The 5th Step - English Edition of Dag Andersen's Book

Hjem / Nyhetsarkiv / Nyheter 2004 / The 5th Step - English Edition of Dag Andersen's Book

A brief account of the book's principal argument

1. The landscape around the corner - a brief account of the books principal argument

At some time, in a not all too distant future, life on Earth will be very much better than it is today. Considerable trends, and the underlying principal trend itself, point in this direction. The time factor is what is most difficult to evaluate since it is both possible to delay and speed up the process. Whichever, we face a long transitional period which many will find difficult but which will be an unbelievably rich time for those who take up the challenge.
    The fact is that this transitional period has already begun. We just do not see it because we have not yet caught sight of the future. What lies ahead of us is so surprising that it is difficult to catch sight of â it represents a clear change of direction in relation to the principal trend of the last few centuries. Nevertheless, it is a natural continuation of the great cultural-historical developmental direction, which in turn is a continuation of the direction of evolution itself.
    We stand before a new reality, not so much because of the physical changes, although these too will be great; the most fundamental changes we are faced with are of a non-physical nature. They are at least equally ârealâ but, because over several hundred years we have got used to believing that the physical dimension is the only âreally realâ, we have difficulty in discovering the new reality which is awaiting us.
    So what about financial crises, overpopulation, nuclear war, climatic change, terrorist wars and all the other things we are scared of? Yes, it can go wrong, most things can, but if it does not go wrong, what then? That is the question that this book is going to try to answer. There are many possible answers â the future exists only as possibilities â but the answer we seek here is the main alternative that lies in the middle of our path.
    As a matter of fact, the new is lying right in front of us, but it is as if there is a mirror between us and the future. When we look forward, we see only more of the present, only more of the same. Or, to put it another way: the new is just around the corner, but we cannot catch sight of it because we think the road goes straight on and thus stare fixedly in that direction.
    It has become quite scary to stare straight on in this way because development gets faster every day and no-one, political and business leaders included, is able to see more than just a few years ahead. We are accelerating into the corner, and we can see that if we drive straight on we will end in the ditch. But relax, let us take a look around the corner and see what awaits us. It demands that we stretch ourselves and are a bit flexible but, in return, the landscape which opens up is lighter, warmer, more beautiful and larger than the one we come from.
    It is quite a tough history that we have behind us; human history has quite clearly been no Sunday school. Many are strongly marked by the past and have difficulty in putting it behind them. But it is a relief to find that we, humanity, have, despite everything, put the worst behind us. The corner we are about to enter may well be rather sharp for many, and it is going to take a few generations to come out of it â perhaps 100-150 years for the leading countries â but then the new peaceful landscape will open up before us.

the crisis og modernity

The epoch we usually call the modern, which began with the Renaissance 500 years ago, is showing clear signs of being in its closing phase. Some prefer to talk about this closing phase as the crisis of modernity. The term does not say anything about what is characteristic for the period, only that it represents something new, something modern, hardly very apt when the epoch is several hundred years old and suffering clear signs of aging. The epoch may more helpfully be called materialism since what is characteristic about it is that both its perception of reality and value system are materialistic.
    The great project of materialism has been to understand and master the physical. By means of a whole series of scientific and industrial revolutions, the western world has had enormous success with this project. We have achieved a material standard of living and an economic growth as never before. The individual, the great masses, have been liberated not only from hunger and oppression but also from the slavery of scarcity, from having to use oneâs whole life to secure oneâs daily bread. The rest of the world is fighting to copy this modernization, some to counteract it, but for the great majority in the western world the project has been carried out with great success.
We that are so lucky to live in this rich part of the world have now come to a point where more of the same seems to create more problems than it solves. We have come up against the planetâs ecological limitations and realize that continued economic growth for all eternity is an impossibility. New technology can prolong the process but that does not help those of us who already live in a surplus society. For us, the problem is that we no longer have long-term, meaningful goals. We already have what we need, within reason, and, in the long term, will not be any happier with even larger houses, more cars and more exclusive dinners. We carry on with the same because we do not know what else to do. And for the time being, most people are satisfied with just that, whether they now devote themselves to enjoying the good life or are still hungry. Many are young and unestablished. Some, for different reasons, are greedier than others. But not so very few have discovered the need for a new, long-term goal.
    Scarcity of material goods combined with technological development and political liberation gave life purpose and meaning. We had something to fight for and a goal to work towards; both society as a whole and each individual was to get up and go forward. That it was meaningful was self-evident. But now this has been achieved to a reasonable extent, the growing abundance of material benefits and leisure time do not give life purpose and meaning in the same way. They can contribute to the moment, but even if we increase the doses of pleasure and excitement, we do not attain the same energy-giving, indisputable meaningful direction in our lives.
    In Western European countries, we can see this perhaps most clearly in politics. The political ideologies are dead because their long-term goals have been reached; the ideologies from the 19th century have played out their role. Governments and parliaments all have economic growth as their primary objective â it is repeated like a mantra, a materialistic invocation â but it no longer results in long-sightedness and visionary leadership. Growth has fetched up in a group with stock-market prices and opinion polls, short-term indicators of professional management. We have acquired a sort of instant politics in which politicians take up positions on whatever questions are raised in the media in the hope of gaining the greatest possible attention. And the media themselves function as market-driven amplifiers of contemporary trends.
    Pictorial art is another field in which it is easy to see the crisis of modernity. It has become form without content; it no longer has a program, no message, no unveiling to raise peopleâs consciousness. The major trend in established pictorial art is form, into which we ourselves can read in the contents we desire. There is surely no less talent than before, but the art reflects a cultural epochâs last phase â without our having seen the next. We are whirring around in the goal area but do not know where the next stage goes, what the next goal to give us direction is.

the project of materialism

Modernityâs/materialismâs project was to understand and master physical material and to liberate the individual. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to break with the medieval idea that everything was governed by the hand of God, that every leaf that fell to Earth, every illness that affected people was an expression of his will. One had to learn to see physical items as objects in themselves, governed by the laws of nature. A stone was a stone, neither more nor less, and it was at all times under the influence of the same force of gravity. Humans could liberate themselves from the whims of Nature by discovering the laws of nature and by learning to make use of them for their own purposes. The physical world was objectivized, being turned into comprehensible and predictable objects.
The liberation of the individual was both a goal and a means in this process. The authoritarian society of the Middle Ages was not suitable for promoting an objective approach, where physical evidence through practical experiment stood as the ultimate criterion for truth. After a while, a societal system forced itself forward in which what one did was of decisive importance, rather than which family one was born into. The engineer, the explorer, the inventor, the pioneer, the reformer â these were the heroes of the new age.
On the deepest level, the materialistic epoch which is now nearing its close has been a great project of liberation. It has been a liberation from the traditional societyâs physical toil and from authoritarian, hierarchical power structures. The result is a situation in which we in the rich, democratic part of the world, to a greater extent than any before us, are free to do what we want. Freedom, however, does not mean the freedom to break laws, neither the laws of society nor the laws of nature, but it means that we understand how these laws function and can arrange matters so that they serve our interests. Humans learned to fly by employing the laws of nature, not by breaking them.

confusion in the goal area

But this process of liberation has then come to a halt in the rich part of the world. We understand, in the main, how the physical material world functions and, by and large, have what we need of material goods. If we wish to work hard to acquire more things and higher positions, we are at liberty to do so; if we prioritize more leisure time, that is absolutely possible. But what many people are in the process of discovering is that development no longer has the character of being a project of liberation.
    We are at liberty to do what we want, but every day it becomes more apparent that we are not at liberty to will what we want. We go round with a whole mass of opinions; we like or do not like, we believe or do not believe. But where did we get all this from? Where do these opinions come from? What use is it that we can do what we desire when we cannot ourselves choose our desires? What sort of freedom is it to be able to give oneâs opinion if our attitudes are an unconscious product of inheritance and environment?
    The most obvious, almost too obvious, example of how society functions in this late materialistic phase is advertising, the whole apparatus of marketing. This stands in a class of its own as world historyâs greatest apparatus for propaganda. A large percentage of what we pay for goods in shops goes straight into the advertising which is to get us to buy them. It gives us freedom at the retail level to choose between dozens of different shampoos, or to decide which of the yearâs fashions we want to purchase, but, seen from a distance, the whole thing appears as a society on autopilot. The markets swing back and forth, taking the consumers dangling with them.
    More and more is becoming market driven, an extremely effective method of promoting economic growth and rapid change â the market has its very strong sides â but the market means that the big decisions emerge as a sum of all the small. There is no longer anyone steering towards long-term, ideological goals. Itâs all going faster than ever, but we are driving on autopilot and do not know where we are going. Nevertheless, there are signs that the transition to the next cultural epoch is under development; we just have not managed to catch sight of it yet.

materialism overstepping itself

The process has been hastened in that computers have forced forward a clear divide between hardware and software. We have got used to hardware being something which physically exists and software being a non-physical phenomenon. Software can be sent over the Internet, we can import it onto a hard disk or transport it on a diskette, but in itself it is not physical; it is the program that decides how the physical is to behave. The terminology has begun to seep into dog-training, where one talks about how the dog has been programmed, and into normal speech when we see people behaving strangely. We have begun to objectivize that which, when it appears in humans, is called consciousness.
    Self-development has long been a rapidly growing field; one can find all sorts of courses, seminars and books which are to teach us how we can program, and not least reprogram, ourselves. This has been taken to the furthest extent at the very forefront of competitive society, in business leadership training, in elite sports and in creative professions such as advertising. Where the needs of adaptation and innovation are greatest, where extreme performances are demanded, the objectivization of the mental is proceeding at full pace.
    The cultural epoch to follow the materialistic will hardly come in the form of a counter movement, a rebellion from outside. Late materialism does not carry the stamp of stagnation but quite the contrary, a tremendous dynamism and ability to adapt; indeed, there is something feverish and hyperactive about it. As a matter of fact, late materialism is in the process of outstepping itself, of accelerating out of its own shell.
    So far, self-development and reprogramming are being used to produce winners in materialismâs competitive society. Nevertheless, the most important long-term effect is that it increases awareness of the non-physical, of how we function on the non-physical level. In business, brain capital has become more important than physical capital. Emotional capital is a term not yet taken into use, but it would be an extremely appropriate collective term for phenomena such as brand name and image, as well as customersâ and employeesâ enthusiasm and loyalty. It demands systematic work over a long period of time to build up a fund of emotional capital.
    Even if many researchers still have problems in relating to the non-physical, the stock markets have long since exploded the materialistic perception of reality by making software companies financial winners. It is not only that the products, strictly speaking, are non-physical but that the producers of the non-physical are priced according to their emotional and intellectual capital, according to the marketâs expectations (feelings) of innovations (thoughts) they are to make in the future.
    Materialismâs perception of reality is in the process of cracking. Of necessity, it must begin there: first the perception of reality, then the value system. For how can one value something, the existence of which one has difficulty in comprehending? The first step is that we begin to objectivize the mental, just as in the last round we began by objectivizing the physical.

the next great project

It is this that appears to be the natural and most likely next step in our development. The last step was to teach us how to look objectively at the physical and, upon this basis, to develop the necessary technical foundation for mastering it. The next step, upon which we have just about begun, is to objectivize that which is not physical. At first glance, it is difficult to see what an enormous leap we are in the process of taking. Individually, the first signs are not very dramatic but, put them together and sketch out a picture of how things could be in the future, such as this book attempts to do, and a clear pattern emerges.
    The difficulty is that each cultural epoch, each cultural developmental step, has its paradigm, its way of perceiving reality. The vast majority of us who live in todayâs western society experience both the world and ourselves in a quite different fashion from those who lived in the Middle Ages. They were programmed in a different way, they thought and felt in a different way. Thoughts which were crystal-clear truths for them, to us are mere superstition. Conditions which would make us angry made them happy. Put into the same situation, the medieval person and the modern person would experience two different realities. Even if the sensory impressions are the same, the interpretation/understanding of them is different.
    If we are now to try to imagine development on the next cultural step, after materialism, we must first try to imagine the perception of reality of those who will live on that cultural step. The exercise is difficult, but not impossible. We have climbed a number of cultural steps already and we can see a pattern of which it is possible to imagine a natural continuation. In the light of this possible continuation, a number of developmental characteristics in todayâs society stand out as clear pointers towards the new â the very early beginnings of what we shall call the transformation, the transitional phase to the 5th cultural step. Programming and self-development, capability of change, mental training, emotional intelligence and all the other fashionable words are no longer simply to do with clever courses and smart machines, they are portents of a new age.
    Cultural history, fundamentally speaking, deals with the development of human consciousness. On the materialistic step, we made the giant leap of becoming conscious as to how the physical functions and, upon that basis, created the possibility of solving our material needs. On the next step, according to the picture of the future sketched out in this book, we will become conscious as to how the non-physical functions.

three worlds in one

In the sketch of the new paradigm here presented, it is fundamental that we do not face one physical and one non-physical world such as Descartes, among others, maintained, but one physical and (at least) two non-physical worlds. This is the first major clarification when we really get down to the business of exploring and developing technically in the non-physical field. The two non-physical worlds, here called the emotional and the rational, are each likely to be just as extensive as the physical and as different from one another as they are in relation to physical reality.
    Exploration and technical development, in the emotional world in particular, is the task of the 5th step in this scenario. The scenario is to describe a possible task, not carry it out. Its ambition is to show that there are great unsolved tasks to tackle and that even quite elementary advances will bring great benefits. This is a field where gunpowder has not yet been invented, where research and technical development are at the early âkitchen work-top levelâ and where there is far indeed to the 5th stepâs answer to Newton. It may not be so very far off in terms of time, however, for development is accelerating and, when we get under way with the transformation, this acceleration will increase.
    In addition to the three worlds, the step 5 scenario has a further fundamental tripartite division called the three aspects: the material aspect, the energy aspect and the control or consciousness aspect. In the physical world, we first learned to master the material aspect with tools of stone, bronze and, later, iron. Thereafter we learned to master the energy/movement aspect by making machines: the steam engine, the petrol engine, the electric motor and so on. Now we have also begun to master the control aspect, that which is called consciousness in humans. Machines are receiving artificial brains and software so that they can begin to think and control themselves.
    We have discovered, moreover, that all three aspects, matter, energy and control, are integrated in every individual living cell. Cells, in reality, are advanced small robots, and there are masses of them in every single green leaf on the planet.
    The scenario for the step 5 perception of reality suggests that these three aspects which are integrated in the physical world are also to be found in the non-physical. (Three worlds, all with three aspects, needs a thorough explanation. The authorâs advice is to go through this lightly to begin with, read the book and come back and look at the summary again to finish up. Figure 9.4 on page 225 can be of help.)
    In the emotional world, the material aspect, that is to say the emotional material, consists of dreams, fantasies and other images which we create and maintain both individually and collectively. This is the stuff that art, religion and myths are made of. Emotional energy, the aspect of movement in the emotional, is feelings and moods. It is this which is the driving force of history, the driving force behind markets, careers and crimes. The emotional too is controlled by software, software which functions completely differently from that which controls the rational.
    Rational material is data, facts. It is not something we can touch or feel as we can with physical material, nor something we can shape or reshape at will as we can with emotional material. Thus the rational software, the consciousness aspect, is also of particular character: it is logical, linear and rational in a characteristic way.
    The three worlds function as a unit, but they function in completely different ways, and the interaction between them also has patterns which we must understand if, for example, we are to be able to use the rational to motivate the emotional so that it can put physical action into motion. No special insight into this is needed to be able to wander down to the shop and buy a packet of cigarettes, but as soon as we consider stopping smoking, demands are often made of techniques which have so far been little developed. And, as a matter of fact, teaching robots to go down to the shop has long been impossible because the type of software and computers needed to learn to understand such everyday situations have been lacking.

the driving force of history

The driving force of history, both that of society and that of the individual, is emotional energy. It is the driving force which builds empires and fortunes, and it is the one that splits them up. Emotional energy is what brings about war and peace, friendship and enmity. Emotional energy gets us to build families, split them and gather them. It is the energy which gets us to make a career, to compete, to fight for oneâs own and otherâs rights â and it is the lack of this energy which gets us to give up. It makes no odds if we have the physical energy if we are lacking the emotional. The word emotion comes from the verb movere, to move. Behind the physical action lies an emotional movement, an emotional energy which gets us to activate and maintain the physical. It is this that we are in the process of discovering and learning to master. It will involve a dramatic improvement in human life and society, a process of liberation at least as dramatic as the one we started in the Renaissance.
    A society with greater freedom and greater warmth. The foundation for this is that human consciousness is expanded. People on step 5 will be at least as different from those of today as we are from those of the Middle Ages. What are truths today, about egoism as the driving force of mankind, for example, are no longer true on step 5 because we have acquired a conscious relation to the emotional.
    It is not to do with people becoming nicer or more moralistic, the change is not normative. It is to do with discovering that the laws of emotionality function quite differently from the laws for the physical. What the laws of emotionality and physics do have in common, however, is that they are âlaws of natureâ; they are something one discovers, not something one adopts. They are not something you can be for or against, they are something you understand or do not understand.
    It is to do with developing new understanding and new skills; it is to do with being more able, not nicer. The effect will, however, according to the picture of the future â the scenario sketched out in this book â be happier people. For, on step 5, feelings are not something one has, they are something one does.

one of the great misunderstandings

Already, now at the very early beginning of the transformation, it is possible to reveal one of historyâs greatest misunderstandings. At first we thought that the physical functioned in the same way as the emotional. People thought that what they liked, the rain and the rain god would probably also like, so they made offerings of food or even more precious things in order to get rain. Then we discovered that the physical functioned in accordance with its own laws and we learned to live with them in a relatively intelligent way. But when we had understood the physical, we drew the wrong conclusion. We behaved, and still do, as if the emotional followed the laws of physics. Now it appears that the laws of emotionality to a certain extent function quite to the contrary to those of physics.
    From physical reality we know that when we have ten apples and give five away, then we have five left. This is a property of physical matter and it is uncommonly obvious and indisputable. In addition, as small children we learn from experience that we are dependent on our parents, not just physically, but also emotionally. Children who do not receive the love and other positive emotional energies from their surroundings will be seriously damaged. These two experiences, both with exceptional pedagogical force, have led us to believe that, for independent adult individuals too, emotional energy is a limited resource that we are dependent on exchanging with our surroundings. That is why, in modern times, we have organized society as a series of mutual give-and-take relationships.
    The market and democracy are typical examples of such mutual control functions that are balanced by everyone having to give something and everyone having to get something. What we rather disparagingly call the competitive society and the ego society is a system in which the individuals mutually control one another in more or less balanced give-and-take relationships. In the future, this may come to be organized in a quite different and more positive way â because we make the discovery that emotional energy is not in short supply. The laws of emotionality on this point are quite the opposite to those of physics. Here, to begin with, it must simply be left as an assertion, but it is an assertion that all those who are willing to learn the necessary skills can test out in practice.
    In what we shall later call the 1st law of emotionality, it says: the more emotional energy you give away, the more you get. Notice though, it is not something you get back from those you give to; it comes, in that case, in addition. You get it immediately; it is a kind of through-flow from an inexhaustible source. If the stream out increases, so does the stream in. It is a through-flow, and what you send out is identical with what you get in. If you send out positive energy, positive energy flows through you. If you hate, you are filled with hatred. If you love, you are filled with love.
    Until now, we have seen this as a moral question, something normative. Now we are in the process of discovering that it is an objective relation. The moral message becomes unnecessary because we discover that it builds upon a âlaw of natureâ.
    Thereby we have discovered the foundation for a new and better way of living, and a better way of organizing society. We can move from give-and-take relations to give-give relations. This will bring about a society which is very much richer and safer than todayâs competitive society.
    To many, no doubt, this sounds like a naive utopian idea, something it indeed would have been had it been based, like traditional utopian ideas, on people improving themselves normatively, on everyone becoming nicer. But, on the contrary, this scenario builds upon the condition of our discovering a regulating law on a level with the law of gravity. It is far from certain that step 5, if it comes, will be as sketched out in this scenario, but the uncertainty is connected with a discovery, to something which is subjective today becoming objective.
    Note, however, the laws of emotionality, when they are revealed, concern the emotional and only that. Where the physical world is concerned, the laws of physics remain valid. If you have ten apples and give five away, you still have five left on step 5 too. Changes on the physical level will occur indirectly as a result of motives being changed.
    On step 5, as sketched out in this scenario, the physical production systems are aimed at being stable. Growth is replaced by stable circulation. Life is comfortable, the surroundings are safe, the population stable. This is exciting stuff for us and discussed in Part IV, but it is not here that the focus lies for the people on step 5; the physical is no goal in itself, just an appropriate means. Both the planetâs ecological limitations and the long-term technological development characteristics clearly point in the direction of the material foundation of the future being organized in a stable and comfortable way â without our descendents giving much time or attention to it. To sort out the material foundation is materialismâs great project. Robot technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other things which are on the way will be able to complete this development work.
    The new goals and challenges are connected with the further development of consciousness, exploring and learning to make use of the emotional and the rational. But there is no reason to believe that the challenges in this case will be lesser, that life will become more boring. On the contrary, it is then it begins in earnest, it is then that development really shoots ahead.

conscious evolution

From the outset, evolution, the development of life on Earth, has been to do with the development of consciousness. By means of biological evolution, the biological foundation was developed first, arriving at Humankind and its unique brain. Gradually, the emotional foundation was developed in a simple form in the higher animals, and further developed in humans. Lastly, the rational foundation was developed in the human brain and, through cultural development, in our software. Cultural development took over where the biological part of evolution stopped. As early as the 19th century, researchers pointed out that the human fetus, prior to birth, repeats the evolutionary stages and that, at an early stage, we develop the apparatus for gills and so on (see fig. 2.3, page 62). Brain researchers have shown that we do not have one brain, but a number outside of one another. The innermost, and most primitive, corresponds to that of reptiles (lizards and the like), the next we have in common with mammals, and the last, the outermost, is the only one we have wholly to ourselves. It is the large neocortex which makes us different from animals. If we then chart the steps in cultural development from when we began to cultivate the soil to the present day and correspondingly chart a humanâs psychological development from birth to adulthood, the steps in development run strikingly parallel. As individuals, you and I, roughly speaking, repeat the whole of evolution, the biological stages before birth and the cultural stages through childhood. We reach, if we succeed, as far as the society about us has come. Therefore a new 5th step does not solely mean a new cultural step; it means that the individual develops a new step beyond that which we call adult today. No relationship is more intimate than the relationship between the individual and society. Not only is the individual completely enveloped by society, it is also the case that the whole is found in the part, the whole cultural history, of which we are a part, lives in us. Not just the present but also the past lives in us. Somewhere far inside us, the caveman still lives. Fortunately, he does not appear on a daily basis but, in extreme situations, probably most of us are capable of bringing out the caveman in us and swinging a club against those who threaten our flock. This concerns both men and women, and anyone who has ever wholly brought out the âwild animalâ in them will know how frightening it is â not least for ourselves afterwards when it is hidden away again under thick layers of culture and education. Not before now, in the last couple of hundred years, have we begun to understand what we are really doing, that we are all integrated parts of a huge evolutionary project. This recognition is what forms the basis for our new goals and our new vision in the scenario which follows. It is evolutionism which takes over from materialism. For this is what it is about, directly, in everyday life and for each and every one of us â we are evolutionary creatures. Humans have always been evolutionary creatures; what is new is that on the next cultural step, the 5th, we are consciously evolutionary creatures. The purpose and meaning of life, both at the societal level and for each one of us, is evolution itself, the development of consciousness. In this work, some will have the talent for going on ahead and exploring the unknown â they will be pioneers of the 5th and later steps. It could be as researchers, developers of new techniques and so on. Others will have the talent for helping the young to live through the early steps in an harmonic way. Some will work with maintaining the material foundation, others the emotional. With an evolutionary perception of, and attitude towards, life, it will be self-evident that everyone is on the way from the same starting point towards the same goals. There are many different ways to go; finding the one most suitable for each individual is what it is about. All of us are under way. In a society based on give-give relations, it is part of the fundamental paradigm that we serve evolution and ourselves by helping others forward. Whether we go ahead and clear the way or follow behind and help late-comers, we are doing evolutionary work. It is neither the individual nor the collective that is centrally placed on step 5; it is the process, evolution itself.

Dag Andersen: The 5th Step

Translated by Tonje Gotschalksen & Neil Howard

Since moving to Norway from his native Britain ten years ago, Neil Howard has been working as teacher of English and translator within both the public and private sectors. In the same period, Norwegian Tonje Gotschalksen has been pursuing her dual career as interpreter and writer-director.

Drawing on their varied experiences, they work together as a team, most recently providing translations of both Jon Fosse and Henrik Ibsen to British theatres, as well as reports and articles for Norwegian and international businesses