Principles of Social Development

Principles of Social Development

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Abstract

The efforts to evolve a comprehensive, integrated theory of social development have proved to be so difficult that many have concluded it is unattainable. On the surface, it appears that each field of social science is governed by different and often unrelated or contradictory assumptions, concepts and principles that would render a unified theory as unattainable. This article attempts neither to confirm nor deny that possibility. It seeks instead to explore a few fundamental principles that appear to be applicable to all fields of social science, social development and social evolution and to illustrate them through a variety of examples that reveal a common basis and dynamics for phenomena that are usually confined to one discipline or another. The author’s view is that if the validity and utility of these principles are affirmed, it can open the pathway for identification of dozens or even hundreds of other transdisciplinary, transcultural principles relevant to a very wide range of human experiences, as well as different fields and levels of the process of social development.

The remarkable advances of the natural sciences have driven the growth of knowledge and technological development over the past two centuries. The fields of science concerned with social phenomena are yet to acquire the clarity, precision, effectiveness and the integration common to their physical counterparts. All fields of natural science depend on the same fundamental principles of physics and chemistry and build on them. The social sciences have yet to evolve a consensus on the most fundamental principles governing social change, development, and evolution.

This difference is primarily the result of three factors. First has been the quest of the social sciences to achieve the quantitative and mathematical precision achieved in Physics, which has been taken furthest in Economics. Second has been the effort of the social sciences to focus on observable and measurable physical events in society more than on their underlying social and psychological root causes. Third and most often neglected is the fact that social phenomena are far more complex than their physical and biological counterparts. Physical phenomena can be reduced to a limited number of identifiable subatomic particles, atomic elements and the laws governing their molecular combinations and processes. Biological phenomena include these same aspects, but also manifest principles related to living organisms as reflected in the laws of physiology and subconscious instinct.

Social phenomena relate to both conscious and subconscious factors that are limited neither by physical nor biological principles. Human behavior, both individual and collective, is governed by human aspirations, values, ideas, ideals, convictions, thought processes, opinions, beliefs, emotions, desires, impulses, sensations and urges, customs, habits, social expectations, etc. All these factors are expressions of phenomena which are difficult to observe and measure but powerfully influence our inner conscious and subconscious experiences and actions, as well as the response of other people and our external environment to that consciousness and those actions. The complexity of human behaviors reaches its ultimate expression in the principle of individuality, which manifests most fully in human beings but only to a very limited extent in lower forms of life and material substance. Animals of the same type may respond differently than one another to the same stimuli, but only within a narrow range governed by subconscious instinct, unlike the remarkable variety of individual human responses, both conscious and subconscious. Molecules, atoms and subatomic particles are even more strictly confined to predictable patterns of behavior. But human individuals display an almost unlimited range of responses which render the quest for a social theory the most challenging of all scientific endeavors.

Nonetheless, the quest for an integrated social theory of development is a valid and essential pursuit if we are to better understand and more effectively govern the tumultuous, zigzag, and hazardous course of global social evolution to avoid the threats confronting humanity today and to fulfill the higher aspirations of global society in future.

1. Catalytic Role of Individuals in Conscious Development

Development results when knowledge subconsciously acquired by society over long periods rises to the surface and is consciously expressed by pioneering individuals in the form of new ideas, attitudes, aspirations, discoveries, inventions and organizational innovations.

Human society is a collective entity and needs the direction provided by leaders who think and aspire to transcend the limitations of the prevailing knowledge, beliefs, habits and traditions that preserve the past to give expression to new, creative forms of thought and action. Pioneers play that role. The cumulative learning and experience of society in the past is stored in its subconscious collective memory and shapes the thinking and action of the collective, without even the need for conscious reflection. But when past ways of knowing and acting are inadequate to fulfill the emerging aspirations of the collective, those aspirations are given conscious expression in the words and actions of formed individuals to what the collective is yet unable to express. It is at this point that pioneers appear on the scene and social change gradually or suddenly commences.

For centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, European society went through a long dormant period of feudalism governed by prevailing ideas and practices in which relatively little significant creativity and innovation occurred, while much previously acquired knowledge, skills and organizational capacities were forgotten or abandoned. The influx of long abandoned classical knowledge into Europe from Byzantium, coupled with advances in trade and finance in Western Europe, released the latent, long suppressed aspirations of Western society, giving birth to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and revolutionary movements that followed. The catalysts for that awakening and transition included thinkers, artists, rulers, inventors, explorers and entrepreneurs who all began doing novel and creative things. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, Copernicus, Luther, Gutenberg, Italian bankers, Spanish and Portuguese explorers each gave expression to new ideas and practices that released the suppressed energies of feudal Europe from the oppression of religious conformity, ushering in centuries of creativity and expansion. The momentum generated by the Renaissance continued well into the 20^th century, and in that period, Europe emerged from obscurity as a principal driving force for global social evolution. A similar renaissance has been witnessed in Japan, China, Korea, India and other Asian nations during the latter half of the 20^th century.

During the long period in which Europe was awakening, India underwent a gradual decline characterized by successive waves of Moghul and then British conquest until it lost the prodigious creative impulses that had characterized its earlier history. The renaissance of Indian culture began early in the 20^th century with the emergence of new leaders giving expression to long suppressed energies and aspirations. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh sowed the seeds of social awakening and revolution, by giving fresh creative expression to long suppressed social aspirations and cultural values. He was followed by Mahatma Gandhiji who adopted non-violence as the principal driver of the Indian freedom movement in keeping with the ancient Indian principle of Ahimsa.

Such pioneers have appeared now and then in different times and places wherever and whenever society was subconsciously prepared for advancement but required fresh ideas and actions to break through the inertia of conventional beliefs and practices. In 18^th century France, thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau appeared on the scene and were prominent among the voices of the Enlightenment, who gave expression to the call for values and institutions which ultimately led to a succession of democratic revolutions in Europe and the Americas. Similar movements took place in Eastern Europe, giving rise to the Russian Revolution at the beginning of the 20^th century and the revolution that swept away the Russian Empire seven decades later.

Pioneers need not come up only with new ideas. They also are responsible for new discoveries and inventions. For example, it has been a dream for a long time for humanity to fly in the sky like a bird. But attempts to do so failed until the American Wright brothers proved that mechanical man-made flight is possible. Similarly, fast mechanical transportation has also been a dream for humanity for a very long time. That dream turned into a reality in 18^th century England when Richard Trevithick designed the first steam engine powerful enough to pull a locomotive. Over the last two centuries, a proliferation of technological pioneers has ushered the world into new revolutionary phases of energy, transport, communications, manufacturing, biotechnology, computing, and most recently, artificial intelligence.

2. Forces of Progress and Resistance to Change

Forces of Nature and external events play an essential role in generating the necessary pressure on society to overcome entrenched forces of inertia that resist development.

The inertial resistance of long-established beliefs, conventions, social institutions and organized social power represents powerful obstacles to social evolution. Established beliefs, habits, systems, institutions and centers of power pose barriers to development. New opportunities and threats compel humanity to break its inertia. Migration compelled by natural calamities and environmental changes, wars and foreign invasions, new discoveries, ideas and inventions often have provided the impetus to either tempt or compel humanity to break free from the bonds of past practice. The discovery of the New World, the chronometer, double-entry bookkeeping, electricity and automation have all played that catalytic role.

War is a destructive activity, but even such destructive activity has played a crucial role throughout history in the dissolution of barriers to humanity’s future progress. It has yielded unintended benefits. The enormous destruction and suffering resulting from two world wars in the 20^th century resulted in the collapse of European empires and gave rise to the unprecedented development of the multilateral system founded in 1945, which is now pressing for radical reform to address the complex challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century.

The two world wars of the 20^th century were no doubt very destructive in terms of loss of life and property. But they alerted the world community to the dangers of warmaking and the need to preserve peace. As a result, the victorious nations called for the formation of the United Nations as an institution intended to safeguard peace and prevent wars from breaking out. The World Wars also had the unintended effect of disbanding the colonial empires of European powers. As war brought forth such positive benefits, so did economic dislocations have their beneficial results too. The dangers of nuclear warfare, terrorism, global warming, Corona Virus and fake news have compelled the nations of the world to collaborate to an extent never before achieved in human history. Without such dangers looming on the horizon, it is very doubtful that humankind would have progressed this far towards the levels of global cooperation, universal human rights, global rule of law and environmental consciousness which has been achieved in recent decades. Only when society becomes fully conscious of the need for a cooperative global system that extends equal rights and human security to all will the necessity of negative pressures cease to be essential for further progress. Where humanity refuses to recognize the necessity of progress, nature seems to compel us.

Medical advances stemming from the development of life-saving antibiotics and vaccines ushered in the population explosion of the 1950s. This in turn gave rise to food shortages in the 1960s, which ushered in revolutionary advances in food production followed by a host of new and unanticipated threats to environmental sustainability. Today Climate Change and AI are challenging conventional practices and compelling humanity to find new and more sustainable ways of life.

3. Power of Energy Conversion through Organization

Organization is a powerful catalyst for development. Wherever organization is introduced or elevated, development can be observed. Wherever it is missing, development will also be missing.

In the earliest times, humanity advanced by trial and error without the application of the mind’s capacity for conscious organization. Modern Homo sapiens appeared about 160,000 years ago and survived as wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers until about 10,000 years ago, when the earliest traces of agricultural practices began to appear. It took human beings that long to discover the essential conditions and ingredients for agriculture, to invent systematic practices, establish organized communities and adopt a sedentary way of life. At the time agricultural practices were adopted, the total population of human beings on earth was estimated to be about 10 million people. Within the next ten millennia, it rose 10-fold to 100 million. In the following 18 centuries the population reached 1 billion and in the last two centuries it multiplied another 8-fold. The organization of food production through agriculture increased humanity’s food supply 800-fold. That is the power of organization. Much of what we describe as technology is the organization of physical processes in terms of space, time, sequence and application of tools and skills, which are themselves also forms of organization designed for specific purposes.

Planning is the hallmark of organization. It involves consciously directing energy in a specific manner for a specific purpose. Giving direction to raw, undirected energy, such as sunlight or a raging river, converts energy into a force. Channeling that force in an organized manner converts the force into productive power to accomplish work, just as dams and solar power plants convert raw energy into usable power. When that power is channeled through systems and combined with the necessary knowledge and skills, it acquires the capacity to serve productive purposes.

The human body is a very fine example of a complex organization. It consists of organs for the processing of raw materials and generation of energy, systems for the transmission and circulation of that energy and application of it for specific processes, and other systems for the elimination of waste products. Each of these systems is linked with the others and interacts with them in a manner designed to support the overall functioning of the living body. Indeed, the notion of systems taught in anatomy and physiology is really an abstraction. In vitro, the systems are inseparable and interdependent on one another. They all form vital components of the organized living entity we refer to as the body. Heart, lungs, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, liver, kidneys, brain, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, and so forth all depend on one another for their existence and their effectiveness depends on the functioning of an organization of remarkable sophistication and complexity.

The value and significance of organization become most apparent when it is absent or breaks down. Then the things we take for granted as natural and automatic cease to function as we expect. Imagine the chaos that results when the system of traffic signals for road, rail or air transport ceases to function, even for a short time. The simple signaling system that allows vehicle movement in one direction only and stops movement in other directions is consciously designed to avoid chaos. Imagine commerce without markets in which buyers and sellers convene physically or virtually at the same place to exchange goods and services for money. Money itself is only a form of organization to facilitate exchanges in time and space that would be inconceivable without it.

India’s Green Revolution is a dramatic demonstration of the power of organization. India experienced two successive years of drought in 1965 and 1966 which led the FAO to estimate that 10 million Indians were threatened by famine. India rushed to acquire 10 million tons of imported food financed by foreign aid to avoid widespread starvation. It was at this time that India’s Food Minister, C. Subramaniam, conceived of a way to reorganize food production in the country through a combination of strategies that came to be known as the Green Revolution. In popular understanding, the Green Revolution became a success because of the introduction of hybrid varieties of rice and wheat. But the new technologies constituted only a small part of the strategy and wherever they were adopted in other countries without the other essential elements, they failed to eradicate food shortages.

India’s approach certainly harnessed the potential of hybrid varieties of wheat and rice, but it did not stop there. Subramaniam planned to expand the domestic fertilizer production to meet the requirements of the high-yielding crops. Along with fertilizers, he made provisions to import and expand domestic production of pesticides, which were also essential to protect the crops from pest attacks. Anticipating an increase in yield, he arranged for the construction of a national chain of grain warehouses to store the extra harvest. Most important of all, the government established a minimum floor price for foodgrains to ensure that the prices farmers were paid did not fall below their costs of production, and he established a National Food Corporation to buy up surpluses in high production areas and transport them for sale in food deficit areas.

The Green Revolution was the result of a complex, organized effort to transform the way food was produced, sold, distributed, and processed. This fine coordination between production, transport, storage, distribution and marketing resulted in increased production and affordable prices, which would not have been possible otherwise. It also included more than 100,000 demonstration plots on farmers’ lands to show how crop yields could be improved, the establishment of a national network of warehouses to store surpluses, mills to process it, transport systems to move them quickly to where they were needed, the coordination of agricultural research to focus on crops and technologies with the highest potential, the establishment of a national system of agricultural universities and research institutes under centralized direction, and commercial funding of farm production by banks which had previously confined their activities to financing industrial manufactures.

India’s total foodgrain production in 1965 averaged 50 million tons a year. In five years, it rose to 75 million. It doubled in 10 years to 100 million. It had taken India 10,000 years to acquire the capacity to produce 50 million tons a year. By an organized effort, it took only a decade to double what had taken 10 millennia to achieve. That is the power of organization.

The rapid recovery of Western Europe after the enormous devastation of WWII was made possible by the Marshall Plan, but it could be achieved so rapidly only because the capacity for highly organized, well-coordinated work was already known and practiced in those countries. This remarkable achievement led to the belief that provision of foreign aid to the rest of the world would result in equally rapid and dramatic results. But in practice, Western development aid to poor developing nations in Asia and Africa was not nearly as quick or successful, because the underlying knowledge, systems, skills and capacity for coordination were not as well developed. Foreign aid failed in the absence of essential knowledge, systems, skills and organizational capacities.

The difference was dramatically shown by the rapid recovery of Japan after the destruction of WWII. As far back as the 1870s, Japan started to study and emulate Western methods of production and rose to become an industrial powerhouse before the First World War. Despite the devastation it has suffered, it quickly began to rebuild its industrial capacities and export to the rest of the world, becoming the first modernized industrial nation in Asia. Before the end of the 20^th century, the countries known as the Asian Tigers followed suit.

4. Five Engines of Social Evolution and Organizational Development

Society is an unlimited reservoir of potential. It consists of five dimensions. The natural environment is the sixth. Society is composed of people. People are not merely a resource, as is commonly understood. Each individual has an untapped capacity for development based on the intensity of aspiration and energy released through will for accomplishment, the quest for knowledge, the depth and idealism of values, acquisition of skills and motivation for accomplishment for themselves or the world in which they live. None of these are inherently limited in potential. Society represents the sum of these individual capacities knit together in interrelationship by shared identity and culture, expressing in the collective aspiration for material, social, mental and spiritual progress. Market is the expression of society in terms of economic needs and aspirations. Technology and the knowledge on which it is founded represent the mental resources for expressing human energy for productive purposes to meet these ever-expanding needs and aspirations. Resources include the full range of society’s material, financial, social, mental and psychological capabilities. Organization expresses as language, roads, money, the internet, laws, schools and in countless other ways which enhance the relationship between people that make possible physical, political, social, economic, cultural and mental exchange that gradually brings more and more people together from greater distances as humanity evolves into more diverse, complex and integrated social units. Society is the organization that knits together people, technology, markets and resources into a single, increasingly interrelated human community. Each of these five has infinite potential, since there is no limit to their development. Human development and evolution result from the increasing development of all five and their increasing integration.

All social organizations are manifestations of these five powers–people, knowledge, the capacity for collective action, productive activities and exchange, and the binding powers of an organizational framework composed of rules, regulations, systems, structures, laws, standards, customs, beliefs, etc. Beyond lies the natural environment of Nature, the mother of all life, which provides the context, content and unlimited potential of the wider world in which we live. Humanity’s survival, growth, development and evolution depend on the extent to which it can develop and apply its own capacities in harmony with this wider world of nature, its universal Mother.

Business and economy are subsets of this larger social existence and are composed of the same unlimited reservoir of potential. All commercial enterprises that are successful and profitable apply this power of coordination which is the hallmark of organization. In any enterprise, there are five key components that have to be finely integrated—people to manage, produce and deliver services; products or technology for how to generate and deliver these products and services; the needs of a market to demand and absorb what is produced; money as a means for exchange; and also, that nebulous thing we call organization. This last one is responsible for combining and holding the other four together in a coordinated manner that produces useful results. The first four are very visible and tangible, but organization is invisible and intangible, though far more powerful than the other four. Organization is intangible in the sense that it is a product of conscious mental conception that is applied to things that are physical and sensible, but in itself consists of abstract form of knowledge.

The failure of foreign aid to lead to miraculous development in developing countries was due to the inadequate development of these other four dimensions. Their failure was in stark contrast to the remarkable recovery of Chrysler Corporation when it was brought to the brink of bankruptcy, in the late 1970s. The skyrocketing cost of oil resulting as the result of two oil crises combined with the huge surge in import of high-quality, low-cost fuel-efficient cars from Japan led financial and automotive experts in America to predict the quick demise of this 60-year-old automotive giant. But the actual results achieved under the leadership of Lee Iacocca proved to be quite different.

When Iacocca took over at Chrysler, he discovered the five key components of the company were operating without coordination, almost independent of one another. The cars the company was designing and producing were not no aligned with the changing needs of the market. When customers wanted fuel efficient cars, Chrysler’s design and engineers’ teams were still keen on producing large, fuel guzzling cars which the customers did not want. In the face of falling demand for their cars, the company continued to produce models that were not selling, until it acquired a backlog of 100,000 unsold.

Iacocca took swift action to correct these imbalances at all levels and in all parts of the company. He called on the design engineers to radically alter engine and vehicle designs to produce the most fuel-efficient cars made by American carmakers. To restore consumer confidence, he introduced a money-back guarantee unheard of in the US car market. He changed the accounting system to accurately reflect real sales and financial performance rather than production. In sum, he dramatically raised coordination between people, technology, market, finance and organization. Between 1978 and 1980, Chrysler lost $3.3 billion, which was more money than any American company had ever lost during a similar period. In the following three years, the company earned a net profit of $3.3 billion–a net change of $6.6 billion—which was more money than Chrysler had earned during the previous fifty years of its existence. That is the power of organization.

5. Challenges provide the Impetus for Social Progress, Development and Evolution

Historian Arnold Toynbee formulated the theory of challenge and response to describe the emergence, growth, development and decline of civilizations. Isolated and self-confined communities tend to develop slowly, level off at one stage of achievement and eventually decline if they are not compelled to progress by external pressure from their physical or social environment. Societies are stimulated by contact with other social units with different lifestyles, attitudes, values, activities, systems, knowledge, technology and ways of self-organization. They grow in response to and in the measure they learn and adapt to relations with different social entities and the larger world of which they are a relatively isolated part.

Japan is a good example of this truism. Nineteenth century Japan lived in a traditional cultural environment largely insulated from the external world. When European traders came to the East for trade, Japan sought to limit the contact with material exchange and isolate its people from Western cultural and religious influences. That changed in the second half of the century, after US Commodore Perry arrived in Tokyo harbor and demanded that Japan open itself for trade. The Japanese reluctantly agreed but it did them good. They responded positively to the pressure generated by foreign powers. The Japanese Emperor dispatched emissaries to European countries and America to study and learn the methods adopted by Western nations for industrial, economic and social development. Japan introduced universal primary education in 1872 along with many other practices they had learned. What they learnt abroad they implemented back home with very good effect in the sense that industrial production rose rapidly. By the end of the century, Japan had emerged as an industrial and military power to be reckoned with.

The exposure of other Asian and African nations to European colonial trade was slower and less systematic. It led gradually to the development of railways, post and telegraph, schools and legal systems, etc. The encounter with the foreign language revitalized many of their native languages. For example, the Bengali language witnessed a renaissance in the 19^th century primarily because of its encounter with English which is a foreign language. Notable writers, such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore were the products of that renaissance. A similar renaissance was witnessed in Tamil literature and the poet Subramanya Bharathi was a product of that renaissance.

The US itself represents a good example of the positive effects that resulted from the impact and mixture of the many European and later Asian cultures that poured into the US. The challenges of immigration and life in America were immense. But so were the opportunities available to those who seized them. In the freedom of a vast land mass with relatively undeveloped social institutions, America offered a field of opportunities for unfulfilled individual aspirations. Vast untapped natural resources and social freedom combined with an emphasis on education became the fertile soil and spur for rapid economic progress. Historian Paul Johnson reported that penniless immigrants to America could rise from poverty to middle class status within a period of a few months to a few years. As Adam Smith had foreseen a century earlier, by the end of the 19^th century, America became the largest economy in the world.

6. Removing anachronistic practices and the associated mentality is a spur to rapid development

Human beings are largely creatures of routine, repetition and habit, like their animal ancestors. Only the habits in our case extend beyond instinctive physical behaviors and ways of life. They also include the aspirations, ideas, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, social institutions, and cultural practices acquired from previous generations which change slowly and often resist the intrusion of new ideas, beliefs, institutions and ways of life.

Theoretically, human beings can attempt anything and readily change their thoughts, opinions, emotional attitudes, aspirations, skills and ways of life. In practice, clinging to tradition, preserving existing institutions and imitating established practices represent a very powerful obstacle to social progress—even in today’s fast changing world, as it has for centuries in the past. The inertia witnessed in higher education is an example of the institutional resistance to change in a sector that has traditionally served as an engine for social progress.

When US westward territories achieved statehood during the 19^th century, one of their first acts was to establish an agricultural college to support farming, which became the backbone of the state university system that prevails today. Historically, education focused on acquiring knowledge of the distant past beyond the scope of confirmed knowledge. Today our knowledge of the past extends back for millennia and mastering that body of knowledge would require lifetimes of work. But today the world is changing so rapidly that even knowledge of the present is grossly inadequate to prepare youth for life in a world that will be very different five, ten or twenty years from now. The reorientation of education from the past to future represents an enormous challenge since our capacity to anticipate future change is extremely limited and speculative. But at the very least, university education needs to shift the focus from emphasis on assured knowledge of the past to mental preparation for a rapidly changing world, openness to new ideas and ways of life and education that becomes life-long learning extending throughout the lives of current and future generations.

A preoccupation with the past played an important role in creating the sense of shared identity needed for the emergence of nation-states. Monarchy, divine rights, aristocracy, class-differences, religion, culture, and ethnicity and discrimination have played a role during earlier periods in nation building. As civilization advances, all these criteria can become barriers to future development in a world of heterogeneous nation states, regional groupings and increasingly inter-related, interdependent multicultural global society. In making this transition, humanity need not and should not discard the valuable contributions of different people and cultures to its evolution, but it does need to relinquish the assertion of superiority and prejudice characteristic of different people in the past.

Attitudinal changes toward others have been taking place in the mentality of people for centuries, but especially since the Enlightenment they have given birth to values seeking a better and more equitable social order and a better method of governing for all people. Such aspirations have been fostered by revolutionary writers and opposed by monarchs and authoritarian regimes all over the world. Some societies have already transitioned, while others are still in the process of discovering a national identity for nation-building or clinging to authoritarian values of a recent or distant past. On the national and international scene, old mindsets, values and beliefs still prevail. When the world is moving towards global unity many individual nations are refusing to co-operate even in matters crucial to the survival and well-being of all humanity, such as climate control and environmental protection. War has been openly declared to be an anachronism, but we find many nations showing little respect for this truism, arming themselves to the full and diverting precious capital resources from development to armaments. But whatever the values or basis for our present pride and identity, the world moves on and compels even the most enlightened and progressive to transcend the limitations of past competitive urges, social classifications and dividing barriers to human unity.

7. Toward an Integrated Theory of Social Evolution

This article explores a few principles of humanity’s social and psychological evolution. The Process of development is governed by basic social principles just as much as the body’s functioning is governed by fundamental physical principles. While science has discovered the biological principles governing the functioning of the body, all but a few of those governing the process of social development and evolution remain obscure. Hundreds and perhaps more are yet to be discovered due to our continued insistence on viewing human development in physical, measurable, and quantitative terms as we do the sensibly observable phenomena of physical nature. The phenomenal success of physical science has imposed such an insistence on the tangible, observable, quantitative, and measurable aspects of human life that our social sciences have yet to come fully to terms with the much more powerful forces of our mental, emotional, vital, cultural, subconscious physical and superconscient spiritual planes of consciousness, which are the real determinants of that which manifests in physical terms observable to our senses.

Phenomena such as the remarkable chain of events marking the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the decline of communism, dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, reunification of Germany, the one-third reduction in global military spending in three years, nuclear arms treaties, elimination of more than fifty thousand nuclear weapons, the founding of the European Union and WTO, and the revolutionary emergence of the Internet—all within a span of five years—can never be fully understood without fundamental advances in our science of society and humanity.

A true science of society must reveal insights into a still greater science of life which extends the limitations of the biological conception of life presently studied in the natural sciences to include principles of consciousness governing events that to our material senses appear to be determined simply by chance and coincidence. For as aspiration, energy, ideas, organization and skills are driving forces for evolution, much more so is the compelling force of evolving consciousness that gives rise to them all and grows through their growth and evolution.