The Utopian World Championship

Cyril Belshaw: From Youth Maturity to Global Government : The Utopian Tapestry

Summary: show/hide

Summary

We have the intellectual tools to create a practical Utopia by the end of the 21st Century.. A theory of innovation, and the vast socio-cultural changes of the last quarter-century, provide an anchor. There has been a growth in the power of peoples. What is needed now is for the peoples to influence institutions to take the steps towards a Utopian world.
In the first part I concentrate on changing education by means of Youth Maturity Institutes incorporating schools into wider organisations. They will bring together interests and expertise focussed on the growing maturity of the child as he/she learns to become adult.
It is here that we will have a chance to instil the central value of courtesy and to enable individuals to control the anger and violence that is bedevilling the world. Among a range of other goals will be such themes as creativity, risk-taking, the defeat of boredom: values essential to a balanced adult persona, and the absence of which are at the root of most social ills.
The second section emphasizes the notion of a holistic tapestry. We cannot expect a Utopian solution in one dimension of society to succeed unless it is articulated with the rest. Thus parental influences in the Youth Maturity Institutes will not be fully functional if the relations between men and women are dysfunctional. This essay is not the place to elaborate on all the many dimensions, from control of criminality to zero-based taxation and universal minimum income. Instead there is a summary list of the threads which must be woven to succeed
The third section jumps to the constitution of global government. Now we build on the confidence of the earlier sections to tackle world order.
Global Government emerges from an analysis of the weaknesses in the present system. It will be a true world government deriving its authority from an elected body based on population units. It is organised into functional departments rather than the present independent organisations. It has an elected Cabinet and Ministers and a monopoly of military forces.
We cannot depend on national governments. They still work in a culture of competitive power, and are mostly far behind the wishes of their peoples. We need an alternative source of movement to give power to the people. I suggest that the most likely form to succeed would be a Council of International NGOs, mobilizing opinion to push governments and the UN to take the necessary steps.

Previous page | Next page | Page: 2 of 65 |
Jump to page:

Page 2

There are multiple ways of arriving there, and billions of value-laden decisions to take along the way. Here the premise is that we, as peoples, must take steps to examine, evaluate, discuss the intermediary objectives – the ones to be defined as we move forward. However definitive I may seem in my ideas, they are just that. Ideas. I believe in them at this moment. But they need to be discussed, amended, replaced. All I ask is that in the discussion, the implication of the amendments be thought out, and traced through the rest of the argument for inconsistencies and further amendment. We must never forget the holistic pattern, that one decision affects all others. What you and I do now, individually and intimately, affects the 2100 outcome. In making decisions, we must never forget that.
Another premise is that cultures, whether local, professional or global are dynamic. The changes which took place in the twentieth century – little more than one lifetime – were fundamental to all societies in the world(2). Some would argue, persuasively, that the rate of change increased exponentially, leading to inequities and anxieties about our ability to absorb the innovations. What is more, the changes have not been limited to technology or commercial practice or instruments designed to kill. In a very uneven way, they have included the most basic elements of human culture, from religious belief to marriage and sexual practice.
Up to the present, despite the existence of pressure groups, powerful politicians and CEOs, the changes have been blind. There is one relevant rule of human life. However much we plan, scheme, and rationalize policies, the results of any action, public or private, contain unforeseen elements. Sometimes these are trivial, sometimes they completely frustrate the given objective.
Thus we cannot be 100% certain about what we do. This is not a plea for more research – we must accept uncertainty and, its concomitant, the learning experience of failures along the way. We cannot wait for the completion of a major study; we must act in good faith, with the best knowledge and sensitivity we can muster.
The cliché has it that the movement of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon will influence the state of mind of a hermit in the Himalayas. We cannot detect that tiny influence. What the cliché says is that what we do has ramifying effects on the thoughts, actions, emotions, planning, of others both near and far. We do not normally extrapolate the consequences of our individual acts to the analysis of the nature of the world order. Yet the pond ripples, and it would be good to judge the effects of our own actions, however humble, in terms of their rippling consequences.

Previous page | Next page