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. - Mark Satin

"Are you here to help?" soft-spoken Mark Satin asked the trio of young girls sitting on the worn sofa with the apple strudel in their laps. The girls nodded happily and Satin, 21, went off to find a knife to cut the cake. He returned with a metal bookend, sliced off a few chunks, and soon the Toronto anti-draft office was filled with a gentle munching. Most people – and there were plenty in the office yesterday – were Americans. "I'm not against the draft," Satin said, leaning on a desk where he's typing a form letter telling Americans how to avoid it. "Defensive armies are all right, but not the way it is right now." ... Two workers were telephoning people willing to house newly-arrived draft evaders. ... Two youngsters in the outer office were talking seriously about ... substitute teaching. ... "I have a feeling we'll be open rather late tonight," Satin Said.

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.

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.