Readers: In the task of increasing economic literacy in its many variations the transformation of what is understood by the word "economics" and the assumptions that many people have whiche cause them to substitute a low toned version of economistic nonsense for the high toned economistic toxic sewage there is a common pattern. It is one reason for the chaotic nature of the Tea-bagger's faux revolt, looking for simple answers and someone else to blame for it all. It also produces the reflexive sorts of Marxism which have a lot of dogma but little sense of application or constructive process. It is also the source of the wishful thinking dominant within the marching band known as community currencies. Fraud more often occurs through supposed leadership and preserving the pay-offs that are provided through political loyalty.

In some ways this article is ancient, even pre-www, but it is jaw dropping to realize how little actual maturation has been accomplished in the declared zones of social/societal transformation. True, there are many oases where the local culture has flourished in a socializing fashion, and this offers the possibility that these examples can be reproduced elsewhere. Above all other factors the development of a socializing culture precedes the arrival of the white washed knights seeking to dominate the air time from the podium.

The implication in my opinion is that a form of progressive management desperately needs to be applied to organizations which presume to represents a more progressive and sustainable way of of being a community or of doing economics. Attempting to use corporatist organizational models to manage a context which is declared to be cooperative in nature ends up intentionally subversive in favor of command and control fantasies, to placate personal insecurities, and fraudulent in terms of intentionally not accomplishing the goals that are abused as window dressing to mask a reactionary process. admin

Published in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 23 No. 1, Winter 1983 7-15

Association for Humanistic Psychology [http://www.ahpweb.org]

MICHAEL MARIEN, after four interesting years in Berkeley during the early 1960s, returned "back East" to earn Ph.D. in interdisciplinary social science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (1970). He has monitored the writing of futurists, system theorists. and various other reformers and visionaries for the past 14 years. His self-published guidebook to this literature. Societal Directions and Alternatives (1976; out of print) led to the founding of FUTURE SURVEY. a monthly abstract journal of books and articles on trends, forecasts, and proposals-transformational and otherwise. FUTURE SURVEY and Future Survey Annual, which integrates abstracts from the monthly, have been published by the World Future Society since early 1979. In late 1979, the New World Alliance was initiated. and Michael has served as a member of the Governing Council since then, with special effort devoted to helping prepare the NWA Transformation Platform (1981), which he considers unique and promising, but very preliminary and incomplete. This essay adapted from a presentation at the Association for Humanistic Psychology Twentieth Annual Meeting in Washington (1982), is seen as an initial probe into the vast and vexing problem of why so little humane, transformational change actually takes place. [See footnotes for additional biographical notes- S.G.]

Summary

Belief that a social transformation is happening serves to keep it from happening. Behaviors associated with the sandbox of political impotency include: pronouncement of actual or imminent success, confusion of goals and results, an acritical stance, hubris, an incapacitating dialect, pseudo holism, egalitarian blinders. and self-centeredness. Upward growth to escape the Sandbox Syndrome is a necessary ingredient of any serious social change.

At the outset, I want to emphasize three beliefs that I share with many others:

- Peace, freedom, equality, justice, community, love, truth, health, beauty, frugality, self-reliance, and self-fulfillment--despite frequent conflicts with each other--are all worthy goals, and should be pursued for all people worldwide.

-The old paradigms or ways of thought are obsolete; new and broader paradigms offer more promise for the intelligent conduct of human affairs.

-Hyper-industrialized societies are in deep trouble, as are "developing" countries seeking to follow their example; major changes will be necessary if we are to survive in any dignified fashion.

Although a transformation in values, perceptions, and institutions is desirable. it is far from inevitable. Despite an urgent need, change in a humanly desirable direction may not be taking place at all or may be taking place at such a miniscule rate rate to be irrelevant. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the widespread belief in a transformation that is happening in fact keeps it from happening. We need reasonable hopes, of course. But making a religion out of social change--developing a body of unquestioned belief, derived from concern for the human condition and hope for a better world--only serves to deflect energies away from the hard work that must be done.

To illustrate, imagine that you are an agent of the FBI or CIA. You are called into the office of the Big Chief and informed that there may be a subversive movement afoot--some call it the Aquarian Conspiracy.1 It threatens the American way of life by seeking to disarm the U.S. and make peace with the Soviet Union. by redefining national security, by weakening the nation-state in favor of global peacekeeping. by weakening the global economy in favor of national and local self-reliance by slackening U.S. participation in world competition for high-technology leadership, by encouraging individuals to be more self-reliant and not to consume as much. by promoting environmentalism at the expense of commerce, and by decentralizing economic and political power through wider participation in corporate and community decision making. This is clearly subversive. Your mission is to stop it. What should an effective agent do?

Being wise in the ways of the world, you realize that the 1950s strategy of fighting the Red Menace will no longer work in the sophisticated 1980s. In our age of infoglut, why give valuable publicity to the Green Menace, when the movement, at least in the United States2, is largely invisible! Rather, you would exploit the widespread tendency of the movement, such as it is, to render itself politically impotent. You understand the dynamics of the sandbox: an. enclosed area where children safely play, while adults carry on, undisturbed, in their usual wicked ways. Two complementary forces promote this condition: Adults place children in the sandbox to get rid of them, and children volunteer to play there because it is fun.

To stop the potential subversion of America, all you have to do is go with the flow and promote the Sandbox Syndrome.3 It's easy. Here are some tips:

(1) Encourage Belief in Success. Promote the view that cosmic change is coming, or taking place. Similar to the fundamentalist Christians, who believe that Armageddon is about to take place, to be followed by a millennium for those who are saved, preach that the Transformation, or the Third Wave, is happening now--that we have reached the turning point, and that people are now seeing that we can't continue the old ways. Don't attempt to offer evidence for this change, other than a one-time 1977 Harris Poll based on leading questions,. or some fuzzily estimated data sanctified by association with Stanford Research International.5 Anything else would involve left-brain quantifying--an artifact of Consciousness II.6

(2) Confuse Goals and Results. It feels good, and it won't hurt anyone's feelings, to proclaim that we are working for peace, we are changing minds, we are healing. Perhaps we are; perhaps we aren't. The intention and the process are primary, and they are not the outcome. Any hint of a managerial, performance-oriented approach is fascistic.

(3) Don't Criticize. That's related to asking embarrassing questions about results. Just let it be. Being peaceful, loving, supportive, and cooperative means treating everyone equally and saying ill of no one. After all, everyone means well. Prickly questions are hostile and best ignored, or met with a hug.

(4) Add a Dose of Hubris. Stand on the leading edge, the crest of the Third Wave, amidst the New Age. You're superior to those unliberated, linear cluckheads out there. You know; they don't. Write a guidebook to networking or bartering, the magic processes of the alternative culture--but don't acknowledge the networks and barters used by the rest of the world. Your folkways, too, are superior: To enhance communication, invite Them to your saunas and hot tubs--don't even think of visiting their bridle trails and tennis courts, or, among the masses, their corner bars and bowling alleys.

(5) Promote Your Own Dialect. Tired of pedantic jargon? Create your own hip language. Turn nouns to verbs such as "peacing" and "futuring." Use adjectives such as "incredible" to describe every experience. Blows the mind, but who needs it? Use positive words such as "network," "caring," "holistic," "creativity," "synergy," "foresight," "cooperation," "transcendence," "win/win," "human scale," and "human values." Don't use negative words like "competition," "corporations," "communism," or "crime." Maybe they'll go away.

(6) Extol the Informal and the Nonacademic. Your intuition is a safe guide, as is the common sense of the people. Ignore the elitist academics, with their ponderous footnotes and interminable data. Accordingly, the academic journals and commercial publishers should also be dismissed, in favor of small book publishers and honest, alternative periodicals.

(7) Get the Holistic Picture. You can acquire instant wisdom by taking the general systems point of view, or viewing whole systems. When you have the Big Picture of humanity, nature, and society, you know it all, and there is no need to learn any more. A historical perspective isn't needed because these ideas are obviously new.

(8) Create Instant Equality. Forget the rich and the poor. The rich have great power, which is too much to contemplate. So don't. The poor can't meet their basic material needs, which is also a downer, best ignored. Preach that we all have enough and that more self-help is needed. Fits nicely into the antipoverty strategy of the Reagan administration.

(9) Be Self-Centered. You have the power of the New Age in your head; change your consciousness and you can change the world. We have met the enemy and he is us. The responsibility for health, for change, for peace, is within you.

All of the above--and more, no doubt, could be added-add up to the Sandbox Syndrome: a set of behaviors guaranteed to keep "an individual or an organization in a childish state of innocence, 7 content with building sand castles, instead of real-life structures. A good CIA agent would promote this simple-mindedness, rather than publicly fight the specter of the Green Menace.

But what if you read some books by Lester R. Brown, Willis Harman, Hazel Henderson, Ivan Illich, Amory Lovins, James Ogilvy, James Robertson, Theodore Roszak, Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Satin, E. F. Schumacher, Robert Theobald, William Irwin Thompson, Alvin Toffler, and others,8 causing you to believe the Green Message? What if you see the necessity of a sustainable, decentralized, human-needs-oriented society-the Jeffersonian vision of America as the real American way of life, rather than the Hamiltonian, corporate view? 9 With a flush of true patriotism, you decide to be a counteragent and to work for genuine eco-decentralism. What do you do? Here are some general tips:

(1) Grow Up. All of the above-mentioned positions are simplistic. An upward growth requires a broader, more subtle, and complex view:

(a) Develop a wide range of indicators that describe both successes and failures.

Two Paths to Transformation

Utopian/Puerile
(The prevailing Way of the Sandbox)
Pragmatic/Mature
(A possible pattern of the future)

I. Progress
The Sandbox:The Transformation is happening
The Pragmatic: Weigh both successes and failures

2. Results
The Sandbox: The Goals are Outcomes
The Pragmatic: Outcomes not necessarily in accord with goals

3. Supporters
The Sandbox: Be supportive and don't criticize,; all efforts are good; no sense of evil or excellence
The Pragmatic: Constructive criticism; back winners and drop losers; evil and failure are possible

4. Opponents
The Sandbox: Ignore or vilify any who disagree; you are superior
The Pragmatic: Seek to debate opponents and learn from them; invite hard questions

5. Language
The Sandbox: Create your own; ignore official definitions of reality
The Pragmatic: Use common language to communicate broadly; challenge ideas in power

6. Information
The Sandbox: Favor comfort, intuition and the non-academic
The Pragmatic: Seek the best in formal and non-formal, scholarly and popular

7. Truth
The Sandbox: Perfected wisdom through instant holism
The Pragmatic: Holism as a learning tool and unrealized ideal

8. Power
The Sandbox: Ignore it or accept the conventional patterns of authority
The Pragmatic: Acknowledge it--and its very unequal distribution

9. Se1f
The Sandbox: You are central; change self to change world
The Pragmatic: You interact with nature and society; there are many paths to change

(b) Don't confuse goals and results, but insist on measures of performance and on standards.

(c) Be constructively critical: Point to good work and how it can be improved--and also to work that is useful or damaging 10.

(d) Be humble: We all have much to learn in an age of ignorance. Identify your opponents and their arguments, and learn from them.11

(e) Use the English language correctly as a tool of thought, and to enable communication with those in need of hearing your message.

(f) Seek the best thought from both academics and nonacademics; use your intuition as one of many learning tools.
(g) Similarly, holism should also be used as a tool for learning, and recognized as an ideal to strive for ceaselessly both in apace and time.

(h) Recognize that inequities in wealth and income are increasing, that the poor need help to help themselves, and that even good help will not necessarily help.

(I) Understand that there are many sources of problems in both individuals and society, that the two are interactive, and that individuals are often not at all responsible for their problems.12

(2) Connect Some Disconnected Yins and Yangs. In advocating a Taoist framework for dealing with reality, Fritjof Capra notes that a dynamic balance between yin and yang is good, and imbalance is bad.13 Several balances are mentioned above (success and failure, academic and nonacademic, individual and society). Several additional pairings not to be found on Capra's list are also needed:

(a) Inspiration and Perspiration. Our spirits can benefit from the uplift of preaching and cheerleading. But exhortation toward the promised land is not enough: we must work very hard to bring it about.

(b) Realism and Idealism. We need idealists with a foot on the ground of reality, as well as realists who can keep some ideal in mind. Both, in dialogue with each other, should replace the great number of utopians with no sense of reality and "realists" with no appreciation of any ideal.

(c) Cooperation and Struggle. In our age of instant gratification by video and drugs, many think that social change should be instant, painless, and non-reversible. While seeking out opportunities for cooperation, a dialectical view of struggle is also needed. Indeed, those who ostensibly share your views may not necessarily be cooperative, and your greatest struggle may be with such "movement killers. "14

(d) Intellect and Spirit. In trying to escape from what is seen as too much rationality in modem society, an excuse is often provided for anti-intellectualism in the name of the neglected "right brain." We need a more rational rationality, not less rationality.

(e) Critics and Lovers. As pointed out by John W. Gardner. we should avoid the extremes of unloving critics and uncritical lovers.15 Another way to consider more productive behavior, to note the traits of Abraham Maslow's self-actualizing people, which include: fighting untruths, not needing to be loved by everyone, enjoying greater efficiency and being effective, looking at facts courageously, and avoiding illusions.16

(3) Get the New Age Act Together (to Some Degree). The pervasive condition that must be faced is the fact that we live in an age of infoglut. Another book, journal, conference, or newsletter about peace, healing, or environmentalism will not necessarily help people, and might simply add to the pervasive problem of information overload and fragmentation. The transformational message must be recognized as "the world crisis solution with a hundred names"-green revolution, human scale, person-centered society, human economy, conserver society, solar age, meta-industrial alternative, Gandhism, and so on. As long as this message is fractured into a hundred or so labelings. The Transformation, or whatever, will continue to be stillborn.

(4) ... and Take it on the Road. Talking to the converted is sufficient for a religious organization, although even religions seek converts. If we are serious about a genuine transformation of values and perceptions, the world must know that desirable and practical alternatives exist. Despite the great volume of New Age literature, "the world-crisis solution with a hundred names" still remains invisible to mainstream culture, or is readily dismissed as "small is beautiful" romanticism. New Age literature is seldom reviewed in mainstream periodicals. It seldom enters textbooks or political campaigns. The old ways of thinking are still very much in power:

(a) One-dimensional, flat-earth politics, restricting all possibilities to "the" left-right political spectrum of liberals and conservatives, still prevails in our political analysis.

(b) One-eyed economics, ignoring the informal or household economy, exiling advocates of different perspectives continues to define "the" economy.

(c) One-directional social evolution, involving more economic growth and a service society, continues to be the only definition of progress.17

(d) One-time education, assuming that an individual has completed learning upon leaving school or college, continues to inhibit adults from discovering ignorance and learning needs.

To improve on these paradigms in power, there must be widespread and genuine debate and discussion, rather than smug isolation and empty talk of paradigm change.

(5) Aim High and Don't Shoot Your Foot. There is a frequent tendency to underestimate the transformational task, while overestimating the progress that has been made. This is complicated by the use of images and ideas that are intellectually laudible but politically inept: for example, a "no-growth society," in contrast to the more attractive notion of a human-growth society. Western science is another illustration: rather than rejecting it, and creating an easy target for the charge of being antiscience, a better strategy would advocate a more scientific science--a superior world science that incorporates various scientific traditions.18

This advice is for the counteragent, who would seek to promote an actual transformation. But this task is difficult. For the agent, who embraces the Way of the Sandbox, follows the path of least resistance, the task is easy. Both the agent and the counteragent are at work. Who will win? Probably the agent, Still, the counteragent may prevail--the slender hope that prompts this essay. Whom do you want to win?

NOTES

1. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1980).
2. Green parties such Les Vertes. Die Grünen, and the UK Ecology Party are now established minor political parties in Europe. Despite characteristic disorganization, they are at or near the point of being wooed by the major parties.

3. The Sandbox Syndrome is not confined to New Age groups, but can be found in many minority political groups of both the Right, the Left. and "beyond Right and Left" (which New Age groups purport to be), as well as in established organizations. For purposes of this exploratory essay, Sandbox behaviors will be described only as they apply to "transformationalists."
4. Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity {New York: William Morrow. 1981), p. 128. An example of the leading questions asked: "By 66 percent to 22 percent, the public chooses 'breaking up big things and getting back to more humanized living' over 'developing bigger and more efficient ways of doing things'"
5. Ibid., p.132. Based on work with Arnold Mitchell at SRI, Elgin estimates that, in 1980, roughly 6% of the U.S. adult population is "wholeheartedly exploring a life of voluntary simplicity," and that such a lifestyle" could well grow to be the dominant orientation for as much as a majority of the adult population of many Western developed nations by the year 2000." No justification is given for this exuberant extrapolation. Although the SRI data have been frequently and acritically cited by many New Age writers, they are not based on a rigorous survey, but on "beat guesses based upon our immersion in all of the relevant data that we could find" (Elgin letter to Marien, September 7, 1979).
6. For historical buffs, Consciousness II is the establishment mindset as characterized in a 1970 best seller by Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House). Ferguson's Aquarian Conspiracy might be usefully compared as a 1988 version of Reich's book.
7. Rollo May, Power and Innocence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). May describes innocence as the virtue of not having power--a way to confront one's powerlessness by making it a seeming virtue. He distinguishes between the authentic innocence of childlike attitudes and the childishness of pseudo-innocence, often associated with utopianism and the urge to make things simple and easy.
8. Abstracts of recent books and articles by most of these writers are available in Future Survey Annual 1980-1981, ed., Michael Marien (Bethesda, MD: World Future Society, 1982). Note especially the section on Decentralization/Eco-Humanism, pp. 109-117.
9. This argument, still applicable today, is made in detail by Herbert Agar, Land of the Free (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), who posses a choice between the true American Culture of self-government, equality, freedom, and humanity, and a debased form of the Civilization of the West (finance capitalism and ownership by the few).
10. May, Power and Innocence, p. 110, eloquently states that "our narcissism is forever crying out against the wounds of those who would criticize us or point out our weak spots. We forget that the critic can be doing us a considerable favor."
11. Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. 1970), p. 327. Developmental radicals, in contrast to dogmatic radicals, need the insights of all their political opponents (p. 329). Also see May, Power and Innocence, pp. 109-110, who points to the necessity of opponents for all important truths.
12. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Pantheon, 1971), argues that the ideology of victim-blaming is a primary barrier to effective social change. Also lee Dana Ullman. "Responsibility and Holistic Health." Holistic Health News (Berkeley Holistic Health Center), Spring 1980. Ullman has pointed out that "blaming the victim" (including self-blame) is another important characteristic of the Sandbox Syndrome (Ullman letter to Marien, July 30, 1982).
13. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 36.
14. Byron Kennard, Nothing Can Be Done, Everything Is Possible (Andover, MA: Brick House Publishing, 1982). p. 83.

End of Michael Marien's Original Article