Systemic solutions required

 It’s increasingly harder for people to believe that things are going to improve before getting catastrophically worse.  Optimism has blinded most of us to the accelerating global chaos of costly and unsustainable economic, environmental, health, social, and political systems over the last 50 years.  Increasingly human insecurity factors continue spilling harm across national borders as if those borders don’t exist.   News flash!  They only exist on maps and in political documents and in human beliefs.  Actual borders do not exist in nature and advances in technology are increasingly undermining the security of the political borders we draw.

“Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....” Jen Easterly. Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency’s director in a speech Oct. 29, 2021. [CISA is our nation’s newest federal agency established by the Trump Administration in 2018]

Humans have possessed the solutions for most of our current problems/threats for thousands of years.  Unfortunately, economic, political, and technological progress spawned human hubris into believing we are separate and above nature.   Growing arrogance and scientific ignorance have blinded us into believing that democracy, national sovereignty, wealth, military power, religion, and/or selfishness would make us more secure and most things better.  Nature ignores these entrenched beliefs.  It doesn’t care what we want or what we believe.  But it does provide what we need to survive and thrive.  Ignoring or avoidance of this functional reality is literally killing us and the planetary life support systems and infrastructure that we all depend on for every aspect of our health (mind, body, spirit, economy, and government...).  This must stop if we intend to sustainably maximize our species' most cherished freedoms and security.   

In a nutshell.  We simply lack virtue and value in protecting nature and each other.

Our minds have instead chosen other priorities.  Selfish non-virtuous actions that are unsustainable at every level.   Our government’s reactionary policies and failures have fueled skyrocketing expenses in attempting to defend our artificial political borders.  Failings at this have given rise to populist leaders and growing political movements around the world.   These inward-focused policies will only fuel more global chaos and everyone’s economic and environmental bankruptcy.

Fundamentally, we suffer from truth decay.  Neil deGrasse Tyson has classified three types of truth.   The first is our personal truths.  What God we believe, or not. And the experiences or insights we have.  Second, are those we learned from our culture or political view. Concepts and ideas we have heard so many times that they must be true.  But the most valuable truths needed now are what can sustain our collective freedoms and security.  These are (in my words) ‘self-evident truths, fundamental principles, or first principles.

A profoundly wise and primary global truth is that all people are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. Such as the right to not have a child die before their parents. And to defend one’s self and offspring from any threat. 

Consider the value of studying gravity and physics before building airplanes.  Or the value of science and  biology if one values health or space flight.

Follow the Golden Rule (the foundation of every major religion) or, expect highly undesirable consequences.  Americans were offered these truths as ”‘the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in our Declaration of Independence.  Unfortunately, the US Constitution allows too many laws that violate both.

Abraham Lincoln wrote that the Declaration of Independence is our “Apple of Gold”.  And our Constitution its “Frame of Silver”.  Thomas Jefferson wrote that “every law and constitution” should be rewritten “every 19 years”.  Because the future belongs to the “living and not the dead”.

As the US and other nations approach election seasons, it would be wise to grasp the fact that whoever wins, will only inherit a profoundly dysfunctional government system.   A global governance system based on the United Nations charter.  Both it and most national constitutions put the protection of national sovereignty far above the protection of fundamental human rights and the environment.  There is no sane means of globally enforcing the essential list of human rights approved within the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  This profound document was created after the horrors of WWII with the intention of preventing another world war. 

We are now on the cusp of an increasingly dangerous new Cold War.  New threats of nuclear war, cyber-attacks on our elections or energy grids, more pandemics, increasing weather extremes because we failed to heed clear warnings, the increasing risk of bioterrorism, and the inevitable evolution of Artificial Intelligence.

These costly and potentially catastrophic conditions were predicted by a bipartisan Presidential Commission in 1980.  A commission on world hunger.   Its commissioners unanimously warned that ...“The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… Calculable or not...this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”  They also stated “that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe....most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion.  Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”  It specifically warned of increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems” (refugees, genocide, human trafficking…). 

Independent government “self-interests” can no longer be more important than humanity's potential to survive and thrive in facing these accelerating threats. 

What’s urgently needed is comprehensively achieving the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.  These SDGs are infinitely more accurate in measuring the wealth of nations than their GDP.  In essence, humanity would be buying the protection of fundamental human rights and the environment.  No need to rewrite Constitutions ...as important as this may be.  Just one law is needed.  Freezing and seizing the tens of trillions of dollars locked in offshore accounts by kleptocrats, oligarchs, crime cartels, violent extremist groups, and filthy rich capitalists avoiding taxes.   

Dozens of other prestigious, bipartisan studies and academic reports have followed since 1980. Each clearly documents the direct and indirect links between world hunger, human rights violations, global instability, and the growing array of other threats to our freedoms, nation’s security, economy, and political stability.

Time is not on our side. The evolution of pathogens, weapons, war, corruption, environmental distresses, growing economic disparities, and government debt burdens from reactionary policies are simply unsustainable.   Without an effective response to this fundamental truth, trust in government will continue to erode.  Things change!  The big question is...Can we? 

Everything in the known universe is made up of systems and structures that are connected, interdependent, and changing.  Artificial intelligence will eventually gain consciousness.  Human biological systems and our physically engineered systems are extremely vulnerable.  If our intelligent species fails to gain the wisdom urgently needed to live virtuously on this abundant planet.  Things will only get worse unless AI decides to hold each of us accountable for abuses of nature and each other.