It wasn't supposed to be this way. Half a century ago, humanistic thinkers were heralding a great awakening that would usher in a golden age of enlightened living. Pathfinders like Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollow May, and Viktor Frankl were laying the groundwork for a new social order distinguished by enlightened living. This tantalizing vision was the antithesis of our society of blinkered narcissists and hypnogogic materialists. Dumbness was not our destiny. Planetary annihilation was not the plan. By the 21st century, we were supposed to be the rarefied “people of tomorrow,” inhabiting a sagacious and wholesome world.

Erich Fromm's 1955 tome The Sane Society signaled the debut of the one-dimensional “marketing character” -- a robotic all-consuming creature who is “well-fed, well-entertained, but passive, unalive, and lacking in feeling.” Yet Fromm was confident that we could avoid further descent into the fatuous. He forecast a Utopian society based on the principle of “humanistic communitarianism” that would nurture our higher “existential needs.”

In his 1961 book, On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers wrote “When I look at the world I am pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.” While acknowledging consumer culture's seductive invitation to disown our higher selves and enter the pointless dreamland of trinkets and desire, he believed that we -- the “people of tomorrow” – would minister over a growth-oriented society, with “growth” defined as the full and positive unfolding of human potential.

We would be upwardly driven toward authenticity, social equality, and the welfare of coming generations. We would revere nature, realize the unimportance of material things, and hold a healthy skepticism about technology and science. An anti-institutional vision would enable us to fend off dehumanizing bureaucratic and corporate authority as we united in an ongoing realization of our “higher needs.”

One of the most famous concepts in the history of psychology is Abraham Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” often illustrated by a pyramid. Once widely accepted, it was also inspired by a faith in innate positive human potential. Maslow claimed that, rather than being materialistic by design, human beings naturally switch attention to higher-level needs (e.g., intellectual, spiritual, social, existential) once they have met lower-level material ones. In moving up the pyramid, and “becoming,” we channel ourselves toward wisdom, beauty, truth, love, gratitude, and respect for life. Instead of a society that catered to, and thus maintained, the lowest common denominator, Maslow imagined one that prospered in the course of promoting mature “self-actualized” individuals.

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