The Withway confronts the civilizational choices with which we are today being collectively presented. It is not a political manifesto or a detailed programme for action. It is, rather, an exploration of ideas which is intended to act as a preliminary signpost, a rough sketch of the way in which many of us know intuitively we ought to be heading. As our awareness grows, it becomes obvious to us that the Withway has not so much disappeared from view as been hidden from view, in the interests of power. At this point, the Withway takes on a meaning that it would not have possessed in a different kind of society.

If all was largely well with our world, the Withway would amount to a simple continuation of the direction we were already taking, the maintenance of ‘an orderly society in harmony with nature’ urged by traditional Confucian philosophy in China.

But since this is far from being the case, it necessarily implies a radical breach with the status quo, so that we may rejoin the true path. People who instinctively seek community, cohesion and continuity - a society founded on the natural order of withness - therefore find themselves confronted with the need to become revolutionaries .