"Sometime this century, after 4 billion years, some of Earth’s regulatory systems will pass from control through evolution by natural selection to control by human intelligence. Will humanity rise to the challenge?
– Professor Tim Flannery, Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist, conservationist, 2008, Monash University 50th anniversary Keynote lecture.

Introduction

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY

Generations Defined:
Silent Generation— 1928-1945;
Baby Boomers— 1946-1964;
Generation X— 1965-1980;
Generation Y / Millennials— 1981- 1996;
Generation Z / Zoomers— 1997- 2012;
Generation Alpha— born in the 21st century;
(Detailed on Wikipedia)

The Fear of Youth
Ephebiphobia: Fear of youth.
Pronunciation: a-fib-a-fobia
Origin: Latin ephebus, from Greek ephe-bos - early manhood.
Definition: The word ephebiphobia is formed from the Greek word for "youth"
or "adolescent" - and "phobia" or "fear". Ephebiphobia was defined as 'fear and loathing of teenagers' by University of Arizona Professor Kirk Astroth, (1994):

"It is commonly stated that almost half of all adolescents are at risk of school failure, substance abuse, delinquency, and teenage pregnancy. Recent research shows that today's American teenagers are healthier, happier, better educated, and more responsible than past teens. Ignoring these facts scatters valuable resources and dilutes efforts to help the minority of genuinely troubled youths."
- Professor Kirk Astroth, (1994)

Young people are increasingly being driven into institutions where they are forced to relinquish their autonomy. While most are masters of the Digital Age, the majority have joined the ranks of the poor. To understand how this 'system' came to be and how to correct it requires a basic understanding of economic history.

"...instead of denigrating young people, consider the reasons behind such violence and look beyond the surface, draw back the veil of misunderstanding and consider the hardships, prejudices, stigma and even vilification that many young people experience. Investigate ephebiphobia - a social phobia that describes a culture of fear and loathing of teenagers and adolescence – a fear and loathing that is often an exaggerated and counterproductive characterisation of young people." – Tiffaney Bishop, Ph.D.

Over the last century, and especially during the rise of Economic Rationalism and Free Market rule, after 1980, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher came to power, educational institutions have focused increasingly on training for industry.

Highly focused and energetically dedicated scholars will need 'respite' to reorientate creative focus: to redirect learned power of intention; focus on health strength, 'spring cleaning', targeted visual awareness; to deepen imagination through focus on gratitude and by creating room to move - music - dance - poetry in motion.

Henry A. Giroux (b. 1943-), American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic, is a leading advocate for the rights of youth. His main focus is on social media as a tool for activists and their use of language - how alternative media can be utilized by progressives for social change - and the emergence of youth-led social movements.
September 2013 INTERVIEW with Professor Giroux,
Youth in Revolt: Technology, Language, and Emerging Social Movements

Part 1
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A short history of the "Counter Culture Movement" in America
USA: 3.79 million sq. miles (9.83 million km2) population 321.4 million (2015).
International region list: Mid-twentieth century baby boom.

Suburbia: The Great Migration, 1916 to 1970, and the Baby Boom
For the first time since the Great Depression, at the end of WW2, in 1945, returning soldiers led massive population shifts to sprawling cities- and a strong post-war American economy: The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration, was chiefly led by educated women who had entered the workforce: defense industry and 'higher' working classes.

Grocery shopping in Baltimore, MD, 1963:
Abigail Heyman (1974), Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal

Baby Boom:
Urbanisation led to the majority of births occurring in hospitals, under supervision of male doctors, rather than traditional Midwifery (Feldhusen 2000).

Why were so many babies born in the United States after World War II?
“… adding on average 4.24 million new babies to the population every year between 1946 and 1964.” >>>more

"Urban development patterns in the 20th century have been increasingly typified by urban sprawl, which exacerbates climate change, energy and material consumption, and public health challenges." – (Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball, 2015)

"Groupthink"
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers.

Why Groupthink Happens:
"Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when a group of well-intentioned people makes irrational or non-optimal decisions spurred by the urge to conform or the belief that dissent is impossible. The problematic or premature consensus that is characteristic of groupthink may be fueled by a particular agenda—or it may be due to group members valuing harmony and coherence above critical thought. ...
How to Recognize and Avoid Groupthink..." - Psychology Today

Post-Boom
1. Population Growth, Immigration, and the Problem of Sprawl
Outsmarting Smart Growth, Aug. 2003
By Roy Beck, Steven A. Camarota, and Leon Kolankiewicz

"At the most basic level, there can only be three reasons for sprawl: either there is a rise in per capita land use, a rise in the population, or a rise in both. Quantifying the relative role of population growth is important because almost all anti-sprawl organizations have focused on Smart Growth and have generally been dismissive of population growth's role. These groups are not alone. A New York Times editorial in 2000 called it absurd to suggest that population growth and the immigration that drives it contribute significantly to sprawl. Our findings indicate that this view is incorrect.
Among the study's findings: ... >>>more

2. Baby Boom Migration and Its Impact on Rural America (pdf)
by John Cromartie and Peter Nelson, (2009), USDA

“. . . The analysis finds a significant increase in the propensity to migrate to nonmetro counties as people reach their fifties and sixties and projects a shift in migration among boomers toward more isolated settings, especially those with high natural and urban amenities and lower housing costs. If baby boomers follow past migration patterns, the nonmetro population age 55-75 will increase by 30 percent between now and 2020.”

Summary The size and direction of migration patterns vary considerably by age group, and baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have entered a stage in which their migration patterns will increase the population of rural and small-town settings. Many older boomers are ending child-rearing duties, changing housing preferences, and pondering early retirement options. Quality-of-life considerations are beginning to replace employment-related factors in decisions about when to move and where to live. Within clearly marked ranges, this report projects the level of net migration change for baby boomers through 2020 and measures its impact on the retirement-aged population in nonmetro areas. >>>more

Part 2
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The “Deep State"
Rarely discussed in Civics 101 - theoretically controllable via elections and, as it turns out, Nixon, not Mr. Bush or Harry S. Truman, ''deserves the title of the 'decider'.
Bill Moyers and Mike Lofgren have said something worthwhile about that:
~ The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight (2014), by Bill Moyers
~ Anatomy of the Deep State (2014), by Mike Lofgren

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.
– Mike Lofgren, 2014

On the impact of turning points in military "enterprise initiatives":
For those concerned by 'innovations' in warfare post WWII, President Eisenhower set the tone when he famously warned against the expansion of the Military Industrial Complex and the Dulles brothers' agenda - Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers—John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War" (Time Books, 2014) uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?
It's now clear that the foreign interventions they fomented were seriously misguided, and set in place decades of hostility between the US and countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Cuba.
– Listen/download the 14 Jan, 2014 ABC-RN LNL interview, HERE.

"Our arsenal of persuasion must be as ready as our nuclear arsenal and used as never before." – Journalist Edward R. Murrow, Director, U.S. Information Agency, 1963 (Under J.F. Kennedy): Quoted in "Strategic influence : Public Diplomacy, Counterpropaganda, and Political Warfare(PDF), 2008, by J. Michael Waller, Washington, DC: Institute of World Politics Press. pg. 9.

In tandem, the aftermath of McCarthyism and the Cold War against Communist and Socialist ideologies heightened public awareness and concern in the USA, leading to the Anti-Vietnam War movement (Zimmerman, 2017) which gave rise to the Counter-Cultural movement, both in America and in Australia where the Australian Security Inteligence Organisation (ASIO) acted on the belief that all anti-Vietman war protestors were Communists, according to The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC TV) docudrama, I, Spry: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy (broadcast Nov. 4, 2010). Also of interest: Dr. Paul Kengor's commentaries.

"Counter Culture"
Theodore Roszak (1933-2011) coined the term “counter culture" –
The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, 1969, University of California Press, (Download the PDF)
Summary: When it was first published, this book captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels--as well as their baffled elders. The author found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy--the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Goodman

Reviewed by Alan Watts, in the San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle, 21 September 1969:
If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian.

Alan Watts, (1915-1973), British-born American philosopher, is best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences.
Born in England, Watts received his early education at King's School, Canterbury, emigrated to the United States in 1938, gained a master's degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois and was awarded an honorary doctorate of divinity from the University of Vermont. He went on to become a professor and graduate school dean at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, and a research fellow at Harvard University.
Writings: Alan Watts Literary Library
Poetry: Alan Watts Organisation

"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money ... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination." – Alan Watts

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.” – Alan Watts

The Culture of Counter-Culture, a collection of 1960s lectures by Alan Watts, exploring the roots of the American counter-cultural movement, reviewed by Nick Bozanic.

Excerpt: Knowledgeable, earnest, and always engaging, Alan Watts was one of the most popular and effective purveyors of that specifically American decoction of Eastern religious philosophies which permeated the counter-cultural activities of the sixties.
...
Watts staked out this territory in the early (1958) essay
“Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” which, in its City Lights edition of 1959, was as much required reading for novitiates into the counter-cultural movement as Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Ginsberg’s Howl.
Perhaps the most urgent of Watts’ concerns is what he perceived to be a sort of spiritual absenteeism endemic to mainstream American culture: “We say of a person who is insane that he is not all here,” Watts says. “Not being all here is our collective disease.” These informal, often impassioned, and ultimately persuasive “talks” always lead toward the same prescriptive injunction: “Please,” he bids us. “Wake up.” Although grounded in the socio-political milieu of the sixties, Watts’ critical appraisal of American culture remains cogent and compelling. And his syncretic approach to both Eastern and Western religious, philosophical, and pharmacological traditions should find a ready and receptive audience with a new generation of spiritual seekers. >>>more

Part 3
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The Beat. The Beat. The Beat.
The Beat Generation:
From the 1950s, leading Beatnik poets and philosophers succeeded in directing popular attention to issues around social and economic justice, including new awakenings on concepts of personal freedom, which defined the 'cutting edge' sensibilities of the first post-war generation of city-born and educated middle classes: Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were followed closely by their younger siblings and children with the wave of popular 'enlightenment' that emerged with Flower Power– and "Flower Children" wearing "flowers in their hair" to promote non-violence and compassion – the ideals of Free Love.

"If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times..." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

From this rich philosophically driven environment many fruitful ideas struggled to become part of the fabric of modern life. In Fragments of consciousness, Professor David Chalmers leads an interesting analysis of philosophical thought during the 60s.

Beatniks included legendary poets such as Allen Ginsberg: Howl and Other Poems (1956); Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957) & Dharma Bums (1958); William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959).

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (1919-2021), was a founder of the San Francisco Beat movement during the mid-1950s. Majoring in journalism at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, upon graduation in 1941 he joined the U.S. Navy. The G.I. Bill funded his MA from Columbia University and his Ph.D. at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), completed in 1951, he then moved to San Francisco, where he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism.
In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. In 1955 he launched the City Lights publishing house. His publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges: the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers.

“Throughout his career, Ferlinghetti consistently challenged the status quo, asserting that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals.”
- PoetryFoundation.org

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (age 88, 2007)
Pity the Nation
(After Kahlil Gibran's The Garden of the Prophet (1931)
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars,
whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Love and hate are viruses.
Love can make a civilisation bloom.
Hate can kill a civilisation.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2015, reading on YouTube

The 2013 documentary film: Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Readings at City Lights Michael McClure (1932-2020) - sitting on the floor. Obituary: Michael McClure, famed Beat poet who helped launch the SF Renaissance, dead at age 87. Sam Whiting, SF Chronicle, May 5, 2020 (includes photos of the time) Excerpt: Without the roar of McClure, there would have been no ’60s,” actor Dennis Hopper once said. ... for 43 years he was a professor of poetry at California College of the Arts. He started there in 1963 and was still teaching when he was bestowed an honorary doctorate degree, in 2005, as the longest-tenured faculty member at the art college. “There is no way that you can read a poem by Michael McClure without experiencing some kind of connection with something primal and cosmic,” Juvenal Acosta, dean of Humanities and Sciences and professor of writing and literature at CCA, told The Chronicle in 2018. “He has changed the way we speak and read American poetry.” Well into his 80s, McClure remained a poet in demand, both for his current work and for his association with the Beats. He and Gary Snyder were the only poets still alive who had read at Six Gallery on Oct. 7, 1955. In his nonfiction account of that night, “Scratching the Surface of the Beats,” published in 1982, McClure sets the stage for the revolution that was to follow in the mid-1950s: “The world that we tremblingly stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one. But San Francisco was a special place. Rexroth said it was to the arts what Barcelona was to Spanish Anarchism. Still, there was no way, even in San Francisco to escape the pressure of the war culture. We were locked in the pressure of the Cold War and the first Asian debacle — the Korean War.  My self image in those years was of finding myself — young, high, a little crazed, needing a haircut, in an elevator with burly crew-cutted, square jawed eminences, staring at me like I was misplaced cannon fodder. … We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead — killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life.” ... “It was the critical moment for the Beat Generation, the grouping together of five young proto-anarchists and Buddhists,” said McClure of the Six Gallery Reading. "As we spoke, we realized from the results that we were speaking for the people. We were saying what they needed and wanted to hear, and that encouraged us. We drew a line in the sand and decided not to back off that line.” ... His final reading that night was “For the Death of 100 Whales,” which is credited with launching the concept of eco-poetics and presaged the “Save the Whales” movement by Greenpeace by about 20 years. >>>more

Part 4
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Civil Rights Movement
Further references under Part 4 - Racism and Class Struggle

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) - "Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
From 1955, until his assassination on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most prominent American leaders seeking equality and human rights for all victims of injustice. Through peaceful non-violent protests, he gave over 2,500 public speeches. His most legendary speech, I have a dream, (NPR transcript and photos) during a March on Washington DC, on August 28, 1963, became the defining moment of the civil rights movement. He was designated Time magazine's 1963 Person of the Year, and in 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
"His acceptance speech in Norway included the famous statement, 'I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.' King also donated his prize money of $54,123 to the civil rights movement. ... The world has changed greatly since 1968, but King’s message survives intact."
- National Constitution Center, April 2, 2022

"Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort." - Robert F. Kennedy's statement on the evening of April 4, 1968, JFK Library

Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute The Encyclopedia features over 280 articles on civil rights movement figures, events, and organizations. It also offers a detailed day-to-day chronology of King's life, drawn from the volumes.

"Slavery never did and never could aid improvement."
Henry George (1839-1897), "Progress and Poverty" 1879 (Free download)
Excerpt from the last 3 paragraphs -
Book 10, Ch 3, "The Law of Human Progress"

As for slavery, I cannot see how it could ever have aided in establishing freedom, and freedom, the synonym of equality, is, from the very rudest state in which man can he imagined, the stimulus and condition of progress. Auguste Comte’s idea that the institution of slavery destroyed cannibalism is as fanciful as Elia’s humorous notion of the way mankind acquired a taste for roast pig. It assumes that a propensity that has never been found developed in man save as the result of the most unnatural conditions—the direst want or the most brutalizing superstitions∗ —is an original impulse, and that he, even in his lowest state the highest of all animals, has natural appetites which the nobler brutes do not show. And so of the idea that slavery began civilization by giving slave owners leisure for improvement.

Slavery never did and never could aid improvement. Whether the community consist of a single master and a single slave, or of thousands of masters and millions of slaves, slavery necessarily involves a waste of human power; for not only is slave labor less productive than free labor, but the power of masters is likewise wasted in holding and watching their slaves, and is called away from directions in which real improvement lies. From first to last, slavery, like every other denial of the natural equality of men, has hampered and prevented progress. Just in proportion as slavery plays an important part in the social organization does improvement cease. That in the classical world slavery was so universal, is undoubtedly the reason why the mental activity which so polished literature and refined art never hit on any of the great discoveries and inventions which distinguish modern civilization. No slave-holding people ever were an inventive people. In a slave-holding community the upper classes may become luxurious and polished; but never inventive. Whatever degrades the laborer and robs him of the fruits of his toil stifles the spirit of invention and forbids the utilization of inventions and discoveries even when made. To freedom alone is given the spell of power which summons the genii in whose keeping are the treasures of earth and the viewless forces of the air.

The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law? Just as social adjustments promote justice, just as they acknowledge the equality of right between man and man, just as they insure to each the perfect liberty which is bounded only by the equal liberty of every other, must civilization advance. Just as they fail in this, must advancing civilization come to a halt and recede. Political economy and social science cannot teach any lessons that are not embraced in the simple truths that were taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One who eighteen hundred years ago was crucified—the simple truths which, beneath the warpings of selfishness and the distortions of superstition, seem to underlie every religion that has ever striven to formulate the spiritual yearnings of man. ...

"Turn on, tune in, drop out"
1966, popularized by Timothy Leary (1920-1996), Harvard University clinical psychologist and researcher (1960-1962), on the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs. Harvard fired Leary in May 1963. "Many people only learned of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal.” - Howard Junker, 1965, LSD: ‘The Contact High’, The Nation (archived)

"Neocons"
Late 1960s to mid 1970s "A lexical shift was under way: along with continued use in references to revised conservatives, neoconservatives gained the new meaning of a former liberal or leftist who had moved right."
- Benjamin Ross, Who named the Neocons?, Dissent, V54/3, 2007, p. 77-78.

The Dawning of The Age of Aquarius
The 1967 musical Hair, with its opening song "Aquarius":
"This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius"
"When the Moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars". The August 1969 Woodstock Festival, which took place at Bethel, New York, was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition". The 1970 film, Woodstock, provides an 'informative' historical insight!

The Summer of Love, June 1967.
The "Revolution" began when nearly 100,000 youth marched to San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury district, first to protest the Vietnam War, followed by the Monterey Pop Festival, a three-day music festival, June 16 to 18, 1967. The spirit of the season was lifted by the music of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Who, and the first large-scale public performance for Janis Joplin Big Brother And The Holding Company, and for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the introduction of Otis Redding, and Ravi Shankar to a mass American audience. Similar events took place in England and New York, but "hippies were a San Franciscan event.":

'Go ask Alice': Remembering the Summer of Love forty years on,(pdf) 2007, Anthony Ashbolt, University of Wollongong.
Abstract:
In 1960s historiography today, the expression ‘Summer of Love’ is used in three senses. It refers generally to the explosion of psychedelic
sounds, images and lifestyles in that decade. It is also code for the overall phenomenon of Haight-Ashbury between 1965 and 1968. Specifically, and more accurately, it applies to the summer of 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. While the multiple meanings all carry weight, too often that first general sense of the Summer of Love shields a dialectic of hope and despair behind a banner of optimism and dreams. To put it more bluntly, the hippie experiments of the 1960s were full of utopian promise, while the Summer of Love actually spelled the end of that particular vision in Haight-Ashbury. This is a paradox rarely explored.

The Origins of Haight-Ashbury
The cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall once suggested that ‘hippies as a subculture constituted an ‘American ‘moment’.1 In the first instance, hippies were a distinctive subcultural product of American society, a ‘moment’ sustained by the economic boom, expanded leisure and political conflict at home and abroad. Perhaps more importantly, however (and never let us forget the importance of the local in American politics and society), hippies were a San Franciscan event. The city had captured the media imagination by 1966. Hundreds and then thousands of ‘flower children’ had flocked to San Francisco in search of love, peace, community and self. They sought refuge from an American dream that was crumbling quickly in suburban wastelands and urban hothouses, as well as the jungles of Vietnam. The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was the focus. Richard Alpert, the former Harvard colleague of acid guru Timothy Leary, observed at the time that:

"The Haight Ashbury is, as far as I can see, the purest
reflection of what is happening in consciousness, at the
leading edge of society. There is very little that I have seen in
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, that is giving me the hit that
this place is because it has a softness that is absolutely
exquisite." - Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, (1931-2019) interview, Oracle, vol. 1 no. 5, 1966.

Heroic Journeys:

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) “Follow your bliss"
"Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function within human society."
In "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" (1949), Joseph Campbell traced "the hero’s journey" across ancient myths and legends around the world.

Monomyth: Hero's Journey Project, Berkeley ORIAS
"Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, developed in Hero With A Thousand Faces, describes the common heroic narrative in which a heroic protagonist sets out, has transformative adventures, and returns home. It is a useful formula for comparing literary traditions across time and culture."

Wikipedia biography:
Excerpt:
Comparative mythology and theories
Monomyth
Campbell's concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called "folk" and "elementary" ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as "the hero's journey" and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).[43] An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce,[44] Campbell borrowed the term "monomyth" from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.[45] Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung's theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms such as anima, animus and ego consciousness.
As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made use of the concept to express the idea that the whole of the human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world "transparent to transcendence" by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. To achieve this task one needs to speak about things that existed before and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the solution to which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that point beyond themselves into the transcendent. The Hero's Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.
. . .
Metaphors for Campbell, in contrast with similes which make use of the word like, pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence "Jesus is the Son of God" rather than "the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father".[46]

In Joseph Campbell: A Hero's Journey, (1987) he explains God in terms of a metaphor:

"God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those are categories of thought. I mean it's as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it's doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being. If it isn't, well, it's a lie. So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they're lies. Those are the atheists." >>>more

Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) Kurgan hypothesis
Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Curator of Old World Archaeology at what is now UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History.
In "The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe" (2007) Gimbutas revealed the mythical imagery of "early humanity's concepts of the cosmos, of humans' relations with nature, and of the complementary roles of male and female".
Wikipedia biography
Excerpt
Kurgan hypothesis
In 1956 Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis, which combined archaeological study of the distinctive Kurgan burial mounds with linguistics to unravel some problems in the study of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples, whom she dubbed the "Kurgans"; namely, to account for their origin and to trace their migrations into Europe. This hypothesis, and her method of bridging the disciplines, has had a significant impact on Indo-European studies.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Gimbutas earned a reputation as a world-class specialist on Bronze Age Europe, as well as on Lithuanian folk art and the prehistory of the Balts and Slavs, partly summed up in her definitive opus, Bronze Age Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe (1965). In her work she reinterpreted European prehistory in light of her backgrounds in linguistics, ethnology, and the history of religions, and challenged many traditional assumptions about the beginnings of European civilization. >>>more

General Systems Theory presents another approach to understanding perspectives which Ludwig von Bertalanffy is credited with framing.
See Perspectives on General System Theory (1972) by Ludwig von Bertalanffy
- a collection of essays gathered together and published two years after his death in 1972. The Forward is by another key thinker, Ervin Laszlo, also credited with creating a 'new paradigm' for theoretical thinking.

Self-actualisation refers to various approaches to self discovery and exploration. In summary, self-actualized people feel authentically themselves, safe, not anxious – accepted, loved, loving, living a fulfilling life.

"hierarchy of needs" - Abraham Maslow, (1908-1970)
American psychologist Abraham Maslow believed, that to become fully human, people have lower order needs that in general must be fulfilled before high order needs can be satisfied: "five sets of needs - physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization."
In 1943, Maslow's, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, 50, 370-396, defined self-actualization as self-fulfilment - to become ‘actualized’ in achieving our potential - to become everything that we are capable of becoming.

"What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization... It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming."
– Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation (1943)

It is widely claimed that Abraham Maslow's Motivation and Personality (1954) launched the philosophical revolution that led to humanistic psychology – researching how healthy, motivated people define their potential.

"If we wish to help humans to become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health." - Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (1968), Simon and Schuster (1968)

Evolutionary Epistemology circle (EE)
What does this mean exactly? Biological evolution is regarded as the precondition of the variety of cognitive, cultural, and social behavior that an organism, group or species can portray. In other words, biological evolution precedes (socio-)cultural (co-)evolution. Conversely, (socio-)cultural (co-)evolution originates as a result of biological evolution. Therefore:

• EE studies the origin, evolution and current mechanisms of all cognitive capacities of all biological organisms from within biological (evolutionary) theory. Here cognition is broadly conceived, ranging from the echolocation of bats, to human-specific symbolic thinking;
• Besides studying the cognitive capacities themselves, EE investigates the ways in which biological evolutionary models can be used to study the products of these cognitive capacities. The cognitive products studied include, for example, the typical spatiotemporal perception of objects of all mammals, or more human-specific cognitive products such as science, culture and language. These evolutionary models are at minimum applied on a descriptive level, but can also be used as explanations for the behavior under study. In other words, the cognitive mechanisms and their products are understood to be either comparative with, or the result of, biological evolution.
• Within EE it is sometimes assumed that biological evolution itself is a cognitive process.

While Karl Popper (1902-1994) was not considered a member of the Evolutionary Epistemology circle (EE), from 1963, Popper's "work on conjectures and refutations is often regarded as a first account on EE".
Popper's 'logic' became a cornerstone of modern thinking:

“Without waiting, passively, for repetitions to impress regularities upon us, we actively try to impose regularities upon the world.” and "In our daily life we are continually confronted with the necessity to make decisions as to what action to take. We cannot shirk that duty, because not to take action, is just another kind of action." – REVIEW: Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 2012 (PDF)

"How does man know anything and, in particular, how can we account for creative thought?" – Donald T. Campbell (1960), Gestalt on Closure and Insight (Obituary: Master of Many Disciplines.) Donald Campbell's main focus was the study of false knowledge– biases and prejudices. He states:

"Both the blind-variations-and-selective-retention model and the Gestalt theory emphasize the advantage of breaking out of old ruts, and the disadvantages of set and rote drill. Furthermore, the encountering in thought of an idea which fits can be accompanied at the phenomenal level by a joyful 'Aha Erlebnis' [Aha experience!] or a Gestalt experience of “closure”, and at the overt performance level by a sudden and stable improvement signifying 'insight'. – Campbell, D. T. (1960), Psychological Review, 67(6), 380-400.
" And, 'In ‘Methods for the Experimenting Society’ (1971) I am future oriented, reformist, and on the social science edge of psychology, in this address I emphasize respect for tradition and a concern for the roots of human nature in biological evolution."
– Donald T. Campbell, 1976

“If we want to learn anything, we musn’t try to learn everything.”
– Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 2007

1967: Summer of Love
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Following San Francisco's 1967 Summer of Love, the city remained the epicenter for the Hippie Revolution amidst growing concerns for peace, social and economic justice, and environmental sustainability. Peaceniks and Pacifists put up a 'good fight' for peace within the Anti-Vietnam War movement. A decade of marches, love-ins, sit-ins, peace-ins, music festivals, etc. helped to raise popular public awareness across all social divides, and led to a tremendous sense of social and cultural cohesion, which fostered an increase in government sponsored initiatives promoting multi-culturalism while encouraging policy development on sustainability.

1968: The Year that Rocked the World


". . . when television’s influence on global events first became apparent, and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the world." >>>more

"There were popular uprisings in 19 countries in 1968, including the general strike in France, the urban riots in the US and Prague Spring. Student activists and workers on both sides of the Iron Curtain learned from and copied one another and supported each other’s liberation struggles." – Kurlansky's "1968" reviewed by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, Doctor of psychiatry

"The Philosophy of Roger Scruton" June 25th, 2014, by Australian academic Mervyn F. Bendle Ph.D. reveales key insights on "a humanist in the classical style", the English political philosopher, Sir Roger Vernon Scruton's (1944-2020) embrace of conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France.

Excerpt:
Reality itself had been affronted. Repulsed, it had recoiled and collapsed into countless pieces, never to be reconstituted. Such is the striking image of the May 1968 French student rebellion recalled by Roger Scruton in his autobiography, Gentle Regrets (2005)... The twenty-four-year-old Scruton had completed a BA in philosophy at Cambridge and was determined to be a writer, taking Jean-Paul Sartre as his role model because the French existentialist’s prose moved effortlessly “from the abstract to the concrete and from the general to the particular [and] wound philosophy and poetry together in a seamless web, which was also a web of seeming,” as Scruton later recalled on his web page. From Sartre he learned that intellectual life need not be confined to the academy but can flourish around the creative arts like literature, art and music, “through which the world strives to become conscious of itself.” But he rebelled against the Frenchman’s conviction that such a life demanded a radical political commitment, and Sartre’s mindless embrace of Maoism in 1968 alienated him completely. … >>>more

After 1968
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Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972, by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, respectively a philosopher and a psychoanalyst.
It is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being
A Thousand Plateaus. (Download pdf) >>>more

French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is remembered for his "strong influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines." In the 1977 preface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, Foucault declares that minoritarian politics is the decisive political invention of May 1968:

"During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual... Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years...

The New Left
Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium / University of Washington

New Left and Antiwar Movement History and Geography
The social movements of 1960s and 1970s triggered transformations that have resonated for more than half a century. Black freedom movements and uprisings, women's liberation, gay liberation, Native American, Chicano, and Asian American struggles yielded profound legal and cultural changes, effectively rewriting the rules of race, gender, and sexuality. Antiwar and countercultural activism by millions of young people of every backgound turned campuses and cities into both battle grounds and zones of social and cultural innovation while helping to bring down two presidents and rearranging both the Democratic and Republican Parties. The impact of these movements registered widely: in the military which had to be redesigned to operate without conscription; in mass media which scrambled to recapture a generation that had discovered underground newspapers; and especially in the new ways that many Americans would from then on view their nation's institutions and role in the world. >>>more

Noam Chomsky (1928-)
Noam Chomsky's criticisms of capitalism and mass media defined the New Left: Founder of modern linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky rose to national attention with his anti-Vietnam war essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (1967), and was arrested multiple times for his criticism of U.S. foreign policy. See Chomsky.info
The film: “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the media” (1992)
Following the 1987 Stock Market crash, Noam Chomsky's film credits documented the effects of independent community-based voluntary communication initiatives producing local newsletters/papers, community radio and tv stations. The irony was that these community members were unaware that they were part of a new movement supporting an international popular outpouring of collaborative 'community activism'.

 

Part 5
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1980s - A New World Paradigm

"The movement that has no name" gave rise to a loose, enthusiastic network of innovators from almost every discipline, united by their apparent desire to create real and lasting change in society and its institutions: Energetically productive people taking “grassroots” action in 'sustaining good health' - for themselves and for the earth.

Which brings to mind Marilyn Ferguson’s “The Aquarian Conspiracy” (1980).
Journalist Marilyn Ferguson (1938-2008) celebrated the potential for Baby Boomers as the generation that held the power to influence public policy. Instead, in the early 1980s, it became ‘fashionable’ to invest in the stock market!

The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (1980), by Marilyn Ferguson, "The hand book of the New Age." (USA Today)
- now available on Archive.org.

Marilyn Ferguson was the first to use the biological concept of a "New Paradigm" in referring to stages of consciousness:
"A great shuddering, irrevocable shift is overtaking us.
It is not a new political, religious, or economic system. It is a new mind — a turnabout in consciousness in critical numbers of individuals, a network powerful enough to bring about radical change in our culture. This network, the Aquarian Conspiracy — has already enlisted the minds, hearts, and resources of some of our most advanced thinkers and steadily growing numbers from every corner of American society. This underground network is working to create a different kind of society based on a vastly enlarged concept of human potential." – Marilyn Ferguson

NOTE: The book's title led to some confusion, having to do with astrology only to the extent of drawing from the popular conception of the Age of Aquarius succeeding a dark Piscean age. Marilyn Ferguson used the word 'conspiracy' in its literal sense of 'breathing together', as one of her great influencers, the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, had done before her.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) American historian, playwright and social activist, in his multi-million bestseller, "A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present" (1980), chronicled the role of “open-air meetings” - public forums, rallies, marches, protests, ranging across electoral campaigns and labor strikes, to arts festivals, held in the parks, streets, squares, where thousands gathered to celebrate and freely express opinions - representing movements across diverse cultural, social and political character throughout U.S. history.

Zinn Education Project:
Time Periods -
Colonization: 1492 - 1764,
Revolution & Constitution: 1765 - 1799,
Early 19th Century: 1800 - 1849,
Civil War Era: 1850 - 1864,
Reconstruction Period: 1865 - 1876,
Industrial Revolution: 1877 - 1899,
Turn of the Century: 1900 - 1909,
World War I: 1910 - 1919,
Prosperity, Depression, & World War II: 1920 - 1944,
Cold War: 1945 - 1960,
People’s Movement: 1961 - 1974,
Post-Civil Rights Era: 1975 - 2000, 2001 -
Present, All US History via the 2015 edition.

"Triple bottom line" aka 3BL
The concept of the "triple bottom line" aka 3BL emerged in the mid-90s, inspired by the environment movement and as a possible antidote to the 1987-1993 real estate and banking "boom-bust cycle". The aim was to help establish clear guidelines in dealing with social, ecological and financial concerns.
"Greed is good!" from the 1987 film, Wall Street, brought home the fact that corporate executives must focus on the 'single bottom line' or be fired, because Shareholders come first - predominantly ‘ordinary citizens’ who invested in the stock market without understanding the consequences of their influence.

Withdrawal as a survival strategy

• Palliatives for cultural withdrawal
• Addiction and consumerism
• Alienation and division
• Interpretation and perception is everything.

Concepts such as Post Modernism, Consumerism, and Globalization defined cultural meanings as numerous and fragmented, rather than an homogenous construct (e.g. the American culture or the European culture). Consumer culture was viewed as a social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through market.
– Arnould, E. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research, Journal of Consumer Research

Everyone recognises the central role of land in economics and we all cherish our spiritual connection to 'the land'.

Who Rules America?
An Investment Manager Breaks Down the Economic Top 1%, and explains how the 0.1% Control Political and Legislative Processes.

Q: Does social science research have anything useful to say about making progressive social change more effective?
A: Yes, it does, but few if any people pay much attention ...

Professor of psychology & sociology G. William Domhoff, University of California at Santa Cruz, author of best-selling sociology textbook, Who Rules America? (1967), now in its 7th edition, with a new subtitle,"Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich" (McGraw-Hill, 2013), documents the dangerous concentration of power and wealth in the American upper class: "reflects the success of the wealthy few in defeating all of their rivals (e.g., organized labor, liberals, environmentalists) over the course of the past 35 years."

John Taylor Gatto
What Is An Education?
A reflection on the significance of schools and schoolteaching, the difference between networks and communities

On Inequality
The truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality. Across whole populations, rates of mental illness are five times higher in the most unequal compared to the least unequal societies. Similarly, in more unequal societies people are five times as likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be clinically obese, and murder rates may be many times higher. The reason why these differences are so big is, quite simply, because the effects of inequality are not confined just to the least well-off: instead they affect the vast majority of the population. – Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009)

Excerpts
There is a hunger for the evidence we present - as if, under the surface, the world was full of closet egalitarians. ... The general public is averse to the high levels of inequality in very unequal countries. In a random sample of more than 5,500 Americans, researchers from Duke and Harvard Universities investigated views of the distribution of wealth (rather than income) in society. People were shown three pie charts illustrating three different distributions of wealth - one in which each fifth of the population got the same, another that showed (unlabelled) the distribution of wealth in the United States and another (also unlabelled) based on the distribution in Sweden.

Ninety-two per cent said they would prefer to live in a society with the Swedish distribution.
...
We show no fewer than five sets of data illustrating that, whether you classify people by education, social class or income, people in each category are healthier (or have higher literacy scores) if they are in a more equal society than people in the same category of income, education or class in a less equal society.

Conclusion:
Greater equality usually makes most difference to the least well off, but still produces some benefits for the well off. ... higher levels of income inequality damage the social fabric that contributes so much to healthy societies.



A Declaration of Professional Conscience for Teachers (pdf) by Kenneth S. Goodman 1990
Excerpt:
There is a time in the historic development of every human institution when it reaches a critical crossroad. Institutions, like people, cannot stand still; they must always change but the changes aren't always for the better. Human institutions are composed of people. Sometimes the people within the institutions feel powerless to influence the directions of institutional change. They feel they are swept along by a force beyond anyone. Yet people within institutions can determine the directions of change if they examine their convictions and take a principled stand. ...

There are strong pressures today to dehumanize, to depersonalize, to industrialize our schools. In the name of cost effectiveness, of efficiency, of system, of accountability, of minimal competency, of a return to the basics, schools are being turned into sterile, hostile institutions at war with the young people they are intended to serve. As teachers we hereby declare ourselves to be in opposition to the industrialization of our schools. We pledge ourselves to become advocates on behalf of our students. >>> more



Friends, it’s worse today.
Our voices are not valued, our insights and experience are dismissed, and our ability to teach is increasingly restricted by testing and paperwork. ... I chose to teach so I could make a difference…. I also believed that by modeling being a lifelong learner I could empower my students to take control of their own learning as a necessary step toward taking control of their lives. I believe that my teaching is a political act; it’s my attempt to empower those students who come through my classroom, empower them to move off the sidelines and become engaged, however they see fit and on whichever sides of issues they choose.
– Kenneth Bernstein, winner of the The Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award, 2009-2010.

"The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism." – Dr. Martin Luther King

Fruit Flies in a Bottle
by Earnist Partridge, Ph.D.
Excerpt:
Place a few fruit flies in a bottle with a layer of honey at the bottom, and they will quickly multiply to an enormous number, and then, just as quickly, die off to the very last, poisoned by their wastes. Similarly, add a few yeast cells to grape juice, seal the bottle, and the cells will consume the sugar and turn it into alcohol. When the alcohol rises to 12.5% it will kill off all the yeast, and the wine will be ready for the table.

Fruit flies and yeast in a bottle are embarked upon suicidal endeavors. They can’t help it. They don’t know any better, lacking the cognitive equipment to “know” anything at all.

Human beings, we are told, are different. Humans can utilize their accumulated knowledge, evaluate evidence and apply reason, and with these skills and accomplishments they can imagine alternative futures and choose among them to their advantage.

Human beings have these capacities. But history teaches us that all too often, human beings simply refuse to apply them and, like the mindless fruit flies, march blindly into oblivion. For example: >>>more

Intuition, Incubation, and Insight:
Implicit Cognition in Problem Solving.
by Jennifer Dorfman, Victor A. Shames and John F. Kihlstrom
Oxford University press (1995)
Note: An edited version of this paper appeared in G. Underwood (Ed.), Implicit Cognition (Oxford Uni. Press, 1996).
Excerpt:
A number of isolated phenomena that usually make up the potpourri of topics grouped under thinking, such as functional fixity, the Einstellung effect, insight, incubation, and so on, must surely be included within the scope of a comprehensive theory. No extensive reanalysis of these phenomena from an information processing viewpoint has been carried out, but they speak to the same basic phenomena, so should yield to such an explanation (Newell & Simon, 1973, pp. 871-872).

Introspective analyses of human problem solving have often focused on the phenomena of intuition, incubation, and insight. The thinker senses that a problem is soluble (and perhaps what direction the solution will take), but fails to solve it on his or her first attempt; later, after a period in which he or she has been occupied with other concerns (or, perhaps, with nothing at all), the solution to the problem emerges full-blown into conscious awareness. These phenomena, which have long intrigued observers of problem solving, have also long eluded scientific analysis -- in part because they seem to implicate unconscious processes. The Gestalt psychologists, of course, featured insight in their theories of thinking and problem solving, but interest in intuition, incubation, and insight, among other mentalistic phenomena, declined during the dominance of behaviorism.

With the advent of the cognitive revolution in the 1960s, psychologists returned their attention to thinking, so that a large literature has developed on problems of categorization, reasoning, and judgment as well as problem solving per se. While our understanding of these aspects of thinking has advanced considerably over the past 35 years, most of this research has focused on the subject's performance on various problem-solving tasks, rather than the subject's experience during problem solving. In this chapter, we wish to revive a concern with problem-solving experience, in particular the experiences of intuition and incubation leading to insight, and to argue that recent work on implicit memory provides a model for examining the role of unconscious processes during problem solving. >>> more

"At the sound of the bell now in the silent night. I wake from my dream in this dream world of ours. Gazing at the reflection of the moon in a clear pool. I see beyond my form. My real form. The song of birds. The voices of insects, are all means of conveying truth to the mind..."
- Alan Watts Organisation

Note: There are almost 6,500 spoken languages in the world today, of which approximately 2,000 have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

Part 6
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The GOOD news!

The Empathic Civilisation
An RSA animation: The Royal Society for the Arts is a 258 year-old British charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas.
Introduction: In recent times there have been very interesting developments in evolutionary biology and neuro-cognitive science, which are challenging long-held beliefs about human nature and history, and in particular, the institutions we have created based on those assumptions: Educational, business practices, governing institutions...
Excerpt:

We are apparently soft-wired – some of the primates – all humans… Soft-wired with mirror neurones so that if I'm observing you, your anger, your frustration, your sense of rejection, your joy, what ever it is, I can feel what you are doing, the same neurones will light up in me as I'm having that experience myself. …we take this for granted, but we're actually soft-wired to experience another's plight as if we're experiencing it ourselves. Mirror neurones are just the beginning of a whole range of research going on in neuro-psychology and brain research and child development that suggest that we are actually soft-wired not for aggression, violence and self interest and utilitarianism. That we are actually soft-wired for sociability, attachment, as John Bowlby might have said, affection, companionship, and that the first drive is actually the drive to belong. It's an empathic drive. (1:50)

The Corporate Psychopaths
Featured article in the Independent.co.uk, 29 December 2011, Beware corporate psychopaths – they are still occupying positions of power by Brian Basham, veteran City PR man, entrepreneur and journalist.

EXCERPT:
In attempting to understand the complexities of what went wrong in the years leading to 2008, I've developed a rule: "In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top." And there are none who are less principled than corporate psychopaths.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics, "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R. Boddy identifies psychopaths. "They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy. [...] Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'. ...

In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies." ... He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."... As Mr Boddy warns: "The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning." >>> more

Paranoia of the Plutocrats
by Paul Krugman, New York Times
Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality. >>> more

A Revolutionary Decision-Making Process
by C.T. Lawrence Butler
Process is the key to revolutionary change. This is not a new message. Visionaries have long pointed to this but it is a hard lesson to learn. As recently as the 70s, feminists clearly defined the lack of an alternative process for decision making and group interaction as the single most important obstacle in the way of real change, both within progressive organizations and for society at large. ... There are but a few models in our society which offer an alternative. >>> more

The Great Isolation of the 1%
The 1 Percent State of Mind by Imara Jones
Chronic racial and gender imbalances amongst the super-rich only add to their detachment from the world around them. "the top 1 percent has captured nine out of 10 dollars of all the wealth added to the economy since 2000... they’ve successfully constructed a society that defers, supports and caters to those that have the most even as they pathologically convince themselves otherwise." >>> more