Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.”—E.B. White, in his essay, Unity.
If you set aside the notion that world peace is unachievable, what would you replace it with? I have studied organizational behavior for some years now, and I have been thinking what I would do about war and pestilence if I took that on as an assignment. The population of the Earth is just a really big organization that presently doesn’t work very well.
With this in mind I have begun a plan for achieving world peace. If you follow my reasoning you will quickly see that I believe there is a close and essential correlation between peace and democracy. That assumption pervades the entire plan.
I realize there may already be several good plans for world peace out there, and if you know of any I would be pleased to learn about them. It could save me a lot of work.
In the meantime, I am going to publish my plan in serial fashion in this blog. The first installment is a recipe that merely lists the required ingredients. This list does not include an action plan for combining the ingredients, I will present that in installments, and hopefully with contributions from people who are smarter than I am.
This is a draft list of the elements that I believe are required to make and execute a plan to achieve world peace by the year 2060. World peace is a state in which no government sponsors physical violence against its own citizens or its neighbors, nor does it even attempt to substitute dictatorship for democracy. In a peaceful world no government orders an attack on its neighbors, nor do they attempt to create hardship for others for selfish gain. It is a world in which the fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a universal norm.
I propose that the following elements constitute the means to achieve world peace in approximately 50 years provided we develop and express the intention to succeed.
In future issues I will elaborate on each of the elements. Please stay tuned if you find this information valuable and relevant.
The Ingredients for a Plan to Achieve World Peace in 50 years
State the underlying theoretical basis for the world peace and democracy effort
- Offer and promote a viable alternative to the widely-held assumption that world peace is not achievable.
- Define and articulate the economic incentives for world peace as an appeal to the titans of business
- Educate society about the social dynamics that foment strife; this should provide a collateral improvement by reducing the size of the prison population
Survey and catalog existing resources devoted to global peace and democracy and continue to monitor activity in these areas for innovation and trends
- Organizations
- Literature
- Academic programs
- Internet resources
- Look for opportunities to create synergy among groups currently working on peace or on any of the elements in this list
Communicate peace and democracy news to a broad base of world citizens
- Establish world peace and the spread of democracy as valid and meaningful categories of news (equal to or greater than sports, the stock market, etc.)
- Create a nurturing environment for the development of peace and democracy spokespersons
Build a networking infrastructure for emerging democracies
- Peer-to-peer connections
- Help line to resource providers in democratic countries
- Community building among emerging democracies
- Access to experts and expertise
- Dynamic idea generation (access to think-tank resources)
Advocate meaningful work for everyone
- Restore the dignity of work–become work and fair-pay advocates
- Reaffirm and model the work ethic as a core value
- Lobby for laws and policies that support the two previous points
Encourage learning
- Emphasize art, theater, music, dance, and meditation practices that sensitize and tune human awareness
- Emphasize systems thinking as it relates to the interconnectedness of all natural processes
- Make college available to everyone
- Treat all children with respect and admiration
- Lobby for adequate financial support for education
Build an international infrastructure that dynamically supports emerging democracies
- Pay attention to citizen groups that are working to oust their dictators
- Make support services to emerging democracies easily accessible and highly responsive
- Shine the light of publicity on dictators
- Limit the mobility of dictators and their access to goods and services
- Punish the dictators, not the citizenry
Lobby existing foreign relations organizations to adopt democracy-supporting priorities
- Re-structure existing government agencies so that they give priority to spreading democracy and establishing peace
- Change the reward systems for diplomats and foreign service professionals to emphasize the spread of peace and democracy
Affirm and live by the overarching values of the world peace campaign
- Modesty
- Transparency
- Innovation
- Universality of opportunity
- Demonstrate a prediliction for forgiveness and amnesty over punishment and revenge
- Make a relentless commitment to the rule of law
Encourage international exchange programs and take it beyond the artisan level of activity
- Accelerate exchange student programs
- Create worker exchange programs
- Monitor and report the effects of exchange programs
- Build an infrastructure for “expatriot” employees across companies’ boundaries
- Create a community of practice for Americans who work, or have worked, abroad
- Install a learning history program to capture and magnify knowledge acquired by expats
Create a physical infrastructure of office space, solicitation of donations, and communication networks for peace and democracy work
- Establish a loose confederacy that accommodates a wide range of innovative approaches that does not become rigid, exclusive, or dogmatic
- Maintain a low barrier to entry for startup peace making efforts, and give them an opportunity to demonstrate their value
Expand on the ability of current democracies to extend aid to nations suffering natural disasters
- Overcome barriers such as those presented by the government in Burma (Myanmar) where they currently have a Nobel Peace Prize winner under house arrest
- Lobby for adequate funding on the part of donor nations
- Develop quick response systems that can absorb donations from grass roots citizenry
The next installment is available here.
