God, global self-government, and male domination

Dear Ones and Friends,

One of the things I have realized about world federation theory as a result of a recent Wilmette Institute course on this subject is the extent to which both the theory as articulated by scholars and the actual efforts of good-willed people in the direction of world federation are disabled by a failure to take account of male evolutionary psychology and the ritual displays that almost all males, including human males, go through when threatened with loss of territory or control.

Just as Baha'u'llah was the prisoner of male leaders, so too world federation and His world order--the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth--are the prisoner of specifically male political thinking.

By the amount to which we fail to address and overcome typical male thinking in relation to world order, by the amount to which we fail to empower girls, women, and non-adversarial patterns and methods of self-government, by that amount we fail to appreciate the nature of the Kingdom, of the world order of Baha'u'llah, and the notion of global self-government guided by God.

The nasty, pathological aspects of alpha male evolutionary psychology are again dominating recent headlines and distracting the public from urgent issues of humanity’s future sustainability. First, there was Putin’s gesture in Crimea, then North Korean missile tests, and now Japan's reaction to North Korea.  Suddenly the world of “politics” reveals itself again as mostly a snake pit of male-psychology-driven tensions. Meanwhile, NASA and UN reports on climate change paint an ever more urgent picture of the need for massive global cooperation in human family problem-solving.

For example, in the face of North Korean alpha male bluster, the alpha male Japanese government apparently now thinks it is more urgent to shoot down future unarmed North Korean missiles flown out over the ocean than to do anything effective about the radiation pouring out of Fukushima—radiation that will, if not stopped, increasingly contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean, affecting the immediate and future health and food security of literally hundreds of millions of people, not to mention the health and genetic integrity of future generationsrandchildren.

Here's the article:

http://news.yahoo.com/japan-orders-military-strike-north-korea-missile-launches-035401019--sector.html.

The International Court of Justice has just recently outlawed Japan's Antarctic whaling practices, but what government has filed suit in the International Court of Justice against Japan's unbelievable laxity and public safety failures in the Fukushima calamity?

Where will this new round of “crazy male” idiocy and idiosyncrasy stop? 

Or will we, allegedly intelligent beings, continue to just stick our heads in the sand and do nothing constructive as tensions keep getting escalated by male heads of nation-states as they put on their pathetic public displays of strength and virility and “readiness for conflict” in response to one another's rhetorical challenges and military gestures?

Humanity doesn’t have time for this puerile waste of focus and energy! We have to get our global act together.  We should have been doing so decades ago.

When will we begin see through this charade and do something serious about this pathetic illusion, foisted on us by the males of the One Percent, of their so-called leadership, which constantly in fact sets back and destroys the collective unity we need in order to be building a viable global society that works for everybody?  When will we start envisioning the real possibility of better patterns and methods of self-government that progressively move us away from the primitive rituals of male adversariality?

Self-government by ganging up in pyramids of rank under the supreme direction of adversarial individual alpha males has been tried now for roughly 10,000 years as a method of governing ourselves in a “civilized” way and in metaphysical alignment with our image of a male deity living somewhere “above” us, and this method and its devastating results have moved humanity to the brink of imminent global system collapse.

None of the 195 national governments on Earth, the vast majority of them led by males, currently puts the future benefits and sustainability of the Peoples of the Earth as a whole above its own narrow self-interests. It’s been 70 years since the founding of the United Nations, and despite all the talk by male leaders since WW II of democracy and self-determination, those leaders have confined the methods of democratic decision-making to within the nation-state so the Peoples of Earth still have no direct democratic advisory vote within the framework of the United Nations on global public issues and policies.  Creation of humanity-wide programs and policies relating to the global human future (e.g., shifting from fossil fuels to a globally coordinated system of sustainable energy) require humanity-wide democratic mandates for purposes of creating motivation, empowerment, and a unity of will.  But when was the last time your government asked you to vote in a worldwide advisory referendum as a direct citizen of the United Nations?

The fact that this has never happened shows us male leadership under the current system for what it really is: not a genuine concern for global public system benefits but a façade using the discourse of public benefits to maintain the more basic agenda of personal and class and male gender control.  Or maybe, with some leaders, the concern for benefits is real but publicly unable to be honestly articulated because the leader is embedded within a hierarchical and adversarial system of money and force that makes power and control and “survival” in a position of leadership an ultimate value and goal in and of itself for which all other principles get sacrificed.  Expressing a “feminine” concern for the health and viability of the global human household would be attacked by other males as “weakness” in the face of our “enemies” against whom we must always maintain a posture of hostility.

How is the colossal and continuing failure to of male-dominated national governments to use the United Nations to its full capacity in order to achieve global human welfare otherwise explainable?  What else but primitive male evolutionary psychology can explain the gross failure of most governments to meet their promises to contribute 0.007 of their gross domestic product to meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals?

And where is the global democratic outcry against this failure of leaders to work in cooperation through the UN?  Where is the search by rational and intuitively sensitive people for ways around this central bottleneck to global cooperation and viability?

Time to wake up!   Time to start seeing that the current world order system, as the founder of the Baha'i world community said 150 years ago, is "lamentably defective."  Time to start seeing that we need new patterns and methods of self-government on this planet. 

But what are the alternatives to what we have? 

Well, why not begin by looking at the principles, attitudes, and the functional patterns and methods of self-government at work within the Baha'i community itself. Among the features of that multiracial, multilingual world community are:

·        A Covenantal duty of urgent concern for the problems of one’s present historical epoch and situation;

·        A systematic approach to the discovery of fact and the application of values and principles in the solution of these problems;

·        A supreme Covenantal and guiding value of the oneness and communicational health of the human system (“The earth is but one country and humanity its citizens.”)

·        Strong emphasis on justice in economic relations and the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty through multiple ways that move toward well-being and a spirit of unity.

·        Strong emphasis on the dignity and social empowerment of women and the education of the girl child.

·        Seeing the purpose and aim of immediate physical life as making a personal contribution to an ethically ever-advancing global civilization.

·        In terms of administrative functionality, no individual leaders, only group decision-making, all the way up;

·        Strong emphasis on ensuring gender balance and inclusion of diversity in the groups elected;

·        No self-chosen and self-promoted candidates for leadership; everyone is open for being chosen.

·        No nominating.

·        No campaigning or campaign contributions.

·        No "parties."

·        No "corporate free speech.”

·        Instead, just people previously consulting and getting acquainted with ideas and possible solutions and then voting reflectively, prayerfully, and by secret ballot for those whom they think are, in character and specialized talent, best qualified to solve the problems and to serve the best interests of the community in question.

The time is over when the world can afford to waste energy on watching male political displays and outdated methods of partisan, adversarial self-government. 

We need a vision of a non-adversarial democratic form of self-government that, in the spirit and way it functions and in the way it incentivizes people, actually supports the spiritual-political aims of global justice, sustainability, peace, and good will.

IMO, we live in an age that, in its prophetic, spiritualizing, and inward reality, is radical, evolutionary, and progressive beyond anything imagined by our general ethical, religious, and political culture.  We no longer have to wait for it; instead, we are already living in the beginning of a fulfilment that has been promised to us for thousands of years.

I urge, therefore: let us try to truly grasp the enormous historical importance of this age and of being alive at this time of history, and let us try to be a source of illumination, inspiration, and real hope to one another and to our fellow human beings.

Yours,

John Dale