This is an impassioned discussion which looks at the contradictory trends of the last two decades in which one movement advocates fundamental change as the only way to avoid the complete collapse of industrial societies, and the other insists that the continuing of existing forms of social and economic organization offers the best, indeed only, hope for humanity. The authors argue that this peculiar tension has determined the atmosphere of immobilism in which we live, and that the worlds of the two consciousnesses cannot be brought together.