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We find ourselves in the midst of a cultural revolution –a global renaissance of humanistic values and insights that give rise to a new social consciousness about what it means to be a healthy, whole human being. Based on this profound knowledge, we are presented with an opportunity to create a society where people flourish.
Beyond their brilliant contributions to the field of psychotherapy, humanistic visionaries like Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Sidney Jourard, Erich Fromm and Virginia Satir forever transformed the way we experience ourselves as human beings. In the process, they revolutionized the centuries old debate about our essential human nature.
The human potential movement they inspired offers a new organizing principle for psychology, sociology, law and politics. Its core values are empathy, understanding, liberation, unfolding of one's potential, and trust.
The human potential movement marks a departure from conservative beliefs that human nature is basically evil, sinful and must be controlled by force and strict authority. A humanistic worldview sees humanity as innately inclined toward goodness, deserving of liberation and capable of being empowered through love and nurturance to become ever more life-affirming, constructive, responsible, and trustworthy.
Most people want to do good. However, human nature may seem like a self fulfilling prophecy. Treat people as evil and untrustworthy and too often, that is what you get. Treat people with dignity, listen to their voices, respect their needs, empower their dreams – and people flourish. It's an ideal reachable only if we choose to leave behind our more dominant values of self-centered individualism, dominance, materialism and greed.
There are miracles of love, kindness and community that await. We can create the best society possible. And perhaps you will discover that beneath the surface goodness was there all along, just waiting to be given opportunity.
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Those who have faith in the human potential can attest to how dramatically adopting this view changes the way we go about our daily lives. It renews and intensifies our search for identity and purpose, for community and relationship, and how best to attend to life-affirming tasks including communication, parenting, working together, teaching and learning, health care, elder care, public safety, social justice, even world peace.
Most of all, it awakens within us the deeper significance of our lives as human beings, and brings us to the stirring realization that we are all worthy of inclusion in community and essential to the whole of society.
Yet despite this new consciousness about ourselves we're stuck with the same old politics. Today's politics is rooted in divisiveness and distrust, too often blind to its routine betrayals of the human spirit.
Ultimately a negative and cynical view of human nature undermines our better intentions to bring about a truly inclusive, co-creative, and equitable system of government. It corrupts the very heart of our democracy by taking political power away from the People and placing it in the hands of selfish special interest groups and ineffective government bureaucracies. Conditioned by the belief that humanity is by nature flawed and inclined toward wrongdoing, most public policy today emphasizes restricting, controlling, and punishing. Instead, society should focus upon liberating and empowering each person to achieve her or his potential. This is a vision of politics and governance that truly serves the human interest. |
The chart above compares fear-driven traditional politics with the Politics of Trust . As you can see, it's little wonder we're failing to get at the roots of our problems. So many of us feel disconnected from our political leaders, from the daily affairs of government, and from the political process itself. Yet never before have we so desperately needed to come together in a collective effort to heal the social epidemics we all face.
The Politics of Trust is a call for change. Informed by the tenets and values of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement, the Politics of Trust champions the virtues of self-esteem, social inclusion, and collaboration as pragmatic alternatives to the cynicism and divisiveness so predominant in today's politics.
It offers a new orientation to managing and governing people, proclaiming actualizing human potential as its primary concern. Such wisdom should inform new policies, programs, and political processes aimed specifically at building social capital. We need to invest in social resources that enable people to achieve the best of the human potential. That potential is love, community, self esteem and happiness.
This establishes a new framework for effective collaboration between sectors, new measures for assessing our quality of life and the health of our communities, and a new legislative agenda based on personal empowerment and a deeper sense of the inherent trustworthiness of the human heart.
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O nly in a democracy can we choose a new way to govern ourselves. Our own Declaration of Independence reminds us of what the early Americans fought so hard to establish: the unalienable right of citizens to alter or change their government to more accurately reflect the needs of the People. We must take seriously the words of Abraham Lincoln, that government ought to be "of the People, by the People, for the People."
Democracy is a dialogue in which we come to understand each other's needs, circumstances and predicaments. It is important that we become intimately involved in the struggles of our day. We must consistently exercise our right to vote, and more, we must create new ways to involve ourselves in shaping our government.
A Politics of Trust must transform both society and the way we do politics. Humanistic politics is more than packaging our ideas using the same old marketing techniques, backstage power brokering and deal making.
Politics is about power. Power is not just about controlling others. Humanistic power is about recognizing the life force within us and trusting the human heart to hear the direction it would lead. How we do power changes lives, and the politics we practice is based on who we are.
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