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WORLD PEACE IS (Y)OUR BUSINESS

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, Virginia

November 7, 1987

 

 

"Man is a prisoner of his own way of thinking

and his own stereotype of himself.

His machine for thinking

the brain

has been programmed to deal with a vanished world."

Stafford Beer, PLATFORM FOR CHANGE, Wiley, 1975

 

 

 

Since 1900, nation-states have fought 207 wars. Seventy-five million people - mostly the poor fighting the poor - have been killed. Forty-five wars, big and small, are being fought as I write. One hundred forty-two governments are spending more than $1 trillion a year on their military while millions starve, hundreds of millions go to bed hungry, the homeless proliferate and ecological disasters threatening humanity along with all species survival go unchecked.

The current situation in the Persian Gulf exposes in frightening detail the "vanished world" to which Stafford Beer, one of the world's leading general system scientists, refers.

Just what is the real spectacle we are witnessing here?

The content of the problem assails us in daily headlines and nightly newscasts. But what is The Problem itself?

"The world of divided states..is out of control," wrote James Reston in the New York Times on December 20, 1979.

Like ancient Rome, Carthage, Babylonia, the Egyptian dynasties, Mesapotania, Mycenea, the more modern Constantinople and all the eras of relative political reigns, we are witnessing the collapse of what Alvin Toffler calls "The Second Wave" or the nation-state system itself which replaced feudalism.

Both President Reagan's and General Secretary Gorbachev's problems along with those of all their fellow heads of state derive from obsolete decision-making machinery totally inadequate to handle the "proliferating complexity" of the industrial/electronic/ nuclear/space age.

In short, today's 20th century world is far and away too complex for leaders of the 18th century nation-state world to even understand much less structure or systematize.

Even such a professional politician as former Senator Charles McMathias, after four terms in the U.S., declared to the Washington Post in a recent interview that "the system doesn't work."

To put it in its simplest terms, the national governing system has broken down: it doesn't work anymore.

Hence, it continues the bankrupt and clinically insane "foreign policy" of the war option as a final "solution" to conflict resolution.

But most of us, hypnotized by the content of the problem dramatically exposed by the daily news totally overlook The Problem itself: the imperative need for fundamental global STRUCTURAL change; i.e., the world public order.

The American people and indeed the people of the world looked upon the recent White House Irangate spectacle with varied emotions: glee, sadness, contempt and anger, others with disdain and disgust and many with fear that such immoral and irrational officials control the apparatus of war and particularly nuclear war. But amidst all the recriminations and revelations, not one criticism of the National System itself. No mention of the anarchy which divides nations permitting and condoning such reprehensible public conduct.

Amid the current consternation with volatile stock market fluctuations worldwide, while some commentators reveal the startling news that the economy is "global," no linkage of that self-evident fact with the political anarchy which sanctions the monstrous monetary chaos attempting grotesquely and with total disdain for the poor who own no equity, to regulate the world marketplace.

At the outset of the nuclear age, Einstein reminded us that "everything has changed except our ways of thinking."

At the same time, Emery Reves in Anatomy of Peace wrote that we think "nation-centrically" rather than "globally."

The "vanished world" of the nation-state, that surrogate institution which still dominates the exclusive domain of politics due only to our allegiance to it, must now be transcended by structuring a higher allegiance to humanity and our common world community itself.

An even more startling revelation is that humanity itself IS already the "meta-system" or actual global infrastructure - a species bound by immutable spiritual, cosmic, social and biological laws.

Obviously, the "tool" for handling world complexity is WORLD organization. The multinational corporation, for better or for worse, already understands and operates this maxim full well...and at a profit.

But even while many who know the underlying problem as structural, while accepting with banality every technical innovation, refuse to consider a political structural change which is always revolutionary. They attempt only to modify the existing national rulebook. These include the U.N. supporters, world federalists, the "pocket" revolutionaries within nations, and of course, nationalists of every ilk.

My New Year's message of 1980 stated "Though the time for nation-states is fast running out, the era of humanity's fulfillment, long prophesied, has begun." I predicted that the 80's would reveal World Government as a dynamic political/moral reality.

Only two more years to go!

The upcoming U.S. presidential election is the next major media blitz.

My run for mayor of Washington, D.C. in the midterm election of '86 on a "world citizen" platform was to illustrate the dynamic linkage of that city - as all major cities - with world structural problems.

Five hundred eighty-four United States citizens voted for a World Citizen to be mayor of the U.S. capital! I consider that news, a significant harbinger for the future.

Given the desperate need to reach the widest possible public with the message of not just one moral and biological world but one STRUCTURED world, given the apathy yet anguish of a vast majority of the voting public in the present anarchic situation, and given the abject ignorance or worse, duplicity of Republican and Democratic party leaders and followers, along with their Soviet counterparts, as to the revolutionary requirements for coping with our common problems, I have entered my candidacy for U.S. President on January 19, 1987, at Middlebury College, Vermont.

A vote for an activist World Citizen would be an actual "world vote," a power vote, a world peace vote. It would challenge all candidates as well as voters to consider world politics intimately allied to their local and national problems.

In conclusion, world peace is the business of those who stand to gain by its structuring: US. And that structuring can only come about by the recognition and then manifesting of our inalienable world citizenship and our intimate relationship to Mother Earth, that incredible, living "space ship" spinning majestically in the living universe.

One world or none is the christening ultimatum of the Nuclear Age.

Thank you.


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