Page 4 RAIN November/December 1984 The Transformation as Sandbox Syndrome by Michael Marien Michael Marien, after four interesting years in Berkeley during the early 1960s, returned "back East" to earn a Ph.D. i11 interdisciplinary social science from, th.e Maxwell School at Syracuse University .(1970). He has monitored the writing of futurists, system theorists, and various other reformers and visionaries for the past 14 years. His self-published guidebook to this .literature, Societal Directions and Alternatives (1976; out of print) led to the founding of Future Survey, a monthly abstract journal of.books alld articles on trends, forecasts, an.d proposals-transformational and otherwise. Future Survey and Future Survey Annual, which integrates abstracts from the monthly, have been published by the World Future Society since early 1979. In late 1979, the New World Alliance was initiated_, and Michael has served as a member of the Governing Council since then, with special effort devoted to helping prepare the NWA Transformation ' . Platform (1981), which he collsiders unique and promising, but very preliminary and incomplete. This essay, adapted fro171 a presentation at the Association for Humanistic Psychology Twentieth Annual Meeting in Washington (1982), is an initial probe into the vast and vexing problem of vhy so little human e, transform.ational ch ange actually takes place. This piece is reprinted from the Journal of Humanistk Psychology, Winter 1983. Summary: Belief that a social transformation is happening serves to keep it from happening. Behaviors associated with the sandbox of political impotency include: pronouncement of actual or imminent success, confusion of goals and results, an acritical stance, hubris, an incapacitating dialect, pseudoholism, egalitarian blind-
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