Consequently, wisdom, foresight, and the acceptance of change as a major factor in all social relationships seem to justify our assumption that sooner or later man's survival on the planet will depend on a degree of worldist thinking, association and institutionalism that will guarantee the preservation of order and decency at the planetary level.

Since conformity implies and involves a will to diversity, measures to establish and maintain order and peace would include the widest possible latitude and the utmost effort to encourage the greatest possible diversity at regional, national and local levels. Thus diversity would become a virtue in much the same sense that conformity became a virtue in bourgeois Europe toward the end of the last century and in North America during the Joseph MacCarthy period. Through the past dozen years American youth has reversed the trend, adopting a permissiveness under which the sky is the limit in language, clothing, sexual conduct and professional choice and behavior.

Civilization and Beyond — Part 189

Non-conformity is all very well as protest against super-conformity, but it fails utterly to meet the basic need of the 1970's for a mass movement away from the institutions and practices of civilization, plus a disciplined and purposive mass determination to assume attitudes, adopt practices and establish institutions leading beyond civilization to a world culture pattern which insists upon conformity up to a point necessary for survival and social advance, and beyond that point, a diversity--including recognized and organized opposition at the planetary center. At the same time there must be a degree of regional and local diversity that will provide for the utmost independence, self-confidence, self-expression and regional and local self-determination compatible with the basic principle: to each in accordance with need.

Civilization and Beyond — Part 189

Beyond civilization, matters of general concern will take precedence at the same time that matters of regional and local concerns will be dealt with regionally and locally. In such a society individuals and communities at all levels will be schooled and experienced in self-discipline and prepared to follow conduct patterns that emphasize the principle: live and help others to live to the fullest and the utmost.

Civilization and Beyond — Part 189