Mark Satin Quotes

Not long after Miles and Eric hitch to St. Louis, Graham turns to me and says, "Let's hitch to Chicago!" "Right now?" I ask, peering up from my American government text. "Why not?" says Graham. "You've got to learn to do things when you want to; otherwise you'll be just like one of the plastic people, the dead people." So by one A.M. we are on the road. ...

Typically, "progressives" and change agents have demanded more money for social programs. But today it's clear that the way we do things needs to change – and that if things were done more appropriately, more humanely, more intelligently, we might end up spending less on social programs than we do now. Take education ... . Over the last 10 years or so, a handful of education reformers have ... come up with exciting new ideas for changing the ways our schools are administered, the ways our children are taught, and the kinds of things they're taught. And nearly all their ideas would cost no more than our current practices cost. Some would actually save us money!

After Satin accepted amnesty in 1978, he was invited to speak at a gathering in the States. He had just returned, and he was awake all night before the talk with excitement and fear. ... The speech got a standing ovation, and Satin wept. His vision of what was possible, of what in fact was already moving through the culture, had evidently struck a nerve. ... Two decades later, we know that Satin's hopes for a new political platform did not materialize. But over those long years in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver Island, he caught sight of and began to plan for the general movement for change that is taking form now.

The young men who came to Canada rather than take part in the Vietnam war always impressed me with their singleness of purpose. ... Probably a more honest statement about the complexity of the feelings that caused them to reject their homeland in the turbulent days of the sixties is expressed in Mark Satin's Confessions of a Young Exile. ... Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions and situations as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girl friend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority.

Mark and I became "conference buddies." He and I were both on the road a lot in those days, each of us offering our particular message, and we would meet up at one conference or another. I was always glad to see Mark. I saw him then – and still see him now – as one of the true "carriers of spirit" who have dedicated their lives to bringing a fiery vision to life in order to better humanity. If anyone can claim to be a spiritual teacher, Mark can, for he teaches us how to claim and express the human spirit of freedom, potential, and wholeness.

These 100 books do not agree on everything – and that's OK too. You don't need total agreement when you're an open-hearted, decentralist, experimentalist New Ager. After the Prison and its institutions lose their hold over us, you won't even want such agreement. Within the parameters of certain life-affirming values, you'll want a hundred flowers to bloom. Synergy is all; cooperation and coordination is all.

The radical middle movement is phenomenally diverse. But if you look at what everyone who might be called radical middle is saying and doing, you'll discover we share four goals. I like to call them our Four Key Values:

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.

As represented by Mark Satin's (1978) movement-encompassing treatise, New Age Politics, the New Age movement is plural in its expressions of antagonism towards relations of subordination in the United States. It calls for a new revolutionary strategy appropriate for our time, and focuses its efforts on the discursive plane, at the level of consciousness. Its goal is a radical plural democracy, although it lacks specific criteria for the ideal world or ideal political work. And it rejects, explicitly, the working class as the primary agent of change, emphasizing instead plural struggles from diverse standpoints. This chapter argues that the New Age does not represent an adequate political response to the conditions of late capitalism. ... Satin is calling for therapeutic, self-oriented work within the democratic imaginary, a reworking of individual consciousness in place of public struggle. ... Satin does not call his enemy capitalism.

In his new book, Radical Middle ..., which provided the initial inspiration for this article, Satin fleshes out pragmatic new policy ideas. ... Satin draws inspiration from nonpolitical realms of society where people are blending what works from various orthodoxies. He points to developments like integrative medicine, ... socially responsible business, ... and judges' increasing use of psychology, economics, and even literature in crafting legal opinions. "Politics," he says ruefully, "is the last area of society where this kind of creative thinking is taking hold."

His [Satin's] most important contribution to draft resistance was editing the TADP Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada which he compiled from his own well-researched knowledge of Canadian immigration and from material submitted by a number of Canadian and American contributors. The ninety-page book contained every conceivable piece of information that a young American could possibly need to know about moving to Canada, including the demolition of a number of myths. All of it was presented in a strikingly thorough and concise format. It is excellently written. .... If a resister had any doubts about going to Canada before he read the book, he seldom had any after finishing it. ... By mid-1968 the TADP manual had become the first entirely Canadian-published best seller in the United States.

The First American Experiment began in the mid-1700s, and by its own criteria, at least, has been a smashing "success":

Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from Maine to Alabama to California, from ghettos, suburbs and schools, young Americans are coming to Canada to resist the draft.

A lot has changed in the forty years since I stood before Mark's table at the World Symposium on Humanity and purchased his ugly but powerful little book. Mark and I have changed. Undoubtedly, if he were to write this book now, it would be different. But it stands as the first comprehensive articulation of a transformational political ideology. It shows, in great and systemic detail, how we can depthfully understand our world of crisis and get to a world of collaboration and wholeness. And, by the way, it restores the true meaning of "New Age" – from a prophetic image all too often used to justify narcissism, to an image of the innate potential in all of us to make things new for the benefit of all.

New Options suggests that the New Age / New Left has to continue to evolve into the "New Center" – or fail, for real this time, to change the world.