On Growth

31. Carl R. Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1902. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1928.
He first worked with children in the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. Then he taught

[p. 198]

psychology and psychiatry at the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin. Subsequently he came to La Jolla, California, where he was connected at first with the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute and is now with the Center of Studies of the Person.
Professor Rogers ranks among the great psychologists of our day. In 1931 he published Measuring Personality Adjustment in Children; in 1951, the by now classic study Client-Centered Therapy; and in 1961, On Becoming a Person. His latest works are Freedom to Learn (1969) and On Encounter Groups (1970).

Professor Carl Rogers' house in San Diego, California, 6 October, 1972

I understand from your past that your initial love for nature, biology, agriculture, indicates that you would have sympathy for an endeavor like that of the Club of Rome. Your own love for the planet would come in here.

Yes, I feel that the planet is in great danger at this point. It is true that I feel that my love of nature and my love for nature as revealed in persons would both cause me to be very much interested in the question of how we might preserve this earth from destruction.

Your main interest lies with the individual. How to save the individual, because you would expect this world to be more and more controlled, more and more programmed. That's actually what Skinner says. We are victims of this environment. We need to redesign the environment. You believe that there is still a place for the individual even when space keeps shrinking?

Yes, I think that if we become more and more programmed, there's someone who is going to do the programming. This is the thing that Skinner does not like to talk about. Someone would have to do the programming. In other words, you've got to have some people who are free to make the plans to control all the rest of us. I feel that that road does lead to the destruction of individuality. I do prize the individual person, because the individual person is the reservoir of creativity. I feel that our efforts ought to be to release the individual to be his own freest, purest self, rather than our efforts being devoted to controlling him.

[p. 199]

As a part of my belief in nature I think that the human species is by nature social. Not every species is social. The cat family is not very social. They are naturally loners for the most part. But the human being - coming as he does from the apes - is naturally social. So I believe- - if individuals can truly be themselves, can be aware of what's going on within themselves and aware of their interpersonal relationships - they prefer harmony to discord, prefer constructive action to destructive action.

Yes, but the space for human beings is becoming smaller, shrinks - seven billion people in the year 2000. What institutional and organizational means for authority would be useful or possible to program behavior? I understand that you feel that our final behavior - you said somewhere - will not be controlled, but the inclination to behave a certain way will be controlled. You don't believe that you can program behavior, do you?

I think that you can program behavior for a time or within limits, but that the free human spirit breaks through it. This is what I think occurs in Russia and in other places. But to return first to your main question, I agree that physical space is shrinking as we increase speeds. The actual physical space for each individual is shrinking as we let population zoom out of control. Those things are desperately serious problems.

My experience with individuals and with small groups - with small antagonistic groups - gives me some optimism. Individuals can communicate with each other at a deeper level and then can begin to resolve the problems that they are facing. What are we going to do about population? What are we going to do about pollution?

Pollution is a good example. I feel that the American people have at some fairly deep level made the choice that they are going to do something about pollution. It may take decades. They may even fail, but I think that the beginning has been made. The decision has been made.

In regard to the population explosion, it is uncertain as to whether the people in general have really come to a decision. I think they have in some countries. Probably India has faced up to the fact that it must control population. Much depends on the decisions that are made at a very deep level within the whole population.

How to influence the decision-makers? How to make people more aware that there is an emergency, that we are in a state of war?

[p. 200]

I like your second phrase much better. Not how do we control the decision-makers, but how do we encourage them to make rational decisions. I like to engage in a little fantasy. So far, our relationships between nations have always been on a very formal basis. If you are the envoy of one country, you have been instructed by your government as to just what position to take. You cannot deviate from that. I am instructed by my government. I cannot deviate from that position. That approach guarantees there will be no real solution of the problems.

I have had a fantasy that if we, at the same time that there is a diplomatic conference - like the conference in Paris at the present time between the warring forces about Vietnam - if along with the formal diplomatic delegation, another group was chosen of equally prominent citizens on both sides who had no obligation to speak for their government, but who would simply be speaking for themselves, then I think those two groups would find that gradually they would move toward a common ground of agreement and perhaps that that common ground of agreement could then be interpreted or passed on to the far more rigid diplomats and governments.

I don't care how antagonistic they might be at the start, if they met with a psychologist who was trained in facilitating communication. I feel there is no question but that citizens of North Vietnam meeting with citizens representing the Vietcong and citizens representing the United States and citizens of South Vietnam could come to some kind of resolution.

Would we not probably also need psychologists to improve communication between politicians and their own electorate? Because the amount of lies and untruths that are now being spoken in order to get throngs of electorates behind false assumptions and false presentations just for votes is absolutely shocking and self-defeating. Could psychologists not interfere first at their homeground?

I would certainly hope that might be true. I only know of one or two politicians who are really attempting that. There is one in the state legislature in California who is trying to communicate honestly with his constituents. But by and large, without knowing other countries well enough to pass judgment, I feel that hypocrisy has grown to such gigantic proportions in this country that it would take tremendous skill to change the situation. First of all, it would take a willingness on the part of the politicians really to communicate with the people and to receive the communications of people in return. I am not sure that this willingness exists.

[p. 201]

What role could the behaviorists and the psychologists play to promote the speeding up of a change in the politicians?

I think we are doing that in various ways. For example, there was a most promising attempt at holding what I would think of as encounter groups or human-relations laboratories with members of the state department, ambassadors and their staffs. They were enthusiastic about it. They wished to take it to the host countries so that they could begin similar groups between the American representatives and the representatives of the country to whom they were sent.

Later the whole project was wiped out for lack of funds.

This was one small start. But there will be more starts. My only question is, Will they occur in time? We have done a great deal on a very small scale. The accomplishments have been exciting in relieving racial tension through improving communication between black groups and the establishment, between Mexican groups and the establishment. I don't think it's hopeless. The behavioral scientists are at the same point as the Wright brothers when they first took off in their flimsy little plane. No one would believe it. No one felt that it had any significance. The public was not yet ready to buy the idea. I feel we have made a number of small flights like that, but so far the public as a whole does not have the confidence in the behavioral scientists that it has in the physical scientists, for example.

Professor Rogers, how about the communication between the rich Western world and the rest of the world? Where to start building real bridges with Chinese, Indians, Africans and Latin Americans, as you would say, based on being what you are?

My experience there leads me to be optimistic, when groups are not bound by some rigid control of instructions. I have dealt with groups in France, I have dealt with groups in Japan, in Australia, in other countries. In every case, to be sure, the customs were different, the traditions were different. Yet if individuals are permitted to talk beyond those customs and traditions, freely, and with someone to help each side understand the other, then you begin to get deeper personal communication. It is very similar in each of the cultures with which I am familiar.

Starting from, let's say, individual freedom as a principle - twenty years ago or eighteen years ago you had a discussion, a dialogue with your

[p. 202]

colleague at Harvard, Skinner. Looking back, do you feel the world is moving towards a Skinnerian view or a Rogerian view? What is happening?

I feel that academic psychology in this country is clearly moving in a Skinnerian direction. There is no question in my mind about that. On the other hand, I do not believe that the Skinnerian point of view is very attractive to sophisticated foreign countries. I believe that more and more voices are coming out on the side of the human individual in what I think is the deepest force in psychology, the humanistic trend. I think Freudianism is dead, though its funeral has been long delayed. I think that behaviorism, the Skinnerian point of view, has a great deal of appeal to the American culture, because it fits in with our love for technology. Here is a technology by which we can control behavior, so that must be the best way. But I actually think that time is on the side of the trend to a belief in the individual.

You, I understand, prize the privilege of being alone very much in your life, and call it your most fruitful period.¹ Is there sufficient room to be alone in our modern world with the growth of population and acceleration of directives and the intensification of programming our lives? Students in Holland cannot study anymore what they want. They cannot choose. They have been told at times to break off their studies altogether because there were too many in certain fields. Where is the hope for the individual?

I suppose my answer to that is a very radical one. I think that most of the established institutions in our society are strangling the hope of the future. I believe this is true of education. I believe this is true of the church. I believe this is true of marriage if you regard it as an institution. That is why I titled my recent book Becoming Partners, not necessarily becoming married. I think government is perhaps - especially in this country - the most powerful of all in strangling the hope of the future.

This is where I place my reliance on young people, because one of the primary values that they hold is the value of being themselves, being genuine. They are no longer willing to say, ‘Well, of course I have to accept a nine-to-five job, working for this corporation and do it the rest of my life.’ They are not willing to say that. Nor are they willing even to say, ‘Yes, I must serve my country in the draft even though

1 On Becoming a Person, a Therapist's View of Psychotherapy, Houghton Mifflin Company (Boston, 1961), p. 15.

[p. 203]

I don't believe in war.’ More and more of them are saying, ‘No, I will not do that. I have my life to live. I will not be bound by institutions.’ Some of the best students are leaving our universities not because they couldn't get through but because they refuse to submit to this programming that we are prescribing. Exactly what will come from that - I am really not a prophet - I am not certain. It will be something freer, looser, more communicative, more real. That I do think.

Gabriel Marcel² spoke of our possessions that devour us. ‘How other than to program the mass’ of people or the young and turn the tide away from this mad race for material gain?

I don't believe that the place of the psychologist is as a missionary to turn the tide away from material things. I think that tide is already appearing and the psychologists had better understand that, just as they should understand that the tide is turning away from rigidity in education. I believe that young people are accustomed to using material things and use them very casually, without much thought. Yet when it comes to a choice between material possessions and being themselves, the trend is toward the latter. I don't believe that the young are going to fall back into being stockbrokers and suburbanites. To be sure, some will. That's to be expected. But I think we are seeing a real turning in the tide of the goals of young people in this nation.

What role can you people play in improving a planetary model in order to study what is needed to be done to achieve survival? Do you see a role at all?

First of all, I would like to be a little more clear as to your question.

This is the question: The model was made by system-analysts. Some economists have objections. A second model is being prepared. I wonder where do the psychologists and behaviorists come in? Could they come in, and should they come in, and are you behind the effort of studying this, and are you also in favor of using computers in this study? Do you use them yourself in your study of behavior of groups?

I think that behavioral scientists, including psychologists, should have a very real part to play in developing the factors that enter into any model of what this planet is going to be like. I think it has been shown time

2 Gabriel Marcel (1889-), French philosopher.

[p. 204]

and again that psychological factors are far more important than the factors that often are given great credence. Why does the stock market go up and down? Even the economists have come to admit that to a very large extent it is due to psychological factors, that economic factors may point one way and the stock market go another way. The same is true in many other fields.

The discontent and even the despair of people at their own impotence is a much larger factor in politics than any of the politicians have recognized. Large segments of the population feel it is hopeless to try to influence the outcome of things. ‘I am totally impotent in regard to my government.’ That means the seeds of a revolution. It may not mean a violent revolution. I hope very much that it will not be. But it could be a revolution in thinking and in the way of being that will profoundly influence politics in the future.

Then, as to the use of computers, I am not an expert in that field. I don't use them myself. I have respect for what they are able to accomplish, if they are entirely regarded as servants and tools of the human mind and not given some mystical weight because they are so complex. It is highly unlikely that any perfect computer model will ever be designed.

Professor Rogers, how hopeful are you about the future of our planet?

I have been asked that a number of times. I have to divide my answer. I work mostly at the present time with small groups. But I worked most of my professional life with individuals. All that experience makes me thoroughly optimistic. The human organism is a constructive organism. When given a free choice and knowing all the circumstances, it seems almost inevitably to choose a creative and constructive pathway. If we are talking about the human being, about the human being as he comes together in small groups, I am a thoroughgoing optimist. I even feel, as I tried to indicate before, that we have the beginning knowledge of how to deal with much larger groups and entities. But whether that knowledge will come into play in time, I don't know. That's why in regard to our culture and in regard to the planet as a whole I have a very fifty-fifty feeling. We may destroy ourselves, or we may manage to rescue ourselves in time. Human nature has a great record, especially in democratic societies, of rescuing itself at the last possible moment. That may happen in regard to the globe. But I am not a bright-eyed optimist in regard to the globe as a whole.