Mark Satin: Quotes about age

Mark Satin is American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher. Explore interesting quotes on age.
Mark Satin: 90 quotes2 likes

“If Thomas Jefferson is the liberals' (and libertarians') Founding Father, and George Washington is the conservatives', and Tom Paine is the radicals', then Benjamin Franklin is the radical middle's. He was extremely practical. … At the same time, he was extraordinarily creative. … He was a man of principle. … Yet synthesis and healing were an art with him. He became our most ardent champion of religious tolerance. And better than anyone at the Constitutional Convention, he was able to get the warring factions and wounded egos to transcend their differences and come up with a Constitution for the ages.”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 3, "Journey to the Radical Middle," p. 22.

“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)

“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)

“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)

“In Part II I argue that the Prison is institutionalized by the "monolithic mode of production" which creates effective monopolies not for its brands but for its products … institutionalized medicine; the universal, compulsory school; compulsory heterosexuality; … In Part III … I propose a class analysis that sees us not as ruling-class, bourgeois or proletarian, but as life-, thing- or death-oriented. In Part IV … I suggest that the new worldview implies four "primary" New Age ethics – the self-development, ecology, self reliance-cooperation and nonviolence ethics. … In Part V I try to suggest what "New Age society" might be like. … It would foster "localization" – community and regional decentralization (to whatever extent the various communities wished). And it would foster "planetization"”

Mark Satin

planetary cooperation and sharing. ... In Pat VII ... I argue for a strategy that would involve ... (a) healing self, and (b) healing society.
Pages 7–8.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

“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.”

Mark Satin

Source: Radical Middle (2004), Chapter 12, "Bring Back the Draft, for Everyone This Time," p. 133.

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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