Eupsychian Network II
Dr. Henry Winthrop’s own list of the Eupsychian Network in the effort to remove some of the limitations in Maslow’s Eupsychian Network.
January/February 1971
By Dr. Henry Winthrop, Ph.D.
The number of adult citizens, students and organizations that are today criticizing our Western way of life, particularly the U.S.A. mode of life, is rapidly increasing. The "system" —as it has come to be called—is rejected by such groups as the Hippies, Beats and youthful expatriates that choose flight without remedy. The system is rejected with some political savvy by most student groups that one would be tempted to lump together under the catch-all rubric of The New Left. It is rejected by a composite of intellectually gifted, knowledgeable and socially concerned scholars, some of which are associated with such periodicals as Dissent and Liberation . It is scorned in its own economic terms by Robert Theobald, Ben Seligman and other professional economists: by scholarly social critics, like Michael Harrington and Paul Goodman; or by historians like H. Stuart Hughes and Staughton Lynd. And almost all who repudiate the system are disgusted with its crass materialism, outraged over its moral indifference and overwhelmed with the myopic and immature uses to which money and leisure are put by those who have both.
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There is little doubt that ours is a sick society, if we examine the themes most Americans live by. Nor is there any way of changing the system by violent revolution. In the industrially advanced countries of the West, revolution has almost become a "romantic" notion. The institutions and processes of the system; that is, its components, are too deeply interdependent for revolution in the classical sense to have any relevance. The system can be changed rapidly and effectively, of course, by such imaginative measures as Waskow 1 has described. It can be changed piecemeal—with what results remain to be seen—by quasi-Establishment intellectuals such as Moynihan and Keyserling, if their ideas are given a proper tryout. But most reformist proposals are too moderate and slow to produce radical change or dislocations.
While it is difficult to change the system drastically, it is not difficult to swim against the stream of its prevailing ideas. In a sense this was done by Stuart Hughes. 2 Individuals can develop novel ideas which, once diffused to others, create nodes of spiritual resistance to the prevailing themes of our culture. Groups can form which experiment with new modes of communal life—developing social styles that give the lie to the alleged necessity of our suburban nightmares or the civic spoliation caused by realtors, organizations can expose various types of social pathologies produced by industrial shortsightedness and by the disastrous domination of what Veblen and Simmel have called "pecuniary canons of judgment." Some groups may choose to educate the public about the poisons in our food or the pollution of our air and water.
Still other groups may try to awaken citizens to a sense of the possibilities for personal development, self-actualization and social improvement. Some groups seek to do this in religious terms which are to be expressed in action. Others seek the same objectives in purely secular terms that arouse our often latent sense of justice. Books are written to open the eyes of the social zombies of our time and prompt many of the living dead to change their way of life. Periodicals are published which penetrate more deeply into the causes of many of our social pathologies and much of our spiritual malaise.
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