Mike Vargo: The Insanity of Our Times, According to Philip Slater

Nothing explains everything, but some things explain a lot. The science of physics still lacks a unified field theory. Nor does such a theory exist for understanding human behavior. But nineteen years ago, in 2005, I was asked to read and comment on a manuscript that amazed me by how much light it shed on the latter. 

The book-length document was titled Temporary Insanity. Written by an unusual scholar for a general audience, it proposed a new way of thinking about the turmoil we experience in our modern era, on levels from the social and political to the personal. What struck me deepest was the underlying concept — a very simple model of the kinds of choices we make in relating to the world around us. While the model didn’t account for all that we do, it rang true. And rings just as true now. 

The book eventually made it to print, slightly revised and retitled. Unfortunately it hasn’t come close to being widely read. I am writing this piece for two reasons: to give the book’s messages a little more airplay. And to tell, in brief, the story of the author and his previous work. The story is an intellectual detective tale, showing how an astute thinker’s thinking evolved over time. What I hope you will get is a look at what it’s like to try to figure out the puzzle called “we the people.”

**

In springtime of 2005 I was riding the momentum of a middle-aged career change. After working as a journalist, I had gone freelance and found a new specialty: helping social scientists and similar types with their books. The projects ranged from editing a book about postcommunist Eastern Europe, to co-writing one on fundamental socioeconomic changes in the U.S. Fascinating stuff, wherein the challenge was to make complex doings clear to the average reader. 

Then a dear friend asked a favor. Jerry Starr, a sociologist, told me that a former professor and advisor from his student days — an older man he admired — was trying to finish a late-life book. The man had sent Jerry his most recent draft, inviting feedback. Jerry thought the draft needed work and wished I would offer suggestions. 

I left Jerry’s house carrying an 8½ x 11 stationary box with a printout of the manuscript stacked neatly inside. Critiquing something that size for no pay was a hefty request. But Jerry was eager to send my comments to the author, and though I didn’t know the author, what I could learn about Philip Slater intrigued me.

**

The dream of many a sociology professor is to win fame as a public intellectual — to hold high rank within the profession and to be read, quoted, and interviewed beyond it on topics of interest to the society at large. Decades earlier, Philip Slater had achieved that dream. From the 1960s into the start of the ‘70s, while rising to department head at Brandeis University, he wrote eye-opening articles and books. Together with the management scholar Warren Bennis, Slater wrote a series of pieces laying out themes that others would echo for years to come: New technologies and social trends are creating an era of constant change. Both in business firms and in governments, authoritarian command-and-control systems may seem good for getting things done, but they’re too rigid to respond well to changing demands. The future will belong to democratic, people-participatory systems, which despite being messier are more adaptive. (In a famous 1964 article, Slater and Bennis predicted the fall of the Soviet Union for these reasons. The USSR, strong at the time, slid into collapse mode twenty-five years later.) 

Slater then scored a solo hit with his 1970 book The Pursuit of Loneliness. In a jam-packed 150 pages, the book painted a sweeping overview of the malaise then troubling mainstream U.S. society, and the rebellions against it. Slater traced much of the malaise to a cultural imbalance. Every culture, he wrote, encourages a person to develop a mixture of traits: independence and competitiveness on the one hand, interdependence and cooperation on the other. American culture was tilted far to the individual/competitive end of the scale. And among the American middle class, Slater saw a spectrum of unhappy results. 

One was a “fanatical acquisitiveness” of consumer goods, a spectacle of “people already weighted down with possessions acting as if every object they did not own were bread withheld from a hungry mouth.” There was the frustration of finding that in a mass-market society, where even the standards of success are mass commodities and everyone is chasing them, it’s hard to stand out as unique. Slater also noted a fixation on private ownership and control — private transportation, a private home in the suburbs, etc. — which, unsurprisingly, left people feeling isolated: “We interact largely with extensions of our own egos … There is an uneasy, anaesthetized feeling about this kind of life — like being trapped forever inside an air-conditioned car with power steering and power brakes and only a telephone to talk to.”

Other effects included a powerful impulse to squelch anyone or thing perceived as an unpleasant other: exclusionary racism, the Vietnam War. And a bizarre faith in technology, with its bounty of super-weapons and super-cosmetics, as the savior of a nation of lonely souls. (In fact, wrote Slater, “Technology saves us from having to cooperate.”) Slater saw the Sixties counterculture and liberation movements as being driven by high ideals but unable, in themselves, to build the city on the hill that many hoped for. He argued that along with near-term reforms, America needed “a long-term thrust at altering motivation.” The Pursuit of Loneliness ended on a hopeful note:  

“It is the structured narcissism of the old culture that brings down upon our heads all of the evils we detest … Nothing stands in our way except our invidious dreams of personal glory [and] our horror of group coercion … If we can overcome this horror, however, and mute this vanity, we may again be able to take up our original utopian task.”

**

Philip Slater didn’t fit the typical profile of a nagging doomsayer. He was handsome, friendly, and upbeat. He beamed a hearty smile in magazine photos and gave engaging, thoughtful interviews. Surely a star on the rise. 

Then in 1971, shortly after his book was published, Slater walked away from that staircase to stardom. He left Brandeis, left academic life in general. His first move was a charitable one, cofounding a personal growth and counseling center for low-income people in the Boston area. After that he headed west and, as the cliche would put it, drifted into obscurity. 

But the obscurity was only relative and it suited him. Slater was a cross-disciplinary thinker, who once said his scholarly approach was to follow “the path of least specialization.” (A single sample of his writing might mingle references to psychology, ancient mythology, political theory, pop music, mysticism, and quantum mechanics.) Leaving academe freed him to investigate life from many angles and express what he saw in many forms. He settled in Santa Cruz, a nexus of West Coast investigation and expression. Short of funds, he shed possessions and lived frugally. He kept writing — a 1980 book, Wealth Addiction, won a following among readers wishing to break the grip — and he branched out beyond analytic nonfiction. Slater wrote novels. He wrote and acted in plays. In 1990, when Harvard Business Review reprinted the 1964 Slater-Bennis article about democracy and the Soviet Union, Slater’s author-ID line listed him as artistic director of the Santa Cruz County Actors’ Theatre.

And so it went until the spring of 2005. By that time Phil Slater was 78, an old lion gathering his thoughts and themes for a final roar. The product, a work in progress, sat on a desk far from Santa Cruz in my home in Pittsburgh. I lifted the lid of the box and plunged in.

**

The cover page displayed the full working title: TEMPORARY INSANITY / Living in a Transitional Era. Interesting! Then, alas, came the opening pages of Chapter 1. The opening was a mess, right from the initial fanfare — a string of apparently random, bullet-pointed factoids that read like a madman’s PowerPoint, not a serious book. These segued into rambling paragraphs, followed by a bold proclamation that “the ending of an old world, the beginning of a new one” had arrived. 

Were we instead seeing the end of Mr. Slater’s coherence? I felt a hot blush around the ears because of the jam I’d gotten into by promising feedback. Here was an author whose credentials far exceeded mine. Was there a delicate way to say he might have exhausted his supply of marbles? 

Then again, writers often misfire when writing drafts. Especially with openings. They are tricky to do, and get trickier if you are tempted to try to compose the most stirring overture since William Tell. Aim for the moon, land in a muddle. 

So I kept reading. And before long I found myself pacing around the room, as if looking for people to share my excitement with. On reaching the end, I sat and stared in wonder at the pile of manuscript pages. I felt I’d been granted access to an important truth, glaringly simple and obvious — obvious, that is, now that someone had pointed it out. 

**

Popular psychology and folk wisdom tend to sort people into two kinds: extraverts and introverts. Optimists and pessimists. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, ad infinitum. Phil Slater took a broader view, knowing that we are shaped by the situations we face and by the people around us. This makes us creatures of a culture, from which we learn mindsets for interpreting the world and corresponding “systems” of behavior for coping with it. 

And that was where Slater drew a two-kinds line. An old mindset, an old system, has been dominant worldwide for millennia, he wrote. The system manifests itself in myriad forms but the driving principle is always the same. He called it “Control Culture” — built around the drive to master and control nature, other people, the laws and rituals of life.

Further, he said, the influence of Control Culture is now fading while another approach comes to fore: “Connecting Culture.” This involves seeing ourselves, others, and nature as parts of an interconnected whole. The preferred course of action is to seek and nurture connections for mutual benefit. Quoting Slater directly,

Control Culture’s “concern with mastery led to the creating of rigid mental and physical compartments, a static vision of the universe, a deep dependence on authoritarian rule, a conviction that order was something that had to be imposed, and a preoccupation with combat.” 

Connecting Culture’s “guiding impulse is to dissolve mental walls and permeate artificial boundaries, to recognize interdependence. It has a dynamic view of the universe, a democratic philosophy, and sees order as something that evolves, as it does in Nature, from spontaneous interaction.” 

In the 2005 draft, Slater reported a shift from the old culture to the new occurring on many fronts: more people caring about the ecological health of the planet. Economic and social liberalization in countries where central planning and iron-fisted rule once prevailed. Women participating more fully in societies that had pigeonholed them. (According to Slater, control over women has long been a key marker of Control Culture.) Corporations moving from top-down, hierarchical management to “flatter,” openly networked structures, and more.

Reading the list today, you might be skeptical. Haven’t these trends been sandbagged or derailed since 2005? Climate-change denial lives on, and essentially was U.S. policy under the Trump administration of 2017-2020. Russia, China, and other once-liberalizing countries have reverted to autocracy. The U.S. Supreme Court gutted women’s reproductive rights, and the heads of big tech companies now constitute a worrisome new oligarchy. Had Slater lit a victory cigar prematurely?

Not at all. He had seen “backlash against Connecting Culture” as inevitable: “Old cultural systems are not abandoned without fierce resistance. As they sense an old cultural system dying around them, those who espouse it will assert its values more harshly, more stridently, more desperately.” 

Citing modern history, Slater noted that “extreme forms of authoritarianism [arose] when democracy was spreading,” which indeed was the case during the early to later 20th century. Russians overthrew the tsar and wound up with Stalin. Germany’s Weimar Republic gave way to the Nazi regime; subsequent years brought regimes of liberators-turned-dictators in postcolonial nations of the Global South.   

Thus the “temporary insanity” of our era. In realms from politics to personal life, we’re being torn by the tensions, schisms, and back-and-forthness that come with the transition from Control to Connecting Culture. 

Slater speculated that Connecting Culture is not new; that it had been the worldview of people in prehistoric times:“When we were gathering, hunting, and fishing, we lived much like other species. We knew we were part of Nature, part of a much larger organic complex … But with agriculture and animal husbandry we began to set ourselves apart, psychologically, from the rest of Nature.” This step brought the ascendance of Control Culture, which over the years “created civilization with all its wonders.” Yet it also created a raft of obsessions. Humans became obsessed with hierarchy (since masses of Controllers needed higher-up Controllers to control them). With conflict and carnage (since “living things aren’t all that crazy about being controlled”). And, as Slater saw it, the culture bred a persistent but hopeless obsession with attaining security, stability, and certainty for all time. 

Spirituality and religion changed, too: “In keeping with the Controller passion for hierarchy, all deities were removed from the earth and elevated to the sky. Instead of a Goddess who was everywhere, Controllers introduced Gods who were elsewhere.” Moreover, Slater wrote, internal contradictions came about. Most of today’s major religions were founded by “ardent Connectors” such as the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, but were modified afterward by “centuries of Contoller priesthoods.” Religions thus came to have “strong Connector themes” embedded in Controller overlays of “repressive, fear-driven” rules and doctrines. 

** 

Overall, said the manuscript, one could see the Control era as a phase of human development that has become self-limiting. Control Culture propelled humankind from infancy through its teens, but now many of the culture’s elements are unsustainable. Today’s ever-changing, interlinked world calls for a more evolved version of the Connecting Culture seeded ages before. And its emergence is bound to be choppy, with breakthroughs here, setbacks there: “A wall comes down in Berlin, but walls go up in Israel and on the U.S.-Mexico border.” 

Slater added caveats and qualifiers to his analysis. “This cultural divide is not a Left-Right split,” he wrote in one passage. “Communists and the Radical Right share many Controller values.” More fundamentally, he warned that his concepts shouldn’t be taken as precise portraits of complex realities: “‘Control Culture’ and ‘Connecting Culture’ are logical constructs, ideal types … for we are all well-stocked with both Controller and Connector traits.”

Therefore, the eventual triumph of Connecting Culture won’t mean the end of Control Culture; “life will always be a mixture of the two.” Controller traits will, however, “become less dominant.” And “the balance in the world” will shift as Connector values shift our inner balances toward a new synthesis, more in tune with the world and with who we really are.

** 

Slater had sent the draft to several readers. I knew that at least one had been severely critical. Despite Slater’s caveats, this reader thought the core argument was too simplistic and too ambitious in scope, using only two human tendencies to interpret the entire trajectory of our species. The critic urged Slater to rethink and rewrite from the ground up.

When I typed my comments I urged him not to. In my view, simplicity and scope were the virtues of the manuscript. If the analysis had gaps in it or was spread thin, that didn’t concern me. I wasn’t looking for an ironclad theory of everything. Just for a way into the puzzle. A lever that could pry open new and useful insights. The worth of any concept depends on how useful it is. To me, the Controller-Connector framework showed great potential as an aid to thinking about all sorts of human phenomena. 

I had already begun looking at (and still look at) my own behavior in these terms. When interacting with others in any situation — working together, leading a meeting, hosting a party, or simply getting along with people — I often ask, Am I trying to connect or control? (Usually, connecting works better. But I am also more able to recognize when it’s time to exert control.) Controller-Connector is equally useful for a perspective on public affairs, and whatever the case, it helps me see where others are coming from. Those people fear losing control. This person wants to connect, so shut up and listen. 

In my feedback on the draft, I said a stronger opening was needed and suggested some rhetorical tweaks in later chapters. But the main message was to start moving the manuscript to print while fine-tuning. After connecting Phil with a New York literary agent, I stepped out of the loop, and the game was on. 

**

The critical reader had been right about one thing: that the manuscript would be a tough sell to publishers. Perhaps the content or the style didn’t ring the right bells, and I’m guessing part of the problem was that Slater no longer had a hot, marketable reputation. Like the man in the Dylan song, he’d been “famous long ago / For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row.” Now the question was whether anybody cared to release his latest tunes.

Finally the book found a home with an academic publisher in England. It came out including Slater’s final revisions, many of them minor, a few not. The title had changed from Temporary Insanity to one quite different: The Chrysalis Effect. This reflected Phil’s new opening. In an analogy he credited to Elisabet Sahtouris — a biologist and social thinker — he compared the turmoil of our times to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. The insect begins as a leaf-eater, gobbling up huge amounts of green resources. Later it emerges as a butterfly, one of nature’s cross-pollinators. And in between comes the chrysalis stage, where the gobbler is encased a cauldron of wrenching cellular changes and realignments that produce the transformation — an apt metaphor for the state we’re in.

Also, throughout the book, Slater changed “Connecting Culture” and “Connector” to “Integrative Culture” and “Integrator.” Sadly this lost the smooth alliteration of Controller-Connector. (My brain still insists on thinking “Connector.”) Yet it seems the change conveyed Phil’s thinking more accurately. Out west, he’d had association with the California Institute for Integral Studies, where “Integral” means a fusion of intellect with spirit and Eastern with Western thought. And the new wording worked better in certain parts of the book. For example,

“Integrative Culture is built upon and incorporates Control Culture … Integrators are trying to create a more complex unity out of the rich and dissonant elements introduced by the exuberant clashes of the Controller Age.”

The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture was published in 2009 by Sussex Academic Press (later acquired by Liverpool University Press). The book remains in print, although my city’s extensive public library system doesn’t have it. Recently its Amazon sales rank has hovered around 2,000,000th of all books sold. Which means that every once in a while, somebody buys a copy.  

Postscript

On one occasion, during the search for a publisher, l met Philip Slater. My friend Jerry took me along to a sociology conference where Phil was present. Each of us was scheduled to give talks and do things, so we met in a series of sorta-brief encounters. I didn’t get the full Slater experience but first impressions were vivid. 

Amid setup for a presentation, in strode a trim, white-haired man who looked liked an advertisement for 80 is the new 60. He was genial in a gentlemanly, old-school way, leading with a sincere pleased-to-meet-you rather than a forced hug. He projected a healthy inner blend of self-assurance and modesty. I detected no attempt to emanate guru status. This bestowed comfort.

We talked about the book for a while; touched on the conference agenda. Then somehow, I defaulted to the role of a petitioner seeking wisdom from a guru. When Phil asked what I’d been working on, out came a jumble of worries and frustrations. A collaborative project had hit a dead end, and in my own writing, my mind often felt trapped in orbit — circling the subject matter, unsure where to land. The words that I settled for felt superficial. Time and again the real deal glimmered in sight, but eluded me. Phil nodded sympathetically while I poured it all out. 

His advice? I can only recall the bottom line, short and sweet. Don’t worry. Keep going.

After the conference I never saw him again. Philip Slater died in 2013, at the age of 86, survived by his wife, four children, and their descendants. His body of work included ten nonfiction books, two fantasy novels, a slew of plays, and more. 

As for me, I can’t hope to make such a contribution. But I keep going. 

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Mike Vargo is a journalist, theater critic, essayist and spoken word performer based in Pittsburgh.

Copyright 2024 Mike Vargo