6. Revolutionists are in a hurry. Disillusioned with the past and the present they seek by "direct action" to create a new social order, out of whole cloth, quickly, here and now. Never mind the means, get results!
7. Totalists have the whole truth, attained through reasoning, experimentation, revelation. Having learned the truth, they dedicate their energies to the propagation of the faith. Where they encounter opposition they counter it and, if necessary, annihilate it with its originators and advocates.
As a matter of practical experience, proponents of all seven approaches to social problems and social change employ a wide range of techniques from persuasion to coercion. To support their projects they advance logical arguments, elaborate half-truths, make emotional appeal; employ trickery, deceit, preferment, privilege, flattery, soft living, bribery, coercion, physical and social violence—individual and collective extermination.
Civilization as reported in history and in its current practice is based on five faulty ideological assumptions:
1. Competitive survival struggle results in social improvement. Survival struggle has certainly played a role in stimulating discovery, invention and the diffusion of culture traits. Its end results have always included civil and inter-group war with its unavoidable costs in destruction, dissolution and death.
2. The effort to grab and keep, with its accompanying competition, is a chief source of social progress. The game of grab and keep is play for children. Mature human beings should strive to create, produce, share.
3. The accumulation of goods and services brings happiness. At the out-set of life this may be true. But accumulation for its own sake produces the miser. Misers are not happy people. Riches yield happiness only as they are distributed. Accumulation brings many headaches, and few abiding satisfactions.
4. Successful accumulators "have fun." Perhaps they do, for a time, at the expense of others on whose backs they ride and whose life blood they suck. But mature men and women do not "have fun"; they shoulder and carry their share of social responsibility.
5. Progress can be measured by the multitude of personal possessions. Not so. True progress for humanity consists in movement from having to doing; from the possessive to the creative; from the material toward the spiritual.
Ideologies have played a role in determining the structure and function of every civilization. As civilization grows up, matures, and declines, ideologies change with the changing times. In its early history each civilization seeks acceptance for its picture of reality and its techniques for reaching individual and social goals. As each civilization declines and disintegrates, a multitude of counselors clamors for attention to a particular formula that will prove acceptable and workable in the existing emergent circumstances.