promote and export this Culture to the alien people who he regards always somewhat as uncultured barbarians.

Civilization-man has not the same attitude as culture-man to his homeland. He may acknowledge a certain emotional feeling toward the people, place and cultural patterns (language and art or old ways of life) which molded his early bio-psychic development; but he feels that he has transcended their regionalism and exclusivism. He feels free to roam in mind and if possible in body through unbounded spaces, on this planet or anywhere else where some kind of bodily existence, however unfamiliar and strenuous, can support his universalistic thinking. He must experience all kinds of conditions in order to test the universality of his knowledge, while avoiding being attached emotionally or bio-psychically to any one in particular. His task — and indeed his passion — is to extract abstract universals from concrete particulars. If he succeeds in so doing, he can indeed provide operative patterns of management which can organize narrowly limited into broader and more inclusive particulars; that is, he can establish effectual procedures necessary for the integration of small regional cultures into larger culture-wholes. He can organize differences of methods into polyvalent modes of operation within a new compound able to function as an integral organism.

It should be obvious from what has just been said that these two types of human beings co-exist in a complex society such as ours, and especially whenever a crisis of higher integration has begun. But, as I see it, the last few millennia of recorded history constitute such a crisis, which may have begun at the time of the Hindu Kali Yuga, 3102 B.C., if not before. It is during such a period that what the English historian, Arnold Toynbee calls "civilizations" have been operating. However, I feel that his use of the word, civilization, is confusing and that he has failed to grasp the interplay between the two ideals of culture and of civilization, an interplay in which two basic types of human beings are involved. Each type basically operates at a different level of consciousness and according to a different rhythm of activity.

Oswald Spengler was aware of the existence of these two types but extremely biased in his interpretation of their value and function. He gave to the concept of civilization a strictly negative meaning because he was longing to return to a social state dominated by the culture ideal. Many people today, distressed by what the civilization-drive and the technocrats embodying it have produced in terms of destructive results and of the possibility of planetary disaster, are likewise preaching an unconditional return to nature and hoping that somehow the mentality and the works of civilization-man in the Western world will vanish, or at least lose their controlling influence.

Some of the statements in this and previous chapters may have given the impression that I also am entertaining such a hope; but this is not what I envision for the future of mankind in a "New Age." I believe essentially in a global society including all human beings wherever found in our planet; and it is inconceivable that such a global or planetary society could be founded, develop and maintain itself without some kind of over-all management. At least in the first stages of this development, such a management requires the activities and mental power of integration of men and women who function according to the characteristic rhythms and concepts of civilization — as I use this term — rather than as culture-men. They have to be universalists, not regionalists. They have to think in terms of planetary operation, an operation which has to find complex formulas and techniques in order to integrate the points of view of our many existing culture-groups.

I go one step further. I claim that the culture-principle is to be reinstated in its pure, but non-exclusive form not only so as to reverse for a time the totally unwholesome fascination with both the intellectual abstractions and artificially analytical processes of our modern technology and the unnatural conditions of existence of sprawling urban as well as suburban living — but as a permanent feature in the organization of the future global society. Both the culture-principle and the civilization-principle have their place in any sound social organization; and in the future they should be harmoniously interrelated, each fulfilling its function in the economy and the meaning of the whole. This, however, can never satisfactorily occur if the validity, usefulness and indeed the necessity of two different types of human beings are not accepted.

Just as today we begin to realize the need there is for generalists as well as for specialists in the field of mental activity, and thus for true philosophers as well as for research men in most minutely specified areas, likewise, in a much more broadly human sense, the future global society needs not only universalists — men and women whose attention is focused on large problems of planetary integration and of management and distribution of the resources of the Earth and of men — but regionalists or culturalists who feel themselves not only participants in the rhythms and processes of nature but also cultivators guiding and improving these processes.

I emphasized the word, feel, for in such a type of culture-man feelings, intuition and a kind of subtle positive symbiosis with a particular region of the globe normally predominates; it should predominate if such men and women are to develop healthfully and productively. The vast majority of human beings today actually belong to this culture-type; but they try to pervert their nature so as to fit in with the prevalent rhythms of civilization and the demands of jobs requiring a superficial intellectuality for the effective use of formulas and machines. They are caught into the whirlpools of our city-civilization, rushed into the mouth of the greedy Moloch of industrialization. And because our new electronic technology is demanding increasingly few non-intellectualized brains and muscular hands, non-employment and slums poison the lives, feelings and egos of a multitude. Everybody has to, and thus craves to, become intellectualized to the point at which he receives the certification of merit which opens the door to ever more competitive jobs devoid of vital meaning for the jobholder.

These human beings who inherently belong to the culture-level should be "redeemed" from city-slavery; but this can only really happen if, first, one redeems the very concept of culture and one removes from men and women whose natural rhythm and level of function belongs innately to the culture-man type the feeling that they are "inferior" because non-intellectualized and without the increasingly senseless official stamp of college graduate. There has been an exodus from the rural to the urban regions because of the mechanization of agriculture. Machines may produce more and faster, but is it not more expensive to keep millions of "rural expatriates" on the dole in the modern city ghettos? It is not only financially expensive for the social whole, but spiritually and socially destructive. This is what so many intellectuals in the scientific, managerial and political Establishment seem unable to see. They are trading machine-made quantity and personal power or prestige for the quality of many millions of human lives. They have poisoned the living reality of the world of culture with the infectious fumes of a hypertrophied and monstrously unbalanced realm of civilization.

The very concept of civilization which is necessary for the attainment of a global society integrating all human beings must be rescued from its own nauseating wastes. Civilization-man is needed; technicians are needed; minds able to organize vast enterprises are needed; but they are not "superior" to men who would bring out of the soil and the ocean a wealth of vital, healthy products, or who would produce works of art vibrant with an ethnic character extracted directly from the diverse regions of the globe, each with its own vitality, beauty and functional meaning.

Both culture-man and civilization-man can, and should, be functional with reference to the whole of mankind and to the integral meaning of the Earth as a complex multilevel field of activity. The heart, the lungs, the liver and the colon are functional agents in the metabolism of the whole body; but so are the two or three nervous systems and the forebrain. Alas, our society is like a brilliant brain vampirizing the metabolic system of glands and organs forced to operate under the unrhythmic and stress-producing dictates of the intellectual centers.

It is not easy to see how this situation could be radically changed — and radical change is needed — short of a total catharsis followed by a slow process of rehabilitation, unless a truly divine Physician could appear to shock mankind into accepting a strong regime of psychological, mental and social transformation leaving hardly anyone of our present official beliefs and our entire system of ego-gratifications untouched and still standing. But whatever be the way in which change does come, it should be clear that the false kind of intellectual and abstract equality which we theoretically believe in — equality in reaching a stereotype of "success" which actually makes no sense, is not functional and leads to spiritual emptiness or boredom — such a kind of equality will have to be replaced by a healthy acceptance of natural differences. There are, and must always be, differences in temperament, in the type of feeling-responses which are spontaneous and healthy because functional, and in the level at which the consciousness operates without being subjected to organically destructive and character deteriorating stresses.

It is impossible at this point to determine how each human being will find his or her own level of functioning. It obviously should not depend mainly on race, heredity or environment; though these factors cannot be ignored as long as human beings are not machines manufactured according to a single model and operating on a planet with uniform features in all longitudes and latitudes. Somehow each person should find his own level as he grows up and, hopefully, should discover where he belongs as an individual person and who he wants to be related to — i.e., his companions. He certainly cannot be expected to do so, except in favored cases, when he grows up in our disorganized and disharmonic society, while subjected to all kinds of pressures from family, school and the business world. This means that the family situation, the concept of education and the socioeconomic and political system have first to be totally transformed. Then, if the new society does not interfere in some other way, a child may naturally and spontaneously grow into his own individual mode of participation in society, and thereby find his own level of function. He should do so primarily either as a regionalist focusing on culture processes, or a universalist developing the type of mind-power and scope of awareness which are required to deal with the operations of a vast global society, the efficient management of its resources, and the harmonization of cultural differences.

Theoretically, aptitude tests should be helpful if the child or adolescent does not experience a clear vocation; but, the way in which all such tests are devised today by our clinical psychologists and so-called educators, they take for granted a certain type of social-intellectual attitude which is considered "normal," but which actually is normal only in terms of fulfilling the requirements of our particular type of society. The only really valid test should be the test of experience under a variety of more or less controlled circumstances — tests by doing — for only activity and participation in groups with a functional character can tell a young person whether the experience gained arouses in the depth of his being a response of vital acceptance or rejection.

This could be the function of "pilot groups" in which the youth could operate for a certain time in order to discover what kind of persons are the comrades and co-workers who he feels — in a sense "organically” — are needed for the full actualization of his innate potential of being. Society should not use its educational power and self-appointed prerogatives to force, subtly or not, children and adolescents to meet its requirements — as is the case today, even though this is supposed to be an individualistic society. It is rather the society whose organizational patterns should be flexible enough to adapt itself to the needs of its members.

Such a flexibility should be possible now that we have built extraordinarily complex machines which could give us an instantaneous picture of all the world's needs and resources; but the interpretation and organizing of the data certainly will demand highly trained minds that are not biased by a type of specialization based on a priori judgments, "moral" values and personal power-motives — power over other people. What are needed are great, but flexible and open minds who, in a real and unequivocal sense, consider themselves "servants" of society. The future society needs men who fulfill the ideal of public service which in the old Laws of Manu was associated with the third phase of the life-cycle — public service without pay or personal benefits of any kind. Years ago I spoke of such a type of man as the Server type.(2) An old occult saying states that "mind is the slayer of the Real." But mind can also be a formative agent through which the potential inherent in a transpersonal creative Impulse can actualize itself.

"Man", as I have used this word — that is, as the sum-total of the structural potentialities inherent in the human species — requires a planetary kind of intelligence and organizing power to become actualized in a global society. A planetary mind is a synthesizing and structuring mind; not the mind of specialists bent upon tedious analysis for the production of perhaps unassimilatable or insignificant data, but the mind of generalists and managers who, because they are fully aware of need and overall purpose, can plan in such a way that the planning will always adjust itself to both individual need and all-human purpose.

These men and women must inevitably emerge from the ranks of civilization-men or universalists. The culture-man has another kind of task which is essentially to identify himself with and to assist the inherent fruitfulness of the Earth. His it is to experience every phase and mood of the productivity of the region which he has taken as his field of conscious operation; and to extract from all his experiences full consciousness — then to give form to this consciousness so that it can be transferred to other men, and that thereby groups of human beings within the common field of an open and free togetherness may celebrate the Earth and rejoice in the transcendent cosmic Power of which this Earth in its multi-level totality is but the concretized expression.

The Earth is the Foundation

The foundation of culture is the Earth, and as there is a great diversity of climates, land features and telluric-magnetic conditions, there must be also an equally great variety of cultures. The ideal of global mankind operating in a uniform way, eating the same food, living in the same kinds of houses, subjected to the same music and supposed to enjoy an "international style" of art and clothing is a nightmarish product of a civilization denying all truly cultural values because it has repudiated its rootedness in the Earth.

Such a civilization worships power, and its systems of production, management, distribution are almost totally conditioned by politics. Politics and the haphazard operation of conquest, marriages between rulers, inheritance and personal caprices of passions have established today the boundaries of nations, the official language of people, the economy of countries and to a large extent their allegiance to the "great religions" whose abstract universalism makes of them convenient tools for the control of conquered populations. The boundaries of practically every nation in the world, and of every state in federal Republics, result from chance happenings and artificial, because political, causes.

The first principle on which an organic and harmonic global society should be founded is the principle of geomorphic functionalism. The division of the Earth's surface into regions should be functional and based on the structure, etiology, climate and resources (potential and actual) of each region. The example of Europe and the United States, with their senseless state-boundaries and the disproportionate sizes of their component units of administration, shows clearly how anti-organic and, from the point of view of an efficient type of production and distribution, absurd the political basis of human operation is.

What can be done about it in the present conditions and with nations armed with means for total destruction is not our problem here. All that can be said is that unless these conditions are radically changed no wholesome and healthfully operating world-society can be envisioned. Limited political readjustments — like the European Common Market — could of course alleviate some especially crucial and senseless inefficiencies and injustices, but they usually take decades to work out even half-effectively, and most likely there is not enough time left for such half-hearted political processes to operate successfully. Mankind, in some hardly predictable way, must be compelled to realize that national or state politics — and all types of organization based on the lust for power as well as on past traditions — are totally obsolete and ineffectual ways of handling human affairs in our era of potential and inevitable global organization.

The only logical foundation is one that is basically geomorphic. What I called thirty years ago "geotechnics" must take the place of politics. The whole Earth must be considered as an organism, each continent and sub-continental region, as an organ with its own characteristic rhythm and function. Africa is no more like North America than an Eskimo is like the executive of a large German firm. Spiritually and abstractly the two men partake in the common humanity of all men; but functionally and organically they operate at different levels of consciousness. You cannot organize spirituality, but you can organize functional activities. The essential point not to forget, however, is that the concept of functional organization should never obliterate the concept of spiritual equality, or belittle its value. Likewise, while each geomorphic region should be allowed to function as an organic whole with its own character and culture, nevertheless all these regional operations should become integrated in a global pattern of production and distribution because every region is but a part of the planet-as-a-whole.

Who will do the over-all global organizing? Individuals who, according to their own nature and personal level of feeling-responses and consciousness as well as their capacity for necessary training, will prove themselves to be civilization-men, universalists — which must mean "servants" of Man and of the Earth. These men, however, should in no way be allowed to forget their common humanity. They are not superior in spirituality or civic value, even though they deal with larger organizational issues, than cultural-men who focus their attention upon regional and cultural problems. Level of function is not the same as political-economic class. An organic and harmonious global society can have no room for basic differences of class or wealth. Differentiation should be functional and organic, not in terms of social-political power. Every person should have the same human rights as any other, and all be considered not only valuable, but essential to the functioning of the whole — as long as they, themselves, realize and accept the fact that they are functional units within the larger whole of mankind. If they do not recognize such a fact, then they are symbolically like cancerous cells in a body — cells which operate as anarchic, because unrelated, entities even though existing within an organic whole.

The refusal to be related functionally to the whole cannot be considered justified as long as this whole is a natural whole. The Earth, and mankind as a functional part of the planet-as-a-whole, are natural wholes; political states are not. In a similar sense, the name a child receives from his parents is not a natural indication of the individual potentialities of this child; it is conditioned by parental like or dislike, by family pressures, by cultural and religious traditions. But the birth-chart of a person is a natural expression of what he is as an individual in as much as it represents the space-time formula of his being — his "belongingness" to the universe. Thus I have spoken of it as the "celestial Name" of the individual person.(3) The point is not that this birth-chart represents the direct action of planets or other celestial bodies on the person and his life, but simply that it symbolizes his functional relationships to the whole solar system in which he operates as a "cell."

A person can legitimately change the name his parents gave him, if he is able to perceive intuitively another name as a true symbol of his essential individuality. Likewise an individual should have the right to refuse to participate in a man-made political structure (a nation, state or organization) because it is not a natural organism. Man should accept being fundamentally conditioned by nature — by the universe, but should not be compelled to fit in a certain place by rules devised for political purposes based on patterns of operation of personal or group power.

A region of the globe is a natural, functional unit, related though it be to atmospheric and oceanic currents and other telluric factors which integrate the total planetary field; but a state like Belgium or Rhodes Island, or even like the United States or the Ukraine, is not a natural unit. It is the artificial man-made product of politics. It has of itself no functional meaning or value in the organic life of mankind. It can have no place in a truly functional and harmonic world-society.

Harmonic Concepts of Social Operation

The question which no doubt will be raised is: But you do not take into account the feelings of attachment of the people who today have their ancestral home in these national units and feel bound together by linguistic, cultural, religious links. Are not people and their attitudes more important than the land of a country and its products?

This is obviously a crucial question in terms of what can and cannot be done just now. However, anyone who takes for granted that, if present trends continue, technological achievements will inevitably lead us to a condition of global interdependence and global organization should expect that industrial and commercial enterprises of always greater scope, the speeding of communication and travel, the spread of mass media through satellites and so on will almost completely do away not only with smaller enterprises, but also regional customs and eventually languages. Such an outcome would require that the greatest world-powers agree on "spheres of influence" and on economic control. The result would be a technological and technocratic kind of totalitarianism or a possibly not overtly political, yet none the less effective, type of forceful "integration" of racial and cultural minorities by any means, fair or foul — as has happened in old European countries (for instance, the Albigenses crusade of the 13th century in France) and even in these United States in relation to the Native Americans. The picture of mankind's future evoked by most "prospectivists," their computerized type of intellect and computer models certainly suggests such a prospect of totalitarian organization which sooner or later would homogenize the multi-national and still somewhat multicultural would in which we are living.

Such a process of homogenization has operated relatively slowly in the past; but it did not take so long for Coca-Cola, American Jazz and miniskirts to be accepted in Asiatic and African nations. The main obstacle to homogenization is the power of special financial interests or politically ambitious groups, and of vast and entrenched bureaucracies — especially the military Establishment and related national organizations.

At times, a popular tide of opinion seems to offer a genuine resistance to the more disturbing processes of international integration, but even then such a mass movement is never completely spontaneous. It is manipulated by a relatively few individuals who want power or are afraid to lose what they have. These people play on the subconscious feelings and egocentric interest of the people who by nature are attached to their ancestral traditions and their regional patterns of existence. These people are usually the majority, yet they go along, if they are either lured away by promises of affluence, or shocked and frightened into accepting new ways of salvation from what they finally realize to be a nearly immediate collapse of their cherished social-cultural structures. Thus they can either be bought, or converted by "fascinating" new Images, when life for them has become sufficiently hopeless or meaningless. For this reason the answer to the problem of a collective change in strongly rooted feelings has always been the use of mass-psychology, or else sheer and relentless destruction, whether by man or nature.

However in order to fascinate the masses, the new Images of living being promoted should answer to a deep and conscious longing for something which has been denied them. It may be a need for sufficient food, peace or land. It may be the need to feel one's personal worth in terms of a life which makes sense, when the social or group relationships become so obviously empty or debasing that a deep-seated organic revulsion occurs — a contagious revulsion against a deadening kind of life which no longer stimulates the will to live.

It is such a kind of organic revulsion which already has been manifesting among a large section of our American youth; and if it is not the majority, on the other hand only a minority seems positively committed to and willing to fight for the status quo or for promises of the much publicized bright technological future. The state of revulsion exists, and it is probably the subconscious cause of so many teenagers being involved in the use of drugs. They become involved either as a means of escape from a dominating but, to many, unacceptable social-economic system, or as an emotional protest. In many instance it is in the hope of having experiences which could both free them from a still upsetting attachment to the convenient and sentimental features of a permissive affluent environment, and at the same time bring them fascinating promises of the possibility of a world in which unity, love and freedom would be the motive-power of a totally new social order. Fashion is, of course, also a strong factor in youthful behavior; but behind fashion usually lurks deeper unconscious motivation.

All this, however, refers to what is only the prelude to a new global society. Why and how to transform the past can never be satisfactorily resolved until one is able to present an at least tentative vision or conceptual image of what an alternative to a totalitarian global society developing gradually from our present conditions of life on this Earth could be. I have so far stated two basic principles which I consider all-important in a global society in which both the essential equality of individuals and the organic and functional differentiation of human activity would be accepted as fundamental features. I have stated my belief that human beings will naturally divide themselves into two characteristic types — the regionalist who represents the culture polarity of society, and the universalist who embodies the civilization aspect. However, such a polarization implies basic problems: that is, (1) how the working relationship between these two types of human beings at the functional level is to be kept harmonious and effectual; and (2) how the results of regional productivity and cultural activities in the many regional units can be integrated as functional factors in the economy and the spiritual integrity of the planetary whole of mankind.

When two basic factors are constantly interacting and are interdependent — each of which could easily tend to overpower the other and control its operations — it is reasonable to assume that a third factor should be present which has the capacity to constantly readjust any serious disturbance of equilibrium. This is the "threefold principle" which was stressed in a significant manner by the German philosopher-seer Rudolph Steiner,(4) but which indeed the founders of the American Republic sought to embody in the Constitution — the result being the official division of power between the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary.

The important point, however, is that in our American system this three-fold division constitutes essentially a division of political power. This power theoretically resides in the people; but "the people" in this case actually refers to a collection of voting individuals. When these individuals lived in small villages or towns, close to the necessity of making the soil productive with nearly bare human hands, functional problems related to the regional needs of the soil and of its cultivation dominated political issues. Moreover the collective power of a definite culture — imported though it unfortunately was from Europe — could curb the ever increasing egocentric urges and ambitions of individuals.

The Industrial Revolution, the Westward expansion, then the tragic aftermath of the Civil War came, and America lost her collective integrity. The political and quantitative technique of simple majority-rule became perverted by the pressure of special interests, and the lobbying technique, which often has a legitimate functional validity became mixed with and thoroughly contaminated by the yearning for political power. Population increased tremendously; financial and cultural differences came to divide the people into ever more sharply defined social classes; huge cities emphasized always more destructively the inorganic character of our society of egocentric and money-greedy individuals, and the situation became ever more chaotic, under the pressure of international wars which brought abnormal and morally unwholesome wealth and power to our nation. The practical and tragic fact is that today our citizens are concerned with productivity only in so far as production can be translated in terms of money and social power; likewise they are not concerned with the healthful, self-actualizing and humanistic results of culture except in so far as their increasingly empty lives are titillated and compulsively fed by the commercially controlled and massive products of this inorganic and anarchic culture.

The "third force" in the American Constitutional system is the Supreme Court. It acts in principle as an arbiter and supreme adjuster of social and political conflicts between individuals and groups. However, it finds itself in a most ambiguous situation; for, on the one hand it is supposed to strictly depend for its decision on an ancient Constitution which obviously was not conceived or formulated in terms of the functional needs of our present society, yet on the other hand it cannot possibly ignore these needs and the results of the most fundamental changes which have occurred since the Industrial Revolution. These have affected both the functional sphere and the basic life-attitude of individuals. Freedom and equality mean for present-day Americans something totally different from the significance and value they had in New England towns in the late 18th century.

The threefold division which I envision for the future rests primarily on the realistic difference which today exists between what I have briefly described as the regionalist and the universalist — between regional and cultural activities and those which refer to the global organization of the production and distribution of all the resources of the earth on an efficient basis of management — using this term, management, in its broadest as well as most philosophical sense. And in order to make my meaning clearer I shall resort again to a biological illustration, even though this can be a dangerous and confusing procedure, should the illustration be taken literally and in terms of the details of the operation referred to.

In a human body there are organs which have a rather stationary role — and I include among them all the muscles. They are located in certain places of the body and they act in organic sequences under a variety of stimulation and controls — some internal in relation to their own spheres and functions, others external. There are also in the body circulatory systems. These systems relate and partially (and in some cases, totally) control the organs. They are concerned with the balanced operation of complex bipolar functions, such as we find clearly exemplified in the entire process of the metabolism of food. They feed the organs and their cells, distributing to them a great variety of chemical substances, disposing of waste materials, stimulating or slowing down their activity, and so on.

These circulatory systems have their fixed channels of operation — the arteries and veins, the lymphatic canals, and all the nerves which belong to at least two definite systems with different functions. The blood and lymph are composed of a myriad of individual cells which, especially in the case of the blood, circulate constantly at relatively great speed. These cells have a dynamic existence; they carry chemicals to the organs; and some of these chemicals act as "messages," in that they trigger specific reactions.(5)

The distinction between the cells of the localized organs of the body and those which circulate more or less rapidly through blood and lymph channels may be significantly related to the distinction I foresee between regionalists and at least one type of universalists; the other type of universalists can be compared to the system of nerves — nerves through which a constant stream of information — the afferent and efferent nerve-messages — circulates. This second type again should be divided into two, just as the nervous system is divided into the automatic system which normally keeps the whole organism in a balanced load situation, and the conceptual-volitional cerebro-spinal system which establishes goals and values, makes decisions, starts activity-processes (mainly in terms of external action).

This analogy between biological functions and the structural pattern of organization of a future society is evidently far from perfect. No such analogy should ever be taken literally. Yet it has value at least in suggesting the general character of basic functions in a society founded upon holarchic rather than democratic values, in both the literal and the traditional sense of the much abused word, democracy.

In terms of this analogy certain points are worth stressing. The first one is that just as there is a constant feedback from the organs, glands, muscles and skin to the nervous system, likewise the regional groups would constantly convey their direct reactions and problems to the universalist groups. Each region should have its relatively independent organizational structures and its characteristic mode of operation. It has its own needs which it wants filled, and special achievements which are to be shared with the whole of mankind. However, this interplay and feedback should be an organic and not a political process. It should not have too crucial an effect upon any individual person living in the region, at least in the sense that his "blood supply" would, in the main, be guaranteed by the greater planetary whole, mankind. This guarantee belongs to the sphere of essential equality — or what we call today, in a limited sense, civil or legal rights. But it should be "human" rather than merely "civil"; it is the right to function in terms of optimal (but not maximal) conditions of living according to the individual's process of self-actualization and not according to an abstract, and therefore inorganically individualistic, standard indifferently applied to every human being.

To use an extreme case, much in the spotlight at the present time: if a woman finds that her desired life-goal is to have and educate children — i.e., to function mainly at the biological level — she should be given all opportunities to actualize her human potential along this self-chosen line in the best manner possible. It would be her potential and she would be just as valuable a member of her regional group as a woman who would choose to participate either in another type of activity, or would be able to join the ranks of a universalist group. Likewise she would be just as valued as a man who would fulfill a "cultural" function. As an individual person, any human being would be free to actualize his or her human potential as he or she is able to recognize it and to work for such an actualization.

Who would harmonize, guide within limits, and sustain the regional processes? Local and regional Assemblies whose members would be selected in terms of the functions they represent, rather than according to their personal power to sway the masses. Wealth or family tradition would not influence the selection because there would only be very limited possibilities of accumulating purchasing power, especially through hereditary transfer. Besides, the family pattern would be much enlarged through multi-familial group interactions within small communities. These would not be crowded near each other, but just as easily in communication through news media and fast travel, and eventually perhaps other psychic means.

These local communities would supersede, at least in social functional terms, the present-day narrow and neurosis-generating family. They in fact would represent simply a return to the more organic type of social and productive units known everywhere until the entire social scene became confused and perverted by the pressures of our modern industrial civilization.(6)

Local Assemblies would send representatives to the larger regional Assemblies at the level of which the working relationship between the universalists and the regionalists would operate. It is at that level that conflicts and revendications could mainly occur, for it is there that the inevitable problems of distribution would come to the fore. I do not envision quotas of production being established for each region of the Earth, but a global policy would no doubt at times place certain pressures on the natural productivity of a special region whose products would be in great demand — or on the contrary whose products would be in too small a demand elsewhere.

I do not believe in the 18th century concept of laissez faire economy. The absolute type of free enterprise is inevitably a thing of the past, even though it still arouses the longings of men dreaming of the good old days of Frontier-men and rugged individualists amassing fortunes through crimes against nature and against Man," if not against particular individuals, laborers and competitors. The human qualities resulting from. the stress on individual character and the typical American success story — paralleled in other countries in slightly different ways by power-greedy men — do not seem worth the generalized havoc they inevitably cause in the great majority of cases. What such a stress on competition and ambition produces, in the successful as well as in the unsuccessful person, seems to me a denaturing of human nature. The ideal of "mastery" is certainly ambivalent, when it means unrestrained power over other men and over nature; indeed it makes no sense unless power is an expression of love, unless its actualization leads to the "Master of Compassion" — the Buddha-like and Christ-like person, the Bodhisattva who renounces salvation or liberation for himself until all sentient creatures also have become "free," whatever one may actually understand such a freedom to mean.

We hear much today concerning freedom under law; but this begs the question: what kind of law? How is it made and to what purpose? What today is a legalistic approach to interpersonal, regional, national and international problems makes very little sense, even where it appears necessary to take care of a social situation which has degenerated into anarchy and crime — necessary because no other solution can be considered, decided upon or implemented in our present power-mad society with its extremes of wealth or influence, and of poverty and personal degradation.

A living organism is not structured by law. It is the result of a harmony of functional activities. Law does not produce harmony, once the sense of functional activity has been lost. We do not need law-makers, but harmonizers. We need men of wisdom, rather than specialists and technocrats for whom humanistic values are but a secondary consideration, even while they talk glibly about "saving lives" while destroying through defoliation and still worse methods huge areas of the world. The saving of lives is not what matters most — we are so sentimental about death, even while supposedly believing in immortality! — but rather what we do to and with human lives. A psychologically or physically maimed individual is a far greater tragedy than a dead person.

We need harmonizers, Sages, men and women of vision. We have to find a place for them in our social organization. Not men of legal achievement, but men of wisdom. Occasionally wise men may find their way to the Supreme Court in spite of the way they are chosen; but this does not make the concept of a Supreme Court, as formulated in our or similar Constitutions, a functional one. It is simply meant to try to insure the perpetuation of the status quo, with only the possibility of minor interpretative changes. It is not really able to function as a harmonizing force between the Executive and the Legislative. It can only check the danger of too radical innovations or abuse of power.

This is not what I meant when I spoke, a few pages back, of a third factor in a social organization in which two functional factors operating at different levels and with different rhythms and mental temperaments may clash in terms of their objectives and methods. To define the way in which such a third factor should operate and, even more, how human beings would be selected for its operation — is very difficult at this stage of our social evolution in the Western world. We are indeed deeply prejudiced against certain terms which seem necessary for such a defining. As I see it, there should be a group at the regional as well as the global level of organization who should embody the basic principle of harmonization of the opposites. To state this principle, however, is easy: how to work it out concretely and functionally is quite another matter.

There should be individuals who would stand for the wholeness of the whole (thus, for "Man,") in any situation of conflicts between the parts of the planetary whole, and especially as harmonizers of potential conflicts between regionalists and universalists. Because they would symbolize the wholeness of the whole they should have "authority," as I previously defined this term. One could of course say that they represent the Judiciary, but not in a strictly legal or Constitutional sense. Above all, their function would be far more pervasive than that of judges, for their presence would be felt wherever problems of human relationship within groups, and/or between groups, are occurring. They should not act as rulers passing judgments enforced by police, but as harmonizers and conciliators; and more exactly as a constant reminder to the groups that they are parts of a whole, Humanity, and that this whole is essentially present in every part.

If a group decides to fulfill a particular function within its regional whole — thus to some extent affecting the functional equilibrium of mankind — the "harmonizer" should watch the operation without intruding on it in any way if it proceeds constructively, but in a position allowing him to make his presence felt, as if it embodied the purpose of the operation in relation to the whole region. In a sense, this could be considered to mean a preventive concept of justice — somewhat as in old China a physician was paid for keeping his patient well, and not when the patient became ill.

It is, indeed, non-sensical and wastefully expensive for society to try to incarcerate persons who have committed crimes. What should be done in an organic or holarchic society is to deal with the causes of really criminal acts — actions which exteriorize inharmonic interpersonal or intergroup relationships in a destructive manner. Most of the time these causes are in evidence long before the criminal act is committed. When human beings live in relatively small and interpenetrating groups, such potential causes of discord or even of ineffectual work (which in turn may result in cheating or destructive acts) should soon be apparent to the other members of the group. The group should then try to act toward readjusting the disharmonic process; and if this involved special problems of more-than-personal scope, the harmonizer would be available to advise, and if necessary oversee, the implementation of the group decision in terms of this advice.

Theoretically at least, and except in probably fairly rare cases, there would be no need for an external police force. The group itself would pass judgment — which in such a setup would simply mean an evaluation of the disharmonic situation and a decision as to how it should best be remedied (i.e., harmonized) before it exteriorizes itself into a disintegrative type of activity. Nevertheless, an individual person feeling wronged or "excommunicated" would be able to appeal to harmonizers who could function as integrative courts of appeal if the need arose.

Problems affecting the relationship between the interests or desires of a region and the managerial decisions of the universalists in charge of inter-regional planning and global distribution would be worked out in the regional Assemblies; and there also the presence of harmonizers would be felt. Global planning would take place in a global Assembly in which representatives of the regions — or perhaps of intermediate continental units based on geomorphic characteristics — would meet with a group of universalists (global managers). There too harmonizers would be present and the decision would be the result of a constant interaction between the three functional levels of the society: regional, global and . . . yes, "spiritual"; for spirit is the principle of harmony in operation. It is the wholeness of the whole exerting its all-pervasive magnetic influence upon the entire field of activity of this whole.

The field of activity of mankind is the Earth — the whole Earth. But human activity should not be, as unfortunately the Bible claims (Genesis I), "to have dominion over" all living things as if he were an absolute God-appointed ruler. It is first of all, to extract consciousness from the immense variety of experiences which nature makes available to men, women and children in the different regions of the globe. A further functional task for mankind is to help nature in every region to undergo, perhaps more speedily, its own planetary evolution. "Help" obviously does not imply the destruction or poisoning of nature. Mankind should be able to fecundate the unconscious automatic processes of nature by the light of a consciousness able to recognize, evaluate and, if needed, harmonize the processes toward the goal of a quasi-alchemical transmutation of the very substance of the globe and of all that operates in, on and around it.

The tragedy inherent in Western civilization is that, instead of man relating himself to the Earth as a fecundant power in a conscious interplay of love, he has claimed viciously and with supreme arrogance the position of tyrannical master, using his proud and tense intellect to rape and tear open nature. The tragedy of our over-individualistic and intellect-and-technique-worshipping society is that it represents a perversion of the patriarchal ideal, which was meant originally to help humanity emerge from the matricial unconsciousness of the tribal state and individualize his consciousness. Pride, anger and lust for power over other men, women and nature developed as the dark shadow of the process of conscious individualization. And the result is our present chaotic and self-destroying society of sadistic men and emotionally rebellious women. Will the Earth-woman also rebel?