What life conditions drove you to work for societal and cultural transformation?
What life conditions drove you to work for societal and cultural transformation?
I was born and raised in Hungary. I had a very authoritarian father who claimed to be a Communist, when Communism was the state religion in Hungary, after the 2nd World War.
In my teenage years, he taught me to deeply appreciate the inspiring stories of heroes in the international workers movement, and the beautiful ideas of the Communist Manifesto.
Studying the Manifesto led me to discover the sharp contrast of its beautiful ideas and the ugly, oppressive reality of the so-called “socialism” in Hungary. So, I started standing up against the hypocrisy of my father and of the state’s ruling elite.
Inspired by students fighting the Establishment all over the world in the 1960s, I organized a student movement of revolutionary study circles and demonstrations, just like our counterparts in the West did, except that our movement was a minuscule. Nevertheless, I had to serve a 20-month prison sentence for what the prosecutor termed “fomenting an anti-state conspiracy.”
The student movements fizzled out but some of their graffities are still alive in my soul and 53 years later, they are still guiding my work. I haven’t talked about them before, so sharing a couple of them with you is a precious moment for me. Here they go.
“The future will only contain what we put into it now.”
“The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.”
“To call in question the society you ‘live’ in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.”
“We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.”
“We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.”
Can you describe your vision of a desirable future direction of society to transform into?
I guess I could talk about it but I don’t think that it is really important what is my vision of a desirable future.
What’s much more important is how specifically “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens” to use my favorite quote from Rainer Maria Rilke.
How such a future enters into a few pundits is much less important than how it enters into the myriads of initiatives and movements for civilizational renewal.
I did write an essay about steps towards my vision, which is a wisdom society, 3 years ago, with the title “On the Verge of Collective Awakening” that you can find on the Internet.
But since then, my attention shifted to what does it take to invite the future to enter into us. That question begets a couple of other ones, which are very practical. For example:
How to develop global communities of evolutionary agents who are capable to skilfully facilitate profound transformation in individuals, organizations, and social systems? Here’s another one.
What enabling structures and processes need to be in place for the transformative social movements to engage in more vigorous, mutual learning across the different context in which they operate?
That second question was inspired by my training in Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Lab, which transformed my thinking about transfomation.
What is the greatest potential you see and that you think we should contribute to in terms of transforming society?
Who is the “we” that we are talking about? I believe, the Integral movement doesn’t have a conscious collective agency to make such a contribution. The Integral conferences don’t seem to be designed for developing a collective agency.
Then the best bet for individuals who want to make a real difference is to find each other, discover their evolutionary purpose and cultivate evolutionary friendships that Aftab Omer and I talked about a few years ago.
If the cry in the world that we feel called to respond with our talents, happen to be the same, then responding together, we can accomplish much more than separately.
At least, that’s my experience with our team at Campus Co-Evolve, our virtual university for evolutionary agents. Among other programs, we have a 5-month long Protopia Learning Expedition, going through the phases of Personal Shift, Interpersonal Shift, Organizational Shift, Societal Shift, and Planetary Shift.
The program includes collaborative action research, 1-on-1 mentoring, and working on real-world projects. It has a modular design, which means that we are about to complete the Personal Shift segment but if applicants want to join the learning expedition for the remaining Interpersonal, Organizational, Societal, and Planetary Shift segments, they still can. Contact Anna Betz at anna@campus co-cevolve.org .
Societal transformation needs well-trained people capable to facilitate it and befriend its complexity. That’s what we are contributing to with our learning journeys on the Campus. Let’s do it together.