e massive disillusionment of entire populations
who have been taught to worship at their altars can be read history's
irreversible verdict on their value. The fruits these doctrines have
produced, after decades of an increasingly unrestrained exercise of power
by those who owe their ascendancy in human affairs to them, are the social
and economic ills that blight every region of our world in the closing
years of the twentieth century. Underlying all these outward afflictions
is the spiritual damage reflected in the apathy that has gripped the mass
of the peoples of all nations and by the extinction of hope in the hearts
of deprived and anguished millions.

The time has come when those who preach the dogmas of materialism, whether
of the east or the west, whether of capitalism or socialism, must give
account of the moral stewardship they have presumed to exercise. Where is
the "new world" promised by these ideologies? Where is the international
peace to whose ideals they proclaim their devotion? Where are the
breakthroughs into new realms of cultural achievement produced by the
aggrandizement of this race, of that nation or of a particular class? Why
is the vast majority of the world's peoples sinking ever deeper into
hunger and wretchedness when wealth on a scale undreamed of by the
Pharaohs, the Caesars, or even the imperialist powers of the nineteenth
century is at the disposal of the present arbiters of human affairs?

Most particularly, it is in the glorification of material pursuits, at
once the progenitor and common feature of all such ideologies, that we
find the roots which nourish the falsehood that human beings are
incorrigibly selfish and aggressive. It is here that the ground must be
cleared for the building of a new world fit for our descendants.

That materialistic ideals have, in the light of experience, failed to
satisfy the needs of mankind calls for an honest acknowledgement that a
fresh effort must now be made to find the solutions to the agonizing
problems of the planet. The intolerable conditions pervading society
bespeak a common failure of all, a circumstance which tends to incite
rather than relieve the entrenchment on every side. Clearly, a common
remedial effort is urgently required. It is primarily a matter of
attitude. Will humanity continue in its waywardness, holding to outworn
concepts and unworkable assumptions? Or will its leaders, regardless of
ideology, step forth and, with a resolute