Dear Ones and Friends,
One
of the things I have realized about world federation theory as a result of a
recent Wilmette Institute course on this subject is the extent to which both
the theory as articulated by scholars and the actual efforts of good-willed
people in the direction of world federation are disabled by a failure to take
account of male evolutionary psychology and the ritual displays that almost all
males, including human males, go through when threatened with loss of territory
or control.
Just as Baha'u'llah was the
prisoner of male leaders, so too world federation and His world order--the
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth--are the prisoners of specifically male political
thinking.
By the amount to which we fail to address and overcome typical
male thinking in relation to world order, by the amount to which we fail to
empower girls, women, and non-adversarial patterns and methods of
self-government, by that amount we fail to appreciate the nature of the
Kingdom, of the world order of Baha'u'llah, and the notion of global
self-government guided by God.
The nasty,
pathological aspects of alpha male evolutionary psychology are again dominating
recent headlines and distracting the public from urgent issues of humanity’s
future sustainability. First, there was Putin’s gesture in Crimea, then North
Korean missile tests, and now Japan's reaction to North Korea. Suddenly the
world of “politics” reveals itself again as mostly a snake pit of male-psychology-driven
tensions. Meanwhile, NASA and UN reports on climate change paint an ever more
urgent picture of the need for massive global cooperation in human family
problem-solving.
In
the face of North Korean alpha male bluster, the alpha male Japanese government
apparently now thinks it is more urgent to shoot down unarmed North Korean
missiles flown out over the ocean than to do anything effective about the
radiation pouring out of Fukushima—radiation that will, if not stopped,
increasingly contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean, affecting the immediate and
future health and food security of literally hundreds of millions of people,
not to mention the health and genetic integrity of future generations.
Here's the
article:
http://news.yahoo.com/japan-orders-military-strike-north-korea-missile-launches-035401019--sector.html.
The
International Court of Justice has just recently outlawed Japan's Antarctic
whaling practices, but what government has filed suit in the International
Court of Justice against Japan's unbelievable laxity and public safety failures
in the Fukushima calamity?
Where
will this new round of “crazy male” idiocy and idiosyncrasy stop?
Or
will we allegedly intelligent beings continue to just stick our heads in the
sand and do nothing constructive as tensions keep getting escalated by male
heads of nation-states as they put on their pathetic public displays of
strength and virility and “readiness for conflict” in response to one another's
rhetorical challenges and military gestures?
Humanity
doesn’t have time for this puerile waste of focus and energy! We have to get
our global act together. We should have been doing so decades ago.
When
will we begin see through this charade and do something serious about this
pathetic illusion, foisted on us by the males of the One Percent, of their
so-called leadership, which constantly in fact sets back and destroys the
collective unity we need in order to be building a viable global society that
works for everybody? When will we start envisioning the real possibility of
better patterns and methods of self-government that progressively move us away
from the primitive rituals of male adversariality?
Self-government
by ganging up in pyramids of rank under the supreme direction of adversarial
individual alpha males has been tried now for roughly 10,000 years as a method
of governing ourselves in a “civilized” way and in metaphysical alignment with
our image of a male deity living somewhere “above” us, and this method and its
devastating results have moved humanity to the brink of imminent global system
collapse.
None
of the 195 national governments on Earth, the vast majority of them led by
males, currently puts the future benefits and sustainability of the Peoples of
the Earth as a whole above its own narrow self-interests. It’s been 70 years
since the founding of the United Nations, and despite all the talk by male leaders
since WW II of democracy and self-determination, those leaders have confined
the methods of democratic decision-making to withinthe nation-state so the Peoples of Earth still have no direct democratic advisory vote within the framework of
the United Nations on global public issues and policies. Creation of
humanity-wide programs and policies relating to the global human future (e.g.,
shifting from fossil fuels to a globally coordinated system of sustainable
energy) require humanity-wide democratic mandates for purposes of creating
motivation, empowerment, and a unity of will. But when was the last time your
government asked you to vote in a worldwide advisory referendum as a direct
citizen of the United Nations?
The
fact that this has never happened shows us male leadership under the current
system for what it really is: not a genuine concern for global public system
benefits but a façade using the discourse of public benefits to maintain the
more basic agenda of personal and class and male gender control. Or maybe, with
some leaders, the concern for benefits is real but publicly unable to be
honestly articulated because the leader is embedded within a hierarchical and
adversarial system of money and force that makes power and control and
“survival” in a position of leadership an ultimate value and goal in and of
itself for which all other principles get sacrificed. Expressing a “feminine”
concern for the health and viability of the global human household would be
attacked by other males as “weakness” in the face of our “enemies” against whom
we must always maintain a posture of hostility.
How
is the colossal and continuing failure to of male-dominated national
governments to use the United Nations to its full capacity in order to achieve
global human welfare otherwise explainable? What else but primitive male
evolutionary psychology can explain the gross failure of most governments to
meet their promises to contribute 0.007 of their gross domestic product to
meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals?
And
where is the global democratic outcry against this failure of leaders to work
in cooperation through the UN? Where is the search by rational and intuitively
sensitive people for ways around this central bottleneck to global cooperation
and viability?
Time
to wake up! Time to start seeing that the current world order system, as the
founder of the Baha'i world community said 150 years ago, is "lamentably
defective." Time to start seeing that we need new patterns and methods of
self-government on this planet.
But
what are the alternatives to what we have?
Well,
why not begin by looking at the principles, attitudes, and the functional
patterns and methods of self-government at work within the Baha'i community
itself. Among the features of that multiracial, multilingual world community
are:
· A Covenantal duty of
urgent concern for the problems of one’s present historical epoch and situation;
· A systematic approach to
the discovery of fact and the application of values and principles in the
solution of these problems;
· A supreme Covenantal and
guiding value of the oneness and communicational health of the human system
(“The earth is but one country and humanity its citizens.”)
· Strong emphasis on
justice in economic relations and the elimination of extremes of wealth and
poverty through multiple ways that move toward well-being and a spirit of unity.
· Strong emphasis on the
dignity and social empowerment of women and the education of the girl child.
· Seeing the purpose and
aim of immediate physical life as making a personal contribution to an
ethically ever-advancing global civilization.
· In terms of
administrative functionality, no individual leaders, only group
decision-making, all the way up;
· Strong emphasis on
ensuring gender balance and inclusion of diversity in the groups elected;
· No self-chosen and
self-promoted candidates for leadership; everyone is open for being chosen.
· No nominating.
· No campaigning or
campaign contributions.
· No "parties."
· No "corporate free
speech.”
· Instead, just people
previously consulting and getting acquainted with ideas and possible solutions
and then voting reflectively, prayerfully, and by secret ballot for those whom
they think are, in character and specialized talent, best qualified to solve
the problems and to serve the best interests of the community in question.
The
time is over when the world can afford to waste energy on watching male political
displays and outdated methods of partisan, adversarial self-government.
We
need a vision of a non-adversarial democratic form of self-government that, in
the spirit and way it functions and in the way it incentivizes people, actually supports the spiritual-political aims of global justice, sustainability, peace,
and good will.
IMO,
we live in an age that, in its prophetic, spiritualizing, and inward reality,
is radical, evolutionary, and progressive beyond anything imagined by our
general ethical, religious, and political culture. We no longer have to wait for it; instead, we are already
living in the beginning of a
fulfilment that has been promised to us for thousands of years.
I
urge, therefore: let us try to truly grasp the enormous historical importance
of this age and of being alive at this time of history, and let us try to be a
source of illumination, inspiration, and real hope to one another and to our
fellow human beings.
Yours,
John
Dale
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