"For hundreds of years the solid agreements of the old world view had maintained a well-defined, even rigid, order for human life. All roles were clearly defined, and everyone knew his place: for instance, men at work, women and children at home, nuclear and genetic families intact, a ubiquitous work ethic. Citizens were expected to discover a place in the economy, to find meaning in family and children, and to know that the purpose of life was to live well and create a more materially secure world for the succeeding generation.Then came the sixties wave of questioning and analysis and criticism, and the unwavering rules began to crumble. No longer was behavior effectively governed by powerful agreements. Everyone now seemed empowered, liberated, free to chart his or her own course in life, to reach out for this nebulous idea of potential. In this climate what others thought ceased to be the real determinant of our action and conduct; increasingly our behavior was being determined by how we felt inside, by our own inner ethics.
For those who had truly adopted a more lived, spiritual point of view, characterized by honesty and love toward others, ethical behavior was not a problem. But of concern were those who had lost the outer guidelines for living, without yet forming a strong inner code. They seemed to be falling into a cultural no-man's-land, where now anything seemed to be permissible: crime and drugs and addictive impulses of all kinds, not to mention a loss of the work ethic. To make matters worse, many seemed to be using the new findings of the Human Potential Movement (the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical psychological, and spiritual potential) to imply that criminals and deviates weren't really even responsible for their own actions, but were, instead, victims of an oppressive culture that shamelessly allowed the social conditions that shaped this behavior.
...A polarization of viewpoint was quickly forming around the planet, as those who were undecided now reacted against a cultural viewpoint they saw leading to runaway chaos and uncertainty, perhaps even to the total disintegration of their way of life. In the United States especially, a growing number of people were becoming convinced they were now facing what amounted to a life-and-death struggle against the permissiveness and liberalism of the past twenty-five years--a culture war, as they called it--with nothing short of the survival of Western civilization at stake....Many of them even considered the cause already near lost, and thus advocated extreme action.
In the face of this backlash, I could see the advocates of Human Potential moving into fear and defensiveness themselves, sensing that many hard-earned victories for individual rights and social compassion were now in danger of being swept away by a tide of conservatism. Many considered this reaction against liberation an attack by the embattled forces of greed and exploitation, who were pushing forth in who last attempt to dominate the weaker members of society.
Here I could clearly see what was intensifying the polarization: each side was thinking the other to be a conspiracy of evil.
The advocates of the old worldview were no longer considering the Human Potentialists as misguided or naive, but were, in fact, considering them to be part of a larger conspiracy of big government socialists, holdout adherents of the communist solution, who were seeking to accomplish exactly what was occurring: the erosion of cultural life to the point where an all-powerful government could come in and straighten everything out. In their view this conspiracy was using fear of increasing crime as an excuse to register guns and systematically disarm the public, giving ever-greater control to a centralized bureaucracy that would finally monitor the movement of cash and credit cards through uplinks into the Internet, rationalizing the growing control of the electronic economy as crime prevention, or as a necessity to collect taxes or prevent sabotage. Finally, perhaps under the ploy of an impending natural disaster, big brother would step forward and confiscate wealth and declare martial law.
For the advocates of liberation and change, just the opposite scenario seemed more likely. In the face of the conservatives' political gains, all that they had worked for seemed to be crashing before their eyes. They, too, observed the increasing violent crime and the degenerating family structures, only for them the cause was not too much government intervention, but too little, too late.
In every nation capitalism had failed a whole class of people, and the reason was clear: for poor people their existed no opportunity to participate in the system. Effective education wasn't there. The jobs weren't there. And instead of helping, the government seemed ready to back away, throwing out the antipoverty programs with all the other hard-won social gains of the last twenty-five years.
...In their growing disillusionment, the reformers were beginning to believe the worst: that the rightward swing in human society could only be the result of increased manipulation and control by the moneyed, corporate interests in the world. These interests seemed to be buying governments, buying the media, and ultimately, as in Nazi Germany, they would slowly divide the world into the haves and the have-nots, with the largest, richest corporations running the small entrepreneurs out of business and controlling more and more of the wealth. Sure there would be riots, but that would just play into the hands of the elite as they strengthened their police control.
...I finally understood the polarization of Fear completely: great numbers of people seemed to be gravitating to one perspective or the other, with both sides raising the stakes to that of war, of good vs. evil, and both visualizing the other as the perpetrators of a grand conspiracy.
And in the background I now understood the growing influence of those people who claimed to be able to explain this emergent evil. These were the end-times analysts.... In the growing turmoil of the transition, these interpreters were beginning to increase their power. In their view the Bible's prophecies were to be understood literally, and what they saw in the uncertainty of our time was the long-awaited apocalypse preparing to descend. Soon would come the outright holy war in which humans would be divided between the forces of darkness and armies of light. They envisioned this war as a real physical conflict, fast and bloody, and for those who knew it was coming, only one decision was important: be on the correct side when the fighting began.
Yet simultaneously, just as with the other landmark turns in history, I could see beyond the Fear and retrenchment to the [original intentions] of those involved. Clearly everyone on both sides of the polarization had come into the [scene] intending that this polarization not be so intense....
I could clearly see that this growing belligerence was an aberration, coming not from intention, but from the Fear. Our original vision was that the ethics of human society would be maintained at the same time that each person could be fully liberated and the environment protected; and that economic creativity would be at once conserved and transformed by introducing an overriding spiritual purpose. And further, that this spiritual purpose could descend fully into the world and initiate a utopia in a way that symbolically fulfilled the end-times Scriptures.
...I could almost glimpse...the full picture of where human history was intended to go from here, how we could achieve this reconciliation of views and go on to fulfill our human destiny.
...Clearly, without the mediating influence of the World Vision (the positive culmination of history), the polarization of Fear would continue to accelerate. I could see the two sides hardening, their feelings intensifying, as both began to think the other to be not just wrong, but hideous, venal...in league with the devil himself."
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"Life end when you die. But imagination share with others, live forever."
--Quan, Final Fantasy IX
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