A Book that Changed My Life
Changing Images of Man, higher guidance, and the possibility of a mass breakthrough.
The course of my life has several times been changed by books I've encountered. Usually, this change happens as the models I use to make sense of the world are expanded or revised in light of new information. But sometimes, the nature of this change is more mysterious. When I read a book called Changing Images of Man in my twenties, it put me on a whole new path.
Overtly, this book proved that the powers that be have known about many of our most pressing problems and how to solve them for half a century. This was a startling revelation, because it suggested that society's problems weren't the result of ignorance. Rather, they arose largely from the limited identities assigned to us by the control regime. By seeing ourselves in economic rather than ecological terms, and by emphasizing our competitive tendencies over our cooperative natures, we manufactured crisis after crisis while making real solutions inaccessible.
Changing Images
In 1968, the US Office of Education partnered with The Stanford Research Institute (which later became SRI International) to study social problems and their policy implications. SRI developed a new investigative methodology to do this, gathered a team of accredited scholars, and proceeded to describe fifty different plausible alternative future histories, which it deemed 'scenarios.' It became immediately clear that very few of these scenarios could be considered at all desirable, and that pretty much every aspect of industrialized society would have to change for any of the desirable futures to be considered possible.
As other efforts of the times had come to similar conclusions, such problematic findings appeared credible in high level academic and policy circles. Sadly, these findings did not appear actionable, because they implied the need to develop and adopt some fundamentally different ways of doing things. As a result, the US Office of Education began pursuing other, less daunting challenges, and SRI created its own Center for the Study of Social Policy to continue investigating desirable future histories and how to bring these about. This new SRI center obtained funding from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation to study and chart what changes in western society's underlying conceptual premises would lead to a desirable future.
SRI released the report The Societal Consequences of Changing Images of Man in 1974. It took nearly a decade to find a company willing to risk publishing this material, in part because it didn't fit within standard marketing categories. In 1982, with its title shortened to Changing Images of Man, an expanded version of this work was commercially released by Pergammon Press. This publication looked at how a vast array of societal challenges were playing out over time, and how the future might consequently unfold.
When all was said and done, this book described a future societal trajectory that very closely resembles the past several decades. It accurately anticipated some of the significant challenges our society now faces, and presented some strategic suggestions for meeting these challenges. The work itself considers the long term trending of environmental, security, energy, social, food, and other problems converging into a mega crisis. This crisis, which is now underway, was viewed as the natural result of human tendencies arising from the conceptual basis and mythic stories that we use to describe ourselves and each other to ourselves and each other. This conceptual basis, and these stories, were seen to significantly define society's interactions with itself and the physical environment on which it depends.
CIM's conclusions describe three plausible outcomes to society's dilemma between industrial growth and finite global resource limits. Two of these outcomes are the result of a 'technological extrapolationist' future leading to an either/or choice between 'friendly fascism' and 'catastrophe.' The third plausible outcome involves developing an 'evolutionary transformationalist' image of man, which would promote the kinds of decisions that might lead to a more viable society. This 'evolutionary transformationalist' image of man would:
Convey a holistic sense of perspective or understanding of life;
Entail an ecological ethic, emphasizing the total community of life-in-nature and the oneness of the human race;
Entail a self-realization ethic, placing the highest value on development of selfhood and declaring that an appropriate function of all social institutions is the fostering of human development;
Be multi-leveled, multi-faceted, and integrative, accommodating various culture and personality types;
Involve balancing and coordination of satisfactions along many dimensions rather than the maximizing of concerns along one narrowly defined dimension (e.g. economic); and
Be experimental, open-ended, and evolutionary.
Over time, CIM became fodder for conspiracy theorists who imagined the text to be part of a global mind control conspiracy. Here's a quote from a random blog post promoting this idea:
Of course, this was well understood by the assembled scientists at SRI. Interestingly, the shaping of thought in order to steer society in a predetermined direction is the very definition of brainwashing. The only thing left for SRI to decide was which of the many techniques proposed would be implemented? What behaviour modification strategies would prove most effective in the establishment of a more docile, benevolent society?
In my opinion, while the work did have a clear social engineering purpose, its whole point was to avoid both friendly fascism and catastrophe. Had more of its ideas been incorporated into the US policy-planning machine by the turn of the century, society today would look very different, and many of the crises we now face would be smaller or nonexistent. The world would be a more egalitarian and less dystopian place.
Meeting the Project Director
Around 2010, I wanted to incorporate some material from CIM into an early draft of my book Fixing Broken Robots, but I didn't want to do this improperly with regard to copyright, attribution, etc. Oliver Markley, Ph.D. was listed in CIM as the project director, so I found him online and sent him an email. To my surprise, he responded and a correspondence developed.
Over time, Oliver became a dear friend and a mentor who expanded my horizons. We read each other's work and he cited me in a couple of papers. We'd talk about future studies or systems theory and Oliver would have resources ready to fill in the knowledge gaps left by my autodidactic education. Sometimes, our conversations veered into stranger territory.
A subject like remote viewing would come up, I'd mention Puthoff and Targ and he'd introduce me to Ingo Swann. Discussing higher consciousness, we might start with Jane Roberts and end up at the Monroe Institute. I've learned more about human potential from Oliver than I could've learned anywhere else. He also highlighted the value of tapping into higher guidance.
Higher Guidance
Every religious tradition offers its own brand of higher guidance. There are holy books, prophets, and practices designed to put followers in touch with this guidance. Oftentimes, there are priests available to translate divine mysteries into more everyday terms. While the influence of religions in society is waning, the need for higher guidance has never been greater.
In the secular world, twelve step groups reference a higher power without defining that power. Some members of these groups treat God as an acronym standing for Good Orderly Direction. Some regard other people as their higher power. Both conceptualizations seem to work.
Personally, I like to think of this guidance in terms of the conscious self and the whole self. The idea isn't to make the whole self conscious, but rather to establish a dialog between the selves. This dialog is higher guidance useful for bringing the conscious and the unconscious into closer alignment. Listening to this guidance has many benefits, but mostly it just makes it easier to get out of my own way.
There are a wide variety of approaches to higher guidance in the New Age movement. Appeals to deities or angels or the planet are common. So are various kinds of chants, prayers, and meditations. Some formulas come from history while others grew out of modern psychology. These formulas seem to work great for some people and not as well for others.
Breakthrough
Most of the time I think of higher guidance as small truths in everyday contexts. But some forms of higher guidance are much more pronounced, producing a breakthrough or paradigm shift. These breakthrough moments are of special interest for a couple of reasons. They have incredible healing potential for individuals. And society will continue becoming more and more dystopian until enough people begin demonstrating radically different values, implying the need for some kind of breakthrough on a massive scale.
Psychedelic medicine can make breakthrough moments more accessible. Medically, psychedelics show great promise for conditions like PTSD and treatment resistant depression. But they are highly individualized, making them unlikely vehicles for a mass breakthrough. A more promising path to such a breakthrough is UFO disclosure. If a flying saucer landed on the White House lawn or something similar happened, it might expand our minds in ways we can't imagine.
Of course, a mass breakthrough needn't be spectacular. It could overtake us organically as a byproduct of improvements in how we communicate with each other. Psychologist Kirk Schneider brings people together across ideological divides, in part by encouraging the embrace of awe. Here's some of what he has to say about that: "As a result of the dialogue groups, participants feel less angry and more comfortable with one another; less estranged from and more understood by one another; and less fearful of and more curious about one another."
For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.