PROUT: A New Paradigm of Development
PROUT is a new and comprehensive socioeconomic theory intended to create opportunity for every human being to fully develop and constructively express their physical, mental and spiritual potentials. Current systems of development are unable to provide this opportunity. They cannot even ensure the peace, equity, sustainability, basic necessities, and social unity required for basic human existence. No amount of reform can change this, as their limitations stem from their fundamental values. Rather than focus on criticizing the defects of the dominant paradigm of development, PROUT emphasizes a solution-oriented approach, based on an empowering vision that provides a constructive means to build a truly sustainable and abundant future.
Fundamental Social Objective
Based on a universal humanist outlook that values the welfare of all living beings, PROUT puts forward the fundamental social objective that all people must have reasonable opportunities individually and collectively to develop and progressively utilize their physical, mental and spiritual potentialities, while sustainably coexisting with the other living beings of the earth. To give practical expression to this social objective, PROUT has proposed solution-oriented approaches and policies to guide development in social, economic, political and cultural spheres of life.
Conditions for Social Transformation
Many people recognize the need for a new paradigm of development, but cannot envision how the leviathan global economy, with its allied state power, can be replaced. While this undertaking seems daunting, the inevitable alternative to the continuation of greed-driven, unsustainable growth is collapse. Reforms that ameliorate the excesses of the global economy are not sufficient; they can only slow, but not stem, the tide. Deep solutions, based on new values and new approaches, are necessary. PROUT offers a viable means for transitioning to a sustainable and life-promoting society, placing emphasis on giving people hope, vision, empowerment, and a solution-oriented approach.
Future Vision
While recognizing that humanity faces unprecedented problems, and that significant disruptions in social life are now upon us, PROUT holds a positive outlook on humanity’s future. It sees the difficulties of the present forcing shifts of consciousness and creating conditions for the rapid emergence of a universal humanity, able to work together to develop the rich potentialities of the human species that have been long suppressed by an excessively materialist culture. PROUT seeks to help open a path through the darkness of the present to this new stage of human existence and to provide a socio-economic paradigm in which humanity’s emerging new consciousness and unity can take root in fertile soil and flourish. It seeks to open a cleared vista, without dogma-created impediments, to the comprehensive fulfillment of human potentialities.
Dharmalaya 