Behind a wall of bulletins prefiguring world economic collapse, the future is forming uncertainly. Its vagueness does not come from our ignorance of economic trends; we know about the disastrous course that poverty, population, and production are taking. The great mystery is political. What power, what organization will be conferred upon this emerging future? What politics, dominating the next generation, will dominate the subsequent millennium?
Earth is now relentlessly gripped by economic and social forces that are bound to shake it to death.
(1) Industrial and agricultural production are increasing wildly, without reference to the needs of the people. America's Gross National Product is one?third of the whole world's, but Americans are already suffering from a chaos of malorganized production.
(2) The world's population is multiplying beyond the capacities of production growth and even beyond the capacities of a vastly improved and redirected production. Eight billion people are forecast for the year 2000, twice the present number. Famine and near?famine are already epidemic in certain areas.
(3) The land and mineral resources of the world are being exhausted at an increasing rate. If the Chinese, or any quarter of the world's people, rose to the U.S.A. consumption level, all of the world's resources would be immediately burned up .
(4) The world of nature and the cities of man are, with all of these, being devastated, polluted, and crowded. Air, land and water throughout the globe are taking in and relaying to man and nature radioactivity, heavy metals, and other poisons in alarming quantities.
Every person can glimpse these happenings from the window of his apartment or the door of his shack. What everyone cannot know, unless he is helped by the statisticians, is that this personal experience is universal and true, and that the changes he is experiencing, projected into the future, proclaim a crisis — a shattering series of disasters — before another human generation has lived out its time on Earth.
The one and only force that can counteract the array of destructive forces and arrange tolerable and progressive equilibrium for the future is absent from the calculations — because it is absent in fact! — and that is political revolution. Only a political movement of global dimensions can bring about large?scale social changes that are needed within a generation.
If this constructive political revolution does not come about, we do not get rid of politics. On the contrary, a politics will come to drive the world like a beast. It will brush aside the inane party politics of front pages of newspapers, and impose a new politics of reactionary explosions, contractions, and more explosions.
Examine the natural regions of the world. They are not so many; they are ten in number. See how they will behave and how they fare as the climax approaches.
Islam is a sacrificial victim. Its oil will be the first great robbery. Its weaker governments, so vociferous and demanding today, will be squelched like insects as soon as the oil crisis — doomed to come in a few years — becomes sharply clear to the masters of America, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. The stronger governments will scuttle for safety in the shadows of giant patrons. So goes Islam.
Turn to Black Africa. In return for ravaging the apartheidists of South Africa, who richly deserve their fate, the Africans will give themselves to the new superimperialists, Russia probably, moving in from Indian Ocean bases, with Indian help, an American-West European alliance perhaps. Riches out, trinkets in.
Look to Japan. It's mad growth can only end in Chinese hands, for, as resources become scarce, new markets negligible, and competition fierce, an East Asian co-operative sphere will emerge and Japan must make its peace with China. But at what a sacrifice? Politically, culturally, economically, militarily, Japan will become the industrial slave of China and service its operations throughout Asia.
And where will India turn? There is nowhere to go. Japan and China will fight her for the Malay world, in itself a magnificently-endowed region but as pathetically inept for survival as Black Africa. It will be denied to India. India's masses will wait another eternity for resurrection.
Latin America as well. The low point of Yankee intervention will be reached in a few years and the rebound from there will exceed by every indicator the imperialism of history. Helpless, divided, rich in materials and land, burgeoning with poor and hopeless birthing, the Latin American countries will become the severely suppressed colonies of the U.S.A.
In the event of a climactic struggle for resources, for lebensraum in every bestial sense of that term, the United States' constitutional and economic older is likely to be reduced most speedily. For the U.S.A. is the most modern and world-connected nation, the most consumer-oriented, the most volatile psychologically. It can collapse more quickly and resoundingly than India, whose mass will simply sink deeper into its historical depression. The U.S.A. will, therefor, despite its present isolationist drift, be the first state to act hyper- imperialistically. Logically, also, a positive movement to regenerate the world order will find its most active support in America.
But the Soviet Union is better conditioned to survive the initial stages of the world crisis, apart from the possibility of a nuclear missile exchange. The Soviet population is less drugged by heavy consumption; its economic and state machinery is less complicated; the natural resources under its direct control are more ample; and the central position of its landmass, astraddle three continents, makes the movements of its conventional armed forces and their auxiliaries less costly and complicated. These advantages convey an additional propaganda benefit: when the U.S.A. takes an imperialistic initiative, the Soviet imperialist response dons the guise of defense of subject peoples and of self-defense.
We see, in the end, a struggle of the hyper-imperialist powers for survival. Perhaps, the Soviet Union, Euro-America, and Sino-Japan may persist. Most likely, no chance will recur for peace and planning, and the world will emerge from this period of hyper- imperialism immensely poor, devastated, despairing, and disintegrated.
Of the three formulas of the future, hyper-imperialism is the most likely. Man, unless forced to do otherwise, thinks in shorter futures than reality demands. The mechanisms for the sequence — chauvinism; fear; armaments; aggression; and amnesia of horrendous mass injustices — have been historically readied for use in man's mind and technology.
However, reality is as implacable as obsession. The costs of hyper- imperial conflict will boomerang against any victor so rapidly that the selfish gains will be dissipated before they can be enjoyed. The inevitable aggressions will drain natural resources. They will divert consumption to wastes that stretch far beyond the misdirected and blundering alternative course of the present. They will bring inconceivable hardships to the victors and vanquished alike. They will pollute the air, the sea and the land. Far from avoiding either world or national collapse, the imperialist course can only precipitate it. Of the many groups who believe that they will survive as happy enclaves, a small fraction will succeed.
Widespread famines will promote dislocations of population. Continual shortages of raw materials will incite interventions that will become sheer marauding. Runaway inflations will reduce large social strata, such as the small enterpriser, salaried workers, and the elderly, to ruin. Communications within and among nations will disintegrate. Transportation will be scarce and expensive. The hyper-imperialists, in their heyday and in their decline, will quarantine the poor of the world. Over all will hover a cloud of guilt and despair that may take centuries to dissipate.
Certain qualities of this collapse would be largely replicated if the present course of the world continues and if, from mutual fear, the large powers manage to evade all-consuming conflicts. Instead of the hyper-imperialist formula of conflict and collapse, the conservative formula of decline and collapse would occur. For, if the present politics of the world are taken as a constant factor, it political measures are not taken within the next two decades to redirect radically the trends of population, pollution, production, energetics, and land and resources use, one or more of these forces, colliding with one or more others, will bring the old world order into a climactic and profound collapse.
Once in precipitous decline, nothing can preserve the world order as it is known today. The political forces engendered in the social and economic collapse are most likely to create a kind of feudal system. The requirements for feudalism are a breakdown of sophisticated far- reaching economic systems and a weakness of centralizing force. Then small units of humans, disconnected by failures of central authority and technology, maintain themselves by survival economics and marauding.
Depending upon the extent of the economic and cultural breakdown, the feudal system provides the possibility of differing life-styles. The feudal societies would typically possess elements of a ruling class, which, putting aside democratic claims, would carry on at a mediocre cultural and economic level; their unconcern for their impoverished populations would have to be ideologically rationalized. It is possible but unlikely that these societies would be held together by rich streams of informal communications and a world outlook. A composition of nations would emerge that would more resemble the Malayan chiefdoms before European imperialism, the baronies of early medieval Europe, the nineteenth century Caribbean or Chinese warlordism, or the medieval Slavic world.
If such ages tempt the prosperous classes today, it only goes to prove how fantastic are their calculations of survival and how epidemic and degenerative is the neo-poverty of the age. Everywhere in the world today, as people escape their old poverty, they fall into the stresses and distractions of the new poverty. Everywhere, increasing drug addiction and crime rates, incessant riots and terrorism, and epidemic mental illness and alienation exhibit themselves as indicators of a collapse of human faith in the traditional and conventional political authorities.
Is there a realistic alternative to the present blind and drifting policies of the world community, other than a hyperpower struggle and a collapse into feudalism?
Search far back into history, even into the archetypes of the human mind. We always find people of good will, capable of sacrifice, people who would have the whole of humanity disposed into decent settlements, deriving a modest livelihood from dignified labor, creating, enjoying at peace. The dream has been to universalize a history that has been exceptional, to realize the omens inherent in these perennial occurrences. Whenever the world begins to shake, it is time once again for the savers, searchers and builders. This is the time of times, for out of the deepness of the trouble may surge a movement to surmount all previous pinnacles of social achievements.
We wish a word for this urge to defend the world against its enemies and to build a happier future, a word that can stand for the alternative. We can use the special term, Kalos, from the ancient Greek root of "civic beauty," a word pronounceable by as many tongues as must be included in kalotic unity for survival. Kalos pertains to a world movement, quickly generated among positive elements of the world, to transform global and domestic societies and policies beneficially within a single generation. Kalists think psychologically and pragmatically. They inherit, modernize, and universalize the enlightenment, the social gospel, and the socialist revolutions that began in the eighteenth century. Kalos is a strategy for the survival of human kind rather than of occasional individuals; it alone can provide a decent world order.
At present, a great many men, women, and children around the world are ready to work to these ends. They possess, with the exception of skill in arms, nearly a monopoly of the skills of science, education, communications, and management that are absolutely required. Indeed, if it were not for the fact of the technical capacities of well-disposed people, any hope of avoiding tragic futures would have to be abandoned.
The kalotic revolution must be classless. No social class, as such, carries the gift of grace or power. It must find its own cadres and most will come from new groupings: the students and teachers whose numbers have so greatly increased; the many technical, organizational, and psychological scientists; some educated military personnel; aroused people from every quarter: lawyers and pastors; women; blacks, yellows, and whites; the poor but also those rich whose troubles arise from having lifted the veil from the face of this self-destroying world.
To organize the great diversity of kalists, work gangs are necessary. Each kalotic gang, as the basic unit of organization, should contain the varied skills needed to promote the general aims of kalos and to achieve specific goals of its own, whether geographic or functional in scope. Each gang should be capable of coordination and assembly with other gangs to focus intensively upon major issues and programs.
The goal of kalism must logically be to organize one million persons from all nations, especially those nations that command the greatest industrial energy and greatest concentrations of resources. This group of leading kalists or tutors must promptly destroy the ideological foundations of the dysfunctional world order. Existing institutions need to be pervaded by virtual institutions, whose kalists are, in effect, if not in law, taking over their beneficial operation. They are to impose upon the world a government of powers sufficient to halt and reverse every perilous trend before the age of collision, destructiveness, and disintegration arrives.
The tutors aim to provide, within a peaceful world and in local communities, under a system of representative government and legal equality, a minimum comfortable subsistence for everyone, with opportunities for personal education and cultural equality. Unprecedented dedication is needed, coupled with a disdain for lesser objectives. Political power has to be generated in huge amounts and applied directly. Kalos must be settled upon the world within thirty years.
The achievement of kalotic goals requires a social structure that can initiate and process the policies of the future. The structure, which means no more or less than a new set of decision-making habits, is adequately subdivided into four sub-structures of the world system: (1) the Ethnic structure, (2) the Metropolitan structure, (3) the Functional structure, and (4) the Cosmarchy. All world structures should be simultaneously established. Which of them emerges first and most perfectly cannot and need not be foretold here. Since they are consistent and complementary, the success of one contributes to the success of all.
The four main structural forms should correspond to essential principles of constitutionalism. They should be representative governments, led by assemblies. Every person over sixteen years of age in the world holds five votes in the elections that ultimately shape government. A person votes in a regional role, in a metropolitan role, in a functional role, in an ethnic or national role, and in a world role. How this happens is sketched in the chart on the Power Structure of Cosmarchy, below, page 15.
All forms provide for free expression. Their units on various levels should be decentralized; autonomy should be stressed. Their laws should be explicitly justified by reference to their constitutions. Conflicts of jurisdiction on all levels should be arbitrated quickly by groups composed of delegates of the units and delegates of the next superior assembly. Deficiencies or violations of constitutional principles in units or sub-units of government should be corrected by appeal of abused parties to the next most general level of their organization, ending in determination by world regional assemblies or the world government. In each geographic or functional unit that an elected assembly does not directly rule, but that administrators govern, a countervalor, delegated by the assembly, should continuously and professionally act the role of a "devil's advocate," criticizing thoroughly and reporting publicly upon the negative side of what is being accomplished.
All matters are "public" that substantially affect the lives and kalotic state of the members of a structural unit and of their clienteles outside. The land beneath the surface, the seas, and the air are public and cosmarchic. But while much is public, much need not be done by government. It is imperative that pulling together the world be counterbalanced by pushing out. ward new orientations, new initiatives, and new management powers to the furthest reaches of human organization. Governmental branches of the great cosmarchy should legislate, represent, express, tax, stress, support, inspire, regulate, adjudicate, penalize and criticize. To a degree never before realized, public activities and their management should be contracted out, or organized outside the strict frameworks of government. The recent sharp expansion in accounting, communicating and supervisory machinery, whether, for instance, in human supervisory form such as surveys or in mechanical forms such as computers, permits and invites the extensive distribution of autonomous powers, both geographically and functionally.
The world system expects to create organizations combining and superseding the nation states in several ways. This is to be accomplished by the creation of regions and, concurrently, of the world government. The national state must shed its concept of sovereignty, give over some of its critical activities to functional associations and metropolitan communities, and submit to cosmarchic planning. It should remain and be an ethnic community.
The state today is often a bed of procrustes on which ethnic minorities are cut or stretched to fit the imperial demands of the ruling ethnic group, as in Belgium, the Soviet Union, Spain, China, Nigeria, India and, formerly, Pakistan. The continual harassment and- suppression of component cultures will cease when the ethnic state is reassured concerning the uniqueness of its economic areas and its safety from external foes. Thus, the principle of ethnic self-determination can be more realistically and sympathetically applied under the conditions of a world order than it can under the sovereign state system of today.
A new age of cities has come into being. In poor and in rich countries alike, the rural folk are pouring in upon the cities. By force or by incentives, some countries pressure the ruralites to remain in their villages, to little avail. Rural happiness and independence have usually been only a myth of the sophisticated urban intellectual. The cities offer electricity) anonymity, and a feeling that their mass of people is too close to the government to be ignored. Yet the original older city populations have not solved their own basic problems — of crime, metro-neuroses, class conflict, corruption, pollution, and bad housing.
The remedy is two-fold. The world has to organize its cities into metropolitan communities into which all of the rural population falls as well. There are about 100 natural metropolitan areas of the world, containing one-third of all people. Transportation systems, communications systems, mental and physical health, population control, housing, education, recreation and crime control are the major subjects that lend themselves to the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Councils.
The Metropolitan Councils should proceed immediately to the construction of new cities. At least two hundred new cities of a million persons each are needed in the world today The technology and sociology of their construction are known. The new cities should be organized by experienced cadres of the old, the necessary scientists and managers, and the rural folk who are participating anyway in the great urban migration, Consortia of companies under metropolitan direction will invest in each new city, construct it, and retire from it as its plans resolve into operations and the city population begins to take hold of its life and governance.
These cities will differ drastically from the old ones. Their designs will not only bring a rarely experienced decency to the lives, work, and pleasures of their residents, but also make immense savings in construction, in costs of occupancy, indeed in every facet of productive activity, law and order, and the costs of living. During this critical age, the heavy relative costs and dispersion of kalotic forces required for new small towns gives them a lower priority; when the new large cities are built and the old ones regenerated, the privilege of building the towns will descend to our heirs.
While the humbug politicians of the world rule their territory of maddening cities and distressed countrysides, irresponsible large corporations and socialist agencies make the most important decisions of who among the people shall work, how they shall live, what they may eat, and how much filth they will swallow. This aggregate force, be it plutocratic or bureaucratic, roams the world like the Vandal and the Hun, taking from here and there, competing quarrelsomely with its own kind, and evading coordination under a kalotic law.
The 2000 largest corporations of the world, with their bans national affiliates, and their 2000 equivalent agencies in the socialist and partially socialized countries must be brought promptly into world associations along functional lines, and pledged to transmute their production and distribution into kalotic forms. Here is by far most of the world product. It Is not important to debate the number of- such basic functions. Fifteen groupings can be postulated that include other functional categories besides the sheerly market- oriented: banking and finance; manufacturing; communications; transportation; agriculture and forestry; fisheries; mining; construction; distribution and services; health services; educational services; religious groups; mothers and housewives; and an aggregate of all other concerns.
The weighing of each interest in representation is determined by the number of people engaged in it and its volume of transactions where the people work and the transactions occur. The basic units of these world-sized constituencies begin to form in the ethnic communities or nation-states and proceed outward until they are organized into fifteen World Association Boards. The World Boards elect a fifth of the World Congress.
The regions of the world system represent, besides what they choose to represent, the general cultural and geo-political interests of the world. They concentrate groups of related statal interests according to relative national populations. Any region can logically be the first to organize for the cosmarchy, and can convert into cosmarchy by fission of its structure and fusion with new members. Especially in the beginning the regions will be dissimilar in their degree of centralization; West Europe, for example, will be less centralized than the nations of the East European socialist region, while the Greater China Region will be more centralized than the East Pacific Region.
Hypothetically (not dogmatically), the world regions are composed of the Soviet Socialist Republics; North America; Central South America; Europe (aside from the Eastern Communist States); Greater China; The Malayans; the East Pacific Japan, a part of the Chinese, and Southeast Asia); Greater India; Africa; and the Middle East (Islam).
The regional government, and the world government that springs from two or more regions, are alike in form. The world government is directed by a Congress of 500 members, 100 each from its regions, its ethnic (national) components, its Association Boards, its Metropolitan Councils, and its public directly. The Congress legislates, elects ceremonial High Commissioners, operates through powerful committees, and chooses the Co-ordinator or president for a limited term so as to avoid charismatic cults.
It is useless to haggle over details where final decisions are not only unpredictable but deliberately negotiable. The sticking points are well-known: who is to establish the first region: when will fission and fusion create the second region; who is to assure the co-ordination of authorities. The answer must be in human terms: those tutors and kalists who organize the new world must hold to their goals and stand by each other until the necessary structures are established and the first generation of policies enacted and implemented.
The idea, the movement, the structures, the policies, and the new world society: this is the succession of events. It is also the accumulation of events, for the idea, the movements, the structures, the policies continue on and become the essential nature of the new society. It all forms one powerful new exponential curve of world political development. This steeply rising force aims to grapple with and control the unmanaged and disastrous forces now loosed on earth.
To suffice for the task, the new policies must be of wide scope, heavy impact and long duration. The most difficult policy of all is wrenching around the world production system to make different goods and services and to distribute them by new principles. Population and environmental controls, new cities, technological inventions, and education, and even and especially the control of force give lesser difficult and can be handled at the same time.
The state measures its economic progress today on the fallacious idea of gross quantity of goods and services sold. If this sum is increasing, the nation is growing. Peru, in its dire poverty, exports fish products to the U.S.A. to fatten cattle which have enough protein but need an elegant marble of fat, and then imports the cuttings of waste fat; both countries are credited with national product. Every traffic jam in any city increases the GNP by the amount of gasoline wasted. Whether growth is benign or cancerous is irrelevant to those who gain promotions, contracts, labor forces, and profits (that is, the owners, managers and bureaucrats). Actually, much economic growth has become a cancer: it increases expotentially; it starves the normal tissues; it provides no function to the healthy body. For world survival, it is quality of production that counts and the form of its distribution. The most recent reports on conclusionsnds strive to soften their pessimistic conclusions by accepting growth of capital and production in its conventional unacceptable form, putting aside the character of the production. The quality of present day production and services is so poor, however, that an additional dimension of pessimism has to be added. Unless politics finds a kalotic solution to the transformation of the GNP of nations, the impending world crisis will both occur sooner than predicted and will result in worse dislocations
By the same reasoning, those who venture predictions confess that the distributive mechanisms of the present world system are woefully deficient. Even if the quality of production were ample and its quality were radically changed, a revolution of distribution is required. For, make no mistake, the world as a whole is now growing poorer, but the poor are growing poorer faster than are the rich. The rich are trapped in new poverty which is the incapacity to enjoy the presumed luxuries afforded them; the poor are increasingly to be submerged in paleo-poverty, the historical struggle for subsistence, elementary education and medical care.
The problems of quantity, quality, and distribution of world capital and production must be handled together. The kalotic goals are clear. Therefore a child, the Kremlin, and a World Congress can simultaneously make their appropriate determinations within their own area of responsibility. In the end, the bulk of decisions must be sufficient to turn the world from its present course.
There are three trillion dollars of goods and services generated in today's world. Most of these are dysfunctional to the kalotic world order. Every activity of individuals, associations, companies and governments must be examined to determine:
What part is wasted production? Here are the costs of armaments and armies, of huge paper-shiffling bureaucracies, of the pet food industry, of monopoly power when it forces shoddy products upon the market, of impractical education, of elaborate packaging.
What part creates new indirect costs? Here are the charges for pollution (not counting the costs of heavy pollution that do not enter the market, the ravaging of nature and man's habitat), the costs of commuting and of crowding.
What part is fraudulent? Here are the costs of advertising beyond the minimum needed to inform, of planned obsolescence, of payments to farmers and workers to restrict their production, of criminal activities.
What part is incompetent or malorganized? Here is the use of valuable agricultural land for urban sprawl, the flying of hundreds of half-empty giant airplanes across oceans, the over complicated systems of production and distribution that bring raw materials from one part of the world to another and return the same materials, processed simply, back again.
What part is wrongly distributed ? Here is the production to keep the production machine going, which is dumped without regard to need or desire. Here are the expensive charges of raw materials, labor, and capital to the accounts of the rich, who barely want things but must consume extravangantly.
A statistical kalotic analysis of these parts of the world's charges, and for that matter, of all human energies and resources, is needed. In its absence, and estimating both partial and total elements of each category, a cost of stupendous proportions is arrived at. Of all of those energies that go into the paid goods and services of the world (the three trillion dollars) a total of one and a half trillion dollars, or one-half is anti-kalotic dysproduction and dyspending, contributing to the continued injustices and early ruin of the world economy and its social- political system. From the same calculus, we conclude that there is already sufficient production potential in the world to raise significantly the world average standard of living without any further acceleration of the rate of use of Natural resources 'or any increase in pollution levels. Even if one-fourth of the estimated current product were refashioned by new world goals and better co- ordination of work and' resources; the average kalotic level of the world's people could be doubled.
What must be done to reconstruct world economy? First of all, the establishment of the political structures already described is necessary. Power and planning in large amounts are immediately necessary.
Then to begin we must begin. An army cannot merely plan a landing; it must land its forces, regardless of remaining doubts and risks. Every person in the world must be guaranteed, by the first agglomerate of competent forces, a minimum subsistence for life with a minimum medical care and education. The world economy not only must be asked to do this; it must be dragged into doing it. No one, no so called agent or delegate is permitted to haggle over relative minimum's as over a piece of cloth. The mighty taxing machines of the nations should be dismantled to make way for an equal, cheap, simple, and clearly visible system.
The national and private international banks of the world must be ordered into the World Bank and that Bank transformed into an association whose immediate directives are to set up and stabilize a world currency, to lift the enormous load of debt from the shoulders of the poorer countries; and to manage the credit and exchange needed by the World Associations and metropolises as they move into kalotic world production programs.
All macro-property of the world is declared public' in nature. All micro-property is declared a personal right for it is an extension of the personality. Macro-property is property used generatively in the economy and in storage if it exceeds a million dollars. However, despite its public nature, macro-property may remain or be accumulated under personal or private corporate title. Its disposition for public purposes will be publicly determined, as is increasingly done almost everywhere now. As there is no attainder by blood and family, so there shall be no inheritance by blood and family beyond three lifelong minimum subsistences.
To halt the rise in population of the earth, two policies take effect, one structural, the other substantive. The 100 great cities, with all the rest of the population as their hinterland, will receive the power to control the peopling of the earth under the directives of the World Congress. The chauvinistic sensitivities of ethnic states are too great to let them be trusted with this problem.
Now it will be the task of the metropolitan communities of the world to enforce the law of demopolicy. By this law, every woman shall have the right to a child, if she desires, even if she cannot well support the child without the kalotic minimum guarantee. The second child is forbidden without private support assurances, but mild proctoring penalties will prevail. A third child will be permitted only with assurances of support and if a foster-child cannot be found to adopt. To further control the system, the World Congress hands to the metropolitan community its portion of a world quota, and that portion relates to criteria of public health and education in the metropolis; the higher the indices, the greater the portion, within limits of the general idea of equality of all women and men.
Kalos is fashioned for humanity. It fails if it mechanizes people and deprives them of their rights to be in a large sense their own masters and servants. Today they are caught up in a whirlwind of forces that proceed alarmingly towards dehumanization. To stand off now from world reorganization for fear of alienating humanity is already two hundred years too late. Humanity is alienated and bewildered. The sole recourse is to knife into the problems at their vital points. This principle, generally applicable, is pertinent especially to the implantation of basic industries in the poor areas of the world. The managerial and technical skills are ample today to establish within several years systems for the production and distribution of basic kalotic necessities in every area where paleo- poverty is general.
Cloth, shelter, food staples, medical services: the United States alone can capitalize, build, operate and then turn over complexes for producing these goods for half a billion people in five years. This is indisputable, among other reasons because in effect the U.S. Government has done the equivalent during wars and its companies have done the equivalent in peace. The chief difference is in the kalotic character of the new demands upon the American people. That they will rise to the occasion, if it is courageously explained to them, is certain.
The doubt is neither in the provisioning nor in the will; it is in the counteraction of degenerate local elites and in the failure to buttress the implanted services by severe demopolicies and imaginative and just financing arrangements. The plants must be rapidly transferred to local management, and to local and worker ownership. The population rise must be halted. The local elites must begin to form into world structures according to the general plan of Kalos.
One of the World Association Boards that calls for prompt realization deals with health services. Here the inadequacies of both rich and poor countries are great. What could readily become a world-wide service system is in fact a fantastically skewed and peculiar set of services. The poor are kept from dying epidemically in order to live listlessly ill. The well-to-do and the medical practitioners combine to promote expensive services at high-income points, cutting out ordinary citizen. even where medical and health portions of the GNP rise to the cheers of the growth fetishists.
Ordinary medical and public health services, of the kind that 90 per cent of the world's poor, and rich need throughout life, require a corps of professional and pare-professional workers twenty times the present number, ordinarily trained in one-four~-h the time, and facilities ten times the present number. These can be supplied at a kalotic cost not much different than the total now spent upon all medical and health services in the world. But monopoly and bureaucracy lock in a macabre dance, entranced by each other and oblivious of the disconsolate crowd.
Crowding is compounded of population growth, movement, and the frustrated desire for aesthetic and recreational experience. It is a disease of the neo- poor more than of the paleo-poor. While the poor of India and Portugal dwell silently in their villages, the poor of America and Europe drive desperately for work and pleasure. As the elements of crowding increase, people become not paleo-poor but poor in a sense more device sating than any poverty except starvation. The optimists of population and economic growth, who wish the mountains ahead to recede, are unbelievable; they tout technological innovations and dispute the disappearance of resources; in the end they will sink into an insufferable crowd. The kalotic ways to make the crowd disappear are to reduce its numbers, and to redistribute it physically, and to hold back polluting technology, and to depollute the environment, and to cut the anxious mobility of people by giving them less reason to push and pull.
The first decision of kalotic justice is its promise not to let humanity die of neglect or imperialism. From the assurance this decision gives to men, women and children comes the authority of Kalos. From this principle, too, extend logically some specific concerns with injustice in the world.
Both the statisticians of unconcern and of catastrophe, for different reasons, pass over the deep resentment of the great majority at the`: system of law and courts found around the world. With singular exceptions, the ordinary person in a poor land finds himself the victim of a stratified system, Apt gives legal process to the powerful and rich, and summary justice to the rest of the people. In a so-called rich land, the ordinary person falls victim to an incredibly tangled maze that can be called neo-injustice just as it proceeds out of neo-poverty.
A wild and profuse growth and an impenetrable thicket of discrimination and rituals frustrate the victim in his search for justice. Crimes unlabelled as crimes flourish while harmless activities are - called criminal; indictments, processes, and penalties are conferred or denied without relevance or consistency, effecting finally a chaos from which emerges not a law that matches man with morals, but a jungle code of tooth and claw.
This chaos reflects upon the police in so-called modernized societies, so that they too become confused and corrupted.
But law cannot be let to collapse while the world is in transformation. New codes need to be proclaimed. Rapid arbitration must supersede the games of ritual legal process. The courts are to be relieved of their function as legislatures. The horde of demoralized and self-destructive characters bred in palco-poverty and neo-poverty need the reclamatory organization of the healing professions and pare-professions. greatly expanded at the expense of penitentiaries.
In a profound sense, every intelligent decision of new policy is a work of legal art; every legal process is an intelligent decision. Applied science, public policy, and legal process are fundamentally connected as instrumentally rational ways of arriving at kalotic goals. Improved legislative and managerial process, meet halfway with improved legal process, where disputes are politically resolved and goals are rationally advanced. The shake-up and reconstitution of the legal order are not an isolated and terrible job; they can occur speedily and readily from their essential co-ordination with the kalotic revolution taking place.
The new world cannot let education and science stand aloof. Their social theory and practice require drastic revision. Life is a kind of education and education is a kind of life; life is a kind of science and science a kind of life. The root of education, science, and life is a striving by the person to relate to the universe. Everything that occurs thereafter is a help or a hindrance.
The hindrances are the external foes of human progress: coercion masked as reason; formalism in the guise of specialization: chaos representing itself as freedom. The poor and the rich suffer in their own ways: the one is fortunate if he can become lettered: the other is taught to ride backwards on an ass. In no school system of the world are students educated for the future; the faster the future moves, the worse the education actually imparted.
To scribble and speechify, as so many educators and bureaucrats do, that the U.S.A. spends $100.00 per capita per year for higher education and that the poorer countries,- who spend $0.03 for the same, ought to be lifted to American levels. demonstrates once more the growth fetish, the chaos of mind, the utter incompetence of leadership in this prekalotic age.
To be a help in life and collectively to kalofy man's future education has to be relevant to our projected goals. We must stop the pyramiding of bodies and buildings, banish the obsession that schooling begins and ends inside a classroom at a fixed age, and demand that teachers prepare their students — whether in kindergarten or in laboratories of microbiology — for the obligations of the coming age of kalotic revolution.
There are portions of American and European universities that need to be kept intact for social and physical research and training. Otherwise every university would better be disbanded and set up in storefronts in a hundred towns of the world. dealing even-handedly in education with the surrounding population, exchanging by capillary action the intellectual nutrition and wastes of the universe. Again kalotic revolutionary activity and the kalotic life — in this case, education — go hand in hand.
To bring such grave complaints against the existing educational order is to insist upon the importance of education. Kalos, if it is to succeed, is education writ large on the face of the earth. The cadres of Kalos must come largely from those persons who have acquired the skills of knowledge while escaping the enervating effects of conventional schools.
The same should be said of science. As there are more teachers than coal miners in America, there are more scientists than managers. The kalotic revolution cannot proceed without their help and leadership. Science is a life process whose specialized behaviors aim at perfecting the steering intelligence and evaluating mechanisms of mankind working towards Kalos. The spirit of science should pervade the totality of governmental processes, from the smallest field office to the top leadership.
Applied science is a branch of administration; it is goal- directed. As such, science can no more be irresponsible for the future than the military, workers, businessmen, teachers, or officials. Its special business is programmed as enlightenment and invention, for which it is politically accountable.
Just as Kalos depends upon teachers and scientists for its general revolutionary drive, it depends upon them as specialists. And in both cases, it bespeaks disciplined work, not dilettantes. The scientist, acting as specialist, carries a skill as powerful as a gun, a treasure of symbolic information about the world, and a general social confidence that extends his personality in social space where it can connect with the principles of kalotic revolution.
The million and more people who lead the coming world revolution will logically be required to take ~ innumerable actions. In every case, the question arises: "How must this event be made to occur?" Perhaps in five out of ten cases, the action can be generated out of consent, from the spreading consensus and the techniques of persuasion and propaganda. In four of the ten cases, organizational and economic measures will produce the intended result. But what of the tenth case? What is the technique of the tenth case? And the answer is "Force" in the end, then, if not in the beginning, kalists must admit that force is vital to their enterprise. Whether the skill in coercion is found among civilians or the military is not important; it is more important that the expert on force know when and how to decide upon compulsion, and how to do the job efficiently.
The optimal revolutionary process is swelling and bursting of a wave of change over all institutions, coincidental at the finale with the assumption of power over the peak legislative and executive institutions by the revolutionary leadership. If the tidal process does not occur, the seizure is attempted under more dangerous circumstances. The new power-holders, if successful, will operate under less restraints by friends and foes, less orientation, less co-operation. The role of violence would be augmented, with the dangers incident thereto.
The ethics of force are the same within a country as among countries, between Americans as between American and Vietnamese. The infinity of violations cannot affect this moral principle. The techniques of force do not vary greatly, either, in this age of 360° conflict, of all-around insurgency. Only the heaviest arms — nuclear missiles — and only the severest repression — genocide — can prevail against a determined, disciplined, fully diffused revolutionary movement which, no matter how much it may want to limit arms, knows how to use them.
Regarding nuclear arms in the years ahead, their cost is odious and their risk obvious, when hyper-imperialism tries to control absolutely the remaining material resources of earth and to quarantine the poor and indignant masses. The policy of the kalotic movement must therefore be to demand nuclear and heavy-weapons disarmament. Safety against mad leaders who command nuclear arms is impossible; retaliation against a full onslaught is a futile and foolish dying gesture. A moderate destructive potential is adequate to deter any rational leadership in the world. Accordingly, unilateral disarmament is to proceed where multilateral disarmament is retarded. The risk of fear is better than the fear of risk. As there is a good life and a bad life, there is a good death and a bad death.
The effort at world change, to occur rapidly: and effectively, must occur everywhere, in every function and at all levels. A preview and preplan of the phases and steps are necessary, even if they must be adopted in the process Of their development. Kalos, if it is to succeed, is education writ large on the face of society.
(1) Recruit initial members in every geographical and functional area.
(2) Set up directing committees in every area.
(3) Establish newsletters in every major language.
(4) Gather funds.
(5) Set up alternative plans and virtual organizations for every structure — ethnic, functional, metropolitan and cosmarchic.
(6) Hold first world Kalos convention and organize virtual cosmarchic institutions.
(7) Promulgate specific policies and the overall plan.
(8) Raise the demand that all existing governments denounce sovereignty and approve participation in world government.
(9) Raise the demand that all rich governments cut their non- kalotic GNP in half and give over the other half to kalotic policies. ~
(10) Begin heavy pressures on radio, film, and press everywhere to reform the images of chauvinism. violence And anarchism that they inculcate.
(1) Demand kalotic control of or accord with all voluntary institutions and merge virtual organization with real institutions.
(2) Hold world convention of any and all localities, associations, institutions, parties, and governments that are in fact engaged in the kalotic revolution.
(3) Resist by every means all world expenditures everywhere that drain world resources from kalotic enterprises.
(4) Demand primary social loyalty of people everywhere to Kalos.
(5) Levy assessments upon all institutions whose existence is foreseen within kalocraq and collect them in any part or form by any possible means.
(6) Replace the juridical system everywhere by persons acting within a competitive virtual juridical system that does not recognize the legitimacy of the old systems.
(7) Cut off all production, services of supply, and funds to all armed forces and police excepting lightly armed contingents amounting to one per two hundred population.
(8) Win the first governments and armed forces to the kalotic revolution.
(1) Organize and start up at least three regional federations under the direction of one world government.
(2) Elect all appropriate kalotic organs.
(3) Pass all appropriate kalotic legislation.
(4) Demand the prompt adherence of the remaining regions of the world on equal terms compatible with kalotic cosmarchy.
(5) Celebrate the new world order by the inauguration everywhere of basic kalotic principles of well-being, opportunity and justice.
Four beliefs suppress the organization of kalists. One is that supermen alone can bring about a world revolution. But realize this: If, as is likely, the world is torn to shreds in the next century the parochial legends that remain will be of supermen, destructive supermen, heroes of mutual destruction. Superman is an ex post facto myth. Superman is whoever survives.
Today, more than ever before, a second belief prevails: that for massive change massive numbers of activists must be found. Nothing in the history of successful revolutionary movements supports this belief. It is a crippling belief, all the sadder because the best of people feel that they are ethically bound to it, that they must blind themselves to the external realities of social action. A great revolution ends in popular support, truly, but it begins in a few hands and is won by the few. Nowhere in this world, where every great country calls itself a people's democracy, are more than three out of a hundred people active in the whole political order; no more than one in a hundred are direct participants in the ruling order, and no more than one in twenty thousand constitute the ruling group. Hence, we say that there must be these proportions in Kalos: 10,000 top leaders in the U.S.A., 200,000 in the world at a maximum; of direct participants, 200,000 in the U.S.A. and 4,000,000 in the world. But, since the United States is a leading instrument of change, the proportion everywhere diminishes. Given a mass of 100,000 kalists in America and a million in the world, the movement will generate a sufficiency of leadership and will prevail.
A third belief that inhibits kalists, even while red signals of danger flash throughout the world, is that reason and logic are doomed when confronted by man's essential irrationality. This is a self-destructive myth of overconsiderate philosophers, castrated intellectuals, masochistic pacifists, and morally-ruined cynics. In every human predicament there are probabilities and improbabilities. The probability of perfect happiness or of perfect misery is alike near zero. The probability of fashioning and managing a decent world order is greater than ever, because the stark necessities of the future glare at us. Still, admit that this probability is only 20 percent in the competition with the hyper-imperial and expand- collapse formulas. Considering, however, these dreaded alternatives, there is nowhere else to go. The improbable is our destiny.
Fundamentally, our preferred improbable has little to do with man's rationality or irrationality. We are not proposing rationality; we are proposing a certain "Kalos," an order of human beings who subsist, who are friendly, who are ready to suffer in some known proportion to alternative modes of worse sufferings. Surely, we appeal to reason and logic, but essentially we appeal to all men, women, and children. We promise, through thinking, suffering and reordering, a society of human beings that can be lived with, stomached, and slept in without nightmares.
But, finally, the revolution will be won on the swift millrace of time. Cleared of every other doubt and illusion, some people (and the more specialized and highly educated will be the most prominent among them) will still say that the great changes of the kalotic program cannot be accomplished within the time available. The name of social science is invoked: every change in a factory or in a parish church takes years; how is world change to take only thirty years, or even fifty?
The small changes are stressed because their details can be studied; pedantry does a disservice when it generalizes. Between 1776 and 1815 the face of America and Europe changed and the modern age was ushered in. Between 1930 and 1940, one decade, a smug and "progressive" world order was destroyed; totalitarian movements seized Europe and Asia; America turned from complete isolationism and hedonism, underwent a fearful depression, constructed a welfare state, and began the process of invading the whole world economically and by force.
The precedents of history, including these exceptions, are recalled to warn of time's harsh restraints: every world religious and economic revolution has taken centuries and been partial; how can Kalos become universal, and in so short a time? All previous movements have offered solutions that in fact, if not in principle, were culturally and politically biased. Today, historical time is speeded up. The control Of the world is easier because of the speed of communications, travel, scientific applications, and rationalized organization of tasks.
We are sorry that we cannot grandiloquently offer an extra century to the critics. That offer could only have been made by our ancestors: in 1945, and 1919, in 1815. The movement of forces through the near future is implacable. The moment must be seized. The word is kalokinesis: the speeding-up of desired social change.
More good can be done now that the worst is obviously before us.
A revolutionary movement can be charged from the accumulated disgust of the neo-poor, who until now rested egoistically upon the deprivations of the paleo-poor.
A large skilled class of world perspectives is potentially ready. Scientists throughout the world can switch to kalotic tasks and kalokinesis.
Large changes are as readily accepted as small changes.
The speed of revolution, like the kalotic revolution itself, is the product of a determined leadership and an aroused people, knowing large goals, instructed by science, and wielding an immense physical and emotional force.
The future looms as a mountain range before this generation. Its passes are unknown. Each is bound to be perilous. To overcome each will require different ideals, leadership and techniques. Those who cover their eyes and say that the marching front of humanity will never reach the mountains will perish upon the approaches. The second party will abandon the masses upon the plain, bringing a quick passage and the survival of a selected few. A third force will assume the world-burden; but this burden contains the gifts of the civilized human spirit that can guide it through the tortuous paths and into the warmer lands unashamed.