40 Basic Problems & Their Solutions
Canaan State Can Later Lead the World
Recovering from its own dire troubles, say, after the year 2014, which is assigned to its becoming a State of the USA, Canaan can play a leading role in the world’s recovery from its present dire predicament. In 1967 Israel and the Arab world were at war; I was then composing a utopian world order that was published in Mumbai, India as Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World? You can read the book by clicking http://www.grazian-archive.com/governing/kalos/index.htm
Shortly thereafter I delivered a paper to the political scientists of New York University under the title of Forty Stases and Theses, to wit, the forty worst situations of the world and the forty beneficial resolutions of these onerous situations. (In the jargon of today they could be eighty “Twitters”.) For some years the Forty Stases and Theses have been part of my website of http://www.grazian-archive.com. Later I conceived the idea of making posters of them and persuaded the eminent Italian psychotherapist and graphic artist, Licia Filingeri, to create forty suggestive paintings to accompany the forty pairs of stases and theses.
The STATEMENTS ALONE are republished here now in the Canaan Blog because the people of Canaan should bear in mind what their future tasks might well be, after becoming American and World leaders. You can link the 40 posters to this blog here by clicking http://www.grazian-archive.com/governing/kalotics2/kalotics_all.html
Forty Stases and Theses, by Alfred de Grazia
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Stasis 1
The troubles of the world — wars, famine, crowding, hate -are interconnected and their effects are worldwide; their proposed solutions are piecemeal, isolated, special.
Thesis 1
The solution of the world’s major troubles must be general and integrated, a movement throughout the full circle of social space. |
Stasis 2
The problems of the world are worsening individually and collectively, and moving toward one or another catastrophic resolution.
Thesis 2
Invention and applications of methods of large-scale, world-wide, intensive, and rapid change, are the first priority of humans in the new generation. |
Stasis 3
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.
Thesis 3
Several millions of persons around the world must be mobilized in a common effort to
develop and institute a beneficial world revolution. |
Stasis 4
Authority in all its present forms – traditions, laws, sheer domination – is dying; authority is above all what people believe in, and the world disbelieves.
Thesis 4
The fountainhead of authority for a beneficial revolution is the agreed-upon future, with scientifically achievable ideals, and as complete as possible. |
Stasis 5
A low-paced but enervating 360-degree conflict is burning; geographical and social insurgency erupt continually, while nature and technology are misused.
Thesis 5
The authoritative prevision demands a world order in which social conflicts are controlled, technology reoriented, and nature respected. |
Stasis 6
A pestilence of psychic distress is spreading among a majority of people who had progressed to live beyond caloric hunger.
Thesis 6
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. |
Stasis 7
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.
Thesis 7
A new identity calledemos,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. |
Stasis 8
The distribution of goods is skewed aimlessly but disastrously, while the world demand for equality is petty, naive, and ineffectual.
Thesis 8
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. |
Stasis 9
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.
Thesis 9
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. |
Stasis 10
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.
Thesis 10
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. |
Stasis 11
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.
Thesis 11
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. |
Stasis 12
Existing institutions are sets of rigid incantations, containing some valid humanistic procedures, hidden in a tissue of lies about their real purposes and effects.
Thesis 12
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. |
Stasis 13
Representation of humans in circles of power is fragmentary and partial, while possibilities of their representation derided, though unknown.
Thesis 13
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. |
Stasis 14
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.
Thesis 14
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. |
Stasis 15
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.
Thesis 15
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. |
Stasis 16
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.
Thesis 16
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. |
Stasis 17
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.
Thesis 17
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. |
Stasis 18
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.
Thesis 18
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. |
Stasis 19
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.
Thesis 19
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. |
Stasis 20
Militarism prospers at the expense of real solutions and international peace, lending machismo to souls, glamour to taxocracy, security to liberalism, aggressiveness to poverty.
Thesis 20
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. |
Stasis 21
**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.
Thesis 21
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. |
Stasis 22
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.
Thesis 22
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. |
Stasis 23
**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.
Thesis 23
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. |
Stasis 24
The world’s cities are enlarging from floods of rural folk, and becoming physically and mentally exhausting to their residents, and ungovernable.
Thesis 24
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. |
Stasis 25
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.
Thesis 25
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. |
Stasis 26
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.
Thesis 26
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. |
Stasis 27
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.
Thesis 27
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. |
Stasis 28
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.
Thesis 28
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.
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Stasis 29
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.
Thesis 29
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. |
Stasis 30
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.
Thesis 30
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. |
Stasis 31
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.
Thesis 31
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. |
Stasis 32
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.
Thesis 32
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. |
Stasis 33
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.
Thesis 33
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. |
Stasis 34
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.
Thesis 34
Compatibility of means and ends, though it cost the revolution dear, guarantees that the revolution won is the revolution to be enjoyed. |
Stasis 35
Even if converted, the present disordered elites of capitalist, communist, and fascist regimes, out of opportunism and defensiveness, can be aggressive against change.
Thesis 35
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. |
Stasis 36
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.
Thesis 36
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. |
Stasis 37
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.
Thesis 37
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.
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Stasis 38
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.
Thesis 38
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. |
Stasis 39
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.
Thesis 39
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. |
Stasis 40
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.
Thesis 40
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. |
