Mark Satin Quotes

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.

West German Green Wilhelm Knabe and a few U.S. Greens ... were becoming impatient with the movement's slow pace of growth. Mark Satin, one of the "New Age" and more conservative participants, suggested that Greens needed to leave behind some classic characteristics of the sixties counterculture: namely, their fear of money, hierarchy, authority, and leadership. Satin felt the Greens would need both fundraising skills and a more coherent structure in order to get their message out to a broad base of the population.

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. ...

Spretnak and Satin played a significant role in facilitating the articulation of Green political thought, and the philosophies they represented have left their influence on the Greens' ideological foundation. ... Although Spretnak's and Satin's books developed their sources in different ways, both authors drew upon radical and cultural feminist critiques of women's oppression. ... The sixty-two founding Greens may have chosen the term community-based economics over anticapitalism because cultural feminism and New Age thought are both antileftist. Both Spretnak and Satin rejected leftist critiques, preferring instead the West German Greens slogan that had graced the cover of Spretnak and Capra's book Green Politics: "We are neither Left nor Right, we are in front."

New Options is spearheading a movement that is still nameless. He [Satin] no longer uses the "New Age" moniker, as it now conjures up Shirley MacLaine and Windham Hill. Though he's active in the U.S. Green movement, ... he's reluctant to identify his newsletter as a Green publication. "The U.S. Green movement so far is characterized by an ineptness of organizing strategy and a substantial degree of cultural alienation from the American mainstream," he says. ... But Satin isn't reaching for the brick pile. He says he's content with New Options' pragmatic stance. "I think it's a third path which alienated people can move to once they become bored with their own alienation."

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

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.

You can't say that New Age politics is "left wing" or "right wing". It is perfectly compatible with public or private ownership of the means of production, and it speaks equally much to rich and poor, young and old, white collar and blue.

There are two defining political choices that every society must make ... and neither of them is covered by the old political categories "left" and "right". The first choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to encourage us to seek rich individual experience and to be of service to others – or do we want our society to encourage us to seek material riches in the form of possessions and status? ... The second choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to extend state and institutional control over our lives (for whatever reason) – or do we want our society to encourage us to be self-reliant and self-determining?

We need mandatory national service so we will all take part in performing the collective tasks we know are ours. We need mandatory national service because duty and honor are as necessary to us as oxygen and water. That's what I was trying to tell the Army in my application to the JAG corps at the age of 52. And that's what the radical middle needs to tell the American people.

The themes of New Age politics were first articulated in the late 1970s by Mark Satin, who had fled the Vietnam War draft for Canada. There it dawned on him that "the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements – feminist, ecological, spiritual, human potential and the like – were beginning to come together in a new way." Drawing on decentralist and feminist theories of the early 1970s, Satin's New Age Politics called for an escape from the "six-sided prison": patriarchism , egocentricity, scientism, bureaucracy, nationalism and urbanism. In its place Satin advocated a "third force" which would transcend the traditional divisions between Marxism and capitalism, liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. Still seeking that synthesis, Satin publishes the Washington-based newsletter "New Options," which has criticized both the Sandinistas and Reagan's policy in Central America while searching for a "different" ground from pro-life and pro-choice forces on the abortion issue.

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.)

Because of the consensus on full employment, certain observations rarely break in to the public political dialogue. These include: ... that even if full employment were possible, it might not be desirable in the new kind of society we are entering; and that even today, most of the useful work we do is not structured into paying "jobs."

A new way of seeing and a new politics is arising already in bits and pieces, here and there, across the continent. ... The new politics is arising out of the work and ideas of many of the people in many of the social movements of the 1970's: the spiritual, environmental, feminist, and "men's liberation" movements; the human potential, simple living, appropriate-technology, and business-for-learning-and-pleasure movements; the humanistic-transformational education movement and the new nonviolent-action movement. … Each of these movements ... has something to add to the new politics. Their contributions come together like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.

The politics we need in North America today will not and cannot come from liberalism or Marxism, or even from just muddling through. The situation we're in is so new – so unprecedented – that we need a whole new way of looking at the world. A whole new way of seeing things and thinking about things (especially political things).