Barbara Marx Hubbard: Visions of a Universal Humanity
In the 47 years since you’ve had that vision and you’ve been doing this work, has there ever been a time when you felt hopeless or “I just don’t know if this is going to happen”?
Yes. I have felt a form of depression. I have 5 children and at one point I didn’t know my vocation. I was in my late 20’s in 1959/60 and I was really depressed. I just felt like I was turning to stone. And I went to a Freudian analyst. It was a Freudian analysis of someone with four to five children who wants more so they thought I was neurotic. They were trying to find out what was wrong with me.
Then I read a book by Abraham Maslow, “Towards a Psychology of Being” and he’s the first to study wellness. He identified a person he called a self-actualizing person and that person had deep values and growth needs that actualized this person’s potential. Well, the minute I read that I thought I had not yet been actualizing. The way you got self-actualizing is by finding work that was intrinsically self rewarding and of service. In other words, when you do it, like on this interview right now… when I’m doing this, there’s something intrinsically self rewarding about it. Even if we don’t get a Nobel Prize, we are actually doing what our calling is. When you do that you get rewarded and then you begin to grow towards self-actualizing.
That map was extremely valuable to me and now I’m realizing that we are at the threshold of a self-actualizing society and a potential social movement. So in order for you or me to feel our vocation is meaningful, you almost have to feel that society itself can be evolved. Some people look outside and say, “I don’t see any hope here. Look at this violence. Look at this terrible behavior. What is it that anybody can do that would make a difference?” Well, that is not only personally depressing, but it gives you a social reason to be depressed. And then you get into all the pitfalls: depression, substance abuse, alcoholism, violence, illness. It’s a downward slope there. For me it’s an understanding of a deep spirit-based evolutionary story of universal evolution that we’re part of.
