Global governance
From Sustain
To cope with the real crises ahead, we cannot escape the dire need to establish a new form of global governance. We need to transcend the competition of the Natural System, the survival-based, status-driven, male pursuit of dominance over the environment and over perceived rivals. It has been suggested that the only stimulus that could unite humanity is a mortal, extra-terrestrial threat: a new rival upon which to exert our competitive energies. I like to hope that the planetary threat of resource depletion can act as a surrogate for ET.
There is a plethora of societal and environmental problems that will only adequately respond to universally coordinated action. The delusion that individuals and the market are all that is required is evaporating before our eyes. The neoliberal dogma we have been sold in the West has created huge barriers to the necessary changes that must be realised.
We need to graduate beyond the primal competition for survival – pitting individual against individual; company against company; country against country. Once resources become increasingly scarce, this competition will turn very ugly indeed. We have a narrow window of opportunity to act before we spin into terminal, bloody decline.
Sovereignty is a sham. Every nation is interdependent, just as every individual is. We are each one of 7 odd billion, but should all feel inextricably part of a united whole. Diversity should be celebrated; but our equality and fraternity should remain paramount. Our primary duty should be to humanity, not only to ourselves; to our one precious planet, not to borders defined by historical, barbaric bloodshed.
We have started along a path to global governance already, and there are many aspects of the UN and the EU that are admirable. Unfortunately, with their current mandate and in their current form, they have not the capacity to address the pressing challenges of the 21st century. To deliver the mandatory breadth of coordinated action, comprehensive reform will be required.
The necessary switch to global governance grants a unique chance to reconfigure our relations in a manner to actively incorporate dignity, fraternity and genuine equality. The quest for ever more has been almost exclusively fired by testosterone. The check upon our scramble to the bottom has been delivered by nature, but for too long suppressed. The female yin needs to counter the male yang – any rewiring of governance needs to actively capture the balanced contribution of the female of the species.
An elemental evolution in human character will be required to achieve true global cooperation. I suspect that the only expedient means capable of rousing this advance is a benevolent, secular faith.
First on the agenda for my imagined transnational government is the subject of the next chapter: Sustainability
