How to Save the World: Actually Achieving Personal Evolution

Abstract: This article carries forward the ideas in Savage’s book with Bernard Phillips, Creating Life Before Death: Before Disaster Strikes the Ship of State (2nd ed., 2024), as illustrated by the 55 references in the bibliography. By reversing that book’s sequence of ideas followed by stories, so as to present stories followed by their sociological implications, Savage looks toward communicating the full power of sociology for solving individual and world problems. He sees the result as nothing less than the framework for a new social movement, an Individual Evolutionary Movement. The key figures in the bibliography—Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Addams, Dewey, Korzybski, Polak, Mills, Gouldner, Gould, Kelly, Phillips, Savage, Busch, Plotkin, Levin and Turner—succeeded in laying the groundwork for this paper with their focus on personal and world problem-solving. By centering on the concept of INTERACTION, the paper integrates these ideas, working toward fulfilling the vision of the “dynamic duo”—Phillips and Savage—of a social movement delivering an incredibly effective science of human behavior in the hands of the ordinary individual. Our times, with unsolved problems threatening the very existence of the human race, call for nothing less than such an Individual Evolutionary Movement. It opens up to individuals of all political persuasions and all nations with its focus on moving democratic institutions a step further, following the vision of Jane Addams: “The Cure for the Ills of Democracy——Is More Democracy”. That vision extends to John Dewey’s mantra to “educate every individual into the full stature of his possibility.” In the view of Phillips and Savage, that possibility is limitless. Metaphorically, they see the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, Dorothy and the Munchkins as learning to travel on the yellow brick road with no end, carrying forward the visions of Addams and Dewey and stretching beyond Emerald City.