setbacks in human well-being and extraordinary advances in civilization.
To appreciate the benefits is to acknowledge also the setbacks, as well as
the clear limitations of the behavioral patterns that have produced both.
Habits and attitudes related to the use of power which emerged during the
long ages of humanity's infancy and adolescence have reached the outer
limits of their effectiveness. Today, in an era most of whose pressing
problems are global in nature, persistence in the idea that power means
advantage for various segments of the human family is profoundly mistaken
in theory and of no practical service to the social and economic
development of the planet. Those who still adhere to it--and who could in
earlier eras have felt confident in such adherence--now find their plans
enmeshed in inexplicable frustrations and hindrances. In its traditional,
competitive expression, power is as irrelevant to the needs of humanity's
future as would be the technologies of railway locomotion to the task of
lifting space satellites into orbits around the earth.

The analogy is more than a little apt. The human race is being urged by
the requirements of its own maturation to free itself from its inherited
understanding and use of power. That it can do so is demonstrated by the
fact that, although dominated by the traditional conception, humanity has
always been able to conceive of power in other forms critical to its
hopes. History provides ample evidence that, however intermittently and
ineptly, people of every background, throughout the ages, have tapped a
wide range of creative resources within themselves. The most obvious
example, perhaps, has been the power of truth itself, an agent of change
associated with some of the greatest advances in the philosophical,
religious, artistic, and scientific experience of the race. Force of
character represents yet another means of mobilizing immense human
response, as does the influence of example, whether in the lives of
individual human beings or in human societies. Almost wholly unappreciated
is the magnitude of the force that will be generated by the achievement of
unity, an influence "so powerful", in Baha'u'llah's words, "that it can
illuminate the whole Earth."

The institutions of society will succeed in eliciting and directing the
potentialities latent in the consciousness of the world's peoples to the
extent that the exercise of authority is governed by principles that are