1971

CHANGING OURSELVES

      Section 1
   What Politics Has Been
  Last year we drew a clear distinction
between rebellion and revolution. A
revolution does not just deal with past
injustices. A revolution must involve a new
stage in the evolution of mankind, the
creation of a "new man." If, for example,
you spend the rest of your life worrying
about what happened to blacks during
slavery, you will never be able to make the
leap into the future which a revolution ,
demands. Particularly today in the U.S.A. a
revolution is not just a struggle between the
rich and the poor, between the haves and
the have-nets. A revolution must deal with
the contradictions within man himself. We
cannot look at a revolution inside an
advanced country like the U.S.A. within the
confines of "class struggle." A revolution
within the U.S.A. involves a struggle
between people with different sets of
values, and decisions within people to live

17      picture

I8      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

by one set of values rather than another. What are the new values,
the new standards by which people should live today, in this
epoch! A revolutionist has to take responsibility for developing a
new vision of man and for projecting this new vision of man. The
creation of a "new man" is a process; we can't expect the "new
man" to blossom suddenly one morning; we can't look at
revolution with a D-Day mentality.
  In all these ways we have broken completely with what has
become Marxist dogma. It was only after many years of practical
and theoretical struggles that we acquired the courage necessary
to reassert the distinctive character of human beings--not only to
work but to have thoughts (to be had by thoughts), to make
choices, and to live purposefully. We have yet to explore all this in
terms of its full political significance, but it is important to see that
we were able to arrive even at this stage only through 1) struggles
within and between ourselves and 2) participation in and
reflection upon the historical developments of the sixties.
Without this we would not be able to recognize how we were
previously controlled, dominated, possessed by another way of
thinking--a way which conceives of revolution in terms of
necessity rather than choice, in terms of material wants rather
than purposeful actions, and in terms of victims and villains rather
than in terms of human purpose and the creation of a "new man."
  It was hard to break away from the old way of thinking
because it governed our actions and participation in the Move-
ment; and because it is the way of thinking that prevails in our
society today:
  1. among the various liberation groups and the constitu-
encies with which they identify;
  2. among sociologists, liberals and Marxist radicals whose
minds are still in the nineteenth century, who are motivated
chiefly by guilt for their own privileges and by sympathy for the
masses as victims, and who look to the spontaneous rebellions of
these victims to make "the revolution" out of their grievances;
  3. among defenders of the status quo who only see revolu-
tion as a threat coming from those whom they have victimized
  It is not easy to break away from the way of thinking
characteristic of all these groups--or, having made the break, to
keep from slipping back into that way of thinking.

The Challenge We Now Face
  On the one hand, we have to grapple with philosophical con-
cepts. to explore the philological question to what it meant to

            Changing Ourselves        19

     ideas and to be possessed by ideas, to understand in what
   possess
   sense they are not something you possess externally like clothes
   or things that you can buy over the counter. On the other hand,
   we have to explore the political relevance of this new way of
   thinking, i.e., what it means to an American revolution.
     Last year we dealt philosophically with the nature of man. We
   talked about necessity and choice. We used terms like "responsi-
   bility," "purpose"--all of which are very general. We have to
   become more clear about what we think philosophically, but we
   should also start to explore the relation of these philosophical
   concepts to the historical process by which those various elements
   within the population who are rejecting the present society can
   begin to create a new society.
     In the United States today most of the liberationist groups are
   separatist in their thinking-centrifugally-minded. Is it possible to
   pose the question of the American revolution as the creation of a
   "new nation" or rather of a new national unity on the basis both of
   repudiating the present and of recognizing and building on what
   has been achieved in the way of human knowledge, experience
   and power over the centuries--rather than to return to a new
   Golden Age or some form of primitivism? (We have to be careful
   not to use the word "nation" so freely: Today people talk about
   "Black Nation," "Woodstock Nation" without any sense of what is
   historically necessary to the creation of a nation.)
     Can we inspire and challenge those millions of Americans
   who have rejected the present society on the basis of its injustices,
   its inequities, with a vision, a perspective that is centripetal, i.e.,
   that poses a common goal for all the diverse groups, that projects a
   vision of a new unity that will embody and encourage their
   diversities 7

   What Is Politics?

     What does it mean, for example, when former Chief Justice
   Warren says, as he did recently at the Fifth International World
   Peace Through Law Conference in Yugoslavia, that "we have
   grown up in the comfortable sense that politics is the art of the
   possible. Few of us have faced the fact that science has trans-
   formed politics into the art of the indispensable."
  Everyone uses the term "politics" as if he or she knows what it
means, but maybe what we need today is an entirely new notion of
politics. It would appear that politics includes much more today
than it has ever included before. If you decide that you don't want
nuclear Power plants, for example, that is politics.

20      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

  Most people think of politics as a "thing." Perhaps the first
thing to understand is that politics is a process, a method of social
action and decision-making that involves the organization of
society and of the institutions responsible for the organization of
society.
  First we have to review what politics has been; then find out
what it can be. We do not have to be governed by what politics has
been; rather we should explore what it should be in order to
accomplish what it must accomplish--without at the same time
being in a rush to arrive at the last word in the definition of
politics.
  If we are going to talk about a new revolution, we have to talk
about a new man. The concept of a new man requires not only new
concepts of the relationships between people but new concepts of
relationships between government and people. These new rela-
tionships have to spring not from institutions but from new
attitudes in people themselves. New institutions cannot be cre-
ated without new concepts; only human beings can create new
concepts.

Economics and Politics

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western political
economists drew a sharp distinction between economics (civil
society) and politics (the super-structure) and claimed that the
latter should be subordinated to the former. Thus the physiocrats
and Adam Smith fought for freedom of trade and laissez-faire for
the bourgeoisie versus the intervention of the State as the best
way to achieve the harmonious development of society. Marx's
nineteenth century vision of the "withering away of the state" and
of Communism as a new form of civil society in which each
receives "according to his needs" and gives "according to his
abilities" was in the anti-political tradition of the eighteenth
century.
  On the other hand, when we think of politics today, we have
to think in terms of the mutual responsibilities of government and
people, and not just in terms of relations between individuals
within the civil society.
  Most radicals still have a concept of politics that flows from the Marxist
concept of "economics in command." If a militant worker says nothing
about politics, that has been considered profoundly political
because his actions presumably expressed the instinctive drive of
the working class to reorganize society on socialist foundations


 Changing Ourselves        21

    For most radicals, revolutionary politics is little more than being
"on the right side," the side of the oppressed masses. Yet often
(although it takes courage to say so), you can learn more about the
modern crisis of Western civilization from people who have been
    thinking seriously about the dilemma of modern man but who are
    not on the "right side" in terms of class.
     Not until Lenin does a Western revolutionary attack econo-
    mism and seek instead to put "politics in command." Lenin
    Understood that workers in production were concerned chiefly
    with their economic needs and that a political party was required
    to raise them to political consciousness. After the Russian Revolu-
    tion he developed the concept of "politics in command," warning
    that if the Bolsheviks allowed economics to command, the
    workers' state would turn into state capitalism. After Lenin's
    death the Bolshevik Party under Stalin gave priority to the
    development of the productive forces, i.e., they put economics in
    command.
     Coming to the Chinese Communist Revolution, politics
    clearly takes command, both because the Chinese were able to
    learn from the Russian experience and because the Chinese
    tradition is based upon politics in command (Confucius).
     In our technologically advanced societies, where so many
    social decisions need to be made about what should and should  not be produced and in what quantities, we are going to find it very
    hard to distinguish between economics and politics, or between
    economic and political decisions. Politics is taking on new and
    wider dimensions. It must be redefined to take in much more than
    has ordinarily been considered political activity. Politics involves
    making choices and choosing directions, not only for oneself or for
    one's own intimate group, but for the whole society.

    Politics and Ethics

     In the West, particularly since Machiavelli, a distinction has
    been drawn between ethics and politics. Now we must ask
    ourselves, "is it possible to create new politics without new
    ethicst" This country is lousy with politics without the slightest
    trace of ethics. In the recent past people always determined their
    ethics by politics--if it didn't pay, you changed your ethics. We
    have to think in exactly the reverse today: If it is bad ethics, it isn't
    good politics.
     When the Italian city-states fought one another in the 15th
    century, what did they care about ethics! Ethics was completely

 22      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

 subservient to politics; Machiavelli said that you can't confuse
 ethics and politics; politics is a science--value-free: a politician
 can't be ethical.
  Now that we have lived through five hundred years of this
 kind of separation, we should begin to realize that one of the
 reasons we are in the dilemma we are in is that ethics has for so
 long been subservient to politics. It is impossible to project a revo-
 lution without ethical concepts, or without concepts of the appro-
 priate role and relationships between people.
  In the new era we are entering, we must reject any pretense
 of value-free politics or of politics independent of ethics. No
 politics can be anything but self-defeating unless they are ethical.
 The big problem that remains is to decide what is ethical.
  Politics involves citizenship-relationship and responsibility
 to a particular polity, the creation of governing structures, of
 plans, of laws, of leadership--whereas ethics deals with one's
 social relationships with friends and associates, irrespective of
 citizenship. One can engage in politics and have no ethics; one can
 be ethical and not engage in politics. At least that has been the
 situation up to now.
  Most people think of "going into politics. " Is politics an activity that
 everybody should be engaged in, that is, not appropriated by an
 elite or assigned to an elitist Why shouldn't everyone take posi-
 tions on issues not just with regard to his friends or his intimate
 circle but with regard to a constituency to which he belongs,
 which includes a lot of people he doesn't know.
  You have to have conflict before you can have politics. But
 you have to have an idea before you can have conflict over it.
 Politics involves taking sides. It means proposing or supporting
 particular plans, programs, perspectives for your community
 which you believe are right. Most people in the U.S. don't want to
 be "involved in politics." Politics is "dirty" or it means dictatorship
 or "elitism." But doesn't their attitude to politics stem actually
 from the fact that politics means taking sides over issues and con-
 flicting with people over issues--something that they would
 rather not do7 They cherish the illusion that things develop auto-
 matically without the need for political decision-making, that
 the best government is the one which governs least. Yet many of
 these same people are the ones who are today demanding a strong
 government to "establish law and order."
  Up to now they have thought of government chiefly in terms
 of the administration of social services, a welfare state that takes

        Changing Ourselves        23

care of sanitation, Old age pensioners, Social Security, and
the lights on the corner. Jacques Ellul in The Political Illusion
criticizes the 'readiness of the modern citizen to leave all these
decisions to Someone else, as if they were value-free or made by
God in heaven, or purely technical questions which did not involve
actual choices or principled decisions. In fact, we are beginning to
realize that political decisions are involved in all matters and that
people are going to have to take responsibility for making these
decisions--not only in terms of paying taxes but by debating what
should be done and what shouldn't be done.
  Will some people have to move out of Washington if the
Potomac River is ever again to yield a pure water supply? Does the
birthrate have to be cut7 Should Americans reduce their standard
of living What keeps the average Russian from saying, "You have
an automobile, why can't I have one!" When the rulers of Russia
say, "We are not going to get into the automobile business," is that
an ethical or a political responsibility We haven't faced these
questions. People have to arrive at the appropriate answers to
these questions out of a different set of basic values. Who is going
to give up what 1 Is that a political question or an ethical question
Could we say that the general statement: "People are going to
have to give up things in order to have a decent society," is an
ethical statement; while the process of deciding who is going to
give up what, and the actual making of decisions in a particular
polity and for a particular polity, is a political question Can we say
that ethics deals with principles, while politics deals with the
actual decisions, the choices--that the governing principles are
the ethics, while the decisions on how to govern, made on the basis
of ethics, flowing from ethical judgments, are the politics.
We are trying to reestablish the concept of politics as based
upon principle and not only on power. Modern man has been
dominated by the concept of means rather than the concept of
ends, by the question of how to do things rather than why, by the
Concept of politics as a value-free science. Modern societies
manipulate the minds and actions of people through propaganda
so that it is difficult for the average person to proceed from prin-
ciples. The fault is not with the propagandists alone; it is with the
basic concept of value-free politics which is shared by both
Propagandist and propagandized. Modern man tends to rely upon
external forces (the state or the economy) to resolve problems
rather than accept the responsibility of people to resolve
problems. Many Frenchmen (like Ellul) who have had experience

                        

24      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
with European Communism have a kind of anti-political bias, in
the sense that they distrust the tendency in modern masses to rely
upon the centralized state to resolve all problems. They want to
reestablish responsibility within the people--but this cannot be
done by turning your back on politics.

New Politics?

  For many years we thought we had the answers to how this
country should be run because we were on the side of the workers,
and the workers were the ones destined to reorganize society on
new foundations. This was called "our politics" (as opposed to
other people's politics). Now, through an arduous process, we
have begun to examine and explore what principles should govern
the relations between people and what is the nature of man in this
day and age. Meanwhile the country's politics have been going to
rack and ruin. So we are now challenged to begin to relate the
principles we have been developing to the political sphere in a
more concrete way.
  Up to now we have thought that politics existed only if you
had a clash between classes. Today we can see that what must be
involved in the American revolution is a clash over values. As
Revel says in Without Marx or Jesus, it is not a question of redividing
the cake but how to put together a whole new cake. There is a
tremendous clash over what values should be involved in creating
this whole new cake. This is a politics with which few people are
familiar, since redistribution of property has been at the root of
previous politics.
  In the last ten years various liberation movements have come
into being. Many of these are still concerned chiefly with the
question of redistribution of the cake, how blacks or chicanos or
women or young people should share in it. Others claim that their
values should be the values of the entire society. Few, if any, of
these groups think at all in terms of their commitment to the
whole. A kind of absenteeism has developed. Liberation has come to mean
separation. All that each group is concerned about is itself. Each
one has a conception only of its own rights, although some claim
superiority of their life-styles above all the others. So as Revel
says, they have added to the rights of man, two other rights, the
right to walk away and the right to be internally contradictory
"Do your own thing" is the most prevalent tendency within the
liberation movements.
  Revel does not deplore this because he thinks the only

        Changing Ourselves        25

alternative is a police-state; and in fact to bring these groups
together 'Lt this point would require a dictatorship. But Revel has
little idea of how all these groups which are formed on a biological
basis (race, sex, age) can degenerate. There is nothing beautiful
about youth or women or blacks in themselves, and people who do
not recognize this are bound to degenerate. Womanhood, ethnic
origins, age are the ground on which individuals, cast adrift by a
disintegrating society, can come together on the basis of what
they have in common, to begin to explore and develop through
struggle and conflict and through criticism and self-criticism. If
they are unable to develop a more historical identity, they are
bound to degenerate.
  If you create a collective or a commune with the idea that you
are going to develop ethical standards among yourselves but the
hell with everybody else, you are not being ethical. Yet this is
happening. One group will steal from another on the basis that its
members come from those most oppressed in the society.
  If a doctor believes in the right of women to abortion, he could
lust walk away from the law and say he is going to give abortions.
On the other hand, there are doctors who perform abortions as
test cases in order to bring about abortion reform. They walk into
establishing something for society; they don't lust walk away.
They act for the sake of a new positive.
  Revel claims that, through this catalog of various groups
organizing on the basis of race, sex, age, and life-style, and with
this new view of the rights of man, a new kind of politics is
emerging. Yet isn't it obvious that these groups are going to have
to get together at many different levels before we can achieve
anything like a revolution in the U.S.? But what will they have in
common7 Up to now they have been unified chiefly by anti-imper-
ialism or their common opposition to the war in Vietnam. As long
as these groups think of their grievances only in terms of their
Own interests and do not reflect on these interests as they relate to
the whole, there isn't much of a basis for their ever arriving at the
point of being part of an overall movement to advance the whole--
Which is the only basis for a revolution. All you will have is
constant disintegration and a continuation of the present chaos.
  Obvious It is not obvious to them. And extremely unclear,
and yet to be explored, are the principles on which they will be
brought together. To what end will they be brought together?
Unless somebody begins to think about the principle or principles
On Which these disparate groups can discover a new unity, we will


26      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

not have a revolution or a new society. In their anti-ness today,
each sees itself as better than everyone else, as having the key. In
their separateness they can only degenerate, whether they are
black or women or gay. By their excesses and their "couldn't-care-
lessness" about what has been achieved by mankind over the ages,
they provoke middle America into counter-revolutionary
positions.
  We have to shift what unifies these groups (anti-Vietnam
War, anti-racism) away from just rejection to projection, from just
denunciation to annunciation. We need to develop projections
that contain both unity and diversity.
  Up to now, the tendency has been for each group to view itself
in the same way that Marxists have traditionally viewed the
working class--as the class with the solution to all social problems.
Blacks were only interested if you were talking about blacks; they
could not see anything in the past as related to them unless it was
black. Women's liberation groups have substituted the sex of
women for the class of workers or the race of blacks. None of
these groups seems to have thought about how all of this is to
come together or converge at any point. This is a period of the
disintegration or fragmentation of the social structure. But,
unless the dividing lines within our society are projected on
different bases than those on which each of these groups started,
each group is going to become increasingly negative, and the
possibility of bringing them together on any basis is going to
become harder.
  Are these groups open to another vision! They have each had
perspectives but they have been limited and negative ones. Last
November (1970) the Black Panther Party made an effort to unite
these groups at its "Constitutional Convention" in Philadelphia
The result demonstrated what can happen if you begin from
abstractions. Huey Newton drew up the theory of "inter-
communalism." Instead of nations--or communities with a
common history or language or habitation struggling to
transform themselves and their institutions--people were going
to set up voluntary communities, based on whatever they had in
common, racially, sexually, etc. These then would come together
and create the new society by relating to one another instead of to
any government. Under the aegis of the Black Panther Party, all
kinds of groups actually came together to write a "constitution" in
which the rights of each would be protected. It was really a very
naive conception, yet a lot of fairly sophisticated people bought it?

        Changing Ourselves        27

If your thinking abstractly, or if you are so guilt-ridden that you
have suspended thinking altogether, it is easy to arrive at this kind
of conclusion. Not only did the Black Panther Party call this
revolution, but all sorts of really "heavy" people attended. Huey
went around to universities and gave long lectures on "inter-
communalism" All sorts of people listened while he held forth. It
indicates how impatient people are for something that will pull
together all these liberation groups.
  For the same reason, they look to the Vietnamese for leader-
ship. There is a hunger for somebody to come along, some individ-
ual, who will provide the focal point for unity.
  Can we begin the search for a basis for unity by saying that
the U.S. revolution is going to be the revolution of the last quarter
of the twentieth century--or of the twenty-first century! Since
this country's technological development already makes it
possible for everyone to have according to his needs, the U.S.
revolution is not going to be around the issue of the distribution of
goods and property, but around values, around the further
development of the human personality. In this country, there is an
enormous variety and enormous scope for variety--by
comparison with other countries. The whole concept of what man
can be, of human potential, of humanhood, goes far beyond
anything imaginable elsewhere. This tremendous diversity and
variety would have to be an element of the new unity, as well as of
the new concept of revolution. Up to now, revolution has always
been conceived by socialists to be "following our program."
Maybe, today, it is possible to move toward revolution with a
whole lot of programs.

          Section 2

   Forming the Vision: The Politician as Artist

  BY what vision can these various groupings begin to see
themselves as moving in the same direction but along their own
Particular lifelines? One of the most important reasons why we
are so far from achieving that vision is that no works of art have
been produced which represent a unifying vision. None of the
Psychedelic stuff, the Woodstock Nation stuff, or the Black Arts
creations (Leroi Jones, etc.) really presents or projects a new vision
for this period.

  It should be emphasized that we are not asking artists to be
politicians. Rather we, as politicians, are wondering how we can

      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE        28

discover in art the manifestations of what we are seeking to dis-
cover. If anything, rather than asking artists to be politicians, we
are asking politicians to be artists-to put it in an exaggerated form. We
are demanding of revolutionary politicians that they expand their
horizons, their vision of humanity, that they enrich these visions
with the illuminations of the artist, that they be constantly
receptive to the human potential that the artist opens up to view.
  Up to this time, most of the stuff coming out of the
Movement is pure protest politics, guerilla art. All of it is very
narrowly political. The painters of 1890-1940 demonstrated an
amazing ability to break with the past while maintaining a contin-
uity with the manifestations of man which artists for thousands
of years have been trying to accomplish. The music of Duke
Ellington, of Louis Armstrong recalls the relationship of art to
mankind, not just to the man who is playing or blowing. But in the
last decades we have entered into a period of self-expression
where people who know or care nothing about the past or the
future of mankind only express their own emotions, their own
angers, their own frustrations. Are Ornette Coleman, Archie
Shepp playing music or only their passionate rejection of the
horrors of modern life!
  How does one become historically angry, futuristically angry,
philosophically angry, wondering about tomorrow as well as
angry about yesterday and today Artistically angry because one
feels so deeply that man is so much more than he is manifesting
himself to be today. An artist must project, not just express a
personal response.
  You can go to a film like Truffaut's Wild Child and in an hour
and a half get a feeling for duration, i.e., for how long it has taken
man to get to the state he has reached and how far he still has to
go. How many guys could have put that feeling into an hour and a
half of Him: Any white man Any black man? Any Marxist It
takes very special people to develop and project a vision, just as it
takes very special people to become revolutionists at the begin-
ning. And we are just at the beginning. We have to accept this
exceptionalism. In a column in the New York Times this summer
William Shannon describes:
  The children of the television age see politics as a hap-
  pening, a demonstration, a dramatic confrontation. They
  do not realize how much time and effort are needed to
  alter the character and direction of a large, mature,
  complex society like the United States...Their despair,



         Changing Ourselves        29

   like the apathy of the hippy and the alienation of many
   middle-aged people, is a response to a world of undirected

   technology and unnecessary speed.
   Resenting death, we murdered time. Now, time van-
   quished, we lie exhausted alongside our victims. Almost
   too late, we see that what we have slain is not time but
   our sense of ourselves as human. Left alone with our
   machines, we know not how to wait, to prepare, to disci-
   pline, and deny ourselves. Therefore, we know not the
   rejoicing which comes when we have reaped and con-
   summated and brought to fulfillment, all in good time.

   To reject the past is to deprive today of its meaning
   tomorrow. To evade the limits and significance of time is
   to empty life of its limits and significance. It is that
   meaninglessness which pervades this age of instant
   gratification and instant results and permanent
   dissatisfaction.

 In the same issue of the Times, William Serrin writes in an article
 describing the rising murder rate in Detroit since the 1967 rebel-
 lion, "It's terrible that life can be so cheap." In many of these
 killings, the victims and murders are desperate young people with
 no sense either of the past or of the future.
  We need a new sense of time as duration rather than as units
 ticking away mechanically on a clock. More than any other art
 form, the film can give people a sense of time. It can do this
 because it compresses events into a process that develops in time.
 People who view a film can identify with this process. Wild Child
 gave those who saw it--people who, like most human beings
 today, feel as if they are just flotsam and jetsam with no solid
 relationships--a tremendous sense that human beings have come
 from somewhere.
   What does one say to a thousand black kids in Detroit who
 say, "so let's buy a gun and make it?" What do you say to them
 about time and about the past?
   You might tell them, "After the Russian Revolution, the
 Russians claimed that they had invented practically everything.
 That was natural, but it was also false. Today, among black people
 in particular, there is a lot of talk about art and culture--meaning
 Principally African art and culture--and big claims that long
 before anybody did anything, Africans had done it. Blacks are
 making the claims to justify their being. Their rejection of the

 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE                30

 white man's superiority. This too is part of man's development, of
 the process of learning."
  You might say, "Black youth and white youth are both saying
 that they don't have time for the past, that they are only inter-
 ested in Now, right now! Yet how did you get here? It is obvious
 that if it were not for your mother and father, you would not b,
 here. Or are you just accidental people! Because if you are just
 accidental people, we don't have anything to discuss at all. You
 didn't just get here by accident. Undoubtedly there was a process
 for you even getting here.
  "Now, suddenly, you are saying that you are going to change
 this whole world, today, right now, as if the very process by which
 the whole world got to this point never even happened. Take this
 room, for example. Where there is now an air conditioner, there
 used to be an orange crate. So somebody had to develop an air
 conditioner.
  "Now suppose I entrust my future to you--which is what I
 have to do really. But you have no concept at all of process, neither
 of the process by which your very present is dependent upon the
 past, which in turn was brought into being by men and women
 from a still further past--nor of the future which has to be created
 from this present. It isn't enough to want to tear up a house
 because it is old and rotten and the door doesn't fit. You have to
 have some vision of what kind of house you are going to put in its
 place. Very few of you have any idea even of how the present
 structure functions. You are mad at how it affects you; you are
 concerned with your feelings, your pains, with what you don't like.
 Society is always made up of people with all different kinds of
 feelings. You are not the first young people in the world nor the
 first people to have felt frustration. The people who organized the
 Boston Tea Party were youngsters, teen-agers. The founding
 fathers were mostly young people in their 30s. As a matter of fact,
 at that time few folks got to be very old."
  We have to make a further penetration into the revolu-
tionist's relationship to art. There are films today that tell us more
about man and the revolution than anybody on a soapbox. People
who went to Shakespeare's plays saw and heard things they had
never heard before: They had never seen a black man make love
to a white woman, or gotten so close to the intrigues of nobles?
Shakespeare's notion of what was real was incredible; people
learned about it with joy. Antonioni's Red Desert is an extraordinary
film. Every frame in that film is a painting. Antonioni did it very
ing these claims to justify their being, their rejection of the

        Changing Ourselves        31

deliberately? to tell you how incredibly beautiful everything could
be an amazing demonstration that life is not as simple as you
think it is? Art and revolution are fantastically intertwined.
Obviously not all art but art, the notion of art, is absolutely
fundamental to the notion of mankind. If we are going to get out
of this, art is one of our most revolutionary weapons.


What is Vision?

  Vision is not a portrayal. That is exactly what it is not. A
vision is what might be portrayed, but never has been. A portrayal
of something is a painting or a likeness of what has been. A vision
raises your sights, gives you a feeling of what might be. For
example, life in America as a "land of milk and honey" was the
vision perhaps of a Sicilian who might be coming here in steerage.
Vision is not a description or portrayal of anything that is or was.
It is insight or foresight. Within a vision there can be the envi-
sioning of certain sets of social relationships. The vision suggests
or projects what might be.
  We must search for an enlarged notion of how one contri-
butes to the revolutionary process. It is so easy to imagine that the
revolution has nothing to do with art, that art is a "bourgeois
luxury." Suppose it is true that, in the past, only the rich had the
leisure to create art. Would that mean that the art they produced
does not represent man! Or would it mean, rather, that their art
represents what other men and women could do if they had the
time Actually, of course, throughout the long history of man--
long before there was a bourgeois or privileged class--a great deal
of art was produced by other than the rich. Dance was the first
language. The people who made utensils for use also carved them.
We must thoroughly rid ourselves of the idea that art is a
bourgeois luxury," that "art is a product of slave labor." Art is
Perhaps the most profound expression of man's humanity.
Therefore we have to use art again particularly in this material-
istic age--after a hundred years of deeming art a bourgeois
luxury--as a revolutionary weapon. If we don't, we are going to
fail in the totality of our approach to man's desires and man's
humanity. Revolutionaries who do not incorporate what artists
are trying to say in their vision of revolution don't know anything
about man's future. They have a materialist concept of revolution,
rather than a humanist concept of revolution.
 We have the opportunity today to put forward a new idea of
man. The idea of man as purely producer, as purely rational, as

32      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

knowing only in the scientific sense and therefore reducing reality
to what can be measured and machined (a concept which is about
two hundred years old, a very short time in the history of
mankind) has now demonstrated both its enormous power and its
enormous limitations. The latest moon shot is the best example of
this--both in its fantastic technological perfection and in its
equally fantastic fragmentation and reduction of human beings to
instruments of the computer.
  A new idea has little power over man unless an old tradition has exhausted
itself. Today we have the opportunity to unleash our own vision of
the tomorrow for which mankind is striving.
  As you listen to jazz, you realize that here in America,
humanity, in the form of black people mainly, has achieved a form
of self-awareness and a kind of spontaneity which is combined
with discipline and control--all of which represents an extraor-
dinary achievement in the evolution of humanity. It is a
combination that is uniquely American. There is in jazz a kind of
wisdom and a kind of mellowness which comes from the aware-
ness of human development as a process, involving time past, time
present and time future. These are all attitudes which are
extremely important for the next stage in human development so
that human beings can organize themselves and their relation-
ships to one another and to their natural environment in a
different way.
  American jazz expresses something of America which is
unique. It is crucial to understanding America. America isn't just
technology. American technology itself is the product of incredi-
ble diversity, of scientific knowledge and sensitivity. American
jazz came out of America because this was the only country with
this diversity. America is the result of these different strands,
something qualitatively different from any other country;
  Western man has a kind of self-awareness and a spontaneity
that is precious and worth preserving. This comes through in jazz
and blues. There is a sense of human hopes, of the infinite
potential of the human spirit.
  Jazz was created by black men in this country because their
experience in this country was one of suffering and hope. They had
heard white folks play; they had heard the drum from Africa?
Then, out of the liberation which blacks felt after World Wa' I,
came jazz. Jazz built on the spiritual which had been created in the
South out of the music from Europe and that from Africa. Due to
the African experience, blacks had a unique notion of rhythm and


        Changing Ourselves        33

timing that nobody else in the world had, of physical freedom and
buoyancy. Also nowhere in the world is the drum so much an
expression of being as in Africa. They added to this the experiences
of both joy and suffering which they found in their situation.
(Note: Each's music stemmed from joyous attitudes which he had
to his God and his church. All the greatest music Each wrote was
in relation to his religious experiences.)
  Something in the American experience drew jazz out of the
blacks; and the response of so many other Americans to jazz sug-
gests that everybody in this country is in certain sense like a black
in relationship to society. Everybody is enslaved in his own way by
U.S. society. Of all the popular musical forms which express the
contradiction between man's aspirations and his enslavement,
jazz remains the greatest liberator. Nobody knows why.
  Jazz is a form of music which devotes itself to the exploration
of equality, of freedom, of humanity. Beethoven, Bach made
statements. Jazz explores the content of man's aspirations and
hopes (partly because it has vocals). Jazz asks everything; and
gives some notion of tomorrow. And suddenly it became the
music of the whole world (except the East), the music of liberation,
the music that says you can be different from what you were yes-
terday. Jazz is an attitude expressed musically, which is why it is
never written. It is invariably improvised. It cannot be "pro-
grammed." It epitomizes creative freedom. It is one of the least
contaminated and least full of bullshit of any art form.
 Jazz suggests new forms in which man can express his
attitude to his own nature--and therefore his attitude to man's
nature, and to the changing, developing character of truths
(versus, for example, Plate). It is an exploration of that which is
not yet. Jazz is not trying to discover fixity or correctness. Jazz is
the expression of an attitude.
  Revolution is improvisation or creativity just as jazz is. Nobody knows what the revolution is going to be and who is going to do what.
Nobody. Just as in the jazz form, nobody ever told the other man
exactly what he should play. Jazz is an expression where a bunch
of people (not like one guy writing a novel or a song) say, "We
agree on what moves us, this is the general idea. We are going to
do this rather than that. We will start off this way." After that it is
left to improvisation. The American revolution will be exactly the
same kind of thing. Something is going to start after enough
people have agreed on the general idea, but it will be improvisa-
tion. If somebody writes a scenario, it isn't a revolution. That

34      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

does not mean that a revolution lust happens, spontaneously, and
that no preparation is necessary. Quite the contrary.
  Why is politics an art rather than a practice? Because practice
in itself does not imply the element of creativity which is essential
to politics. Politics must involve political leadership; political
leadership must be creative. Leadership requires responsibility
and the capacity to think grandly.


          Section 3

     Changing Basic Notions: Truth,
     Equality, Personality, Freedom

2500 Years of Platonism

  You are in trouble the moment you accept notions of absolute
good and absolute evil, the same as if you were to accept notions of
absolute truth and absolute falseness. Confucius and Plate both
lived at approximately the same time. But they had completely
opposite attitudes to good and truth. Confucius understood that
man is part of the universe. He said that people need principles by
which to organize themselves and society, and these principles
should be the same as the ones that are at work in the universe.
Plate, on the other hand, said that there are absolute truths by
which societies should be organized, and that man should strive to
know these truths: only those divorced from the confusion of
"change" and "becoming" can know them; and knowing them,
people become good. The Western world comes from this other
(Platonic) conception of truth. This is 2500 years that we are
coming to grips with.
  What is meant by principles in harmony with the universe?
These are three kinds of unity which we must achieve: unity
within ourselves, with other human beings, and with the uni-
verse. At the very beginning, when he talked about truth, Plate
set up a separation between one's material and one's mental being
The further away you got from the confusion of matter, the
higher you climbed on the ladder of truth. Plate created this dicho-
tomy within the concept of the human being from the beginning
  What is interesting is that this dichotomy applied in thinking
about man is much worse than the Confucian concept which
accepted the difference in the role between peasants and intel-
lectuals, but which said that there should be a harmonious


        Changing Ourselves        35

mutuality between them. Each should contribute what it has to
the whole, and both must relate and be responsive to the other,
because this is the way of the universe. If you deny something that
iS actually real, then you build a whole series of conclusions that
eventually crack up or crack you up. The Chinese said that there
are two sets of people--not equal but unequal--the peasants who
till the land, and the intellectuals who do the work of the mind and
advise the rulers. If those who do the work of the mind and advise
the rulers don't do right, then the peasants have a right to rebel.
This is your unequivocal right, to rebel against misrule. That is
much better than saying you are equal when you are not equal--
so that you are forced to prove your inequality before you can
justify your rebellion.
 For two thousand years, at every critical stage in the develop-
ment of Western man, leaders have come forward with new
interpretations of the concept that all men are equal. For Jesus
Christ it was all men being equal in the sight of God. For
Rousseau, the French revolutionary thinkers and the American
revolutionary leaders, it was all men being equal politically.
Obviously this concept of the equality of men goes very deep in
the history of the Western world. Yet men are in fact obviously
not equal, so it is bound to lead to all kinds of contradictions. You
can't keep building your world on a conviction that is so manifestly
not a fact. We must realize that individuals are very different; that
there is a very wide range of individuality. We must start from the
fact that all important truths change over given periods of time:
there are no fixed truths. We have to recognize that the only ideas
that matter are ideas created by human beings, that are, therefore,
changeable and relative.
 Let us for now abandon the word "truth" in order to get rid of
the Platonic idea of truth as fixed ideas, and in order to internalize
the concepts of principles and convictions that are held and
Created by human beings. This will help us to appreciate that ideas,
like human beings, have changeable characters, improvable char-
acters, complicated characters. If we use the words "principles"
and "convictions," then we will be able to see that important ideas
are the ones that move us to act, and we will have something that
is much closer to the Chinese idea than to the Western idea. The
western concept of idea is of something "out there" that you catch
onto, a thing, something that you contemplate and to which you
have a passive relationship. It doesn't have to move you. The idea
Of a principle, on the other hand, is that it is no damn good unless it

36      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

moves you to act. It was enormously difficult for Western man to
accept the idea of evolution of the species. Now we are trying to
get him to accept the concept of ideas as evolving. Most people
think that the evolution of man as well as the evolution of ideas
have come to an end. We are saying they haven't. Marxists have
not grappled with the Western concept of ideas. They have
concentrated their attack on the class character of particular ideas.
  We haven't even begun to try to create the new ideas for our
age. We are still working on the shattering of the old shackles of
fixed ideas--of materialism and rationalism. Marxists have always
had a class objection to Plate. The class critique is easy--"class-
angling." But it does not deal with the concept of ideas at all. All
evil is on the other side, not in you. This is the attitude of the
liberationist groups. Now, however, we are saying that if Plate
thought that way, we must also be thinking that way until we sub-
stitute another way of thinking--because Plate is one of the first
creators of Western thought, and we are Western thinkers.
Liberationist groups have simply taken their specific biological
state of being--sex, race, age--and substituted it for class. They
have the same ideas about race, sex, age, and so forth as Marx had
about class--that all the evil is on the other side. They have the
illusion that since those whom they oppose are the ones who rule,
your" ideas can't be "their" ideas.
  Take, for example, the question of law. We are convinced that
a society based on law is the best society; yet the concept of model
(emulation) is much richer than the concept of law. When we look
at what is happening in the courts today, it should become clear
that we are going to have to devise another way for people to
govern their interactions than by means of law. Otherwise all it
amounts to is reforming the courts. What is happening in the
courts is not accidental. It is based on the idea that human
behavior can be regulated by laws.
  "The Chinese had no power to legislate directly, no power of
taxation, no voting right. But they had at all times the right of
rebellion" (Riencourt, The Soul of China). The right of rebellion
stemmed from a conviction about the appropriate roles that
different sections of society should play rather than from any
concept of legal right or inalienable right.
  What are inalienable rights is What are legal rights? The con-
cept of legality Is not prized in China. Over two thousand years
ago, in the midst of tremendous chaos and conflict, a group of
legalists emerged. They simply established a kind of equality and

           Changing Ourselves        37

   justice in order to get some sort of unified order. It lasted only
   about fifty years, and thereafter it came to be recognized that law
   and order are not sufficient foundations for a society. So the
   Chinese then said that order must come from within rather than
   from without, and they began to establish an ethical basis for
   people to live together. A civilization can establish itself only on
   an ethical basis, and the cynical realism of the Legalists, useful to
   bring about the necessary revolution and unification of the
   civilized world by fire and blood, had to be discarded as soon as its
   limited purpose has been fulfilled" (Riencourt). Hence the ensuing
   Confucianist revival.
    As soon as you begin upsetting one part of a structure, you
   have to begin rethinking all its parts. You can't just discard the
   foundations or one corner. That is what puts such an awesome
   responsibility upon a revolutionist. You can't lust talk about
   getting rid of the evil bastards. We have said that this is the
   greatest crisis that Western civilization has ever faced.
    In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx says that if you deal
   with the concept of rights, you are already dealing with a deprived
   society organized on some negative basis. We have always dealt
   with rights as if they were great positives, rather than seeing
   rights as a way to limit the infringement by some men on other
   men. There is a punitive quality written into them, an assumption
   that you can't trust people to behave in a civilized fashion with one
   another. You can add the word "inalienable" to make it sound nice,
   but the concept of rights is still restrictive.

   No Thought is "Mere"

    In Western thought, absolute truth has come to us as a
   positive goal to be striven toward, while relative truths have come
   down as "merely relative," mean, material, and negative. This
   started with Plate (whose class bias was unmistakable). It was
   extended by Christianity (to save the souls of the meek and
   humble). Then science gave it new life. At each of these critical
   Stages of Western development, the idea of absolute truth became
   more deeply entrenched. Therefore, it is hard to impress upon
   People the idea that truths are constantly being created and that
   this creative process is in fact the greatest achievement of man.
   We tend to speak of ideas as "merely relative," implying that what
   is relative doesn't matter too much because it is not fixed, as if only
   fixed truths were important.
     It is self-evident that science has discovered many facts about

38      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
 

hysical realities that are repeated again and again and are
relatively unchanging for millions of years. Yet some day,
someone is going to discover that something even in these
spheres, e.g., in the speed of light--by which everything is
measured--is, in an Einsteinian sense, relative; and then all things
will have to be reevaluated.
  The concept that all truths (because they deal with the nature
of man) are relative and not absolute is indispensable to
revolutionists. In order to make a revolution, you have to discard
the notion that anything one has previously known as true is
necessarily true. Revolution is an effort to discover or to create
truth, not to prove that something is true. It is hard to persuade
most radicals of this. You shatter their personalities if you
question what they live by. For them being a revolutionist is living
by certain truths, rather than discovering or creating new truths.
The New Left--as distinguished from the Old Left--started out
by trying to discover rather than prove. But they were empirical
and pragmatic to an extreme. The Old Left has a body of ideas
which the masses of people are supposed to prove for them. So
they are happy, gratified, satisfied whenever the masses do
something to prove what they already believe. All this has nothing
to do with revolution.
  A revolution is to create new truths about man and society.
That is why a revolution is such a challenging, dangerous
enterprise. In a revolution you sail out on uncharted seas. There is
no proof really that the road you are taking is the "true" one. You
have to make it true. Revolution is becoming, creating. Revolution
creates new bases of tensions--new unities which will split again
into other dualities.
  Man's concepts are in constant evolution. God was a concept. Man
created the first gods. The first gods that man created were closer
to nature because man was closer to nature at that time. As man
progressively departed from the dominance of nature, beginning
to master nature for the first time in the last few hundred years,
he created other, more complex gods. As man was enhanced in one
direction, he was dulled in another. This is the contradiction, the
duality in man. When man crossed the threshold of reflection, he
began to discover things about this own developing nature. Man
thinks he has discovered the final truths about himself, and
therefore he knows what he is. But he doesn't; we don't. The
nature of man, not just the future nature of man but even the
present nature of man, is infinitely more complicated than we

39              Changing Ourselves
have permitted Ourselves to recognize or to express.
  Maybe we have to discard the concept of truth because it is
more confusing than revealing: "the truth, and nothing but the
truth--so help me God!" Perhaps in China there are no such
Word as the truth" since this concept (of fixed truth) began with
plato's idea of truth, of a heaven in which perfect truth resided
which imperfect men were always striving to reach. When we
think of the limited class character of the society from which all
our basic concepts spring, it is incredible that we have clung to
them for so long. Plate thought you reached truth by removing
yourself from every kind of confusion and material involvement.
it is almost impossible for us to use the phrase "a truth." We
always say "the truth." It is so difficult to think of truth as human,
as evolving. But the words "truths" or "convictions" would be
much more accurate. Then one could always dispute, struggle
over ideas with the clear understanding that we were talking
about convictions held by actual people. "Truth," on the other
hand, implies independence from human beings, like the law of
gravity. Under the umbrella of the word "truth," we have
subsumed both facts and convictions. Now we want to make a
separation between them. By using "truth" to refer to hard facts,
we have given facts a human value they don't possess.
Conversely, by using the word "truth" to refer to convictions, we
have given convictions a permanence and an independence of
historical and human relations that they don't possess.
  A revolutionist does not believe in absolute truth, but he does
have strong convictions-thoughts that move him. How does one
relate thoughts and convictions to reality is How can you have
strong convictions that possess and move you, and yet develop
them in relation to struggle, to practice, and to unfolding reality?
The highest form of being human is the continual developing and
advancing of your vision. This is the dialectical process of
thinking.
  Vision is more than thought. Vision brings to the rational
Process of thought all the instincts, intuitions, untapped qualities
in man. That is why vision is indescribable, why it can't be
analyzed the way thought can be. A vision isn't just a thought.
You don't consciously think up a vision, it occurs to you.
 Just as we recognize that truth is not absolute and that ideas
are not permanent in the sense in which Plate conceived them, we
Understand that we cannot change the ideas that people invest
with truth merely by arguing with them. Ideas cannot be changed


40      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
through argument. We are not seeking to discover new ideas but
rather to create new attitudes in ourselves and others with regard
to ideas.

Equality
  Certain attitudes and convictions that Americans have concerning
equality, abstract freedom, personality, truth exist nowhere else in the world.
Many of these attitudes and convictions must be modified; some
should receive opportunity for enlargement.
  In many respects the idea of equality is ridiculous. People are
not equal. Yet in some respects people should be equal. Many
equalities should be taken for granted, e.g., equal access to medical
care. In the realm of capacities we are all unequal; yet we are all
equal in our ability to recognize inequality. There are spheres in
which people are equal and should be equal. There are others in
which they are manifestly unequal.
  Revolutionary politics has been mixed up with liberal human-
itarian notions, stemming from Rousseau's idea that everybody
was a "noble savage" until he got messed up by civilization.
Everybody is not equal, but people feel queasy about making such
an absolute statement. Men, women and children are all equal in
the sense that they all need to eat, they all need to be born. But
essentially all these equal qualities are mere generalizations, least
common denominators. No one fights over these. The equalities
that people fight about are the ones that matter, the ones that
need to be investigated.
  The United States, by creating political democracy in accord-
ance with an abstract ideal of equality, also made it a process that
excludes political development.
  Not to recognize that in the realm of politics everybody is not
equally dedicated or equally capable, and that there has to be a
dialectical inter-relationship, a process of mutual education,
between leaders and led, is to make nonsense of politics. If in a
democracy, everybody is equally entitled to vote, then it is naive to
think that the equal voters are actually deciding which way society
is going. It is as naive as the idea of having a national plebiscite
every night on TV with everyone watching and punching a
button. As if any society could decide important questions on the
quantitative basis of which side gets more of the equal votes. You
make nonsense of important matters when you make equality
central to these matters.

        Changing Ourselves        41

 Equality is only applicable in spheres which are no longer relevant to the organization of power.

  The existence of the hierarchy of power has been largely
  neglected by humanistic thinkers because it does not
  conform to their ideal of man. But an ordered society can
  admit the equality of men only in fields other than those
  which determine the hierarchy of power at any particular
  time. The establishment of religious equality was only
  possible at the Reformation because political power had
  replaced religious power, and the various sections of the
  community had accepted their place in the new political
  hierarchy. Similarly, political equality could be realized
  during the nineteenth century in communities where
  financial and economic elements already effectively
  determined the hierarchy of power. The overthrowing of
  an old social system from within is possible only by those
  who can call to their aid a new principle for the organiza-
  tion of power. Humanitarian socialism failed to achieve
  power because it offered no alternative to the economic
  hierarchy, and totalitarian national socialism succeeded,
  temporarily, because it transferred power to the hier-
  archy of technicians of total war. Whyte, The Next
  Development in Man, p. 132.

  Before the modern age, religious equality was the ideal.
Everybody should be able to go to God. Then came political
equality--everybody should be able to go to the polls. In the
Western democracies, everybody has an equal right to go to the
polls only because the organization of power is not in the ballot
box at all. It is taking place through industry, through the
Pentagon, and so on. We are all equal in helplessness.
  What we have not faced is the need to have a principle for
organizing power in terms of new principles. We begin to face it
with the idea of a "prophetic voice"--with the need for people with
Prophetic voices to reach out to some other people--not to every-
body at once, but to those who are searching for new principles.
Those in turn have a mission with regard to others. Thus there is
an actual hierarchy in the sense of political leadership according
to political conviction and dedication.
  In the new society, there should be a tremendous amount of equality in terms
Of economics. Clearly the realm in which equality does not exist is

42      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

that of political responsibility. The aim of the society will be to
develop general, universal, political responsibility. Precisely
because this will be recognized as so precious, so valuable, so
crucial to society's and humanity's development, there will be no
illusion that everybody is equally responsible. But if you tried
seriously to build your society on illusion, you would be building
nothing but disillusionment.
  There should obviously be equality in many spheres of
human life where there is terrible inequality today. But the idea
that all men are equal is an illusion that destroys the possibility of
the leadership--not lust political but also ethical and aesthetic--
which special individuals can give and which is especially needed
by us all in times of very great crisis.
  If all men were really equal, then all motion would stop--unless all men
could change simultaneously, which is obviously ridiculous. This
is why those who believe all men are equal also believe that all big
changes take place with a kind of spontaneity. As in a school of fish,
all change direction at one time, because of instinct presumably.
  Totalitarianism took this mass of Western man--like a school
of fish who had no ideas in their heads, except of themselves as
equal and a lot of other abstract notions--and handled them as
masses. Lancelot Whyte wrote The Next Development in Man in light
of the reality of fascism. A very advanced Western man himself,
he asked why fascism had come to the West. He concluded that if
there were no great ideas to move Western man, then the
contemporary technical apparatus of propaganda could be used by
those with the most distorted ideas to influence Western man.
  If we believe that it is necessary for man to create a closer
harmony with nature, with his own nature and with others,
would the development of these harmonies also bring a higher
form of equality in most spheres! Is it equality we are aiming at--
or is it greater harmony in these spheres What does harmony
have to do with equality anyway, except in the minds of certain
people who feel uncomfortable if they don't see equality all around
them?
  Do modern tensions come from lack of equality or from
frustration over our powerlessness to do anything about what has
occurred or is occurring? Or from neither! Are people in the
U.S. concerned with powerlessness at all! For example, a lot of
people felt tense during the Cuban missile confrontation, but they
didn't want to get in on the conference between Kennedy and
Khrushchev.

        Changing Ourselves        43

  Society, or the organization of a new society, depends upon
ho, one relates the spheres in which people are equal to the ones
in which they are unequal. We are constantly confusing the two
spheres As long as we keep yapping away about equality, we are
not going to penetrate into the nature of man. Part of having a
human nature is the ability to recognize the differences between
people: some are men, some are women, some are hunters, some
musicians, some witchdoctors, some educators. Out of a
conglomeration of Christianity, liberalism and Marxism, we have
screwed up the whole notion of human quality to the point where
we can't evaluate the quality of human beings or project to human
beings the diversity of their own qualities or the vision of a new
unity based upon this diversity. The idea of equality was projected
originally against a rigid feudal inequality. There was a very good
reason for it; it was a fantastically revolutionary conviction at the
time. That is why every black man in the U.S. is still under
tremendous pressure to insist upon equality, to think in terms
only of equality. Yet one of the most revolutionary things we can
do today, in 1971, is to advance the notion of the inequality of people.
  The concepts of equality and inequality are different from the
concepts of sameness and difference. Equality implies parity in
relationship to some standard. Inequality implies some concept of
hierarchy, the recognition of real uneveness within the particular
sphere--and therefore a need for hierarchy. For example, the
notion of the "new man" is meaningless if everybody says "I am
the new man." If everybody's claim to be the "new man" is equally
valid, then you can't move; everything and everybody is on dead
center.
  Fifteen years ago in Facing Reality we wrote:

  There is no mystery about what is happening to our
  society. If so many find it easier to accept total
  destruction of human society rather than see that a new
  society is all around them, a society based on cooperative
  labor, it is not merely because of greed, desire to retain
  privilege, original sin. It is because, arising out of these
  material privileges and reinforcing them, is a habit of
  mind, a way of viewing the world, a philosophy of life still
  so powerful because by means of it man has conquered
  nature. It has governed the world for over four hundred
  years and now it has come to an end....



44      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

  I think, therefore I am, said Descartes, and the world
  rejoiced at the perspective of the expansion of individual
  personality and human powers through the liberation of
  the intellect. The resting of self-certainty on man's own
  thought and man's thought alone was a revolutionary
  defiance of the medieval dogma which had derived
  certainty of self from God or the Church. Rationalism
  encouraged and developed an elite, the organizers of
  ideas, the organizers of industry, the discoverers in
  science. At that stage of human development they were
  needed. They cultivated the individual personality. It
  followed that they looked upon the masses of men as
  passive unthinking servants of the active organizing
  elite. Rationalism saw each human being as an individual,
  the natural leaders being the most able, the most
  energetic, the most far-seeing individuals....
  Today the tasks envisaged by Descartes, the great men of
  the 16th century, and their followers in the 17th and
  18th centuries are accomplished. The pressing need of
  society is no longer to conquer nature. The great and
  pressing need is to control, order and reduce to human
  usefulness the mass of wealth and knowledge which has
  accumulated over the last four centuries. In human,
  social terms, the problem of mankind has gone beyond
  the association of men in a natural environment to
  achieve control over nature. Today mankind is sharply
  divided into two camps within the social environment of
  production, the elite and the mass. But the trained,
  educated elite no longer represent the liberation of man-
  kind. Its primary function is to suppress the social com-
  munity which has developed inside the process of
  production....This antagonistic relation between an ad-
  ministrative elite calculating and administering the needs
  of others, and people in a social community determining
  their own needs, this new world, our world, is a world
  which Descartes never knew or guessed at....Two
  philosophies, the philosophy of man's mastery over men
  and the philosophy of man's mastery over things, have
  met face to face.

  It sounds beautiful, it is a tremendously challenging passage,
but why is it so wrong? Why did it seem so simple at the time! We

        Changing Ourselves        45

were trying to release man's mastery over nature as contrasted
with man's mastery over other men. We had no sense of the need
to discover in contemporary human nature its tremendous
complexities and capacities. We had an answer, a solution: "Man
needs to plan and administer 'things'; the proletariat must do this
administering rather than the elite or bureaucrat." We had a
dogma and we were trying to prove it. We were not trying to
discover new truths. The same man was to shift his emphasis
from mastering "men" to mastering "things." We didn't wonder
whether the same man could do it or whether mastery was what
was required. We assumed that Stalin was wrong because he
didn't follow what Marx said. The "way" had already been laid out
by Marx but Stalin had departed from it; if he had only followed it,
he would have gotten the right result. As if that result were
already pre-determined, as if there were no question of what man
should be striving to achieve. There was no sense of any develop-
ment, any evolution, taking place in man himself.
  Socialism as we saw it was simply the administration of things, the
cooperative, organized, rational administration and reduction to
order of the tremendous abundance that could be produced by the
development of the production forces. To this day, that is what
most people think of as socialism, and it is the ultimate of what
they strive for. People talk and write about the administration of
things very glibly because they consider that this is what Marx
conceived of as the goal, generally speaking. Three, four genera-
tions of socialists have accepted this as the goal of modern society.
Yet even Marx did not stop at socialism. He went on to the idea of
communism, the classless society, in which each would receive
according to his needs and give according to his abilities. Today we
are not only beyond simple planning, but even beyond the
concepts of "to each" and "from each." We are at the stage of
discovering and creating a new human nature.
  For over a hundred years, radicals have accepted that if the
Proletariat were to administer the developing productive forces,
the contradictions between people and within the human being
would be resolved. How could they think this! How could we have
thought this7 There has been no contemplation of the complexities of man.s
nature at all. Man's whole being has been determined by his
relationship to the productive forces. Why!
 Any revolutionary breakthrough has to be considered in light
Of the stage of historical awareness at the time the breakthrough
took place. Thus, Western self-awareness of the individual

46      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

came two thousand or more years ago with Socrates and jesus.
The reason why the concepts of individualism and self have
remained so narrow is that they were born at a time when the
individual who was looking within himself and becoming aware of
himself was a limited individual, i.e., limited in relation--not to his
time but in comparison to where we are today. Thus, anybody
who is a dogmatic Christian is automatically limited. We don't say
this because we are anti-Christian, but because we realize that
Christ lived so long ago--when man, and therefore man's concept
of the self, was so undeveloped. Similarly, if the various racial and
sexual groupings now seeking liberation were actually developed,
whole people, then out of their liberation might emerge a whole
and developed society. But they have become self-centered and
are seeking their identity on a very narrow basis. Therefore, if
they try to make a principle for the whole society out of their
identities, it is bound to be nonsense.

Personality
 China never had the individualism that we have in the West. This helps
to explain Chinese history and its present and future. But it
doesn't change the fact that the concept of individual personality
that emerged in the West is now part of the evolution of
humanity. The question becomes, how do we keep these
individual personalities from remaining narrow individuals who
are only expressing themselves!
  The Chinese and the U.S. revolutions could not possibly be
the same. Unlike the West, China never had a period of Chris-
tianity-a period when what was most important was the immor-
tality of the individual. In China, human continuity was achieved
through the family; it was not personal or individual. The Chinese
never had an individualism based upon freedom of enterprise,
tremendous mobility, and all the other features of a country like
the U.S. Even if in the U.S. there is a tremendous egotism and
concern for one's "precious personality" which has to be modified,
individuality, as a human achievement, still has to be respected
Otherwise you do violence to the developments of two thousand
years. In Moby Dick, Ahab and Ishmael are very individualistic and
self-destructive types: but the "noble savages," Queequeg,
Tashtego and Daggo are no longer possible in the U.S. And who
wants to be a Starbuck or a Stubb who just go along? Individuals
known for their achievement are very few in the history of China
and India, but in the history of Western civilization there are
thousands of such individuals.



        Changing Ourselves        47


  What is a whole man? Harmony with nature is essential to a
whole man; so is a relationship to work (as distinguished from
labor) and a relationship to time (i.e., to the past and future as well
as to the present).
  Mankind today has three great needs:
  1. somehow to integrate his ideas, feelings, skills and actions
without the rigid separation which leads to sentimentality,
technocracy, and abstraction;
  2. somehow to create some kind of collectivity that will allow
diversity, because it is the rampant individuality of the U.S. that
has led to mass-man;
  3. somehow to develop an organic relationship to nature, in
place of the aggressive, exploitative, relationship to the
environment, which by destroying nature is also jeopardizing
man's survival.
  Wherever man is not separate from nature, you do not have a
concept of individual personality, of equality, of freedom, or
abstract value-free truths. Hence the difference between China
and the West. (We are using China here as a contrast to help us
understand our own society better.) Western man has to move
beyond where he is, to acquire some of the serenity that resides in
a certain kind of relationship between man and nature. His
relationship can't be a Confucian one. But when you ask the
average guy,"How long can we continue to deplete and pollute the
earth without a plague!" he isn't concerned because he thinks it is
a question of fifty years or more, not the next year or two. So it is
"not in my time." The phrase "not in my time" is as obscene as the
concept "doing my own thing."
  On the one hand, we say individuality is wonderful, that to
reduce everybody to nothing but a part of the whole would be
reactionary. Yet we know that individuality also has within it the
contradiction of the "cult of personality." Great creative
individuals have had a scope in the West of a kind that they have
not had elsewhere. And yet we cannot but deplore the self-
Centeredness which sees everything in terms of the self, e.g., the
"cult of personality," "what about me?" or the "leader" to whom
everybody always looks for salvation. People who are only
concerned with their own precious personalities are pretty
horrible people. Yet personality is something previous, to be
neither wasted or eliminated.
  What do we want? Or what we think man should be wanting!
We have to know what we want before we can go out and tell
Others. That is why it takes such a long time, why it is necessary to



                         11
48      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

be patient. We cannot approach what we want as we did in the past
because we now have to examine the nature of man, the nature of
technology, and the nature of nature. What we want is tied up
with all of these. It is obvious, for example, that unbridled
technology is catastrophic to man's future. Yet it is equally
obvious that what man has learned about the uses of technology
should not, cannot ever be lost. We can never return to th,
Garden of Eden.

Concepts of Freedom
  What do we mean by freedom? We will have great difficulty in
defining this--more even than with equality, truth, personality--
all of which could in some way be pinned down to a particular
historical period, a group of thinkers, a series of events. We are in
very deep water indeed.
  The Civil Rights movement asked for (given) specific rights.
These specific rights were what it meant by "freedom." What did
people mean by "Freedom Now?" Freedom from white domina-
tion. But you can be dominated in five hundred ways. Which
domination! When we talk about a specific historical movement
like the Uhuru movement in Africa, we are in a sense in less
difficulty because Africans clearly mean self-government by
"Uhuru." They have in mind a historical image of national
independence. (They refer to George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Patrick Henry.) Even in the U.S. the early movement
for "Freedom Now" was very concrete--for the civil rights of
blacks to be able to move about as freely as whites were moving
about. They were not talking about the concept of freedom in the
elusive sense in which we are pursuing it now.
  Again, using China as a contrast, the idea of freedom does not
exist in Asia. Not even in Russia. Chiefly because in these
countries the idea of a subjective, individual will separate and
apart from the will of the community, from the order of the
society, from the external pressures of the environment, or
institutions, or objective world does not exist in Asia. Thus a
historical, philosophical concept of freedom (apart from a specific
movement) has never existed. The abstract concept of freedom
could not, in fact, exist separate and apart from the concept of
separate individuals each with a will of his own. Precisely because
this concept of separate, individual wills emerged in the West at a
time when the individual had a very limited concept of the world
and of historical development, it has turned out to be a very
arbitrary, capricious type of freedom.

        Changing Ourselves        49

  For example, if a child says "I'm free," he could then begin to
do all kinds of capricious things because his freedom has no
internal limits. This helps to explain the Movement in the late
sixties? When the human nature that you are trying to express is
limited, while the concept that you are projecting is very vast,
there is bound to be contradiction in your actions.
  In what sense should man be free? We certainly don't think he
should be un-free. Man should think of himself, perhaps, as free in
the same sense as a bird is free. A bird is in total relationship to its
environment. It knows that there are cats around that limit its
freedom, that would like to eat it up, so it organizes itself
accordingly. A man is free when he is confident of his relationship
to the world he lives in and is not fearful of it. He is also free when
he is confident of his relationship to other men and women.
Freedom is above all a relationship. It comes from recognition of
the dialectical inter-relationship between oneself and one's social
and physical environment. There are all kinds of extensions of
these inter-relationships, but no notion of freedom which frees
one from inter-relationships is a valid notion. Freedom is not a
thing that you get or you gain or you accomplish or you buy.
  Few people talk about freedom in terms of the freedom to
move and to act with people in a certain relationship. They usually
mean being able to do what you please--the freedom of the
individual. They are dissociating the individual from any
necessity, from any relatedness, because to Western man any
relatedness is a kind of restriction.
  This is the concept of freedom that we have to attack. Lance-
lot Whyte talks about Europeans never having been able to accept
external conditions as necessary for integrity and life; of their fear
that as part of the general order of nature, they would lose the
reality of freedom, and their precious sense of individual freedom.
By treasuring this individuality, they have actually destroyed the
integrity, the wholeness of the individual which can only come
from inter-relationships. Since their concept of freedom was
asserted in independence from reality, it never has had any basis in
reality.
 Western man has had this concept that he was free in himself,
that the individual is not dependent upon the conditions of
Society, that he has his own "blithe, free spirit" within himself, to
be nurtured and to be respected by others. That sense of
individual freedom, precisely because it was so unreal, unreali-
Zable and illusory, has haunted us all, because we are all part of the
West, It was expressed in Facing Reality: "The free development of

      50      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

the individual personality, the right of the meanest intelligence to
wander through the strangest seas of thought, alone if need be,
this freedom has been established as a universal principle,
however limited it might be by the actual conditions of existence
at any particular time or place. It is now an ineradicable part of the
human personality." All the present liberation groups are
permeated by this definition because they too are part of this
tradition.
 In the U.S. there was a more objective basis for this sort of
individual freedom that anywhere else in the world; hence this
concept became more entrenched. All the liberation groups--
blacks first, women and others later--still share this concept.
They see themselves as part of some sphere of freedom which
does not in fact exist at all. Hence the concept of "doing your own
thing." Because Americans have lived in a land where it was more
feasible to think about freedom this way, it has also permitted
them to believe that they are the defenders of freedom through-
out the world--a kind of "chosen people." What is most objection-
able in U.S. foreign policy is derived from the notion that we know
what freedom is and nobody else does. Therefore we are going to
give some of it to the world. Actually, you can be against U.S.
policy in Vietnam and still be biocidal at home, because you still
haven't grappled with and uprooted this illusion of individual
freedom.
  Freedom, equality, truth--none of these has ever been seen
as a relationship. Each has been seen as a thing. There are rela-
tionships which permit freedom and relationships which don't.
Freedom is not a concept that one is free to define for oneself. It is
utterly impossible for man to transcend nature because he is part
of it. If there is no such thing as freedom, we can only talk about
freedom from what, for what, to what.
  Should people be free at all times to say just what they feel!
There are a lot of illusions about that. This idea of the unlimited
right to speak--proceeding from the preciousness of this internal
sense of freedom--has to be abandoned. It is not easy to abandon?
Even after agreement that this or that specific freedom--e.g.?, the
right to yell "fire" in a theatre--should not be preserved, there is
still that urge to preserve the internal sense of freedom as
precious. All of us are under enormous pressure as revolutionists
to defend the freedom of people. When do you not defend a
person! Where do you draw the line? What is appropriate? In the
name of an abstraction like freedom, we are destroying other
values and relationships of incalculable importance. P

        Changing Ourselves        51

  People who have lived in other societies are more likely to
think first and not be so cocky about their freedom. They have
some recognition of realities, of relationships, of limitations. But
because Americans have had more of an objective basis for their
concepts of individual freedom, they have extended it to every
sphere? We have reached the point where millions of people regard
it as a God-given right to do what they please. All the "free"
movements that have developed in the last three or four years are
manifestations of this. The implication in all of them is that
human beings don't have to make choices. They thereby represent
a very narrow, backward view of man.
  How does one project a new notion of freedom to those who
have rejected this society! What freedoms can we discover; what
freedoms do we want after we have freed ourselves from
erroneous concepts of freedom!
  Because Western man's concept of freedom was erroneous or
too narrow does not mean that it did not, in the past, enable
enormous contributions to be made to the advancement of man.
However, the new notion of freedom must be a social one, which is
the greatest freedom there is.

Smashing Old Idols

 Truth, personality, equality all have to be concretized and
clarified in order to create new harmonious relationships; but we
seriously question whether the concept of freedom can be cor-
rected. It is too individualistic, too antagonistic to community.
 What we are trying to discover are new relationships which
are not based on old concepts, e.g., the old individualistic notion of
freedom or the old abstract concept of freedom. If we could project
and create the appropriate set of relationships, we might discover
that we were approaching freedom. We block ourselves from
discovering new relationships by holding on to old concepts.

  The dissociated idealist is unable to understand this
  experience of necessity as freedom. He looks for the
  fundamental conflict which he is convinced must always
  exist between the compromises of social life and the
  Standards of the individual conscience. This is just the
  trouble with the idealist: the conflict does exist for him,
  he cannot escape the antithesis of the real and the ideal
  Which reflects his inner dissociation....The idealist seeks
  the security of the static harmony, and therefore
  Considers every tension evil. Unitary man recognizes

52      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

  tension as an essential feature of the formative process
  operating in man. Man creates in resolving tensions, but
  never brings them to an end. The contrasts of past,
  present and future forms provide an inexhaustible
  source of tension. In every society, there is a wide
  scattering of individuals at all stages of development, just
  as the tradition comprises ancient myths, contemporary
  platitudes, and prophetic vistas. The individual who can
  understand and accept the long-term development of
  his community may have to stand alone. (Whyte, p. 274-
  275 emphasis added.)

  Chinese man could understand this, but Western man is such
a fragile creation of his own concepts. If we want to make a
revolution, we have to smash these concepts. It means smashing a
great many of the idols on which Western man is presumably
built. Our job is to take the notion of freedom a derivative of real
relationships, not of old abstract concepts. Where man once
created God in his own image, he has now created himself in the
image of God.
  There is tremendous release in thinking about all the other
things we will discuss in this way, in the sense of smashing old
idols. We must try very hard to project a sense of new
relationships-aesthetic, ethical and organic--out of which will
come a new notion of freedom.
  If our society, and we ourselves, are made up of "ancient
myths, contemporary platitudes and prophetic vistas," we will
need some conception of these myths and also of the platitudinous
character of many of our own notions in order to move ahead.

          Section 4

      Ideas Shape Man's Becoming
  How do people begin to move in their minds! How do you

move people in their mindset How can we help them to penetrate
through the ancient myths and contemporary platitudes~
particularly myths and platitudes of equality, absolute truth and

abstract freedom?
  Last year we called our conversations "Towards A New Man'
Essentially what we tried to do was get clear in our minds the
difference between a revolution and a rebellion (in which the


         Changing Ourselves        53

 oppressed rise up in protest) or a revolt or an insurrection (in
 which there is simply a change of power). A revolution--we made
 clear to ourselves then and have been trying to make clear to
 others since we must involve both a drastic change in direction and
 a leap forward, an advance, in the evolution of mankind.
   This year we are trying to move towards new concepts of
 ourselves and of humanity. We now understand much more
 clearly how ideas have been the instruments by which human
 societies are organized and integrated. Over the years we have
 been afraid that it was "idealistic" to think this way--that societies
 are organized only by the division of labor. Paradoxically, the most
 important lesson for us in the Chinese Revolution is the crucial
 role of ideas in shaping man's becoming. The philosophy that
 "once the ideas characteristic of the most advanced class are
 grasped by the masses, they become a material force capable of
 changing society and the world" (Mao) is a fantastically liberating
 philosophy. It stands on its head the thesis that contemporary
 radicals have taken from Marx to justify their mindless militancy:
 "Philosophers have only contemplated the world. The thing is to
 change it."
  These notions have not only shaped Western man, they have
 shaped us, in this room. They shape the great "silent majority" of
 Americans as well as those who presumably have repudiated or
 are antagonistic to the views of the great silent majority. Our
 becoming has been shaped by these notions. We must destroy,
 smash, change these notions, if we are to advance new notions.

 Why Change Ourselves?

  Why would Americans change their concepts is Perhaps we
 should distinguish between cause and reason. Causes are what
 Push us from behind; reasons are positive goals that attract or
 pull us forward. What are the reasons that would mobilize the
 American people's will to go ahead? We are exploring new
 attitudes because we are convinced that unless we can persuade
 Other people similarly to change attitudes, none of us can do
 anything more than continue to accumulate goods, pollution and
 war. But what reasons would motivate the average person in the
 U.S.A
  What about some kind of therapeutic reasons! For example,
 someone discovers that he is getting nervous, losing or gaining
 too much weight, working too damn hard to make too little
 money. The best possible way for him to get rid of all these


54      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

problems is to try to do something different, acquire new relation-
ships. As some guy who has enjoyed smoking all his life might
suddenly wake up and say, "I think it would make sense to stop. I
would like the results of not smoking better than I have liked
smoking." Is this too limited an analogy?
  At crucial periods in history very rare people come forth with
prophetic convictions. "Such voices appeal because they convey a
sense of resolution of earlier tensions within a new harmonious
rhythm" (Whyte, The Next Development in Man, p. 247). That is very
general and philosophical, but if we could discover the way to
project it, it could be very specific and personal to anybody and
everybody. Damn near everybody in the U.S. would admit that he
is aware and conscious of tensions. Most people would also realize
that there is such a thing as "harmonious rhythm, "that it is
desirable--although no one knows how it could be created. Many
people go on dope because that seems the most accessible release
from tensions.
  When we, in this country, think of harmony with nature, we
think of going on a vacation--we never think of continuous
harmony. What we then get is the invasion, congestion and
destruction of vacation sites. When people think of seeking
harmony only as a respite or as a temporary measure, then soon it
can no longer be achieved even temporarily. The generation to
which we belong is still struggling, bumper to bumper, to get to a
tree, but the next generation might not even know that there are
trees, and so won't struggle to get to them. They will only struggle
to get from one motel to the next. Anything in between won't
exist for them.
  It goes back to something characteristic of Americans: when
Americans reject what exists, they tend to take off in some way.
This is the Pilgrim--the Roger Williams--the Brook Farm syn-
drome. The difference is that people used to go off to new geo-
graphical frontiers. (This is still happening with some hippies--off
to New Mexico.) They leave one area behind and go on to another,
not caring about what happens to the area they leave behind. This
"new frontiers" mentality has been an obstacle to the develop-
ment of U.S. civilization, because people tended to abandon
problems when the "auspicious beginnings" didn't pan out (Five
Easy Pieces). The challenge is to make a human environment by
reconstructing and reorganizing where you are. When you take
off, you not only leave behind used-up buildings, but you leave
behind half-built cultures.

         Changing Ourselves        55

  One of the most important results of our discussion this
summer is that we have been able to appreciate ideas in relation-
ship to human process and to human development and to human
history. This doesn't in any sense mean we are seeking to abolish
ideas or to abolish intellectuals. We are rather affirming the
crucial importance of ideas precisely because of this historical,
relative character.
  Many young people in the New Left are also convinced that
you can't have fixed ideas and that you can't change yourself just
by changing ideas. They believe that you have to develop ideas in
practice and that through the life style, the life process by which
you live together and develop a new style and new relationships,
you are advancing the revolution. Many of them are very serious
about this. But they have not really confronted the basic ideas that
they must reject before this process of creation can develop
something new. Ideas cannot develop without practice, but if you
don't grapple with your theories, your ideas, you are simply
practicing inside the limits of your shackles. If you try to create
something new without having made a profound critique of old
ideas, then all you are going to do is capitulate to the existing ideas.
  The ideas that you start with delimit or circumscribe the ideas
that you can arrive at. In order to achieve the freedom to create
something new, you have to be sure that you are not imprisoned
in what you think you believe. The revolutionist must acquire the
freedom to think without being limited by generations of Platonic
thinking.
  The people in these collectives have never come to grips with
the Western ideas of truth, equality, freedom, personality. Being
purely pragmatic and empirical, they are bound by existing ideas.
They fall into lots of traps; they have all kinds of illusions about
equality; they are antagonistic to any kind of leadership; they are
open to all kinds of influences because they have no basis on which
to judge things in this society. Hence they are collective
subjectivities, aggregates of individual self-expression.
  Do we just wait while they try to find their way to Truth, they
have to arrive at new ideas through their own experiences. We are
not saying they have to arrive at our ideas. But we can question
the way they are trying to arrive at their new ideas, the way they
limit themselves to ephemeral, subjective, insignificant agitation.
Many young people haven't the vaguest idea what they are for,
only what they are subjectively against. How demanding should
we be on youth, rather than just understanding Must everyone

56      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

have a long experience before they can have a base from which to
advance? Or can people learn from other people's experiences? If
everyone had to go through the same experiences, the world
would be in pretty bad shape.
  People who are merely resentful can't give leadership. They
are too obsessed with their resentment, with themselves. If you
are going to lead, you have to be deeply concerned with more than
yourself. You need a great "generosity of spirit." Most of the
volunteer armies of liberation in the U.S. are made up of people
with resentments. The task of the leader is to project goals in such
a way that they become more than that. If you become a leader
who expresses only resentment, then you are in reality a follower,
not a leader. Whoever accomplishes any great change must first
stop feeling sorry for themselves, blaming society and others for
doing things to them. Rebels and reformers both project to-
merrow in terms of today--a little better than today--or a lot
better than today. They don't raise the question of the new man of
tomorrow who will want entirely different things.
  How do we go about persuading people that the advancement
of mankind comes through changing what man wants! What do
you do while you are struggling to develop new appropriate ideas!
  Ideas are not developed full-blown. You can't get them
completely clear from the get-go. They don't come out like a
blueprint so that you can say that these are their ideas by which
mankind will be governed for the next period. You begin to move
in your mind away from certain kinds of thinking and towards
others; and then the energy that comes from working with these
new ideas and with people who have been looking for new ideas by
which to think and live begins to give a new strength to these
ideas. "Thoughts are born of failure." About the time your new
ideas are firmed-up, they are ready to be thrown out and replaced
by another set of ideas. Western civilization has never understood
this because it started out with Plate and his concept of fixed ideas.
It took Western civilization until the time of-Hegel to begin to
understand the process of developing ideas. That is the
importance of Hegel.
  Maybe we are doomed in the sense that the speed with which
we develop the new ideas that are necessary can't match the speed
of technological change. Or perhaps with the aid of the artist and
the mass media, and with the hunger for ideas that may emerge ;as
people begin to realize that they are jumping up and down in the
same place, we can begin to develop ideas quickly enough--yet not

        Changing Ourselves        57

40 quickly that they become only "experiences" and not ideas in
the process of development.
  We are fortunate to live at this point in history. If the Chinese
Cultural Revolution had not taken glace, it would have been
Difficult for us to recognize the tremendous role of ideas in the
shaping of man's becoming. People could have argued about their
importance, but it takes a tremendous revolution like the Chinese
Revolution to help us feel it in our guts. This does not mean that
we expect the Chinese Revolution to be all smooth sailing. But it is
,demonstration of the importance of ideas, of thinking. The Little
Red Book is a symbol of this. Thus observers like Barry Richman
(Industrial Society in Communist China) noted the tremendous amount
of discussion and debate taking place among people at their work.
Felix Greene has called the Chinese Revolution a revolution of
"perpetual discussion." The Chinese people discuss and debate
ideas because they believe in the importance of ideas.

Ideas Matter
  The Chinese had to adopt Marxism at a certain stage in their
development as the only way to internalize the notion of rapid
economic development and to break up the rigid social structure.
But having done that, they are now calling on many ideas from the
humanistic philosophies of the past. (The Russians did not have
such philosophies to fall back on.) Having stayed at a low level of
economic development for thousands of years, the Chinese are
now in a position, historically, to learn from what has happened as
a result of the rapid economic development in the West.
 Until this century, Western man's concept of his own
importance, his determination to impose his ideas upon reality, his
use of his intellect to conquer nature was still piddling in scope. No
massive technological development had taken place, no creation of
mass political parties dedicated to "increased prosperity." No
Charismatic individual had at his disposal either tremendous
armaments or the mass media to create real threats to all
humanity out of his conviction that he has all the right answers. In
the last hundred years ideas have begun to reach great masses of
people. They now have tremendous social and technological force
behind them. That is why incorrect ideas are now so dangerous.
  As long as ideas were in the province mainly of philosophers,
and the masses of man just went plodding along trying to survive
from one year to the next, ideas couldn't matter too much. Now,
however, people with wrong ideas can acquire enormous power.


58      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
Great masses of people have been mobilized behind the ideas of
Marxism. America in the name of "freedom" feels it has the right
to police the entire world. It is a very different situation from
freedom being lust an idea in peoples' heads. Ideas move people
internally, emotionally--and multi-million dollar media organiza,
tions exist to spread ideas.
  The only way to get rid of Platonism is not to be impatient for
certainty, but to develop a profound feeling for the continual
"becoming" of ideas. Marx had a concept of historical develop-
ment, but at a certain stage he began to fall short in his own
conviction, trying for a final answer and using his mind to
organize the world and human history in terms of fixed cate-
gories. That was when he became dogmatic rather than dialectical.
New sets of contradictions are constantly emerging. There is no
end to them, no "final conflict." "In their calmer moments Marx
and Engels knew that their doctrine was not a universal
conception of man or of history, but an interpretation of one
phase only in the development of a particular civilization"
(Whyte, p. 231). Analogously, the Russian Revolution was one
phase in the development of revolution. To regard either
Marxism or Leninism as ultimate is to betray the concept of
dialectics, the concept of the continuing evolution of ideas.
Marxists treat as permanently dominant such transitorily
dominant concepts as class. In the same way that Hegel rushed too
quickly to impose an idealistic absolute, Marx rushed too quickly
to impose a materialistic absolute. Freud fell into the