The fourth principle of humantrue reality is individual responsibility. To be responsible is to respond to that which is humantruly required of us. In order to know what our humantrue responsibilities are we need to intellate and achieve supraconsciousness. In order to carry them out we need to co-operate. To co-operate we need to be individually free, and such freedom required that we are equal. But we cannot be free of responsibility for maintaining our humantrue society. If we are not to contravene the principles of co-operation, freedom and equality, but abide by them, then that responsibility can only lie equally with each individual. This may be brought home to us if we replace our present concept of reality, as a personal experience of an externally imposed regime, with a new concept of it as a collective experience of a humanly created way of life, as we individually wish it to be and determine that it shall continue to be.
To world societies which, for thousands of years, have put their responsibilities in the hands of some kind of centralised authority, this concept may be hard to accept. We are accustomed to believing that the majority are by nature irresponsible and mustbe subject to the control of a responsible minority. But we have to understand that these minorities have not truly shouldered that responsibility - that the automatic system does not allow them to do so, and that a humantrue system would not wish or require them to do so. We have to understand that automatic reality has never encouraged, enabled, or allowed anybody to realise what our true responsibilities are. We have to understand that our social system has never worked for us, as a whole race, both because of its responsibility to the Machine and irresponsibility to our true humanity, and because of its conditioning of our thinking. We have to understand that our minds are presently contrived constructions that compel or tempt us to superimpose bad reason onto good, and to be led by instinctive emotions. We need to see that we deceive ourselves, suppressing our humantrue awareness and covering it over with a thick crust of automatic motive and opinion.
The nearest we have approached to individual freedom is perhaps democracy, but at the sacrifice of the other three essential principles - co-operation, equality and individual responsibility. The nearest we have approached to co-operation and equality seems to be Marxist theory, which has not generally attained to these principles in practice because it has failed to recognise the other vital principles of freedom and individual responsibility. In each case the error or omission has had the same cause - failure to recognise humantrue awareness of the individual mind, rather than the dictates of the automaton, as the basis of reality; failure to invest responsibility for human affairs in the individual, rather than in the authority of the state or the governing institutions of the Machine.
When the state takes responsibility in an overall automatic reality (whether it be a communist state or a capitalist government), it becomes its own construction of thought, like a separate mind but quite unlike the individual human mind. It thinks in terms of the automaton, which fundamentally governs all and to which the state administers, and in terms of the mechanics of that administration, with human beings - we potentially balanced, independent correlations of mind and body - merely treated as basic units of its calculations. The state is firstly responsible to itself, and irresponsible with respect to the human mind and its potential for realising the humantrue way of caring for humanity. In the eyes of the state the people areirresponsible, because they do not entirely think its way, and this seems to justify its authority. But the people are not responsible to the state because it is not responsible to their humantrue awareness. And they are irresponsible with respect to themselves, for they do not follow that awareness but pretend to it whilst accepting government by the Machine. They accept automatic reality because it exists, and they earn, or hope to earn its rewards because there seems to be nothing else to do.
Just as the desire to live humantruly is innate in us, so is the wish to take responsibility on ourselves. This can be demonstrated thus : parents well know the difficulty of getting their children to do things, such as washing up. If children are ordered to do it against their will they resist, and if we force them to obey they are resentful. If they can escape the task they shall, for it is important to them to obey theirwill rather than ours. If we offer reward they may readily obey, but they are then obeying their own will for the reward rather than us, and we are bribing them - not only encouraging them not to give without taking but also giving something that we would otherwise withhold as unnecessary. How much more pleasure do they, and we, enjoy when they themselves think of doing the task and voluntarily do it for its own helpful sake, without reward but for itself, by their own responsible will.
In existing reality the automaton is in the position of the heavy-handed parent, and we of the children. Some of us are given special responsibility, bythe Machine, tothe Machine. All of us are personally responsible for securing some means of survival from the Machine. It does not provide or care for us excepting as cogs in its machinery. All of us are in some way forced, or bribed, to obey. None of us may wholly and freely take voluntary responsibility for the self and others. Yet almost any of us responds to responsibility. Where we can take it voluntarily, in limited local spheres, it is a joy, and where it is shared by a group of comrades its pleasures are increased by co-operation. This pleasure of comradeship can be experienced even where the task undertaken is an automatic one and its objectives inhuman, such as in the case of a troop of soldiers in war. Willing co-operation is a supreme joy when it fulfils a humantrue objective. The opposite extreme is unwilling group labour, exploited in return for bare subsistence with the alternative of starvation, like the lot, under apartheid, of the black workers in a South African diamond mine, or forced labour with no reward at all and the alternative of worse punishment, like prisoners breaking rocks.
Our existing reality, then, is that the Machine and its institutions strictly and closely govern most of our thoughts and activities and are responsible for our way of living, our basic social framework. We have our own human structures of responsibility but these are sub-systems wherein we are personally responsible tothat automatic framework and forour individual self-survival in it, not collectively for our common, whole humanity. We are bound to automatic aims. We are not free humantruly to co-operate, except in limited groups and dealing with temporary or marginal concerns. We are not free to care for and protect each other so that each and every one is provided for and content. We are not free to prevent the Machine from laying waste to our environment or threatening us with imminent nuclear, chemical or biological destruction - these are the ultimate results of domination by the automaton, and of our not assuming vital responsibility.
This automatic reality may only be broken when we bring our inner beings, and minds, to the fore, and is presently maintained by our outer shells. Our present structure of human responsibility is that of automated mankind, and is self-regulated by pressures from both the top down and the bottom up. Pressure from the top down comes from leaders who have been made responsible bythe Machine; responsible tothe Machine and forautomated society, including, as sumissive units of it, human individuals. It has already been established that permanently authoritative leadership is an automatic function, not a humantrue function. The present function of leaders is themselves to be led by the Machine, and to lead the rest of us, in directions which nobody's humantruediscretion suggests nor awareness can honestly approve. The task of leaders is firstly to carry out autoprogressive policies and secondly impose them on all individuals, either by compulsion or enticement, so that they also work to support these policies. Leaders could not be supraconscious and still willingly remain automated leaders for long, nor allow the public to be thus enlightened and expect them to remain content to be so led, for no supraconscious individual could long tolerate this reality.
Since this reality doesexist, and ispresently tolerated worldwide, the greatest pressure exerted from the bottom comes from the fact that we, as majority individuals, mainly take responsibility only for ourselves and our personal struggle for meaningful survival. We do not make our way of living responsible to our potential humantrue awareness, but submit ourselves to conditioned reason which in turn seeks satisfaction from the Machine that conditioned it. Though opposite in direction, this pressure has exactly the same effect as that from the top down. For example, an unnecessary product which is manufactured and advertised purely for money-economy reasons is widely desired and purchased for emotional possessive reasons; a nation is plunged into war for competitive political reasons, and the 'public' responds for patriotic reasons. This upward responsive pressure represents the will of automatedhumankind, submerging its potential humantrue will, to satisfy false hungers and expectations. This, our automatic will, keeps in place the institutions, so perpetuating the Machine which makes the whole circus seem necessary.
Working from the top down, supreme leaders are given their aims and objectives by automatic lores and instituted laws, to be strictly pursued for the sake of, and to justify, extreme prestige. They divide these into several compartments and delegate them to directors whose limited function is to direct one such compartment, a function also to be faithfully performed in order to both earn and justify high reward and privilege. The directors further subdivide their function, entrusting small parts of it to many executives, each given above average status and reward dependent on success in carrying out his or her specialised objective. This delegation continues down through managers, foremen, gangers, and eventually to the working majority. Though with submissive rather than authoritative bias, this process works similarly in reverse, from bottom to top.
There have to be reasons why this system persists, despite its shortcomings, and we ought to consider these reasons together with the system's effects and consequences. Bear in mind that the work situation is competitive, basic to a competitive society which values money, status, privilege and prestige. Everyone involved is rewarded, but by no means everyone is involved. We may desperately need the lowest reward of a barely living wage, or we may be in a position to satisfy our desire for the highest rewards of every kind, but neither can be secured excepting from the Machine, if it needs us, by working to its orders, directly or indirectly. It is these orders which are passed from top to bottom, and obeyed from bottom to top of the Machine's human hierarchy.
The higher in the hierarchy the bigger the effect of a person's opinions and decisions, the lower down the less. The higher in the hierarchy the nearer we get to possible understanding of the true reasons and real effects of policies and decisions. But the pressure on us to obey the Machine is then also higher, exerted by the terms of responsibility it gives us and the expectations of an automated society, linked to our own desire to retain the prestigious and privileged position, to its remoteness from majority experience, and to the fact that we are given power and reason by the Machine to carry out its policies regardless of humantrue awareness, our own or that of others. The lower in the hierarchy, the less reason we have to support and more to oppose automatic policies, but we are then further away from clearly understanding automated reason and action - whether decisions made are truly necessary and their ill-effect truly unavoidable - and the less automatic power we have to influence affairs.
From the individual viewpoint, it can be seen that generally speaking when we take a job our first consideration is the wage we need or the reward we desire, not critically to assess the work we will have to do and question whether or not its effective purpose is good and humanly useful. Keeping a job depends upon carrying out orders, and we are not expected to question, criticise, or refuse them - in some circumstances, for example in the armed forces, it is a criminal offence to do so. From the point of view of the Machine, basic wages are given to secure labour, not for need, otherwise they would be given equally, with or without work. By the same token, we who are at the bottom of the hierarchy do not usually seek work out of a responsible desire to do it, but out of a simple need to survive.
It can be seen that where all tasks are presently given to us by the automaton, or are related to it through employment by the institutions of the Machine, our views of what is right to do will be coloured not only by the automaton's conditioning of us but also by the particular objectives its employment gives us. It can also be seen that our different levels of co-called intelligence - the varying degrees to which we use our intellectual faculty - are not inherent in us, but are a question of the extent to which we were stimulated in infancy and to which stimulated minds have been further developed and conditioned by the Machine for its required functions. The effect of this is to keep us from common agreement, not only through the different limitations on our thinking, giving rise to differences of opinion, but also by way of our wish to keep, and loyally justify, our jobs, wages, or privileges, creating prejudice in our minds.
That ever higher rewards are given for ever higher responsibility to the Machine is presently construed as deserved compensation for greater effort or value. This view is hard to justify when we compare the work and reward of a dustman, coal miner and company director. A more acurate view is surely that the Machine evaluates our abilities and buys our work at the lowest price we will accept, or at a price attractive enough to persuade us to fill its required role. Besides, higher rewards are not so much a matter of greater effort as of greater knowledge and understanding - not of humanity, and of that which is truly needful for its well-being, but of automatic aims and methods.
Of course, all features and characteristics of the present social system do not work in this inhumanly calculated way, but the sinews, muscles and nerves of its body, and the thought processes of its brain, which determine its main policy and activity, certainly do so. We are all humane in our inner beings, and give our humanity expression where we may, but this automated body is our reality, with our outer shells as its cells and fibres. There are humanitarians among us who bring their inner beings to the fore, but they are of no interest or value to the Machine, and are not to be found in the front rank of its basic affairs but on their fringes, trying somehow to humanise them.
Some of these factors have been discussed earlier. Why go over them again? Because they bear heavily on our understanding of human responsibility. And what can now be deduced? We have to decide who, or what, is truly presently responsible for the proper care of our true humanity. The answer we are bound to come to, as before concluded, is clearly that nobody and nothingis. The Machine is responsible for our existing reality, which is not responsible to us. We are responsible to the Machine, and therefore not to ourselves. The phenomenon of unemployment is a totally humanly unnecessary device to equate our needs with service to the Machine, and our desires with products of the Machine. It robs us of our potential supraconsciousness, by which we would simply and directly take responsibility for ourselves. The chain of downward delegation matched by upward dependence allows automatic motives to direct, and automatic responses to those directions to impel, our fundamental actions.
Normally none of us, from bottom to top, can give supraconscious reasons for our actions - that they are humantruly responsible actions - but we can give automatic reasons justified by the fact that this isexisting reality and everyone else contributes to its support. Having accepted this we can further justify ourselves in humane terms - that only by acknowledging the 'here and now', rather than trying to change it, can we concentrate on relieving its human sufferings. But these sufferings are generated, and regenerated by the Machine itself. At the same time as we use automatic means to relieve them, those same means are causing them. This reality coagulates somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy structure, shaped by the Machine and held in place by reciprocal forces from bottom to top, and the conflicting competitive influences whose collisions create human suffering. These forces and influences form and fix the narrow personal realities of automated individuals, whatever benign motives they may profess. The basic function of their position, at bottom or top, is both to supply the demands and demand the supplies of each other, or to refuse or be denied them as the economic and political rules require, or dictate.
This arrangement fails because we servethese influences and forces, they do not serve us.They are not equated with or restricted to general true human need. They are equated with automatic purpose, and almost unlimited as to the direction they take and the extent to which they may go, with human agency. They may reward or deprive us, favour or oppress us, raise or crush us. Weallow ourselves to do this toourselves. We dothen turn round and try to relieve some of the resultant suffering, but we also inhumanly fight wars, following the Machine to this ultimate example of competitiveness, using the Machine's reason to tell ourselves that this is also a legitimate way of righting human wrongs.
Let it be repeated - no one who is supraconscious can tolerate this existing reality. She or he would want both to take responsibilty for making it humantrue, and for serving that humantrue reality in order to keep it so. We have established that the intellect is the supreme human faculty and that its supraconscious fulfilment is ultimate human being. We have established that co-operation, freedom and equality are the necessary founding principles of a humantrue society. All of us having attained that fulfilment, and achieved that society, it is clear that both will be sustained only by individual responsibility. Any system of control other than common self-control is contrary to supraconscious intellect, and to the founding humantrue principles.
Supraconsciousness, then, is the key to realising a humantrue society. Individual responsibility is the key to making it work in practice. Again, we cannot rely on our present automatic judgement to tell us whether such a society couldwork. If we have any doubts, we should always remember that the supraconscious mind cannot lie, or practice deceipt, or allow its being to be other than humantrue. We should also remember that once consciousness is fully opened to the postconscious, thus becoming supraconscious, it cannotdeny its new awareness, or revert to its former state. This is the assurance needed to dispel our present doubts that we could ever aspire to a humantrue reality, and an insurance against our fears that we would not be willing or able always to sustain it. To be humantrue is our true human nature. To compete with each other, to lie, and to deceive ourselves is the way of automatic reason, and our long adopted automatic nature. This present wrong reality educated us, and then obliges us, to close off our independent postconscious from our consciousness, and to keep it so with automatic reason, which argues against humantruth.
For example, it is argued that present reality, being extremely complex, is far beyond the comprehension of any one mind. But that is presentreality. It is autoprogression of the competitive money economy that has made it so. Instinct and applied intellect have pursued every separate policy they can conceive, and have dragged humanity in many different, self-justified, complicated and contrary directions. A humantrue constitution will be such that the understanding of every mind can embrace. Its provisions will be no less simple, nor more complex than they need to be for our well-being, nor its practices more than we can commonly manage and maintain.
It may be argued that human minds vary widely in capacity and capability, so that logically the 'best' minds shoulddominate. But this requires definition of what is meant by 'best minds', and recognition that minds appear to vary because of their very different circumstances and degrees of stimulation in existing reality. It is these differences which advance or retard otherwise healthy minds, to make individuals apparent 'geniuses' or 'morons'. Considering the huge capacity of the human mind, so-called 'genius' is not so remarkable, evident stupidity is unwarranted and probably misleading, and understimulation is shameful, like an untreated, unchecked disease.
The Machine develops and gives its own especial outlets only to the most stimulated, 'bright' minds. In human terms the best minds are those which seek humantruth, and try to apply it to human life. But these are not the minds which the Machine uses to govern us. The Machine recognises as best those minds which serve it best, and it is they that dominate our affairs. But if the majority of minds, undeveloped by the Machine, have failed to develop their humantrue potential, so have the minority of leading minds, however well developed automatically, for they have never come near to making humanity humane.
If leading minds were to complete themselves they would become supraconscious. They could then no longer use their mental powers to sustain their leading position, but would try to bring all minds to supraconscious equality. By this I do not suggest that all minds could or necessarily should possess all knowledge, skill and talent. I do suggest that in the ideal society all minds would equally encompass complete understanding of the humantrue principles. Human individuals would be equal in that understanding, and in their responsible service according to these principles. That some had more knowledge, skill or talent would simply mean that they gave accordingly, not that they were more important. Scientists, for instance, are not made greater, or more human, or more valuable than other persons by their knowledge of science. If that value exists it is in the science, not the individual scientist. Scientists should not make science their guide, their research following where it leads, but make it and themselves the servants of a guiding humantrue need.
It can be argued that without competitive incentive some very unpleasant jobs would not get done properly, if at all. But we already voluntarily accept challenges, and endure hardships, for morally meaningful or meaningless reasons, and for vitally useful, or useless purposes. For example, by compassionately tending lepers in a leper colony, or climbing high and dangerous mountains. The Machine has conditioned us to endure hardship in the course of involuntary employment only when there is no easier way of surviving, or the pay is very high. Supraconscious, responsible individuals will accept the challenge of such work if there is vital need. If there is no real need, then it will not be done, and rightly so.
There is a difference between man's assessment of his personal needs which he himself is responsible for providing, and that of wants which he hopes or expects to win or extract from the Machine, which itis responsible for providing. There are many things which we presently believe, quite wrongly, we could never do without. We are accustomed to equating higher positions in the Machine's hierarchy not only with a greater share of its trappings, but with a higher level of what we believe to be needs. A humantrue society will provide for itself equally as it deserves, through true awareness of its needs and responsibilities, and willingness to make sacrifices which it knows to be necessary. If it is vital to mine coal, we will mine it; but knowing it to be inhuman and unnecessary to use weapons of war, we will not make them.
It has been pointed out already (Chapter 37 Humantrue Findings) that society's thinking must be represented by the intellation of our own postconscious mind, if it is to be humantrue; that the individual mind is the only source of truth, and its only means of verification; that we must rely on each individual's honesty of mind to reach humantruth in common. It follows that responsibility for a humantrue society must rest with the individual, as the source of truth and therefore as the true interpreter and upholder of the constitution. We presently give this responsibility into the hands of groups or institutions, subjecting humanity to lesser (conscious) motives and objectives. We generally respond to this in the same way as the individual responds to the influence of a crowd - with instinctive emotion, which goes contrary to the intrinsic truth of our postconscious minds. No intellect should be bound to instinct, or to the Machine, or by anything but its own awareness. But at the same time, no mind can call itself complete until completely supraconscious, ie when the postconscious is fulfilled and the conscious submits to it absolutely, and should not rest content until it is so.
If world affairs are beyond that mind's capacity to comprehend, then they are too complex. This should be a society ofhumans, run byhumans, forhumans and all fellow life, with no greater purpose, meaning or objective beyond. World human society should be such as any one balanced supraconscious mind would wish it to be. When all human minds are similarly supraconscious, that wish will become an agreed design, and will then become our new reality. It will be the product of the individual, the result of each arriving at the same decision by way of the same awareness. It follows that responsibility for this new reality must also be taken by the individual, and shared in common.
Pt.VII REALISATION
THE PRINCIPLES
Previous Chapters
38 Cooperative Concord
39 Freedom
40 Equality
Current Chapter
41 Individual Responsibility
Next Chapter
Pt.VII Realisation. Deciding the Constitution. 42 Definition of Human Being
Back to Home Page INDEX.htm