Ideology? Personal choice! We are the people.

The essence of the Atlas syndrome is that we feel more responsibility than we can bear. So we have to balance our burden and our carrying power at the highest level of both impact and satisfaction. We should bite off as much as we can chew, while staying healthy. We should not stretch our load to the limits of our carrying capacity, or we would grow too tired, and deteriorate our future carrying capacity.

Our challenges should be really challenging, making us want to confront them, to exert ourselves, not to waste ourselves. We should not become frustrated and unhappy in carrying out our responsibilities. Stimulation and happiness are great sources of energy. Solving problems, meeting challenges, offering successful responses, provide at least as much energy as they take. And that is what we need - plenty of energy. We should carry our burden ‘with a light step, as gentlemen go’.

We can try to increase our understanding of the problems we face, our sense of discrimination to sift the important from the less important, the essential from the accidental, and to distinguish causes from effects and identify the loops by which effects become causes and vice versa. We need to gain a helicopter view, a global view, without losing sight of the particulars. There is no sense in becoming aware of more problems if we cannot map them, both practically and meaningfully. This approach takes both intelligence and guts.

If we lack one of those qualities, we may end up with merely an ideology, the poor man’s substitute for a vision. An ideology makes us aware of the problems of the world in terms of simple causes and effects, good people and bad people, clear-cut do’s and don’ts. But instead of becoming aware of the facts and problems first, we get a package deal, becoming aware of problems and their solutions simultaneously. Then we may feel that unless we buy this package deal, we will be doomed to ambivalence and impotence and therefore irrelevance.

So ideology appears to be an attractive offer if we are willing to pay the price of exchanging an independent mind for a program. Such an exchange is akin to selling our birthright for a pottage of lentils, something civilized people don’t do (nor have done to them).

In looking at the world, we cannot escape personal viewpoints and therefore subjective choices. But we can put these personal views to empirical test and critical review and still be strong and effective in our action. We can, that is, if we have guts. In this case, that means guts of mind.

A personal and flexible viewpoint differs from an ideology, like a personal dress differs from a uniform.

Now if you need a uniform, or if you think that uniforms are needed, or if you simply like a uniform, choose one that fits you and make sure it is of good quality. I will make some suggestions to help you choose. Think of these suggestions as a consumer guide to picking social or political ideologies. I recommend judging such ideologies by five criteria.

The first criterion is the extent to which social and political appeals are based on negative emotions, on fear, anger, hate, envy, contempt or despair. The more that such emotions are present, the more we should avoid these appeals. Such suspect appeals may take many forms: from contempt for opponents, to establishing order by inspiring terror in opponents; from envy and anger toward those who are better off, to fear for foreigners (xenophobia); from prophesying doom unless the prescribed solution is taken, to ascribing vile and base motives to those who refuse the solution.

The second, related criterion is how much understanding and empathy are extended to those who do not adhere to the ideology or oppose it. Be suspicious of scapegoating. Such an attitude is the main indicator for lack of empathy. Of course we may oppose outrageous and barbaric behavior, as long as we do not see such behavior as coming from inherently wicked people.

The ultimate in this lack of empathy occurs when those in power exterminate people instead of certain types of behavior. Throughout history, entire peoples have been decimated or exterminated for their alleged behavior or alleged characteristics. Beware when leaders portray other people as inhuman barbarians, and their own followers as a noble herd, full of goodwill. Carl Gustav Jung and Erich Neumann have explored the destructive psychology of scapegoating. Politics is full of scapegoating, but it is not a political disease. It is rather a social and individual disease, and a malignant one at that. Scapegoating has to be overcome, and every sign of overcoming it is welcome.

Joe Camplisson, a community development man who was in the thick of ugly sectarian heat and human misery in Belfast, wrote in 1974:

It is not these people

Way out there

We are the people

Here and now

And we are the people

That have the finger on the trigger.

The third criterion for judging ideologies is their appeal to positive emotions such as hope and joy, as long as these ideologies do not need to direct negative emotions toward scapegoats. An ideology better promises pie in the sky than the destruction of enemies. Still, the use of hope is dangerous. What will happen when hope is not fulfilled? Hope is especially dangerous with a collectivist approach.

The fourth criterion is the presence or absence of great collectives, staging great events, be they marches, rallies, or even mass prayer meetings or mass peace demonstrations. Mobs are dangerous political foundations, even when they are full of goodwill. The distance between ‘Hosanna!’ and ‘Crucify him!’ is disturbingly small.

The fifth criterion is the extent to which an ideology appeals to personal freedom and responsibility.

These five criteria suggest the presence or absence of incumbent destructive and fanatical elements. The twin criteria of appealing to negative emotions, and scapegoating, I find most helpful in analyzing political statements. These criteria offer a simple and powerful tool to weed out useless and even dangerous ideas, proposals, politicians and sometimes even parties.

Limitation of one’s own response seems an easy way out, but it usually is not for sensitive people. The world with its problems is each day encroaching into our lives through television, internet, radio, and newspapers. You may find it difficult to concentrate on your immediate surroundings instead of diluting yourself on the world. If you find that the world is still weighing on you, but you do not have the energy and talent to improve it, there are still ways to contribute. I will return to those ways in the last chapter.

If you have attention to spare, or cannot ignore the problems that you see, don’t bog yourself down with problems that keep staring you in the face, or you will only feed negative emotions. Think rather about the people who try to fight or to solve those problems. If the fact that people are still being tortured is nagging at you, become informed about the people who are fighting such torture. Think of them and support them. You can more easily walk about with feelings of sympathy for those who fight atrocities, than with feelings of hate for those who commit atrocities, or with feelings of hopelessness when thinking of those that suffer atrocities. If you cannot beat the problem, you can at least mentally join those who try to beat it. Such a choice will boost your energy rather than drain it.

A simple gift of money to a worthwhile cause is better than endless pondering about the ugliness of the world. Such pondering just makes us misers, adding to the ugliness. We should direct, not fragment or dilute our energy. It is better to give small sums repeatedly to the same personally and consciously chosen cause, about which we stay informed, than to contribute to many things that we can hardly can tell from one another. We will still be aware of a world full of problems, but perhaps then we can stand it, because the small things we do may grant us some satisfaction.

The difference between people with small talents who really use them, and people with great talents who use them, is small. The real difference is between people who care and those who do not. Some people do not care because they cannot, others because they will not. That difference is also great, but difficult to perceive.

Satisfaction brings the energy to do some more small things. It works more effectively than does overshooting yourself, as people with inflated egos are apt to do. They set goals for themselves that they can never reach, and by that habit they screen themselves from failure because they can always blame the circumstances, if not the world. So their superiority feelings are protected and they live on, barren, with elevated, but vulnerable self-regard. Ostentatiously trying to make deals that overrun his credit is the way a showman buries his talent. Let us trade with what we have, whatever the amount. ‘The rest is prayer, observance and discipline’.

What then - apart from writing or reading books like this one - is the profile of a civilized, humane, rational, effective citizen who feels responsible for the world, makes a contribution and does not turn away or suffer from being Atlas? It is someone who has found the golden mean:

1.     between optimism and pessimism;

2.     between passivity and frenzy;

3.     between meaningless and powerless political engagement.

It also means submitting private interests to the public interest without abandoning private interests or private judgment. Socially, it means common sense and responsibility; politically, it means statesmanship.

No matter how crushing the circumstances, if we find the role that really suits us, we will have, in several respects, the best of both worlds. We will find the peace of mind of contemplation in the midst of action. We will enjoy ourselves while exerting ourselves. We will be tremendously conscious of ourselves while forgetting ourselves. We will carry the world, with a light step.

These are diary notes of Winston Churchill. The date is May 10. The year is 1940:

‘As I went to bed at about 3 A.M., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’

Relief. The opposite of an Atlas syndrome. We may not have Churchill’s stature, nor will we be ever in his position, but every man or woman can reach such a point in a task that fits like a glove. First we must discover our destiny, which means we have to know both the world and ourselves. This may not be easy.

Around 1936 the political role of Churchill seemed to have finished. Most saw him as an opinionated and cantankerous old man who drank too much. If acute, professional political commentators were so mistaken about a man who had already been so long in the public eye, how can we be sure that we know our own destiny?

So let us find our destiny and be resilient and resourceful.

We are the people

Here and now

And we are the people

That have the finger on the trigger!

From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book

Moods in Societal Development; Politics and Alternatives

Since the 18th century, the basic mood of Western society has been the optimism of Enlightenment, modulated by Romantic overtones of jubilant confidence and undertones of despair. Empathy can have as its object both positive and negative feelings, both vital and morbid tendencies. Much literature is preoccupied with the problematic side of life. After all, literature comes from drama, from the classical tragedy, and tragedy portrays human struggle against odds. Tragedy is not to indulge in defeat, nor to indulge in triumph, but to induce catharsis, an intense and meaningful release from human limitation.
Jean Paul Sartre, in a monograph about emotions, pointed out that emotions form an older, more primitive response to our experience than our ratio. Emotions are more related to our hormonal system and less to our nervous system. Emotions tend to be general; they influence our overall state. According to Sartre, our basic emotion is the one that reduces everything most, resolving all details, making us drift in a sea of feeling, with everything blurred, even ourselves. It is melancholy. Melancholy at least deepens the otherwise shallow optimism of the Enlightenment.
    Universal suffrage has institutionalized the view that people can influence society, and that as responsible citizens we should do so. Anyone can begin a political career. We cannot righteously complain about the state of affairs in society, or merely blame others, while staying inactive ourselves. So the Atlas syndrome afflicts more people today than in the past.
    Pessimism pervaded after the Great War of 1914-1918, and especially after the Great Depression. The coming of fascism offered optimism, but at a terrible price, and led to more pessimism in the remaining democracies. When the tide turned, and the democracies won the war, optimism returned. This was clear in my country, the Netherlands. The aftermath of the war brought a new spirit. Everyone worked hard to undo the damage done by war. The period up to about 1965 brought one of the most spectacular advances ever in the standard of living. This was the time of technocratic optimism. Pessimism was still present, but it loomed in the background. Great hopes for a postwar society, based on solidarity experienced under German occupation, did not materialize. Instead, people experienced the shock of learning of the inhumanities that had occurred in concentration camps, the distant terror of the atomic bomb, the growing influence of existentialist philosophy.
    The second period, from about 1965 to about 1975, showed a strong reaction to technocracy. This was the age of hippies, of flower power, of student demonstrations, of the rise of alternative communities, alternative life styles, a comeback of mysticism and of eschatology - back to the simple life, a clean environment, small is beautiful, great bureaucracies are ugly, dangerous, inhuman. Don’t follow leaders! The New Age is dawning!
    From about 1975 a new period set in, a time of cultural pessimism which we are now leaving. A sense of defeat is spreading. Apparently we cannot solve our problems. Whatever we do appears to have serious unintended consequences. Unemployment is rising markedly, as are government deficits. Public policies are poorly devised and poorly carried out. Any redress of ineffective but institutionalized practice proves difficult, almost impossible. Employee morale problems appear insoluble. Administrative organizations are growing more inefficient, more remote, more rigid. Crime is rising and the police feel demoralized. Once we have established standards to fight one environmental problem, another looms at our doorstep. Dissatisfaction has increased. Drug addiction has grown explosively. Development aid appears largely to have been wasted money.
    The main reaction to this new pessimism has been the rise of neoconservatism, which today is also neopositivism. In terms of cultural determinants the pendulum seems to swing back to more power distance, more avoidance of uncertainty, more individualism and probably more masculinity.
    In management literature, pessimism about the effectiveness of the proposed cures against bureaucracy, rigidity and demoralization is being countered by analyses of well-established success stories, first of Japanese, and later of U.S. companies. In Search of Excellence has been one of the greatest management bestsellers ever. The book you are reading now is also a child of its time.
    The Atlas syndrome is the price we have to pay for trying to make society more civilized, or even to prevent it from lapsing back into barbarism. In Western society the Atlas syndrome has spread under the influences of Utopias, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the scientific, technological and economical explosion, and has widened under universal suffrage.


No one likes to feel dragged down by problems. If we cannot solve a problem we may substitute something else for it, or we may avoid or ignore the problem altogether. Some things are simply too big for us. I could not make my two-year-old son see an elephant in the zoo. He just saw the sparrows around the elephant’s legs. Our first defense to a budding Atlas syndrome is to ignore the challenge. Perhaps we do not see a problem, or we do not accept that it is there, or we see it as something that will be solved some other day. Perhaps we feel that a problem is not for us to solve, but for the politicians and the authorities. We can go to sleep, be optimistic or simply not bother about it. ‘They have always found a solution, so there is no reason they will not find one now.’
    A related response is not to worry about the course of the ship we are all on, but to use our talents to be on the upper deck, with the trend-setters, the in-crowd. Being at the front of things, we assume that we can adapt ourselves with grace and wit to whatever comes. Usually this attitude does not help when the ship is going down, although we may have more chance of getting on a lifeboat.
    A more useful response is to turn to politics. We accept the challenge, assuming that it can be handled within the existing political framework. By that approach we run the considerable risk either of not getting enough influence or of having to forget what we wanted to use our influence for in the first place. Politics functions with the uncanny habit of turning every issue into a political game issue, and thus often transforming issues beyond recognition. Going political is often ineffective, but it has few alternatives. To be effective, we have to win the game without becoming absorbed by it.
    The third response to major social problems is to go political without trusting the present political framework. We may engage in political activism, protesting and seeking public attention. By meetings, discussions and publicity events we try to create grass-roots or special interest support and to exert political pressure. So we mobilize influence outside of the established political framework. Much of this activity goes by the name of awareness raising.
    The main effect of becoming aware is usually the irrepressible urge to make others aware. Often the same happens with religious conversion. Apart from feeling better, the main consequence for many converts seems to be persistence in attempting to convert others. Starting a religious revival compares to starting a chain letter, although the chain letter is much more ephemeral.
    In democratic politics this game of awareness raising is assumed to be infectious. We escape from the Atlas syndrome by passing it on to others, assuming that in the end so many people will be converted that the world’s problems will be solved. The underlying assumption is that the main reason problems are not solved is obstruction by selfish, indifferent, devious or mistaken people in power positions. We trust that such mistaken people just will be swept away by the tide.
    We also can go ‘political-plus’, trying to change the political system itself. We need much power if we are to do that. Usually we cannot muster institutional power, because the people involved are likely to prefer the status quo, unless they are frightened and may gamble on us, as some German industrialists gambled on Adolf Hitler. We need to muster grass-roots support, for which we have to be rather demagogic, and we need to be clever enough to outwit the existing political influences that oppose us. We may even have to deal with such factors as arrest, mob violence or assassination. Or we may turn to violence ourselves and go revolutionary. All those means, however, are incompatible with the end of a more civilized, more humane society. The idea that the end justifies the means, is dangerous. Usually the reverse is true: the means desecrate the end, and by that desecration destroy it.
    We may, however, have to use means that are not compatible with the end. Tolerance toward intolerance should be limited, just as nonviolence toward violence needs to be limited. Tyrannicide, the killing of tyrants, is the subject that originated political philosophy, because the killing of tyrants lies at the heart of the paradox of creating and maintaining a civilized society that contains uncivilized people. But beware of choosing the option of changing the political system, unless you go easy on self-justification.
    The fourth response to major social problems is that of people who do not trust pragmatic Machiavellian politics at all, whether inside or outside of the present system. The key success factors in improving society are those of having pure altruist intentions and of being upright and inspired. Only a really humane, idealistic approach will do. Such an approach can avert pending hostilities, break deadlocks, bypass bureaucratic and diplomatic rigidity and reach out immediately to other people of good will.
    Such do-gooders are often naive. They may trust unreliable information and may even be dangerous, as the preludes and beginning of both World Wars illustrate. Usually such people mistake good intentions for good results, and never question the factual effects. They mistake good input for good output, and although the two are undoubtedly related, the relationship is not a simple one. Financial people know this: good money does not save bad money. The abolition of alcohol consumption in the U.S. is an example of well-meant measures having disastrous effects. Self-righteous virtue is often very good soil to the weed of effective vice. Good intentions are an easy way out of poor results.
    The fifth response is that of substituting one challenge for another. Such a response reasons that we should improve the world by improving ourselves: ‘Forget politics, it only winks us away from our real task. Instead, turn inward, discover the inner realms, meditate, contemplate’. This may be a constructive road to take, if we do not use it as a substitute for social action.
    People engaging in Transcendental Meditation believe that even if only some people in an area practice this form of meditation, crime rates there will drop. Alternative spiritual communities may appear aloof from the wheelings and dealings of ordinary society. They may seem insignificant, but in reality they are situated on important etheric centers or crossroads of this planet. Though nobody notices, they are great forces for the betterment of humankind.
    I happen to believe that in the age-old question of the precedence between contemplation and action, we should prefer action. Of course, preferably the two do go together: action without contemplation is rush; contemplation without action is sterile. Rush, however, still leads to experience, and experience will eventually lead to contemplation. However, contemplation that does not lead to action is essentially spiritual masturbation, a higher but not necessarily more attractive form of narcissism.
    Arnold Toynbee concludes that mystics and hermits are our true guides to the future. St. Francis of Assisi is his favorite. St. Francis apparently was a very active sort of mystic. It is worth noting that the alleged function of hermits becomes useless without people who are inspired by them but who do not necessarily follow their example. Besides, I don’t happen to see the intrinsic value in becoming poor and going begging. Of course it can be a tremendous educational experience to free yourself from stifling wealth, from financial cares and from fetishist attachment to objects. But once the lesson has been learned, please return to an active and responsible life.
    Being a beggar, as a person or as a church institution, without a social function (of course many church institutions have social functions) is merely being parasitic. The only useful function of such a role is to relieve other people’s guilt feelings, giving them beautiful feelings instead. But society provides more than enough sensible not-parasitic occasions for that.
    Aristotle gives contemplation the highest marks because it sets the mind to things that do not change and therefore are the highest, a philosophy fitting world-weary people. One good thing about action is that it requires contemplation, and the experience of contemplation within action is, in terms of Abram Maslov, a top experience.
    The sixth response is to redefine the challenge until it is no longer a challenge. This approach can be combined perfectly with the fifth response, but still it is a response in its own right. What we are really witnessing nowadays is a cosmic transition. What we are seeing are not the signs of an overburdening challenge, but rather the birth pangs of the new age that will come about anyway. The New Age is dawning, the Age of Aquarius is upon us. We need only to prepare ourselves for that new time. We need only to set our sails to the new wind that is blowing. In the words of Bob Dylan, the minstrel of the sixties: ‘This is the hour that the ship comes in’, and ‘the times are a-changing’.
    The more stubborn reality seems, the more we see everywhere the signs of what really is changing. Such a time of change provides fruitful soil for conspiracy theories, for a change of the positive kind. In the minds of some people there is, for example an Aquarian conspiracy, or there is a hidden revolution going on in science toward a holistic vision.
    The more apocalyptic versions will have it that there first has to be a global purge, a deluge, an Armageddon. After a huge crisis, there will come a new beginning. This view is a typically pre-Enlightenment religious version. It could become true, pending a now improbable outbreak of a nuclear world war. Possibly there would be Noahs, but they would not find a cleansed earth after 40 days. Although they might see in the sky more fantastic phenomena than rainbows, they will derive no comfort or inspiration from such sights. A post-nuclear sunset will not be a covenant with the Lord, but a covenant with their past, doubling the crushing weight of their unattractive present. Then, an Atlas syndrome may be worse than a disease - it may prove fatal.

From 'The Atlas-syndrome,' the first chapter of Humanity, Civilization and Politics, also available as e-book at http://www.onlineoriginals.com