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Evolution of Revolution

 

October 31, 1999

Wars and revolutions have been the sources of organized destruction of the widest scale known. Sri Aurobindo has said that such events have benefited mankind by quickly removing the age-old obstacles and anachronisms. Every well developed form of social organization or institution that has matured into settled culture forms itself into an entrenched obstacle to social progress. Anachronisms of any type are crystallized attitudes of the present to worship the reactionary past in symbols.

It is often pronounced and widely appreciated after such events as world wars or revolutions that the society has made considerable progress because of these apparently negative events. The fifty years following the Second World War witnessed a progress that is greater than the progress of the previous 500 years. This progress consists mainly in the abolition of world wars, recognition of subject nations under colonialism, practical recognition of individual rights, enthroning the "rising expectations" of all those who have been ‘have nots', destruction of proprietary rights over material resources, technological innovations, decentralization, breaking of the elite's monopoly of education. As a result of such vast widespread changes, society witnessed innumerable changes in its collective ability, pursuit of knowledge, way of governance, attitude to rights, understanding of ways of managing organizations, and evolving new cultural norms. As a result,

  • Global wars have led to the abolition of world wars.
  • Revolutionary urges have given place to evolutionary transitions in all walks of human life.

It powerfully affects every facet of collective human existence at first and finally emerges as changes perceived in individual culture in the social living. No facet of collective or individual life is an exception to this impact. It pushes humankind from

-- the physical existence to a life governed by mental understanding and spiritual life,

-- selfish individual possessiveness to selfless collective enjoyment,

-- values that cherish forms of slavery, primitivity and backwardness to rising expectations of every type that find expression in

  • Politics, as the right to become the head of the nation.
  • Economics, as socially recognized and encouraged opportunity to earn as every other individual.
  • Society, as a desire for dignity presently enjoyed by the elite.
  • Psychology, as equal rights for women and the poorest.
  • Militarily, as a desire to abolish wars.
  • Religion, as an individual quest to spiritual experience.
  • Technology, as a movement for creating products to realize these goals.

All the changes in society we witness today, many of which are gratifying and many others that wring our hearts, are positive and negative expressions of these evolutionary transitions that have helped us avoid revolutions on a global scale. Their major expressions in society are

  1. Breakdown of the family in any sense of the word.
  2. Recognition of the business community of the ultimate value of the customer, however refractory he is.
  3. Role of the individual worker in the process of management decision-making.
  4. Emerging emphasis on Consensus in all intellectual meets.
  5. Ever-growing corruption as a way of life.
  6. The ‘right' of the gangster to successfully function in society.
  7. The organized de facto recognition of governments to grow drugs that is destroying the very fabric of the global community.
  8. Indiscriminate pollution of every type.
  9. The movement of the entire population toward the cities.
  10. Physical possessiveness giving place to communal enjoyment of mental abilities (as expressed in the spread of information).
  11. Money outgrowing the control of national governments.
  12. The possibility of Internet taking over the role of mass education, rendering universities obsolete or otiose.

As these changes come to stay, we find the reconciliation of opposites, upgradation of the low, equalization of the high with the low, emergence of the truth out of falsehood, good out of evil, Knowledge out of Ignorance. All present social expressions of collective and individual living can be brought under these heads without exception. But the greatest BOON to humankind will issue if it is recognized that,

This phenomenon can be used to hasten social evolution by a few millennia, if humanity comes forward to accept this unconscious process as a consciously practiced form of social living.

Obviously, man moves from physical crudeness to spiritual gentleness, the safe personal falsehood to safer collective truth, secure survival in depravity to collective peaceful existence in a life of high values. Instead of he being pushed to do so by the pressure of the revolutionary urges, man is called upon to consciously recognize the process and its trends, so that he can become the unseen pioneer of Social Evolution.



story | by Dr. Radut