January 1, 2011
Among the myriad problems facing our human race and indeed each one of us as we turn the yearly clock is that of “ownership” of the planet itself on which we all live. In short, the major issue on which most minor issues are based is territory![1]
Where all action takes place: local and global. Or relative and total.
But whose territory is it, the nations’ or humanity’s? OR EACH CITIZEN’S? Without territory, there is no such species as humanity or political entity as a nation or you and me as individual humans not to mention every other living “being” on planet Earth. But if we consider that only nations “own” the planetary turf, then we, humanity are doomed. And deserve it just like the struggling silkworm in a suffocating cocoon neglects to break out into the clean and limitless air.
But we humans better claim it NOW before some brain-warped “cocoon-leader” pushes the BUTTON! and BOOM! There goes the territory…ours! Planeterally-speaking.
The metamorphasizing of citizenship before the national doomsday machine implodes alone can justify our human existence on this home planet.
Besides, now we’re legally on world territory! The International Criminal Court’s [ICC] Statute cites “enemies of humanity” for indictment. Consider the implication. What heretofore was only a fact (humanity) is now a recognized element of global jurisprudence! (If an international criminal court can claim in its Statute the existence of humanity, it has legitimized it!) Humanity, however, is defined as “all human beings collectively.”[2]
And we, you and I, are charter members of humanity, are we not?[3]
So, already a de facto human being, now you and I have become de juris humans!
But we, as individuals, must claim it! That is, bond civically to our humanity, our species as we are already bonded generically. And we do that simply by exercising the fundamental right of political choice[4] by claiming world citizenship as an addition to our lower levels of citizenship down to the city or town we live in locally.
And guess what! You’ve just made a “global civic contract of world peace” with every other human who has made the same claim![5]
This then joins together in a true social pact both “bottom up” and “top down” unity.
All nations, of course, claim an exclusive part of world territory. But that claim is not only fictional but illegitimate condoning and perpetuating a condition of anarchy between them.
Result: war, the latest being a lawless condition called “terrorism” unwinnable and eventually destructive of all social codes leading to totalitarianism.[6]
Think back to 1789, for instance, when the United States government was formed. Its founders also claimed a part of the world territory naming it “The United States of America.” The actual land, however, was still “sovereign world territory” but now partly circumscribed by United States law, deemed “exclusive” of the rest of the world’s territory and “owned” by the newly-endowed “United States citizens.” In that pre-industrial, pre-electronic, pre-nuclear and pre-space world in which the horse was the fastest mode of transportation, when 98% of the population were farmers, “territory” was relative to both local and national needs, views and loyalties yet while certain sages like Tom Paine claimed that “My country is the world.”
“Top down” allegiance stopped at the nation’s shoreline or other man-made national frontiers up to the 20th century.
But now in this 21st century coming up to its 11th year, with THE BOMB ticking away over our collective heads, with open space reaching the stars also over our collective heads now populated in the speeding airbus circling the planet every hour and a half, “Top down” government is survival-relevant for humanity itself.
Because that’s where you and I live. (one single world territory) — minus fictional national (18th, 19th and 20th century) frontiers.
(If you have trouble with the word “fiction,” just think about the universality of nature and problems like “global warming,” Carl Sagan’s “nuclear winter” and solar power promoted by Buckminster Fuller as unlimited untaxable energy.[7]
Moreover humanity is sovereign. It obviously has political choice. But who speaks for it? Answer: you and me…as humans with a voice…and global awareness.
Now do you understand why, if you want to live through this and the next few years, you MUST I.D. yourself as a “citizen of humanity,” i.e. a “world citizen” (probably the most ancient idea in the history books).[8]
It’s no big deal. Socrates claimed it. Erasmus claimed it. H.G.Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King, etc., even F.D.R, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama claimed it. Choosing your political allegiance is the essence of fundamental human rights. All the UN member nations have already sanctioned that choice via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, etc.”
And all human beings are living on world territory! (Look down once in a while to check).
So what are you waiting for? Fear? Ignorance? Don’t know how?
Today, over 1,000 towns and cities throughout the world have “mundialized,” that is, declared that they exist on “sovereign world territory,” and that their citizens are legal world citizens as well as citizens of their local constituencies. The first town was Cahors, France in July, 1949.[9] Indeed many cities in the United States–the first being Richfield, Ohio, followed by Akron, Oberlin, Boston, Amherst, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, etc.–as well as Burlington, VT, next door, have likewise “mundialized” since 1949. (See the list at www.worldservice.org/mundcity.html).
Millions of us have already claimed it. (“Bottom up” authority). And we have official documents to prove it: World Citizen cards, World Passports, World I.D. Cards. The lot.[10]
The fateful and decisive moment has come with the advent of a new year to make the evolutionary leap, the “metathesizing” transformation from the “cocoon” of 18th 19th and 20th century, dysfunctional nationalism to the freedom of world space surrounding the planetary soil to and on which we all have arrived at birth.
You don’t have to be a prophet or a sage to understand this demonstrable if challenging truth. Every child over ten sitting at a computer going “online” knows it’s one world and he/she is a functioning part of it. Every mother no matter where, what skin color or religion knows with the miracle of birth the truth of the one human family of which she is a sacred source and preserver.
Every aware human.
So, it’s time to practice “Bottom Up with Top Down” political thinking.
Two final thoughts: We humans are both conceptually and perceptually endowed. We evaluate metaphysically while functioning physically. The first is identified by such qualities as “spirit,” “understanding,” “wisdom,” “reason,” “love,” “fairness,” “justice,” “kindness,” and the like. The second is identified by “DNA,” “species,” “physical,” “organic,” “biological,” “earthly,” “systemic” and the like. The universal code identifying all social intercourse is the dynamic relationship between the one and the many. “Do unto others, etc.” is a “code” of social behavior. “E pluribus unum,” “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite,” In short, the “geo-dialectic” of human activity wherever and whenever humans congregate.[11]
Viewed “vertically,” (or ontologically) the oneness of the human species is self-evident (as seen from the Space Station, for instance.) Viewed “horizontally,” (or teleologically) the “we-they” aspect dominates “dividing” humans culturally, socially and civically.
World law then combines both the vertical and horizontal (ontological and teleological) aspects of human civilization. Our political thinking therefore must encompass both methods. Example: the mayor of a city represents the total civic population as a whole yet must also represent each citizen within the code of civic justice and personal responsibility. The code word then for world law is a “meta” politics deemed “systemic.”[12]
A new and revolutionary technique of communication and problem-solving utilizing both “bottom up and top down” thinking combined with the frontierless medium of cyberspace, thanks to the internet, known as “syntegration” was inaugurated in 1993. Based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome structure[13] and reconfigured by the eminent cybernetician Stafford Beer as a dynamic tool for humans to reach valid and reasoned solutions to complex problems, the “Syntegrity Project” was then created, tested and practiced by 30 teams throughout the world in answer to the single question: “How can we, as sovereign world citizens, govern our world?”[14]
This coming year and 2012 promises to be one of joyful global coherence and fulfillment given such programs as “mundialisation” combined with “the Syntegrity Project” where in both “Top down and bottom up” thinking and participation allied with the ongoing and power-oriented identification of world citizenship[15] for the general world public join “not to fight the existing reality” as Buckminster Fuller sagely advised, but to “create a new model to render the old model obsolete.”
We are “the new model,” “bottom” and “top” linked gloriously together, and looking outward every night at the ever-expectant heavens.
________________________________________
[1] “5. A field or sphere of action, thought, etc.” Webster’s College Dictionary, 1991
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court
[3] “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…” Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[4] “Everyone has the right to a nationality and everyone has the right to change his nationality,” Article 15[2], Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[5] See www.worldpeaceisyou.com
[6] War Is A Crime, David Swanson, 1969
[7] “Big government can see no way to collect taxes to run its bureaucracy if people are served directly and individually by daily cosmic-energy-wealth income. Money-makers cannot find a way of putting meters between people and the wind, Sun, waves, etc.” (Critical Path, p. 219, St. Martin’s Press, 1981)
[8] World Citizenship and Government, Derek Heater, (St.Martin’s Press, 1996)
[9] See http://www.mairie-cahors.fr/actualite/BAT_LIVRET_MUNDI%20BD.pdf
[10] See www.worldservice.org
[11] See www.worldservice.org/memor.html
[12] “Our so-called ‘contemporary’ political systems are copied from models invented before the advent of the factory system…They were designed in an intellectual world that is almost unimaginable — a world that was pre-Marx, pre-Darwin, pre-Freud and pre-Einstein.” The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler, Bantam Edition, p. 414
[13] Icosahedron
[14] See www.worldservice.org/syn.html
[15] A documentary and feature film on world citizenship is projected this year to “change the story.” See www.OneFilms.com
***************************