On The Dangers of The Old “Tribalisms”, and The Necessity For A Global Cooperative Forum Based On The Prior Unity of Humankind
1.1 The old moral, social, and political order of humankind is now dead.
1.2 This is the moment when it will be decided what the future is going to be.
1.3 The future is either going to be catastrophic disaster, or it is going to be the turnabout moment in human history, in which humankind will step out of its dark ages of “tribalism” into a new mode of human cooperative order.
1.4 This next handful of years is the period in which this choice has to be animated, one way or the other.
1.5 All generations now alive will have to make things right, or everything is lost.
1.6 The old civilization is about “tribalism”. The new politics is about the civilization of “humankind-as-a-whole”, and only this has the potential for a viable human future. Humankind cannot survive a “tribal” world.
1.7 Starting in the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, all the “tribes” found themselves face to face—and terrible wars, using the means of industrial civilization, have been the consequence.
1.8 At the same time, there are all the other effects of humankind’s impact on the Earth—from global warming to migrations, urban chaos, shortage of crucial resources, disease, and poverty.
1.9 At present, most of the energy of humankind is going into industrial-age warrior conflicts rather than addressing urgent global realities.
1.10 Wise leadership is essential for humanity now. The necessity is for those who have the clarity to see what is going on, and who know what to do about it, to get the support of the human populations.
1.11 The kind of leadership needed begins with disciplined individuals who are responsibly managing their own lives, rather than merely going along with the consumerism of conventional society.
1.12 The modern “everyman” of consumer society is a propagandized individual, participating in illusions and, effectively, self‑destructing.
1.13 The modern “everyman” is being created by the power-system of the world, because it is in the interests of that power-system for there to be consumer-egos who are “self”-involved, “self”-seeking, and stupefied.
1.14 Generally speaking, politicians have to stay identified with the common mind and common illusions. But it is too late for that. The world cannot afford leaders who are deluded by the old patterns of culture and of mind.
1.15 If the global chaos that is now happening is not re-organized by the force of truth, it is going to be done by other means—including totalitarian and dark materialistic means.
1.16 Humankind now needs to choose its collective survival and well-being in the real world, rather than determining its politics based on old mythologies.
1.17 There has to be a global understanding that world peace requires stepping beyond both religious mythologies and secular ideologies.
1.18 The old “tribal” mythologies may touch upon Reality and the Absolute, but they are also human inventions—and their exclusivist and absolutist claims must now be relinquished.
1.19 If there is not this relinquishment, there is going to be nothing but disaster, created by the psychotic struggle for one or the other to be the winner.
1.20 History is filled with the destruction of past cultural monuments and temples, and the conquering of homelands. But industrial-age “tribal” wars cannot reclaim what has been lost. Rather, they threaten to bring an end to everything.
1.21 The idea behind nuclear weapons is the idea of total war. Total war is not about conflicts based on confrontations between the armies of the warring states. Total war is about a practice of war in which the people are the target.
1.22 Total war is an obscenity. It is evil. Total war would destroy the people, and it would destroy everything—for a political advantage.
1.23 The seed, or root, of the idea of total war is the commitment to global dominance. Total war has no function except for a nation-state, or an alliance of nation-states, that is interested in global dominance.
1.24 This kind of warfare has become global policy in the course of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first century.
1.25 Total war is absolutely unacceptable, and so the current warlike posturing must stop. It is on the verge of producing its ultimate catastrophe.
1.26 It is not that this or that nation-state should not have nuclear weapons. Absolutely no state and nobody should have nuclear weapons.
1.27 There needs to be an immediate intervention on behalf of humankind to eliminate all nuclear weapons and to establish a working process for settling issues.
1.28 At present, a culture of total war, a culture of death, is ruling, while the people are engrossed in consumerism.
1.29 The only power on Earth that can stop the trend toward total war is the power of the human population declaring it will not cooperate with this nihilistic culture of total war and the ideologies of total dominance.
1.30 In the present day, declarations of independent nation-states based on ethnic and religious traditions are creating huge problems. Previous larger confederacies are breaking down.
1.31 This trend is all about “tribalization”, setting up absolute pockets of power—based on the mythologies of the past, the traditions of the past, the separateness of geographical zones, the separateness of particular classes or races of people.
1.32 This disastrous fragmentation of humanity has to stop. What is needed is exactly the opposite of that.
1.33 The absolutization of “tribal” minds is the happening of the human race in this moment, and this is exactly what must be transcended. That requires a new kind of political orientation.
1.34 Right leadership, disposed toward global cooperation—based on a comprehension of the inherent and always prior unity of humankind and the total Earth-system—is now needed.
1.35 What needs to be supported everywhere is cooperative, participatory existence for the entire human population globally—and the establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum to express and implement that reality.
1.36 A Global Cooperative Forum representing humankind as a whole would operate based on the principle of “prior unity”—meaning an acknowledgement of the fundamental unity of humanity and of all existence.
1.37 The human family would be represented at a Global Cooperative Forum by morally-enlightened leaders capable of moving the world population into a separatism-transcending view, and, thus, into modes of cooperation.
1.38 On the basis of the working-presumption of prior unity, such a Global Cooperative Forum would deal with all the urgent issues that humankind has in common.
1.39 There are, at the present time, nation-states, but nation-states would need to allow and cooperate with the Global Cooperative Forum that represents humankind as a whole. That is the only politics that is viable for humankind now.
1.40 The nation-state configuration of the world is a leftover of the “tribal” past, in which larger regions of humanity were separated from the others and, generally, just kept their distance from one another.
1.41 Representatives of the nation-states getting together as the means of creating global order is not working. The “multiple-flags” model for global discourse represents the old “tribal” orientation, which now needs to be abandoned and replaced by a global cooperative.
1.42 Within a global cooperative there would be certain multiplicities of difference. Those differences should be largely cultural—simply part of the texture of humankind—and there should no longer be any effort to establish certain human groups as separate absolutes.
1.43 The principle of the Global Cooperative Forum is that the prior unity of everybody-all-at-once must become the basis of global politics.
1.44 The purpose of the Global Cooperative Forum is to ensure that the totality of humankind, or everybody-all-at-once, is participating in a global political reality, and demonstrating the self-organizing means for making it right and keeping it right.
1.45 Presently, the powers of the separate nation-state are being used to control populations all over the world.
1.46 The power of industry and money has actually become senior to the power of governments, and is now controlling the entire world.
1.47 The only power that can deal with these powers that are on the verge of destroying the Earth-world is everybody-all-at-once—meaning not merely mob power, but a new cooperative system for dealing with issues.
1.48 The efforts of separate nation-states and vested interests to control the people are not going to work forever. Sooner or later, the global population is going to demand a cooperative, benign situation.
1.49 That is why there needs to be a Global Cooperative Forum, in which all of humankind participates through right representation.
1.50 Such a Global Cooperative Forum would not be subordinate to a “tribalization” program imposed by nation-states, but would inform all of the existing political entities benignly and cooperatively.
1.51 Humankind has got to get down to its own business, and choose itself—and the Global Cooperative Forum is the means to do that.
1.52 Humankind needs to be relieved of the burden of its past, and step beyond its past, like a butterfly out of a cocoon, or like a snake shedding its skin.
1.53 The self-ordering system of humankind must be free to put itself in order. Humankind will self-organize itself if it is free to do so, and it must no longer be prohibited from so doing by the separatist factionalisms of the “tribal” mind.
1.54 “Not-two” is peace. “Not-two” is prior unity. Conversely, “two” is separateness, prior dis-unity, “difference”, otherness, competitiveness, opposition, confrontation, chaos, and war.
1.55 In the “room” of humankind as a whole, the “room” of everybody-all-at-once, there is no “two”—there are no “flags”, there are no religions, and there is no “self”-imagery that may be exclusively asserted. Rather, humankind must simply represent itself, and get together to create a new global domain for human existence. This is the great project.
These days, a polarization or “separation of camps” exists between authorities and authoritarians. An “anti-authority” sentiment has arisen in one camp that distinguishes poorly between legitimate, helpful, knowledgeable authority and illegitimate, detrimental, ignorant authoritarianism — or “dominator authorities”.
A “pro-authoritarian sentiment” has grown in the other camp, a sentiment that resists and attacks the inevitable new developments of newly emerging authorities (“progressives”).
Very often, people use the word, “authority”, to describe both, indiscriminately, so that people mis-categorize persons of authority as authoritarians and resist or otherwise fail to support them, when their services are direly needed.
This polarization has crippled people’s intelligence and rendered them more susceptible to manipulation by persons of malicious or self-serving intent.
This piece exists to clarify the difference, so that people exercise their intelligence, better and save themselves from the machinations of authoritarians.
Authority vs. Authoritarianism – Can you tell the difference?
There’s a night-and-day difference between authority and authoritarianism.
The words authority and author are obviously related. An authority is someone with a comprehensive understanding of how things work in some aspect of life. Someone who writes it all down is called an author.
Authoritarians on the other hand, are people who believe in the right of the authority to control others. What’s important to them is not understanding, but obedience.
To clarify that difference, let’s make a distinction. And authority is rightfully a teacher. An authoritarian on the other hand, is a controller of others – a control freak. An authoritarian believes in the right of an authority to dominate, who expects to be dominated and, on the basis of that “chain of authority”, expects to dominate others.
There’s a world of difference between teaching and dominating, isn’t there?
Teaching versus Dominating
Every competent teacher knows that teaching involves the voluntary cooperation of the student. The teacher presents information or a viewpoint. The cooperative student voluntarily internalizes that viewpoint or understanding. The teacher hands it off. The student captures it. The process of capturing it is known as self-discipline.
Authoritarians, on the other hand, believe that they have the right to compel cooperation. The words, “Thank you for your cooperation,” then, take on an ominous tone.
Authoritarians are afraid to exercise their own intelligence. They conform, but without intelligence — if with cleverness — to maintain the dominance of their (inherited) view. They conform, merely obediently.
That, indeed, is their stupidity — and it is self inflicted. So, where authoritarians self-inflict stupidity, the students of an authority apply self discipline – which requires them to exercise their intelligence — and also the courage to test and question.
Can you tell the difference?