The task of the new generation is to be the teachers of their fellow men and women, so that the great liberating process of recovery of self, started by our youth, can become the means of liberation for all Americans; and so that the domination of self by false goals and false consciousness may be ended for all Americans. When the self is recovered, the power of the Corporate State will be ended, as miraculously as a kiss breaks a witch's evil enchantment. [...]

This task does not demand missionary aggressiveness, zeal, and self-sacrifice. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Consciousness III. The most important *means* of conversion is, and will continue to be, simply living one's own life according to one's own needs. Direct efforts at proselytizing, on the other hand, are all too likely to involve depersonalization and a loss of consciousness for both parties. But without going to that extreme, we have tried to suggest an attitude of openness for the new generation to replace what often has the appearance of hostility toward outsiders and rejection of them. Consciousness III will never convert anyone by abandoning its own life-style in order to become ideologists, pamphleteers, and propagandists. But it can understand the possibilities of conversion in others, and it can live its own life in such a way as to help others to join.

To live in this way requires, before anything else, a rejection of hostility - even hostility toward those who are the outspoken opponents of change. Any efforts by the new generation to raise consciousness in others must be accompanied not by a hostile, threatening, or rejecting stance, but by a demonstrated offer of acceptance and affection. We know that the greatest thing holding back most people is fear - fear and the lack of a significant group to join on the other side. If youth presents itself as a closed society, contemptuous of older, "straighter" or less well educated people, those who want to make a change will find that the most crucial encouragement of all is lacking - the promise of support and acceptance bythose who have gone ahead. But when changes that affect their lives as sought for by the radicals of the new generation, there will be the potential for a growth of trust, understanding, appreciation and solidarity between the new generation and the middle class. For the new generation will be visibly helping the middle class, not threatening them. There is already evidence that when young people join hands in a cause that workers understand, they are welcomed.

The student radical of today [1970] is all too likely to call policemen "pigs,", to be scornful of "straight" people and "uptight" people, to call right-wingers and George Wallace supporters "fascists," to be harshly critical of his own parents and their contemporaries. In doing this, students are reacting naturally to the anger and violence and lack of understanding directed at them, but they are nevertheless making the same mistake as those who are radical or religious bigots. Look again at a "fascist" - tight lipped, tense, crew cut, correctly dressed, church-going, an American flag on his car window, a hostile eye for communists, youth, and blacks. He has had very little of love, or poetry, or music or nature, or joy. He has been dominated by fear. He as been condemned to narrow-minded prejudice, to a self-defeating materialism, to a lonely suspicion of his fellow men. He is angry, envious, bitter, self-hating. He ravages his own environment. He has fled all his life from consciousness and responsibility. He is turned against his own nature; in his agony he has recoiled upon himself. He is what the machine left after it had its way.

The task of the new generation is to see the humanity in all men, and to work for the renewal, the rebirth, the return to life, of all men. The new generation must bridge the gap that separates parents from children, and the still greater gaps that separate worker from student, white-collar professional from those who are young and liberated. They must realize that "youth" is not chronological age, but the state of growing, learning, and changing, and that all people must be helped to regain the condition of youth. The new generation must make their revolution by the yeast theory; they must spread their life.