New Planet, The

From the Introduction:

I'm linking up your future(s) to the future of the planet, not because you are chained to what happens to the planet, but because your own invented destiny has features that need to be reflected in what plays out over the next 50, 100, 1000 years.

There is no new planet without the individual who is free.

All the Utopias that have been offered up to humanity are based on the notion that people are somehow mechanical. That is, they ultimately resonate with some Force, and if that Force makes a space, a place, a universe, all the individual has to do is find the resonating chords within himself, and he will be Connected to Force, and the whole search will be over.

This is a sham. Always was. Always will be. Free means free. Free to invent and create and imagine and improvise. If you knock that out and opt instead for "the lost chord" that ties us all together, you wind up with a tyranny. It may have a smile pasted on its face, but it is still a tyranny.

When individual freedom becomes a platform from which to create, in unlimited spaces, all the future and magic and enlightenment anyone could want is available. It doesn't come drifting in on a pink cloud after five minutes of waiting. It's something you invent on and on and on.

Tyrannies always try, on various levels, to flatten out and bury Great Desire in all its shapes and energies and ecstasies. Great desires come from the individual. That's what he creates into fact in the world. So in this sense, too, a future and a planet worth pursuing must have infinite room for you and what you profoundly want to realize through creative action.

What would such a new planet look like? Or to see it from a better angle, how could such a planet possibly be composed of only a single image or a single ideal or a single shape? That would be false from the ground up.

So this is not a book about simple-minded primary colors or New Age promises or instant fixes that dissolve all challenges. It's a book about what lies light years beyond that.

Excerpt:

Look at the two parties, the two political parties in America, and you see in a very vague and rough way that the Democratic party seems to stand for this generosity impulse, whereas the Republican party stands for the individual acting on his own behalf. These are the vague glimmers, at least, that one can infer from these two parties. They have been opposed to each other. They run against each other. Their rhetoric seems to fall out along these opposing lines and has for many years. They have established, in fact, conflict where none need exist. They have made a polarity.

Either you're for the individual, or you're for giving it away, the individual giving away what he has. That's been the tenor. Then finally we see as the smoke clears that these two parties have now become one. The single body has two heads. It's all rhetoric and nonsense. All of the posturing, all of the propaganda, all of the PR about one party standing for the individual and the other party standing for the individual as part of a group, that all turns out to be dimensions of a fictional battle to give the voters the sense that there is some real difference between the major parties, that they really are choosing on election day, that this is really free, that this is really an effective way to operate government. Both parties now stand for the group, and both parties ultimately stand for the mass, the great group controlled by the few from above.

That's where we have come, from these two great interior impulses that move outward, the individual acting on behalf of himself, and the individual acting on behalf of another. That's what it's come down to now. So is there any question that it really needs to be rethought at the root if the future is going to mean anything? I am talking about rethinking, for example, education. How do you approach these impulses? What do you do about them? Is there a way, for example, to make individual students more powerful and free as individuals, who will act on their own behalf, and yet not fall into the trap of perverting that 'on my behalf' to mean something like 'I'm going to take the money and run'?

You surely don't want an educational system to run on the premise 'it's all a group, everybody. There's no individual at all'. That was a fairy tale that we've now come to understand. Yet you can see, in schools, signs that both of these perversions of the two great streams have been taken. You can see that these strategies have been played out. It's not always with ill will in mind. It's simply that the teachers and administrators don't understand the issues involved. They aren't looking at it, either. If they are looking at it, it's only a very brief glance because then they need to get back to business, and we don't have time for philosophy. This is like saying we don't have time to think about what reality actually is because we are so enmeshed in it that we have to continue playing our roles and play them out to the bitter end.