Mark Satin Quotes

The participants in the Second American Experiment have differing views of the First Experiment. Some ... think it was a noble and brilliant experiment that is no longer sustainable. Others ... think it was ignoble and wrong-headed from the start. ... But the larger point – and the point that concerns us in this book – is that all participants in the Second Experiment are convinced that the First Experiment is no longer wise. Here are some of the questions they've been asking:

New political parties such as the Citizens Party have formed in the United States. ... The more visionary, global movement coalescing around the prodigious communications efforts of Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics (Delta, 1979), has now incorporated as the New World Alliance.

Politics is stuck in America today. We need to break through the stale debates and self-serving non-solutions that are coming from both political parties, and we need to do it without ending up at the "mushy middle," where there's no direction or principle. That's where the radical middle comes in. The radical middle is an attempt to break out of that stuckness in a fresh and principled way. It consists of everyone who's bold and yet savvy enough to want idealism without illusions – a fresh and hopeful vision that doesn't fall into the trap, as many leftists do, of looking back to chestnuts from the counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies. ...

The caring person is the carrier of radical middle politics. ... To see this clearly, it helps to look at three competing archetypes of the Good American. ... Self-aggrandizers are ambitious strivers. They get their primary identity from their occupation and the social status associated with that. ... Self-sacrificing individuals are not personally ambitious – and when they are they try to hide it. They get their primary identity from their ethnic, racial, or religious affiliation or sexual orientation. ... Caring persons may or may not be personally ambitious, but they want their jobs to provide them with opportunities for personal growth and social relevance. They get their primary identity from the lifestyle choices they make and the values they consciously choose. They are equally committed to personal freedom and social justice, self-development and social change.

Were the '80s as bad as some people think? At least one social interpreter, Mark Satin ..., says no. ... Satin maintains that a new cultural archetype emerged during the '80s, "the caring individual," or one who is equally committed to self-development and social change, to individual freedom and social justice. A true grassroots democracy, he argues, requires these personally and socially responsible individuals. ... Just as he rejects the "media caricature" of the '80s, he rejects some of the romanticization of the 1960s. An antiwar activist who fled to Canada to organize similarly disaffected Americans, Satin ... recalls the era as divisive and judgmental, with too much emphasis on us-vs.-them. "I hope what we're moving toward is an integration of individualism and community with acceptance of the diversity in our society," he says.

From the United States there seemed to be not one but many different kinds of movements developing ... as well as a number of ideologies that already then seemed to be in competition with one another: the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, the new-age politics of Mark Satin, the appropriate technology of Amory Lovins, the ecofeminism of Carolyn Merchant, to name some of those that I became acquainted with.

There is no draft in Canada. The last time they tried it was World War Two, when tens of thousands of Canadians refused to register. Faded "Oppose Conscription" signs can still be seen along the Toronto waterfront. The mayor of Montreal was jailed for urging Canadians to resist – and was re-elected from jail. No one expects a draft again. It's a different country, Canada.

At the root of our troubles is a cultural complex whose six main elements make up a "Six-Sided Prison" that traps us all. In Part I[,] I try to name and describe the six sides of the Prison: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism, and the big-city outlook. Capitalism and socialism are, I argue, both rooted in the Prison (which predates capitalism by hundreds of years) – though neither needs to be. (Racism, militarism, exploitation, ecocide, etc., are also rooted in the Prison.)

We have not tried to sell you on Canada – our chapter on climate is chilling – but the truth is that Canada is a nice place to be. There is little discrimination by Canadians against draft resisters, and there is a surprising amount of sympathy. Most Americans lead the same lives in Canada they would have led in the U.S. Americans who immigrate are not just rejecting one society; they are adopting another. Is it really freer? Most draft resisters – and most Canadians – think so.

Mark Satin has thrown himself, as much as any man can, into helping his draft-evading contemporaries. For the first time in his twenty years, he has found a cause he can believe in. Seven days a week, from nine in the morning until, often, very late at night, he runs the SUPA Anti-Draft programme. ... On my first visit, there were ten to fifteen young Americans drifting in and out of the SUPA office. Some were settled for the evening in the elderly but comfortable furniture (all donated). They were reading, napping, gassing; some writing letters, one strumming a guitar. There was a mail basket and someone to take and pass on messages; a hot plate, an assortment of instant foods. There's always someone's baggage lying around. ... All the young Americans seem to respond to Mark Satin. His enthusiasm for the job and general air of unflappability seem catching.

How long, Lord, O how long will it be before I can f--k someone like the girl sitting at the SDS literature table?

Satin ... helped create the first edition of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants which was published under his name. ... Fetherling observed that Satin was highly publicity conscious and reports once having heard him say, "Anonymity would kill me." Perhaps Satin's interests ran in the family, for his mother was interviewed about her son in the Ladies' Home Journal and his father started a publishing house. ... A reporter who interviewed Satin ... described him as "unremarkable looking. Not tall, not terribly tidy, with brown hair and eyes and a bit of length to his nose. A bit of length to his hair, too, though not enough to startle."

Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name. It opens breathlessly. ... Satin ... perceive[s] obvious solutions to almost everything. The greater part of the book consists of short chapters that state daunting problems and then summarily solve them. ... Why do so many liberal preachments grate like glass shards on a blackboard? Well, maybe it's the haut à bas tone, the disdain of politics, the smug armchair analyses, the insufferable smart-aleckness.

Lorian Press could have simply reprinted the first edition of New Age Politics, from 1976. I liked its length (only 50,000 words), it covered almost all the ground I do here, and I wanted to prove to you that the perspective I synthesized – the perspective of many people in the social change movements of today – goes back to the Nixon-Ford era, when the traditional left and right both lost their way. It was not spontaneously generated by any single social movement of the last 40 years. Rather, all our movements have been re-inventing, adding to, and deepening a perspective that already in the 1970s stood as our only real alternative to More Of The Same.

By [refusing] to work for a traditional revolution we would not be "giving up the struggle". As we saw in the previous three chapters, we would be struggling – nonviolently – against the Prison [of consciousness] and its institutions, which are more responsible for the sterility of our lives (and our society) than "human nature" or "capitalism". But even if we can't do any more than embark on the stage of self-healing, even if we can't get a strong group together, or if all our group efforts fail to heal society, we would still be learning to preserve our worth as human beings. And that is an essential part of the political process today. For without life-oriented people ... there can be no New Age evolution. And only New Age evolution can take us off of the production-consumption continuum and out of the Prison.