Mark Satin: Politics

“This article was written for those who believe that the spectrum of opinion is more like a circle than a straight line. It was written for those who believe that each of the different perspectives on terrorism has something to add to the whole. In this view, coming up with a solution to terrorism is not a matter of adopting "correct" political beliefs. It is, rather, a matter of learning to listen – really, listen – to everyone in the circle of humankind. And to take their insights into account. For everyone has a true and unique perspective on the whole. Fifteen years ago the burning question was, How radical are you? Hopefully someday soon the question will be, How much can you synthesize? How much do you dare to take in?”

Mark Satin

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 19, "Twenty-eight Ways of Looking at Terrorism," pp. 167–68.

Question , Learning

“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.”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 2, "The Caring Person," pp. 17–18.

Justice , Freedom , Change , Help

“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.”

Mark Satin

Page 201. The second word above was printed as "trying" in the second edition, but was printed as "refusing" in the first edition, page 78, and in the third edition, page 230. "Refusing" is consistent with Satin's argument.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Life , People , Age , Nature

“Few political authors employ the term New Age anymore; however, … many use equivalents or near-equivalents such as communitarian, evolutionary, green, holistic, integral, post-socialist, radical centrist, spiritual, transformational, and transpartisan, and that's OK. Perhaps the new generation, not being ego-attached to any of these, will finally come up with a term we can all say "Aha!"”

Mark Satin

to.
Page 180.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Age

“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 if 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?”

Mark Satin

Page 11.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

“Put these values together and you can see how the radical middle draws holistically on our entire political tradition. Each value is a sort of updated version of an aspect of our 18th-century political heritage – liberty, equality, happiness, and fraternity, respectively.”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 1, "A Creative and Practical Politics," p. 6.

Drawing , Happiness

“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.”

Mark Satin

Page 11.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Age

“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….”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 1, "A Creative and Practical Politics," p. 5.

Hope , Way

“Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from kitchen tables to nonprofit organizations to corporate boards, Americans are turning away from the politics of bickering and division and working on a new politics – a politics of creative problem solving. It would have us take the best from the political left and right, and come up with something new that serves us all. It would have us come up with solutions to public issues that are thoughtful enough, clever enough, and inclusive enough, to bring people and factions together.”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 1, "A Creative and Practical Politics," p. 3.

People , Problem

“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.”

Mark Satin

Page 5.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Men , People , Pleasure , Education

“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”

Mark Satin

especially political things
Page 5.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

World , Way , Thinking

“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."”

Mark Satin

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 6, "Should We Protect Jobs – or Redefine Work?," p. 46.

“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.”

Mark Satin

Page 18.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

People , Age , Way , Change

“I'd do some things differently if I were writing this book from scratch today. I would be more nuanced in the history sections. I'd be less inclined to see everyone at "Self-development Stages Six and Seven" as the cat's meow. Above all, perhaps, I would emphasize that some of what I call "monolithic institutions" are evolving (i. e., are being shoved by us) in a positive direction today – so I'd bend over backward to encourage immersion as well as resistance. We need transformers everywhere, inside "The System" as well as outside it. But even with such "flaws" (mainly the flaws of youth), I think New Age Politics is still the best single expression of the new politics as a coherent, systemic, integral whole.”

Mark Satin

Page 17.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Books , Youth , Age , History

“There is an emerging alternative to the big government-big business-big labor kind of "rebuilding" of America. Its basic strategy is to get investment capital out of the hands of the big banks … and into the hands of the communities. Its greatest champions are neither politicians nor oppositional political groups, but – remarkably – bankers; or, more specifically, those few bankers who describe themselves as "community development bankers."”

Mark Satin

Source: New Options for America (1991), Chapter 8, "Rebuilding America – the Old-Fashioned Way," p. 57.

Communication , Business

“More and more of us have, over the last 10 years or so, become deeply involved in one or more of the movements mentioned above. At the same time, though, the radical political movements of the 1969's seem to have collapsed. Could there be a connection? I believe that the radical political movements declined as soon as they began to promote a doctrine of us-against-them, of "we have all the answers", of separation rather than healing. As soon as they began to promote a dogmatic Marxism that overstressed our need for things and tried to make us feel guilty about our deeper needs, which are emotional, psychological and spiritual”

Mark Satin

and which are what got us into the radical political movements in the first place
Pages 5–6.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Feeling , Time

“This new edition of New Age Politics – stripped-down and updated for the 21st century – has been launched to reassert, in thunder, that the movements of our time have generated a perspective or ideology of their own. It's as coherent an ideology as liberalism or Marxism – and far more relevant to our needs as life-loving human beings on a finite planet. In other words, New Age Politics gives us a common ground on which to stand.”

Mark Satin

Page 17.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Love , Life , Age , Time

“The New World Alliance … was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues … were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation.”

Mark Satin

"Preface." In Woolpert, Stephen; Slaton, Christa Daryl; and Schwerin, Edward W., eds. (1998), Transformational Politics: Theory, Study, and Practice. State University of New York Press, p. xi. ISBN 978-0-7914-3945-6. Woolpert had been a member of the Alliance, see p. xi, and Slaton had worked with the Greens, see McLaughlin quote below.
New Age and Green activism

World , Personality , Age

“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.”

Mark Satin

Jamison, Andrew (2001). The Making of Green Knowledge: Environmental Politics and Cultural Transformation. Cambridge University Press, p. 5. ISBN 978-0-521-79252-3. The author is discussing the period of the late 1970s.
New Age and Green activism

Age