A vision of hope for Humanity
The human race is designed for survival, and yet, now it has developed to the level of consciousness we experience today, it must choose survival, not simply assume that it is destined to survive.
Humanity has, until today, let itself evolve without an awareness of the process of its own evolution. Its mode of survival has been to compete for what it has experienced as scarce resources, permitting those who have chosen to exercise aggression and violence in their pursuit of power and wealth and domination to amass huge and totally disproportionate wealth to do so without, as yet, successfully challenging this model of evolution.
A close friend of mine describes the place we find ourselves in today in this way:
“Catastrophic climate change is a direct result of capitalism which encourages the most ruthless exploitation of labour and the earth’s resources for profit irrespective of consequences, as explained in Martin Empson’s 2022 publication ‘Socialism or Extinction’. It’s as stark and as simple as that.
We inhabit and are ill-served by a global economic system designed to get as much money as possible into as few pockets as possible as quickly as possible. That we blind ourselves to the absurdity of this situation is not just a moral issue it threatens our very survival as a species.
As Mary Pipher observed in her 1996 publication ‘The Shelter of Each Other’:
‘Capitalism favors what’s called the survival of the fittest, but really it’s the survival of the greediest, most driven and most ruthless. We have cared more about selling things to our neighbors than we’ve cared for our neighbors. The deck is stacked all wrong and ultimately we will all lose.’”
For us to survive, we must now choose to pursue a revolution in consciousness, a transition from unconscious competitive behaviour, to a conscious awareness of who we are as a species and what it will take to overcome the disastrous effects of an unfettered competitive market economy, which eventually leads to war, when nations choose to exercise their military might in support of this competition for land, for material resources, and for the money that oils the wheels of this military-industrial complex.
If we don’t change course, humanity is on course for extinction, through exhaustion of natural resources, through climate change and through war, all consequences of an unfettered market economy backed up by military force.
The alternative requires that we change our view of the world where we believe that it is there to be plundered by anyone who has the nerve to compete for it.
The human race now needs to end this competitive rat race, this lemming run, which will have us run over a cliff to extinction.
That alternative requires that we learn to co-operate, that we learn, each of us, to take responsibility for who we are, how we behave, and for all the choices that we either take ourselves or let others take on our behalf. The only way this can happen is for each of us individually to self-reflect, deeply, on our own beliefs, our own, often highly reactive, personal behaviour, and to learn to relate to our neighbours from a place of generous friendliness, rather than from fear and insecurity, from a fear of scarcity and from a fear that we will be abused or mistreated if we don’t get there first by dominating those around us so that they can’t get close. As a race we choose to put up a shield rather than make ourselves vulnerable to each other. We have learned that we don’t get our needs met unless we fight for space, and fighting for space means that when we do get that space, we don’t know how to live in it healthily. We need to learn how to relate well, how to listen to our neighbours rather than to judge them, how to come from compassion and understanding rather than from ego and from pretence, in the mistaken belief that putting on a show will make others appreciate us and attend to us. For the most part, as we have grown up, we have not been given healthy nourishing attention, and therefore we don’t know how to give that to others or how to attract it to ourselves. That HAS to change for us to be able to co-operate, to listen to each other, to understand each others’ needs, and to participate successfully in creative community decision making. For us to overcome the competitive world we live in, we have to learn how to co-operate in consensual participatory democracy, from the bottom up, so that the needs of EVERYONE is conveyed step by step from the ground to wherever it needs to be heard and to be noticed, for every decision, wherever it’s taken, to reflect the true needs of humanity.
In practice, none of the political parties in the UK reflect this vision. Reform, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party all support the current established competitive capitalist system and the armed forces and the armed alliances that protect it. To believe that any of them will step up to the plate and promote and deliver a peaceful, co-operative alternative is to believe in cloud cuckoo land. That’s very sad, as there are some fine people in most of these political parties, but, given the status quo, where the press and the media are in private hands, promoting the establishment way of doing things, most of them appear to believe that the only way to get elected to parliament is by espousing values that reflect the prevailing establishment philosophy and practice of capitalism and everything that goes along with it – the media, businesses, the banks, the stock-exchange, etc, etc …
Humanity is the political party I founded in 2009 and for which I have stood for Parliament on three occasions since then. I am not suggesting that Humanity is the sole or even primary vehicle for the change I seek. What it does offer is a vision, that, if held to, will act as a beacon for those who want the kind of change I’ve been describing here. The vision I have is of all organisations to the left of Labour coalescing into a movement for change, uniting around a minimum programme for change that will embody the revolution in awareness I have described here, a programme which will regulate the market until it serves the people rather than those who seek to profit from it, with a government that has the courage to introduce measures that direct the wealth of this country to where it is needed to meet the needs of the vast majority of the population, who are currently excluded from sharing in the wealth that this country has in spades, being the sixth largest economy in the world and the most unequal one.
And, if this movement begins as a movement of the left, if it is truly a movement representing the true needs of humanity, it will slowly inspire the vast majority of the population to join in, as the interests of the vast majority of the population coincide with this vision. It must be a movement of hope, of inspiration, of inclusion, of consensus, of peace, of freedom, of innovation, of creativity, of celebration of all the best qualities the human race has to offer.
For Humanity, check www.humaine.org.uk and https://www.facebook.com/humanitypoliticalparty .