James Robertson

POWER
MONEY&SEX
Towards a New Social Balance
IDEAS IN PROGRESS
This is a series of working papers dealing with the
alternativesto industrial society. In short essays
specialists make availabletheir ideas to the general public
who are invited to participate critically in the process of
finding a solution to controversial and pressing
contemporary problems.

ENERGY AND EQUITY

Ivan Illich
Arguing that speed is a tool of political manipulative
power, Illich advocates a limit to the use of transport

PROFIT OR PEOPLE?
The New Social Role of Money
James Robertson
A radical approach to growth economicsthat proposes
a new money theory

LIVING ON THE SUN

Harnessing Renewable Energy for an
Equitable Society
Godfrey Boyle
How weshould use the obvious and readily accessible
source of life itself—the sun, wind, water and
vegetation

MEDICAL NEMESIS
The Expropriation of Health
Ivan Illich
An attack on the myths and practices of the medical
profession and health services

PLANNING OR PREVENTION ?
The New Face of'Family Planning'
Peter Diggory and John McEwan
An objective and scientific paper by two eminent
doctors that deals with such controversial topics
as abortion, contraception and sterilization

HOUSING BY PEOPLE
Towards Autonomy In Building Environments
John F. C. Turner
The important thing about housing is not what it is
but what it does, who provides and who decides
Illustrated

THE HOSPITALIZATION OF SPACE

Roslyn Lindheim
An examination of how contemporary hospital
architecture is destructive of health maintenance and
how this can be remedied

Cover design byJohn Callings

 About the Series

IDEAS IN PROGRESS is a commercially published series of

working papers dealing with alternatives to industrial society.
It is our belief that the ills and frustrations which have over
taken mankind are not merely due to industrial civilization's
inadequate planning and faulty execution, but are caused by
fundamental errors in our basic thinking about goals. This
series is designed to question and rethink the underlying con
cepts of many of our institutions and to propose alternatives.
Unless this is done soon society will undoubtedly create even
greater injustices and inequalities than at present. It is to cor
rect this trend that authors are invited to submit short texts of
work in progress of interest not only to their colleagues but also
to the general public. The series fosters direct contact between
the author and the reader. It provides the author with the op
portunity to give wide circulation to his draft while he is still
developing an idea. It offers the reader an opportunity to par
ticipate critically in shaping this idea before it has taken on a
definitive form.

Future editions of a paper may include the author's revisions

and critical reactions from the public. Readers are invited to
write directly to the author of the present volume at the follow
ing address: James Robertson, 7 St Ann's Villas, London W11
4RU, England.

THE PUBLISHERS
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Robertson was born in Yorkshire in 1928. He was

educated in Yorkshire and Scotland, and at Oxford University.
After two years in the Army and one year in the Sudan, he
joined the Colonial Office as an administrative civil servant. In
1960 he accompanied Mr Harold Macmillan, then Prime
Minister, on the 'wind of change' tour of Africa. From 1960 to
1963 he worked in the Cabinet Office as private secretary to
the Head of the Civil Service and secretary of the Cabinet,
Lord Normanbrook. He then spent two years in the Ministry
of Defence.
Robertson left Whitehall in 1965 to become a consultant in
computer systems analysis and management science. In 1968
he set up the Inter-Bank Research Organization (IBRO), and
remained its first director until 1973.
In 1966 Robertson submitted an influential memorandum
to the FuUon Committee on the Civil Service. In 1968/69 he
was appointed to advise the Procedure Committee of the
House of Commons about parliamentary control of public ex
penditure and taxation. In 1971 his book was published on the
'Reform of British Central Government'. In 1972 he led the
IBRO team that reported on 'London's Future as an Inter
national Financial Centre'.
James Robertson's previous contribution to the Ideas in
Progress series was Profit Or People?, published in 1974.
POWER, MONEY AND SEX
 By the same author

REFORM OF BRITISH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

PROFIT OR PEOPLE? THE NEW SOCIAL ROLE OF
MONEY
 IDEAS IN PROGRESS

POWER
MONEY & SEX

Towards A New Social Balance

James Robertson

MARION BOYARS • LONDON

 A MARION BOYARS BOOK
distributed by Calder & Boyars Ltd
18 Brewer Street, London WIR 4AS

First published in Great Britain in 1976 by

Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
18 Brewer Street, London WIR 4AS

© James Robertson 1976

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ISBN 0 7145 2554 5 Cased edition

ISBN 0 7145 2555 3 Paperback edition

Any paperback edition of this book whether published simultaneously with, or

subsequent to, the cased edition is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of,
without the publishers' consent, in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or

transmitted, in any form or by any hieans, electronic, mechanical, photocopy
ing, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purposes of review,
without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and publisher.

Typeset by Input Typesetting Ltd. London SEl

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by W & J Mackay Limited, Chatham, Kent
by photo litho
 CONTENTS

•
page
Foreword 11
1. Dismantling the Nation State 22
2. Unscrambling the Centralized Economy 36
3. Exorcizing the Institutional Imperative 65
4. Overriding the Inherited Program 89
5. Phasing Out the Patriarchal Society 119
6. Focussing On the Future 140
Bibliography 147
'Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their
friends, or to the world, are inspired by hope and sustain
ed by joy: they see in imagination the things that might
be and the way in which they £ire to be brought into ex
istence. In their private relations they are not pre-oc-
cupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection
and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving
affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of
itself without their seeking. In their work they are not
haunted by jealousy of competitors, but are concerned
with the actual matter that has to be done. In politics
they do not spend time and passion defending unjust
privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making
the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of con
flict between rival greeds, and more full of human beings
whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by op
pression. '

Bertrand Russell.
 FOREWORD

ONEor two friends have raised an eyebrow at the

title of this book. It will worry some readers. So a
word of explanation may help.
Systems of political power, economic wealth, and sex
ual relations can all be based on an ethic of domination
and possession, or on an ethic of co-operation and shared
humanity. In every society these systems are closely in
tertwined. Together they provide the means by which a
society shapes its own future. They are closely related to
ideas like sovereignty and ownership, freedom and love.
To illustrate this close connection between power,
money and sex - and its crucial importance to the future
of the human species - I have quoted extensively from a
wide range of thinkers and authors. I hope that readers
who are sceptical about the connection or its importance
will be prepared to suspend judgement and keep an open
mind until they have finished the book.
In their personal lives many people are hung up about
power, about money and about sex. The organized struc
ture of modern society suffers similarly. These hang-ups
pose a threat to the survival of the human species. How
can we liberate ourselves from them?
Social and economic problems combine to create in a
sick society the equivalent of psychosomatic illness in in
dividuals. The cure is not of the kind that can be ad
ministered clinically by professional teachers and doctors
11
standing apart. It must come about by processes of
learning and healing from within. Effective reform in the
political, social and economic spheres is a process of
learning and self-healing, collectively experienced. It
may be painful. There are old structures to be broken
down, before we can break through to a more balanced
and more sustainable way of life.
The drive to seize the heights of power and the urge to
make a great deal of money are distinguishing features of
a male-dominated society. So is the striving for intellec
tual and technical mastery, the desire to be in the know,
the syndrome that special knowledge brings special
power and wealth. These have been among the main
forces motivating the human race throughout recorded
history, but especially in the western world since the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The rise of
nationalism, capitalism and big science all in their
different ways gave free rein to masculine ambition and
aggrandizement, and made them respectable.
There have been many changes, often revolutionary, in
the last four hundred years. But the whole era of human
history that began with the Renaissance and the Refor
mation is now coming to an'end. Its methods of deciding
how power and wealth should be distributed between
different members and different sections of society are
breaking down. Similarly, the conventional pattern of
relations between the so-called developing and developed
nations, between the primary producing countries and
the industrialized countries, between rich and poor, is
also breaking down; previously prevailing methods of
deciding how power and wealth should be distributed
among the peoples of the world prevail no longer. We are
beginning to recognize that the finite natural resources of
our planet set limits to material growth and expansion;
and that this makes the national and international
problems of sharing power and wealth even more acute
12
and urgent. The pressures of modern societies are
already causing more and more violence, crime, mental
ill-health, and psychosomatic disease. The mounting ac
cumulation of specialized intellectual knowledge and in
stitutionalized activity in every conceivable field of en
quiry and endeavour is becoming a crushing burden on
the human mind and spirit. In all these spheres we need
to achieve a new balance, before escalating dis
equilibrium leads to complete collapse. Mankind is at a
turning point.
The publication of Profit Or People?, as an earlier con
tribution to this series, put me in touch with many new
people who are involved in many different ways in shap
ing the future. They include some who are altering their
personal lifestyles and encouraging their families and
friends to do the same, for example, by living in smaller,
more self-sufficient communities closer to the land. They
include scientists and engineers who are developing new
forms of technology - low impact, intermediate, ap
propriate, conservationist, alternative, energy-saving -
designed to give us the advantages of scientific progress
without the crippling side effects of capital-intensive
technology, pollution and waste. There are others who
are working to develop an ethos and practice of self-help
in fields such as housing, education and health, as an
alternative to ever-increasing reliance on large and
remote institutions. Other activists are working inside
today's established institutions to transform the manage
ment style and corporate ethic prevailing in government,
business, science and the public services, so that these
organizations can live up to a new awareness of their
social responsibilities. Others again are working to
modernize the formal structure of our social institutions,
by redefining the functions, rights and responsibilities of
the various participants in government, the economy,
and public life. Others are especially concerned with the
13
developing role of women in society. Yet others feel that
party politics is the critical area, and are seeking a
realignment of traditional political forces and a restruc
turing of political thinking and political debate. Yet
again there are those who give pride of place to new
religious and cosmological ideas about man's place in the
world and the universe, feeling that all other changes will
follow from new intellectual and ideological perspectives
of that kind.
For all of us who are working at these new frontiers
there is a natural tendency to feel that our own particular
approach is the one that matters most. When I wrote
Profit Or People? I still felt that the key to a better future
would be found to lie in the transformation of our ex
isting political, economic and social institutions, and that
other approaches to the problems of mankind were in
some sense less central. To that extent my earlier ideas
reflected my previous working experience in the fields of
government, business and finance. Since then the
emphasis has shifted. It now seems to me that all these
areas of change - the technical, the institutional, the
political, the ideological, the personal, the ethical, the
ecological - are equally important. Moreover, the various
different strands of thinking and activity in these areas
are now beginning to converge in support of one another.
Common to them all is the idea of balance or harmony -
a balance in the world of nature, harmony between peo
ple and nature, harmony between different groups of
people and between one person and another, balance
within the individual mind and spirit, and harmony
between mind and body.
Thus, in developing the idea here that systems of
government and money are instruments of social self
control which ought to function as balancing
mechanisms to enable the billions of people in the world
to live in harmony with one another, my primary concern
14
is still with the social dynamics of an equilibrium world.
But I see more clearly than I did that, if people are to live
in harmony with one another, they must also live in har
mony with the planet that is their home, and in harmony
with themselves. In thinking about the social dynamics of
an equilibrium world we also have to think about the
eco-dynamics of spaceship Earth and the psycho-dynamics of
sane and healthy individuals. Conservationists,
ecologists and scientists who are working to achieve
balance between man and nature; teachers, healers and
psychologists who are helping man to live in harmony
with himself and his fellows; and those who are concern
ed, as others of us are, to replace the pursuit of economic
growth by self-sustaining social and economic
equilibrium: we all are working as co-partners to create a
future in which mankind will be better able to survive
and prosper. We all, in our different ways, are witnesses
to Erich Fromm's perception in TheSane Society that 'the
necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions
in his existence, to find ever higher forms of unity with
nature, his fellow man and himself, is the source of all
psychic forces which motivate man, of all his passions,
affects and anxieties.'
There is another, more directly compelling, reason
why my perspective has broadened. The earlier argu
ment led to the conclusion, which I should perhaps have
stated more explicitly, that a highly institutionalized
society cannot reform itself by institutional processes
from within. The only people in the system who could
take the initiatives necessary to change it fundamentally
are themselves its prisoners. External factors will be
needed to precipitate the required mutation. In thinking
further what these external factors might be, I was driven
to conclude that, in one way or another, they would have
to consist of changes in the hearts and minds of people.
The next question was, how might such changes come
15
about? Might women bring an altogether new outlook to
the world of money and government in the West? Might
there be interior capabilities in human beings which -
hitherto thought of as supernatural or paranormal, and
therefore untrained and undeveloped - could provide a
much needed counterweight to the exterior, alienating
forces of technology by which men have hitherto sought
to amplify their powers?
I do not claim that these questions are particularly
new. Nor do I claim that they are explored very deeply or
developed very fully here. Certainly, no cut-and-dried
answers to them will be given. However, the beginning of
wisdom is to ask these questions, and to see them as part
of the same universe of discourse as questions about the
future structure of government and business, nationally
and internationally. One of the most damaging
weaknesses of western societies today is the fragmenta
tion of our perception and understanding.
A few signposts to what follows may be helpful. We
take as our starting point what R. H. Tawney, in Equali
ty, called 'the collapse of two great structures of thought
and government, which for long held men's allegiance
but which have now broken down. The first is the system
of independent national states, each claiming full
sovereignty as against every other. The second is an
economic system which takes as its premise that every
group and individual shall be free to grab what they can
get and hold what they can grab'. Our first task,
therefore, is to consider how political power could be
redistributed in a more balanced way than at present,
between the various levels of government in the world,
ranging from the United Nations at the top to the local
council at the grass roots; and how, correspondingly,
economic power could be redistributed in a balanced
structure whose constituent parts will remain in
equilibrium with one another.
16
 Without laying down a detailed blueprint, then, the
first two chapters outline a political and economic struc
ture to replace the nation state as it is dismantled, and
the centralized, late capitalist economy as it is un
scrambled. My aim in those two chapters is to take up
the ideas put forward in Profit Or People? and, using them
as a starting point, to indicate the general direction to
follow if we are to transform the institutions of govern
ment, law and money into a social framework for balanc
ed, organic activity in place of mindless, competitive,
cancerous and ultimately suicidal growth. This accords
with the global perspective outlined by Mesarovic and
Pestel in Mankind At The Turning Point, when they say
that 'were mankind to embark on a path of organic
growth, the world would emerge as a system of in
terdependent and harmonious parts, each making its
own unique contribution'; and that we need to create a
sustainable balance between interdependent world
regions, which will lead to 'global harmony - that is, to
mankind's growth as an 'organic entity' from its present
barely embryonic state.' The purpose of these two
chapters about government and the economy is to
suggest the kind of institutional transformation that must
form part of Mesarovic's and Pestel's 'eventual transition
into sustainable material and spiritual development of
humanity.'
However, there is a central feature of modern societies
that appears to frustrate all hope of any institutional
transformation of this kind. This is the institutional im
perative itself - the compulsion that insists on size, on
growth for growth's sake. There are ample reasons for
fearing that the process of institutionalization has now
acquired a built-in momentum of its own, that it points
us towards ultimate collapse, and that its nature
precludes the possibility of its own reversal before
collapse occurs. We can make constructive suggestions
17
bearing directly on the need for institutional reform, and
a number of such suggestions are put forward in Chapter
3. But measures of that kind cannot by themselves be
enough. More will be needed, if we are to exorcize the in
stitutional imperative before it is too late.
The next step, therefore, is to recognize that the in
stitutional imperative derives directly from the program*
which governs the behaviour of people in human societies
today. Mankind has inherited this program from the
past, by a process of genetic and cultural evolution in
which the key areas of power, money and sex have been
closely intertwined. By a kind of tragic irony, the in
herited program now conflicts with the type of behaviour
needed if the human race is to achieve survival as a
species in the environment which (with the help of the in
herited program) it has created for itself. We shall be
able to transcend this conflict only if we use our growing
understanding of genetic and cultural evolution to
override the inherited program. In particular, we shall
have to use our growing understanding of the way that
human behaviour and ideas have evolved and may be ex
pected to evolve further in the closely related areas of
power, money and sex.
This leads us to take a closer look at the complex
patterns of human behaviour and thought which focus on
power, money and sex, and to examine the possible scope
for redefining such concepts as power and wealth. In
Chapter 41 suggest that out of the political and economic
bureaucratization of modern society there could,
paradoxically, emerge new concepts of power and
wealth, as aspects of the capacity for self-realization.
In Chapter 5 I consider whether the increasing par
ticipation of women in activities that have hitherto been
largely the preserve of men might possibly encourage
* A programrefers to a set of behavioural instructions (e.g. a computer
program), as distinct from a programme meaning a series of events.

18
these new concepts of power and wealth to take root. I
suggest that it could do, provided that women's par
ticipation aims at bringing the man-made world into a
saner and healthier balance, not simply at giving women
a fairer chance to compete in the man-made world on
equal terms with men. The liberation of women from the
traditional shackles of the women's world is now being
accompanied by a corresponding liberation of men from
their very different prison on the other side of the great
divide. Fundamental changes in sex roles are already
taking place; the sexes are converging; the need to es
tablish a new balance between them is now beyond
doubt; and this new balance could be one facet of a
radical transformation of our inherited attitudes to
power and wealth.
Near the begininning I said that many of us who have
been working at these new frontiers separately and in our
own ways are now converging in support of one another.
In the concluding chapter I return to the theme of con
vergence, but in a more general way. Convergence is ap
parent everywhere in the world today. Our very planet.
Earth, is converging upon itself to become a single global
village. Man is converging with Nature once again.
Governors are converging with governed. Masculine is
converging with feminine, logic with emotion, reason
with intuition, science with religion. West with East. The
old divisions and demarcations are disappearing. The
old mould is breaking. As John Donne said nearly four
hundred years ago about the last such break-up of an
epoch, ' "Tis all in pieces, all cohesion gone." ' No
wonder so many people today see nothing but confusion
and disaster. The old order is changing and the outline of
the new order is not yet clear.
If convergence is one of the main features of the crisis
now facing mankind, it is also the key to the solution.
The need now is to bring these processes of convergence
19
into focus. In that way, rather than by attempting to lay
down detailed blueprints of the future, we can bring our
problems into a common perspective and thus construct
a shared basis for truly creative action. Especially, as we
are concerned with ideas in progress let us recognize the
scope for promoting convergence in the intellectual and
institutional spheres, where immense forces of moral
energy could be released by imploding - as in nuclear fu
sion - today's serially proliferating structures of
specialism. This is the way to trigger off the mutations
which will precipitate fundamental changes in attitudes
and institutions; and only through such changes shall we
be able to create a new balance - a new state of natural,
social and psychic equilibrium - on Earth, before the old
one collapses irretrievably. By deliberately focussing
today's converging trends upon the future, mankind may
be able to break through to a new and higher state of
conscious self-control and thereby to navigate the loom
ing crisis of survival.
During the writing of this book I have discussed these
ideas with many people in one context or another.
Among them have been the participants in a project on
the future legal and financial structure of business enter
prise, which has been sponsored by the Anglo-German
Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. They also
include students and colleagues at the London School of
Economics, and fellow participants in a series of Futures
Forums held in London in April 1975, with whom I have
talked about various aspects of study and planning for
the future. They include officers and members of the
Conservation Society with whom I worked on the
preparations for launching their 'Campaign For Sur
vival' in the latter part of 1975. They include a group of
people from whose discussions at Conway Hall in Lon
don stemmed the 'Turning Point' initiative launched
there towards the end of 1975. They also include a wide
20
range of other people who, in their various ways, are ex
ploring the contours of the 'new age' and 'alternative
society' of the future. I cannot mention many individuals
by name. But I would like to acknowledge particular
debts of gratitude to David Berry of the World Futures
Society, Colin Hutchinson of the Conservation Society,
and Peter Cadogan of the South Place Ethical Society,
for putting me in touch with so many people and ideas
that were in tune with my own thinking.
My wife, Anne, read the text in draft and suggested
many important improvements. Alison Pritchard worked
with me on Profit or People?; we have continued to work
together throughout the present book; and many of the
good things in it are due to her. Finally, I would like to
thank Marion Boyars for this further opportunity to con
tribute to Ideas In Progress, and once again for her shrewd
and sympathetic editorial suggestions. Neither she nor
any of the other people whose names I have mentioned is
in any way responsible for the faults and shortcomings
that it still contains.

21
 1. DISMANTLING THE NATION
STATE

SMALL is beautiful. Only one Earth. Those two phra

ses convey many of our thoughts and feelings today.
More and more of us are rebelling against big, remote
institutions; yet, at the same time, more and more of us
are recognizing a wider responsibility for the planet that
we share with billions of our fellow humans. We want
more personal scope to manage our own lives; but our
actions may help or harm people of other countries and
other generations, and we have to organize and control
ourselves accordingly. That is one aspect of the dilemma
facing mankind today, and there is no way of avoiding it.
We are searching for a new balance in the structures of
decision-making - a new balance of political power.
At this point some brief preliminary remarks are
necessary about power, and about what we mean when
we talk of power. One of the themes running through this
book is that power can take various forms; that different
people (and the same people in different circumstances
and at different times) have different ideas about power;
that our ideas about power evolve over the centuries,
much as our ideas about God, or nature, or justice or love
evolve; and that, as the long course of human history un
folds, new concepts of power may come to prevail
because they become more useful items in mankind's
survival kit.

22
 For example, we can think of power as the power to
destroy, to cripple, to dominate, to command, to
frighten, to obstruct, to compel servility and obedience
from other people - in other words, the power of some
people to impose themselves in a hostile and negative
way on their fellow men and women. In a more neutral
sense, having power can mean being in a position to
represent other people and to take decisions which will
affect their lives for good and ill - in other words, the
kind of power possessed by politicians or managers in
government or industry. Finally, power can also mean
the power to create, to heal, to lead, to teach, to en
courage, to help, to elicit respect and love from other peo
ple - in short, the power to contribute positively and con
structively to the lives of our fellows. The first kind of
power is based on personal strength and aggression,
often of a fairly primitive nature, physical or psy
chological. The second kind of power is based on the oc
cupation of particular positions and roles in the ordered
structure of organized society. The third kind of power is
based on personal creativity, on the possession and
development of interior capacities of mind and spirit and
personality from which there springs constructive and
liberating person-to-person contact and communication.
All these three kinds of power can be mingled in one
individual, as - to take a fairly recent example in British
history - in the person of Winston Churchill during the
second world war. But one of the suggestions I shall be
exploring in the later parts of this book is that, over the
course of centuries and millenia, the nature of power and
our concept of it is evolving from the first kind of power,
through the second, towards the third - from Achilles
and Genghis Khan, through Gladstone and Justinian,
towards Gandhi and Jesus Christ. And among the
hypotheses I shall be putting forward is that, while one
important aspect of the human task today is to con-
23
solidate and bring under control the second kind of
power, i.e. the power that resides in the decision struc
tures of organized society, another important aspect of
the task is consciously and deliberately to develop and
widely disseminate the third kind of power, i.e. the kind
which is based on the creative attributes of human per
sonality.
As an example of world-wide trends in the structures
of social decision-making at the present time. Figure 1 il
lustrates what has been happening in politics and the
economy in countries like Britain during the last fifty
years. The institutions of government, finance, industry
and the trade unions have all been getting bigger and
looming continually larger in our lives. More
nationalization has been accompanied by the growing
power of central government. Until quite recently there
has been a steady stream of mergers and takeovers
between big banks, and between big industrial com
panies. Trade unions too have been making much more
powerful political use of their growing size and weight.
Whether the government of the day has been of the right
or of the left - theoretically capitalist or theoretically
socialist - has made little difference. Politicians, civil ser
vants, industrialists, financiers and trade unionists have
drifted closer and closer over the years in the search for
economic growth, attempting together to manage the
economy and plan the future development of industry,
and to find ways of controlling prices, incomes and the
distribution of wealth. Meanwhile, Keynesian
economists and other adherents of the intellectual es
tablishment have propagated the view that solutions are
to be found centrally for problems of this kind. A host of
academics and commentators now broods over our af
fairs, pronounces continually upon them from a central
point of view, and casts its shadow over them from a
great height.
24
 Figure 1

CENTRALIZE

BIG Trade Unions, Government, Finance, Business

Corporate State

/N>
\
/
\
/
/ \
Socialism ICapitalisnTj
LEFT ^ A RIGHT
I
\
\
/
\ /
\ \/

^ n—r

SMALL Grass Roots Organizations

DECENTRALIZE
 In political terms, the old conflict between right and
left has developed into a scarcely concealed corporate
state. The result of general elections now makes only a
marginal difference in the power-sharing arrangements
between politicians, public servants, big industrialists,
top financiers and the leaders of the big trade unions.
This is true of countries like the United States, Germany
and France, as well as Britain. There may still be much
huffing and puffing between politicians of the left and
politicians of the right; in Britain there may still be
cliff-hanging pay talks at 10 Downing Street between the
CBI and the TUC which sometimes lead to strikes and
industrial disruption; and widely reported public
dog-fights may take place about proposals for further
nationalization. But, in spite of all this, the drift to cen
tralization proceeds inexorably. Meanwhile, the so-
called mixed economy - once the pride and joy of British
pragmatism and compromise - has turned into a
thorough-going muddle. The proper functions and
responsibilities of government, industry, finance and the
trade unions have become hopelessly confused. 'Crazy
mixed-up' would be a better description than 'mixed'. A
recent British writer, Neville Abraham, perceptively call
ed his book Big Business and Government - theNew Disorder.
Many people are now becoming aware that too much
centralization simply does not work. As Lionel Tiger and
Robin Fox put it in their book 'The Imperial Animal',
'we were not evolved to cope with organization on this
scale; it is almost literally inhuman.' Centralization is
coming to be seen as a blind alley, politically and
economically. As we reach what the American scientific
writer. Hazel Henderson, has called an 'Entropy State',
it is clear that we are coming to the end of that road. As
she says, the 'transaction costs' of getting anything done
are now so great that virtually nothing is done. Conges
tion in the corridors of power is bringing the traffic to a
26
standstill. Giantism, it now turns out, gives the shadow
and not the substance of power to those who lead the big
battalions. When they give the order, their troops do not
march. When they pull the levers of power, the
machinery does not respond. The channels are clogged.
The links are disconnected. Communications have
broken down. That kind of power is becoming a delu
sion.
The fact is that to agglomerate more and more func
tions of government in the same place, i.e. at the level of
the nation state, is contrary to both the principles 'small
is beautiful' and 'only one Earth'. It is obvious that local
and personal affairs cannot be sensibly managed by a
centralized government in a remote capital city, and that
global problems cannot be effectively tackled by in
dividual nation states. The forces that perpetuate and
continually strengthen the concentration of government
functions at the level of the nation state are thus perverse.
It is true that continually increasing centralization seems
to be inherent in modern society, since - if power is
already centralized - it is the centre that must take new
powers to put things right when they go wrong. This ex
plains the apparent compulsion to more and more cen
tralization, even when attempts are made to stop it from
time to time. But, as I shall argue later, this compulsion
is an aspect of the institutional imperative that stems
directly from the nature of the masculine mind. Because
men are not equipped to bear children or accustomed to
nurse them, they are more remote from nature's realities
than women are. In Erich Fromm's words, man is thus
'forced to develop his reason, to build up a man-made
world of ideas, principles and man-made things which
replace nature as a ground of existence and security.'
The trouble is that these man-made constructions, in
cluding the governments of nation states, then acquire a
life-force of their own, detached from the real-life tasks
27
that have to be carried out. This is one of the ways in
which the fantasies that control the minds and shape the
ambitions of men perpetuate the problems that men
think only they are qualified to tackle.
Are countries like Britain becoming ungovernable, as
is so often claimed? Would it not be nearer the mark to
say that their governing institutions, their governing
elites, and their governing assumptions have lost their
relevance? The credibility gap that now separates the
majority of people from the world of big government, big
business and economic punditry, simply reflects the fact
that people no longer take seriously the overgrown
schoolboy fantasies of the men in power, the men in the
money, and the men in the know.
In addition to the centralizing drift towards a cor
porate state, a grass roots backlash has been gathering
impetus, as Figure 1shows. On the right there are the free
enterprise economists, the small business lobby, the
rebels against taxes and rates, and the self-employed. On
the left there is the workers' control movement and grow
ing pressure for industrial democracy on the shop floor.
Scottish, Welsh and Ulster nationalism has been getting
stronger. Whatever people may have thought about
Britain's future relations with Europe from a political
point of view, the idea that they were being railroaded
into Europe by the business and political elites caused
widespread resentment. Local action groups, consumer
groups, residents' and conservationists' associations, and
a whole host of 'alternative' pressure groups have been
gathering strength. Admittedly the 'small is beautiful'
movement has been very fragmented so far, compared
with the centralized mass of the new corporate state. But
that is only to be expected. As Francis Bacon said, 'those
things which have long gone together, are as it were con
federate within themselves; whereas new things piece not
so well.' In any case, fragmented though it may be, the
28
demand for an alternative to bigness and over-centraliza-
tion is making itself widely felt.
An example of how extreme are the changes now being
proposed in certain quarters in Britain is to be found in
Peter Cadogan's Direct Democracy; An Appeal to the
Politically Disenchanted; The Case for an England of Sovereign
Regional Republics, Extra-Parliamentary Democracy, and a New
Active Non-Violence of the Centre. Cadogan argues that
over-mighty government is characteristic of both the
public and the private sectors of British national life; that
the country's problems are not economic, but con
stitutional; and that a clear break is now needed with the
desperately tired values and procedures of parliamentary
party politics, representative government and
bureaucratic officialdom. Direct democracy, he says, is
different in kind. It is the constitutional form of incipient
classlessness.
When I first read this privately published pamphlet
towards the end of 1974, I thought - as I subsequently
told the author - that many of the proposals in it came
perilously near the lunatic fringe, if they did not actually
go beyond it. But steadily I find my sympathy growing
with such assertions as 'we can in future do without the
centralized nation state', that 'all taxes can be regional',
that 'the starting point is individual and small group
responsibility', that 'direct democracy involves prin
cipled non-violence', and that 'land, properly un
derstood, does not and cannot belong to anybody'. Even if
Cadogan's line of thought appears to ignore global
problems and our personal responsibilities as citizens of
the world, ideas like his are pressing for serious explora
tion today. That this is so is a measure of how fast the
situation is changing, together with our perception of it.
There are, then, these two opposing currents of
political movement, in one direction towards a cen
tralized corporate state bogged down in muddle and con-
29
gestion, and in the opposite direction towards a mul
tiplicity of separate grass roots activities. It is this pull
between big and small that underlies much of the strain
and stress in party politics in countries like Britain today.
It helps to explain why relevance has evaporated from
the conflict between capitalism and socialism, and why
the liberals, social democrats and progressive conser
vatives of the centre are often no more than wishy washy
moderates in the old no-man's land between left and
right. A country like the United States is larger and
wealthier, and it has stronger traditions against big
government in favour of personal and local freedom.
There remains more room for manoeuvre there than in a
densely populated, older, economically poorer and more
highly institutionalized country like Britain.
Nonetheless, very similar trends and tensions appear to
be at work in American politics today.
However, the most important question is not about the
surface froth of politics. It is more fundamental than
that. The most important question is whether some new
ideology or political platform will soon emerge that will
enable us to reconcile the principles 'small is beautiful'
and 'only one Earth', and strike a new balance between
them.
If in our next diagram (see Figure 2) we broaden the
perspective, we see that in fact the peoples of the world
are already coming to recognize that the nation state can
no longer act effectively as the main centre and focal
point of decision and power in human affairs. In some
respects at least, the progressive accumulation of govern
ment functions at the level of the nation state has begun
to be reversed. The drift towards centralization and the
corporate state in countries like Britain in recent years
has been accompanied, and could soon be overtaken, by
contrary currents of change. In some respects, the bundle
of functions, rights, duties and powers that has con-
30
 Figure 2

THE REDISTRIBUTION OF POLITICAL POWER

ONLY ONE EARTH World

(UN,WHO,etc.)
/N
Continents
(EEC,OAU,etc.)
Nation States
NATIONAL Britain, France, etc.)
SOVEREIGNTY
Subnations and Regions
(Scotland, Wales, etc.)
I Cities, Counties, etc.
I (Local Authorities)
Localities
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL (Neighbourhood Councils, etc.)
stituted national sovereignty has begun to be dismantled.
Few people would now deny that some functions of
government need to be carried out at world level (by the
United Nations), some at continental level (for example,
in Europe, Latin America, or Africa), some at sub-
national level (for example in Scotland, Wales, or the
English regions), and some in the districts and smaller
localities where people actually live and work. This
reflects a recognized need to redistribute political power
and government activity on a worldwide scale.
As that redistribution of political power proceeds, and
a new fabric of government institutions begins to emerge
worldwide, many different problems and questions will
arise: how shall multinational companies be controlled?
how shall the international monetary system operate?
how shall a new world economic order be brought into
existence? But in tackling these questions as they come
up, it seems clear that practical people will worry less
and less about the old legal fiction called 'national
sovereignty'. They will accept as a matter of course that
the bundle of powers and functions exercised until
recently at the level of the nation state has now got to be
dismantled, and that those powers and functions must be
redistributed by a steady process of constitutional
redefinition - outwards to the wider world and inwards
to communities smaller than the nation state.
In this perspective, the way to resolve the apparent
contradiction between 'small is beautiful' and 'only one
Earth' becomes rather clearer. Those who stress the
'small is beautiful' approach are concerned with the
failure of the centralized nation state to provide con
ditions in which people can live their daily lives as
members of human communities on a human scale. It is
only the extreme communitarian version of this view
which holds that macro problems will take care of
themselves if we limit our attention to the micro

32
problems. On the other hand, those who take the 'only
one Earth' view and urge that we should all regard
ourselves as citizens of the same small planet, are con
cerned with the failure of nation states to provide a global
perspective for dealing with global problems. There is no
necessaryconflict between the two views. Once we accept
that a structure of decision-making and government
which is based on paramountcy of the nation state is in
adequate both from the local and from the global point of
view, the way is clear for us to concentrate on transfor
ming the present structure of government into a new
multi-level structure of decision-making for a self-gover
ning world. There will of course continue to be in
stitutional problems at every level of the hierarchy. Em
pire building, red tape, and other bureaucratic distor
tions are just as rife in international organizations and
local government as they are in national governments.
But once the principle is accepted that the multi-level
tasks of government worldwide should be clearly struc
tured, those distortions will at least be easier to identify,
and perhaps even to rectify and bring under control.
As we shall find in the next chapter, there is a parallel
between these changes in the worldwide structure of
government and those that are taking place in the
economic structure of the developed countries. In the
latter case, the relative rights and duties of the various
stakeholders in the business system have become con
fused, and the old demarcation lines between business,
finance, trade unions and government are fast disappear
ing. A new definition of the functions, rights and duties of
the various participants in the industrial economy is
needed, if the system is to be brought into balance. In
that sphere too, 'constitutional' reform is needed; but in
that sphere constitutional reform will reflect and
crystallize a redistribution of economic power, as com
pared with political power. In that case it is the
33
anachronistic rights and duties of economic ownership,
as compared with the anachronistic rights and duties of
political sovereignty, that have to be replaced.
In other words, the declining years of the nation state
are also the declining years of capitalism. The era of
human history that was dominated by the concepts of
national sovereignty in the political sphere and
ownership in the economic sphere, is now passing. It was
an era in which nationalism and capitalism - and their
derivatives, fascism and state socialism - flourished. It
was an era of proliferating expansion, economic growth,
and the continual pushing forward of new frontiers. It
was suited to a world in which mankind's environment
and the resources it offered were infinitely greater than
the impact of human activities upon them. It was an era
in which masculine drives and ambitions were unleash
ed, and in which a philosophy of aggression and competi
tion was reflected in the divisive idea of the nation state
and the exclusive concept of property rights.
As that era draws to its end, we can already see its
successor as an era of re-integration and convergence,
rather than expansion. We can see its ethical basis in the
principles of ecology, social responsibility and self-
realization. Astrologers see it as the Age of Aquarius;
mystics and meditators see it as the Age of Enlighten
ment; increasing numbers of engineers, agriculturalists,
technologists and even economists, are coming to see it as
a 'spaceship' age in which the resources of the planet
must be recycled, as opposed to a 'frontier' age in which
mankind rapes nature and moves on; and women may
come to see it as an age in which they will enter into their
own, and humanize the man-made world.
For philosophers and scientists, including social scien
tists, the dominant conceptual model of the world in this
new era is likely to be a model of multiple systems of
perception, decision and control, interlocking and in-
34
teracting in dynamic equilibrium. The ecological model
will be its paradigm. As the next chapter suggests, such a
model provides the conceptual basis for a decentralized
equilibrium economy, to replace the centralized, mixed
and muddled, growth economy which now has to be un
scrambled.

35
 2. UNSCRAMBLING THE
CENTRALIZED ECONOMY

IF we are to dismantle the congested apparatus of the

nation state we shall obviously have to discard the
traditional right wing commitment to national sovereign
ty and the traditional socialist preference for centralized
government. We shall also have to reject a good deal of
other conventional thinking about industrial society. For
example, we shall have to reject the socialist idea that the
public responsibilities of economically and socially im
portant industries and services will be best met if those
industries are nationalized. We shall have to reject the
Keynesian idea that economic activity is best managed at
the national level. We shall have to reject the corporatist
idea that economic policies should be decided by discus
sion and agreement between national governments and
national representatives of industry, finance and the
trade union movement. We shall have to question the
continued existence of national currencies.
In other words, if we are thinking about dismantling
the nation state, it follows that we also have to think
about unscrambling the centralized national economy.
We must think about how to evolve an institutional
framework for a world society that is democratically
decentralized - a world society in which the power of
economic decision-making, like political power, will be
internationalized, decentralized and widely dispersed.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to sketch an
36
equilibrium model for a decentralized industrial
economy. This model, to quote from Hazel Henderson in
the U.S. journal Business and Society Review, will help to
conceptualize 'the cybernetic requirements for operating
interdependent economies on a finite planet'. It will
suggest how the institutional structure of the world
economy could be redesigned as one of the balancing
mechanisms for an equilibrium world society, thus con
tributing to a better balance between man and nature, a
better balance between man and man, and a better
balance between material and non-material concerns in
the minds and hearts of individual people. Thus, where
the previous chapter concentrated on redefining the
structures of government decision-making and the
patterns of political power, this chapter focusses on the
structures of economic decision-making and the role of
money as one of the main internal regulators for a free, but
socially responsible, society.
Some people have pointed out similarities between my
ideas and J. K. Galbraith's. So it may be helpful if, before
we go any further, I briefly state the points of agreement
and difference between us. We are agreed that the pre
sent dividing line between the so-called 'public' sector
and the so-called 'private' sector is laughably absurd. As
Professor Galbraith says in The New Industrial State
(Pelican Books, page 386): 'Increasingly it will be
recognized that the mature corporation, as it develops,
becomes part of the larger administrative complex
associated with the state. In time the line between the
two will disappear. Men will look back in amusement at
the pretence that once caused people to refer to General
Dynamics and North American Aviation and A.T. & T.
as private businesses'. Where I differ from Galbraith is
that I want to look forward to the next stage, beyond the
massive extension of the public sector which his
diagnosis implies, to a new kind of radically decen-
37
tralized, pluralist economy in which the functions of
business and government, national and international,
regional and local, will have become freshly defined on a
new basis and will once again have become clearly dis
tinct from each other.
I must also mention at this point a radically different
attitude to economic activity and economic institutions.
This is that money - and also laws - are in themselves
alienating and divisive. The suggestion, therefore, is that
we should aim to create a de-institutionalized society in
which relations between people would not need to be
governed by impersonal devices like laws and money.
Peter Cadogan powerfully advocates a 'gift economy' of
that kind. As he says in Direct Democracy, western
economists define work as an activity concerned directly
or indirectly with production for exchange through the
medium of money in the market. The value of work is
then equated, more or less, with price. But in fact there
does not have to be a market, and to assume that there
does distorts the true nature of work. Subsistence
economies use no money and therefore have no prices.
Moreover, even in advanced societies people work for a
smaller proportion of their time on money-earning work
than on unpaid work - productive or unproductive as the
case may be - for example in their house and their gar
den, in the leisure hours of the day, at weekends and dur
ing holidays. Already, therefore, people spend a greater
part of their lives in the gift economy than in the market
economy. Cadogan's suggestion is that our personal hap
piness and quality of life will be increased, in so far as
each one of us can extend the frontiers of the gift
economy and reduce the role of the money economy in
our lives.
Personally, I believe that that is becoming a valid
suggestion for more and more people in countries like
those of Western Europe and North America. The con-
38
cept of work without money implies work that is an ex
pression of one's own creativity, work whose results are
freely given to one's fellows and to the world in which one
lives. It is very different from the concept of work as
something which is provided to job-consumers by remote
employers, backed by an employment services industry
whose activities include collective bargaining, job crea
tion, and the provision of redundancy payments, un
employment benefits and industrial training courses. It is
closely related to the kind of concept of power that I men
tioned earlier - power as the capacity to contribute
creatively to the lives of other people, by teaching, by
healing and in a wide variety of person-to-person contact
and communication. This kind of work is the kind we
should aim to encourage, even if we accept that we may
never be able to recreate a society entirely based on a gift
economy.
For practical purposes, we do, in fact, have to make
that assumption: that it will never be possible to switch
over altogether to a gift economy. It may be true that
many aspects of people's lives are not directly affected by
laws and are not directly concerned with monetary tran
sactions. It is no doubt also true, certainly in our per
sonal lives, that the more our thinking and feeling and
behaving are influenced by legal and financial con
siderations, the more cramped and inhibited our
relations with other people are likely to be. But in a
world containing several billion people many aspects of
our relationships with one another must necessarily be
conducted at arms length, with the help of institutions
like law and money. This is why a good system of law
and a good system of money are so important. Only if
there are good rules and a good scoring system for the
game shall we be able to forget about them, take them for
granted, and get on with the game itself. Even if we were
aiming to phase out the market system altogether and
39
eventually reach the destination of an economy based en
tirely on unpaid work, one of the staging posts en route
would almost certainly have to be an honest and reliable
money system.
One of my starting assumptions, then, is that a good
system of law and a good system of money will, for prac
tical purposes at the present time, be essential features of
a decentralized economy in which personal initiative and
social responsibility can work together and not against
each other. They will provide the structure needed for
such an economy to maintain its equilibrium. They are
the two basic control mechanisms in the model of the
economy which I shall now outline.

This model is in essence very simple and straightforward.

But it is unorthodox. For both these reasons it is not easi
ly grasped by economists, businessmen, bankers, govern
ment officials and politicians, whose mental perceptions
are focussed on the search for complicated new versions
of conventional ideas.
The model is essentially organic. According to it,
human societies consist of numerous centres of percep
tion, decision and control. Every person and every
organization constitutes such a centre - each possessing
a greater or lesser degree of autonomy. Each has certain
responsibilities and certain rights. These rights include
claims upon the resources of material, energy and skill
which are available for use by society as a whole - claims
which can be transferred by one member of society to
another, or exchanged between them.
Wealth consists of rights and claims to use resources;
each member of society has a certain set of rights and
claims at any particular time. Economic activity consists
in the use of resources by members of society and the cor
responding transfer of money by them to other members,
40
representing the transfer of claims to use resources in the
future; each member of society is engaged in a certain set
of economic activities at any particular time. Law
provides the mechanism by which a society formally
specifies its members' responsibilities, rights and claims,
money the mechanism by which a society places a quan
titative value on its members' claims and thus facilitates
their transfer and exchange.
The behaviour of all members of society is governed
by external rules and constraints (including those of a
legal and financial character), as well as by their own
habits and attitudes. How they all behave determines
how they all interact. How they all interact determines
the character of the society to which they belong - for ex
ample, how free it is, and whether it remains in a steady
state of self-regulating balance or suffers from cumulative
instability.
To sum up, therefore, an important aim in the
economic sphere today should be to evolve at every level
- international, continental, national, regional, local and
personal - economic agents which behave as interdepen
dent but autonomous centres of perception, decision and
control. The nature of their interdependence, i.e. the way
they interact and the manner in which they exchange
resources and claims on resources with one another, will
be governed by systems of law and money, to much the
same extent as the nature of a game - such as football or
bridge - is shaped by its rules and scoring system. A
primary task for governments, therefore, must be to see
that those systems of law and money are so designed as
to encourage the kind of economic activity that will
maintain a world society in equilibrium and ensure the
survival of the human species. I concentrate in this
chapter on the evolution of a decentralized economy
within an equilibrium society, in order to illustrate this
concept. But the corresponding evolution of interdepen-
41
dent economies in an equilibrium world is, of course,
equally vital.
This conception of society as an organism, the interac
tions between whose parts are formally controlled by
rules (laws) and by the exchange of quantified rights and
claims (money), has something in common with the
medieval conception of society. In R. H. Tawney's words
in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, medieval thinkers saw
society not as the 'expression of economic self-interest,
but as held together by a system of mutual though vary
ing obligations. Social wellbeing exists, it was thought, in
so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the
rights proportioned thereto'. The difference, of course, is
that, whereas medieval thinkers perceived society as em
bodying a system of obligations that were divinely sanc
tioned, I am suggesting that the framework which main
tains society in balance consists of social mechanisms
socially designed and socially administered. The
medieval model of society was static and theological. The
modern model is dynamic and cybernetic. It recognizes
that people are responsible for shaping the society in
which they live, and for revising its institutional
framework in accordance with changing needs. It
emphasizes that government officials, as the paid ser
vants of society, should concentrate on keeping the
balancing mechanisms of law and money in good order.
This last point is of profound significance. Operational
improvements in the actual mechanisms of economic
decision-making and control at every level of our world
society, of the kind I shall now suggest, should be
fostered by those who are supposed to be trustees for
their good working. This will achieve infinitely more
than all the pretensions of economists, political scientists,
politicians and government officials to evaluate a
society's economic needs objectively and to intervene in a
society's economic affairs dispassionately from outside,
42 ,
as if in some way they were above the battle. It might be
far-fetched to compare those pretensions with the at
titude of the well-known schizophrenic, Schreber, who
said, 'He who has entered into a special relationship with
divine rays, as I have, is to a certain extent entitled to shit
on all the world'. But even in a much milder form a solip-
sistic attitude, together with what Theodore Roszak in
The Making of a Counter-Culture calls the myth of objective
consciousness, is an unhelpful guide to thought and ac
tion in public servants. It lays them open to the charge of
vanity that Simone de Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex
about Montherlant's attitude to women, when she
speaks about 'the agreeable fairyland that the man of
vanity creates around himself . . . Montherlant's works,
like his life, admit of only one consciousness'. Likewise, in
a political and economic sense, our neo-Keynesians
recognize only one seat of consciousness and sovereignty
in the structure of organized society. Their intellectual
vanity cannot allow them to admit that they themselves
are no more special than the other members - the other
centres of perception, decision and control - in a pluralist
society.

Some of the most important elements in our model of the

modern economy are shown in Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6. A
business enterprise, a financial institution, central
government, and an individual person or family, are all
shown as nodes or distribution points which receive
money from and pass money to other members of society.
Similar diagrams could be drawn for local government
agencies, public corporations, charities, partnerships
and other corporate bodies of all kinds.
If we now imagine all these entities linked by the flows
of money passing between them, we can picture the
whole of society as a multitude of distribution points (or
43
 Figure 3

ENTERPRISE
V Taxes, Rates
Government
Assistance v

New Capital v Management

/ Procedures
Investors Dividends

and Interest Payments for

Customers
Purchases
Decision
Wages and
Employees Rules
Salaries
etc.

Payments for
Suppliers 4
Purchases

Reserves
 Figure 4

FINANCIAL
INSTITUTION
Customers

Taxes Rates
Government ^ Interest etc. Borrovi^ers
Assistance
Management
Procedures
Loans etc. ^
Dividends
Shareholders
Nevy Capital,
Deposits
Depositors
Decision Premiums etc.
Wages and Rules
Employees Investors
Salaries etc.

Interest
Insured
Dividends etc.
etc.
 Figure 5

CENTRAL
GOVERNMENT
(Treasury)

Members Public Spending Members

of
Departments of
Expenditure
Society Society
including Revenue including
Departments ^Taxes
PERSONS PERSONS

and ^ Loans etc. and

Bank of
ORGANIZATIONS England Interest ORGANIZATIONS
and Mint
Banknotes Coins^

^ Savings
National
Savings Interest and ^
Savings Repaid '
 Figure 6
Outward Payments
Inward Payments
Food
Clothing INDIVIDUAL Wages, Salaries
(or FAMILY) and Fees
Household
Transport Pensions

Holidays Social Security

Decision Habits Benefits
Leisure «- <-
Medical Life Style Dividends, Interest
Children's Education
Personality Type, Gifts, Prizes
Mortgage Payments etc.
H.P. Payments <r Realized Savings
Insurance Premiums Sale of Property
and Possessions
Taxes

Savings Reserve of Cash Insurance Policies

falling due
Investments Cash Boxes,
Mattresses, etc. Loans, Mortgages,
Jank Deposits,
etc.
etc.
decision centres) connected with one another by a very
complex network of money flows. Every person and every
organization - every individual member and every cor
porate member of society - will appear as a node or dis
tribution point on that network, directly linked by in
coming and outgoing flows to all the other members of
society from which it receives, and to which it pays,
money.
Each of these distribution points or decision centres
has what Arthur Koestler has called 'the dual character
of being a subordinate part and at the same time an
autonomous whole.' As he put it, all these 'sub-wholes or
holons are Janus-faced entities which display both the in
dependent properties of wholes and the dependent
properties of parts. Each holon must preserve and assert
its autonomy, otherwise the organism would lose its ar
ticulation and dissolve into an amorphous mass - but at
the same time the holon must remain subordinate to the
demands of the (existing or evolving) whole.' In other
words, each member of society is to some extent an active
decision centre on the society-wide network of money
flows; none is a merely passive recipient and transmitter
of money. But, at the same time, the activity of each is
constrained by the structure of the larger system, and by
the activities of other members of society.
Each member of society, as a financial decision centre,
has its own built-in mechanism of choice and decision
and control - the set of circuits, as it were, which shapes
the pattern of its incoming money flows and the pattern
of the flows that it sends out, and transforms the former
into the latter. This mechanism consists of the rules, con
straints, attitudes, habits, bejiaviour patterns and deci
sion procedures that govern the way each company, each
financial institution, each government authority, each
family, each individual and each other member of society
plans and manages its activities.
48
 Among the most important of the externally imposed
constraints are the formal constraints imposed by Law
and Money - the first laying down the rules about what
may and may not be done, and the second recognizing
that the total amount of money going out must be
balanced somehow or other by the total amount of
money coming in. Other important external constraints
arise from the position in society and in the economy of a
particular individual or organization (including its
wealth, i.e. the total set of rights and claims it can exer
cise upon society's resources), and from how a particular
individual or corporate member of society is treated by
other members with whom it deals. Subject to those ex
ternal limitations, however, each member of society is
free to behave in a wide variety of ways. For each one,
therefore, the pattern of its incoming and outgoing flows
of money reflects at least to some extent the active,
autonomous facet of its dual character - the way it
perceives the world, the values which it holds, and the
goals it pursues - as well as its passive, subordinate role
as one member of a large and complex society. Thus, to
some extent, the actions of every member of society (as a
decision centre on the society-wide network of money
flows) influence the actions of the other members with
whom it deals, and help to determine the overall pattern
of money flowing through society as a whole.
It is sometimes said that, since money is transferred
from one member of society to another as payment for
real transactions, flows of money are properly regarded
as no more than comparatively unimportant
counterflows mirroring the transfer of real goods and ser
vices between different members of society. But that is
only half the story. Flows of money, together with
holdings of money and other forms of wealth, actively
help to shape the behaviour of society's members and the
nature of the whole society to which they belong. Indeed,
49
the financial structure of a society - the way the flows of
money are channelled through one particular set of deci
sion centres or another - is one of the most important fac
tors determining who shall have power to take the
decisions that will shape society's future.
If, for example, the pattern of flows is highly cen
tralized - in other words, if taxation, government
borrowing and government expenditure are very high -
we shall live in a society which is centrally controlled and
dominated by the state. Centralized money flows will
both reflect and reinforce a centralized structure of
political power. It will be politicians and civil servants
who take the decisions that shape the future. The more
taxes they raise, the more they will deprive other people
of the power to take these decisions; while the greater the
public expenditure they control, the more they will
arrogate this power to themselves. If, on the other hand,
big financial institutions like banks and insurance com
panies occupy the strategic centres on the money
network, we shall have a society in which financiers and
money men wield disproportionate powers of decision
and control. Another possibility is a society in which
business and industrial leaders are able to retain in com
pany reserves much of the money that has flowed into
firms in the so-called private sector, and thus to keep the
spending of it under their own control. In that case, in
dustrialists and business people will have a dispropor
tionate power to decide the shape of the future. Finally,
we may have a more participatory society, so organized
that politicians and civil servants, financiers and money
men, businessmen and industrialists have to seek the
agreement of taxpayers, investors, customers, working
people, and the public at large to the way they distribute
the money passing through their hands. The reforms that
I shall suggest will help to create a situation of that kind.
It is the only way power can be given to people to make
50
the financial decisions that will shape the future. It is the
only way to combine a wide spread of free choice with
social responsibility in a political and economic
democracy. Without it, such ideas as consumer
sovereignty, worker sovereignty, or citizen sovereignty
are no more than myths.
Thus the structure of our society's money system will
not only reflect what kind of society we have. It will also
help to determine what kind of a society we are going to
have in the future, and who is going to have the power to
decide its shape. As John Rawls says in A Theory of
Justice, 'an economic system is not only an institutional
device for satisfying existing wants and needs, but a way
of creating and fashioning wants in the future'. Responsi
ble men and women will not regard the existing
economic system as given. They will not aim to change it
to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their
fellows. They will aim to transform it by a process of
evolutionary re-design into a system which will create
and satisfy the wants and needs of a sustainable, civilized
and fair society.
Our model of industrial society, then, consists of
numerous decision centres exchanging flows of money
with one another, i.e. between themselves and other
members of society. The kind of society we have is both
reflected and determined by the rights and claims which
these centres enjoy, and by the overall pattern of the
money flows between them. This model allows for a wide
variety of financial structures, i.e. for a wide variety of
possible distributions of economic power, all of which
could - at least in theory - remain in a state of
equilibrium.
However, as we shall now point out, the model also
enables us to see how disequilibrium occurs, and to see
how - once disequilibrium has set in - equilibrium could
be restored.

51
 The economies of the advanced industrial countries,
especially Britain, seem by the middle 1970's to have
reached a state of chronic instability. Inflation has been
the most obvious symptom of this. Our model suggests
that the cause of inflation is altogether different from
anything that economists have supposed. The cause is
not economic at all. It is constitutional, in the sense that
inflation can be seen to arise from the absence of an effec
tively defined structure of rights and obligations and
functions in the economic sphere, and from the resulting
loss of balance, autonomy and control by all the main
participating elements in the economic system. They all
try to maximize profit, or wealth, or utility, or welfare, or
economic growth, rather than to strike a balance
between competing interests; as a result, all the main
elements in the economy exert de-stabilizing, in
flationary pressures on the rest. Inflation and economic
instability are thus a systemic feature of any densely pop
ulated, densely institutionalized, pluralist society whose
main economic agents are all dedicated to a primary aim
of continued material growth. As this model suggests, the
only lasting way to restore stability and eliminate infla
tion will be to introduce effective mechanisms of balance
and control in all the various decision centres in the
economy. So let us now examine in greater detail what
that would involve, in terms of institutional reforms and
changes in corporate and individual ethics.
The business enterprise (Figure 3) is one important
kind of decision centre in the economy. When we look at
its mechanisms of control, we find that the framework of
law defining the responsibilities of those in charge, and
the rights and duties of the various stakeholders in rela
tion to one another, is disjointed and does not match the
relative power of the different stakeholders (e.g. investors
and employees). The fact is that the legal framework for
business enterprise has grown up piecemeal, and the
52
time has come to develop it into a coherent whole. It
should be based quite clearly on the requirement that
those in charge shall serve the interests of all the
stakeholders (including especially the employees,
customers, investors and the public, as well as suppliers
and creditors) and maintain a fair balance between
them, rather than try to maximize profits for the
shareholders.
The out of date 'constitutional' responsibility of
business managements to make maximum profits for
shareholders has provided much of the impetus for con
frontation between the 'two sides' of industry. As con
frontation has intensified, control has seeped away from
management. It is now exercized remotely and divisively
by the trade unions standing behind the employees, by
the financial institutions standing behind the investors,
and by central government. What has happened is this:
competition between organized employees and in
stitutionalized investors to get a bigger share of the finan
cial cake has squeezed business managements into rais
ing prices to their customers; financially irresponsible
monetary policies, on the part of governments intent on
maximum economic growth, have enabled companies to
raise prices without losing customers; the resulting infla
tion has then led governments to impose centralized con
trols on companies to limit their prices, their dividend
payments and their salary and wage payments; the con
tinuing imposition of corporation tax based on
traditional concepts of 'profit', on top of price and profit
controls has then created a 'doomsday machine' which
has tended to deprive companies of cash; in these cir
cumstances companies have been unable to raise new
finance for investment; which has made it necessary for
the government to set up new central organizations, like
the National Enterprise Board, to fill the gap. So one
malfunction has led to another, inevitably, in an es-
53
calating progression of centralization and remote con
trol. This has been a powerful contributory factor in the
growth of Hazel Henderson's Entropy State in which, as
mentioned in Chapter 1, the transaction costs of deciding
anything and doing anything in the congested corridors
of power now outweigh the value of any achievement that
results. It has also meant that individual business enter
prises have lost much of their autonomy.
The only way to reverse this process, and thus to stem
inflation and heal confrontation in industry, will be to
revalidate the authority of business managements on a
new basis of social acceptability. This will require
business managements to accept formal responsibility for
serving and balancing the multiple interests involved in
their enterprise. That will involve appropriate revisions
to company law, fair trading law, employment law and
other law governing the behaviour of business firms. It
will involve the development of new procedures that are
widely understood and widely accepted as fair and
reasonable for distributing the income and the assets
generated by business enterprises. It will involve the
introduction of new methods of measuring, monitoring
and reporting on the performance of business enter
prises, which will clearly show the benefits and the costs
they are creating for other members of society. Finally, in
addition to changes in the requirements externally im
posed on business enterprises under the law, changes will
also be needed in their internal constitutions, internal
decision procedures, and internal management styles.
These things reflect the corporate ethic of a business
enterprise and its outlook towards the society and the
wider world in which it operates.
Only by a powerful effort on these lines, to re-establish
the social acceptability of business enterprise, will it be
possible to restore the power of decentralized self-con
trol, to re-introduce internal balancing mechanisms that
54
work, and to resolve internally the inflationary pressures
generated by competing interests within the enterprise.
Only thus will it be possible to create a situation in which
there will no longer be a need, and no longer an excuse,
for damaging and divisive outside intervention in the af
fairs of business enterprises by big trade unions, big
financial institutions and big government.

Financial institutions (Figure 4) are also now suffering

from uncertainty about the way in which their directors
and top managements should be expected to discharge
their multiple responsibilities to employees, customers,
investors, and the public. The volatility of the financial
sector, for example in Britain in recent years where bust
has followed boom in such fields as property and fringe
banking, underlines the need for effective mechanisms of
balance and control. As we shall see, government
monetary policies and government failure to control the
money supply have been an important contributory fac
tor, but weaknesses in the internal constitution of the
financial institutions have also played a vital part in the
recent troubles.
As Figure 4 shows, financial institutions like banks
and insurance companies have two kinds of customer.
The first consists of people and organizations who en
trust money to these institutions - depositors who
deposit their money with banks, savers who invest their
money in unit trusts, policy-holders who pay insurance
premiums to insurance companies, employees whose
pension contributions are paid into pension funds, and so
forth. Customers of this first type are really suppliers to
financial institutions. They supply money which is the
main material used by financial institutions in carrying
out their business. The second type of customer consists
of the people and organizations to whom financial in-
55
stitutions put money out - including the customer to
whom a bank gives credit or a loan on overdraft, the com
pany in whose shares an insurance company or a pension
fund invests money, and the person to whom a building
society lends money on a mortgage. The first type of
customer thus comprises those who in the broadest sense
lendmoney to financial institutions; the second comprises
those who in the broadest sense borrow money from them.
This process of channelling money from lenders to
borrowers, and thus of transforming savings into invest
ment, is at the heart of any society's economic activity. It
can be carried out in a balanced way, or in an un
balanced way. Lack of balance will lead to a faulty
pattern of investment, and to inflation.
One of the accusations made against financial in
stitutions, especially in Britain, is that they have failed to
carry out their investment responsibilities: instead of in
vesting in economically useful industries and socially
desirable services, they have speculated in existing assets
like property and land; and instead of taking steps to im
prove the performance and efficiency of firms in which
they have invested money, they have concentrated on
getting a quick cash return for themselves. To this the
financial institutions reply that their first duty is to the
kind of customer whose money they have received in
trust, not to the kind of customer to whom they have put
money out. In other words, the present constitution of
financial institutions, the present legal framework in
which they operate, and the present rules and decision
procedures which they use, provide no mechanism for
balancing these two responsibilities.
The idea that financial institutions should be aiming
to get the maximum monetary return for their
depositors, rather than simply a fair and acceptable
return, is bound to exert special inflationary pressures.
In this respect, there is a special need to create effective
56
internal mechanisms of balance and control in financial
institutions, in addition to the need that applies to
business enterprises in general.
Central government (Figure 5) is the most influential
single decision centre in the whole complex network of
money flows that run through society. In Britain, for ex
ample, the spending departments of government allocate
about half the resources and distribute about half the
spending power of the country, according to the normal
way of measuring these things; while the revenue
departments by taxation, and the Bank of England (and
National Savings) by borrowing, preempt the equivalent
amount of resources and spending power. In other
words, the spending departments, revenue departments
and borrowing departments of central government - un
der the overall supervision of the Treasury, the Cabinet
and Parliament - are responsible for an incoming and
outgoing pattern of money flows that strongly influences
the total pattern of money flows through society as a
whole. It thereby affects the circumstances and the
behaviour of all society's members.
Again, as in business enterprises and financial in
stitutions, the outlook and procedures of central govern
ment can be such that the pattern of the money flows
coming in and going out is determined in a balanced way
or in an unbalanced way. But the importance of the
government's financial activity is so great that, if the
decision procedures and control mechanisms for handl
ing government money are muddled and obscure, and if
the responsibilities of politicians and government officials
for balancing the various interests involved are unclear,
then the efficacy and the credibility of the country's
whole financial and monetary system will be undermined
as a mechanism of social choice and economic resource
allocation.
Government procedures for planning and managing
57
public spending and public revenue have, in fact, virtual
ly broken down in a country like Britain today. They are
full of obscurity; shrouded in mumbo-jumbo, ancient
and modern, parliamentary and economic; and riddled
with unresolved conflicts of interest. Past irresponsibility
and past tendencies to political aggrandizement and
bureaucratic empire-building have virtually deprived
today's politicians and government officials of all power
to control the patterns of money flows for which they are
meant to be responsible. Only in 1975, after British
public expenditure had demonstrably run out of control,
did the pundits recognize that 'cash limits' should be
placed on government spending plans!
It is true that difficulties arise from ideological dis
agreement about a government's proper economic role,
and from unavoidable bureaucratic inefficiency. These
difficulties are among those that have to be resolved in
the normal processes of politics and administration. But
it is also beyond doubt that the rules, procedures and
behaviour of governments that are committed to max
imizing economic growth are b9und to have a powerfully
destabilizing and inflationary effect on the whole
industrial economy. A balanced system of controls over
government spending, borrowing and taxation is sorely
needed.
Finally, what about individual members of society
(Figure 6)? In a sense, they are the most important deci
sion centres in our model. They, too, can handle the
money coming in and the money going out in a balanced
or unbalanced way. They too can exert stabilizing or
destabilizing influences on other elements in the
economy, and they too are subject to stablizing or
de-stabilizing influences from these other parts of the
system.
The habits, lifestyles and attitudes of individual peo
ple, as influenced by their educational background,
58
social position and other similar factors, shape the
pattern of their incoming and outgoing flows of money.
In this respect their behaviour is deeply conditioned by
the aspirations which the rest of society encourages them
to adopt, for example by political and commercial adver
tising campaigns. If people are systematically taught that
maximizing material consumption is the aim, and are
persuaded to want to possess more and more material
goods which they had never thought of having; if they are
constantly encouraged to rely on outside institutions to
meet all the important needs in their lives; and if they
find that the prices and taxes they have to pay for these
things are constantly going up - then it is no wonder if
they press to be paid more and more money to enable
them to meet these increasingly pressing financial
demands. It is not surprising if they thus inject their own
de-stabilizing anxieties and greeds into the inflationary
process, contributing thereby to the further escalation of
economic and social disequilibrium. Nor is it surprising
if, like the people in charge of government and business
finances, they find it difficult to choose between different
possibilities and to balance competing demands. They
too feel that they are losing control - in this case over
their own finances and their own lives. People are depriv
ed of personal autonomy by the contradictory pressures
and pulls of the institutionalized consumer society, in
much the same way as business managements have
become trapped in the untenable position imposed upon
them by the conflicting demands of big government, big
finance and the big trade unions.
The only way in which individuals can recover per
sonal autonomy and balance will be to reject the per
sonal ethic prevailing today, that sets such a high value
on material consumption. Some people find it possible to
do this, even though it means swimming against the
current that runs so strongly in modern societies. But, in
59
general, if'Grab what you can!' and 'Grow, grow, grow!'
are the names of the game that everyone else is playing,
most people will join in, if only to show that they can
play it as well as the next man. Personal ethics and social
structures reinforce one another. There may be many
sane and balanced people in an insane and unbalanced
society, just as there may be many individuals who
preserve their personal integrity in the organizational
jungle of big business and big government. But in all
kinds of ways the cards are stacked against them.
To sum up, then. Once we accept that the economy
can be seen as a multiplicity of decision centres of
different kinds, linked to one another by flows of money,
and that the aim should now be to bring this interacting
system into a state of dynamic equilibrium, it becomes
clear that the need is to create effective mechanisms of
balance and control at all the different points on the
network of money flows. We should not look exclusively
to financial responsibility in central government, or ex
clusively to honesty in the financial sector, or exclusively
to social responsibility in business and industrial
management, or exclusively to less materialistic attitudes
in the hearts and minds of individual people, for the
solutions to the problems of inflation, industrial unrest
and economic breakdown. We should look to mutually
supporting changes in the rules, the habits, the
procedures and the attitudes that govern the behaviour of
all these various sectors of society. We should redefine
the functions, rights and duties of all the various par
ticipants in the industrial economy. We should put in
hand a broad three-pronged programme of reforms, to
create socially responsible business enterprise, honest
money, and financially responsible government. We
should thus create a social and economic environment in
which sane and balanced human beings will have a
better chance to flourish.

60
 The first part of this programme will require us to
recognize explicitly that the people in charge of large
public companies have multiple responsibilities, to serve
- and to balance - the interests of employees, investors,
customers and the public. We shall need to develop
employment law, company law, fair trading law and the
law governing such matters of public concern as safety,
health and pollution, into a coherent legal framework for
business enterprise. Nationalized industries, consumer
co-operatives, worker controlled firms, mutual societies,
and shareholder companies are all alike in having these
multiple responsibilities, and the law should make their
responsibilities clear. More specifically, we should aim to
evolve a corpus of enterprise law, which would be:
(a) comprehensive, in the sense that it would regulate the
relationships between an enterprise and all its main
stakeholders (including employees, investors,
creditors, customers and the public);
(b) universal, in the sense that it would cover business
enterprises of all kinds (companies, co-operatives,
mutual societies, public enterprises, common
ownership companies, etc.);
(c) permissive, rather than prescriptive, in the sense that it
would allow enterprises to experiment with a wide
variety of ways of meeting the obligations laid upon
them by law, rather than prescribe in rigid detail
how those obligations should be met; and
(d) appropriate, in the sense that it would enable the ap
propriate functional distinctions to be drawn
between enterprises that are based on proprietorship,
like private companies; stewardship or trusteeship, like
co-operatives, mutual societies, and public com
panies; and publicservice, like public corporations and
nationalized industries.

These legal developments will have to be accompanied

61
by the introduction of new procedures in such fields as
participation, industrial democracy, profit-sharing, and
social accounting, which will enable the performance of
those in charge of large public companies to be
monitored and influenced by the people most directly
affected.
Second, we shall have to stop operating our monetary
and financial system on the basis that financial in
stitutions exist to make money for their shareholders, or
that individuals work in the financial sector to make
money for themselves, or that the monetary authorities
rig the financial system in the government's favour and
borrow cheaply for the government by exploiting the
goodwill or ignorance of people who invest in govern
ment stocks and national savings. We shall have to insist
that financial institutions accept explicit responsibility
for serving the public interest and for balancing the in
terests of the various parties towards whom they have a
responsibility, including their different kinds of
customers. We shall have to see that a new regulatory
framework is introduced which will meet that need. In
Britain, for example, we shall have to require the Bank of
England and the Treasury to submit to effective public
and parliamentary scrutiny, and show that they are
operating the money system straight and fair. And
special emphasis may be needed on the importance of
bringing financial institutions under the umbrella of a
general enterprise law on the lines suggested above.
Third, we shall have to insist that governments
manage their financial affairs with a strict sense of finan
cial responsibility. We must require our public servants
to develop procedures for planning and handling the
flows of expenditure, taxation and borrowing under their
charge so that the people whom these public servants are
employed to serve can see whether resources are being
allocated according to priorities democratically laid
62
down, and whether purchasing power is being dis
tributed and redistributed among workers, investors,
taxpayers, rate-payers, pensioners, sick people, poor peo
ple, rich people and other classes of citizens in ways that
meet with general acceptance from the public. Where
choices have to be made, and where conflicts arise, the
public should be shown what these are and be given an
opportunity to discuss the possibilities for resolving
them.

It is sometimes said that we need a new Keynes to solve

the world's present economic problems. I hope I have
made it clear that we need to think more radically than
that. Keynes' main contribution was to give an extra
half-century of life to the capitalist/socialist economy,
based on the metaphysic propagated by Adam Smith
and his successors which says that economics is an
autonomous department of human life and that material
production and consumption are what matter most. In
making this contribution, however, Keynes also provided
the means by which that metaphysic and the social and
economic institutions that are founded upon it are now
being tested to destruction.
In this chapter I have been discussing an altogether
different approach. I have outlined the kind of reforms
that are needed to create socially responsible business
enterprise, an honest money system, and financially
responsible government. I discussed in greater detail in
Profit Or People? the actual measures that will have to be
pushed forward on a number of specific points. Here I
have tried to do something rather different. I have tried
to suggest that, by pushing forward in this way we could
take the first steps towards bringing inflation under per
manent control and towards creating equilibrium in the
industrial economy. We should be constructing the for-
63
mal framework for an equilibrium economy in which in
dividual organizations and individual people would find
encouragement to develop a socially responsible cor
porate or personal ethic of their own. We should be mak
ing it possible to reverse the centalizing trend of recent
years, and evolve a 'new look' economy on a decen
tralized basis for the future. We should be re-distributing
the power of economic decision-making widely among
society's members. We should be transforming our pre
sent economic institutions into mechanisms for making
choices and balancing the interests of society's members.
We should thus be equipping ourselves to achieve a
better ecological balance between man and nature, a
better social balance between man and man, and a saner
mental and emotional balance in the minds and hearts of
people. We should be helping to build the institutional
foundations for a world society that can sustain itself in
dynamic equilibrium.

64
 3. EXORCIZING THE
INSTITUTIONAL IMPERATIVE

Dismantling the nation state will result in a

redistribution of political power and the
functions of government in a vertical dimension, so to
speak, between the United Nations at one end of the
scale and local communities at the other. Unscrambling
the centralized national economy will do the same for
economic power. It will also result in a redistribution of
power in a horizontal dimension, a redefinition of the
functions, rights and duties of all the various participants
in economic activity, and a new concept of the social role
of money. This dismantling and unscrambling of the
present faulty structure of political and economic power
will be the next step on the road towards One World, in
the sense that it will clear the way for a new fabric of
political and economic institutions to emerge which will
enable the peoples of the world both to decentralize and
to handle global decisions at the global level. Within
such a framework, mankind collectively could reconcile
the two principles 'Small Is Beautiful' and 'Only One
Earth'. By creating it, we could bring into being the or
ganizing substructure for what Teilhard de Chardin saw
as the emerging organism of inter-thinking humanity.
All very nice, in theory. But, in practice, the vested
interests of power politics and the interlocking inertia of
institutionalized society appear to present insuperable
obstacles to progress on these lines. One of the central
65
features of human society today is the institutional
imperative. The big institutions that dominate the
modern world have acquired a powerful momentum of
their own, quite separate from the purposes which they
supposedly exist to serve. Is this institutional imperative,
like the technological imperative with which it is linked,
now driving mankind relentlessly up an evolutionary
cul-de-sac? Or is institutionalization only a temporary
diversion from the broad highway of human evolution?
Will it collapse of its own momentum? Is it programmed
to self-destruct? If so, how shall we put ourselves back on
track, when institutional self-destruction takes place?
It is Teilhard, of course, who more than anyone else
has taught us to see humanity as the spearhead of
evolution on earth. Man emerged out of the biosphere -
'the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of
the globe' - to create the noosphere or 'thinking layer',
which now encircles the world with a web of shared
consciousness and psycho-social energy. With the
emergence of man, evolution became conscious of itself.
However, as Max Nicholson has recently pointed out in
his book, The Big Change, two great and cancerously
growing organisms have been thrown up by the
noosphere. They have proliferated on a global scale and
now seem to be out of control by man who created them.
One of these Nicholson calls the technosphere, and the
other the nomosphere.
The technosphere has grown out of man's incessant
urge for tool-making. It now takes the form of a vast
complex of processes for manipulating material
resources. Most of these processes are incomprehensible
to the great majority of human beings. In aggregate, they
have achieved such a degree of complexity and so
powerful a momentum of their own that even the people
who are supposed to control them are unable to do so.
Man, the mad tool-maker, as Nicholson puts it, is now
66
awakening like the sorcerer's apprentice to the horror of
what he has let loose.
The nomosphere, on the other hand, consists of the
system of laws, institutions and established practices
which man has built up to regulate his own social
behaviour. This too has now become a vast complex of
political, governmental, legal, financial, administrative,
managerial and bureaucratic processes. These processes,
like those of the technosphere, have become totally
incomprehensible to the great majority of people. They
have also acquired so powerful a momentum of their own
that even the people who are supposed to be in charge of
them are unable to control them.
The technological imperative and the institutional
imperative have thus become the dominating drives of
modern society, and both are out of control.
In this book we are looking for new ways of balancing
political and economic power, and the suggestions about
government and money in the first two chapters were
made with that purpose in view. So our discussion here is
mainly concerned with institutions rather than with
technology. But the link between the two is very close.
Capital intensive technology is symbiotic with the highly
geared political, economic and social power of big
government, big business and other big institutions. Both
are committed to growth; both create increasing social
and economic inequality; both are alienating and
dehumanizing. Thus both are opposed to the ideals of
ecology, social responsibility and self-realization. So,
although we shall be concentrating on institutions and
not be saying much about big science and technology, let
there be no doubt that the development of appropriate
technologies must be an integral part of the transition to
a democratically decentralized society.
Some preliminary questions should be posed at this
point. Is the institutional problem basically a problem of
67
size? Do big organizations go wrong, simply because
they are big? Is it better in principle, therefore, to have a
large number of small organizations than a small
number of large ones? Or is it a question of hov^
institutions are organized, rather than a question of their
actual size? Is it possible for big organizations to be so
well structured and so well managed that they function
well? Do the problems stem partly from the way
organizations deal with one another, and from the
disputes that arise between them? In any case, what is
the essential difference between one big organization and
a collection of small ones? Is the British Government one
organization, or are all the ministries and departments
like Health, Employment, Defence, and so on, separate
organizations? Is Congress one organization, or are the
Senate and the House of Representatives two separate
organizations? How is an organization or an institution
to be defined for these purposes?
There are no satisfactory answers to questions like
these. For practical purposes, all we can say is that, by
their nature, institutions and organizations are prone to
malfunction. Large organizations in particular have
always seemed to be less intelligent, less moral, less
forward-looking and less civilized than many of the
individuals employed in them. This is partly a question
of how large organizations function, and partly a
question of the kind of people who rise most successfully
within them to positions of power and decision-making
near the top. One has seen these failings at work in
organizations within one's own personal experience.
Historical evidence suggests that large organizations
everywhere have suffered from them.
Recently, however, the self-serving, self-perpetuating
tendencies of big institutions have become more obvious
and more obtrusive. It has become increasingly apparent
that people are required to serve the convenience of
68
organizations rather than vice versa. Internal pressures
inside organizations have become stronger than the
demands of the external w^orld to which they are
supposed to respond. Big business, big trade unions, the
civil service, and public services like education, health
and transport, nowadays give top priority all too clearly
to the interests of the people who run them and work in
them. Customers, savers, investors, citizens, students,
patients and travellers are treated as the material upon
which business tycoons, trade union leaders, politicians
and top civil servants, teachers, doctors and public
service administrators, can make their fortunes, build
their empires, and express their personalities - the
fodder, you might say, on which hungry organizations
and hungry organization men can satisfy their
aspirations - the rungs of the ladder up which ambitious
men can climb to power.
To say all this is not to cast personal reflections on
particular individuals. There are many civil servants,
teachers and doctors, for example, with high professional
skill and great integrity. But even they, to a greater or
lesser extent, are prisoners of the system in which they
find themselves. In Platform For Change Stafford Beer
makes the following statement about the National
Health Service in Britain: 'On the one hand is the
ostensible reality: an introverted organization,
pre-occupied with its own antecedents, its internal power
struggles, its levels of status, its costs and wages, which
solves its management problems in equations of political
factors and psychological stress. On the other hand is the
notion of a health service, to which surely in fact many
people dedicate their lives, conceived as a national
system for promoting healthiness.' The same diagnosis is
widely applicable to institutions of all kinds. Human
beings have not yet been able to devise effective ways of
making large organizations socially responsible or
69
socially responsive.
Now growth. Think what it would be like if the eye, or
the liver, or any other organ of the human body, had to
go on growing and growing or otherwise to die. The big
organizations of modern society are in precisely that
predicament. Why the whole system is set up this way,
and whence comes the psycho-soeial impetus that makes
it so, takes us to the mainsprings of human motivation,
and we shall come to that aspect in a later chapter. What
is relevant here is that, because the big organizations are
compelled to concentrate on growth, they have turned
into powerful engines of self-perpetuating expansion.
As J. K. Galbraith has made us aware, for example in
The New Industrial State, they persuade people by
advertising, marketing, and various other forms of public
relations and promotional activity, to want the products
and services and satisfactions that they themselves
purport to offer, thus creating a demand that is never
satisfied. Industry makes people want more and more
material goods. The medical profession, the health
administrators and the drug companies make people
want more and more health services and health products.
The educational establishment creates a similar demand
for education services and formalized learning. The
political parties create a continually growing demand for
goods and services and employment of all kinds.
Economists measure economic activity with yardsticks
like Gross National Product which reinforce this
tendency. Taken separately, each element in today's
industrial economy stimulates a growing demand for its
own output, since that is how it will survive and grow.
Taken together, the institutions of the public and
commercial sectors stimulate a limitlessly growing
demand for everything. We thus find ourselves trapped
in a political and economic system that provides a
built-in guarantee of social and economic disequilibrium,
70
including inflation, in the world of today. And in the
limits-to-growth world of the future, it offers a sure
prescription for the ultimate suicide of the human race.

Quite apart from their self-centredness and their

commitment to growth, today's large organizations are
socially divisive and damaging in a number of ways.
First, they pull people's lives apart, and leave an
emptiness in their homes and the local communities
where they live. Most of us go away from our homes
every day to work in special work-places like factories
and offices. We send our children out of the home to
learn in special places called schools. We go to special
places called hospitals when we are ill. We go out of the
home to shops and supermarkets to satisfy all our needs
for food, clothing, and the other material things of life.
We seek most of our entertainment outside the home, or
have it beamed in through the national television
channels. We move about, and heat our homes, and cook
our food, by courtesy of big organizations specializing in
transport and energy.
This tendency for most important human activities,
including education, health, mobility, energy, leisure,
and - most importantly - work itself, to migrate from the
home and fly apart into separate, specialized institutions,
has been growing rapidly in recent years. In those
institutions our needs are met by the provision of
consumer goods and services - not only from
manufacturing industries and shops, but also from the
education industry, the health industry, the transport
and energy industries, the leisure industry and the
employment services industry. Many of these industries
are run as public services by the state.
Because all these industries have to be paid for, they
pull individuals and families apart financially, as well as
71
geographically. As we saw in Chapter 2, the escalating
claims on people's expenditure caused by rising prices
and taxes and rates are a prime source of social and
economic instability. They deprive people of autonomy
and a sense of responsibility - of the feeling that they are
in control of their own lives.
This process of institutionalization is cumulative and
self-reinforcing. For example, it was the basic source of
the economic and psychological pressures which
impelled both men and, more recently, women to seek
work outside the home. Their absence from the home
created a demand for institutional facilities for looking
after young children, old people, the sick and disabled -
also outside the home. Thus one thing led to another. In
this way, just as the autonomy of business enterprises has
been steadily expropriated - in Ivan Illich's term - by the
encroaching weight of big trade unions, big financial
institutions, and big government, so our personal
autonomy and our personal lives have been steadily
expropriated by the institutions of the producer and con
sumer society. As people increasingly look to these out
side institutions to meet their needs, including their need
for work, they suffer increasing loss of capacity for
self-help and self-fulfilment. The one-dimensional,
alienated character of modern life has been extensively
analysed and documented by such thinkers as Herbert
Marcuse and Erich Fromm. It is a major cause of the
social stresses and economic discontents that exist so
widely today.
The large organizations and institutions of
industrialized society are alienating and divisive in
another way too. They gear up the power and the
opportunities of an elite minority over their fellow
citizens. The existence of big government means that
comparatively few politicians and senior civil servants
can, at least in principle, play a dominating role in the
72
decisions that shape the future. The growth of big banks
and other big financial institutions means that the
comparatively few people who run them play a
preponderant part in deciding where the money goes.
The growth of high technology means, as Illich has
shown, that the small minority of people who benefit
from air travel, for example, do so by exploiting the
world's resources of natural materials and human skills
at the expense of their fellows. In the sphere of
information and communication, the growth of large
newspapers and centralized broadcasting networks has
enormously geared up the opportunity for self-expression
and the power to communicate ideas, which is enjoyed
by the small minority of journalists and other
commentators who have easy access to the media. In
these ways the growing size of institutions makes modern
society more and more highly geared; and a highly
geared society of this kind is bound to be unstable. It
nourishes ambition beyond the human scale. It offers
delusions of power to the people who get to the top. It
sours the outlook of many of those who do not. It distorts
our social value systems and misdirects our mechanisms
of collective choice.
The growth of large organizations has had a more
specifically damaging effect on the sense of perspective of
people in positions of power, and on their perceptions of
their own responsibilities. People at the top of big
institutions easily get the impression that they stand
outside society and above it - that it is their job to deal
with members of society and their problems from on
high. At the same time, organizational boundaries limit
them to a fragmentary vision of the world and a strictly
partial sense of responsibility for the people with whom
their organizations deal - i.e. as customers, or taxpayers,
or patients, or depositors, or travellers, or employees, as
the case may be. In these ways institutionalized society
73
tends to create a conceptual model of itself not altogether
unlike the male-orientated cosmology of ancient Greece,
in which Zeus and his specialist colleagues surveyed the
world from the lofty heights of Mount Olympus and
darted down from time to time to help a favourite, spite
an enemy, or simply to enjoy themselves.
This ancient Greek cosmology is no longer good
enough. We need Einsteinian perceptions of society.
These will go with the interacting, organic model of the
economy outlined in Chapter 2, in which no member or
section or class or profession is above the battle, but all
have roles of their own to play in relation to one another.
Just as man can no longer stand apart from nature, so
governors - as in Mao Tse-tung's China - should no
longer try to distinguish themselves from governed. It
should no longer be permissible for politicians, civil
servants, lawyers, bankers, accountants, scientists and
other professional people to persuade themselves that
their function is to deal with one particular facet of
society's problems in an abstract manner from outside.
They themselves are part of these problems; in fact it is
they who constitute the most important problem that we
have to tackle today. The idea that clever people,
climbing to strategic peaks in the structure of society and
thence surveying social and economic questions from a
great height, can make objective assessments of costs and
benefits, right and wrong, true and false, that will be
valid for us all - that is one of the biggest lies in the soul
of institutional man.
After reflecting on many years' experience of big
organizations in government, business and the financial
sector I am now convinced that large institutions cannot
successfully reform themselves from within. What
Donald Schon describes in Beyond the Stable State as the
forces of 'dynamic conservatism' are far too strong. As
Stafford Beer says in Designing Freedom, so long as the
74
existing bureaucracies 'remain cybernetically organized
so as to produce themselves, our societary institutions
remain set on courses that lead to catastrophic
instability'. In Platform For Change he calls for revolution,
because 'Acceptable Man in his Mediocrity Machine is
entrenched in the face of a challenge to which he cannot
rise. He will have to be shifted, and this will be a
revolutionary move'. On the same note Ivan Illich uses
the words 'A Call to Institutional Revolution' as the
subtitle for his book Celebration of Awareness, stating in it
that 'we must abandon our attempt to solve our
problems through shifting power balances or attempting
to create more efficient bureaucratic machines'.
I confess that on this point my own view has been slow
to harden. Until quite recently, I still hoped that our
economic institutions might be able to transform
themselves into a system broadly on the lines set out in
Chapter 2 above, and that thus we might avert a
breakdown of the socio-economic system in the
industrialized countries - muddled, crazy-mixed-up,
mixed economies though they were. I now find it more
realistic to assume that further serious breakdown will
have to take place in the old system to bring about the
conditions for a breakthrough to the new. Once a society
is trapped in an escalating spiral of malfunction, where
one thing leads to the next and every measure taken to
rectify existing faults simply makes matters worse, it is
difficult to see a way of avoiding breakdown. That society
is like the individual who finds himself, in R. D. Laing's
words, in an 'untenable position. He cannot make a
move or make no move without being beset by
contradictory and paradoxical pressures and demands,
pushes and pulls, both internal from himself and external
from those around him. He is, as it were, in a position of
checkmate'. Further breakdown may be necessary,
involving abandonment of the untenable position, before
75
recovery on a new basis can take place.
There are many signs that the big institutions are, in
fact, set on a breakdown course. In Chapter 21 described
how in Britain the rise of big trade unions and powerful
financial concerns, and the tug of war between them,
undermined the authority of business managements and
compelled them to raise their prices faster than their
productivity; how, by permitting this, the lax monetary
policies adopted by successive governments, in the futile
hope of steering the economy by Keynesian 'demand
management' techniques, encouraged self-generating
inflation; hovv, in attempting to control this inflation,
successive governments introduced centralized measures
in greater and greater detail to hold back prices and
incomes; how these measures distorted industrial
efficiencyand choked offindustrial investment; how that,
in turn, necessitated still more government intervention
to stimulate investment in other ways; and how, finally,
there seems to have been created an irreconcilable
squeeze between incomes on the one hand and prices,
taxes and rates on the other - a doomsday machine that
holds individuals and companies alike in an ever
tightening grip. These developments certainly look like
the symptoms of advanced instability, moving rapidly
into a state of chronic disequilibrium and ultimately
towards collapse.
The compulsive corrections, counter-corrections and
over-corrections to one another's policies that have been
introduced in Britain by alternating Labour and
Conservative Governments in recent years are also
suggestive of a system in disequilibrium approaching the
point of collapse. To take one small example, in 1962 a
National Incomes Commission was created by the
Conservatives, which was then replaced by Labour in
1965 with a Prices and Incomes Board, which was
replaced in turn by the Conservatives in 1970 by a Prices
76
Commission and a Pay Board, the latter being
subsequently replaced by Labour in 1974 by a Royal
Commission on the Distribution of Incomes and Wealth.
The Conservatives set up a Commission on Industrial
Relations and Labour scrapped it; and Labour intend to
set up a Companies Commission, which the
Conservatives will no doubt scrap as soon as they are in
government again. This kind of behaviour is called
'hunting' when it occurs in guided missiles and
servo-systems. It can lead rapidly to total loss of control.
Another sign of impending institutional collapse is the
evaporation of conventional leadership in countries like
Britain today. Those who are ostensibly in leadership
positions have in fact become prisoners of the system.
They are themselves institutionalized. They are
organization men by training, by personality and by
social background. They assume they have to climb the
institutional structures of power and money, and they
assume they have to stay at the top, if they are to be able
to achieve anything. And they find that climbing and
staying are full-time jobs. Most of them fit neatly into
their traditional roles and pigeon holes, which they
defend stubbornly and from whose narrow windows they
look out upon the world. Is something going wrong?
Then it must be someone else's fault. You are an
industrialist? Then you blame the financiers in the City
of London and the politicians and the civil servants in
Whitehall for what is wrong with Britain's industrial
confidence. You are a banker or a financier from the
City? Then you blame the industrialists for being too
timid and unimaginative to run their companies
successfully and to invest boldly in the future, and you
blame the politicians and civil servants for creating
conditions in which investors prefer to put their money
elsewhere than in British industry. You are a politician
or civil servant? Then you lament the sluggishness of
77
British industry and the complacency of the City, and
blame them for the country's economic plight. And, of
course, whoever you are, you blame the trade unions.
Ivan Illich has drawn our attention to another sign
that institutionalized society is on a breakdown course.
This is the failure of the big organizations to deliver the
goods, even on their own terms. They are actually
becoming counter-productive. Modern teaching
institutions positively inculcate ignorance and deprive
their students of the capacity to learn; modern medical
institutions spread disease and deprive people of the
capacity for good health; manufacturers and operators of
institutionalized transport systems positively create
congestion and immobility, and deprive people of the
capacity and satisfaction of moving themselves;
government bureaucracies hamper and harass the
citizens whose liberties and welfare are supposed to be
their concern; in today's inflationary conditions,
financial and monetary institutions have become devices
for actually impoverishing most of the people whose
money they have in trust; and, finally, the big employers
and big trade unions of the consumer society now create
idleness and under-employment on a massive scale,
though one of their main raison-dttre is to provide jobs for
the job-consuming masses.
Even the traditional procedures for clarifying and
discussing society's problems before decisions are taken,
are now bankrupt and ineffective. Royal Commissions,
departmental committees of enquiry, assignments car
ried out by consultants, and similar long drawn out intel
lectual preliminaries to making decisions, assume that
what should be done can be identified by painstaking
analyses carried out as a series of one-off studies. The
theory is that politicians, civil servants, economists,
lawyers, academics and other powerful and highly
educated people - observing the problems of society one
78
by one from their Olympian height, and in each case
calculating the pros and cons of all the possibilities
dispassionately with the help of elaborate techniques like
cost/benefit analysis and technology assessment - can
reach objective answers, which will then be gratefully
accepted as correct by the hoi polloi. In practice, these
enquries are often futile. They are sometimes simply a
device for shelving leadership responsibility. They
seldom contribute creatively to the decisions that have to
be made. Where shall a third London airport be built?
Shall a Channel Tunnel be built? What powers shall be
devolved from Whitehall and Westminster to Scotland,
Wales and the English regions? These are three British
examples of the kind of questions on which millions of
pounds and a very great deal of time, have been spent in
recent years, and similar examples could be quoted for
other countries too. Few people participate in these
investigations, only organizations with vested interests,
since most people find the methods of enquiry
incomprehensible; and the eventual decisions are often
contrary to those recommended by the investigators. The
fact is that, in principle, this one-off method of studying,
discussing and deciding things is obsolete. People's
feelings about what is right and wrong, what they will
stand for and what they won't, what should be done and
how it should be done, now carry more weight than
disembodied analysis.
However, making decisions by popular referenda on
one-off questions whose significance to their own lives
people find it hard to understand, will meet the need no
better than one-off investigations by high powered
pundits whose findings people cannot understand.
Institutional reforms are badly overdue in this area. We
need new methods of continuous social and economic
planning which will attract the genuine participation of
very large numbers of people. This is what Alvin Toffier
79
in TheEco-spasm Report calls 'anticipatory democracy'. By
developing existing methods of futures research, attitude
survey and opinion sampling, and public discussion and
debate, into a continually developing system of open
decision-making, we could create a situation in which
important decisions about the future will emerge from a
widely based collective learning process, in which the
common sense of people will count for as much as the
intellectual fantasies of the so-called experts.

So the big institutions of our modern materialist society

are ecologically destructive and socially damaging. That
gives urgency to the need for a radical transformation of
political and economic structures, on lines suggested in
Chapters 1 and 2. But the big institutions are also
showing unmistakeable symptoms of impending
collapse. That, added to their innate incapacity for
self-reform, means that we cannot expect them to play a
constructive part in transforming themselves. As realists,
we shall conclude with comparative equanimity that
further collapse in our governing assumptions and
institutions is bound to occur. As idealists, we shall
concentrate on preparing and clarifying the alternatives
that will be needed to replace them, when the time
comes.

That diagnosis does not provide us with a clear cut

remedy. We cannot yet spell out, step by step, the
measures to be taken to exorcize the institutional
imperative. All we can do at this half way stage is to
recapitulate in summary form a number of institutional
insights which will contribute constructively to our
understanding of how the eventual transformation could
come about. The essential key to progress will, however,
have to be found elsewhere - in the hearts and minds of
men and women.

80
 Among the insights that emerge from our discussion so
far are the following.

1. The fundamental problems of modern

institutionalized societies are constitutional, not
economic. The prime need is to redefine the
functions of government worldwide; and to
redefine the functions, rights and obligations of
the various participants in the economies of
industrialized societies. When I talk thus about
redefining the functions, rights and duties of all
concerned in goverrunent and the economy, I am
not suggesting that a blueprint for the future can
be drawn up or that new definitions can be laid
down by any single person or any single group of
writers, economists and politicians. The process of
redefinition must be operational. It must consist in
starting out along the lines suggested in Chapters
2 and 3 above, with the deliberate aim of evolving
and introducing new perceptions, new practices
and new procedures in the spheres of government
and business worldwide.

2. The institutional reformer should approach

society as a system consisting of innumerable
interacting centres of perception, decision and
control. The reformer's aim should be to help to
bring about conditions in which the complex
interactions between these centres will create a
continuing state of dynamic equilibrium. He will
be the catalyst in an on-going process of collective
learning and collective self-healing.
3. The reformer should thus adopt an Einsteinian
model of a pluralist society in which the changing
role of every member defines itself relatively to all
the others, and in which the ethical outlook of

81
 every member has its own subjective validity.
There is no Olympian summit in this universe
from which godlike beings can view the whole
objectively and authoritatively. This prompts the
question: can change simply be left to emerge
from natural processes (i.e. unstructured and
disorganized processes) of evolutionary
interaction between the members of a pluralist
society? Must it not be imposed by some powerful
member or group of members of society, who can
claim to be acting on behalf of all? The answer, as
so often with choices eitherlor (either have
democratic government or efficient government,
either trust the heart or trust the head, either go
for social revolution or for personal regeneration),
is that neither alternative will do. Natural change
will not be fast enough, while imposed change will
be unacceptable. We need to develop
appropriately structured processes of collective
learning and collective change, at all levels and in
all sectors of human decision-making, in which
leaders will propose - not impose - their own view.
Walter Bagehot, in his book The English
Constitution, said of the 19th century Parliament
that one of its most important functions was a
teaching function. In today's less paternalistic
climate, deliberative bodies like Parliament
cannot teach in the old-fashioned sense. They
must now become focal points for participative
processes of collective learning and collective
change.

4. The dominant conceptual model of an enterprise

or an activity should be of a system with multiple
objectives, the overriding aim being to maintain a
balance between them. The co-operative ethic
82
 underlying this model differs markedly from the
aggrandizing ethic that underlies the dominant
model in the minds of business people and
economists today, which is to pursue a single
objective - such as the maximization of profit or
economic growth - subject to meeting various
other constraints. It also differs from the
competitive ethic underlying the adversary model
prevalent in the minds of most politicians, trade
unionists and lawyers - according to which the
right conclusions will be reached in politics,
collective bargaining and the law by a process of
confrontation between two sides.

5. Following from this, the public interest should not

be conceived in terms of maximizing welfare,
utility, social benefit or any similar construct in
the minds of economists, philosophers and public
officials. It should be concerned with helping to
develop and maintain a framework of functions,
rights and duties in society - a framework which
will hold the balance between differing interests,
from which social justice will emerge, and within
which people will have scope to fulfil themselves -
a framework which will itself be continually
evolved by the participative processes of collective
learning and collective change which I have
outlined.

6. By the same token, we should accept that in a

pluralist society it is pointless to seek single
remedies for social and economic ills. We should
ignore political parties and other pressure groups
which put forward competing panaceas, and
argue with one another about them. For example,
the problems of the industrial economy will not be
solved simply by nationalizing the so-called
83
 private sector, as socialists tend to argue. Nor will
they be solved simply by introducing sound
monetary policies and a responsible attitude
towards public finance in government, as right
wing monetarists argue. A broader programme,
incorporating both social responsibility in business
and finance and financial responsibility in
government, will be needed to bring the
interdependent elements of a pluralist society into
a new balance.

7. From a more scientific point of view, we should be

thinking about the control mechanisms needed to
keep in a state of dynamic equilibrium the
innumerable interacting centres of perception and
decision which constitute a pluralist society. We
need to learn what kinds of changes in existing
decision procedures at the various control points
(e.g. in government, financial institutions and
business enterprises) would bring a very complex,
highly interactive system into such a state of
equilibrium.
8. Another way to illuminate the problems, from a
scientific and analytical point of view, is to explore
further the idea of the laws as rules, money as the
scoring system, and government as the
administrator and umpire, for a game. This is not
just an apt analogy, which may encourage the
players - teams and individuals, companies and
people - to play the game and deal with one
another in a friendlier and more co-operative
spirit. It suggests also that there could be much
merit in insisting that the administrators, referees
and linesmen should stick to the task of getting the
rules of the game right and enforcing them, rather
than themselves becoming heavily involved in the
84
 game. In other words, it suggests that
governments should concentrate on seeing that the
laws and the money system provide the right kind
of framework for keeping the industrial economy
in balance, and intervene in it directly very much
less than they do at present. (Stafford Beer, on p.
112 of Platform For Change, uses the same analogy,
but from an explicitly managerial point of view.
He suggests that, instead of intervening directly, a
higher manager should change the rules of the
game so that his side will win. But a government
should have no side.)
9. This idea that laws and money should be seen as
the rules and scoring system for a game also
suggests a change in the emphasis of the work of
intellectual analysts and expert commentators,
such as economists and other social scientists.
Much of their work at present can be seen as
providing advice to the referee and the players
about what the score should be, and about who
should win and who should lose, if the game were
played according to a hypothetical set of rules and
a hypothetical scoring system quite different from
those which actually apply. Cost-benefit analysis
is one example of applying hypothetical rules and
scoring systems in this way. The game analogy
suggests that the expert commentators should
concentrate on improving the rules and scoring
system for the game itself rather than on working
out what the results of the game would be or
should be in hypothetical circumstances.
10. Consistently with this general approach, we
should remind government officials, lawyers, and
financial experts like bankers and accountants, of
the trusteeship element in their work. They are
85
 employed to draw up and administer the rules and
the scoring system for the game. As members of an
ineffective and parasitical bureaucracy, or as
members of legal and financial professions which
exploit the failings in the legal and financial
systems for personal profit, they do less than
justice to their own good name. The civil servants'
ethic of political subordination and neutrality can
decline all too easily into personal irresponsibility
and lack of commitment. The money-making ethic
of City lawyers and bankers, stockbrokers and
accountants, can decline all too easily into
excessive preoccupation with self-interest.

11. Fortunately, there are also dormant traditions of

public service and professional integrity. The
personal self-respect of the rising generation of
bankers and financiers may make them
increasingly reluctant to work in a financial
system which is open to the charge - made by
Lord Nelson against the naval victuallers in the
Napoleonic Wars - that 'the only emulation I can
perceive is who could cheat the most'; a financial
system which is biased in favour of those who
operate it at the expense of those who use its
services, in favour of big people at the expense of
small, and in favour of borrowers at the expense of
lenders. The new generation in the legal
profession, likewise, may become increasingly
uneasy about making a good living out of the fact
that, in the words of a British Lord Chancellor,
the 'complexity of English law has, by now,
reached a degree where the system is not only
unknown to the community at large, but
unknowable, save to the extent of a few
departments, even to the professionals'.
86
12. This need to revive the tradition of genuine public
service and genuine professional responsibility
shades into the idea of leadership as service. The
idea of the leader as the servant of the led - as a
teacher who can show his fellows how better to
develop their own lives - has important
consequences for the way we think about power. It
suggests a concept of power, not as the capacity to
dominate or impose, but as the capacity to develop
and draw out potential that is already there - like
the power of Michelangelo to liberate the living
forms imprisoned in the marble rock.
13. The same kind of power, directed inwards to
ourselves rather than outwards to our fellows, is
the source of personal initiative and self-help. By
cultivating it, we can help to break the vicious
spiral of escalating institutionalization in all areas
of human activity. This is directly true of people's
personal lives. But it also applies to their actions
as employees of large organizations, where powers
of initiative can be used according to personal
judgement about what is right and what is wrong,
even when those judgements go beyond what is
officially required of a functionary.
14. We should also be prepared, as part of the same
endeavour, to humanize the workings of modern
society, to rely more on our hearts as a guide to
action and less on our heads, more on common
sense and less on the actions of other people who
are supposed to be more expert and more
knowledgeable than we are.
15. Finally, it will be helpful to think of political and
economic institutions - including law and money
- as providing the basic system of controls and
87
 channels through which human energies find their
outlet in society. How should we change this
system of channels and controls, in order to
encourage our energies to flow more harmoniously
and creatively? Are our energies now set against
one another? Are they blocked and sterile and
destructive? If so, what changes in our institutions
will improve the flow? In this context institutional
reform can again be seen as a process of healing in
the body politic.

At the beginning of this chapter we asked whether the

institutional imperative is driving mankind relentlessly
into an evolutionary dead end, or whether the present
institutionalization of society will prove to be only a
temporary diversion from the main path of human
evolution. Can we foresee the possibility of a
breakthrough to a new and higher plane of collective
human consciousness and self-control?
We cannot yet claim to to have found a satisfactory
answer to those questions. We have crystallized a
number of useful insights about the nature of the
transformation needed in our political and economic
institutions. But something more will be necessary -
something closer to the mainsprings of human attitude
and motivation - before we can be confident of exorcizing
the institutional imperative. Can we develop a new
human imperative, stemming from the inner well-springs
of the human psyche, that will be strong enough to
subdue the forces which our own external creations now
impose so heavily upon us?

88
 4. OVERRIDING THE INHERITED
PROGRAM

HE first statement of the 'thesis' in Stafford Beer's

T PlatformFor Change begins as follows:

'Man is a prisoner of his own way of thinking

and of his own stereotypes of himself.
His machine for thinking
the brain
has been programmed to deal with a vanished world.'

The thesis goes on to discuss our concepts of

organization.
I agree wholeheartedly with that statement of Stafford
Beer's and I agree about the inadequacy of our existing
concepts of organization as a tool for managing
complexity. But I find that I no longer approach these
questions from a managerial standpoint. I have come to
the view that, if we are to exorcize the institutional
imperative, we shall have to see it as the outcome of a
psycho-social drive that stems from the deepest springs of
human motivation. Man must, indeed, liberate himself
from his own way of thinking. But this may be a more
serious and difficult challenge, than institutional
reformers and revolutionaries like Ivan Illich, E. F.
Schumacher, and Stafford Beer himself have yet
acknowledged. Man may be caught in a trap which,
down the millenia and the centuries, he has been making
89
for himself. The trap is his own nature. The built-in
program, inherited biologically and culturally from
previous generations, which now governs the desires and
the behaviour of the species, may be holding us firmly on
a suicide course. The question is, can we find ways to
override the program, much as a computer operator in
an emergency might override the computer program
currently in control?
In this chapter we look briefly at the sources of these
deep springs of motivation. We remind ourselves that the
roles of men and women in relation to each other have
been very closely linked to prevailing concepts of power
and wealth, including money. We trace the evolution of
attitudes towards power and money. We touch on some
of the changes that have taken place in the organization
of power and money, and we suggest that their
bureaucratization in modern society may soon
precipitiate a further radical transformation in the way
we think about them. We suggest that further changes in
sex relationships are likely to be closely connected with
this future transformation of our attitudes to power and
wealth. Finally, we suggest how these changes in roles
and attitudes might contribute to the necessary
breakthrough to a future in which the human species can
survive.
Many writers and thinkers have discussed the
characteristic features of the male and female roles in
human society up to the present time. For example,
according to Erich Fromm in The Sane Society a
patriarchal society is characterized by respect for
man-made law, by rational thought, and by sustained
efforts to control and change the natural world; whereas
a matriarchal society is characterized by the importance
of blood ties, close links with the land, and acceptance of
human dependence on nature. Patriarchy attaches high
value to order and authority, obedience and hierarchy;
90
whereas matriarchy lays stress on love, unity and
universal harmony.
In The Imperial Animal Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox
describe the prevailing masculine characteristics less
flatteringly. They say that human males have 'all the
enthusiasms of the hunting primate, but few of the
circumstances in which this reality can be reflected. So
they create their own realities: they make up teams; they
set up businesses and political parties; they form secret
societies and cabals for and against the government; they
set up regiments; they make up fantasies about honour
and dignity; they turn their enemies into 'not men' - into
prey. They generate forms of automatic loyalty and
complete dedication that can spread the Jesuitical
message of the Church Militant and also send screaming
jets to a foreign country. All a country needs is a couple
of dozen males who take their fantasies about their own
omnipotence so seriously that they spend money, kill
people, and even commit Abraham's presumptuous
conceit of sacrificing their sons to voices of grandeur they
think they hear.'
Meanwhile, as Virginia Woolf pointed out in A Room of
One's Own, the human female aids and abets the human
male in these dangerous fantasies: 'Women have served
all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the
magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man
at twice its natural size. Without that power, probably
the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of
all our wars would be unknown . .. Mirrors are essential
to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon
and Mussolini insist so emphatically upon the inferiority
of women, for if they were not inferior they would cease
to enlarge . . . How is a man to go on giving judgement,
civilizing natives, making law, writing books, dressing up
and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself
at breakfast and dinner at least twice the size he really is ?
91
... The looking-glass vision is of extreme importance
because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous
system. Take it away and men may die, like the drug
fiend deprived of his cocaine.'
These attitudes and behaviour patterns of men and
women are an important part of the inherited program
that we need to override. Are they biologically based and
genetically imprinted, or are they merely due to a process
of cultural conditioning transmitted through previous
generations? Or are they both?
Male dominance can be observed in all human
societies and also in the behaviour of baboons and other
primates;' men are physically more powerful than
women; and in sexual intercourse men have a more
active, initiating penetrative role, whereas women are
more passive, expectant, and receptive. Male chauvinists
maintain that for all these biological reasons men are
bound to play the dominant role in society. As Ruskin
put it, 'the man's power is active, progressive, defensive.
He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the
defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention;
his energy is for adventure, for war and for conquest . . .
But the woman's power is for sweet ordering,
arrangement and decision ... by her office and place she
is protected from all danger and all temptation.'
The protagonists of women's rights and women's
liberation, on the other hand, argue that the roles of men
and women in society today have been culturally
conditioned. John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women
contains a forthright statement of this point of view:
'Standing on the ground of common sense and the
constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone
knows or can know the nature of the two sexes, so long as
they have only been seen in their present relation to one
another .. . What is now called the nature of woman is
an eminently artificial thing - the result of forced
92
repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in
others. It may be asserted without scruple that no other
class of dependents have had their character so entirely
distorted from its natural proportions by their relation
with their masters.'
The argument between these two opposing points of
view generates a great deal of heat and antagonism. But,
it does not take us very far for practical purposes.
Common sense suggests that biological and cultural
factors together underlie the present attitudes and roles
of the sexes in society; that if these now constitute a
program that threatens the survival of the human species
in the environment we have created for ourselves, we
shall be unwise to underestimate the difficulties of
overriding our biological and cultural inheritance; but
that we are obliged to find a way of doing so, nonetheless.
Tiger and Fox have shown that the question of how the
future is to be shaped and who is to participate in
shaping it, which is right at the heart of the evolutionary
process, is inextricably interwoven with questions about
power, wealth and sex. They discuss the critical
difference between ant societies and human societies.
Ant societies are apolitical in the sense that the roles of
queens, drones, workers, soldiers and so on are
genetically programmed and therefore fixed. Human
societies are political. 'Politics involves the possibility of
changing the distribution of resources in a society - one
of which is the control over the future that breeding
allows. The political process - the process of
redistributing control over resources among the
individuals of a group - is, in evolutionary terms, a
breeding process. The political system is a breeding
system. When we apply the word "lust" to both power
and sex,* we are nearer the truth than we imagine. In the
struggle for reproductive advantage, some do better than
* and money. JHR

93
others. It is this that changes the distribution of genes in
a population and affects its genetic future ... Power
equals self-perpetuation'. At a later stage in human
evolution 'power became divorced from the control of the
genetic future of the population, and fastened instead on
to the control of material goods and the symbolic future.
The leaders could not ensure that they controlled the
future merely by peopling it with their own offspring;
they had to ensure that their offspring controlled the
future by having the monopoly of wealth and power.'
Social and cultural evolution largely replaced genetic
evolution. Social and cultural qualities became more
important than purely physical qualities in the
Darwinian selection process.
Thus the crude concept of power as domination and
the crude concept of wealth as property are closely
related to sex. They are rooted in primeval relationships
between the two sexes: males controlled females for sex,
for service and for exchanging with females from other
tribes; and females looked to males for impregnation and
protection. As Kate Millett puts it in Sexual Politics,
traditional forms of patriarchy 'granted the father nearly
total ownership over wife or wives and children,
including the powers of physical abuse and often even
those of murder and sale. Classically, as head of the
family the father is both begetter and owner in a system
in which kinship is property.' She goes on to quote Sir
Henry Maine's view, in Ancient Law, that in the archaic
patriarchal family 'the group consists of animate and
inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land and
goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic
authority of the oldest male', who is 'absolutely supreme
in his household. His dominion extends to life and death
and is as unqualified over his children and their houses
as over his slaves.' Even in modern societies there are
survivals of the chattel status of women, in their 'loss of
94
name, their obligation to adopt the husband's domicile,
and the general legal assumption that marriage involves
an exchange of the female's domestic service and (sexual)
consortium in return for financial support.'
This concept of power as domination is still widely
prevalent. It involves the ability to exercise one's will
upon other people, including the ability to inflict pain
upon them. It still has strong sexual connotations of a
crude, even brutal kind. This is humorously illustrated in
many bawdy verses and songs, such as
'My husband's a sergeant, a sergeant, a sergeant,
A very fine sergeant is he.
All day he fucks men about, fucks men about,
fucks men about,
And at night he comes home and fucks me.'
But, as Kate Millett has exhaustively shown in Sexual
Politics, the connection between power, violence and sex
becomes pathological in the works of writers such as
Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, zind there is no doubt
that this kind of sadism is not far below the surface of
much of the violence and terrorism in modern societies
today. Miller, incidentally, in Tropic of Capricorn,
describes the first rule of business in capitalist America
as 'fuck or be fucked'.
The goal of political and economic power has had
sexual overtones for many modern revolutionary
movements. To take a particular example to which
Shulamith Firestone - among others - has drawn
attention, racial revolutionaries and their opponents tend
to be obsessed with the idea of sexual power and sexual
property: '. .. then came Black Power. A rumble of
I-told-you-so issued from the nation, especially from the
working class who were closest to the blacks; what they
really want is our power - they're after our women.
Eldridge Cleaver's honesty in Soul on Ice clinched it. The
95
heavily sexual nature of the racial issue spilled out.
Internally, as well, the Black Power movement was
increasingly involved in a special kind of machismo, as
busy proclaiming manhood as protesting race and class
injustice.' But more generally, the Lady Chatterley
syndrome has been one of the basic motivators in class
war, race war and sex war - challenging the lower class
(black) male to take possession of the upper class (white)
female, and the upper class (white) female to repudiate
her subjection to the upper class (white) male. It is even
possible to interpret Mao Tse-tung's famous admonition
to every communist that 'political power grows out of the
barrel of a gun' as an expression of the male drive for
sexual dominance. The phallic symbolism is clear.
From early times human beings have had an urge to
quantify power, wealth and sex. 'Now the weight of gold
that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred three
score and six talents of gold ... So King Solomon
exceeded all the Kings of the earth for riches and for
wisdom . . . And he had seven hundred wives, princesses,
and three hundred concubines'. This quantification of
wealth eventually gives a special significance to money.
Quantification also prompts us to ask of power, money
and sex, 'how much is enough?', and we can answer:
with the ascetic, 'too little is enough'; with the moderate,
'enough is enough'; and with the glutton, the power
seeker, the miser, and the Don Juan, 'too much is
enough'. The idea then gets around that the sky's the
limit: grab as much power as you can; grab as much
money as you can; grab as much sex as you can. This
leads men to feel that power, money and women give
them status. In his Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein
Veblen explained the attractions of conspicuous
consumption: the rich and the powerful display their
power and wealth through their women, whose idleness
and decoration (and, in some societies, fatness)
96
demonstrate the success of their menfolk. In The Big
Spenders Lucius Beebe tells us about Potter Palmer, 'the
Chicago hotelman who kept his wife so loaded with
jewels that observers following her progress through the
restaurant of the Paris Ritz thought that she staggered
visibly from sheer weight of diamonds. "There she stands
with half a million on her back," Potter Palmer used to
say admiringly.'
Even in the past there has always been a snag about
trying to assuage personal anxieties and insecurities by
conspicuous consumption: you can't take power, money
and sex with you when you die. In the limits-to-growth
world of the future in which more and more people are
becoming more self-aware, conspicuous consumption
could well come to be widely regarded as an anti-social
symptom of personal maladjustment - an outward and
visible sign of psychological insecurity.
We have already noted the sexual significance of many
violent revolutionary movements. But the very idea of
revolution (or reform) - in the normal sense of those
terms as the forcible transfer (or peaceful redistribution)
of power and wealth from one person, or one group of
people, or one sector of society, to others - is based on a
concept of power and wealth as the kind of things that
can belong to some people and not to others. Such
political objectives as the dictatorship of the proletariat,
an irreversible shift of power to the working class, and a
more egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, are
based on the assumption that power and wealth are
things of that kind. Those objectives are all to be
contrasted with Gandhi's view in Non-Violence in Peace and
War that 'a non-violent revolution is not a programme for
the seizure of power, but it is a programme for the
transformation of relationships.'
A further development of the idea that power is
something possessed by particular people, which can be
97
taken from them by others, is the idea that power is to be
found in certain positions in society. This idea that
power belongs to positions and roles rather than
personally to the people occupying those positions and
carrying out those roles, is an important feature of the
bureaucracies that dominate our highly institutionalized
modern societies. Many a career man, especially among
politicians, public officials, business managers and
professional trade unionists, is inspired by the hope of
possessing power if only he can achieve a place where
power resides.
This idea that power has its location in certain places
in society is connected with two other ideas of historical
importance. The first is the notion that all power
ultimately derives from one particular source; this is the
idea which underlies the concept of sovereignty, and
from which are developed such metaphysical
constructions as the British constitutional fiction that
sovereignty resides with 'the Queen in Parliament'. The
second is the idea that power can be split up into defined
parcels, each of which are then given to certain positions
and roles in society; this notion underlies many of the
complexities of constitutional law. There is an obvious
artificiality about ideas like these, and no doubt their
operational importance will continue to fade vwth time.
A comparable notion in the economic sphere, i.e. as
applied to wealth instead of political power, is that
everything has to be owned by somebody. This idea that
the possessor/possessed relationship is fundamental to
human activity underlies statements like the following.
'It is all very well to say that the shareholders will not be
owners of the company. Who then does own it? There
are evident legal difficulties if assets are owned by no
one.' But these legal difficulties arise, surely, from the
continuing existence of a system of law based on an
absurdly wide extension of the metaphysical concept of
98
personal property. They cannot be attributed to any
underlying feature of the real world according to which
the assets of every undertaking are an aggregation of a
multitude of little pieces, each of which belongs to
somebody in the same way that an eye, or a hat, or a
house belongs. Indeed, there is an obvious artificiality
about the fiction that big companies or big financial
institutions like General Motors and ICI or Chase
Manhattan and Barclays banks are owned by their
shareholders, and that British Railways or the US Navy
are owned by the British or US taxpayers. For practical
purposes we find it necessary to define this kind of
ownership as a set of rights and duties. If we are realistic
we also have to recognize that the rights of shareholders
to control the businesses they are supposed to own have
been heavily eroded in the last half century.
Thus the economic concept of ownership is becoming
less and less useful for practical purposes, as the concept
of sovereignty has become less and less useful in the
political sphere. It is true that constitutional and
commercial lawyers - not to mention politicians -
continue to preserve for sovereignty and ownership a
metaphysical significance far above their practical value
as means of clarifying the operational rights and duties of
the individuals and organizations concerned. But this
only confirms that the masculine mind will go to great
lengths to preserve the fictions and fantasies of Erich
Fromm's 'man-made world of ideas, principles and
man-made things' that replaces nature as the ground of
existence and security for the human male. Clever men
can be very silly indeed when their feet are a long way off
the ground.
However, it is not just the constitutional and
commercial lawyers who reify the concepts of power and
wealth, and think of them as commodities or substances
to be possessed. Conventional thinking in the academic
99
fields of political science and economics also assumes
that power and wealth are, first and foremost, things of
the kind that can be possessed by the particular people
who acquire them, or who occupy positions where they
reside. Political scientists think that politics and
government are basically about the processes of seeking,
acquiring, exercizing and distributing something called
power. Who has got it? How do they use it? How did
they get it? How long will they keep it? Who may take it
from them? Economists ask and try to answer similar
questions about something called wealth, as represented
in quantified money terms. How can we make more of it?
and how should it be distributed? Now of course people
need to fulfil themselves by exercizing their powers, and
of course they have material needs to satisfy. But these
political and economic thinkers are guilty of a grave
heresy. They encourage politicians, business leaders and
other public men to believe that they can do very little
without acquiring and keeping these things called power
and wealth. They may think of power and wealth as
means to other ends. But the pursuit of power and wealth
inevitably tends to become the dominating end itself.
At this point the reader might be tempted to ask,
'What do you mean, then, when you talk of power and
wealth? would it not help if you defined their meaning
before discussing them further?'. Let me explain,
therefore, why this misses the point I am trying to make,
and why I do not propose to define at all rigorously what
I mean by power and wealth. Concepts like power and
wealth, sovereignty and ownership, embody the
structure and the categories of our thinking, much as the
institutions of government and the economy embody the
structure and categories of our social decision-making.
Concepts evolve, much as institutions do, to meet the
changing needs of the times - though, since there is
always a time-lag, they are always to some extent behind
too
the times. As philosophers and reformers come to
understand these evolutionary processes better and
become able to influence them more constructively,
human beings will come to acquire a greater degree of
conscious control over the evolving destiny of the species.
It is the proper task of the philosopher and the reformer
to involve themselves in the evolutionary processes of
collective learning which results in conceptual evolution
and institutional change, to try to improve them, and to
participate in them with other people. The philosopher
who tries to define a concept once for all, like the
reformer who tries to lay down a blueprint for an
institution that will last for ever, is engaged on a
misconceived task. No object would be served by a writer
such as myself trying to impose a new definition of power
and wealth, or a blueprint for a new government
organization, on my readers.
The important point is that our concepts of power and
wealth are evolving. They have evolved, as the concept of
God has evolved, from the crudely primitive to the
metaphysically complex. They will continue to evolve in
the future. The institutionalization of power and wealth
in modern bureaucratic society has led to an astonishing
complexification of the decision jungle in government
and of the money jungle in the financial sector of
advanced countries, and to huge self-generating volumes
of paper and other information which overload those
working within the government and the money system.
As this goes on, the recently dominant notions of power
and wealth are beginning to lose their attractiveness and
credibility. Even the power wielded by a President or a
Prime Minister and the wealth controlled by the
chairman of a big bank seem unattractive goals to which
to dedicate one's life today. As this kind of power and
this kind of wealth continue to lose their magic, it seems
likely that the people who live in modern societies will
101
increasingly think about power and wealth in a different
way. The formulation of new concepts of power and
wealth - and also, no doubt, new formulations of such
concepts as God, work, health, and learning - will
increasingly exercise our minds.
Some of these new concepts will be framed in
institutional terms - for example, they will be about new
patterns of decision-making and a new role for money in
our political, economic and social institutions - on the
lines which I sketched in Chapters 1 and 2. Others will
be framed in non-institutional terms - power as the
internal capacity of a person to contribute creatively to
the lives of his fellow men and women, wealth as the
internal capacity of a person to deploy physical resources
and psychic energies constructively for himself and his
fellows. In both cases, institutional and non-institutional,
the new concepts will be ones that seem attractive from a
practical point of view, because they make sense, because
we know how to use them in an operational context,
because they seem to work, because they represent
liberation rather than imprisonment, and because the
credibility of the old concepts of power and wealth is
evaporating fast in the highly bureaucratized societies of
the present time.
I want to say a brief word here about power and fear.
The crude and primitive exercise of personal physical or
political power by bullies, kings, dictators and barons, of
personal economic power by rich land owners and
factory owners, and of personal sexual power by
domineering and sadistic males, all create fear and
depend upon it. In a more institutionalized society - or in
a more regulated situation - government and the law
provide a measure of protection against the fear of
political, economic or sexual oppression arising from the
personal malevolence or personal whims of powerful,
rich and sexually dominating men. But an
102
institutionalized society also seems to bring with it
impersonal, more institutionalized forms of restriction
and injustice. Hence the call for a de-institutionalized
society which, to be feasible, must imply liberation and
the end of oppression and fear. Benevolence and
creativity, not malevolence and destructiveness, will have
to be the universal rule among those possessed of
personal powers to affect their fellow men and women in
the political, economic and sexual spheres.

We now turn to the question of bureaucracy, and in this

case some discussion of meaning is necessary before we
proceed. In one sense, the word 'bureaucracy' can be
used simply to indicate the mode of government in a
particular society. The assumption is still made that
power resides somewhere in that society rather than
somewhere else. As Martin Albrow says in Bureaucracyy 'If
the question being asked is simply 'who has power?'. . .,
then the concepts of bureaucracy, monarchy or
aristocracy can be seen as specifications of the nature of
the group or individual who at any time holds power.' In
another sense, however, the process of bureaucratization
is to be seen as parallel to industrialization. In this sense
of the word, bureaucracy reflects the institutionalization
of decision-making in government, industry and all other
sectors of social and economic activity; while
industrialization reflects the institutionalization of
manufacture and production. In this sense, bureaucratization
is a change that comes over society, together with
industrialization. To use the terms we borrowed from
Max Nicholson in Chapter 3, the proliferation of
bureaucracy and the managerial mode of
decision-making reflects the growth of the nomosphere,
while industrialization reflects the growth of the
technosphere. The suggestion in Chapter 3 was that this
103
growth has, in both cases, become cancerous and
self-perpetuating. The suggestion here is that it will
inevitably lead to fundamental changes in our ideas
about power and wealth. This is because bureaucracy
represents the alienation of personal power and personal
wealth; because bureaucracy makes impossible the
transfer of power and wealth from one group of people to
another, either by revolution or reform; and because the
continuing growth of bureaucracy is a self-destroying
process, which is bound to undermine the credibility and
authority, and the power and wealth, including the
money system, which are vested in bureaucracy itself.
These points are crucially important. We need to explore
them now a little further.
The alienation of personal power and responsibility
under bureaucracy may, of course, be seen as preferable
to the unbridled, irresponsible exercise of personal
authoritarianism. Officials and managers and clerks are
given defined duties to perform on behalf of agencies
Other than themselves, for example government
departments or business corporations. Those agencies
pay them for performing their duties; those agencies
provide them with the necessary facilities; those agencies
give them the necessary authority to act on their behalf.
The individual official, manager or clerk in an office is
thus alienated from the exercise of decision-making
power, in the same way as the individual factory worker
is alienated from the production and manufacturing
process. The power to make decisions in a bureaucracy
does not belong to the officials, managers or clerks
themselves, but to the positions they occupy. This
applies not only in government offices and departments;
it applies also to officials, managers and clerks in banks
and other financial institutions whose handling of
monetary transactions helps to determine the spending
power of their customers; and it applies to managers and
104
clerks in big businesses of all kinds.
This alienation of individuals in large organizations
from the power of making decisions gives the
organizations a corporate momentum and a corporate
personality of their own. What happens is something like
this.
Formally, the behaviour of officials, managers and
clerks is governed, as Max Weber pointed out in his
studies of bureaucracy, by the code of rules laid down by
their organization, by the policies it adopts, by the
definition of each person's task within the organization,
and by the instructions he receives from his superiors.
The activity of the organization is structured into
compartments (departments, divisions, branches,
sections), reflecting partly the pattern of its past growth,
and partly the prevailing view about how best to divide
up its work. Communication of information and
instructions travels serially within the organization from
one person (or department) to another, and then to
another, and so on. To organize activity and
communication in this way fosters specialism and
detachment, just as - according to the message of
Marshall McLuhan - specialism and detachment are
fostered by the serialism of the alphabet, the written
word and print technology. This mode of work and
thought and action is one which seems to reflect and
satisfy the tendencies and inclinations of the masculine
mind. Logical, analytical, reductive - it is the mode of
operation one would expect to find in a world
constructed by men.
So far so good. However, as organizations grow in size,
chains of command and lines of communication grow
longer. Information and instructions take longer to travel
through them, and are much more likely to be distorted
when (and if) they reach their destination. Policy
becomes more difficult to make, and to communicate.
105
The rules and the departmentalization of activity become
more complex, creating more confusion and greater risk
of internal conflict and overlapping. Meanwhile, the
behaviour and attitudes of people working in this
environment develop in ways well documented in the
literature of social psychology and organization theory.
Informal procedures, informal communication networks,
and informal organizational groupings come into
existence alongside the formal structure of the
organization. Individual departments and groups
acquire an identity and a territorial imperative of their
own. Half-consciously, and sometimes explicitly, they
give a higher priority to their own internal goals than to
the social purposes of the organization itself. An internal
power game develops, the main features of which
include, first, the urge to grow, to build empires^ and to
climb to positions of greater power, higher stams and
bigger monetary reward; and, second, a defensive inertia
and obstructionism against the possibility of changes
which might threaten existing positions, existing
territory and existing status. Thus the man-made world
automatically generates its own malfunctions. The
organization turns in upon itself.
As institutionalization and bureaucracy continue to
spread more and more widely through modern societies,
the successful people in politics, government, business,
finance, the professions, and public services tend
increasingly to be the kind of people who can master and
manipulate the complex rules, procedures,
organizational quirks and power games that characterize
the big institutions. These people are likely to be men,
not women; and, because those complexities acquire a
life of their own based on goals and values generated
internally in the big institutions, these men are likely to
be the kind of men who are capable of bringing to their
working lives a high degree of detachment from normal
106
personal values. They will have the capacity to suspend
their moral faculties in accordance with the conventions
of organizational life, as many people find it possible to
suspend disbelief in accordance with the conventions of
the theatre or the cinema when watching a good play or a
good film. A stock figure in modern society is the
diligent, well-meaning functionary who conscientiously
carries out his instructions according to the rules, even
when the results are manifestly unsatisfactory, ridiculous
or unfair. At its worst this line of conduct leads to
Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago, or Vietnam. More
generally, it means that large organizations take on an
ethic and a set of objectives of their own, which tend to
conflict with those of individual people.
The emergence of bureaucratic man is significant in a
number of ways from the point of view of personal
psychology. E)o individuals become successful
bureaucrats in government, industry, commerce, the
professions or the public services because they have, or
because they do not have, a developed sense of personal
responsibility towards other people and the world in
which they live? because they want to take on, or because
they want to avoid, personal responsibility towards other
people? Are unsuccessful bureaucrats unsuccessful
because they are too conscientious or because they are
not conscientious enough? As bureaucrats become older
and more experienced, do their powers of introspection
and self-questioning grow keener? or do these powers
tend to atrophy until the people in question lose the
ability to assess the value of how they are spending their
lives, except against artificial secondary yardsticks such
as the rapidity of their promotion and the esteem of their
own colleagues? Are bureaucrats perhaps the
counterparts in modern institutionalized societies of the
schoolmen of the late middle ages, immersed in an
artificial world of intellectual complexity created by
107
themselves, into which they are able to escape with
unimpaired self-respect from the genuine problems and
the real facts of life. In a psychological sense, is it the
bureaucrats - including most lav^^ers, accountants,
economists and academics - who are the real drop outs
and escapists of modern society?
The importance of psychological questions of this kind
is that the answers to them will help to determine how
the decline and eventual collapse of our present form of
institutionalized society will take place when it comes
about, and the way in which it will be replaced by the
new form of society which succeeds it. We shall touch on
some of these questions again later. Meanwhile, we need
to consider how the growth of bureaucratized society in
recent decades has called in question currently accepted
views about the nature of political and economic power.
Take two-party parliamentary government, for
example. Two-party parliamentary government is based
on the assumption that if two main parties - say. Labour
and Conservative, or Democrats and Republicans -
compete with one another and take it in turns to form the
government of the day, power will rest sometimes with
people who represent one approach to society's problems
and sometimes with people who oppose it. This, it is
assumed, will give a healthy balance over a period of
time; moreover, the processes of political conflict will
provide the engine to drive the wheels of social and
economic change. These assumptions clearly become
unreal, once we recognize that the diffusion of power and
the institutional distortion of values in bureaucratized
society means that power is no longer the kind of thing
that shifts, or can be transferred, neatly from one group
of people to another. As I said in Reform of British Central
Government: 'Those who live in the so-called corridors of
power do, in point of fact, have very little power,
certainly very little power of positive action. What power
108
they do have is mainly the power of obstruction, inertia
and delay. In 1945 the Labour Party naively welcomed
its election victory with a cheer of 'We are the masters
now!expecting to find something called power in the
corridors of Downing Street and Great George Street -
the efficient counterpart, as Bagehot might have put it, to
the dignified aspects of ministerial life, such as official
cars, red despatch boxes, and attentive secretaries. But,
alas! they were deceived. Just as Pompey and his soldiers
found no god in the Holy of Holies when they stormed
the Temple of Jerusalem, so an incoming government
finds the Cabinet Room empty of any tangible source of
power. All they find are decisions to be made.'
The prevailing view among most thinkers who have
been worried by the growth of bureaucracy has been that
the bureaucrats have grown into a strong interest group
in society and have taken over power for themselves. For
example, as Martin Albrow reminds us, Rosa
Luxemburg accused Lenin of wanting to subject a young
labour movement to an intellectual elite by means of a
bureaucratic strait-jacket. She criticized the lack of
freedom of speech, the absence of elections and the right
of free assembly, and claimed that only the bureaucracy
remained an active element in the state. Other Russian
Communists accepting the inevitability of bureaucratic
organization, have wished to redirect the existing state
machinery in the interests of the workers. Mao Tse-tung
has faced the dangers of bureaucracy in the Chinese
Communist Party, though he regards it as a correctable
malady. Castro has attacked the socialist bureaucrats in
Cuba, though he seems to regard bureaucratic
tendencies as a mysterious disease of which the cause is
unknown; while the more rom,antic 'Che' Guevara
thought such issues were merely 'quantitative' and
ultimately of little importance. The New Left has
recognized the pervasiveness of bureaucracy and
109
organizational structure in modern society. As Albrow
himself says, 'The growth of organizations involves the
bureaucratization of society, and that is tantamount to
society becoming bureaucracy'. But even they believe
that the basic dilemma is that no special group in society
can reflect the interests of all because it has interests of its
own; and so the sectional interest of the bureaucracy will
always be expressed in public policy making.
The argument of the Marxists and political scientists
is thus that in modern society two-party goverrunent -
and even a revolutionary takeover - cannot succeed
because the bureaucrats will exercise the substance of
power regardless of who is formally in charge. There is
certainly some force in that. But in my experience, as I
have said, the problem is more fundamental: power, as
the constructive capacity to take positive action
successfully, tends to evaporate altogether in a
bureaucratized society; it is only the shadow of power,
not the substance, that rests with the bureaucrats. The
bureaucrats are just as much prisoners of the system as
everybody else, if not more. Trying to find where real
power lies in a bureaucracy is like searching for the Holy
Grail; it always lies somewhere else. This evaporation of
power is a symptom of the impending breakdown of
bureaucratized society.
The breakdown will come about partly from within
the bureaucracies, by the gradual collapse of the
personal morale of the people imprisoned within the
institutionalized system - the bureaucrats and managers
themselves. The psycho-social problems of industrial and
service workers in modern society, as shown by industrial
unrest, absenteeism, and similar indicators, need no
further description here. The impact of
institutionalization on government officials and business
managers is very similar. I described it in Reform ofBritish
Central Government as follows:

110
 The cumulative effect of these changes had been very
debilitating. As the vertical chain of command had
lengthened, the work had been down-graded right
down the line. As the work had become more and
more fragmented horizontally, responsibility had
further diminished. As it happened, the Colonial
Office and the Cabinet Office (the two departments in
which I had the good fortune to spend most of my time
as a civil servant) had been largely unaffected. A
young man in the Colonial Office in the 1950's, as the
desk officer in charge of one of the colonial territories
(or two small ones such as Mauritius and the
Seychelles) still had a clear responsibility of his own.
In the Cabinet Office in the early 1960's he could still
carry well-defined responsibility for useful work not
far from the centre of the action. During that spell I
had heard about the 'soggy middle layer' as one of the
personnel problems of the civil service, but it was only
when I went to the Ministry of Defence in 1963 that I
met it personally.
It was a profound shock to discover after ten years of
rewarding - indeed exciting - work in Whitehall that
so many of the stock criticisms of it were justified.
There appeared to be literally thousands of people -
real, live, individual people like oneself, many of them
potentially able or once able - whose energies were
being wasted on non-jobs (most of which would be
done all over again by someone else and most of which
would in any case make no difference whatsoever to
anything of importance in the real world), whose
capabilities and aspirations were being stunted, and
who were gradually reconciling themselves to the
prospect of pointless work until retirement.

Shulamith Firestone speaks of 'the peculiar contempt

women so universally feel for men ("men are so dumb"),
111
for they can see their men posturing in the outside
world'. If she had known it, she would no doubt have
added that more and more men in the big institutions of
the 'outside world' feel a growing sense of dissatisfaction
with themselves.
This process of internal breakdown is paralleled and
reinforced by the declining credibility and authority of
the big institutions in the minds of people outside them.
Their compartmentalized structure, their serial mode of
reaching decisions and communicating information, and
the built-in tendency of the corporate ethic and the
morality of organization men to diverge from personal
ethical values and moral perceptions, all combine to
accelerate this decline. It is not the people who are
becoming ungovernable; the governing institutions are
failing to keep up with the processes of communication
and learning now becoming universal in the world
outside. Formalized education in schools and universities
finds it hard to compete in a society accustomed to the
instantaneous, highly professional communication of the
electronic media. The presentation of economic
information to workers by the companies in which they
work, lags far behind the information they receive daily
through their newspapers, their radios and their
television sets. The big organizations are becoming
clumsy dinosaurs in a world whose awareness is
outstripping them fast. Their power to obstruct, and
even to trample, still exists. Their power to create, to
contribute constructively to the societies which they
dominate, and to help to shape the future, is waning.
Thus the big organizations of institutionalized society
seem bound to collapse, as the self-respect and sense of
self-fulfilment of those who work in them continues to
wither, and as their credibility and authority continues
to decline in society as a whole. Their collapse will make
it increasingly necessary - as I said in Chapter 3 - for
112
people to help themselves, rather than rely on big outside
insitutions to do things for them. This will apply
specifically to food, clothing, housing, mobility,
education, health, entertainment, and countless other
aspects of life. But, in a deeper sense, it will require
people to take power to themselves and create wealth for
themselves - to look within themselves for the power and
the resources to do what they feel is right. Thus our ideas
about the nature of power and wealth will change. We
shall come to think of power as Erich Fromm was
thinking of it in Man For Himself \Nhtn he said, 'With his
power of reason, man can penetrate the surface of
phenomena and understand their essence. With his
power of love he can break through the wall that
separates one person from another. With his power of
imagination he can visualize things not yet existing; he
can plan and thus begin to create'. We shall come to
think of wealth similarly, as the personal capacity for
realizing oneself and discharging one's responsibilities to
others.

In previous chapters we have discussed the foreseeable

breakdown of the nation state, of the centralized
capitalist/socialist economy, and of industrialized
consumer society. In this chapter we have seen that
power and wealth, as we used to think of them, are
evaporating out of the bureaucratized modern world.
New concepts of power and wealth, as personal
capabilities and endowments, seem likely to replace
them. The breakdown of patriarchal society will help. In
the next chapter we consider what may take its place.
Meanwhile, a picture is beginning to emerge that gives a
glimmer of hope.
Mankind has inherited a program governing the
behaviour of the species. Principal elements in the
113
program are our ideas and attitudes and desires about
power, wealth (including money) and sex. The program
is biologically imprinted and culturally transmitted.
Unfortunately, it creates a deep conflict between, on the
one hand, the psychological and behavioural needs of
most men and women and, on the other hand, the
environmental conditions which mankind has now
created for itself and in which the human species has to
survive and pursue the path of further evolution in the
future. In other words, mankind's genetic and cultural
inheritance as a primate, as a hunter, and more recently
as post-Reformation and industrial man, has left us with
drives and skills which, though well adapted to a frontier
economy, are not well fitted for survival on Spaceship
Earth.
Our traditional ideas about power and wealth,
together with our traditional sex roles, crystallized as
part of a way of life in which humans could exploit the
resources provided by the environment without thought
of replenishing them, and in which they could move on
(or turn their attention) from one patch of territory to
another when their interest in the first was exhausted.
The male role was to thrust outward into the big world,
to hunt and to kill, to open up new frontiers, to launch
expeditions to the far corners of the earth, to set up new
companies and start new mining operations, to make a
fortune in the big city, to lead armies into foreign
countries, to fly to the moon, to develop new theories and
probe the secrets of the world and the universe. The
female role was to concentrate inwards on the home, to
look after the offspring, to be receptive and supportive to
the male, to provide him with the comfort and security of
a firm base from which he could make his forays into the
outer world and to which he could return to be physically
and emotionally restored.
But now the environment for human beings is no
114
longer outside ourselves; with billions of us spread over
the surface of the earth, we now environ one another. We
no longer live in a frontier economy; there are no new
frontiers left to be opened up. We live in a world of
limited resources which have to be recycled - a world
which we can all too easily pollute. As a species, we can
look outwards no longer; at least for the time being, we
have to turn inwards on ourselves.
Fortunately, this is becoming more and more widely
understood. The breakdown of the kind of politics,
economy and society that human beings have developed
according to the instructions of their inherited program
is becoming clearly apparent. Our ideas, including
especially our ideas about power and money and sex, are
now evolving fast. And it is precisely here - in our
growing understanding of how ideas evolve - that we
may find the means to override the inherited program.
In Chance and Necessity Jacques Monod, the Nobel
prize-winning biologist, compares the evolution of ideas
to the evolution of organisms. He describes how ideas,
like biological systems 'tend to perpetuate their
structures and to multiply them; they too can fuse,
recombine, segregate their content; in short, they too can
evolve, and in this evolution selection certainly plays an
important role.' He then identifies performance value as
a crucial factor in the selection of ideas, according to
which the fittest tend to survive and flourish. "The
performance value of an idea depends on the change it
brings to the behaviour of the person or the group that
adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea
confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition and
greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added
power to expand which will ensure the promotion of the
idea itself.'
As more and more people come to see that
conventionally accepted ideas about power, money and
115
sex have a negative performance value, in the sense that
they do not enable us to go forward as a species into the
future cohesively and w^ith confidence in our survival, the
pressures to replace them with ideas better fitted to the
new environment will grow stronger and stronger. As
this transformation of ideas proceeds, it is likely to gather
momentum in just the way that Monod describes.
Monod, as it happens, is strongly opposed to the
Teilhardian view that evolution is noogenetic, or
consciousness-creating. But it is difficult to dismiss the
possibility that our growing understanding of the
influence of ideas, and our growing understanding of
how they evolve, may be leading us towards a new level
of collective consciousness and collective self-control. For
some thousands of years cultural evolution has been
increasing in importance, relatively to genetic evolution;
processes of cultural selection, including the selection of
ideas, have replaced the processes of genetic selection as
the dominant forces shaping the future. We are now
beginning to see that, as ideas evolve under their own
survival-of-the-fittest selection pressures, they will either
guide mankind along the path of further evolutionary
progress or, alternatively, along the road towards our
extinction as a species. We are also beginning to develop
various ways, admittedly crude, short-sighted and
misused at present, of consciously influencing the
evolution of people's ideas by advertising and
propaganda. In those ways, and - more importantly - in
our growing understanding of educational and learning
processes, the human race has very nearly reached the
point where it can intervene consciously and
purposefully to shape the future course of its cultural
evolution. In Teilhardian terms, the noosphere is on the
point of folding in upon itself to create a new dimension
of conscious purpose.
It is impossible to know in advance what impact these
116
cultural changes could have upon our biologically
inherited behaviour patterns and attitudes in the spheres
of power, money and sex. Will they create impossible
contradictions and conflicts in society? Or will we find it
possible to override the inherited program quite easily,
once it becomes apparent that this is a matter of survival?
Tiger and Fox suggest that 'basic realities' of
male/female interaction will make the necessary changes
difficult. For example, they point out that 'the business of
politics, absurd as much of its posturing, threat, display,
cunning, chicanery, bonhomie, and pomposity, with its
almost ludicrous tolerance of boredom, must seem to the
intelligent or cynical woman, is a business that requires
skills and attitudes that are peculiarly male ... To make
women equal participants in the political process, we will
have to change the very process itself, which means
changing a pattern bred into our behaviour over the
millenia. It may well be possible, but it will not be easy.
And it will certainly not be made easier by pretending
that all men really want to be equal or that women are
simply men who happen occasionally to take time off to
have babies.' But no-one is, in fact, suggesting that it will
be possible to change our traditional ideas about power,
money and sex within the framework of the political,
economic and social system that now exists in the
industrialized countries of the world. That too will have
to change, and it is in fact already changing beyond
recognition.
As we now know beyond doubt, truly radical changes
are going to be needed in government, the economy and
society as a whole, as well as in the hearts and minds
and personalities of individual people, if our species is to
survive. Among other things, a big leap forward will be
needed if we are to exchange our present ways of shaping
the future for new ways that can already be envisaged.
For example, from the present form of political conflict
117
between capitalism and socialism in a country like
Britain, in which opposing sets of dominant males -
businessmen, financiers, politicians, civil servants, and
trade unionists - dispute the political and economic
power to shape the future, it is a long step to the view
expressed in the Swedish Government's 1972 report To
Choose A Future, that the first objective of futures studies
and government planning should be to prevent the
colonizing of the future by any of today's powerful
national or international interest groups.

Survival of the species, then, is going to require a

fundamental re-orientation of our political, economic
and social organization. There is everyreason to suppose
that this will involve a radical change in sex roles. This
will not be easy to accomplish. But the patriarchal
society is already breaking down, as we shall now
discuss.

118
5. PHASING OUT THE PATRIARCHAL
SOCIETY

IN Chapters 1and 2we discussed the need to

dismantle the congested apparatus of the nation state
and to unscramble the mixed up economies of modern
industrialized societies. We suggested that, in fact, the
nation state, as the primary unit of government in the
societies of the world, is already beginning to break down
- outwards to global and continental levels, for example
in the United Nations and the European Economic
Community, and inwards in the direction of greater
autonomy at sub-national and local levels. We suggested
similarly that the centralizing trend in the management
and the institutional structure of national economies has
also reached its limit, at least in the so-called developed
countries, and that signs of a reversal are already
apparent. We argued that in both spheres - government
and the economy - a redefinition of functions, rights and
duties is now needed for all the participants. This would
transform the institutions of government, business and
finance into mechanisms of social self-control, through
which the peoples of the whole world and the members of
every society could balance their competing interests,
take decisions and make choices about matters of
common concern, and steer a survival course into the
future. Then, in Chapters 3 and 4 we considered the very
serious obstacles to progress in this direction, arising
from the distortions of institutionalized society and the
119
institutional imperative, and from the inherited program
that governs the behaviour and attitudes of men and
women to power and money and to the whole process of
making decisions about the future.
In all four cases we found symptoms of breakdown.
The nation state, the centralized economy, the credibility
of institutions, and the concepts of power and money that
humans have inherited from the past, are all being
eroded by the evolutionary pressures of the present time.
Yet in none of these areas, as it seems, does there exist
the creative capability for self-reform. The broad outline
of what might replace the present system is beginning to
emerge. But how to make the transition is not at all clear.
In this chapter we look at the breakdown of
patriarchal society. We find that it is closely linked to the
breakdown of the nation state, the centralized economy,
the institutions of society, and our traditional notions of
power and money. There is thus some reason for
supposing that a new social balance between the sexes
could play a focal part in the transformation of
institutionalized society - and thus in securing the
survival of the human species. This redefinition of sex
roles can be seen as a counterpart to the redefinition of
the roles of the various participants in government and
the economy. In both cases, flexibility, scope for
experiment, and the possibility of choosing between a
variety of sustainable relationships, should be sought.

Patriarchy has been one of the main features of the era

which began with the Renaissance and the Reformation.
As Erich Fromm puts it 'The renaissance of the
patriarchal spirit since the sixteenth century, especially
in Protestant countries, shows both the positive and the
negative aspect of patriarchism. The negative aspect
manifested itself in a new submission to the state and

120
temporal power, to the ever-increasing importance of
man-made laws and secular hierarchies. The positive
aspect showed itself in the increasing spirit of rationality
and objectivity, and in the growth of individual and
social conscience.' Fromm also says that 'where potency
is lacking, man's relatedness to the world is perverted
into a desire to dominate, to exert power over others as
though they were things. Domination is coupled with
death, potency with life.'
Nazi Germany showed all too clearly the nature of the
link between nationalism and male chauvinism.
Goebbels put it thus: 'The National Socialist movement
is in its nature a masculine movement . . . The realms of
directing and shaping are not hard to find in public life.
To such realms belong for one thing the tremendously
great sphere of politics. This sphere without qualification
must be claimed by man.' And Hitler himself said: 'We
do not find it right when the woman presses into the
world of men. To one belongs the power of feeling, the
power of the soul... to the other belongs the strength of
vision, the strength of hardness. The man upholds the
nation, as the woman upholds the family.' Virginia
Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, put the point differently:
'Imperceptibly, I found myself adopting a new attitude
towards the other half of the human race . . . They too,
the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties,
terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had
been in some ways as faulty as my own. True, they had
money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in
their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver
out and plucking at the lungs - the instinct for
possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to
desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to
make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to
offer up their own lives and their children's lives . . .
Watch in the spring sunshine the stockbroker and the
121
great barrister going indoors to make money and more
money and more money .. . These are unpleasant
instincts to harbour, I reflected. They are bred of
conditions of life; of the lack of civilization ..
That patriarchy goes with capitalism as well as
nationalism, and that all three are connected with the
Reformation, is well documented by historians and
scholars. Max Weber, R. H. Tawney and Christopher
Hill are among those who have spelled out the
connection between the Protestant religion, the work
ethic and the rise of capitalism. Erich Fromm, discussing
the psychological connection between patriarchy and
Protestantism, has pointed out that Freud, by elevating
the father into the central figure of the universe and by
eliminating the mother figure, did precisely for
psychology what Luther did for religion. Equally
significant is the judgement of Sri Aurobindo, the Hindu
philosopher and mystic from whom the international
community of Auroville near Pondicherry in India has
taken its inspiration and its name. Referring to
Protestantism, Aurobindo says that 'the intellect, having
denied so much, cast out so much, has found ample room
and opportunity to deny more until it denies all, to
negate spiritual experience and cast out spirituality and
religion, leaving only intellect itself as the sole surviving
power. But intellect void of the spirit can only pile up
external knowledge and machinery and efficiency, and
ends in a drying up of the secret springs of vitality and a
decadence without any inner power to save life or create
a new life or any other way out than death and
disintegration.'
This is one of the reasons why the complex of
ideologies and institutions that embraces patriarchy,
nationalism and capitalism, including state capitalism, is
breaking down. The power of these ideologies and
institutions is waning. So is their credibility. The male
122
chauvinist, the Colonel Blimp, and the domineering
captain of industry, all seem somewhat ridiculous figures
from an age that is fast disappearing. As circumstances
have changed, so have our intuitive perceptions of the
kind of people, ideas, and institutions that are suited to
them, so have our perceptions of the kind of people we
want to be, and so have our moral and cultural values.
These currents of change have been moving for a long
time, often below the surface of events. With hindsight
we can now see that, while modern patriarchy was
reaching its peak in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the
forces which would ultimately erode it were gathering
momentum.
When we turn to the directly sexual aspects of the
erosion of the patriarchal society that is now taking
place, we find two main trends at work. There is a
general trend towards greater sexual permissiveness; and
there is a more specific trend towards greater equality
between the sexes. The two trends are related, but they
do not always work in precisely the same direction. Both
will help to shape the future, but precisely how they will
be combined and reconciled will have to work itself out.
A patriarchal society is sexually repressive. Not only
does it treat women as inferior, in that males tend to
dominate females. The most powerful, usually older
males also dominate the weaker and younger males. In
primate groups, such as baboon troops, the dominant
males reserve to themselves much of the power to control
the genetic future of their sjpecies, by mating. In human
patriarchal societies, the dominant males reserve to
themselves much of the political and economic power to
send the other males to war and to make them work.
Sexual repression thus goes with the spirit of nationalism
and the work ethic.
As a more permissive society has emerged in recent
years, we can detect three separate strands in its
123
development. The first is intellectual: the sexual
radicalism developed by Freud's successors, often but
not always in association with political views of a radical
nature. The second is the exploitation of sex and the
deliberate cultivation of sex-consciousness on a massive
scale, both to market the products and to manage and
motivate the employees of big business and the other
large organizations of modern society. The third is
technical: the development and widespread
dissemination of contraceptive methods which have
made it possible to separate sexual activity from the
procreation of children.
The main importance of the intellectual strand in
these developments, apart from the contribution it has
made to therapy in individual cases, is that we now
understand that sexual repression can be psychologically
damaging. In the most general way, the man in the street
probably now thinks that sex should not only be fun, it
should also be good for you. More specifically, the view
now accepted by the medical and psychological
professions is that a well-adjusted sex life enables the
individual to organize the release of psychic energies
creatively. It can be said similarly of a well-structured
corporate enterprise in which the various interests and
drives are held in balance, that it provides conditions in
which the collective energies of the participants can be
productively released. In both cases - person and
corporate enterprise alike - repression, maladjustment
and faulty structuring lead to stress, internal strife, and
malfunction.
That kind of analogy between persons and
organizations may be illuminating, but the sexual
radicals have never made clear what practical
consequences, in terms of social and political actions and
policies, should actually follow from their thinking. It is
true that Wilhelm Reich was very conscious of the
124
connection between social, economic, political and
sexual repression. As a member of the Austrian
Communist Party in the late nineteen-twenties, he
established a number of socialist sex-hygiene clinics.
Their purpose was both to provide psycho-analytic
advice to the people, and to make them aware of the
sexual reforms that must be part of a wider programme
of social and political change. But Reich never made it
very clear what patterns of sexual behaviour he was
recommending for society as a whole; and towards the
end of his life, as Paul A. Robinson says in The Sexual
Radicals, Reich was haunted by the thought that men
with dirty minds would misuse his authority to unleash
'a free-for-all fucking epidemic'. Similarly, as Alasdair
Maclntyre argues in a recent critical assessment of
Herbert Marcuse, it is all very well for Marcuse to say in
Eros and Civilization that sexuality must be liberated, if
man is to be liberated. But 'what would be the
differences in the character of sexual behaviour if
sexuality was to be liberated? ... What will we actually
do in this sexually liberated state?' Marcuse does not tell
us, and it is not very clear what he has in mind.
We turn now to the widespread cuhivation of
sex-consciousness as a deliberate policy of commercial
exploitation. This is a prominent feature of the
institutionalized societies of the late capitalist era. As
consumers, men and women are bombarded overtly and
subliminally with a continuing stream of advertisements
and promotional campaigns based on fantasies of male
virility and female sex appeal. As employees, male
executives are at least partly motivated by fantasies of
sexual power and privilege; these 'latterday bureaucratic
polygamists', as Tiger and Fox call them, are offered
increasing access to the services of typists, research
assistants, secretaries, receptionists and other varieties of
'office wives', as they climb the ladder of a successful
125
career. Conversely, women at work are offered
opportunities to develop traditionally feminine roles - to
provide a glamorous status symbol that will mirror the
power and virility of their boss, to refresh him and soothe
his ego after the battles and forays of business life, to
keep a comfortable home base for him and meet his daily
needs. A typical recruiting advertisement - in the
London Times, June 1975 - reads as follows: 'Longing to
be the centre of attention? Here's your opportunity. Fifty
super guys and their boss in expanding insurance group
need your help to organize them and their day.'
Thus, while the intellectual thinkers leave us in doubt
about the practical conclusions - in terms of new sex
roles, new sex relationships, and new sexual behaviour -
to be drawn from their sexual radicalism, there is no
doubt about the direction in which the commercial and
managerial exploitation of sexual consciousness is
leading us. It directly reinforces, on a massive scale and
using all the resources of institutionalized society, the
inherited perceptions of sex roles, together with the
inherited concepts of power and wealth, that constitute a
major threat to the survival of the human species. It does
this with as little hesitation as it encourages us to
consume more and more of everything, in a finite world
whose resources are severely limited and already very
unfairly shared.
The technical and scientific developments,
particularly in the spheres of contraception and abortion,
that are making it easier now than ever before for people
to be active sexually without having children, are - like
the sexual radicalism of the intellectuals - equivocal in
their effect on the balance of power between the sexes.
Because, in the past, the degree of biological
commitment and responsibility in this sphere has been so
unfairly shared between men and women, it is possible to
argue that these technical developments have by
126
themselves helped to redress the old imbalance between
men and women. But it is equally possible to argue that
one of their main results has been to make men feel even
less responsible and sympathetic than before in both
their personal and their working relationships with
women, and to make women even more vulnerable than
they were. The fact that working women need not now
have children unless they so choose, may discourage
employers from making special provisions for the
possibility that they may. In the sphere of personal
relationships the permissive society may easily be
interpreted as a Casanova's charter. As Shulamith
Firestone says, under the guise of the sexual revolution
that is presumed to have occurred ('Oh, c'mon Baby,
where have you been? Haven't you heard of the sexual
revolution?'), women have been persuaded to shed their
armour. Again, therefore, we find that the decline of
sexual repression and the rise of the permissive society
does not necessarily lead to a redefinition of the roles of
men and women and the relationships between them, or
to a fairer balance between the sexes. A free-for-all sexual
philosophy like a free-for-all economic philosophy may
simply be a recipe for grabbing what you can get. It may
lead to a disorderly situation in which sexual relations,
like economic relations, take the form of a power struggle
in which the strongest come out on top and the weakest
go to the wall.
Since John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of
Women rather more than a hundred years ago, campaigns
for women's emancipation, campaigns for women's
rights, campaigns against sex discrimination, and the
movement for women's liberation, have resulted in great
changes. Politically, women now have the vote; they have
the right to hold public office; in some countries women
have even become Prime Minister. Economically, a
woman's property - and, more importantly, the woman
127
herself - no longer becomes the property of her husband
on marriage, as was the case in Victorian England.
Legislation to outlaw further aspects of discrimination
against women, at work, in the home, as consumers, as
owners of property, and as regards their rights as
citizens, has recently been introduced or will shortly be
introduced in many countries of the world. Women's
education has helped to reduce the cultural gap between
men and women. The pill has helped to reduce their
biological disadvantage.
At the same time, many examples of discrimination
and disadvantage still remain. Just as the legislation to
protect the rights of investors, employees and customers
of business enterprise has grown up piecemeal and tends
to be negative (or prohibitive) in character, so the legal
basis governing sexual matters is patchy and negative. In
both cases what is now required is a comprehensive
re-appraisal of the conventional roles, which will provide
a new framework for relationships between men and
women, as for the activities of business enterprises.
In the sexual and the business sphere alike it is often
alleged that, in fact, the disadvantaged class is content
with the situation as it is: most women don't want to play
an influential part or to pursue career ambitions in what
E. M. Forster in Howard's End called the male world of
'telegrams and anger'; most working people don't want
to share responsibility for controlling the fortunes and
the future of the enterprise for which they work. But in
both cases the allegation is irrelevant to the real issue,
even if it does to some extent reflect the situation as it is
today. What is important is that those women and those
working people who do want to participate fully, should
have the opportunity of doing so on fair and equal terms.
What is even more important for the future survival of
the species is to encourage as many of them as possible to
take part in the decisions that will shape the future. The
128
common sense of working people and the common sense
of women are needed to counteract and control the
fantasies of patriarchal males. Once again, a new world
must be brought in to redress the balance ofthe old.
What new framework, then, may be expected to
emerge for relationships between men and women in the
society of the future? In what form will the trends
towards greater sexual permissiveness and greater sexual
equality eventually combine to replace the patriarchal
society of the past? Should women relax and wait upon
events, confident that the future is moving their way?
Should they redouble their efforts to compete on equal
terms with men in a man's world? Or should they aim to
transform the man's world into a world of a different
kind? And what about men? Are they also looking for
liberation? What form will Men's Lib take?
These questions go together with an even more basic
question about the direction in which human society will
develop. Do we envisage 'more and better of the same',
i.e. a post-industrial society of the kind envisaged by
Daniel Bell, in which the institutions, technologies and
knowledge industry of the industrialized societies will be
developed further as the basis for a rational, organized
and orderly world of tertiary and quaternary industries
providing services to service industries which ultimately
- at the far end of the institutional chain - provide
services to people? Or do we envisage 'something
completely different', i.e. a post-industrial society in
which the whole direction of industrialization,
institutionalization, and big technology will have been
radically changed?
It is not difficult to envisage developments in
reproductive technology, such as test-tube babies, which,
together with contraception, would relieve women
wholly of their traditional biological role in child
bearing. Nor is it difficult to envisage forms of social
129
organization in which the responsibility for child rearing
would be altogether removed from parents of either sex.
This combination of technological and institutional
developments would, at least in theory, allow for total
sexual permissiveness and total equality between the
sexes.

This is the scenario for the future envisaged by sexual

revolutionaries like Shulamith Firestone. She looks
forward to a form of cybernetic communism, in which
each person could choose his lifestyle freely, changing it
to suit his tastes without seriously inconveniencing
anyone else; no one would be bound into any social
structure against his will, for each person would be
totally self-governing as soon as he or she was physically
able. There would be nothing restricting love and sexual
freedom. Even the incest taboo would fade away, and
people would develop a natural polymorphous sexuality.
All close relationships would include a physical element,
and our present concept of exclusive physical
partnerships would disappear from our psychic
structure. Wealth would be distributed and services of all
kinds would be provided by the institutions of society, on
the basis of need, independent of the social value of the
individual's contribution to his fellows.
The diagrams in Figures 7 and 8 suggest what this
technologically based scenario could imply.
Model 1 in Figure 7 refers to a society in which the
dividing line between home and community is difficult to
define. Such a society is warm and organic. The home is
open to extended family and friends and neighbours. In
it and around it take place all the important activities of
our lives. It contains, in the able-bodied members of the
household community, male and female alike, the
providers of goods and services and care; and it contains
- in the young, the sick, the elderly, and in guests and
travellers - those who depend upon the able bodied.
130
Model 2 in Figure 8 suggests a society in which all the
important activities of our lives have moved out of the
home. This society is cold and clinical. Children are born
in laboratories, brought up in public nurseries, and
educated in schools and universities; old people go to old
folks' homes for geriatric care; sick people and dying
people go to hospitals; able-bodied people go to factories
and offices to work; travellers are expected to go to
hotels and boarding houses. Unrestricted sexual freedom
in an institutionalized society would presumably even
mean that people normally go out for sex, to specially
organized meeting places, clubs and brothels.
In the last four or five hundred years human societies,
especially in Europe, North America and other parts of
the developed world, have been moving continually away
from Model 1 towards Model 2. So much do we tend to
take this for granted, that economists now assume that
only, the institutionalized activities of the kind of society
shown in Model 2 should be given any value. Only
activities of that kind should count as contributing
towards such things as 'national product', 'national
income', and 'national wealth'. For example, if we all
stopped buying vegetables from shops and supermarkets
and grew them ourselves instead, the economists would
detect a fall in national product and national income,
and worry even more than they do already about the
unsatisfactory rate of economic growth. Among the facts
of life for economists is that growth requires us to grow
less food, and indeed to do less of everything for
ourselves. The Daniel Bell/Shulamith Firestone scenario
implies that, taking the courage of these convictions in
both hands, we should deliberately accelerate the
transition away from a Model 1 society and complete its
transformation into Model 2.
Shulamith Firestone avoids explaining precisely how
we would move from the transitional form of society that
131
 Figure 7

Model 1: Integration

THE HOME IN THE COMMUNITY

HOME

Workers
bodied Men anH Women

D^endents:
Young, (Jld, Siclc, Guests
/
Activities: /
v Birth, Death f
\ Teaching, Caring, Healing, /
\ Work, Leisure /
^ ^ Lodging ^
 Figure 8

Model 2: Fragmentation

THE HOME IN INSTITUTIONALIZED

SOCIETY

INSTITUTIONS

(Companies, Public Services, Government Departments, etc.)

HOME
Teaching
^ Power
Workers:

Able-bodied Men and Women

Caring
Money

Dependents:
Young, Old, Sick, Guests
Healing Work

All:

As Consumers
Lodging

if ^

Goods and Services, including Leisure

exists today into the kind of cybernetic communism she
envisages for the future; 'the specifics need not concern
us here', she says. In this she is very wise. In the well
known words of the Irishman in the story, 'I wouldn't
start from here' if I were hoping to reach her destination.
There are so many built-in features of present day
culture and society, including the inherited attitudes and
behaviour of men and women, that will block the social
arrangements she has in mind.
The same could, perhaps, be said about all radical
proposals for change. However, there are more
important arguments against this kind of cybernetic
communism. In the first place, there would be little room
in it for the special qualities of men and women - logic
and tenderness, reason and love, the head and the heart -
which, in the right balance can constitute a fabric of
civilized personal relationships in a sane society.
Moreover, bringing in technology to deal with the task of
reproducing the species, in order to create a completely
free society, would in fact involve society's final
institutionalization and the final atomization of the
individual. All his functions, all the contributions he or
she can make to the well-being of himself and his fellows
and to the future destiny of his species - the future of the
world he lives in - would have been stripped from him,
expropriated. This would be the logical conclusion - the
reductio ad absurdum - of the view, put forward by
Marcuse in Eros and Civilization but later rejected by him
in One Dimensional Man, that automation and production
technology can relieve human beings of all their tasks
and that, being thus relieved, people will then be free to
realize themselves and to create happiness for themselves
and each other. It fails entirely to take account of the fact
that self-realization and happiness grow out of creativity
and caring relationships with other people. A Model 2
society may aim to relieve people of their burdens; in
134
fact, it would deprive them of their capacities. It may aim
to make them free; in fact, it would make their alienation
complete.
The scenario put forward by Shulamith Firestone and
those who think as she does implies that the aim of the
women's movements should be to enable women to
compete on equal terms in a man's world. This is an
understandable viewpoint when the burning questions of
the day about the two sexes focus on the injustices of
existing relations between them. Equally understandable
in the business sphere is the aim to make workers equal
in every way with managers and shareholders. Indeed,
one should not thoughtlessly reject the even more
aggressive version of these aims: that women should aim
to take over from men, and that workers should aim to
take control of industry. But, in both cases, the saner
view is that a new balance of power is needed, and a new
definition of roles, which will liberate and reconcile the
deep-seated aspirations and capabilities of different
kinds of participants in the industrial economy, and of
men and women in society as a whole.
So far as women are concerned. Dr. Prudence
Tunnadine of the Institute of Psycho-Sexual Medicine is
one of those who have pointed out (Times, 9.4.75) that, in
seeking equality or more than equality with men, women
are wrong to see their emotions, not as talents that enrich
choices, but as shameful weaknesses in a materialist
society. She states that psychosomatic medicine
conclusively shows that this is a mistake. 'Sexually, a
woman achieves joyful relationships not through brains
or athletics or trying to be a better man than a man, but
by valuing her body and its emotional desires in their
own right. Thus she becomes a whole woman and her
own person, truly free in herself, truly creative in the part
she plays in the society in which she lives.'
So far as men are concerned, it is now becoming more
135
and more widely recognized that men, as well as women,
are seeking liberation. Men do not want to go on livingin
the arid, institutional world of business, bureaucracy and
the intellect. They do not want to be excluded from the
warmer world of people and children and families. They
do not see why, if women are to be given the right either
to work or to stay at home, men should not also have the
freedom to choose. Discussing a recent Swedish report.
The Right to beHuman (outlined in The Guardian, 22.5.75),
the report's author describes how she became convinced
after interviewing fifty men about their lives that 'the
only time it is better to be a man than a woman is in the
winter when one wants to pee . . . They were all so
lonely. They had no one with whom they could discuss
their fears and frustrations, and because they rarely or
never discussed their feelings they did not have the
vocabulary to talk about them . . . Boys do not cultivate
togetherness. From early days they are out in large
groups playing football or whatever, while girls are in
groups of two or three talking about themselves and
getting to know each other and learning how to develop
deeper relationships . .. Ideally, men should concentrate
on developing more intimate relationships, and women
should talk less about themselves and concentrate more
on building secondary relationships. If women would
learn to talk about politics and public affairs, then we
would eventually get away from the situation where in
Sweden and other countries 85 per cent of the
decision-makers are men.'
Increasingly, men are in fact looking for ways to drop
out of the fat-race, and to drop back into something that
seems more like real life. At the same time, as women
compete more successfully in the world of men, they
become increasingly subject to its effects - its ulcers, its
coronaries, its stresses and its anxieties. These are
significant pointers to an alternative future - a future
136
that will not be 'more and better of the same', but
'something completely different.'
This alternative future will involve questioning many
of the present trends - the trend towards bigger and
remoter institutions, the trend towards more capital
intensive technology and more capital intensive use of the
land, the trend away from self-help and self-reliance, and
the spreading assumption that everything should be
somebody else's* - usually the government's -
responsibility. It will involve rejecting the idea that
revolution consists in the transfer of things called power
and wealth from one political, social or economic group
to another, from one sex to another, or from one race to
another. It will involve re-thinking the aim of women's
liberation, so that instead of striving to compete with
men in the vanishing patriarchal world of the past
women will concentrate on transforming that world into
something quite different. It will involve taking power
and wealth back from the big institutions and recreating
them in the minds and hearts and hands of real people in
their own homes and localities. It will involve reversing
the present trend from Model 1 to Model 2 in Diagrams
7 and and 8, thereby re-integrating people with one
another in the fabric of the society in which they live.
As I said in the Foreword, many different kinds of
people are now working actively to create this alternative
future. The people who have gone to live in small
communities in a more self-sufficient way; the
intermediate technologists; those who are developing
methods of self-help in fields like housing, education and
health; the conservationist movements; radical
economists who are seeking to replace the traditional
methods of economic calculation with new methods that
better reflect alternative social values; religious and
quasi-religious thinkers who are searching for new
relationships between men, nature and the universe - all
137
these and many others are already beginning to outflank
the conventional discussions and debates of traditionally
minded politicians, government officials, economists,
scientists, academics, businessmen, financiers, trade
unionists and professional people, who are still obsessed
with how to achieve 'more and better of the same'.
No one can spell out in detail a blueprint for this
alternative future. But, in broad outline, we can envisage
an evolving world society in which the functions of
government have been re-distributed to various levels
right down from the United Nations to the local street
association or village council. We can envisage an
evolving system of economic and social activity in which
the functions, rights and duties of the various
participants have been redefined and brought into a new
balance. We can envisage a new social role for money as
an honest calculus of value. We can envisage new
concepts of power and wealth, as the capacity to take (or
take part in) the decisions that matter, and as the
capacity for self-realization. We can envisage a reversal
of the process of institutionalization whose slogans have
been 'biggest is best' and 'economies of scale' - a
counter-movement whose motto is 'small is beautiful',
and which will aim to reintegrate work and homes and
the various facets of people's lives in the communities
and localities where they live. Finally, as the patriarchal
society continues to decline, we can envisage a new
balance between the sexes, in which the heart will be
rated as highly as the head, female as highly as male,
people's personal lives and relationships as highly as
their career ambitions and prospects, nature as highly as
the artificial man-made world, emotion and intuition as
highly as logic and reason.
It is not possible to define in advance the detailed
structure of this new balance between the sexes. The new
structure should possess a high degree of flexibility, to
138
permit a balance to be struck between whatever
particular mix of masculine and feminine characteristics
and capacities arises in any particular relationship or set
of relationships between men and women. It should
reflect the fact that creating a home, a community, a
society and a world in which the human species can
survive, are all tasks that require a joint effort, harnessing
the creative abilities to be found in both the sexes, and to
be found in individual people with a wide variety of
heterosexual, homosexual and bi-sexual characteristics.
At the same time, given the particular nature of the
present turning point in the evolution of mankind, it will
be realistic to recognize that the characteristics and
capacities normally regarded as feminine are likely to
have a specially important part to play in the hoped-for
breakthrough to a sustainable future.

139
 6. FOCUSSING ON THE FUTURE

Iisr Evolution in Religion R. C. Zaehner compared the

thinking of Sri Aurobindo with the thinking of
Teilhard de Chardin. He pointed out that Aurobindo,
the Hindu, unlike Teilhard, the Christian, had been
politically active, and that Aurobindo was more directly
interested than Teilhard in the processes of political and
social evolution.
Aurobindo had been attracted to the Marxist idea that
ultimately the dictatorship of the proletariat would be
inevitably transformed into a free society in which the
state would have withered away - a society in which 'the
free development of each would be the condition for the
free development of all'. But he realised that men - so
long as they are slaves to their own egoism - will not
relinquish power once they have it in their grasp. The
classless society, prophesied by Marx and Engels could,
on purely rational grounds alone, scarcely come into
being so long as men remained egoists. Hence as
Aurobindo said, 'it is not likely that any living Socialist
State machine once in power would let go its prey or
allow itself to be abolished without a struggle'. How,
Aurobindo asked, is the human race to emerge from this
'perpetual cycle of failure'?
That, in essence, is the question we have been
considering in this book. It is not too difficult to envisage,
in general outline, a balanced pattern of political and
140
economic institutions which would enable members of
the human race to take decisions about competing
interests, make choices from among conflicting
possibilities, and steer a survival course into the future. It
is not difficult to imagine the new concept of power or the
new role of money that such a transformation would
imply. But it is impossible to envisage the new
institutional pattern actually coming into existence, until
we have learned how to exorcize the institutional
imperative that demands 'more, more, more', to override
the inherited program that governs the behaviour of men
and women, and to replace the motivations of the
patriarchal society with something very different. And
how is all that to come about?
Clearly, we are looking for some kind of breakthrough
to a new future. The solution to the present crisis of
mankind will not be found in the more effective
implementation of conventional remedies and policies -
higher economic growth, more capital intensive
technology, more elaborate analysis of the problems by
more sophisticated economists and social scientists with
bigger and better computers. Nor, obviously, will the
solution be found by simply trying to reverse the present
trends - by trying to put the clock back to the kind of
society that existed before the Renaissance, the
Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the
development of modern technologies. We must go
forward, but into a future quite different from a simple
extrapolation of the present.
The possible nature of the necessary mutation
becomes a little clearer if we focus on two contrasting sets
of convergent trends. These are shown, schematically, in
Figure 9.
The first set of trends converges towards breakdown.
In the year 1975 it became widely accepted that the
human race was on a disaster course. For example, to
141
 Figure 9: Breakdown or Breakthrough

?THE FUTURE?
Capital-intensive Self-help and
Technology Self-sufficiency

[Pollution New Balance

between the Sexes
Exhaustion of
Natural ResourceslN^ Appropriate Social
(including political
jOverpopulation and economic)
Structures
Food Shortage BREAKDOWN BREAKTHROUGH
Appropriate
(Unemployment Technology
IInflation ^^ Citizens of the Worldj
General Paralysis
of Institutions
Nj Trustees for the
Earth's Future
Personal '•fSupernature
Helplessness
Supermind
quote Mesarovic and Pestel again in Mankind at the
Turning Point, 'drastic unprecedented changes in the
world system' are needed; the conclusion is inescapable
that 'mankind's options for avoiding catastrophe are
decreasing, while delays in implementing the options
are, quite literally, deadly.'AlvinToffler's The Eco-Spasm
Report, also published in 1975, makes the point explicitly
that 'what is happening is the breakdown of industrial
civilization on the planet'. While, earlier in 1975, in an
Observer newspaper feature called The Seventh Enemy
which stimulated a huge response from readers, Ronald
Higgins stated, 'We and our children are approaching a
world of mounting confusion and horror. The next 25
years, possibly the next decade, will bring starvation to
hundreds of millions, and hardship, disorder or war
to most of the rest of us. Democracy, where it exists, has
little chance of survival, nor in the longer run has our
industrial way of life. There will not be a better
tomorrow beyond our present troubles.'
The second set of trends shown in Figure 9 runs
counter to the first. Already, in earlier parts of this book,
I have suggested that those of us who are working on one
or another of these new frontiers will eventually find that
we share a common cause and a common ideology. With
vision it is already possible to see that these trends could
converge to create the breakthrough to a new and
sustainable future. By an act of faith we could now
commit ourselves to developing them towards that
convergence point. As these trends went forward, people
might be expected to develop a closer and more organic
relationship with the natural world; reason and love, the
male principle and the female principle, might be
expected to harmonize in a more creative balance; a
fruitful union might be expected to arise from combining
the logical processes typical of the Western world with
the more mystical and intuitive mode of understanding
143
typical of the East; increasing emphasis would be placed
on developing the personal capacities of perception and
will, described by Lyall Watson in Supemature, which
have been regarded as supernatural or paranormal in a
narrowly and mechanically scientific culture; we might
expect to come nearer to that state of cosmic
consciousness that Aurobindo and Teilhard thought of
as Supermind; and we might expect to move firmly in the
direction of a more sane and balanced human society
than that which we are leaving behind us - a new kind of
society which would equip the human species with better
prospects of survival on spaceship Earth.
The first need therefore is to strengthen the efforts
already being made in each of these fields; more self-help
in housing, health and education; greater self-sufficiency
in people-intensive agricuhural communities working the
land; more technologies for transportation, for
generating energy, for building and construction work,
for agriculture, for manufacturing, and for
communication, which will be small enough and flexible
enough to be used by individual people and households
and small communities; further reform of political,
economic and social institutions, and their deliberate
redesign to serve the needs of people; greater efforts to
establish recognition of the fact that every member of the
human race is a citizen of the world community, and that
every citizen of the world community - including
especially those who live in the poorer countries - should
be respected and treated as such; redoubled efforts to
create in the heart and mind of every man and woman
the sense that the human species, as the leading shoot on
the tree of evolution, is in a special position of trust
towards the rest of nature and the universe; much greater
readiness to discuss the whole range of ways in which
human society might be transformed by a fundamental
re-appraisal of sex roles and relationships; and, finally, a
144
sustained attempt to explore and develop the psychic
capacities of human perception and will which have
traditionally been regarded as paranormal, and therefore
beyond the scope of rational people to understand and
train.
The second need is to cultivate convergence between
these trends - not by any attempt to impose a common
framework of action or thought, but rather by providing
ourselves as thinkers and activists in each of these
spheres with opportunities for discussion and
communication so that common ground and common
goals may increasingly emerge. This deliberate
cultivation of convergence will cut right across today's
proliferation of specialisms in action and knowledge;
and, with good fortune, it will eventually cut the ground
from under the masculine fantasy world of institutional
empires and intellectual fairylands, in which tasks and
knowledge alike are split and split and split again in an
ever-increasing agglomeration of cellular compartments
until the 'transaction costs' of everything become
prohibitive and nothing useful can be achieved or learned
or understood.
In these ways, and by replacing our traditional
concepts of power, money and sex with concepts that are
more valid for present needs, we can equip ourselves to
create a better balance between people, and a better
balance in the minds and hearts of men and women. We
can help mankind to find the way back to the broad
highway of evolution. We can start out on the next stage
of the long ascent.

145
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Neville Abraham, Big Business and Government - The New

Disorder. Macmillan, 1974.
Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy. Macmillan, 1970.
Lucius Beebe, The Big Spenders. Hutchinson, 1967.
Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom. John Wiley & Sons,
1974.
Platform For Change. John Wiley & Sons, 1975.
Daniel Bell, Toward the Tear 2000. Houghton Mifflin,
1968.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Penguin, 1972.
Peter Cadogan, Direct Democracy. 1 Hampstead Hill
Gardens, London NW3, 1974.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. Paladin 1972.
Erich Fromm, Man For Himself. Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1971.
The Sane Society. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State. Pelican Books,
1974.
Hazel Henderson, The Entropy State. Planning Review,
North American Society for Corporate Planning,
April/May 1974.
Ronald Higgins, The Seventh Enemy. The Observer, 1975.
Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism. Panther, 1969.
Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness. Calder and Boyars,
1971.

147
 Deschooling Society. Calder and Boyars, 1973.
Energy and Equity. Calder and Boyars, 1974.
Medical Nemesis. Calder and Boyars, 1975.
Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence. Hutchinson,
1972.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self. Pelican Books, 1965.
Alasdair Maclntyre, Marcuse. Fontana, 1970.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1964.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. Sphere Books,
1968.
Eros and Civilisation. Sphere Books, 1969.
Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the
Turning Point. Hutchinson, 1975.
J. S. Mill, TheSubjection of Women, (1869). Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1966.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics. Abacus, 1972.
Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity. Collins, 1972.
Max Nicholson, The Big Change. McGraw Hill, 1973.
John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice. Oxford University Press,
1972.
James Robertson, The Reform of British Central Govern
ment. Chatto & Windus and Charles Knight, 1971.
Profit Or People? The New Social Role of Money. Calder
and Boyars, 1974.
Paul A. Robinson, The Sexual Radicals. Paladin 1972.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. Faber
and Faber, 1970.
Donald A. Schon, Beyond the Stable State. Pelican Books,
1973.
E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful. Abacus, 1974.
R. H. Tawney, Equality. Unwin Books, 1964.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Pelican Books, 1938.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. Fon
tana Religious Books, 1965.
The Futureof Man. Fontana Religious Books, 1969.
148
Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal.
Paladin, 1974.
Alvin Toffler. TheEco-Spasm Report, Bantam Books, 1975.
Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth. Pelican
Books, 1972.
Lyall Watson, Supemature. Coronet Books, 1974.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and theSpirit ofCapitalism.
Unwin University Books, 1930.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Penguin Books,
1945.

149
 Other books in
Open ¥omrs\IIdeas in Progress
series

PROFIT OR PEOPLE?

The New SocialRoleof Money

James Robertson

In this provocative thesis, Robertson argues that profit is an outmoded

pursuit. It is no longer a prime motivating force in business nor does
it act as a controlling factor. The money system should be a real
mechanism of choice and decision, enabling resources and purchasing
power to be distributed in the way people want. His remedies encom
pass radical changes in business procedure, the tax system, in the
banking and financial sectors, in government, and above all, in the
conceptual framework that informs all economic activities.
 LIVING ON THE SUN

Harnessing Renewable Energyfor an Equitable Society

Godfrey Boyle

The world energy crisis does not mean that mankind will have to
return to pre-industrial living. All our important energy needs can
be metfrom the sun, the winds and the tides. In simple yet scientific
language, Godfrey Boyle shows how ordinary people and institutions
can harness naturaland abundant energy for home and industrial use
andoutlines the political andeconomic ways in which thisknowledge
can be spread and applied to create a more decentralized, egalitarian
society.

THE NEW FACE OF FAMILY PLANNING

Peter Diggoryand John McEwan

Only thirty years ago, social planners advocated the desirability of

maintaining or increasing population. Today the picture has changed
radically, evenin Westernsociety. This bookconcerns itself with the
problems of birthcontrol andsociety. Written by two eminent doctors
in their respective fields, it deals scientifically and objectively with
such controversial topics as abortion, contraception and sterili^tion.
 Energy and Equity
Ivan Iluch

In thisessay Ivan lUich demonstrates, bymeans ofa detailed analysis

of the way people travel, the imbalance which has arisen between
industrial development, social justice and personal freedom. He argues
thatspeed is a source andtool of political manipuladve power in rich
as well as poor countries. The ideology of continual growth which
informs bothsocialist andcapitalist systems imposes intolerable sodal
inequalities. The overconsumption of energy not only d^oys the
physical environment through pollution but, even more important,
causes tlie didntegradon of society itself. lUich's conclusion is to
advocate a radical political decision to neutralize the energy crisis by
the limiting of traffic. For it is traffic, based on transport, he argues,
which corrupts andenslaves, andresults in a further decline ofequity,
leisure and autonomy for all. {Ideas in Progress series.)

Somepress opinions
'Ivan Illich has struck ^am.Guardian

'The insight is valid and crucial; the effort is original and

penetrating...'—The Times Literary Supplement

'G>mpelling aphoristic style is used, with... stunning effisct.'

—Neip Scientist
 Celebration of Awareness
A Callfor Institutional Revolution
Ivan Illich

Asa formidable critic ofsome ofsociety's most cherished institutions,

suchas compulsory education and organized religion, Ivan Illichhas
attracted world-wide attention. What has made him a many-faced
devil in the eyes of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and a hero for the
reformers ofdie Catholic left is his commitment to a radical humanism
againstconventional institutions and current ideas of socialvirtue. He
hasset himself the target to break down the ideologies which alienate
men from men as well as from their traditional sources of human
dignity and joy. In this book arebrought together forthefirsttimethe
lectwes and articles that bear out Illich's challenge to newer ortho
doxies andhis profound questioning of bourgeois andliberal assump
tion. Theymake dramatic readmg because the author has the gift of
giving life and passion to topics that might otherwise remain purely
academic and beyond the scope and involvement of the layman.

Some press opinions

'He is a deeply stimulating thinker.'—The Times Literary Supplement

'Mr. Illich is a good man and a clever arguer. I find his notion of
cdtural, as opposed to political, revolution extremely sympathetic...
stirring new hope in the hollow breast of at least one jaded
"revolutionaiy".'—The Observer

*... his radicalism goes out beyond Left and Right.'—The Guardian
 Deschooling Society
Ivan Iluch

In this bold and provocative book, Ivan Illich calls for a 'cultural
revolution', urging us to a radical examination of the social myths and
institutions by which our lives are increasingly organized in an
industrialized, mechanistic and progressively lesshuman world. Illich
presents a startling view of schooling: schooling (as opposed to
education) has become our modem dogma, a sacred cow which all
must worship,serve, and submit to, yet from which litde true nourish
ment is derived. Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting
Madous notions of'progress' and development that follow from the
belief that ever-increasing production, consumption, and profit are
proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of hiunan life. Our
universities have become recruiters of personnel for die consumer
society, certifying citizens forservice, while at the same timedisposing
of those adjudged unfit for the competitive race. Illich's suggestions
for reform are radical and exciting to speculate about: and he feels
that the measures he suggests in the bookare necessary to turn civiliza
tion from its headlong rush towards the violence which frustrated
«cpectations will cert^y unleash, so long as the school m3rth is
allowed to persist.

Somepress opinions
'Goodradical stuif,couched in Illich'svivid aphoristic style... Illich's
bombardment of Education-as-It—the schooling industry—makes a
good beginning.'—The Observer

^Desehoolmg Society is one of the most genuine subversive books in

that it amounts to a radical re-interpretation of social reality.'
—The Scotsman

*Deschooling Society... is fullof hairyheresy and upsetting notions.'

—The Sm
 Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich

A work of seminal importance, this book presents Ivan Illich's pene

trating analysis of the! industrial mode of production which charac
terizes our contemporary world. The mass production of education
serves as a paradigm for other modem industrial enterprises, 'each
producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility and
each defii^g its output as a basic necessi^'. Such industrial enter
prises include systems of public transport, communication, health
services, wel&re, national defence, in short, any industrialized
service ^ency wUch eventually imposes its use upon its consumers.
The conviviality sought is one in which man's personal energies are
under his control and in which the use of his tools is responsibly
limited. The overall objective is to survive widi justice, avoiding the
bleak prospects of totally planned goals, desires, lives and totalloss of
individual privacy. This book claims our attention for the urgency of
its appeal, the stunning clarity of its It^c, the ovemdielmingly human
note which it sounds.

Some press opinions

'Illich's arguments are shrewd, open and passionate.*—The Guardian

'He seduces, cajoles, alerts and electrifies the imagination..

—Catholic Herald

'... oneof the mostsdmulatii^ presentations of the alternative to the

philosophy of the rat-race.'—Church Times
OPEN FORUM SERIES
This is a series of political and social treatises
designedto provide backgroundinformationand
informed commcnt on a wide range of topics. Some
of these topics are highly controversial but even those
of a less inflammatory nature will undoubtedly provoke
wide interest

CELEBRATION OF AWARENESS
Ivan Illich
A Call for Institutional Revolution

DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
Ivan Illich
A radical look at the social myth of the school

TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY

Ivan Illich
A biting critique of industrial production and a plea for
more persona and creative use of tools
IDEOLOGY AND INSANITY
Thomas S. Szasz
Essayson the PsychiatricDehumanizationof Man
THE NEWSPAPER GAME
Paul Hoch
The political sociology of the press and an enquiry into
behind-the-scenes organization, financing and
brainwashing techniques of the mass-media

BUSINESS CIVILIZATION IN DECLINE

Robert L. Heilbroner
The long-range prognosis for capitalism

WESTERN ATTITUDES TOWARD DEATH

Philippe Aries
From the Middle Ages to the Present

LIMITS TO MEDICINE
Medical Nemesis; The Expropriation of Health
Ivan Illich
The completely rewritten and enlarged definitive version
of Medical Nemesis previously published in Ideas in
Progress

GOODBYE TO THE WORKING CLASS

Roy Greenslade
A study of 122 grammar school children from
Dagenham

A MARION BOYARS BOOK

distributed by
Calder & Boyars Ltd
i8 Brevifer Street, London WiR 4AS
Write for a complete catalogue
Mackay, Chatham
 open ForumjIdeas in Progress £2-25
POWER MONEY & SEX
Towards a New Social Balance

James Robertson

With years of experience in British government and the world of finance

behind him, James Robertson has now completed his second title in our Ideas
in Progress series. In ProfitorPeople? he examined the social role of moneyin a
provocative new thesis, claiming that profit for its own sake is an outmoded
pursuit. Now in Power Money & Sex he enlarges that theory to include our
inherited ideas concerning sexual roles, political power and nationalism. The
patterns of human behaviour which focus on these ideas no longer work; the
old divisions are breaking down before we have developed any workable
alternatives.
With the failure of the viable nation-state and the increasing inadequacies
of centralization, political power must be redistributed in a balanced way.
Robertson suggests that this distribution take place on two levels—one
movingoutward to the world, the other, perhaps more urgent, movinginward
to small communities. The author sees inflation as a constitutional, rather
than an economic crisis, caused by the attempt to maximize, rather than to
balance, competing interests.
With both technological and institutional imperatives out of control,
people no longer feel in control of their own lives. Sexual repression has
naturally entwined itself with the work ethic and nationalism in such a way
that we have learned to rely on the traditional formula that strength and
effectiveness is a direct result of combining power, money and women.
Power Money Sex offers valuable and unorthodox tentative suggestions
for a harmonious change-over to new concepts of power and wealth. It
perhaps marksthe beginningofa survival coursefor the future.
Formerly a high ranking civil servant in the economic sector, James
Robertson now works as a consultant for a number of businesses and financial
organizationsand lectures at the London School of Economics.
Also available in a cased edition at {,4-gs

MARION BOYARS PUBLISHERS LTD

18 Brewer Street
London WiR 4AS
ISBN o 7145 2555 3