Submitted by Aung San U on Fri, 10/09/2020 - 05:30

This article is an excerpt from a book written by me about twenty years ago called "Pragmatic Spirituality for a Progressive and Humane Society." A book (pages 250 in English) to help third world countries to put together a politico-cultural manifesto for progressive evolution.

PROGRESS MEANS CHANGING FOR THE BETTER

In this era, nations are no longer island nations. No nation can afford to be entirely on its own, and furthermore, some progressive ones at last appear to recognize the need to take good care of planet Earth, and hopefully mankind, too. Progressiveness is an absolutely essential here-and now power required to positively affect destiny, and to evolve higher.

Modernization should encourage positive growth, and discourage negative growth. Progress usually is considered to be positive growth. Progress can happen to societies only if their cultures encourage people to generally change and grow for the better and be also ecologically correct. To modernize a society, its people must realistically prioritize their values and take full advantage of proven organizational and technological powers, even if those advances were first made elsewhere by foreigners. They must apply themselves intelligently and be capable of developing better ways of living and working in every manner. This means establishing the right kinds of rules and laws. Modern learning means functional thinking, reading, studying, practicing, and interacting with knowledgeable people throughout the world. Progressiveness basically implies that the present and past ways can be enhanced. Nothing from the past or the present is to escape critical evaluation or scrutiny. An individual can only do so much, but an organization of well-motivated and coherent people with SAMADHI can achieve much greater benefit for all. Only those people who develop the inner strength will have SAMADHI—the personal power. And only when those powers are organized coherently and cohesively, can they collectively and correctly determine their common destiny.

In the past, cultural rules changed very gradually, and accepted traditional culture appeared to be static and everlasting, and dominated the ways of socializing and doing business. That is becoming less and less true in modern societies, where new ways of human interactions are evolving at a very rapid pace with information, communication, computation and transportation technologies (here-and-now powers) of very advanced natures. Most cultures now share a significant percentage of what may be considered the international culture. If a person wants to do business or interact with the people of a foreign society, he will have to understand that foreign culture in addition to his own and his corporation’s cultures, and possibly also the prevailing international culture. One may broadly equate international culture with that practiced by major multinational business corporations. Even if a person wants to go back to a pure traditional culture, he will quickly find out that the imagined “rosy” culture of the past no longer is around. New culture brings new realities, and it is very unlikely that the younger generation, especially when given the freedom of choice, will wish to remain unrealistically backward and be unable to effectively compete with young people of other modern societies.

What about the people whose predilection is not for change and not for progress, and yet who are not oppressors or troublemakers? As long as they are not actively and seriously hindering positive changes, they should have the right to coexist, even to the extent of establishing and maintaining their own encapsulated community cultures (if no criminality is involved). Of course, they may always retain their right to voice their concerns in an acceptable manner and in the appropriate forums. Progress is controlled positive change, and without it, communities will remain backward like those for the Third and Fourth World countries (see Wikipedia on the Internet for explanation of First, Second, Third and Fourth World countries). In such societies, the positive qualities of super realities are quite insulated, but somehow, they are highly vulnerable and permeable to negative qualities (usually misapplied modern superficialities that do not require working at least eight hours a day, nor needing to acquire modern higher education), and often experience negative changes beyond their control. For intellectually insular and spiritually misdirected societies, an inferior evolution is the end result. Whether one likes it or not, there will be changes, preferably systematically for positive changes.

Every progress has to be preceded by development and implementation stages. For truly positive progress to take place there might be significant problems while undergoing development. A progressive society cannot afford to be overly fearful of failure. Having the correct mind-set is essential for managing and controlling the possibilities of failure-related damages during the developmental, implementation, and initial operational stages of new programs. Development programs need to be correctly managed in order eventually to come out ahead.

Only on the basis of economic progress, synonymous with greater productivity and capabilities of a society, can different communities within a society negotiate more effectively for the sharing of available resources. In a no growth or negative growth situation, there are usually not enough resources to be meaningfully shared among the various factions, neither for now nor for the future. That usually means the most powerful group is the winner, and the rest are the losers. Often, the most ruthless self-servers are the winners. When such is the case, the entire nation is in for a hard time if such winners have no vision or the capability to effect reforms that would systematically bring progress, justice, order, and wealth for all, and especially for the under-classes.

It is essential that people of the less developed societies wake up and firmly decide that progress is necessary, and that they are more than ready to work for it. That kind of belief dearly needs to be instilled into their cultural ideology. Without it, there is no way that anybody can effectively assist them to learn to help themselves. There is no way that knowledgeable people in their right senses can afford to waste their time on behalf of societies that prefer to remain counter-progressive in their beliefs. The people of such societies usually have weakness with regard to being proactive when changes are required for the better. Without progress, it can be very difficult to establish a WIN-WIN situation for the people and those holding political power. Only the self-servers win; and for the rest at the bottom, to be downtrodden into the dirt. This also holds true for all poorly performing nations.