page_title: Mark Satin
section_title: New Age Politics, the book
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Satin / New Age politics, 1970s – 1980s / New Age Politics, the book
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Schets van Carl Ransom Rogers Carl Rogers definieerde het begrip zelfbeeld (of zelfconcept) als het geheel van al de gedachten, ideeën en oordelen die je over jezelf hebt. English: Sketch of Carl Ransom Rogers Carl Rogers defined the concept of self-image (or self-concept) as the set of all the thoughts, ideas and judgments you have about yourself. Magyar: Vázlatrajz Carl Ransom Rogersről Calr Rogers meghatározása szerint az önkép (én-koncepció) az egyén magáról alkotott gondolatainak, elképzeléseinek és bírálatainak összessége.
context_page_description: Mark Ivor Satin is an American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher. He is best known for contributing to the development and dissemination of three political perspectives – neopacifism in the 1960s, New Age politics in the 1970s and 1980s, and radical centrism in the 1990s and 2000s. Satin's work is sometimes seen as building toward a new political ideology, and then it is often labeled "transformational", "post-liberal", or "post-Marxist". One historian calls Satin's writing "post-hip".
  After emigrating to Canada at the age of 20 to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Satin co-founded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, which helped bring American war resisters to Canada. He also wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, which sold nearly 100,000 copies. After a period that author Marilyn Ferguson describes as Satin's "anti-ambition experiment", Satin wrote New Age Politics, which identifies an emergent "third force" in North America pursuing such goals as simple living, decentralism, and global responsibility.
context_section_description: As the 1970s began, the New Left faded away, and many movements arose in its wake – among them the feminist, men's liberation, spiritual, human potential, ecology, appropriate technology, intentional community, and holistic health movements.  After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1972, Satin immersed himself in all these movements, either directly or as a reporter for Canada's underground press.  He also took up residence in a free-love commune.  "One fierce winter's day", he says, "... it dawned on me that the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements [were] beginning to generate a coherent new politics.  But I looked in vain for the people and groups that were expressing that new politics (instead of merely bits and pieces of it)".  Satin set out to write a book that would express the new politics in all its dimensions.  He wrote, designed, typeset, and printed the first edition of New Age Politics himself, in 1976.  A 240-page edition was published by Vancouver's Whitecap Books in 1978, and a 349-page edition by Dell Publishing Company in New York in 1979. It is now widely regarded as the "first", "most ambitious", or "most adequate" attempt to offer a systemic overview of the new post-socialist politics arising in the wake of the New Left.  Some academics say it offers a new ideology.
  At the heart of New Age Politics is a critique of the consciousness we all supposedly share, a "six-sided prison" that has kept us all trapped for hundreds of years.  The six sides of the "prison" are said to be: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism (xenophobia), and the "big city outlook" (fear of nature).  Since consciousness, according to Satin, ultimately determines our institutions, prison consciousness is said to be ultimately responsible for "monolithic" institutions that offer us little in the way of freedom of choice or connection with others.  Some representative monolithic institutions are: bureaucratic government, automobile-centered transportation systems, attorney-centered law, doctor-centered health care, and church-centered spirituality.
  To explain how to break free of the prison and its institutions, Satin develops a "psychocultural" class analysis that reveals the existence of "life-", "thing-", and "death-oriented" classes.  According to Satin, life-oriented individuals constitute an emerging "third force" in post-industrial nations.  The third force is generating a "prison-free" consciousness consisting of androgynous attitudes, spirituality, multiple perspectives, a cooperative mentality, local-and-global identities, and an ecological outlook.  To transform prison society, Satin argues, the third force is going to have to launch an "evolutionary movement" to replace – or at least supplement – monolithic institutions with life-affirming, "biolithic" ones.  Some representative biolithic institutions are: deliberative democracy as an alternative to bureaucratic government, bicycles and mass transit as an alternative to the private automobile, and mediation as an alternative to attorney-centered law.  According to Satin, the third force will not have to overthrow capitalism, since Western civilization – not capitalism – is said to be responsible for the prison.  But the third force will want to foster a prison-free New Age capitalism through intelligent regulation and elimination of all subsidies.
  The reaction to New Age Politics was, and continues to be, highly polarized.  Many of the movements Satin drew upon to construct his synthesis received it favorably, though some took exception to the title.  Some maverick liberals and libertarians are drawn to the book.  It was eventually published in Sweden and Germany, and European New Age political thinkers came to see it as a precursor of their own work.  Others see it as proto-Green.  Ever since its first appearance, though, and continuing into the 21st century, New Age Politics has been a target of criticism for two groups in the United States: conservative Christians an
caption: Carl Rogers (1902–1987), whose ideas about human potential helped shape New Age Politics.[99]  He later joined Satin's New Options advisory board.
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