00. Kalotics

KALOTICS
What is to be Done With Our World?

Forty Basic Problems and Their Solutions:

Forty Stases and Theses
by Alfred de Grazia

This, a prose poem about the crisis of the present world age, was originally written by Professor Alfred de Grazia in 1971, and delivered to a faculty seminar at New York University. In 1994 it was presented as the basis for a collaboration with the artist and psychotherapist, Licia Filingeri, of Genoa, noted for her abstract and surreal papier mâché sculptures, and the work culminated in a set of forty paintings, acrylic on paper posters, by her in consultation with Alfred de Grazia, who also autographed the inscriptions. The work was completed in Genoa, Italy, in October 1995. They called it "Quantavolution Art," meaning that the art symbolizes and proposes large-scale, extensive, radical change over short time periods.
Definitions

A stasis posits a trouble or problem. A thesis offers a solution in the area of the problem. Each stasis requires proof, as does each thesis. These are provided mainly in the larger work, Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? (Bombay, India, 1971). The stases, read in succession, from number 1 to number 40, afford a general diagnosis of conditions. Each thesis stands opposite a related stasis and proposes a general alternative to it. The theses thereupon set forth a full and integrated system for the betterment of man's condition -- the world of Kalos.

A short biography of Licia Filingeri appears at the end of this page.

You may click on any of the pictures shown below to get an enlarged view.

KALOTICS

FORTY PROBLEMS AND PRINCIPLES OF

THE WORLD ORDER

A world order exists, in fact, a kind of world government exists. But it is bad. The purpose of Kalotics here is to declare in what forty general respects it is bad and how in each regard a solution is possible that will altogether add up to a beneficial and benevolent world order and government.

The troubles of the world -- wars, famine, crowding, hate -are

interconnected and their effects are worldwide; their proposed

solutions are piecemeal, isolated, special.
.

The solution of the world's major troubles must be

general and integrated, a movement throughout the full circle of social

space.

The problems of the world are worsening individually

and collectively, and moving toward one or another catastrophic resolution.

Invention and applications of methods of large-scale,

world-wide, intensive, and rapid change, are the first priority of humans in the new generation.

Most people are trapped by education and circumstances to give the world only what they receive, or make it worse; few leave the world richer for their work.
.

Several millions of persons around the world must be mobilized in a common effort to develop and institute a beneficial world revolution.

Authority in all its present forms -- traditions, laws, sheer domination -- is dying; authority is above all what people believe in, and the world disbelieves.
.

The fountainhead of authority for a beneficial revolution is the agreed-upon future, with scientifically achievable ideals, and as complete as possible.

A low-paced but enervating 360-degree conflict is burning; geographical and social insurgency erupt

continually, while nature and technology are misused.

The authoritative prevision demands a world order

in which social conflicts are controlled, technology reoriented, and nature respected.

A pestilence of psychic distress is spreading among a majority of people who had progressed to live beyond caloric hunger.

Personal and social health are indivisible;

one and all need a defensible meaning of themselves,

equal chances for life-fulfilling experiences, and a satisfying system of adjusting inner and social demands.

The human personality, in the richest and poorest countries, is schizoid, split from the world;

the higher the social responsibility of people,

the greater the tension to split.

A new identity called emos, comes from universal and particular identifications of affectionate kind,

nurtured by food, sleep, warmth and healthy care, and by possessions that extend the personality, and

give it free play upon things.

The distribution of goods is skewed aimlessly but disastrously, while the world demand for equality is

petty, naive, and ineffectual.

Beyond emos extends the search for experience -- pneumos -- the questing for self-fulfillment that carries a person into the worlds of creativity, of opportunity beyond security, of chances at power, wealth, travel, and knowledge, corresponding to one's character and abilities.

Out of greed, fear, and ignorance, not one ruling group in the whole world espouses policies that are adequate to the world's urgent needs.

Dikeos is adjustment and justice-- inner adjustment, privacy, safety, the ability to resist restraints,

enjoyment of a rule of law,

satisfying humans in the resolution of

their conflicts within themselves, and with others.

The writing of history has conjured up false gods; historiography is parochial, partial,

enemy of the aspiring young, consoler of the inept, brutal, and hopeless.

History should teach of problem-solving man, who has made unending and heroic efforts on behalf of

equality, universality, benevolence, and humanism; history should assist strategy and tactics for the future.

Sick political games are played between leaders

and followers, and called government

of the people, by the people, and for the people;

the winners are those who can inspire

moral indignation over trivia.

Politics should be free and reasonable cooperation among all those affected by public policies,

pitched, like history, at the world future,

justifying its issues by the

imperatives of the worst problems.

Existing institutions are sets of rigid incantations, containing some valid humanistic procedures,

hidden in a tissue of lies about their

real purposes and effects.

A kalotic constitution for all human organizations

aims at emos, dikeos, pneumos,

through instruments of representative councils,

executive committees, and judicial committees;

access to governance is full, expression free,

coercion restricted, accretions of power

without excretions of equal power banned.

Representation of humans in circles of power is fragmentary and partial, while possibilities

of their representation derided, though unknown.

Each large group should be a representative government,

operating under a behaviorally meaningful constitution,

in which every member should be a responsible ruler

as well as a responsible subject.

All institutions block each other and the

ultimate goals of society as a whole:

labor unions block productivity,

ownership blocks human credit,

agencies block personal initiative,

churches block family reform,

families block education,

suburbs block cities, and

all add up to global frustration.

All institutions require reform,

internally, operationally, or administratively,

and in regard to external clienteles;

modern design can create new institutions

easily, freely, cheaply, quickly,

as patterns of conduct in pursuit of goals.

Family relations are chaotic and retarding; although the typical family everywhere is sexist, authoritarian, and stripped of effective functions by society and technology; people stay with it because of compulsion, sickness, dependency, and lack of anywhere to go.

The family must be a constitutional organ,

rehearsing later life; its members need equal chances to express their qualities, to elect membership beyond fourteen years; as a center of productive emotions;

affiliated with surrogates for the old extended families;

its members should be assured financial independence.

Schools on all levels are mismanaged prisons,

maintained peripherally for transmitting knowledge, but directly for disciplining wants, restraining freedoms, fighting new ideas, and keeping people from

crowding into other troubled areas of life.

Schools are major rallying places for revolution,

as they are for conserving whatever should be kept

of society; they should be voluntary associations

formed at all stages of life, and

pragmatically oriented to the future.

Advanced economies are exercises in futility,

their vaunted productivity being a temporary progress

plus a promise, both of which are being negated by misuse of resources, inflation, delusory social accounting, heavy costs that counteract progress, and disdain priorities.

Every person has worth, and the task of economics is to capitalize this worth; the first leap everywhere is a womb-to-tomb disposable life-credit that is

paid out and paid back throughout life

until death casts the balance forgiven.

Corporations, paramount organizations in all economies, dealing with all tasks that are not specially innovative, lack coordination and internal morale, are socially adrift, steering the world on an unknown course, justified by a false log of profit.

Corporations should be owned and governed by their fund-capitalists and worker-capitalists, and oriented to public purposes and priorities by these in cooperation

with representatives of the public.

Taxocracy envelops all countries, regardless of their myths, through rule by impersonal officials, hierarchically arranged, which, whether governmental or corporate, is a response to insecurity, external threats, collective envy, restricting each person's values, preventing his release of directed

energies and inventions.

Taxocracy should be limited internally by regular turnover in office, by countervailing critics professionally equipped to take a negative view of it, and by full representative government employing both subordinates and clientele; taxocracy has to be limited externally by decentralization, generational reconstitution, and inventions of

substitute processes and formations.

Militarism prospers at the expense of real solutions and international peace, lending machos to souls,

glamour to taxocracy, security to liberalism,

aggressiveness to poverty.

The dissolution of armies is possible if a movement

conveys practical assurances of well-being and order then offers itself; armies should convert to civil task forces.

Paleo-poverty, affecting a tenth of the rich countries' people, and nine-tenths of the poor countries',

is outmoded by modern technology,

but the politics breeding poverty is in vogue.

All countries should constitute life-account systems for all, to guarantee, with the help of rich nations,

basic annual personal incomes, and

thus eliminate paleo-poverty.

The rich of plutocracies & taxocracies are exhausted by the complexities and demands of economies that

promise them material completion, but really

divert them from humane goals and plunge them into neo-poverty of psycho-economic distress.

Elimination of neo-poverty needs a revolution in life-style, a denial of popular consumption patterns,

plus systematic diversion of the 70% of

dysfunctional production in world plutocracies, to

eliminate paleo-poverty and provide a richer life to the baffled pseudo-beneficiaries of high-tech economies.

The poor countries are retrogressing, for their

agriculture is hardly needed with industrial farming, with inventions in food growing and processing, because their manufactures cannot compete, and they go

ever deeper into debt despite nationalizing.

A world organ, general or special, needs to capitalize & implant automated consumer industries in poor countries, whereupon rurality is then transformed by

improved transport and communications into

part-time residential areas for urbanites

of all income levels.

The world's cities are enlarging from floods of rural folk, and becoming physically and mentally exhausting

to their residents, and ungovernable.

Cities, with half the world's folk, need self-government and, with their hinterlands, a direct place in world ruling; scores of new cities need construction, with volunteer and lottery-chosen residents, built by private consortia and converted to the residents’ rule when done.

Justice everywhere suffers six gross improbabilities: that a true offense is labeled a crime;

a crime is followed by arrest;

an indictment matches the offense;

any given trial will be rational; and

the penalty will tend to cure both offender and society.

Existing law should be recodified, according to kalotic principles; the practice of litigation should give way

to mediatory and educative methods of coping with deviance; drafting of laws should be an applied science to particularize the goals of legislatures.

Legal and social disqualifications based upon race, ethnicity, religion, sex, poorness, non-schooling, and youth brand three-quarters of Earth's citizens;

every government profits from prejudices,

and most states excite disqualified groups

to fight among themselves.

Vicious social discrimination can be reduced

by concurrent changes in elites , institutions, and personality, produced by heavy political assault

against all of them at once.

Socialism and capitalism hold dead attitudes toward property ownership, for, whether the state or the rich

own most of a nation, results are immaterially bad .

Macro-property should be public, publicly owned, profitable to public, and publicly accessible to control;

to end vicious discrimination, the highest ranks of property-controllers need to be open to chance and merit, while the right to hand down estates is restricted to modest help for dependents; micro-property, such as small business, should be employed with full freedoms.

Science may become scientoid and ungovernable; both the laissez-faire creed of its many specialists and establishments, and the reified nature said to be its

subject and ruler, are intolerable myths,

spawning malpriorities and dysproduction.

Science, properly construed as hypotheticals in

free association with social problematics, is the

inevitable and only means of achieving humane goals,

both of personality and society.

The crisis of authority, the material madness of plutocracy, and the failure of taxocracy with respect to humanism and productivity, attract continually the intercession of dictators, and ultimately a succession of personal rulers with ever greater pretensions,and ever less effectiveness.

The success of any future government must be the success of republics. Old appeals of limited obedience, turnover in office, free public processes, and extensive consultation through participation and representation, must be respected in new complete forms.

The world grows crowded because of more births, prolonged life-spans, higher physical and social mobility, and desperate urban body-jamming;

economic measures promoting weed-like growth are desperate palliatives with damaging side effects.

World population increase can be halted by medicines, ideological pressures, and especially by licensing births according to a quota based on personal competency and national statistics of support available, while conceding limited rights of healthy motherhood to everyone.

No traditional elite has much chance to lead

kalotic revolution on a worldwide scale. Clergy,

businessmen, conventional politicians, bureaucrats, labor leaders, and the military are incompetent for the task; only the communist and fascist parties learned to combine agitation, organization, force, and nationalism, but their revolutions are insane and carry immense destruction.

Beneficial revolution requires an ability to relate the

most modern machines and communications techniques to people, plus a human power of tutors; for the

greatest task is to teach, and the spirit and need of the revolution is for teaching in small groups.

Established but frightened interests divert revolutionary sympathizers by melioristic promises and freeze out advocates of drastic change; all regimes today are crafty enough to espouse this type of liberalism.

For revolutionary change, voting, petitions, discussions, associating, and lobbying must be supplemented

by stressed democracy devised for the removed and protected targets of the establishment: picketing, boycotts, passive resistance, samizdats, free parallel operations, demonstrations, confrontations, tithing, and virtual institutions and governments.

World revolution, as large-scale radical change, accomplished quickly, is presently occurring, unguided by human minds, and its projected overall effects

will be negative and precipitate immense

constraints and suffering.

The cost of planned revolution in assembling wills, investing resources, and overcoming obstacles is far less than costs of resignation to the predictable effects of the uncontrolled forces of today's world.

The destructiveness of revolutions comes from hatreds ingrained in the wretched and impotent, the resistance of vested interests, the absence of phased goals, and

factional struggles among the rebels.

Compatibility of means and ends, though it cost the revolution dear, guarantees that the revolution won is the revolution to be enjoyed.

Even if converted, the present disordered elites of

capitalist, communist, and fascist regimes,

out of opportunism and defensiveness, can be

aggressive against change.

A cool revolution is best: violence rejected in principle;

all peaceful means of rapid, large-scale beneficial change that the opposition will accept are pursued; but the right remains to define violence, to resist violence in self-defense, and combat counter-revolutionary conspiracy.

National governments play crazily upon malicious history and sovereignty in a cruel game of "dog eat dog," nourished, refereed, restrained, and

goaded by a few great powers,

who themselves participate.

Powers and functions of nations, internal and external, are reduced by a world movement dominating single states and working from them, by complementary,

functional, world representation, and

relaxing restraints on ethnic sub-nations.

The momentum of armaments competition frustrates any great coordinated drive to solve world problems, while promising sudden death to large parts of humanity, including, ironically, those who are potentially

equipped to solve them; a first strike is evil,

a return strike is misanthropic suicide.

Unilateral initiative in disarmament can

avoid destruction, while freeing energy

for treating severe social problems,

transferring resources to world aid agencies, and

winning support for reconstruction.

A laissez-faire, or imperial, or balance-of-power, or unstructured world order cannot cope with the

on-going actual world revolution; revolution in one country, no matter how large or small, must be

incomplete and vulnerable to external reactions.

A new cosmarchy is formed of a congress of representatives of regions, nations, functional associations, urban communities, and all individual persons; it begins as one region, which by

fission evolves the elements of new regions,

until the world is assembled by regions

correlating with cultures and political systems.

The human sciences, which began anciently as utopias, and that have completed their second stage during

world collapse and transformation, declare in hundreds of studies how stiff is resistance to change, and

how slow is beneficial progress.

Kalokinesis is the science of speeding up beneficial change: zeal + power, if they are scientifically guided,

make both large changes and small changes

swift and easy.

Established religions give men souls to keep, but are ritualistic, dogmatic and escapist;

violent revolutions exhilarate upon success, but they

lend souls to men, and then retract them.

The condition of one’s existence is to be ever-open, operational, ideal, integrative of body and soul,

and therefore a mirror of the social fusion

of material and spiritual; this is

the philosophy of future humanity.

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The 40 Stases and Theses Project

Alfred de Grazia has written about the project and Licia Filingeri in a letter, as follows:

"She was also a psychotherapist (with a special practice helping troubled priests). I was not only armed by the best School of Political Science of the century, but have been for sixty-one years an agitator in various guises on behalf of world unity. A year ago, reflecting upon how manifest in her art -- see her Bosnian sculpture, for instance -- was Licia's concern for humanity, how fervent, I broached to her these paintings, and soon we were at work transmogrifying into surreal art my abstract propositions designed to quantavolute the world. "Reminds me of Picasso and 'Guernica'," someone said. In a way, yes, but Picasso showed the hell of war alone, terror without recourse, and without fumetti, the word balloons. The Kalotics series of ours, like Dante's Divine Comedy, pictures Paradiso as well as Inferno, but without naming personages.

"No one pretends that the art is easy to grasp at first sight. Both the symbolism and the text are difficult, even slightly cabalistic, but this "secretiveness" comes from the intensity of handling so much visual and intellectual material in limited frames, and disappears if one has recourse to the original work "Kalos."

"A conjecture occurred in conversation with the Public Affairs Director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Politics at Princeton University last Spring. We were discussing an exposition of the Kalotics at its new Marver and Sheva Bernstein Gallery next winter. The pictures are difficult to comprehend as a story, but are intriguing; the propositions are hard to grasp, too, being highly general and abstract, possibly shocking, and employing various exotic terms: so the viewer will look at the picture and turn in perplexity to the words and thereupon turn back to the picture, and will also go from thesis to stasis and back, and from one number to another and back. In all, her mind will be churning, and if she is in company, conversation and argument will ensue. The result will be a multi-media experience more intense and creative than ordinarily occurs in contemplating painting and literature. Or so goes the guiding theory."
About Licia Filingeri

Licia Filingeri (MAB S.P.) was born in Genoa (Italy) in 1942. She received her Licence in Modern Letters (equivalent of a BA) at the University of Genoa, majoring there in Child Psychology. She is married to the sculptor, Pietro Gaietto, and has a son of 18, Giulio, who is deeply involved with modern music.

She studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arte in Genoa with Prof. Edoardo Alfieri, a sculptor of renown whose work has been often exhibited at the Venice Biennale. At the University, she took courses in History of Art with Prof. Eugenio Battisti, together with her co-student Germano Celant, who has since become a well-known art-critic and the theoretician of Arte Povera (the "Art of Poverty" movement).

Licia Filingeri has engaged herself heavily in an artistic environment enriched with ferments from many different cultures; Genoa has in fact always been a key point of cultural transactions among the Near East, North-Africa and Europe.

Paralleling her artistic activities, Licia Filingeri has taught Italian and Latin Literature in the Italian state schools system then, as an active professional psychologist, she has written books and articles about child psychology and child-psychoanalysis.

The artistic activity of Licia Filingeri started in the first years of the 1960's, with ceramic sculptures, followed by an intensive activity in graphics, to which have been recently added large sculptures in brightly painted papier-maché. Her first exhibits took place in Rome, in 1976, followed by many others, in different cities, with increasing frequency. Her work is to be found in private collections as well as in museums. Major critics in Italy have extolled her work. Since 1992, symbolizing her Surreal-Pluralism, she has used the pseudonym of MAB S.P. (from Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet.) Since 1983, she has worked with the International Council of Primeval Sculpture, with Pietro Gaietto and Alfred de Grazia, as well as with Prof. de Grazia on the series of "Forty Stases and Theses."

She is the author of a book in Italian, Etologia dell' Arte, a treatise on contemporary art. She is a descendant of one of the ancient noble families of Sicily, the Casata Filingeri, which goes back to Godfrey of Bouillon, head of the First Crusade and the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem, and which also gave Italy one of its most renowned jurists, Gaetano Filingeri. (Godfrey, incidentally, is a perpetual leading character in the ancient famous Sicilian puppet shows, which may help explain her special media and style.)