In general, the people of our planet Earth hope for lives of peacefulness and the security that comes from not fearing for tomorrow and from the confidence of being able to plan for and work towards better futures for themselves, their children and their communities in a fair and just society.
There are very many nation states across the planet each of which claims dominion over the individuals within them. Whose governments claim the authority to speak and act on behalf of their populations. Who, almost without exception, claim to be doing so in the very best interests of those people. Who claim to be carrying out their responsibilities to the best of their ability and to be doing so much better than anybody else would be able to do it.
Each country, a nation state, also has identified within in it any number of groups of people who are not those identified as being 'the government'. These people invariably believe that the government is failing to provide the people of the country with the sort of lives that they yearn for. They believe that their group , if they were 'the government', would be able to do the job properly and successfully.
Each 'progressive' solution for managing the present, and planning and preparing for the future, characterises itself as being interested only in fairness, justice and equality for everyone; for the brotherhood amongst their citizen clients that comes from tolerance and the understanding of mutual strengths and differences. When they do have the power, that comes with gaining the 'great offices of state' and the institutional organs of government, they claim to represent and to be responsibly reflect the actual desires of the, now, 'ordinary' people and to be responsive to them. Being in effect their 'servants'. Public Servants. So called.
Whatever the actual reality in the context of deep history, or even from recent experiences, their approach and philosophy is self-identified as being democratic. They will claim to be a government arising from the people, being 'of the people', and governing in their interests, and thus being also 'for the people'. The reality however always seems to be very different from the rhetoric.
The idea of prosperous, fair and just societies living in peace, controlling their own destinies with due regard and respect for the rights of others, remains a dream. In practice the actual power demonstrated through the actions of elected individuals in governments, as distinct from their rhetoric, would appear to be more closely aligned to achieving the desires and aspirations of a small minority in each nation. A minority whose interests are represented on their behalf by commercial and industrial forms of organisation. Organisations, 'institutions', which have no real existence except by the decrees of law.
This dominant form of social collective, directing the powers of government, is characterised by the co-existence, with government, of 'the corporations' of this world. 'People', in law, but having no bodily existence. Non-humans. With inhuman goals and behaviours. Existing as a cloak of impersonal legality behind which, in the extreme, individuals are able to create a cloak of anonymity as they seek to wield the power to influence the actions of governments, and the laws they pass, to serve their own personal ends.
The dominant form of government, which calls itself democratic, is now found in these instances of 'Corporate Rule'. Even in societies where a single 'State Corporation' exists, by virtue of the decrees of an individual dictatorship, or a people's dictatorship, or an autocracy, actual democracy does not exist. The government of each is confined within a class of individuals who form a 'self-perpetuating elite', populating the institutions of both government and large corporations. In the Americas, across Europe, in the Russian Federation, Africa, Western Asia, Central and Southern Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, China, the Far East and across the Pacific.
The dream of Democracy as being 'For the people. By the people.' is not being subverted. It has been subverted. Everywhere. It has been for a very very long time. This is very little different from how it has been for thousands of years.
We use the word 'Democracy' but its meaning, like that of so many other words today, is being changed through misuse and abuse. The 'Democratic Model' followed by countries of the OECD, the 'main' countries of the 'Free World', is in practise a close cousin of Plutocracy.
OXOX
Every four or five years 'electors' are asked to choose from among preselected 'acceptable' candidates to be 'their representatives'. These people are not required to be authentically identified as being from within the communities that they seek to represent. Only those individuals who are able to access and utilise the powers of communication and information equivalent to those developed by commerce for the branding and marketing of mass consumption goods and services have any chance of serious notice and consideration by the electorate. Only those who have sufficient corporate and other funding from their own commercial interests will achieve this.
But this only buys, when successfully elected, one seat in a 'parliament' and no hope of actual governmental power. That requires a majority of seats to be filled with individuals with common purposes. Purposes towards achieving goals whose benefits will include those of serving the interests of the donors of the funds needed to become electable and thus justify the 'investments' being made. These associations of individual electoral nominees comprise the organisational forms referred to as 'Political Parties' and are the necessary political complement to the commercial 'corporate' entities and protects them from being seen to be exercising their power and influence over societies.
Unsurprisingly, the electorates of these countries soon find that, in practice, the only 'credibly presented' candidates from which to choose have all, already, been been plutocratically selected. They will govern, not according to the will of the people they claim to represent, but by the wishes of the few who effected their election and may effect their re-elections.
These few elected people will each have been carefully selected, by 'Party' members conscious of the needs of their financial sponsors, to be a likely and compliant source of future political actions and policies acceptable to those needs and with the abilities to present those same policies and actions to the electorate in ways that try to claim and emphasise the few benefits, real or imagined, that might accrue from them in their own lives.
The linkage between the exercise of political favours and the deferred receipt of commercial favours is now so blatant worldwide as to scarcely draw comment. The behaviour is entrenched. In one form or another. As it always has been. People have become apathetic about this injustice and the political charade. They usually just want to be left alone, to get on with their lives. However unnecessarily difficult or unfair their existences may seem.
As a result they can be seen to become very angry at those who seek to change anything. Anything at all. They are cynical and lack trust in what they are told. Their 'reactionary' attitudes are often re-interpreted as a 'conservatism'. These people are often misrepresented as being in support of the commercial entities whose self-interest is strongly vested in keeping a status quo that favours their commercial goals.
In the absence of credible and thought out alternatives this general antipathy amongst people is to be expected.
The creation of societies that can assure some semblance of justice for all, some chance for the interests of electors to be made truly paramount is a risky business when their protagonists' strongest arguments are simply uncertain expressions of exasperation, idealism and enthusiasm.
Generally people do not want uncertainty. They do not want to have to concern themselves with detailing abstractions of the future. Their present life is hard enough. As a result they will often actually oppose or fight any change. Just because any changes bring risk of failure and might make the present even more difficult and hard.
Especially when 'structural' changes are likely to bring real change to their personal lives.
This need by ordinary people for credible assurance that change will be both beneficial and successful is aided and abetted by those entrenched and powerful interests whose own immediate benefit is also served by the status quo. And it is they who have also strongly influenced the pre-selection of the elected 'representatives' of the people.
On the other hand there are always commercial interests that will benefit from change. With the rise of corporations that have global reach, and therefore operate in many socio-economic contexts, it is common for the same commercial organisation to have many and conflicting interests. Some of these are served by significant socio-economic change and some are not.
Commerce finds it easy to both oppose and support the same basic issues, even though they may at first sight appear to be in conflict with one another. Maximisation of shareholder profit is an exercise in the optimisation of costs and benefits over significant periods of time. Diversified production interests, operating across many socio-economic contexts and the 'hedging of bets by backing both political horses' are all examples of prudent insurance against the uncertainties of the future. Supporting both sides of an argument is not seen by commerce as being duplicitous. It is simply good business. In addition, it always has the advantage that it confuses and weakens the competition. Be it commercial, political or social.
Christopher Porritt, doyen of the UK Green Movement, delivering the 4th Blaikie Lecture at the University of East Anglia, UK, in July 2014, recognised the existence of a grassroots antipathy towards the apocalyptic-style and abstractions, far from everyday life, which are inherent to the 'planetary justice' message of the Greenpeace Movement. He asked if, as a result of this, the movement were not its own worst enemy in the struggle to gain wide support.
"What can be done to overcome it? [..the antipathy..]" he asked and suggested that a new 'narrative' is needed. One that will appeal to those that he identified as "the Millenials". Those people, now in their teens, who are moving into their young adulthood.
He suggested this should not be an 'apocalyptic' message on the simple grounds that this is not what they want to hear. They want, he said, to be told that they can keep the high-consumption, high-tech lifestyles that they have, or aspire to. They want to hear they can have this, and that everyone else in the world can have this too.
Mr. Porritt, with impeccable political logic, tells us that we should therefore tell them what they want to hear.
But with the proviso that we should also tell them that this will still require them to push for, lobby and demand from politicians and industry rapid and continual change. Not for positive adoption of Green lifestyles, but for the mass adoption of almost every technical advance now in the labs, or that is likely to be coming out of them. In this way the new generation, he said, will be able to consume its way out of global warming, poverty and inequality due to the huge increases in efficiency of energy production, in power use and in the reduced use of all the other material resources needed to build the new products that will enable a world of 9 billion high consumers to be not only an achievable goal but that it will also be sustainable.
A degree of cynicism on hearing this proposal is almost inevitable. It begs many questions about the real linkages between economic activity, property ownership, employment and mass consumption on the one hand and with human happiness and well-being on the other. It is almost as if Mr Porritt has himself become the political spin doctors' spin doctor. A considerable part of the ensuing 'question' time from 'the floor' was taken up with counter suggestions to those of his own.
It is the viewpoint of this website that our 'non-apocolyptic Millenials' do not need any more pandering to! They, like almost every human being before them, are not stupid. They know there is a problem. They also know, like the increasing numbers of radicals, and fundamentalists, and reactionary traditionalists, and also conservatives, that those that now govern us and the institutions through which and by which this is done will not be the source of the solution. They know that we are effectively governed through 'corporate rule' that emerges from entities which are themselves merely one of those institutions. It is clear to all that any real long-term universally equitable solution must create an automatic conflict of interest for them and for their survival as presently constituted. One they are not equipped or mandated to face. But one for which they are both equipped and mandated by the individuals owning them to resist with every means available.
In the circumstances of this reality our Millennials do not want to hear about 'apocalypse' because they have no faith in one being avoided. They would rather deliberately bury their heads in the sand and hope the 'party' goes on. In a flurry of consumption. The Millenials of our poorer neighbours can only bury their heads in their sand. They have, and will continue to have, little to consume.
Neither group have hope for the future because they know where the real problem lies. They all know that the fault is in the very fabric of the institutions and powers that operate and define the societies that we live in. They know that 'Greenness' and 'Global Green Governance' does not fix the problems of human governance. Just as they know that 'Democracy' in its popular flavours cannot. They know that the laudable objectives and dreams of the mid-20th Century have been largely compromised and subverted by self-interested institutionalised powers of individuals operating, and effectively ruling, through corporate entities.
The Millenials, and all the billions of 'real' people around the globe, want a credible future. They all want HOPE in that dream, if not for themselves then for their children and their children's children.
They all know that we need to fix Democracy, repair 'the Markets' and control commercial criminality. They know that we need to govern democratically, and that we need to do it from fair and just principles. They don't just want sustainability. They also want resilience. They want significance. They want dignity and they want vision.
Global Green Governance? It is, almost by definition, going to be just one of many natural and necessary consequences of any credible vision that is capable of taking all of mankind sustainably and successfully into a meaningful and fulfilling future...
There are very many nation states across the planet each of which claims dominion over the individuals within them. Whose governments claim the authority to speak and act on behalf of their populations. Who, almost without exception, claim to be doing so in the very best interests of those people. Who claim to be carrying out their responsibilities to the best of their ability and to be doing so much better than anybody else would be able to do it.
Each country, a nation state, also has identified within in it any number of groups of people who are not those identified as being 'the government'. These people invariably believe that the government is failing to provide the people of the country with the sort of lives that they yearn for. They believe that their group , if they were 'the government', would be able to do the job properly and successfully.
Each 'progressive' solution for managing the present, and planning and preparing for the future, characterises itself as being interested only in fairness, justice and equality for everyone; for the brotherhood amongst their citizen clients that comes from tolerance and the understanding of mutual strengths and differences. When they do have the power, that comes with gaining the 'great offices of state' and the institutional organs of government, they claim to represent and to be responsibly reflect the actual desires of the, now, 'ordinary' people and to be responsive to them. Being in effect their 'servants'. Public Servants. So called.
Whatever the actual reality in the context of deep history, or even from recent experiences, their approach and philosophy is self-identified as being democratic. They will claim to be a government arising from the people, being 'of the people', and governing in their interests, and thus being also 'for the people'. The reality however always seems to be very different from the rhetoric.
The idea of prosperous, fair and just societies living in peace, controlling their own destinies with due regard and respect for the rights of others, remains a dream. In practice the actual power demonstrated through the actions of elected individuals in governments, as distinct from their rhetoric, would appear to be more closely aligned to achieving the desires and aspirations of a small minority in each nation. A minority whose interests are represented on their behalf by commercial and industrial forms of organisation. Organisations, 'institutions', which have no real existence except by the decrees of law.
This dominant form of social collective, directing the powers of government, is characterised by the co-existence, with government, of 'the corporations' of this world. 'People', in law, but having no bodily existence. Non-humans. With inhuman goals and behaviours. Existing as a cloak of impersonal legality behind which, in the extreme, individuals are able to create a cloak of anonymity as they seek to wield the power to influence the actions of governments, and the laws they pass, to serve their own personal ends.
The dominant form of government, which calls itself democratic, is now found in these instances of 'Corporate Rule'. Even in societies where a single 'State Corporation' exists, by virtue of the decrees of an individual dictatorship, or a people's dictatorship, or an autocracy, actual democracy does not exist. The government of each is confined within a class of individuals who form a 'self-perpetuating elite', populating the institutions of both government and large corporations. In the Americas, across Europe, in the Russian Federation, Africa, Western Asia, Central and Southern Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, China, the Far East and across the Pacific.
The dream of Democracy as being 'For the people. By the people.' is not being subverted. It has been subverted. Everywhere. It has been for a very very long time. This is very little different from how it has been for thousands of years.
We use the word 'Democracy' but its meaning, like that of so many other words today, is being changed through misuse and abuse. The 'Democratic Model' followed by countries of the OECD, the 'main' countries of the 'Free World', is in practise a close cousin of Plutocracy.
OXOX
Every four or five years 'electors' are asked to choose from among preselected 'acceptable' candidates to be 'their representatives'. These people are not required to be authentically identified as being from within the communities that they seek to represent. Only those individuals who are able to access and utilise the powers of communication and information equivalent to those developed by commerce for the branding and marketing of mass consumption goods and services have any chance of serious notice and consideration by the electorate. Only those who have sufficient corporate and other funding from their own commercial interests will achieve this.
But this only buys, when successfully elected, one seat in a 'parliament' and no hope of actual governmental power. That requires a majority of seats to be filled with individuals with common purposes. Purposes towards achieving goals whose benefits will include those of serving the interests of the donors of the funds needed to become electable and thus justify the 'investments' being made. These associations of individual electoral nominees comprise the organisational forms referred to as 'Political Parties' and are the necessary political complement to the commercial 'corporate' entities and protects them from being seen to be exercising their power and influence over societies.
Unsurprisingly, the electorates of these countries soon find that, in practice, the only 'credibly presented' candidates from which to choose have all, already, been been plutocratically selected. They will govern, not according to the will of the people they claim to represent, but by the wishes of the few who effected their election and may effect their re-elections.
These few elected people will each have been carefully selected, by 'Party' members conscious of the needs of their financial sponsors, to be a likely and compliant source of future political actions and policies acceptable to those needs and with the abilities to present those same policies and actions to the electorate in ways that try to claim and emphasise the few benefits, real or imagined, that might accrue from them in their own lives.
The linkage between the exercise of political favours and the deferred receipt of commercial favours is now so blatant worldwide as to scarcely draw comment. The behaviour is entrenched. In one form or another. As it always has been. People have become apathetic about this injustice and the political charade. They usually just want to be left alone, to get on with their lives. However unnecessarily difficult or unfair their existences may seem.
As a result they can be seen to become very angry at those who seek to change anything. Anything at all. They are cynical and lack trust in what they are told. Their 'reactionary' attitudes are often re-interpreted as a 'conservatism'. These people are often misrepresented as being in support of the commercial entities whose self-interest is strongly vested in keeping a status quo that favours their commercial goals.
In the absence of credible and thought out alternatives this general antipathy amongst people is to be expected.
The creation of societies that can assure some semblance of justice for all, some chance for the interests of electors to be made truly paramount is a risky business when their protagonists' strongest arguments are simply uncertain expressions of exasperation, idealism and enthusiasm.
Generally people do not want uncertainty. They do not want to have to concern themselves with detailing abstractions of the future. Their present life is hard enough. As a result they will often actually oppose or fight any change. Just because any changes bring risk of failure and might make the present even more difficult and hard.
Especially when 'structural' changes are likely to bring real change to their personal lives.
This need by ordinary people for credible assurance that change will be both beneficial and successful is aided and abetted by those entrenched and powerful interests whose own immediate benefit is also served by the status quo. And it is they who have also strongly influenced the pre-selection of the elected 'representatives' of the people.
On the other hand there are always commercial interests that will benefit from change. With the rise of corporations that have global reach, and therefore operate in many socio-economic contexts, it is common for the same commercial organisation to have many and conflicting interests. Some of these are served by significant socio-economic change and some are not.
Commerce finds it easy to both oppose and support the same basic issues, even though they may at first sight appear to be in conflict with one another. Maximisation of shareholder profit is an exercise in the optimisation of costs and benefits over significant periods of time. Diversified production interests, operating across many socio-economic contexts and the 'hedging of bets by backing both political horses' are all examples of prudent insurance against the uncertainties of the future. Supporting both sides of an argument is not seen by commerce as being duplicitous. It is simply good business. In addition, it always has the advantage that it confuses and weakens the competition. Be it commercial, political or social.
Christopher Porritt, doyen of the UK Green Movement, delivering the 4th Blaikie Lecture at the University of East Anglia, UK, in July 2014, recognised the existence of a grassroots antipathy towards the apocalyptic-style and abstractions, far from everyday life, which are inherent to the 'planetary justice' message of the Greenpeace Movement. He asked if, as a result of this, the movement were not its own worst enemy in the struggle to gain wide support.
"What can be done to overcome it? [..the antipathy..]" he asked and suggested that a new 'narrative' is needed. One that will appeal to those that he identified as "the Millenials". Those people, now in their teens, who are moving into their young adulthood.
He suggested this should not be an 'apocalyptic' message on the simple grounds that this is not what they want to hear. They want, he said, to be told that they can keep the high-consumption, high-tech lifestyles that they have, or aspire to. They want to hear they can have this, and that everyone else in the world can have this too.
Mr. Porritt, with impeccable political logic, tells us that we should therefore tell them what they want to hear.
But with the proviso that we should also tell them that this will still require them to push for, lobby and demand from politicians and industry rapid and continual change. Not for positive adoption of Green lifestyles, but for the mass adoption of almost every technical advance now in the labs, or that is likely to be coming out of them. In this way the new generation, he said, will be able to consume its way out of global warming, poverty and inequality due to the huge increases in efficiency of energy production, in power use and in the reduced use of all the other material resources needed to build the new products that will enable a world of 9 billion high consumers to be not only an achievable goal but that it will also be sustainable.
A degree of cynicism on hearing this proposal is almost inevitable. It begs many questions about the real linkages between economic activity, property ownership, employment and mass consumption on the one hand and with human happiness and well-being on the other. It is almost as if Mr Porritt has himself become the political spin doctors' spin doctor. A considerable part of the ensuing 'question' time from 'the floor' was taken up with counter suggestions to those of his own.
It is the viewpoint of this website that our 'non-apocolyptic Millenials' do not need any more pandering to! They, like almost every human being before them, are not stupid. They know there is a problem. They also know, like the increasing numbers of radicals, and fundamentalists, and reactionary traditionalists, and also conservatives, that those that now govern us and the institutions through which and by which this is done will not be the source of the solution. They know that we are effectively governed through 'corporate rule' that emerges from entities which are themselves merely one of those institutions. It is clear to all that any real long-term universally equitable solution must create an automatic conflict of interest for them and for their survival as presently constituted. One they are not equipped or mandated to face. But one for which they are both equipped and mandated by the individuals owning them to resist with every means available.
In the circumstances of this reality our Millennials do not want to hear about 'apocalypse' because they have no faith in one being avoided. They would rather deliberately bury their heads in the sand and hope the 'party' goes on. In a flurry of consumption. The Millenials of our poorer neighbours can only bury their heads in their sand. They have, and will continue to have, little to consume.
Neither group have hope for the future because they know where the real problem lies. They all know that the fault is in the very fabric of the institutions and powers that operate and define the societies that we live in. They know that 'Greenness' and 'Global Green Governance' does not fix the problems of human governance. Just as they know that 'Democracy' in its popular flavours cannot. They know that the laudable objectives and dreams of the mid-20th Century have been largely compromised and subverted by self-interested institutionalised powers of individuals operating, and effectively ruling, through corporate entities.
The Millenials, and all the billions of 'real' people around the globe, want a credible future. They all want HOPE in that dream, if not for themselves then for their children and their children's children.
They all know that we need to fix Democracy, repair 'the Markets' and control commercial criminality. They know that we need to govern democratically, and that we need to do it from fair and just principles. They don't just want sustainability. They also want resilience. They want significance. They want dignity and they want vision.
Global Green Governance? It is, almost by definition, going to be just one of many natural and necessary consequences of any credible vision that is capable of taking all of mankind sustainably and successfully into a meaningful and fulfilling future...
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