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Unlike the other three traditional ways, the fourth way exists in everyday life. It is therefore important that we have a basic understanding of what constitutes a healthy, functioning nation, as well as the conditions that make a nation dysfunctional. People in general waste an enormous amount of energy talking about and worrying about politics. This is especially true now because we live in a time of cultural and political upheaval. The question for us is this: does the fourth way (or esoteric thought in general) tell us anything about the principles that govern the creation and destruction of nations?  I would say that it doesn’t tell us anything directly, but it does tell us a great deal indirectly because it describes the mechanics of human psychology. In particular, the fourth way gives us a detailed picture of the right and wrong work of the four lower centers. The idea here is that the conditions that allow for the possibility of individual inner work are the same principles that determine whether a nation supports the potential of its citizens. Put simply the four lower centers play a role on the scale of nations because they determine the needs of the citizens that make up a nation. To some extent, an individual must balance his four lower centers to achieve his potential; that is, his mind, or intellectual function, must work out intellectual questions, his emotional function must deal with emotional issues, and his instinctive/moving functions must negotiate the world and care for his physical needs. In the same way, a nation that wants to give its citizens a chance to find their potential must allow its four major institutions or categories of institutions to play their roles without being overtaken or overwhelmed by the other three. In other words, there must be balance. The four categories of institutions are business, government, religion or myth, and the arts, the press, and education.

Gurdjieff described an Eastern allegory to his students that compares the lower centers of an unprepared man to a house full of servants.

The servants do what they like. The house is in a state of complete chaos… The cook works in the stables, the coachman in the kitchen, and so on. ~ P. D. Ouspensky

In another example, Gurdjieff explains why the intellectual center should not drive a car.

If one drives a car with the help of one’s mind, one can go only in the lowest gear. The mind cannot keep pace with all the movements…  To drive at full speed, especially in the streets of a large town, while steering with the help of one’s mind is absolutely impossible. ~ G. I. Gurdjieff

In order to understand this allegory we must have already verified, on some level, that man is a microcosmos. Man is a microcosmos because, like the universe, he has within him different layers of realities. What this means is that man’s inner life contains the possible experience of different worlds. For instance, the instinctive center’s legitimate function is the care and protection of the body, but it is incapable of understanding and empathizing with other people. The energy that sustains emotion is much faster and finer, and it is needed in order to understand and work with others in a cooperative and tolerant manner.

Racism and religious discrimination are good examples of instinctive reactions to events that require the perception of the emotional center. The instinctive center, instead of seeing that people are essentially alike, sees the differences between themselves and others. (When I say that people are essentially alike, I mean we all have the same possibilities, that we all suffer, that we all feel joy and fear, and that we all know loss.) Since the instinctive center is naturally competitive, it finds ways to marginalize people of other races and religions because it is either afraid of them or is convinced that they are inferior because of their differences.

The predominant development of any one center at the expense of the others produces an extremely one-sided type of man, incapable of further development. ~ G. I. Gurdjieff

When we take this principle of balancing the four lower centers to the scale of nations, business mirrors the instinctive center; government, the moving center; religion and myth, the emotional center; and the press, the arts, and education, the intellectual center. I am not saying that these institutions are devoid of the elements contained in the other institutions—for instance, art needs to have an emotional element if it is to be effective and government must have an intellectual element to be efficient. What I am saying is that these institutions act on different sides of man and therefore all four play a necessary role in a culture that aspires to support the needs and potential of its citizens. In a nutshell, what this means is that the true responsibility of politicians and rulers is to make certain that all these institutions can function in a free and healthy way.

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Business. The instinctive center is necessarily selfish, as is business. Business is the method that an individual citizen uses to provide for himself and his or her family. What is important to understand about business is that it is not meant to give meaning to our lives. Its domain is to provide a scaffold so that emotional experiences and intellectual pursuits can be sought out and concentrated on without too much interference from the day-to-day cares of the body. When moneymaking is imagined to be a source of meaning, there are always problems, both on the scale of an individual life and on the scale of nations. On an individual human scale moneymaking, because it provides no lasting meaning, can easily become greed, an obsessive circle of believing that if I just had a little more money, I’d be satisfied. This leads to cheating, lying, and, if it is carried to an extreme, a lack of regard for the property and the lives of others. A war fought to steal the resources or the boundaries of another country is an example of greed on the level of nations. What we see is that the same principles that motivate an individual or a corporation can motivate a nation. For instance, it is universally believed that if Putin is successful in Ukraine, he will attempt to take another country, despite the enormous losses in Ukraine and Russia. In other words, his greed for power will not be sated by a win in Ukraine.

Government. The moving center is a servant center. Compared to the emotional center and the instinctive center it has few needs. The moving center takes us to the refrigerator when we’re hungry and drives us to our friend’s house when we want company. It is no accident that politicians and soldiers speak of their work in government as service. Ideally government’s role should be to care for and watch over the instinctive, emotional, and intellectual needs of its citizens. It is the role of government to protect, support, regulate, and provide access to the other three institutions.

Religion and Myth.  In individuals, the emotional center is what allows us to understand other people and to know how to act and react in their presence. When it works with its own energy, it is also our best mechanical window into higher centers. But for the emotional center to work consistently with its own energy, inner work is needed. For the most part, the emotional center works with the energy of the other centers. When the instinctive center tries to take on the role of the emotional center, the result is judgment, prejudice, condemnation, and, in extreme cases, persecution. When the intellectual center acts for the emotional center the result is laws and commandants that have nothing to do with conscience. Religion in society should play a role, if not in bringing people together, at least in helping diverse people understand each other. Unfortunately, it just as often plays a role in separating people because of their differences. This happens when religious leaders promote the protection of instinctive needs and formatory ideas instead of advocating emotional understanding.

The Press, the Arts, and Education. The press, the arts, and education are lumped together because they have the same purpose in society: to observe and to talk to a culture about itself.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. ~ Arthur Miller

In art the image of a society is transformed; in the press and in education it is not, or should not be, transformed. The role of the intellectual center in man is to formulate aims and direction. In the esoteric allegory of the carriage, the intellectual center plays the role of the driver, with the instinctive/moving center being the carriage and the emotional center being the horses. Not all art is socially motivated, but that doesn’t matter because any real artist will manage to communicate something about his culture no matter what themes he explores. His themes, for example, may be determined by what he finds lacking in a society or by what he imagines a society to be capable of achieving. Education is a method for a society to learn about itself by providing knowledge already verified by past generations, and the press, in its purest form, is the day-to-day update of the facts that affect a nation.

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Now that the ideas and principles are laid out, let’s look at a few examples of unbalance on the scale of nations.

It is generally thought that the Soviet Union failed because American capitalism, its main competitor, was a more robust system than Soviet communism, but it is more likely that it failed because in the Soviet Union, there was an attempt by the government to control not only business but also religion and the press and the arts. The Soviet Union was an experiment in extremism; it was an attempt to replace the four categories of institutions with one institution, government. Soviet communism was a flawed system because it was tragically one-dimensional—in this case utilitarian—and was therefore subject to despotism and all the other abuses that come along with an imbalance of power.

The American experiment, if it fails, will do so for the same reason, except in the case of the United States the dominant institution is not government; it is business.

You often hear it said that the problems in the United States are the fault of big government when in reality most of our problems are the result of business overstepping its natural domain and trying to control government, the press, the arts, and even religion. A powerful corporate lobby has led to many of the problems we now face. The gun problem and an extremely dysfunctional healthcare system are both the result of a weak government that cannot anymore make common-sense regulations. Income inequality is another problem that is a direct result of corporate overreach. In the last forty years the government of the United States has turned away from its legitimate responsibility—the protection and care of its citizens, especially those citizens who need it the most—and has served the business world and its worse vices. The corporate class has successfully demonized the government to distract the population from its excesses and has sold its flawed version of happiness–possessing more things–as the American dream. The idea that the government should be run like a business, which had been percolating for decades, was realized in 2016. The result was predictable: the government instead of serving all the people (or at least as many as possible), began to serve only those that gave its leaders some profit. We saw selfishness institutionalized, and the people who needed protection the least, protected and pandered to.

The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves. ~ Abraham Lincoln

This was compounded by the problem of corporate overreach in the arts and in the press. The benchmark for success in the arts in the United States at the present moment is not a truthful or revelatory description of our history or our present reality, but rather how much money a project makes. This has forced many of our most promising artists, if they want to be heard at all, to become entertainers instead of thinkers and social critics, which means that in a time of crisis our artists and journalists, whose job it is to observe, inform, and educate are marginalized because they are only ‘entertainers’ or because they lack celebrity status.

The overreach of business into journalism is also very problematic. The idea of reporting the news has become a competition of ratings and of attracting advertisers, which has led to a penchant for reporting the most sensational news stories rather than the most important stories. This encourages extremists to continue to commit more and more sensational and violent acts; it also marginalizes thinkers and politicians who have a balanced and sensible view of events. Business tends to make everything into a competition, a my-product-is-better-than-your-product mentality. And it uses advertisements–short, suggestive messages–to communicate its needs. This is appropriate if you’re selling soap, but if it is your aim is to report the news about a senator or a president, then you end with exactly what we see now, misinformation, out-and-out lying, and coverage that takes on a horserace mentality, where the aim is to generate excitement rather than to communicate complex social and political ideas.

Journalism and education, in their best incarnations, should create discussion, not confirm bias.

The framers of the US Constitution clearly understood the necessity of balance and set up their system of checks and balances to try to avert the problems they saw in European systems of government. They saw the dangers of allowing religion to dominate government—they had witnessed it in recent history—but what they didn’t foresee was the rise of the corporation. If they had, I’m guessing that they would have put restraints on the influence of business over government, as they had with religion.

At this point, the passing of laws that would put the same kinds of separations between business and government, as we have with religion, would find little support among lawmakers. This is so because the people who are needed to pass the laws are the same ones who depend on contributions from businesses for their reelection. It is a circle that will be difficult to break.

The great irony of corporate overreach is that it is destroying the fabric of American society, which is needed for business to flourish. In other words, the corporate community will eventually, by subjecting the other three institutions to its dominance, destroy itself.

History gives us many examples of cultures that were dominated by religion. When the Catholic Church dominated nations in the Middle Ages, we found many of the same problems we now see in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia; that is, persecution, enforced morality, and disastrous crusades. And of course, now we see this trend in Europe and the United States. Though religion always has a social and moral role to play in a culture, it is primarily an institution of individual enlightenment. It should be an institution that changes the way individual men and women see themselves and the world, and this change, which is essentially revelatory, can never be forced on others. Religion’s primary value in society is that it helps form good and, sometimes, great men and women.

One of the many unfortunate consequences of religious extremism is that it discredits texts that were written to teach illumination. When extremists of any religion justify violence and intolerance because of a misreading or a distortion of spiritual texts, they dishonor the texts and the tradition they mistakenly believe they are promoting.

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This is just a sketch. The nations of which we are citizens are complex and cannot be easily analyzed in a short essay. But it is a beginning. It gives us a way to begin to think about the problems that face us, and a way to help us judge the politicians who want our support.

It is also important to remember that not all social problems have political solutions; some social problems are rooted in spiritual issues that cannot be changed if people remain as they are. Real or lasting outer change can only be affected by inner change. In other words, the world will be different only when people become different.

In the fourth way the world is our denying force. Unlike the fakir or the monk, we don’t torture the body or isolate ourselves from the world; instead, we find a way to use the difficulties created by life to increase our valuation for the kind of focus that is needed to connect to higher centers. Our work toward trying to achieve a permanent connection to higher centers is fueled by our day-to-day, hour-to-hour, moment-by-moment transformations. When things go wrong, even horribly wrong, our fallback position is self-remembering. Put simply, transformation can be seen as replacing worry, disillusionment, and anger with self-remembering.

We don’t need to cut ourselves off from the world because, like the stoics, we have the tools to transform whatever difficulties life brings. But without some insight into events on the scale of nations, we will not be able to grasp what is possible and not possible for us as individuals, and we will also be able to recognize candidates who have no understating of what it means to create a healthy, functioning nation, or to heal a nation that has become dysfunctional.

We live in a time when lunatics and criminals are believed and widely supported. Men and women who would have been laughed out of politics thirty years ago are now taken seriously. We should all do what we can to stop this trend, but, as individuals, we can only do so much. The causes that have determined much of what is happening in America, and around the world, were planted years ago and now must be played out. Things happen and people react, which is the cause for more things to happen and for more reactions. In 1916, in observing the Russian Revolution, Ouspensky made this comment:

Nothing could have given [us] more material for the study of the ‘mechanicalness’ of events.

Taken out of the context of the system, the fourth-way view that ‘man cannot do’ can be seen as fatalism. But an attitude of fatalism is opposed to the spirit of the fourth way. One of the foundations of the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky system is its teaching of what is possible and what is not. This is summed up very neatly in an analogy from Ouspensky:

We are in a train, the train is going somewhere. All we can do is to pass the time in the train differently—do something useful or spend it quite uselessly.

So let us do what is useful and possible and not be swept away by events we cannot control. Let us do our work and be good citizens, vote for leaders who promote balance and unity, and support our communities when we can. The privilege of knowing about conscious evolution should not be taken lightly. The tools we have been given are not designed to change the nations; they are designed to change the people who make up nations. We must continue to do our work no matter what happens. Identification is identification whether you’re identified with a worthy cause, the latest movie, or a sports team. We must not lose ourselves, especially at a time when so many others are displaying poor judgment.