workers and farmers with necessaries and amenities far beyond the levels imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of a previous generation.  As an integral part of this maturing revolutionary situation a generation of human beings born since war’s end in 1945 has come on the scene, surrounded by the concrete and glass buildings, block printed nylons, the automobiles and domestic appliances of monopoly capitalism and by the social security of socialism.  In both segments, capitalist and socialist, the more gifted, original, sensitive, creative members of this comfort-pampered generation have turned their backs on affluence and security and begun shouting a new slogan:  “We want to live!”

There is nothing surprising about this development.  Many trained, experienced observers have been predicting it.  Youth, idealism, aspiration, optimism, ambition—­cannot be satisfied with status in any form.  They want to live, to achieve, to face difficulties, to overcome dangers, to express themselves, to create.  They are not content merely to arrive at physical affluence.  Affluence and social security cannot satisfy.  They merely sharpen the appetite for a continuance of the life journey, on the best terms permitted by the current time of troubles.

Among the members of the post-war generation, this ambitious, perceptive elite is aware of two disturbing and compelling realities.  The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution.  The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of purpose and promise.

Current frustrating experience with the breakdown of western civilization, coupled with historical precedents, confront the present generation of mankind with a compelling challenge and a unique, precious opportunity.  The challenge arises out of experiments with particular civilizations and with civilization as a way of life.  Our analysis of this situation leads to only one possible conclusion:  Repeated experiments with civilization unmask it as a way, not of life, but as a cycle of rise, expansion, maturity, decline and certain death.

The challenge is emphasized by the failure of reforms and reformers of civilization to make changes in structure and function sufficient to meet the challenge of the birth-maturity-death cycle.  Nor has it been possible for western civilization to take advantage of the drastic changes and challenges arising out of the current world revolution.

Man’s top negative priority at the present moment is to reject the wiles, the temptations, the mortal conflicts and the annihilative destruction which have disrupted and decimated civilized society during the past six thousand years and reached their apex in the Great Revolution of 1750-1970.  These experiences prove beyond the shadow of doubt that this pattern of human collective life is inadequate to meet the present and future needs of the human family.