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THE BEGINNINGS OF PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT
Part I: by Chuck Paprocki
April, 2007


It was in Carbondale, Illinois, during the 1970s, that Murshid and I were introduced to the remarkable thought of Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. Baba Anandamurti's ideology covered every aspect of human existence and linked each to a single spiritual core. For convenience sake, his lectures and darshan materials were divided into two parts - Intuitional Science and Social Science. The Intuitional Science covered spiritual philosophy, scripture, spiritual practice, universal worldview, the construct of the mind, unit consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness, etc. The Social Science addressed all aspects of collective human existence including politics, economics, history, wave theory, theory of civilization and culture, education, relief, welfare, gender, race, agriculture, industrialization etc. Murshid and I read everything we could get our hands on when the Ananda Marga nuns and monks brought books back from India to share with us.

Baba's ideology was so comprehensive that it dwarfed the intellectual dialogue that raged during the heady days that rocked American society during the 1960s and 1970s. We began to see the cultural revolution as little more than endless piecemeal debates circumscribed by analytical thinking. Baba had given us a tool of incalculable proportions, whereby we were able to see the earth as a whole. He introduced us to  synthetic thinking.

Even though we were inspired by and admired materialist thinkers, we also valued idealist thinkers. We saw benefits and detriment within capitalism and communism. We could be human beings without being threatened by any points of view not similar to our own.

Our challenge during this period of intellectual foment, when all ideas were on the table and subject to widespread scrutiny and debate, was how to introduce spirituality into this stew of  bi-polar dialogues that either hinged on a capitalist/Marxist axis, or upon a materialist/idealist axis. Baba Anandamurti had given us PROUT theory and an organization called Proutist Universal to get the job done.

PROUT is an acronym for PROgressive Utilization Theory. This theory holds that progress can only be realized through spiritual (loving) intent. Actions taken for physical or mental gain create changes but cannot be considered progress because it is in the nature of physical and mental creations to come into being, be maintained and then die. Everything in the psycho-physical realm is finite and as such, limited in its capacity to advance universal human welfare. Spirituality or love, however, always advances human progress because it brings us closer to Divinity, the ultimate attainment of human evolution.

The word utilization indicates that progress can be achieved when our thoughts, words and deeds are used to advance human welfare. Prout theory holds that every human being on earth has the birthright to have his or her basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, health care and education met by society. Later, Murshid would add an environment without fear to the list of birthrights. By dedicating ourselves to making this a reality, we would make progress in our individual spiritual practices and society and our environmental conditions improve as well. We would be in the flow of right living.

While our contemporaries staked their worldview on matter and materialism, we marched out with spirituality in the core of our political and economic theory. We were more than idealists content to let the merchants and warlords control the physical plane. Our work was to benefit the whole of society as well as the planet through engineering social change. This was well beyond dog-eat-dog, or state control as a means to control individual greed.

While those who favored the capitalist system dominated the mainstream media and major institutions, the Marxists had the most cogent analysis of capitalism's flaws. They could see the trajectory of its path and knew that its internal contradictions would result in its collapse. While many of us expected the imminent fall of capitalism, its resiliency proved substantial. Nonetheless its slide had begun and today its trajectory is steeper and its pace much accelerated.

One aspect that distinguished our Proutist Universal camp from the various intellectual camps that had formed to interpret and guide the cultural revolution, was the fact that we actually put projects on the ground in our attempt to change society. Our work in Carbondale included a half way house for teen-age girls, a food coop, a solar energy business, a prison project and an appropriate technology library, not to mention a place to pray and do our spiritual practices. All this was created by young people in their twenties. Howsoever the Marxists might snigger at our attempts to introduce spirituality into a materialist world, they could not deny the fact that we got things done, and we did so from a paradigm of social change.

These were all lessons learned in Carbondale Illinois during the early days of Proutist Universal.

Lessons Learned in New York City

Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 and our projects in Carbondale lost their government funding. Reaganomics became the code word in the press for the President's program to defund social service projects while simultaneously increasing military spending. This caused our old gang to split up. Murshid went to Colorado and I went to New York City.

Soon after getting myself situated in the heart of global capitalism, - on Third Avenue and Thirty-third street in Manhattan to be exact - I completed the paperwork to have Proutist Universal affiliated as an NGO (non-governmental organization) with the United Nations.

During the 1980s I spent my time learning about the United Nations and the issues that consumed the time of the governmental and non-profit representatives of the world's nations. Reality turned out to be much different than that presented in its fragmented form through newspapers, TV and Time magazine.

I learned that it was the United States that established the United Nations after World War II, and that they were clearly in the driver's seat. They called all the shots. The United States and its European and Japanese allies had their way in the world and were called the First World. The Russians and their Soviet Bloc of Eastern European and Central Asian countries formed the Second World. Everyone else, which included the great majority of nations and the great majority of human beings, comprised the Third World. These were the so-called undeveloped countries that never seemed to develop because their labor and resources were exploited to provide the wealth of the first world and to some extent the second world but not nearly as much. The expropriation of value from the third world to the first world was conducted through the United Nation's World Bank. The operation was quite simple: rich countries loaned poor countries more money than they could pay back and then they seized control of that countries resources and infrastructure as payment.

The evolution of the United Nations was interesting to follow because it charted the evolution of human society. After World War II, most European countries were bankrupt and lacked the resources to continue to administer their colonies. Consequently, most of world was "liberated" and political administration passed on to native people. As a consequence many new nations came into being and took their seats in the grand chamber of the General Assembly, located in the United Nations building on First Avenue in Manhattan, newly built by the Rockefellers. This gathering of new nations each living different cultures led to an exploration of common values. The earliest document to arise in this regard was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, completed in 1948, consists of 30 articles, of which the first reads: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reasons and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

By 1966, the spirit of brotherhood was still lacking from the policies and the behavior of the rich countries, their banks and corporations. Consequently, the General Assembly, in which each country had a vote and thus was dominated by the third world majority, introduced the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This document attempted to spur the rich and powerful nations to address issues of human rights. It begins "Economic, social and cultural rights are designed to ensure the protection of people as full persons, based on a perspective in which people can enjoy rights, freedoms and social justice simultaneously. In a world where … a fifth of the developing world's population goes to bed hungry every night, a fourth lacks access to even basic necessities like safe drinking water, and a third lives in a state of abject poverty at such a margin of human existence that words simply fail to describe it, the importance of renewed attention and commitment to the full realization of economic, social and cultural rights is self-evident."

The Covenant is a legal document that established rights that includes the right to work in just conditions, to social protection, to an adequate standard of living, to education, the right to form trade unions, the right to social security, protection for the family, equal rights for men and women etc. Compliance by states to their obligations is monitored by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

The Covenant, for all the expectations it created among those of good will, failed to change existing conditions one iota. The third world was now cynically unanimous in its analysis that neither universal values, nor political freedom amounted to anything worthwhile so long as people were denied economic freedom. While the capitalist countries had relinquished political control of its former colonies, they still maintained economic control within an iron grip and so long as they did so, conditions would not improve.

This was the mind set that characterized third world governments heading into the decade of the 1970s. It was a mind set shared with progressive thinkers in all countries and flavored the debates of the Cultural Revolution as it played out not just in the US but across Europe as well.

In 1972, the Club of Rome, an international think tank having NGO status at the UN, published a book called The Limits to Growth that forever after changed the economic dialogue and shifted the Marxist/capitalist paradigm into another dimension.
Based on a technique known as systems dynamics, developed by Professor Jay Forrester at MIT, a large-scale computer model was constructed to simulate likely future outcomes of the world economy.
The study reached three conclusions. The first stated that within a span of less than 100 years, given no major change in the physical, economic, or social relationships that constitute "business as usual", society will run out of the nonrenewable resources on which industry depends. When the resources have been depleted, a precipitous collapse of the economic system will result, manifested in massive unemployment, decreased food production, and a decline in population as the death rate soars. There is no smooth transition, no gradual slowing down of activity; rather, the economic system consumes successively larger amounts of the depletable resources until they are gone. The characteristic behavior of the system is overshoot and collapse.

The second conclusion is that piecemeal approaches to solving the problem will not succeed. To demonstrate this point, the authors doubled their estimates of the resource base and allowed the model to trace out an alternative vision based on this new higher level of resources. In this alternative vision the collapse still occurs, but this time it is caused by excessive pollution generated by the increased pace of industrialization permitted by the greater availability of resources. The authors then suggest that if the depletable resource and pollution problems were somehow jointly solved, population would grow unabated and the availability of food would become the binding constraint. In this model the removal of one limit merely causes the system to bump subsequently into another one, usually with more dire consequences.

As its third and final conclusion, the study suggests that overshoot and collapse can be avoided only by an immediate limit on population and pollution, as well as a cessation of economic growth. The portrait painted shows only two possible outcomes: the termination of growth by self-restraint and conscious policy-an approach that avoids the collapse-or the termination of growth by a collision with the natural limits, resulting in societal collapse. Thus, according to this study, one way or the other, growth will cease. The only issue is whether the conditions under which it will cease will be congenial or hostile. (Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (third edition). Tom Tietenberg; Harper Collins, 1992.

When I entered New York in 1980, the General Assembly had been debating the conclusions of the Limits to Growth for 8 years. They had begun to develop a vision of a new economic order that was more just and more rational considering the alternative of capitalist business as usual. By the time Murshid arrived in New York City in 1990, things had heated up and the stage was set for the creation of Progressive Development.

This story will be continued....