ABSTRACT
Thomas Merton was aware of the dangers of activism to both the inner life and to the cause itself: "The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful". This is why activism—while often aligned with moral integrity—is actually harmful to the integrity of the self. Morality and consciousness co-evolved, but too much thinking can also have the outcome of avoiding moral responsibility. The child may, like Proust's Marcel, continue to be besieged with longing to recover that primal unity with mother and the participative consciousness with his environment; and indeed Proust, in both his life and work, lived entirely for love and without engagement with power. Using systems theory, Macy and Brown distinguish between two forms of external power: power-over and power-with. Power-with is the political equivalent of the psychological concept of intersubjectivity.
