From the Prologue of Bankrolling Evolution by David Loye
In 1971 I wrote a book called The Healing of a Nation. 
Based on 350 years of American history and the most compelling social science of the time, in the closing chapter I offered a Program for a President.
The book won a national award earlier given to Martin Luther King and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. But since then nothing like the Program on the scale I outlined there has been attempted.
Here, nearly 40 years later, I am going to try again. This time I believe this new Program for a President has a good chance of being put to use for four reasons.
Foremost is the best prospect in some time for the needed President and our best chance to put the power of progressive science and progressive spirituality behind a healing presidency.
In The Healing of a Nation can be found the haunting prediction I made of what we need at what is now rapidly becoming the most crucial juncture in the history of our species on this planet. Included here in the Notes, this long unfulfilled prediction points toward the inspiring newcomer Senator Barack Obama as having the rare combination of intelligence, eloquence, moral sensitivity, organizational ability, and feeling for the role of the leader as healer required for our time. Of correlated importance is the fact of the swelling of hope and a joyful new readiness to fight for the better future among a significant number of young people—as among their elders in what remains of intelligence in America.
There is this surge of recognition that underlying all attempts to blur the issue lies what’s actually riding on the outcome of the 2008 and 2012 elections in America. There is this great new deep and driving recognition of the battle of evolutionary intelligence versus evolutionary lunacy on which all quality of life on this planet depends.
A third reason is the good feeling I have about the new way this book provides to cut through the mess to the evolutionary core. Here, in a liberation of the potentially revolutionary power of a new science of healing, can be seen the cliff edge on which we teeter between progressive leadership policies and the disaster… of a continuation of the regressive Bush years in any way or form.
Fourth is that what I propose is designed not just to empower those “on top.” For no president, or congress, or any other leadership entity alone can possibly do what’s needed in face of the size of the task revealed by the Bush years.
In a way, which still astounds me, out of this book’s new grounding in history and the case it makes for a new science of healing has emerged a device designed to give the kind of power to the people that worldwide we dream of—power to encourage not only the kind of great leadership but also the greatness among a re-awakened people that Abraham Lincoln evoked in calling for the Americans of his time to “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
Outlined in the closing chapters of this book, further detailed in its companion, Measuring Evolution, is the story of the development and potentially transforming uses for a new measure of global health and happiness for more effective guidance of governmental, industrial, and personal and social policy and action.
In comparison with all the much larger and more familiar plans and programs being proposed to help us dig out of and head off further disaster, what I propose must inevitably seem far too new and small for any useful impact. But the Bush years’ profligate and power-mad mix of massive cut back for social needs and massive increase for social lunacy will force upon America the kind of scaling back in hopes and funding that—without new ways of doing more with less money—will further accelerate disaster.
In contrast to the need for new money that won’t be there, what I propose is a comparatively easy way of guaranteeing that the expenditure of money already being spent, or required by basic necessity, steadily advances rather than checks us in place or drives us backward.
This is the vital point.
What I propose doesn’t require the customary battle for passage through a corrupted congress and hordes of lobbyists dangling millions to block progressive action. Maximizing impact for minimal investment, it can be quickly and easily put to use by every one of us in a responsible leadership position in America or anywhere else in the world. It is based on the past 40 years of research into defining what’s best designed to advance human evolution—that is, not only biological and technological evolution, but psychological, social, cultural, economic, political, educational, moral and spiritual evolution…. It’s an expression of the kind of caring, hands-on approach that counselors of every kind—psychiatrists, psychologists, priests, ministers, wise tribal elders—have over centuries brought to the unbalanced individual or family. Both scientifically and spiritually grounded, it is a measure for reaching decisions that lead to national and global health rather than sickness….
To best understand what we face and must do we must take a new look at some widely forgotten or unknown American and world history. Interlinked is the need to catch up and smarten up in understanding science. We must at last grasp how science shapes us and our future. For the incredibly poor and distorted American and global understanding of what science is and does has not only led to where we are. The numbing and dumbing down of the American and global mind now seriously threatens the future for our species and our planet.
Whether we call it that or not, the healing of nations requires the development of the new field of the psychiatry and management science of evolution. We need a new psychiatry of evolution to diagnose the problem and prescribe the course for therapy. We need a new moral-oriented management science of evolution to guide the investment of the funds needed to make therapy work.
…we can no longer afford the pathology of leadership, of enablers and followers, of regressive money, and of consequences probed and laid bare to the eye in Part I. Nor can we any longer afford the survival of the fittest, selfish gene, winner take all, wholly amoral and immoral and thereby incompetent “management science” of men and women like those who during the Bush years poured into the U.S. government and Congress to loot the treasury for their friends.
The driving urgency for this book and proposal is the fact history shows us that once those upon whom blame is focused are out of office the rush comes to sweep bad memories under the national rug.
But should this be allowed both 5,000 years of our bloody past and 300 years of psychiatry tell us that the pathology within the American heart, mind, and soul the Bush years exploited will not only long haunt the world. Without the catharsis and the action-oriented political, economic, moral and spiritual healing outlined in this report, what seized us will rise again to close out the end game for evolution against us….
To those looking for more exotic answers the focus of this report on something as commonplace as money may be jarring and seem out of place. But atop our distressingly unsuccessful earlier investment in religion, we’ve seen millions, indeed billions and even trillions spent on science and education to find our global situation becoming worse rather than better….
The time has come we must face the question of sickness versus health not just on the level for a single American president or any other individual, or just in the family, the neighborhood, the city, or nation, but globally. To shape the development of a psychiatry and a management science of evolution, on the behalf of a world whose future we have endangered, four basic questions, which form the Parts and structure for this book, must be answered by Americans….
What’s wrong with us?…
Why and how did we get sick?…
What’s the prospect for getting better? What’s worked in the past?…
How do we keep this syndrome of the worst in us from coming back again—and by the evidence of this book and countless others, much worse next time?…
