Some books have more significance than others. Most of the important books in my life have been fiction, but there are a few nonfiction titles in this category as well. I first came across Changing Images of Man (CIM) a dozen years ago while investigating conspiracy theories. Here's what I found.
In 1968, the US Office of Education partnered with The Stanford Research Institute (which later became SRI International) to study social problems and their policy implications. SRI developed a new investigative methodology to do this, gathered a team of accredited scholars, and proceeded to describe fifty different plausible alternative future histories, which it deemed 'scenarios.' It became immediately clear that very few of these scenarios could be considered at all desirable, and that pretty much every aspect of industrialized society would have to change for any of the desirable futures to be considered possible.
As other efforts of the times had come to similar conclusions, such problematic findings appeared credible in high level academic and policy circles. Though credible and intensely problematic, these findings did not appear actionable, because they implied the need to develop and adopt some fundamentally different ways of doing things. As a result, the US Office of Education began pursuing other, less daunting challenges, and SRI created its own Center for the Study of Social Policy to continue investigating desirable future histories and how to bring these about. This new SRI center obtained funding from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation to study and chart what changes in western society's underlying conceptual premises would lead to a desirable future.
SRI released the report "The Societal Consequences of Changing Images of Man" in 1974. It took nearly a decade to find a company willing to risk publishing this material, in part because it didn't fit within standard marketing categories. In 1982, with its title shortened to "Changing Images of Man," an expanded version of this work was commercially released by Pergammon Press. This publication looked at how a vast array of societal challenges were playing out over time, and how the future might consequently unfold.
When all was said and done, this book described a future societal trajectory that very closely resembles the past several decades. It accurately anticipated some of the significant challenges our society now faces, and presented some strategic suggestions for meeting these challenges. The work itself considers the long term trending of environmental, security, energy, social, food, and other problems converging into a mega crisis. This crisis, which is now appears in evidence, was viewed as the natural result of human tendencies arising from the conceptual basis and mythic stories that we use to describe ourselves and each other to ourselves and each other. This conceptual basis, and these stories, were seen to significantly define society's interactions with itself and the physical environment on which it depends.
CIM's conclusions describe three plausible outcomes to society's dilemma between industrial growth and finite global resource limits. Two of these outcomes are the result of a 'technological extrapolationist' future leading to an either/or choice between 'friendly fascism' and 'catastrophe'. The third plausible outcome involves developing a 'evolutionary transformationalist' image of man, which would promote the kinds of decisions that might lead to a more viable society.
It summarizes these conclusions with the following statement:
If the post-industrial era of the future is dominated by the industrial era premises, images, and policies of the past, the control of deviant behavior needed to make societal regulation possible would in all likelihood require the application of powerful socio- and psycho-technologies. The result could well be akin to what has been termed "friendly fascism-a managed society which rules by a faceless and widely dispersed complex of warfare-welfare-industrial-communications-police bureaucracies with a technocratic ideology." Evidence exists that this sort of future is already nascent.
CIM further details six characteristics of an 'adequate image of humankind for the post-industrial future.' This 'evolutionary transformationalist' image of man was considered to:
Convincing people to adopt such conceptual and mythic underpinnings was viewed as one of very few plausible ways that we might be able to maintain a complex society through the coming inevitable transition. If these evolutionary transformationalist characteristics seem vaguely familiar, it may be because this work subtly influenced the tone of much subsequent discourse around societal wellbeing.
By the time I started looking into it, CIM was described by several books and websites as part of a vast mind control conspiracy. I read the work carefully and came to different conclusions. I found that CIM was ahead of its time, that its advice went largely unheeded by societal decision makers in its era, and that many of its concepts could be applied to making sense of present-day issues. After studying the work, I sent an email to O.W. Markley, the book's listed project director, and a correspondence commenced. Over time, we became friends. 
Eventually, I started to wonder why Changing Images of Man had become a target for the criticism of fringe authors. Books like Ken Bowers' Hiding in Plain Sight and Jim Keith's Mind Control World Control treated CIM as an important part of a vast and secret plot to produce many of the very societal problems that CIM's authors explicitly attempted to ameliorate. Keith and others insisted that CIM was all about mind control for global domination, but I found no evidence of that.
What I did find has to do with the backlash against Marilyn Ferguson's bestselling 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy. Ferguson's book drew heavily on ideas from CIM and helped to cohere the New Age movement. The Aquarian Conspiracy was published prior to CIM's commercial release. Citizens for LaRouche - a hate group with a massive propaganda machine - interpreted this timing as evidence that the book was part of Stanford Research Institute's role in an elite conspiracy to steal Americans' souls.
The nonsense this group was spewing thirty years ago is not unlike some of the nonsense people are posting online today. Conspiracy theories about a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network publication titled "Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development" are a popular example of this nonsense. It's as if people don't even know how policy-planning groups work. But I digress. Here are some quotes from "How America was Subverted: Stamp out the Aquarian Conspiracy," Citizens for LaRouche, June 1980:
"Every unwashed environmentalist has come out of a social engineering laboratory; every drug addict is the product of some government-sponsored or foundation - sponsored brainwashing project; every yoga - freak, every transcendental meditationist, every biorhythm kook is merely the human refuse that has been excreted from some government-sponsored, foundation - funded project somewhere. There are no exceptions to this."
"The body snatchers of the aquarian conspiracy are after you. And among them are the president of the United States and the National Security Advisor."
Rhetoric like this gained traction following the 1960s, with multitudes of fearful haters looking for scapegoats on whom to blame their eroding socioeconomic power. The LaRouche propaganda machine capitalized on their discomfort to spread its malignant theories from the 1970s until the early 2000s. These theories legitimized bigotry, demonized diversity, and fundamentally misconstrued the threats our society faced.
From what I gather, the conspiracy theories about CIM all stem from the baseless conjectures of the LaRouche propaganda machine in furtherance of an arguably fascist agenda. I wish people had been mind controlled into an egalitarian Aquarian Age, guided by the considered findings of reputable think tanks. But the world never worked like that. It was always much messier.
Overall, I'm glad that I found Changing Images of Man. It was well worth the read. Communicating about it made me a friend. And its misinterpretation by haters was at least interesting enough to blog about.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
Read my novels:
Check out the comic I wrote:
Read my autobiographical monograph:
