Full Spectrum Socialism

The Integration of Socialism and Spirituality, Wellness, and Human Potential

Socialism. The word scares the dickens out of many Americans, conjuring up gulags, brutality, conformity, Stalin, five year plans with central planning, food shortages, lack of freedom, and more.

That does sound horrible. Here in the U.S., you want to be free to be who you want to be, without a government telling you what you can and can’t do. Right?

Except here in the U.S., it’s a specious type of freedom, bereft of thinking of the common good. Instead, it’s a mentality of a dog eat dog world, and if you want to get ahead, you have to beat the competition.

At the root of socialism is the word social, of the community, of the Commons and the common good. At the heart of freedom is the ability to do what you want and be who you want to be, to aspire to what you feel will allow you to flourish.

Yet freedom without socialism is a license for privilege and injustice, while socialism without freedom can become slavery and brutality.

We need a special type of socialism, a democratic socialism, and a special type of freedom, in order to survive and prosper into the future, and in order to ensure humanity’s further existence.

I believe it’s when there’s a full spectrum socialism, an integration of democratic socialism with the best of the values of spirituality, wellness, and human potential, that we can see the true nature of humanity shine through.

To transform the world we need to transform ourselves, and in order to transform ourselves we need to transform the world—the two are inextricably linked.

The aim of the human potential movement is for a person to realize their highest potential and live a life of happiness, creativity, and fulfillment. The belief within human potential is that humans have limitless potential, if properly accessed.

The ideas of the human potential movement come from Abraham Maslow, who developed the concept of self-actualization, of being able to actualize your full potential. Maslow understood that a person couldn’t self-actualize until their basic needs for security were met, what he called the hierarchy of needs.

Interconnected with the human potential movement and self-actualization are spirituality and wellness. People are usually interested in all three, as the desire is to embrace holistic health methods to maintain a sense of wellness, to be connected to a spiritual dimension, and to feel like you are living a life that utilizes more of your potential, helping you live a more authentic life.

The impediment to truly living this way is capitalism. Capitalism is not a holistic system. It engenders a sense of scarcity, by making you feel that you have to look out for yourself, because if you don’t, no one is going to take care of you and someone is going to take advantage of you. This leads to cultivating a narcissistic outlook, one in which your desire to be healthy, spiritual, and more authentic is framed from the perspective of “what’s in it for me,” and “how will this help me get ahead.”

Which is why, decades ago, when the human potential movement was gaining steam, that period of time was labeled the “me decade.”

Additionally with capitalism, everything becomes commodified. It’s all about, how can I monetize what I’m doing or thinking or know? This ends up creating what is known as “new age capitalism,” where people sell courses and products that aim to help people self-improve or become healthier, but in some cases can increase a person’s neuroses, as it gets them becoming even more obsessed with themselves and their own self-improvement.

When people are struggling to make ends meet, which is the case for the great majority of people living in a capitalist society, they have no time to even think about spirituality, wellness, or self-actualization.

The foundation of democratic socialism is the common good, about increasing the security of everyone, so that no one falls through the safety net and ends up homeless, living in poverty, deep in debt, or other consequences of a precarious existence. The ideal of socialism isn’t first and foremost about commodifying things in order to line your wallet, but instead to enrich everyone.

When you live a rich, spiritual life, it can add more meaning to your existence; the hope then is that living this way also expands your consciousness so that you think of the well-being of others.

Capitalism motivates people to have transactional relationships, where people look at the person they’re relating to as a means to an end, where they can use them for their own benefit.

Socialism on the other hand engenders non-transactional relationships, or as some call them, transformational relationships. These are relationships where one person does something or gives something to another without any desire for reward; the relationship itself is the reward for both parties, and often bears long lasting fruit.

Some might say that socialism and spirituality are incompatible, because as Karl Marx famously stated, “religion is the opium of the masses.” But what Marx meant by that has been widely misconstrued.

Marx’s full saying was this: “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.”

In Marx’s time, opium was legal and used as a medicinal aide to help people feel better. And so, Marx’s equation of religion and opium was a positive analogy, saying that in our heartless and soulless world, religion was necessary to help shine a light on a path towards a better world.

This spiritual light can help light the way, when integrated with socialism. It could help us bring a more enlightened consciousness to the world, one in which we collaborate and cooperate more readily in non-transactional relationships, out of a desire to bring forth the common good.

Another way that spirituality, wellness, and self-actualization can help to bring forth a new type of socialism is in the use of the mind’s potential to imagine and create a new society. This can lead to a harnessing of the power of the imagination to help envision a new type of society, one that removes capitalism from the equation and replaces it with a world that is based on love and of seeing all people and creatures as part of one large whole.

We don’t want a socialism that is a duplicate of the Soviet Union or China, states that descended into totalitarianism and took away individual freedoms. But we also don’t want a capitalist libertarian state, one in which the free markets dominate our lives.

We want something humane, in which there’s a regulation of free markets towards the common good and where we aim to not make it all about money and transactional relationships, but instead about transformational relationships.

We are looking to create something new, yet there are role models—the social democracies of Europe. While not perfect, the social democracies offer a road map towards a more fair, compassionate, just, and egalitarian society.

To get there, it isn’t sufficient to just legislate our way. We also have to change the way we think, to become more evolved as human beings, to transform who we are.

Personal evolution is the hallmark of the human potential movement. Societal evolution is the hallmark of democratic socialism. When we achieve a full spectrum socialism, an integration of democratic socialist ideals with spirituality, wellness, and human potential, it’s then that we can transform the world.