1. The Century of the Self (2002)

During the 60s & 70s, the Freudian view – human beings are full of irrational, hidden desires and so must be manipulated and placated by elites – was, for a time, eclipsed by the Reichian view – human nature is at its center benign: all social ills are caused by repression of human desire.

But by the late 60s, disillusioned by the domestic spying, repression and assassinations, people began searching for alternatives to social protest. Psychologist Abraham Maslow had put forward put forward a theory that he called the hierarchy of needs.

It was a pyramid comprised of five levels. The first 4 levels are needs of deficiency: physiological; safety; love/belonging; and esteem. As each need is satisfied, the next-level need then predominates.

Growth needs make up the fifth level: cognitive – to learn about and explore the exterior world; aesthetic – the need to refresh oneself in the beauty of nature; self-actualization – the central need of the growth level and dependent on the bottom 4 levels being satiated, it is the instinctual need to strive to be the best one can be; and transcendence or spiritual, which Maslow said is the only need accessible from all levels.

The Human Potential Movement (HPM) aspired to fill these growth needs. The original idea was that by freeing the repressed parts, you could change both yourself and, by that, society for better. During the 70s, Esalen, est and other HPM groups “trained” millions to unblock themselves so they could achieve this golden fifth level.

In 1978, a group of economists and psychologists at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) decided to find out about these “new” individuals, devising a huge questionnaire based on Maslow’s hierarchy.

The 80s – Morning in America

The researchers discovered people could be grouped according to their needs á la Maslow. They called those who aspired to the fifth level Inner Directives. They devised a shorter survey to quickly determine who was an Inner Directive, and used new-style focus groups to probe their inner feelings, and began to be able to predict what they would buy.

Over 90 years ago, President Coolidge said “The business of America is business,” and the pendulum had swung between a more capitalist or a socialist democracy several rounds since. As business discovered that Inner Directives could be sold to, Edward Bernays, now in his late-80s, was hot again.

New methods of manufacture had come on-line. With the aid of computers, myriads of individual products could now be made in small runs to accommodate the choice these self-actuators needed to differentiate themselves. The resultant consumer boom regenerated the American economy.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the first politicians to recognize and attract this new group of self-actualizers, addressing their concerns, telling them government needed to just get out of the way. Swing voters in this group elected them both.

Consumer democracy was all about defining happiness by purchasing things. Helping each other and the less advantaged via government agency, formerly seen as a sensible long-term goal for the society within which all these newly self-actuated individuals would have to live, was now deemed not necessary, not even possible.

Wilhelm Reich taught that releasing repressed behaviors in the individual would eventually transform society, forcing change, more closely shaping it to accommodate all aspects of human nature. But, people got stuck, more preoccupied with their “process” of releasing these repressed feelings, content to represent. And society became more not less stratified.

By the late 80s, Thatcher/Reagan doctrine had pervaded society and as people became more concerned with themselves and their own families, the Left had continued losing elections. Shut out, they began to change.

The 90s and the Clintons

By using focus groups to cater to voter desires, Clinton was elected in ’92, but he thought that he could cut taxes for the middle class and still initiate domestic help programs by lowering defense spending and increasing tax on the very rich. However, 12 years of Reagan-Bush economic policy had turned the US into a debtor nation.

Within the first months of his presidency, Clinton realized there would be no way to sneak in old-school Democratic programs. Clinton’s appeals to voters to support these programs were met with disapproval. Voters justifiably felt they’d been lied to, and the Democrats lost both houses in’92.

Desperate, Clinton called in political analyst Dick Morris, who used focus groups to guide the President’s policies and speeches. It worked and he was re-elected in 1996.

Now the left was forced to admit that business had a better, more successful way of reaching people. Social programs were unpopular and old fashioned. Democracy via focus groups, continuous democracy as they called it, was a better form of democracy.

In continuous democracy, there are no ideologies to guide leadership — only the people’s will. So instead of leading, politicians found themselves just behind, trapped into short-term, contradictory policies, making government seem even more out of touch.

But business and government as one entity and based solely on the ability to placate a population of self-actuators is evermore dependent that all their underlying base needs are being met. And evermore vulnerable to the inevitable sustained downturns.

The 00s: since century’s end – Loathing & Fear

The Loathing: George Bush has taken Reagan/Thatcher policy to the nth degree. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine says:

“People haven’t fully grasped the revolutionary nature of the Bush years. They are leaving a hollow shell to their successors. It’s like what happens in Third World governments, where the reformers take over the presidential palace, only to realize that the power lies elsewhere.”

And:

“part of [the success of the ‘let government atrophy’ philosophy] is the amazing success of the propaganda campaign around the idea that all progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. . .None of this could have happened without September 11th.”

The Fear: Of the other, the terrorist, the Muslim, the illegal immigrant, the stranger living next door. Freud warned that people could be made to fear and hate, cleaving them to their leadership. Just take a look at the last 6 years, decide for yourself.

Now, late in the first decade of the new century, we’re left to live in a brave new world balanced precariously on a prosperity growing anemic. It’s dawning on many of us: when prosperity does end – even if only for a month, a year, a decade, however long – government is no longer there to unify us, to govern.

Hope…

…might be found in the undercurrents of the Human Potential Movement of today. Spiritual leaders, among them Eckhart Tolle, are saying the human race is on the verge of a quantum shift in consciousness – and just in time.

For unlimited growth is unsustainable and in its last days. Our Earth (Gaia) is breaking down. Last month, James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, says:

“By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.”

Live in the now. After over a century of mayhem, Tolle says we’re ready to evolve — because we must in order to survive.

The Century of the Self has brought us to this. Controlling people via manipulation leads not to self-actualization, but to unlimited, unsustainable growth, and it only truly works when times are good. And when times aren’t so good? There’s the flip side: propagandizing against the other, the axes of evil – there are so many others to be afraid of now; manipulating people to hate and fear.

Yet humans fall for this crap over and over again. Hundreds of millions perished in the 20th Century and the first 7 years of the 21st. Can we evolve, on the massive scale it will take, to the topmost level, the spiritual, transcendent level, accessible from all other levels? Or as Lockwood predicts, are at least 6 billion more of us doomed to perish by century’s end?

13.0.0.0.0 – the end of a Century of the Self

In 5 years and 1 week, the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends. The 13th — and last – baktun, a 394-year cycle began in 1618, just after the creation of the 12-month Gregorian calendar (1582) and the invention of the first machine, the 12-hour 60-minute mechanical clock (1600).

It was also the time of René Descartes, spoken of by Eckhart Tolle as the beginning point of mankind’s wrong turn onto the road to the ego and mind domination – “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes also created the foundation for modern science and mathematics.

Though some think 12.21.2012 portends an apocalyptic “end of time” scenario, others believe it signifies the end of an age of ego, materialism and subjugation of nature.

In other words, 5 more years of this madness of The Self, then welcome to the 21st Century: the Century of the Transcendent?

[continued tomorrow or the next day…]