Values

A social revolution is first of all a cultural revolution and is possible by developing a society that negates subordination of man to man and becomes non-hierarchical in structure and organization.

Such a social system can only be obtained as an artifice of human creativity, and this by considering all individuals significant, through making the social system that they constitute in their coupling a mom-hierarchical allopoietic system, designed to make their lives humanly desirable. Is this possible? My answer is yes, it can be done, but only by agreeing to continuously seek to generate a finite non-hierarchical society in a finite ecologically stable earth, by steps which do not deny the desired end. In other words, I think that such a society can be obtained by agreeing to continuously seek to generate:

ii) a society that seeks to change its institutions following the changing material, aesthetic and spiritual ways in which the biological needs and cultural desires of all human beings are satisfied, because social institutions are instruments are instruments to be used by men to satisfy their needs and desires, and not entities to be maintained by them;

iii) a society that continuously seeks to become non-hierarchical, because its members accept the possibility of error and recognize that anything that leads to an increased difference between the present human hierarchical relations and the desired non-hierarchical ones is a mistake;

iv) a society whose members understand that they live on a finite earth, and that their biological existence is coupled to the ecological stability of this finite earth;

v) a society whose members understand that th natural course of all plastic biological systems is towards the stabilization of the hierarchical relations that determine their unity, and that non-hierarchical is an artificial biological system produced by man that can never be obtained as a stable system, but which must be continuously produced as an always regenerated approximation to the state.

Ethical change leads to revolution. It is for this reason that coercive societies, through economic, religious, political, and military coercion, deny their members the possibility of being observers of their social system, and, hence, of changing it towards a more desireable one

An end always specifies means to obtain it that do not negate it, but no agreement about ends is possible between members of different social systems if they do not change their ethic so as to coincide in a meta-level of identity. Social change can only arise form ethical change, therefore, a social revolution is first of all a cultural revolution. (CS 465-67)

This page was last updated on July 11, 1996, by Rob Sable.