STWR - Share The World's Resources

Bruce Kent

Everyone in theory believes in sharing the world’s resources. Indeed we, at the rich end of the world, have become all too used to diagrams which tell us how well off we are and how poor are other parts of the world. Paul Kennedy’s book, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, is now ten years old, but the statistics have not greatly changed. An average American baby causes twice as much environmental damage as a Swedish one, three times as much as an Italian, thirteen times as much as a Brazilian, and two hundred and eighty times as much as a baby in Chad or Haiti. The difference all relates to the level of consumption.

International reports of all shapes and sizes go on telling us that the situation is actually getting worse. Moreover the billion plus people in our world community who live on not much more than a dollar a day now know very well how the comfortable of the world manage their lives. They know about our holidays, our cars, our golf courses, our pet food, our digital television, and our private health care.

Today, influential voices from unexpected places are telling us that the structures of inequality cannot last. The President of the World Bank recently said: “The idea that a rich world and a poor world can co-exist without dramatic implications collapsed along with the twin towers on September 11th.” The same President this year has pointed out that we are mad if we imagine that we can go on spending a trillion dollars a year on military defence and only $50 billion on development.

But why such progress, if there is progress at all, building a more just world? There are several reasons. The first is that getting rich and staying rich has become part of our new culture. This is the religion of the market. Everything has its price. All other aspects of life – love, beauty, joy, honesty, and community responsibility – are secondary to what is on the balance sheet. It now affects even hospitals, schools and churches. I recently received an invitation to a church event because, said the letter, I was “a stakeholder”.

In a society where the golden calf is a central object of worship it is hard to argue that somehow we have obligations to the less well-off. If they are poor it is probably, so current thinking goes, their own fault. Economic migrants are described in hostile terms. They are supposed to threaten our comfort and standard of living. This is actually far from the truth. Our National Health Service would collapse were it not for those trained elsewhere who now work here.

A second reason is that charity has dominated over justice. There is nothing wrong with charitable projects which deal with the symptoms of global poverty, but unless they deal also with causes – unjust interest rates, arms sales, and protected agriculture, to list but a few – they are really deceiving us. In particular, if such campaigns avoid in their charitable literature pointing out that militarism and war are primary causes of poverty and environmental degradation, then they are not doing justice to the people of generous good will to whom they make their appeals. Sometimes, to be fair, they do point to causes, as they did in the successful Jubilee 200 debt relief campaign which gained the support of so many people.

Finally there is both apathy and hostility when it comes to the possibility of political change. Too many people are not prepared to get their hands dirty and want to leave politics to others. Two thousand five hundred years ago the Greek orator Pericles said that “We regard the man who takes no part in public affairs not as one who minds his own business, but as good for nothing…”

The apathetic have to be reminded that change can and does happen. The British slave trade ended, women received the vote, an old age pension for all became the law, free education became a reality, and an International Criminal Court now exists. Not one of these changes would have come about without organised political pressure. As the notepaper of Let’s Share the World’s Resources says: “Above all nations is humanity”. Quite right too. We are part of one human family long before we are white, brown or black, American, Russian, Chinese, African, Asian or European. It is a scandal that some come to our common table and all but starve, while others at the far end eat more than their fill. Said Gandhi long ago: “The earth has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed”. I am so glad that organisations like STWR are helping to turn those ideals into reality.

Bruce Kent

Chair, Movement for the Abolition of War

Dr. Mark Siegmund

Liberating the future from the past

Continuing to operate in today’s lethal climate with beliefs, practices and systems born entirely of the past is a sure recipe for doom--as the lessons of history proclaim that the future can be little more than a mirror-image of the past. If humanity’s future is to be assured, then it must be created in a different way.

If it is to survive, humanity must break-out from the redundant, closed-loop, cycles of history, into a fundamentally new context and milieu. It must create and pass through a new portal. In so doing, it will leave behind the Age of Scarcity and enter into the new Age of Plenitude.

During this century, science has discovered that Nature rather than being a design for Scarcity, is in fact, a design for Plenitude. It has been discovered that there are no “solids” and that all matter is energy--so the energy is in boundless measure and that the energy humankind requires to power the ways and means for universal plenitude is there.

Nature it has been discovered is the model of efficiency--always striving to “do more with less”. Humanity has begun to follow her lead. In communications, satellite-relays and glass fibers replace 100’s of 1,000’s of tons of copper cable, allowing the recycling of this vital resource into evermore efficient and essential products.

Depletion of increasingly scarce and non-renewable resources such as coal and petroleum to power civilization need not continue to occur, as renewable alternatives, such as: hydro, solar, geothermal, biomass, tidal and wind are increasingly employed and will be able to provide all our energy requirements into the distant future.

Food is plentiful. Inadequate storage, transportation, distribution systems--coupled with economic policies and practices based on an ancient perception of nature’s scarcity stand in the way of nutritional sufficiency for all.

Traditionally rulers have relied on the principle of, “the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing”. In this way the information flowing from this compartmentalization of knowledge flowed only to the ruler where it was integrated and synthesized and kept the ruler in the position of being the only one who saw the “bigger picture”. Knowledge is power.

Today, explorations into the design of systems, general systems and systems theory, has revealed that compartmentalization, specialization, and hyper-specialization inexorably lead to the “mystification of knowledge”--which in turn leads to a general confusion, weakness and vulnerability. Systems view, lateral management, quality circles, cooperation, sharing of information, cross and multi-disciplinary, hierarchical “flattening”, inter-disciplinary, cross-fertilization, general systems theory, information theory, synergy, shared leadership, are now found to be more productive, useful and anti-entropic strategies for perceiving and coping with the myriad of life’s problems. Everything it has been learned, is inter-connected.

This new world which is emerging, stands in stark contrast to the old scarcity and competition driven, “it’s you or me” world of the past--and puts us on the threshold of an entirely new doorway leading to a future in which, “Making the World Work for Everyone” will be the focus of global humankind. In crossing this threshold, humanity will leave behind all that has constrained it, carrying with it only that luggage from the past which will provide the tools and skills to flourish while creating and settling the new Age. Thus, and for the first time in human history, humanity’s future will be fundamentally different from its past; and, the past will be an historical artifact-- the future becomes something new with promise and possibilities.

THE PROBLEM:

Despite all the potential for a fundamentally new kind of human civilization evolving implicitly from and through the extraordinary advances in knowledge, technology and science garnered during the 20th Century, humankind, as it approaches the millennium, faces a future that remains essentially a mirror image of the past, replete with the same basic inequities, disparities, insecurities, and motivations for wars, conflicts, and greed, that have been endured for so many centuries--with one important difference, is that we now possess the capacity, if not the historical proclivity and/or probability derived from our continuing reliance on methods and practices rooted solely in the past, to destroy, all human life as we know it.

Bound, as we are to history and the popularly held and rational (given the nature of the current global system) belief that “history repeats itself”, and further, that there is no escape from that cycle, seems to leave humanity with small, perhaps no reason, to expect or even hope that we can avoid the inevitable--a planetary nuclear/biological/chemical holocaust--the sum total, the final product of a global civilization shackled to a closed-loop system of economic and resource distribution and allocation--a worst possible outcome that seems increasingly likely, should we continue to employ, and rely upon those destructive and self-defeating aspects of our political, economic, religious and social beliefs and systems that each new human life inherits from the past. Those beliefs and systems which remain today, as yesterday, the dominant and ubiquitous “ways and means” of organizing and conducting virtually every aspect of our collective and personal life.

Even should we somehow avoid or delay a global melt-down or doomsday, the traditions and histories of the hierarchies of economic, political and social life will continue to hold the future in bondage to the past; assuring that each new human life will for the most part be constrained and conformed to the same world of inequities of: opportunity, life-support, health, education, shelter, energy and prospects for personal development and life satisfaction that its parents, grandparents and their grandparents endured. A world built upon ancient beliefs that Scarcity is the foundation of nature’s plan, and that survival in a world of scarcity, can only be assured, by “winning” the survival oriented strategies of competition (for resources, money, status and power) which place one against the other and one over the other.

Faced as we are with the prospects of possible, perhaps probable, destruction of global human life, and preceding that outcome, our continuing to permit so many of our species to be born and die captives of Scarcity and its by-products of greed, war, competition for survival, poverty, helplessness, ignorance and the general condition of social malaise, is considered by some as an intolerable and thoroughly unnecessary state of affairs as they struggle to find the resolve to try to do something about it by making the commitment to devote their fullest capacities of mind and energy to develop today for implementation tomorrow morning, the ways and means out of this inexorably cruel and lethal momentum --born of the ancient past, pushing and pulling us helplessly, along the malnourished, scarcity-driven, inequitable, closed-loop of the redundancy of history--into, a new view, a new system and new method for improving life’s circumstances for each and every one of us, everywhere and anywhere.

The late, R. Buckminster Fuller, in his book, Utopia or Oblivion (1969) cited a relevant view on need for urgent action, “Professor John R. Platt, Chicago University physicist and biophysicist in a thorough survey of the overall shapes of a family of trend curves which comprehensively embrace science and technology and man in universe, says: The world has become too dangerous for anything less than Utopia’.” However, creating a Utopia solely from the lessons of history, and within the context of our current system will not take us very far.

Consider how the dictionary defines current views on Utopia: “...any place of ideal perfection; also, an impracticable scheme of social regeneration.” ; and, on Utopianism, “...impracticable scheme of social regeneration.”. Implicit in these views is an acknowledgement that in the sense of the ideal at least, something better has been imagined for humanity; and, that the ideal, which is imagined and better, is beyond our grasp--and therefore, impossible.

Accepting the forecasts that, “history repeats itself”, and that creating a Utopia is an impossible dream, permits the cruelties born of the past to be visited upon today’s global humanity, and, a humanity without possession of the hope for a better and different world and future, tacitly allows the very real specter of the possible destruction of human civilization to escape the urgent and remedial action required to “deflect” that most final, of human outcomes, Oblivion.

Science has now proven that material success for all of humankind is possible. There is enough to go around--for 100% of humanity today, and tomorrow. This fact stands in direct challenge to all the lessons and “laws” of the past.

Even, many would say, if this is true (that material success for all is possible), history has proven that humans are by their very nature competitive and prone to war--and you can’t change their nature. Therefore, humanity is incapable of creating a future that is free from the inequities, competition and violence that are demonstrated historically, naturally and cyclically recur--and are permanent features of the human condition, and will be so in the future. However, there is hope and good news on the social, biological and anthropological fronts, as there is on the material side of the equation for Utopia.

Peace--The Impossible Dream?:

Consider how our views about peace have changed in this century. 1959 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, British statesman Philip Noel-Baker wrote in 1965, “...before World War I the response to a question about peace would have been very different. Many people, including government leaders, would have agreed with German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s words, Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream.’. Or they might have repeated the words of British essayist John Ruskin, War is the foundation of all high virtues and faculties of men’.”

“Such people pointed out that throughout recorded history, war--organized conflict between groups, tribes, cities, and nations--had been a constant feature of human society. They believed that military success was the highest of human achievements and that armed might was the measure of national greatness and prestige. In support of their beliefs they argued--and a handful of militarists still argue--along the following line of reasoning: (1) that man is by nature a fighting animal; (2) that his progress has been achieved by the survival of the fittest in the unending struggle for wealth and power; (3) that stable peace is therefore, contrary to the decisive forces in human evolution; and; (4) that if stable peace could be achieved, man’s worth would decline. As things have been in the past, the militarists say, so they must be in the future. They conclude that because there always have been wars, there always will be wars.”

“British biologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark roundly denied this proposition (that man is a fighting animal). Man, said Sir Wilfrid, by a process of evolution over millions of years, has become the dominant species among hundreds of thousands of other species. He has done so not because he is a fighter, but on the contrary, because he has a gift of Altruism’ and a capacity for Cooperativeness’ possessed by no other species. Sir Wilfrid emphasized that altruism and cooperativeness are the driving forces of man’s fabulous progress, the secret of his success.”

“Biologist Sir Julian Huxley, has written: The biologist denies emphatically that there are human war instincts, either to make war in a particular way, or to make war in general.’ He further stated: The biologist is able to say with assurance that war is not a general law of life, but an exceedingly rare biological phenomenon’.” The foregoing, again, demonstrates the lethality of the past--and the strictures that it continues to exert on the present and future.

The good news is, that, the past is not our nature, it is an artifact--subject to consideration as an important, yet dispensable, historical feature of human affairs. Given the discovery of universal plenitude, coupled with the discovery of our true biological “nature” as creatures of altruism and cooperativeness, the choice for Utopia or Oblivion, is now in our hands.

We may, if we choose, liberate both the future and the past.

The Ideal:

Choosing liberation is a start. Envisioning a new, fundamentally different future, is next. What might be some of the key features of a liberated future?

Again from Buckminster Fuller’s, book, “Utopia or Oblivion”:

“The fact is that now--for the first time in the history of man, for the last (39) years, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions--in any other than secondary roles as housekeeping organization--are completely obsolete. All of them were developed on the you-or-me basis. This whole realization that mankind can and may be comprehensively successful is startling.”

“Essence of the world’s working will be to make every man (and woman) able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forwards days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage.”

Continuing efforts will be underway by university students (and others), who, “forsaking the political expedient of attempting to reform man, are committed to reforming the environment in such a manner at to Up’ the performance per each unit of invested world resources until so much more is accomplished with so much less that an even higher standard of living will be effected for 100% of humanity than is now realized by the 40% of humanity who may now be classified as economically and physically successful.”

While so doing, programs will be created to, “...facilitate attainment, at the earliest possible date, by every human being of complete enjoyment of the total planet earth, through the individual’s optional travelling, tarrying, or dwelling here and there. This world-around freedom of living, work, study, and enjoyment must be accomplished without any one individual being physically or economically advantaged at the cost of another.”

The Solution:

To begin creating a new future, we must ask and answer the question, “How Do We Make the World Work for Everyone?

Buckminster Fuller, "In pursuance of this theme...we are going to undertake...a very extraordinary computerized program to be known as 'How to Make the World Work.'...we are going to set up a great computer program...(into which will be introduced) the many variables now known to be operative in economics...where and how much of each class of the physical resources; where are the people, what are the trendings--all kinds of trendings of world man?"

"Next we are going to set up a computer feeding game, called "How Do We Make the World Work?'...people from all over the world (will) play it. There will be competitive teams...around the world...test(ing) their theories on how to make the world work. If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and is not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics you are very likely to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops the side inducing it loses the game.”

“'The game' will be hooked up with the now swiftly increasing major universities information network...augmented by the world-around satellite-scanned live inventorying of vital data--the whereabouts and number of beef cattle around the surface of the entire earth--the exact condition of all the world's crops --the interrelationship of the comprehensively scanned weather and the growing food supply of the entire earth are becoming manifest.”

“In playing 'the game' the computer will remember all the plays made by previous players and will be able to remind each successive player of the ill fate of any poor move he might contemplate making. But the ever-changing inventory might make possible today that which would not work yesterday. Therefore the successful strategems of the live game will vary from day to day.”

“The general-systems-theory controls of the game will be predicated upon employing within a closed system the world’s continually updated total resource information in closely specified network complexes designed to facilitate attainment, at the earliest possible date, by every human being of complete enjoyment of the total planet earth, through the individual’s optional traveling, tarrying, or dwelling here and there. This world-around freedom of living, work, study, and enjoyment must be accomplished without any individual being physically or economically advantaged at the cost of another.”

“Whichever player or team first attains total success for humanity wins the first round of gaming. There are alternate ways of attaining success. The one who attains it in the shortest time wins the second round. Those who better the record at a later date win rounds 3, 4 and so on.”

“It is my intention to initiate...anticipatory discussion of the necessary and desirable parameters to establish for playing the...game. (Players will be)...those who are outstandingly capable of discussing these parameters...and known for their lack of bias as well as for their forward-looking competence and practical experience.” (end of Fuller's quoted remarks, Chapter 6, “Utopia or Oblivion”)

CONCLUSION
There is currently under development, a design and project to bring into being, a global, computer/internet based version of Fuller’s world gaming concept--it is called: Tetworld Peace Through Development Project.

You are cordially invited to visit Tetworld, at: http://www.tetworld.org or you mail email the Project Director, at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Biography:
Mark Siegmund has been Associate Editor of The International Journal of Humanities and Peace (IJHP) http://www.ijhp.net for the past 15 years. He also is Founder/Project Director of the Tetworld Center for Peace Through Global Strategic Gaming (http://www.tetworld.org) a research and development project of IJHP.

In collaboration with Professor Dr. Vasant Merchant (Editor/Publisher, IJHP), he co-founded and was Director of "University of the Air", which broadcasts radio courses in the areas of Peace and Development via Radio For Peace International (RFPI), the shortwave broadcast service of the United Nations University for Peace, which is headquartered in Escazu, Costa Rica.

http://www.vxm.com/link.siegmund.html