wCHAP.3b

(9/6/98)

CHAPTER III. B.

WALTER LIPPMANN AND THE GOOD SOCIETY

As indicated at the beginning of Chapter III there are few sources of ideas about the Good Society among modern writers. However, as indicated in Section A one exception is Walter Lippmann's THE GOOD SOCIETY[1] discussed here, and John Kenneth Galbraiths book of the same title analyzed in Section C. Some of Walter Lippmann's ideas that are of special significance to a Science of Religion are considered below. Lippmann makes a valiant effort to point western society in the right direction. However, though he provides some important ideas to broaden our foundation, his attempt turns out to be grossly inadequate. He speaks against expecting governments to make all the decisions, but he provides no adequate alternatives. He continues the tradition of four hundred years of western thought which fails to see that a modern religion for the modern world is necessary and that this religion must play a pivotal role in moving society in the right direction. He equates the Good Society with material abundance and sees no goals beyond this. A prime idea of the book is to refocus liberalism in a more satisfactory direction and to point out the errors of collectivism; i.e., socialism, fascism, big business, etc.

On page 174 he says, "The first principle of liberalism...is that the market must be preserved and perfected as the prime regulator of the division of labor....The liberal philosophy is based on the conviction that, except in emergencies and for military purposes, the division of labor cannot be regulated successfully by coercive authority, whether it be public or private...the true line of progress is not to impair or abolish the market, but to maintain and improve it."

RESPONSE: Since the market place is merely the arena in which goods and services are exchanged to eliminate it would be counter productive. Also, it would be well for any who would regulate the market place to recognize the limitations of their knowledge, ability, and talents to plan. It certainly seems to be true that there is no room in the market place or a Wise Community in general for coercive authority. However, Lippmann points out clearly that there is nothing sacred about the market place. To regulate, control, guide, influence it is not a violation of some sacred duty, or obligation. He makes clear that it is an error to think that the market place must be totally left to its own devices. Goods and services are for the improvement of the quality of human life, nothing more, nor less. And it is toward such a vision that A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CIVILIZATION is aimed.

Human life is not about producing every product as cheaply as possible. If doing so destroys our environment and/or produces a condition of poverty and pain for the workers then some deeper principle is being violated. The cost of goods or services must reflect the values of the community. For a Wise Community made up of Wise Persons the goal is a SFLIHM (Sustainable Feeling that one's LIfe Has Meaning) for each person. Unless this value is reflected in costs then the market place is mis-focused. If persons are cut off from achieving a SFLIHM so that a product can be cheaper that is not a step forward.

p. 194: "The claims of the spirit were other-worldly. So it was not until the industrial revolution had altered the traditional mode of life that the vista was opened...[so that] people could see the possibility of the Good Society on this earth. At long last the ancient schism between the world and the spirit, between self-interest and disinterestedness, was potentially closed, and a wholly new orientation of the human race became theoretically conceivable and, in fact, necessary."

"It is the unfinished mission of liberalism to discover the guiding principles by which this revolutionary readaptation of humankind can proceed."

RESPONSE: And it is toward such a vision that A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CIVILIZATION is aimed.

P. 204: "But they [liberals] have been unable to carry forward their science; they have not wrested from it a social philosophy which is humanly satisfactory. The collectivists, on the other hand, have the zest for progress, the sympathy for the poor, the burning sense of wrong, the impulse for great deeds, which have been lacking in latter-day liberalism. But their science is founded on a profound misunderstanding of the economy at the foundation of modern society, and their actions, therefore, are deeply destructive and reactionary."

P. 206: "The really inexorable law of modern society is the law of the industrial revolution, that nations must practice the division of labor in wide markets or sink into squalor and servitude."

RESPONSE: If a new foundation for civilization is in fact established based on a Science of Religion with a better understanding of science, then all people will be able to rejoice since they will then be able to achieve their full humanity.

P. 214: "The good life finds little encouragement where people do not feel themselves to be links in a chain from the past into the future, where they live from day to day without deep associations and long memories and more than personal hopes."

RESPONSE: However, those long memories and deep associations must be tempered by the memories and associations with all other persons, the knowledge that is now available, and a clear vision that grows out of total congruency.

P. 220/221: "Monetary reform, and what is now called monetary management, are...necessary."

"...the person with the least bargaining power is the person who has only their labor to sell. If they do not work today, the product of that day's work is totally lost forever....In some [markets] the price comes close to expressing the true equilibrium of supply and demand; in others the price represents little more than the ignorance and helplessness of one party confronted by the informed resourcefulness of the other."

"Obviously, it is the duty of a liberal society to see that its markets are efficient and honest. But under the laissez-faire delusion it was supposed that good markets would somehow organize themselves or, at any rate, that the markets are as good as they might be. That is not true. The improvement of the markets must be a subject of continual study in a liberal society."

P. 222: "...it becomes necessary to make the seller liable for an untruthful presentation of their wares, to make it unlawful to sell harmful products, to stipulate that only goods of the same quality shall bear the same label...."

P. 223: "There is no reason whatever why some part of the wealth produced should not be taken by taxation and used to insure and indemnify human beings against their personal losses in the progress of industry."

RESPONSE: The issue of empowering individuals to control their own productivity is tackled in Chapter XV. It is a vital issue for the Wise Community and it must be successfully solved. The other matters raised above are important and must also be successfully addressed.

P. 226: "The reformers of liberalism must aim...at correcting the conditions under which...unearned incomes arise [from monopoly, exclusive rights in land and natural resources, bad markets in which the ignorant and the helpless are at a disadvantage]. Now the correction of the conditions involves...large social expenditures on eugenics and on education; the conservation of the people's patrimony in the land and natural resources; the development of the people's estate through public works which reclaim land, control floods and droughts, improve rivers and harbors and highways, develop water power, and establish the necessary facilities for transporting and exchanging goods and services; providing the organization of markets by information, inspection, and other services; insurance and indemnification against the risks and losses of technological and economic change... recreation...."

RESPONSE: Well said! Of course a Science of Religion must lead to solving the above issues or it will be a lot less relevant than what I'm promoting.

P. 232: "...[The] end...is to equalize very considerably the distribution of income. This is greatly to be desired. Since the time of Aristotle it has been recognized by the wise that extremes of riches and poverty, that spectacular differentials of income, are dangerous and pernicious in any society. The enlargement of the middle class as against the poor and the rich must, therefore, be sought by anyone who wishes a society to live soundly and endure long. For the great inequalities do not represent the true inequalities in people's native endowment, or in their characters and their diligence; thus the inequalities obscure and distort the whole moral conception of income as the reward of useful work, of poverty as the punishment for laziness and imprudence....the maldistribution of income causes capital to accumulate excessively in the presence of destitution and want...which makes the whole economy appear irrational and unjust."

RESPONSE: And makes it impossible for all persons to achieve a SFLIHM, including those with extreme riches. In the absence of clear goals widely accepted in society the above point can easily get lost as it has today.

P. 232/233: "These agenda are not to be taken as a definitive and comprehensive outline of liberal social reform. If, as I am arguing, it is the mission of liberalism to discern the guiding principles of the transition from the primitive way of life in relatively self-contained communities to a way of life in a Great Society of interdependent specialists, then liberalism is concerned with nothing less than a readaptation of the human race to a new mode of existence."

"That this is no small enterprise we know from the experience of the Romans, who established, but could not maintain, a Great Society on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. For nearly a thousand years after the decline and fall of that Great Society, western society followed once more a self-contained bellicose way of life. Then the enterprise of living in an exchange economy was resumed, and, as a matter of course, people became interested once more in the classical philosophy which had reflected the needs and guided the policy of the people in the Great Society of the ancient world. This was the renascence of a highly civilized way of life after the long reaction to the primitive way of life in the Dark Ages."

RESPONSE: As I've stated elsewhere, it is my position, that all of human history has been a preparation to take the step we now can see dimly in the mist -- a SFLIHM. The Greeks played a key role by laying the foundation for the scientific method. Each culture has made its contribution, some by helping point out the path, others by exploring paths which are to be avoided. But no society before ours was prepared to step into a new world where we truly can cause a "readaptation of the human race to a new mode of existence." Chapter XV, and Chapter One of VOLUME I deals with this issue more directly.

P. 236/237: "It is in order to fit individuals for their new way of life that the liberal would spend large sums of public money on education. This does not mean only the training of versatile specialists, though that is necessary. It means also that the whole population must be provided with the cultural equipment that people must have if they are to live effectively, and at ease with themselves, in an interdependent Great Society....the method by which liberalism controls the economy is to police the markets, to provide in the broadest sense honest weights and measures, to make the bargains represent the exchange of true equivalents rather than the victory of superior strength, inside information, legal privileges, conspiracies, secret combinations, corruption, and legalized sharp practices."

RESPONSE: When Lippmann says, "that the whole population must be provided with the cultural equipment that people must have if they are to live effectively, and at ease with themselves, in an interdependent Great Society" my mind goes to a SFLIHM. His goes to the economy. I would say the foregoing captures the differences between his vision and mine.

P. 237: "The purpose of liberal reform is to accommodate the social order to the new economy; that end can be achieved only by continual and far-reaching reform of the social order."

RESPONSE: True. But that social reform is just the point of a Science of Religion. And everything included here seems essential to achieving the proper reform and as soon as possible.

P. 238: "In our time the liberal philosophy is engaged in a struggle to survive and to be reborn, and in this struggle its own failings are the chief strength of its opponents. Liberalism is the normal philosophy of people who live in a Great Society."

P. 244: "By placing legal rights on a Superhuman foundation (Laws of Nature and of Nature's God), the inquiry into the justice, the suitability, and the social convenience of laws was inhibited....The [society] met the new need by improvisations, and reconciled the new laws with the unalterable law by employing an elaborate legal casuistry."

"Only by recognizing that legal rights are declared and enforced by the state is it possible to make a rational examination of the value of any particular right."

RESPONSE: I agree. As discussed in Chapter XXII a Wise Community must use law in a very different way from what is done today. Because current society has misunderstood the goals and responsibility of religion they have attempted to accomplish everything through law, courts, judges, jails, etc.

P. 251: "One of the hallmarks of genius, someone has said, is the faculty for asking the right questions."

RESPONSE: For a Science of Religion to work it must ask the right questions. I believe mostly that has been done in A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CIVILIZATION. However, only time will tell if that is a correct assessment or not.

P. 252: "Without civil organization the people are at one time a helpless crowd, at another a horde trampling all before them; then they are mobs which destroy each other; then isolated individuals, each person against all the others in a life that is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'; until again, in the cycle of their impotent violence, they become a horde led by a master of the crowd."

RESPONSE: Well said! My focus is totally on how can we develop and utilize organizations to help each human being become all of which they are capable.

P. 253: "Their [the authors of the Constitution] problem was how to organize the indubitable and inalienable power of the mass in order that it might achieve its own best interests."

RESPONSE: And this is the primary challenge of a Wise Community.

P. 277: "It is no exaggeration to say that without the corporate device modern capitalism could not have been evolved."

P. 315: "...American publicists like Mr. Soule in A PLANNED SOCIETY, Mr. Chase in THE ECONOMY OF ABUNDANCE, Mr. Beard in THE OPEN DOOR AT HOME, though they are confirmed pacifists, look back upon the American war economy of 1917-1918 as at least a tentative sketch of a rationally ordered society."

P. 316: "From the observation that a firmer social control is necessary, they [collectivists] are led on to the conclusion that small states and local communities cannot exercise that control, and that a high degree of centralized authority is desirable, or, at least, is unavoidable."

P. 332: "The idea of arbitrary power exercised at the willful discretion of any person is alien to the very conception of a civilized society."

RESPONSE: Well! I guess that disqualifies any current society as being civilized. In any private business, in government, in every religion, in almost every home we see arbitrary power exercised without discretion. Overcoming such a massive distortion of human needs and concerns is a challenge a Science of Religion must confront and master if it is to succeed. Certainly a Wise Community cannot include such abuses and must have multiple fail-safe mechanisms to ensure such does not exist anywhere in the Community.

P. 333: "The dim apprehension that there must be a law higher than the arbitrary will of any individual has driven civilized persons forward seeking to tame the barbarian that is in us all, and by usages, laws, and institutions to achieve what Plato called the victory of persuasion over force."

RESPONSE: And it is toward this deeper insight that A NEW FOUNDATIN FOR CIVILIZATION is aimed. If it is even half right, a long step in the right direction is being made.

P. 337: "If, as we were taught by so many thinkers of the nineteenth century, the belief in a higher law is a mixture of sentimentality, supervision, and unconscious rationalization of private interest, then the state of affairs into which we have sunk is the only possible one. We must give up the hope of an ordered civilization on this planet and resign ourselves to an interminable struggle for existence in a war of all against all....We are not so full of wisdom, and so comfortably masters of our fate, that we can afford summarily to reject the underlying conception upon which so many sages and saints and heroic leaders have based their hope of a happily ordered existence."

P. 438: "...the persistent search by the noblest individuals of our civilization for a higher law which would bind and overcome the arbitrariness of their lords and masters, of mobs at home and barbarians abroad, and the vagrant willfulness of their own spirits, is too impressive to be lightly disregarded."

RESPONSE: It is my fervid belief that enlightened persons have lost their way over the past 50-100 years and been distracted by their mistakes in not understanding the nature of their search and the tools by which that search could be guided toward success. The good life on this earth for each person is as close as we can get to the highest law. This is the goal of a Science of Religion.

P. 343: "...the logic of liberalism calls for the restraint of material power by immaterial powers, and, therefore, for the inordinately difficult conquest of the individual's lower nature by their higher nature."

RESPONSE: And that is what it means to be a Wise Person, someone who has overcome their "tribal" propensities through development of their "Wisdom" potential because of their involvement in a Wise Community.

P. 346: "The denial that individuals may be arbitrary in human transactions is the higher law."

RESPONSE: I would say that the higher law is more accurately stated in the idea that we must not act so as to prevent another from achieving a SFLIHM either by action, or failure to act.

P. 346: "The laws depend upon moral commitments which could never possibly be expressly stated in the laws themselves...."

P. 347: "To those who ask where this higher law is to be found, the answer is that it is a progressive discovery of persons striving to civilize themselves, and that its scope and implications are a gradual revelation that is by no means completed."

RESPONSE: And a Science of Religion would work in such a way as to constantly expand and broaden this revelation.

P. 352: "The ideal of a society in which all are equally free of all arbitrary coercion is a receding goal. From each new plateau in the ascent higher levels become visible."

P. 358: "...the ideal of equal rights for all and special privileges for none is inseparable from the pursuit of liberty. A free society is one in which inequalities in the condition of citizens, in their rewards, and in their social status do not arise out of extrinsic and artificial causes -- out of the physical power to coerce, out of legal privileges, out of special prerogative, or out of fraud, sharp practice, necessitous bargaining."

P. 361: "It is no accident that it was the Athenian, living by commerce, rather than the Spartans living by exploitation and war, who conceived the good life...."

RESPONSE: And I suppose it should be no surprise that almost all thinking about the good life in the past one thousand years has been totally misfocused since it was done in societies where all thinking was distorted by supernatural thinking that assumed the gross imperfection, and imperfectability of all persons and any good life existing only after life ended.

P. 362: "The hankering for schemes and systems and comprehensive organization is the wistfulness of an immature philosophy which has not come to terms with reality...."

"For the greater the society, the higher and more variable the standards of life, the more diversified the energies of its people for invention, enterprise, and adaptation, the more certain it is that the social order cannot be planned ex cathedra or governed by administrative command....the only feasible goal which statespersons can set themselves in governing it, is to reconcile the conflicts which spring from this diversity. They cannot hope to comprehend it as a system. For it is not a system. They cannot hope to plan and direct. For it is not an organization...."

P. 363: "It requires much virtue to do that well...."

"But these are human virtues; though they are within the attainable limits of human nature as we know it. They actually exist. Individuals do have these virtues....We know that they can be increased. When we talk about them we are talking about virtues that have affected the course of actual history, about virtues that some people have practiced more than others, and no one sufficiently, but enough people in great enough degree to have given humankind here and there and for varying periods of time the intimations of a Good Society."

RESPONSE: Ah! Defining reality is certainly tempting. Lippmann has succumbed to that temptation. But has he achieved it? He is skeptical of schemes and systems and comprehensive organization. Certainly he is justified in his skepticism. But when he goes from explication to characterization, I would say he exceeded the limitations of his abilities.

I believe the idea of a Science of Religion is the essence of coming to terms with reality. If this turns out to be the case it will demonstrate Lippmann's error and be just one more example of the danger of attempting to impose a rigid view of reality onto eternity.

Planning and commanding are very different things and both can be done in varying ways. It is critical that goals be stated in ways that make them achievable and correctable when they are found to be in error. However, it is clear that we all need help to become our best self and in the process will give help to others.

I think statespersons working for a Wise Community made up of Wise Persons can have a higher goal than reconciling conflicts. They will in fact be working with a system. Better yet they will be working with an organization. As long as they limit their planning and directing to the proper areas, they can do so very effectively.

P. 364: "...no one must look to liberalism for a harmonious scheme of social reconstruction. The Good Society has no architectural design. There are no blueprints. There is no mold in which human life is to be shaped."

RESPONSE: On this point Lippmann and I are in fundamental disagreement. A Science of Religion would provide an architectural design for a Wise Community. But since it is empirical in nature schemes for social reconstruction cannot move too far beyond the available data.

P. 365: "To design a personal plan for a new society is a pleasant form of madness; it is in imagination to play at being God and Caesar to the human race....all such general plans of social reconstruction are merely the rationalization of the will to power. For that reason they are the subjective beginnings of fanaticism and tyranny....To think in terms of a new scheme for a whole society is to use the idiom of authority....To think in terms of...authority...that social relations can be fabricated according to a master plan drawn up by a supreme architect."

"The supreme architect, who begins as a visionary, becomes a fanatic, and ends as a despot."

P. 366: "Thus in Plato's great scheme each person was assigned their station and their duties; any architectural plan is necessarily based on the same presumptions. But Plato's scheme worked only in Plato's imagination, never in the real world. No such scheme can ever work in the real world.... To formulate such plans is not to design a society for real people. It is to re-create people to fit the design."

"That is why the testament of liberty does not contain the project of a new social order."

RESPONSE: Well! There it is. Lippmann has thrown down the gauntlet. He has stated clearly and well the position of western thinkers for the last 400 years. Because they have lived in an authoritarian society they can't imagine that there is any answer that lacks the authoritarian element. Certainly these things are not irrelevant. Ten thousand years of human history cannot be shrugged off as if they can be overcome by a little learning.

Charges of madness, "playing God," rationalizing the will to power, fanaticism, tyranny, despot are not easy to disprove. But to me that is the challenge. Could we actually develop a structure that would help persons work through these character flaws and become Wise Persons? The proof is in the doing, or the not-doing. We have been immobilized by centuries of statements such as Lippmann repeats.

Are there any wise persons who truly believe that their best self can only exist when surrounded by other best selfs? Are there real persons willing and able to do the hard work necessary to establish and sustain a Wisdom Group to start a revolution, not with guns, and force, and authority, but with knowledge, with love, with hope, with commitment to admit their deficiencies and work to overcome them -- to become their best self. This is the only valid answer to Lippmann's challenge. If none rise to the occasion then the future of humanity lies in some other direction. Certainly, not in the one I am presenting.

Obviously, we can never know how the creations of our mind will work in the real world. It is easy to believe that things can't get any better than they are. This message has been drilled into our heads for a long time. It takes no imagination to re-package it and polish some of the phrases and pass it on to a believing public. Is the species Homo sapiens better than that? It will take those willing to accept a new paradigm to find out.

P. 367: "Thus it is true that the liberal state is not to be conceived as an earthly providence administering civilization....To the liberal mind the notion that individuals can authoritatively plan and impose a good life upon a great society is ignorant, impertinent, and pretentious."

"The liberal state is to be conceived as the protector of equal rights by dispensing justice among individuals. It seeks to protect individuals against arbitrariness, not arbitrarily to direct them."

"...the record shows that it is beyond the understanding of human beings to know all human needs, to appreciate all human possibilities, to imagine all human ends, to shape all human relations."

RESPONSE: Certainly "impose" and "good life" do not go together. But is it possible to develop resources to help determine what the good life is and to achieve it? Is that truly beyond the vision of a liberal state or a liberal person? Must we know all human needs in order to study them and broaden our understanding of them and how to achieve them? Must we be able to appreciate all positive human possibilities in order to develop ways to help more and more people achieve more and more of their positive possibilities? Must we be able to imagine all human ends in order to learn how to help persons differentiate between those ends that will destroy their lives and those that will lead them to ever greater achievements?

Because we are ignorant of all the ways to shape and direct every human relationship does that mean we cannot learn from others about the differences between better and worse ways to establish and maintain relationships? Isn't the primary lesson of science and living in general that we can learn? That we can pass on our knowledge and understanding to others and help them live a better life as a result? Can't anyone be better than they are? Won't that better also be better for everyone else?

P. 368: "Liberalism commits the destiny of civilization, not to a few finite politicians here and there, but to the whole genius of humanity."

RESPONSE: True. But how can we actually achieve this? That is the answer for which A NEW FOUNDATION FOR CIVILIZATION searches. It may be naive. It may be poorly focused. It may be striving for the impossible. But if we only have one life, isn't it better spent on the greatest idea we can imagine even if it turns out to be wrong, than directed at the trite, mundane, and/or titillating?

P. 372: "They [the great individuals of the past] had known how to orient their spirits, gather together their faculties, and challenge the turbulence and tyranny of their times. Might it not be that they had possessed an insight which we have lost, and that, if we are to be worthy of our inheritance from them, we must recollect and repossess and reanimate their ancient and half-forgotten faith?....I began to ask myself whether perhaps in reasoning about the problems of our time we had lost vital contact with self-evident truths which have the capacity to infuse the longing to be civilized with universal and inexhaustible energy."

RESPONSE: Just so! A NEW FOUNDATIN FOR CIVILIZATION has for me that dimension of faith and commitment. My hope is that there are others out there who resonate at the same frequency.

P. 375: "It is just here, I submit, that the ultimate issue is joined, on the question whether individuals shall be treated as inviolable persons or as things to be disposed of; it is here that the struggle between barbarism and civilization, between despotism and liberty, has always been fought."

P. 376: "The recognition that all individuals are persons, and are not to be treated as things, has arisen slowly in the consciousness of humanity....in that long ascent there is a great divide which is reached when people discover, declare, and acknowledge, however much they may deny it in practice, that there is a Golden Rule which is the ultimate and universal criterion of human conduct. For then, and then only, is there a standard to which all can repair who seek to transform the incessant and indecisive struggle for domination and survival into the security of the Good Society."

RESPONSE: I am in profound agreement. That is one of my key principles that the individual person is the only worthy focus for ultimate concern.

P. 378: "...in the recognition that there is in each person a final essence -- that is to say, an immortal soul -- which only God can judge, a limit was set upon the dominion of individual over individual."

"Upon this rock they have built the rude foundations of the Good Society."

RESPONSE: I would hope ways can be found to achieve a Wise Community without relying on fantasy. It is my belief that talk of God and immortal souls does in fact form the links in the chain that binds many individuals to the will of others. Such an approach delays achieving personal power and does not lead to achieving it.

P. 378/379: "The great reaction in the latter part of the nineteenth century was ushered in by persons who had little use for the traditional ideas in which the inviolable essence of the human personality was affirmed. Their intentions were, of course, excellent, and they imagined that they were attacking only superstition, bigotry, and obscurantism. But in their battle with the theologians and the clerics their zeal outran their insights. They brought down the humanist ideal in the crash of the supernatural order; and from it humanity, who had fancied themself a little less than the angels, emerged as much less than a human being. The iconoclasts were too smart to be wise, too rational to be reasonable, too much enchanted with an immature science to hold fast to tested truths. They could not find the human soul when they dissected their cadavers; they could not measure the inalienable essence. So in the high realms of the intelligence there prevailed a radical disrespect for human beings, and the human ideas of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity were relegated to the limbo of old superstitions along with God, the soul, and the moral law. What could a mere physico-chemical system or a bundle of conditioned reflexes have to do with such glamorous nonsense?"

"In the fury to explain people rationally there was explained away their essence, which is their personhood."

RESPONSE: Regardless of whatever mistakes have been made as we moved beyond the symbols of the past, for me the answer does not lie in going back to them. God, soul, angels, and the Devil are dead. Moral law is open to consideration. Whether the excesses of the past are due to failure to be inspired by "physico-chemical" systems or bundles of conditioned reflexes or a lack of imagination about the possibilities of human life and society is open to question. I put my faith, my energy, my commitment in the future.

The individual human being is the only worthy focus for ultimate concern. Those who understand the challenge must join together and develop the tools and resources to make a difference, to make things better not only for today, but for tomorrow.

P. 382: "Collectivist regimes are always profoundly irreligious. For religious experience entails the recognition of an inviolable essence in human beings; it cultivates a self-respect and a self-reliance, which tend at some point to resist the total subjection of the individual to any earthly power....For in their faith they are vindicated as immortal souls, and from this enhancement of their dignity they find the reason why they must offer a perpetual challenge to the dominion of individual over individual."

RESPONSE: B.S.! Fundamentalist religions of whatever stripe diminish the human potential of those involved and those they attack. The only worthy goal is a religion congruent with all human history which inspires and joins all people together in love, providing the help needed to achieve a SFLIHM.

P. 386: "Of the rationalizations of tyranny the subtlest is that which teaches the individual that they are a cog in a corporate machine or a cell in a collective organism."

RESPONSE: Definitely. And the challenge is to build structures to help each person achieve their personal power, their personhood as a vital, creative part of a Wise Community.

P. 388/389: "...human beings, however low and abject, are potentially persons....[Personality's] essence is an energy, however we choose to describe it, which causes individuals to assert their humanity, and on occasion to die rather than renounce it....It is this energy which has moved people to rise above themselves, to feel a divine discontent with their condition, to invent, to labor, to reason with one another, to imagine the good life and desire it."

"...the will to be free is perpetually renewed in every individual who uses their faculties and affirms their humanity."

RESPONSE: And the challenge of those who would build a Wise Community is to help more and more persons enter into their higher self and thereby extend a hand to others to help them in their growth.