Solving Climate Change:
Transforming International Politics

© John M. Bunzl, 2010

International Simultaneous Policy Organisation

P.O. Box 26547, London SE3 7YT, UK

simpol.org

Design: Orbit Graphic Communication

Cover Photo: Diana Trimble, COP-15, 2010

V1.4

Contents

Putting Climate Change in Context

Blind-spots in the Predominant Worldview

Destructive International Competition and Global Problems

Pseudo-democracy and the Legitimation Crisis

Psychological Denial

Design Criteria for a Global Human Agreement

But how will this be Conceived and Practiced?

Holons and Holarchies

The Vision-Logic Worldview

Surrendering to the Global Politics of Forgiveness

Notes and References

About the Author and Contact Details

Endorsements

Solving Climate Change:
Transforming International Politics

Putting Climate Change in Context

Based on successive scientific studies, it is now widely accepted that climate change is the result of excess emissions—mainly carbon—and that this excess is caused by human economic activity.[1]

Climate change may seem to present us with an entirely new challenge. But it’s worth remembering that it results from one of humanity’s oldest habits; the habit of pollution. If we look back over the course of human history to see how pollution was successfully combated and deterred, we can note that the key factor was always the implementation of appropriate regulations and governance (Polanyi, 2001; Forstater, 2003).

While small-scale pollution has been generated by humanity since time immemorial, large-scale pollution first emerged only during the Industrial Revolution. At that time, the environmental impacts of pollution, although larger than ever before, were usually confined within national borders. It is significant that the institution of the nation-state emerged well before industrialization. So once a particular form of industrial pollution came to be recognized as a threat, national governments did not need to be invented. They already existed and could resolve the problem by implementing appropriate laws, regulations and taxes. This was also backed up by national systems of courts and law enforcement. But today, pollution no longer confines itself to national borders. The global nature of carbon pollution as well as other global problems has far out-grown our essentially national mode of governance. While our economy, technology, communications and their associated forms of pollution have gone global, our mode of governance is therefore lagging seriously behind (McIntosh, 2007; Wilber, 2000). It is crucial, then, to see climate change in the context of this governance gap.

But it’s not just our mode of governance that needs to catch up with the new global economic, technical, and pollution realities. Currently prevailing values and worldviews—the very ways we understand and think about the world—are also lagging well behind. That is, our way of thinking about the world and its problems still has a predominantly national—i.e. nation-centric—focus and doesn’t see the world as a whole system (Stewart, 2008). It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that we’re having such trouble solving what are, now, world-centric—that is, global—problems.

This lag in worldviews arises, Wilber points out, because “technological innovation happens very fast, simply because you can change the materials of production fairly quickly …. But…the worldview, the cultural accoutrements of religion, meaning, beliefs, shared values, and so on moves much more slowly, because this involves…an interior subjective transformation of consciousness—a notoriously slow and difficult process.”[2] As a result, at critical points there evolves a serious mismatch between existing ways of thinking, and the new way the world actually works; a mismatch between old paradigm and new realities, and that tears at the social, economic and environmental fabric and brings on a deepening crisis.

What we’re dealing with, then, is not so much climate change or even global problems generally. Rather, the very way we think about and understand the world must become systemic and global—it must move from nation-centric to world-centric. Moreover, since modes of governance naturally only reflect how we understand the world, our worldview must first change if our mode of governance, too, is to change.

Blind-spots in the Predominant Worldview

Let us briefly examine, then, the predominant worldview and its limitations.

The way of thinking that gave rise to the West’s early-industrial era and to the present nation-state system can perhaps best be described as the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview. This is also known as the Rational worldview; a way of thinking that emerged in earnest with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Today, Rational can be said to consist of early Rational, or modernism, and late Rational, or postmodernism. Modernism and postmodernism today represent, on average, humanity’s predominant sets of beliefs and values (Wilber, 2000).[3] They represent, if you will, but the latest level of humanity’s interior cognitive development, having themselves followed upon previous levels which unfolded over the course of human evolution. To be sure, modernism and postmodernism represent a very remarkable achievement. Nevertheless, each new interior level of development not only brings solutions to the level it supercedes, it also brings its own inconsistencies and blind-spots. Although each newly-emerging worldview (or level of consciousness) can be said to solve the problems of the previous level, it cannot solve the problems that it, itself, brings with it. As a result, crisis eventually, but inevitably, ensues. And it is the onset of that crisis which necessitates the emergence of the next new level. Thus, the process of worldview evolution has continued to unfold over the course of human history: Archaic to Magic to Mythic to Rational to Vision-logic to yet higher levels (Gebser, 1985; Wilber, 2000).

Thus, in simplified terms we could say that the Rational worldview solved the problems of the Mythic-religious worldview and its associated ethno-centric Middle-Age system of warring small-states, so ushering in the more encompassing nation-state system. But at the same time, Rational also gave rise to industrialization, to markets, and to competing nations; to phenomena arising from nation-centric thinking. That is, to a way of thinking, we’re now finding, that has itself become insufficiently encompassing to deal with what are, now, world-centric problems; problems like climate change. In that sense, Einstein’s famous dictum is undoubtedly true: “We will not solve present problems with the same thinking that created them”.

The key solution modernism brought to the previous Mythic worldview was a focus on positivistic scientific discovery; a focus on scientifically proven fact over religiously asserted myth. But modernism also brought with it the limitation of tending to recognize only simple, cause-and-effect relationships (Stewart, 2008).[4] The key advance postmodernism added to this was pluralism; the ability to see, recognize and respect multiple ideas, perspectives or “truths”. But alongside postmodernism’s pluralistic ability came its own accompanying blind-spot: that is, its “flatness”; its inability to differentiate between those truths, to rank them, and then to integrate them in a hierarchical manner (Wilber, 2000). While it sees many truths on the same level, it cannot differentiate between them and so cannot hold them in mind integrally.

These blind-spots most clearly reveal themselves in the way today’s efforts to confront climate change tend to focus on individual entities, such as individual citizens, corporations, or governments, imploring each to take urgent action. “Since they are the entities that emit carbon, or are supposed to regulate it, they must be the problem”, or so modernism and postmodernism would have it. Modernism and postmodernism, in other words, see the individual entities (the fish), but as we’ll see, they have a problem recognizing the water that the fish swim and compete in. And it’s in the water—in the relationship between the fish—where we can quite easily identify why climate change still isn’t being properly addressed.

A brief but careful look at the newspapers explains the problem. The London Financial Times (November 16, 2006), for example, noted that

“governments remain reluctant to address [the climate change] threat because any country acting alone to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, without similar commitments by other governments, risks damaging the competitiveness of its industries.”

In other words, it’s not that governments don’t understand the urgency or have no desire to act. It’s that they fear it will harm the economic competitiveness of their industries in the global market. The problem, then, lies not so much with individual governments, but with the destructively competitive relationship between them. It lies with the fact that no government can rely on all other governments implementing the same regulations. Indeed, each can fairly confidently rely on others not doing so, because all of them have no choice but to keep their economies internationally competitive. It is this fear all nations have of losing out, then, and the inaction it causes that we are calling destructive international competition. As a result, as former British prime minister Gordon Brown rightly concluded, “The truth is we must tackle climate change internationally or we will not tackle it at all” (Financial Times, February 7, 2007).

But, because those at the forefront of the fight against climate change generally consist of people (or organizations) who share a modern or postmodern worldview, a worldview which tends to focus on individual entities, their approaches routinely fail to recognize the relationship between governments. While modernism certainly sees the damage done by individual citizens, corporations or governments, it fails to see the more complex truth of the destructively competitive dynamic between corporations, between national economies, and thus between their governments. As for postmodernism, international NGOs such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, if they recognize destructive international competition at all, they generally see it, in my experience, as just another problem on the same level as all the others, and so fail to see its fundamental primacy. They fail to see, in other words, how each government’s short-term need to keep its economy internationally competitive necessarily trumps every other concern, climate change included. Moreover, they fail to see how it can only continue to do so despite a worsening global predicament.

Their inability to see this, unsurprisingly, is because postmodern perspectives tend to reject all hierarchies. Only seeing global problems all on the same level, rather than recognizing that some transcend others, consigns NGOs and activists—the global justice movement as we might call them—to a flat, fragmented, and incomplete worldview. That is, to a focus mainly on single issues and individual entities; on the fish but not the water. We can also note that, although governments routinely reject NGO demands specifically on the grounds of having to maintain their competitiveness, NGOs and activists still seem disinclined to acknowledge the key role destructive international competition plays in frustrating their efforts. But since their worldview cannot recognize the primacy of destructive international competition, it’s hardly surprising their tactics continue largely unchanged.

Destructive International Competition and Global Problems

If we’re suggesting that today’s inadequate worldview is preventing the development of appropriate responses, we should expect destructive international competition to be the underlying, but as yet largely unseen, driver behind other global problems.

One important issue is the regulation and taxation of corporations, especially multinationals. If we look at rates of corporation tax across the world we see that destructive international competition is a key barrier to governments raising adequate revenues to fund public services:

“Governments vying to attract inward investment are weighing the advantages of cutting business costs…Tax rates have been falling across the world over the past quarter of a century.... This trend is forcing some experts to the conclusion that governments have embarked on a race to the bottom” (Financial Times, January 19, 2007).

Destructive competition is also a significant impediment to securing adequate human rights. Having long fought to end Apartheid in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) came to power only to find that international competition for investment prevents it from implementing the very laws it hoped to introduce to promote black economic empowerment:

“S Africa relaxes empowerment rules. The South African government has exempted foreign companies from having to sell a 25% stake in their local operations to black business… The government exempted foreign players because “we had to be mindful that we also have to position South Africa in a global environment where there is fierce competition for investment”, said Mandisi Mpahlwa, South African Minister for trade & industry” (Financial Times, December 15, 2006).

The same goes for workers’ rights generally. Here, destructive competition to attract investment leaves governments similarly unable to prevent sweat-shop wage exploitation:

“The £25 suit… but at what cost? Asda [part of Walmart] is today offering customers a passable two-piece suit for the price of a round of drinks in a London bar. Bangladeshi student, Shafiqul Islam, said “People can’t survive on £12 a month, but if the government protests, Asda and others will go to China or somewhere else” (The London Paper, January 22, 2007).

And if we look at attempts to regulate global financial markets in the wake of perhaps the most severe financial crisis in history, we see that destructive competition again remains the key obstacle:

“Row erupts as watchdog calls for tax on the City. A fresh row has erupted over ‘excessive’ banking bonuses after Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the City watchdog, claimed Britain's financial sector has grown ‘beyond a socially reasonable size’. His comments caused an uproar in financial centres yesterday, including Edinburgh, with leading figures and organisations warning that Britain would lose yet another major industry to competitors abroad. John Cridland, deputy director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said: ‘The government and regulators should be very wary of undermining the international competitiveness of the UK's financial services industry’ (The Scotsman, November 29, 2009).

The above examples simply show that, almost regardless of the particular global problem we may be most concerned with—be it climate change, trade justice, human rights, financial market regulation, or global poverty—and almost regardless of what NGOs, activists, and politicians may do to mitigate them, no substantive progress is likely unless and until the underlying problem of destructive competition between nations is properly recognized and dealt with.

The issue, then, is not so much carbon emissions or any other global problem, but how destructive international competition can be overcome; how it can be brought within a higher, cooperative, international governance framework that makes competition constructive rather than destructive; a framework capable, in other words, of solving global problems rather than exacerbating them. And that, clearly, is a matter of human agreement. For, as Wilber points out in respect of sustainability, “The startling fact is that ecological wisdom does not consist in understanding how to live in accord with nature; it consists in understanding how to get humans to agree on how to live in accord with nature” (Wilber, 2001, p. 268). That’s because, without international agreement, there can be no implementation. Without international agreement, moreover, emissions reductions by individual citizens, corporations or nations can have only a very limited impact. This radically shifts the debate from climate change (or any other global problem) to how adequate international cooperation and agreement can be secured.

The Roots of Destructive International Competition

The dynamic of destructive international competition emerged with the globalization of our late-industrial economy. With it, the main factors of world trade—global markets, global investors, commercial banks and transnational corporations—evolved an ability to move globally. Because production, jobs, and investment are the key elements without which no national economy can thrive, their ability to move requires governments to compete with each other to secure them.[5] To be successful, governments must make doing business in their country more attractive than in competitor countries. Failure to do so would only invite capital flight, unemployment, inflation, and eventual economic collapse, as investment and jobs would only move elsewhere. Raising taxes and tightening regulations to substantially reduce carbon emissions or to solve other global problems has thus become virtually impossible because doing so would increase business costs. As a result, governments are either being forced to weaken them in their bid to remain relatively attractive to global investors or, at least, not to significantly increase them so as not to harm their “international competitiveness” (Blair, 2008).[6]

Figure 1

The way the need to maintain competitiveness constrains governments is depicted in Figure 1. As indicated, if the degree of competitive pressure between national economies were low, as it is on domestic issues, their ability to act freely remains relatively high. Thus, the curve extends out to the lower-right of the diagram. But when the degree of competitive pressure between them is high, as it is for international issues under globalization, their freedom to act is curtailed. This severe limitation is shown by the vertical dotted line.

For efforts to combat climate change, this constraint is similarly depicted in Figure 2. Since the degree of competitive pressure between nations is high under globalization, each nation fears losing out to others, so they either free-ride or cooperate only minimally, thus limiting emissions cuts to a wholly inadequate level. The same, as we’ve seen, generally goes for measures to treat other global problems too.

International competitive pressure thus strongly determines government action. Destructive competition, we might conclude, represents the worldview of the nation-state system: a vicious circle that nations are thoroughly embedded in, cannot see beyond, and which leaves them quite incapable of dealing with the new life-circumstances created by globalization.[7]

Figure 2

Our focus on this phenomenon might appear to over-emphasize the outer realm of our global economy and its inadequate mode of governance. But all we’re emphasizing is that destructive international competition is a relatively new, world-centric reality; a fundamental reality that threatens our very survival but is not matched, let alone even properly acknowledged, by today’s, at best, nation-centric values and beliefs— and especially when it comes to perceptions of politics and governance.[8] Since there’s a serious disjuncture between the two, and since destructive international competition will, if ignored, only perpetuate and accelerate our decline, “…something,” Wilber points out, “has to give.... There will have to be a profound cultural revolution [i.e. a revolution in inner values and beliefs] in order to…mesh with the [outer] techno-social revolution that just occurred.”[9] Either that, or we face a wholesale regression into chaos.

Pseudo-Democracy and the Legitimation Crisis

The severe restriction on government action that destructive international competition represents is not, however, its only unwelcome consequence. Of particular importance is its effect on democracy.

Since the free-movement of capital and corporations forces governments to maintain their international competitiveness, their policies, as we saw, are severely restricted. All parties in power in virtually any country, then, not surprisingly end up implementing substantially the same, narrow, business-and market-friendly agenda. That’s why we find left-ofcenter parties adopting policies traditionally espoused by right-of-center parties. It’s why New Labour’s Tony Blair was often said to be the best Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher. Or, as the former Conservative prime minister, John Major, himself once put it, “I went swimming leaving my clothes on the bank and when I came back Tony Blair was wearing them” (The Week, 29 October, 1999).

While the mechanics of free and fair elections may still exist, the quality of democracy has been drastically hollowed out, reducing it to what I have elsewhere described as pseudo-democracy (Bunzl, 2001, pp. 30-36); a kind of electoral charade in which, in terms of macro-economic and environmental policy at least, it no longer matters much which party we vote for, or whether we bother to vote at all. This is how destructive competition severely constrains governments and, by consequence, the ability of citizens to remedy the situation through conventional democratic processes. What all this amounts to is a “legitimation crisis”; a breakdown in the adequacy of the existing worldview and its governance systems to command allegiance (Habermas, 1973).[10] Not only are our governments stuck in a vicious circle they can’t escape, we citizens no longer have any effective means of redress—a perilous situation indeed.

Psychological Denial

Truncated, as they are, by the highly limiting possibilities of competing nation-states, modern/postmodern worldviews have the effect of keeping us all in an effective state of psychological denial. This is because the present stifling context of destructive competition persists not simply by constraining present policies, but also because that is the way people think—and that includes politicians. [11] Since the pervading modern/postmodern outlook has trouble even recognizing the new world-centric reality of destructive international competition, politicians effectively have no choice but to try to reconcile national interests, like keeping their economies internationally competitive, with global interests, like drastically cutting carbon emissions. But because destructive international competition, as we saw, makes these two objectives fundamentally incompatible, the result is an on-going attempt by politicians to persuade citizens (and perhaps themselves) that they are compatible; to have us swallow the lie that in the age of globalization environmental sustainability can somehow be reconciled with economic growth and competitiveness when, in fact, it can’t.[12] Since we remain submerged in the current context of competition and can see no other possible context, we are forced, in effect, to lie to ourselves. Such, then, is the disjuncture between nation-centric worldviews and world-centric political-economic realities.

This denial applies, of course, to just about everyone and manifests in different ways. For society as a whole, it can be seen in the way people still generally believe that changing the party in power might make a substantial difference. There are, of course, some important differences between parties or candidates, but the scary overall reality is that politicians have lost control over the global economy and they have no substantive answers; their failure to deliver on climate change being just one example. But, instead of taking on board their fundamental impotence, we lamely carry on choosing between inadequate political parties, or, equally lamely, we don’t vote at all. Meanwhile, the global justice movement has its own version of denial: the belief that if only it shouts loud enough and campaigns hard enough, it can somehow drive governments to solve global problems. But destructive international competition, we’ve seen, means governments’ ability to respond is severely curtailed, so leaving the movement’s demands largely unmet and, more importantly, destined to remain so: a cacophony of desperate cries for change in the chaotic, undifferentiated and echoing flatland of a million other endless cries.

Destructive competition and pseudo-democracy, then, are vital phenomena we must understand if global problems and the global legitimation crisis are to be overcome. What’s more, they are problems emanating from a failure of human understanding and agreement. To solve global, biospheric problems, then, we need a global, human agreement. And because the vicious circle of destructive international competition can only be broken through such an agreement, Wilber is not exaggerating when he emphasises that “Anything short of [that] agreement will continue to destroy the biosphere” (Wilber, 2000. p. 541).

So, what might a global human agreement actually look like? And how could it be achieved?

We’ll now purport to answer those questions by presenting an existing, but as yet little-known campaign that aims to deliver a form of democratic global governance, or what could otherwise be called a global human agreement. Unfortunately, space allows only a very brief discussion of the campaign and its claim to be genuinely transformative. A more detailed account, including answers to many common questions and objections, is given in People-centred Global Governance – Making it Happen![13]

Before doing so, however, and given the underlying problems of destructive international competition and pseudo-democracy, let us first ask what the design criteria for a global human agreement might be?

Design Criteria for a Global Human Agreement

If the free-movement of capital and corporations is global, our first deduction must be that only a global solution—i.e., global governance—can possibly suffice. Also, since the United Nations (UN) exercises no autonomous, objective binding authority over its member-nations, and since gaining such authority could only occur in the unlikely event that nations voluntarily gave it up, it is unlikely the UN could resolve that contradiction. We must therefore look to nation-states directly. But since the nature of governments’ failure to act is the vicious circle of destructive competition and their fear of losing out, it follows that any solution must be implemented simultaneously to avoid that fear. If all or sufficient nations acted simultaneously, no nation, corporation or citizen would lose out: global and simultaneous, everybody wins. But, since nations are locked in a vicious circle and the most powerful ones may not see global cooperation as in their interests, our solution must give citizens the power to compel their governments to cooperate. So our solution must not just be global and simultaneous, but operate through existing electoral systems in a way that is completely new, binding, has trans-national coverage, and so transcends party-politics and nation-states.

But exactly how will this be conceived, understood, embraced, and practiced? What precise details, what actual specifics, where and how and when?[14]

For a few years, now, a very small number of citizens, primarily in the UK, have been test-running a global campaign that meets all the above criteria. Over three general elections, in 2001, 2005 and 2010, they succeeded in getting as many as 27 Members of the UK parliament and countless candidates from all the main political parties to pledge to implement the campaign’s global policy package. This package of global problem-solving measures is being designed to solve climate change as well as many other global problems and governments are to implement it simultaneously, only once all or sufficient of them have pledged to do so.[15]

In some UK electoral areas, more than one candidate signed the pledge, meaning the campaign gained support in parliament regardless which of those candidates won the seat.[16] This showed the campaign to be capable of transcending party-political divides and that it is global in scope, leading one candidate, Jim Knight, to recognize that “The forces of globalization are making the world effectively a smaller place. It is increasingly necessary to act together internationally to tackle the problems we face at home.”

But how could a very small number of citizens achieve such big results in so short a time? The answer lies in their discovery of a new, powerful way to use their votes. They do this by writing to some or all of the competing parliamentary candidates in their electoral area, informing them that they’ll be voting in future national elections for ANY politician or party—within reason—that pledges to implement the campaign’s policy package simultaneously alongside other governments. Or, if they have a party preference, they encourage their preferred politician or party to sign that pledge. In that way, campaign supporters still retain the ultimate right to vote as they please, but they also make it clear to all politicians that they’ll be giving strong preference to candidates that have signed the Pledge, to the exclusion of those who haven’t. So, politicians who sign the Pledge attract those votes and yet they risk nothing because the policy package only gets implemented if and when sufficient governments around the world have signed up too. But if politicians fail to sign the Pledge they risk losing votes to their political competitors who have signed, and so could risk losing their seats. With many parliamentary seats and even entire elections around the world often hanging on a relatively small number of votes, it’s not difficult to see that only relatively few campaign supporters could make it in the vital interests of politicians to sign up.[17] And therein lies the disproportionate power citizens already have to ensure their governments cooperate.

If what has been achieved in the UK continues to be built upon and replicated elsewhere,[18] a disproportionately high number of politicians and governments could be driven towards global cooperation by a relatively low number of citizens.[19] Seeing how this campaign permits our votes to command such power, and seeing how voting can once again have real meaning, increasing numbers of citizens are likely to be drawn to the campaign, so leading still more politicians and governments to sign on. In other words, a powerful and dynamic virtuous circle would have been set in train, potentially leading many governments in democratic countries to sign the Pledge. Thereafter, remaining nations would come under pressure to follow. Whether democratic or not, and whatever their level of development, the worsening world predicament is in any case making it in the interests of all nations to solve problems cooperatively (Wright, 2001; Stewart, 2000). What this campaign provides is an appropriate framework for that to occur, and a way for enlightened citizens to take the lead.[20]

Thanks to this novel way of voting, some Members of the European, Australian and other parliaments have signed up alongside their UK colleagues. The campaign presently has supporters in over 70 countries and endorsements from some leading statesmen and women, economists and ecologists.[21]

Back in 2005, supporters started their own global process for developing—with the possible help of independent experts—the global policies to be included in the campaign’s policy package. The policies to be implemented, then, aren’t imposed upon citizens, they are developed by them. In that respect, the campaign facilitates the coming together of its citizen-supporters and hosts a process by which they can propose, modify, negotiate, and agree policies amongst themselves.

At first, supporters in each individual country are invited to participate in their own independent national processes for developing the policies they, from their particular national perspective, feel should be included. Only at a much later stage, perhaps only when the prospect of implementation was coming into view, would a global negotiation be organized among all national supporter-organizations (including, also, the governments of any non-democratic nations) with a view to establishing a final set of policies, an implementation timetable, and any nation-specific compensations or exemptions that might be agreed. In this way, the process is designed so the policies to be implemented are democratically developed, globally inclusive, can be tailored to the varying needs of each country, while keeping the process open, changeable, and flexible over time.

The campaign’s policy measures could therefore be designed to:

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protect the global commons and combat global warming;

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dramatically reduce military spending in all nations, so releasing enormous sums for health, education, and development;

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ensure multi-national corporations, the financial sector, and the rich are more fairly taxed and cannot evade those responsibilities;

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re-structure the global financial system to serve the needs of the real economy rather than the reverse;

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re-distribute wealth equitably across national borders, so supporting people in the most needy nations while also encouraging the compliance of poorer nations with higher international social and environmental standards; and

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make all trade fair, sustainable, and as local as possible.

This campaign’s over-riding condition that its measures be implemented by nations simultaneously means that all of these policies could be implemented without any nation, corporation, or citizen losing out unduly to any other. In that way, then, each nation’s (and corporation’s) relative competitiveness would be maintained, present excuses for inaction and delay would evaporate, so allowing a very broad range of global problems to be addressed and ultimately solved in the best interests of all.

In contrast to present government-led treaty-making, not only is this new campaign driven by citizens, it offers a multi-issue framework for designing and implementing global policies. A key drawback of present efforts is that each global issue is addressed in isolation. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, deals only with carbon emissions. The problem is that, even if all nations reduced them simultaneously, the cost for big-polluters would still be far more than for low-polluters, thus making it unlikely that big-polluters would cooperate at all. Or, if they did, their reductions would likely be token or inadequate. But with this campaign, there’s the possibility of dealing with two or more issues. For example, emissions reductions could be coupled with a global tax on currency speculation, so permitting considerable revenues to be raised which could then be used to compensate big-polluting nations, or oil-producing nations, thus keeping them on-side with the emissions part of the agreement.[22]

NGOs and campaigning organizations already have well thought-out policies to deal with climate change, oil depletion and other global problems.[23] What they don’t have is a viable political means for getting them implemented in a globalised world; that is, a more authentic, world-centric mode of politics that fits with the new reality of destructive international competition. That’s why they’re beginning to see this novel campaign as a vehicle for driving politicians and nations towards cooperatively implementing them. They’re beginning to recognize that if politicians don’t have the power to deal substantively with global problems, then citizens must logically take the lead, both in designing the necessary policies, and in using their collective voting power to drive politicians to implement them, simultaneously.

The campaign we’re talking about is the Simultaneous Policy (or Simpol, for short). As Knight went on to say, “Simultaneous action on issues such as climate change, fair trade, immigration, terrorism and health pandemics is the ideal means of resolving them.”[24] However, not only is Simpol put forward as a viable means for transforming international politics and so for solving global problems, we will now attempt to substantiate its claim to being consonant with evolutionary principles. We will show, in other words, that Simpol is congruent with the way healthy evolution progresses and why, therefore, it represents a natural choice for humanity at this particular point in our evolution. For it is important to recognize that the challenge humanity now faces is fundamentally an evolutionary challenge; a challenge either to cooperate and so reach our species maturity, or to regress into chaos and potentially die off as a failed evolutionary experiment. To establish Simpol’s capacities in this respect, then, we’ll briefly review its congruity with the key tenets of the theory of Holons and Holarchies as described by Ken Wilber (Wilber, 2000, pp. 43-85). This might sound a bit technical, but as we’ll see, it’s not difficult to understand.

Holons and Holarchies

Holons and holarchies is a theory first put forward by Arthur Koestler to explain the principles of evolutionary transformation (Koestler, 1979); that is, simply put, the general patterns evolution follows to overcome destructive competition in its various guises.

Evolution can be seen as an ever-increasing number of levels of complexity whereby each new level (or holon) “transcends, negates and includes” its predecessor-level (Wilber, 2000).

Molecules, for example, came to transcend, negate and include atoms. Cells, later, came to transcend, negate and include molecules. Thus, in this evolutionary progression—atoms to molecules to cells—each higher-level organization or holon transcends, negates and includes its predecessor-components, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

To be more specific, each higher holon can be said to transcend its own components by providing a completely new and unprecedented novelty or process that is capable of binding them into a higher-level organization; an organization capable of performing processes or of solving problems that its individual components could not perform or solve alone. In doing so, the new higher holon negates its components by elucidating their inability in that respect, thereby showing that it’s in their interests to become lower parts of the new higher whole. But it also includes its components in the sense that the new higher whole is made up of its components; it is made of them and yet it cannot be reduced to them. The phrase “transcend, negate, and include”, we could say, sums up the dynamics of healthy evolutionary transformation; it encompasses, in effect, the dynamics by which destructive competition at one level is solved by moving higher to the next.

Important to note is that, of all the many new entities or organizations that life produces, only a tiny few ever prove to be genuinely transformative; only a very exceptional few have the capacity to create, and then to constitute, a new and higher level of complexity. Most new entities, a new NGO set up to alleviate poverty for example, may perhaps be effective within the confines and limitations of the existing paradigm. But that entity does not change those confines; it does not change the paradigm. Most new entities, then, simply stay on the same level they emerged from and have no capacity to move higher.

So, if we’re suggesting Simpol has the transformative potential to transcend, negate and include nation-states and so to constitute a new, higher level of complexity, we should expect it to be highly congruent with the transformative process I earlier described. We’ll therefore look, now, at the key principles, or tenets, of Holons and Holarchies, in particular those that relate to transformation, and at the ways Simpol can be said to fulfill them.

Unprecedented Emergence (Tenet 3)

How can Simpol’s claim to being a genuinely transformative entity be substantiated?

Helpfully, Wilber identifies a key hallmark of transformative entities in noting that, in contrast to all other entities, they are unprecedented and undetermined. In their case, “Emergence…means that indeterminacy…is sewn into the very fabric of the universe, since unprecedented emergence means undetermined by the past” (Wilber, 2000, p. 54). This sounds complicated, but it isn’t.

“The past,” as Wilber calls it, simply means the past and present context and its worldview. Since all policies implemented by governments around the world today are, we saw, strongly determined by each nation’s need to maintain its international competitiveness, we could say that destructive competition is what determines the past and present. Destructive competition, in other words, is what determines the present paradigm.

Indeterminacy, by contrast, or in this case the ability to implement policies that are not limited by the need to maintain international competitiveness, will only come, Wilber indicates, from the emergence of an unprecedented (i.e., a transformative) entity; an entity that is undetermined by the constraints of the past and thus opens up unprecedented possibilities for the future.

That, precisely, is what the concept of global simultaneous implementation achieves by expressing a satisfactory basis for fruitful international co-operation whereby no nation, corporation or citizen loses out to any other. Moreover, Simpol’s potential to drive all politicians and parties to support, and ultimately to implement, its range of measures means it is uniquely operative through established national electoral systems and is therefore binding. Simpol puts forward no candidates at elections, so it cannot be described as a political party. Yet it allows us to powerfully use our votes to drive existing politicians and parties to support its agenda, so having a direct influence—potentially a decisive influence—on national electoral outcomes. Simpol, then, could be described as perhaps the first, genuine form of global electoral politics; a novel, transformative way of voting that is global, undetermined by the past, and therefore wholly unprecedented: unprecedented emergence.

Deeper Consciousness (Tenet 8a)

Deeper consciousness in this context simply means “seeing more deeply”, or more profoundly, than the existing predominant worldview. In that respect, Simpol’s deeper consciousness and transformative potential resides in its identification of destructive international competition as being the key barrier to solving global problems. As Wilber notes, “In transformation whole new worlds…disclose themselves. These ‘new worlds’ are not physically located someplace else; they exist simply as a deeper perception (or deeper registration) of the available stimuli in this world. They appear to be—and might as well be—‘other worlds’ to the junior holons, but these ‘other worlds’ disclose themselves—they become this worldly—via transformation and self-transcendence” (Wilber, 2000, p. 67).

Here, the Kyoto Protocol gives us a practical example. We might say that, in this world, (i.e. under the existing, inadequate worldview), a 5-6% (or inadequate) reduction in emissions is about all the present constraints will allow. We all know we need a far greater reduction of 60% or even 80%, but we’ve no idea how we’re going to get nation-states to implement it given the competition between them. Such a reduction thus seems other-worldly; beyond realistic reach. But here, Simpol’s deeper understanding of destructive competition, its articulation of simultaneity, and its voting pledge combine into a powerful process potentially capable of achieving binding global governance; a process that makes the ‘other-worldly’ 60-80% reductions feasible because, to implement them, Simpol avoids anyone having to act against their own interests. It also offers citizens a way of driving the process. This is how Simpol transforms sterile policies into fertile ones, so enabling them to be brought into this world and thus within humanity’s collective grasp. As Wilber notes, “Greater depth brings other worlds into this world, constantly…” (Wilber, 2000, p. 67). Simpol’s deeper perception, then—its deeper consciousness—bring into this world a practical, if ambitious, potential solution.

Increasing complexity (and simplicity); increased differentiation and integration; increased organization and structuration; increased relative autonomy (Tenets 12a-d)

Again, more complicated-sounding terms. But they’re actually quite easy to understand in the context we’re speaking of.

In our brief explanation, you may have noticed that Simpol, by its own definition, facilitates the “structuration” or emergence of a new holarchic level. It does this by establishing a simple criterion for assessing whether any individual policy qualifies for inclusion in its policy package. This is expressed in the following question:

“Would the unilateral implementation of the policy measure (i.e., its implementation by a single nation or by a relatively small group of nations) be likely to have an adverse effect on the nation’s (or group’s) competitiveness?”[25]

If the answer is no, then the policy concerned is clearly one that individual nations, or restricted groups of nations, can happily implement independently, as they mostly do today.[26] Policies in this category could include those such as national housing policy, health and education policy, or culturally defined issues such as capital punishment or abortion. For policies where the answer is yes, on the other hand, these policies— and only these—need to be incorporated into Simpol because only simultaneous implementation can overcome the barrier of destructive international competition. Accordingly, policies are structured (or differentiated) into two distinct categories: unilateral policies or simultaneous policies. Unilateral policies effectively belong to the current context of competition while simultaneous policies belong to the yet-to-beborn context of cooperation. The simultaneous mode of policy implementation thus represents, potentially, the new, higher holarchic level; the new, more authentic level of political complexity (Tenet 12a).

Under Simpol, then, all sorts of global problems could be dealt with in a far more effective, high-impact way, so giving humanity greater relative autonomy (Tenet 12d); greater power and flexibility as we proceed together into the future. Also, differentiating between unilateral and simultaneous policies (Tenet 12b) facilitates the implementation of both. That’s because the two different types can now be matched up with their respective, appropriate, implementation methods; i.e., unilateral policies via nations independently, and simultaneous policies via Simpol, thus helping to ensure the swiftest possible implementation of both types. In that way, they’re integrated (Tenet 12c).

Anyone who is yet to discover Simpol (or something very similar) can, of course, see none of this. However elevated their general level of cognitive development or worldview, they can only remain effectively trapped in the current context of competition, caught in the undifferentiated, stifling incoherence of what we might call “Policy Flatland”; in today’s world where all policies are jumbled together on the unilateral level. Caught, that is, in a mode of policy implementation—at a level of political consciousness—incapable of adequately responding to the world’s urgent need for drastic action. Policy Flatland is indicated in Figure 4.

Only by identifying the need for simultaneous implementation—only by reaching a deeper political consciousness—can we go beyond Policy Flatland to embrace the deeper, more encompassing, more authentic context of global co-operation; the only context now capable of delivering us from our present crisis.

Figure 4

Preservation of the lower holons (Tenet 5a)

Again, an odd-sounding term. But its meaning will quickly become clear.

In transcending, negating and including the lower holons, the new higher holon also preserves or, we could say, safeguards them. The ways Simpol does this for citizens, political parties and nation-states, as well as for corporations and NGOs, are myriad. So, we’ll list only the most important ones here.

Firstly, Simpol’s policies would be implemented by nation-states simultaneously, and not by any supra-national body. So, no change to any nation’s constitution should be required—all constitutions would be preserved or safeguarded. Secondly, the inclusion only of simultaneous-type policies means national sovereignty, too, is maximally preserved. Third, Simpol is only implemented at some future point, if and when all or sufficient nations are on board. So, nations, parties and politicians can continue, until then, with their competition-based policy programs. In that way, each nation’s competitiveness is preserved (or safeguarded), so making signing the Simpol Pledge a no risk, win-win proposition. Fourth, while citizens who support Simpol declare themselves highly likely to vote for politicians who have signed the Pledge, it crucially doesn’t prevent citizens from having a party preference or, ultimately, from voting as they please. Far from diminishing voters’ autonomy, Simpol preserves or safeguards it, while transcending our votes by extending their power to the global level.

Regarding the global justice movement, Simpol respects the validity of the movement’s campaigns in raising awareness and in gaining necessary concessions—albeit limited—from the existing system. In that way, Simpol can be said to preserve or safeguard that mode of action. But by supporting Simpol, and so taking on board the implications of destructive competition, the movement would be acknowledging that a large portion of its policy demands required a simultaneous approach. In that way it could start to differentiate between unilateral and simultaneous policies and so could campaign for unilateral-type policies using its conventional methods, and for simultaneous-type policies by encouraging its many millions of supporters to support Simpol alongside the movement’s other campaigns. The risk of its demands being dismissed, as they routinely are today, on the grounds that their unilateral implementation would harm national competitiveness would thus have been neutralised. Simpol, in other words, would allow the movement to move from partial modes of action to complete modes of action; from either-or thinking to both-and thinking; from a chaotic heap to a coherent whole, and thus to an integrated approach that makes “another world” not just possible, but also practical.[27]

Negation of the lower holons (Tenet 5b)

A key feature of transformative entities is that they not only preserve what works in the lower holons, they also negate what doesn’t. The principal way Simpol negates what doesn’t, we saw, is by elucidating the danger of destructive competition between nations, so bringing into sharp relief the present pathological dynamic inherent in the nation-state system. But Simpol also negates nations in other ways. Since its range of policies is designed by its citizen-supporters (helped, if they wish, by their chosen independent experts) and not by politicians or governments, those policies are developed outside of established political processes. In that way, Simpol effectively takes the task of global policy-making out of the hands of nation-states; a move that not only negates them, it is justified and necessary because, as we saw, destructive international competition has already placed substantive international policies beyond national reach. In that way, we could say that although Simpol works through the system, it is not of the system; an example, perhaps, of another hallmark of transformative holons: what Wilber calls a “creative twist” (Wilber, 2000, p. 50).

Coming to political parties, a powerful negation and transcendence is inherent in Simpol’s voting pledge. To reiterate: when citizens support Simpol, they vote in all future national elections for ANY politician or party—within reason—that has pledged to implement Simpol alongside other governments. Or, they encourage their preferred party, if they have one, to make that pledge. The emphasized word “ANY”, you’ll have noticed, implies a strong negation of political parties. In recognising that destructive international competition forces all parties in power to follow a market-friendly agenda that precludes any solution to global problems, our support for Simpol powerfully shows politicians that our consciousness has deepened; that we smelt the coffee; that for us, consequently, their game is up. If a politician comes canvassing for your vote but notices a Simpol sticker in your front window, they’ll know that whatever else they may say, they’ll almost certainly need to sign the Simpol Pledge to have any chance of gaining your vote or the votes of other supporters; votes which, in their bid either to gain a seat or to avoid losing it, could make all the difference. The finer the margin of public support between the main competing candidates or parties, the lower would be the number of Simpolsupporters needed to make it in the vital interests of politicians to sign up. The finer that margin, in other words, the more powerful is Simpol’s negation of politicians and parties, and the stronger, likewise, is its agency or power to transcend.

As a final comment on negation, Simpol could be said to negate those citizens who don’t yet support it because it seems, at present at least, to be the only initiative that allows us to use our official votes to drive national politicians to solve global problems, or to otherwise implement a form of people-centred global governance. Furthermore, supporting Simpol is open to all, no financial charge is made, and citizens are free to cancel their pledge at any time, should they wish to. So, there’s really no excuse not to support it. Since it seems to be the only form of global electoral politics available, and since established methods of solving global problems aren’t working and could ultimately fail, supporting it could be argued to be a matter of personal responsibility, as well as an immensely valuable opportunity. Citizens who support it could, in that sense, be said to have made themselves part of the global political solution, whereas those who don’t know about it, or don’t support it, could be said to remain part of the problem. It follows, then, that citizens who haven’t yet signed up are negated, potentially, merely by that omission; a negation that would likely become more acute and keenly felt if Simpol were to become more widely known, publicised, and supported by the public as a whole.

At all levels, then, be it nations, political parties, politicians or citizens, Simpol’s concept of global, simultaneous implementation, transcends, negates, and includes. But that shouldn’t be any surprise. For as evolutionist, Erich Jantsch, points out, “In the self-organization paradigm, evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels [my emphasis]” (Jantsch, 1980, p. 183). And as the originator of Holons and Holarchies, Arthur Koestler, knew very well, “…evolutionary progress … requires simultaneous [my emphasis], coordinated changes of all the relevant components in the structure and function of the organic holarchy” (Koestler, 1978, pp. 175-6). That’s because, whether it’s the governance of multi-celled organisms or other societies of organisms, including human, evolutionary biologist John Stewart points out that “If…constraints…fail to…act globally and simultaneously across the organism [my emphasis], individual cells will…begin to compete by reproducing as fast as they can. Cancer is an example of this breakdown of constraints in multi-cellular organisms”.[28]

Neither should it surprise us that destructive competition and free-riding are, together, the key barrier to solving global problems. For they have, according to Stewart, always been the barrier to evolutionary progress. This barrier applies, he explains,

“to all living processes. The circumstances that cause it are universal. Individuals who use resources to help others without benefit to themselves will be out-competed. They will be disadvantaged compared to those who use the resources for their own benefit. … The barrier has applied whether the evolutionary mechanisms are those that adapt corporations, individual humans, other multi-cellular organisms, single cells or autocatalytic sets” (Stewart, 2000).

But if that universal barrier completely prevented the evolution of cooperation, evolution could not progress. Yet it has progressed and has done so, says Stewart, “by building cooperative organisations out of self-interested components”[29]; by finding a way to make it in the interests of individual entities to cooperate. And that, exactly, is what Simpol achieves by avoiding anyone having to act against their own interests. Destructive competition has always been the problem; and global, simultaneous governance, likewise it seems, has always been the solution.[30]

The vision-logic worldview

In earlier sections of this briefing, we alluded to the need to move beyond the presently predominant nation-centric, Rational (i.e. modern/postmodern) level of interior development to a more encompassing, world-centric level.

The higher or deeper stage of interior growth that lies beyond Rational at which a genuine solution to our global ecological, economic and social crisis might disclose itself is sometimes referred to as “Visionlogic”. It is vision-logic, Wilber suggests, “that drives and underlies the possibility of a truly planetary culture…” (Wilber, 2000, p. 191). Theorists from Aurobindo to Habermas have identified a similar developmental stage. Aurobindo defines vision-logic as a stage that “can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth, self-seen in the integral whole” (Aurobindo, 1949).

Simpol, we are suggesting, is reasonably expressive of vision-logic. Following Aurobindo’s definition, it could certainly be said that Simpol represents a “single idea”. But that single idea gives rise to a “mass ideation”, to a whole new way of looking at, and thinking about, the world “at a single view”. That is, Simpol discloses a genuinely world-centric, globally systemic, perspective.

Unlike modernism/postmodernism, Simpol holds both the distinct entities themselves (eg. corporations or governments) and the relationship between them in mind, integrally. That is to say, the policy content of Simpol, once implemented, would serve to regulate the individual entities. Then, its global, simultaneous implementation takes into account the competitive relationship between them. It thus holds both truths—fish and water—in mind together, integrally.

Citing Habermas, in whose model “mature or communicative reason” equates with vision-logic, Wilber concurs that modernism/postmodernism “establish the postconventional stages of, first, ‘civil liberties’ or ‘legal freedom’ for ‘all those bound by law,’ and then, in a more developed stage, it demands not just legal freedom but also ‘moral freedom’ for ‘all humans as private persons’. But even further, mature or communicative reason (our vision-logic) demands both ‘moral and political freedom’ for ‘all human beings as members of a world society’” (Wilber, 2000, pp. 267268). And achieving such a world society, as well as global social justice and environmental sustainability, is the end-point of which Simpol (or something very similar) would be a necessary, facilitating and transformative starting-point.

Another feature of vision-logic’s planetary worldview is its transcendence of another of postmodernism’s achievements: the concept of multiculturalism. As Wilber notes, “The ‘multicultural movement,’ which claims a universal tolerance of all cultures freed from ‘logocentric, rational-centric, Eurocentric’ dominance and hegemony, is a step in the right direction, with all good intentions, but ends up being self-contradictory and finally hypocritical” (Wilber, 2000). In other words, multiculturalism’s assertion that all cultures can live harmoniously in any country in a relatively integrated fashion, too often proves false. Far from producing inter-cultural harmony, it has often contributed to raising inter-cultural and inter-racial tensions; and especially when the economy happens to take a turn for the worse.

That’s why the good intentions of multiculturalism can only become a functioning reality—can only be completed and fully realised—if we move beyond multiculturalism to embrace a genuinely aperspectival, global-and-simultaneous view. If the world could, through Simpol, temper the global free-movement of capital by an international redistribution of wealth and resources, the freely given support this would provide to poorer countries would permit their citizens to make a decent living in their home country if they wish. Far fewer would then feel a need to migrate in the first place, so helping preserve and support the cultural richness and distinctiveness of all nations and peoples everywhere.

In terms of eliciting people’s support, this potential of Simpol should appeal to those with premodern (i.e. tribal or ethno-centric) worldviews because it preserves national autonomy and cultural distinctiveness to the maximum. Moreover, the likelihood that Simpol’s policies would provide a substantive economic benefit to poorer countries should make it appealing to them in any case. Meanwhile, Simpol’s potential to produce a more globally inclusive, equitable, and environmentally sustainable world—and, moreover, a means for us to avoid collapse—should appeal to those in richer countries, including people with a modern/postmodern or vision-logic worldview.

As opposed to multiculturalism, then, Simpol’s more complete simulcultural view would respect and honour all cultures simultaneously in their own context, whatever their stage of development, by ensuring that each was not just respected, but equitably supported by a cooperatively governed global economy that was genuinely fair to all. That, in short, expresses what Wilber calls “the prime directive”[31]; i.e., Simpol’s potential to accommodate itself to all cultures and levels of development while governing them from the highest presently-available level.

In this connection, there are important concerns that democratic global governance, if achieved, could be skewed towards inappropriate policies coming, for example, from ethnocentric, pre-modern levels of development. Much of humanity, after all, still finds itself at that level. Such concerns may, perhaps, be very valid for some global governance initiatives, but they are likely to be misplaced, I suggest, when it comes to Simpol. This, firstly, is because ethnocentric policies tend, by their very nature, to address national or culturally defined issues; issues, that is, which have no impact whatever on national competitiveness and are therefore automatically excluded from Simpol in any case. Secondly, since Simpol, by definition, could only be implemented with the support of all or sufficient nations, potentially inappropriate policies, if not already excluded as just described, would likely be screened out for the simple reason that they would fail to appeal to national societies at higher levels of development. Meanwhile, the only policies that can be made palatable to all levels stem, almost by definition, from vision-logic because vision-logic is the only level of development that integrates all the prior levels. In that way, then, inappropriate policies that came from any one of the prior levels would be unlikely to appeal to any of the other prior levels, and so would fall by the wayside for lack of global agreement. Whereas policies informed by vision-logic should win through because they would be the only ones capable of appealing to all.

Differing perspectives, we should note, are also evident when it comes to how different societies interpret the concept of governance, and even democracy itself (Tonkin, 2010). Indeed, societies at a tribal or ethnocentric level of development are unlikely to understand the need for global governance at all, let alone be concerned to ensure it is democratic. Global governance mediated by an institution such as an elected world parliament, then, or any other formulation that assumes all nations already are (or should be) democratic, are unlikely to prove successful. For in their very conception these models already mistakenly presume all societies see democracy from an essentially Western perspective. And because they are centred on the relatively esoteric concept of democracy, rather than on the more utilitarian, and thus more universal, concept of enlightened self-interest— i.e. the concept Simpol is centred on—these models may find it difficult to elicit acceptance outside the West. That, again, is why a model such as Simpol, which not only appeals primarily to everyone’s self-interest, but which harnesses national democratic processes where they are available, and yet is sufficiently flexible to include non-democratic nations, is perhaps more likely to prove acceptable to all.

In all these ways, then, Simpol holds the potential, I suggest, for delivering—as securely and as safely as possible—the global human agreement Wilber identifies as essential. But it ought, also, to be compared with the UN, and with all the various other campaigns and initiatives aiming for global governance, to assess their relative transformative potentials. There is insufficient space to provide that analysis here, but it is offered elsewhere.[32] What it suggests is that, so far at least, Simpol seems to be unique, both in its strong congruity with the tenets of Holons and Holarchies, and in its provision of a powerful political practice capable of permitting citizens (in all democratic countries, at least) to use their votes to drive their governments towards cooperation; towards actually implementing the global human agreement humanity so sorely needs. Because, without such a practice all you have is a theory. And it is just such a practice that philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, identifies as vital; as the prerequisite component of any new paradigm (Kuhn, 1962).

Throughout this briefing, we have suggested that Simpol provides citizens with a means to drive politicians towards cooperative global governance. But in this very turbulent epoch when financial markets threaten Europe’s single currency and when governments are finding unilateral action increasingly ineffective or counter-productive, the pressure created by these instabilities could itself become strong enough to drive governments around the world towards more co-ordinated—that is, towards simultaneously implemented—policy solutions. These pressures, in other words, could be sufficient to drive nations to cooperate without any encouragement from citizens. But we should remember that co-operation achieved in that way would hardly be democratic or accountable. Rather, without direct input from citizens, it is likely to be skewed towards global corporate and banking interests. That, then, is why direct citizen input and accountability is required, not just at local and national levels, but also at the global level. So, whether citizens use a process such as Simpol to bring about global democratic governance, or whether global governance occurs spontaneously in an undemocratic form and must then be democratized by citizens at a later date, Simpol, in either case, offers a practical way forward.

Returning to where we started, we humans have given rise to the realm of the human mind; to what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. But we have differentiated ourselves from the biosphere to such a pathological degree that our very survival is under threat. So the urgent need, now, is to integrate noosphere with biosphere; to bring ourselves, as Wilber asserts, “into an adequate harmony with both our predecessors and our peers” (Wilber, 2000, pp. 109-110). And that, effectively, is what Simpol could enable by offering a way for us to bring our techno-economic noospheric mode of life “into an adequate harmony with [our predecessor,] the biosphere”; that is, the implementation of Simpol’s policies would allow us to achieve ecological sustainability. But, in bringing citizens all over the world to cooperate, Simpol also brings us humans “into harmony with our peers”; into harmony, that is, with each other. Simpol thus holds the potential to integrate, in the outer realm of our social and political institutions at least, the physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere, so achieving, potentially, an adequate harmony between all three: the realization, finally, of our specie’s maturity.

Surrendering to the global politics of forgiveness

The requirement of bringing ourselves into harmony with our peers underlines the fact that humanity is now, more than ever, a community of fate; that we are all in the same boat. And our realization that it is destructive competition and the fear of losing out, rather than deliberate greed or malice, that chiefly drives the socially or environmentally damaging decisions of politicians, investors and executives, demonstrates that what we are facing is a systemic problem. That it is chiefly the globally competitive system we are all caught in, and not any individual person, corporation or government within it, that is to blame.[33]

Transforming that system in the way I have described may perhaps seem fanciful to some. But what mostly stands in our way is not the enormity of the task, but only our false beliefs and our unwillingness to take proper responsibility. So when, finally, we individually and collectively let go of the need to blame others and so take full responsibility for our future, far from being overcome by a feeling of desperation and despair, paradoxically we reach a crucial and fundamentally important intellectual and spiritual turning point. For in letting blame go, we will surprise ourselves to find that we have satisfied the essential pre-condition for building a genuine global community: the condition of forgiveness and non-judgemental acceptance of ourselves and each other which opens us to the inclusiveness that is necessary if we are to find and implement genuine global solutions. For it is upon such a state of genuine global community that a properly functioning people-centred global governance must surely depend. By forgiving ourselves and each other, we would have surrendered in the depths of our very souls to the reality that we are all fallible, that we are all in this together, that we are all jointly responsible, and that we are thus all one—and we always were.

And what better leitmotif could we have for this spiritual turning point than the idea of simultaneity itself? For simultaneity reconciles two seemingly irreconcilable opposites: the equally vital and valid opposites of unity and diversity. For when we act, even simultaneously, we each still retain our individuality and diversity (or our individual national sovereignty). But by acting simultaneously, we also achieve unity. We remain both heroic and splendid in our individuality, and yet we stand strong and proud in our unity. Only by acting globally and simultaneously— only by forgiving each other and taking responsibility—can we not only survive, but together achieve the crowning glory of our long-awaited specie’s maturity. For how else could we—how else should we—cross this crucial and historic evolutionary threshold, if not hand-in-hand, if not simultaneously, if not……together?

The paradox of this and all previous major evolutionary transitions is, that if left to reach a critical stage, competition ultimately ceases to be a strategy for individual survival but instead becomes a strategy for collective suicide. At that point—a point we’re fast approaching—co-operation becomes in everyone’s self-interest. But for a regression into chaos to be avoided and for cooperation at a new higher level to emerge, not only is global and simultaneous action required to overcome the barriers to international cooperation, an appropriate catalyzing political process is also needed. For, as Wilber so rightly makes clear:

“Every revolution, every transformation, every shift in consciousness and culture that actually sticks has of necessity a Lower-Right component [i.e., not just a theory but a new form of socio-political practice], and if that component is not present or prominent, you can dismiss any claims to have a new paradigm, a great transformation, or a new and revolutionary anything.”[34]

That, so succinctly put, then, is what the Simultaneous Policy perhaps offers: a transformative political practice for us to responsibly and consciously co-create the now-vital holon of people-centered global governance; a world-centric governance born of an aperspectival vision-logic that transcends and includes political parties and nation-states and “through which runs the blood of a common humanity and beats the single heart of a very small planet struggling for its own survival, and yearning for its own release into a deeper and a truer tomorrow” (Wilber, 2000, p. 206).

Notes:

__________________________

[1] There is, of course, an argument about whether climate change is human-induced or not. To my mind, this is irrelevant because, either way, global cooperation and a transformation of international politics will still be needed to address it.

[2] Ken Wilber Online. Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1): http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part31.cfm. Retrieved October 12th, 2004.

[3] Although Rational is today’s average or predominant worldview, there are individuals and societies, and techno-economic modes of production, at every level up to the average, and a few beyond.

[4] As Stewart notes, “Our limited ability to understand complex systems is reflected in our failure to solve the difficult environmental and social problems we face. These failures demonstrate that mental modeling guided by rational thought does not enable us to understand and manage complex systems. … Rational analysis is very effective at modeling systems in which linear chains of cause and effect predominate. However, it is poor at modeling systems in which circular causality is common—i.e. systems in which each element impacts on other elements and they in turn impact back on it, directly or indirectly. Conscious rational analysis alone can rarely work out how such a complex system will unfold through time.”

[5] In this sense, financial markets have become the principal medium through which the free-movement of capital occurs. It has thus become a “global commons”; a common resource for which nations compete—destructively.

[6] While many political economists doubt a so-called “race to the bottom”, there seems to be little dispute about the present legislative paralysis or “regulatory chill” concerning climate change and many other global issues. For a review of the research in this area, see Blair, D.J., 2008, in the Reference section.

[7] This is not to say that nations cannot cooperate at all. Indeed, they can do so very productively on international communications, transport, or on any issue where both (or more) sides gain. But where one nation’s gain is another’s loss, cooperation remains highly elusive.

[8] As Greg Wilpert points out, “…we can see that the current manifestation of globalization does not represent a globalization along all possible dimensions or lines of human experience. Today, only some aspects of human development are globalized, while others are left out. Specifically, the economic and some elements of the cultural dimensions tend towards the global, while the moral and political dimensions remain largely stuck at the national level.” From Tikkun Magazine, http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0107/article/010713. Retrieved November 22, 2004.

[9] Ken Wilber Online. Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1): http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part31.cfm. Retrieved October 12th, 2004.

[10] The publication, Voter Turnout Since 1945 – A Global Report, available from Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance www.idea.int, shows that for many years voter turnouts were on the increase but, from the 1980s onwards, they went into decline. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was around this time that the Reagan-Thatcher “Big Bang” de-regulation of financial markets took place.

[11] As Wilber notes: “The type of techno-economic base of a society constrains its various probability waves in very strong ways. Thus, it appears that there is a crucially important (if partial) truth contained in Marx’s most famous statement about these facts, namely (to paraphrase): ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their reality but their economic-material realities that determine their consciousness.’ That is, the… techno-economic base…clearly has a profound influence on the types of beliefs, feelings, ideas, and worldviews of men and women.” From: Ken Wilber Online. Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1): http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part3-1.cfm. Retrieved October 12th, 2004.

[12] Another aspect of denial is people’s willingness to place their faith in green technologies, corporate social responsibility, ethical consumerism, Green political parties, and all manner of other so-called “solutions”. This includes emissions reduction targets that are legally binding on governments. For even if missed, courts have no power to ensure governments fully meet them. They thus constitute little more than promises made to be broken.

[13] The book is available for free download: http://www.simpol.org/en/books/Books_FS.htm.
Further information on the campaign can be found at: http://www.simpol.org.

[14] The title of this section is quoted from A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber, Gateway, (Gill & Macmillan), London, 2001, p.90.

[15] The stipulation of simultaneous implementation need not mean that all global policies would be implemented “all in one go” on the same date. Rather, it is perhaps more likely that in Year 1, for example, two or three related policies would be implemented simultaneously. Then, in Year 3, a further set of two or three policies would be implemented simultaneously, and so on. In that way, the impact of policy could be assessed and appropriate changes made to subsequent measures.
On the question of how many nations would be “sufficient”, this would depend on the particular measures under consideration. For a global ban on weapons of mass destruction, for example, it may require only those states which possess, or are suspected of possessing, such weapons. For a policy to tax or regulate transnational corporations, on the other hand, a much higher number of nations would be required. Essentially, then, “sufficient” constitutes whatever number is needed for all nations to feel secure enough to proceed with implementation.

[16] For a list of UK Members of Parliament who have signed the Pledge, please go to:
http://www.simpol.org.uk/simpol-in-action/whos-signed-up/

[17] Please note, here, that there would be no point in politicians signing the Pledge simply to gain more votes, only to renege on it at some later point. That’s because, if they did, they’d then only lose the votes they sought to gain in the first place, and so would jeopardize their political careers. Reneging at any point up to the time of implementation, then, is simply not in their interests. And when it comes to implementation itself, world problems are, by that time, likely to be sufficiently critical so that no one in their right minds would be likely to hesitate. By then, in other words, implementation would have become in everyone’s interests.

[18] Although the campaign’s processes work most powerfully in countries where elections operate on a simple majority, all elections are based on competition between candidates. So the campaign should prove reasonably effective regardless of the country concerned. It may, however, need to adapt its approach according to individual national electoral systems.

[19] To ensure the campaign has sufficient democratic legitimacy prior to its implementation, and to ensure its considerable transformative power is not abused, its Founding Declaration specifies that implementation can only occur if a majority of citizens (at least in democratic countries)—be they campaign supporters or not—had first given their consent. It is expected that a majority would, by that time, be supporters in any case.

[20] Important is that, although the campaign relies on democratic processes in developed countries to gain initial governmental support, this is not necessarily the case for developing countries. In those countries, the simple agreement of the government, although not democratic or ideal, would potentially be sufficient. In such cases, however, appropriate safe-guards may need to be included. The intention, then, is that support would be gained first in the rich, democratic nations, after which remaining countries— whether democratic or not—would be encouraged to sign up. As more nations did so, pressure would mount on the remainder to follow.

[21] For details, please go to:
http://www.simpol.org/en/endorsements/Endorsements_FS.htm.

[22] Such funds could, of course, also be used to provide support to developing countries.

[23] For example, see the proposal for “Contraction & Convergence” put forward by the Global Commons Institute to address climate change: http://www.gci.org.

[24] This quote, and MP Jim Knight’s earlier one, are both drawn from comments made by him on his Simpol Pledge Form, which was signed on March 1st, 2005.

[25] Although we’ve referred to policies having an adverse effect on a nation’s economic competitiveness, policies adversely affecting a nation’s competitiveness in the military or other spheres could also be included.

[26] Included in this category, of course, would not only be policies having no adverse impact on competitiveness, but also those likely to have a positive impact; i.e. those which give individual nations a competitive advantage.

[27] The same, essentially, would go for political parties. Parties that sign the Pledge would effectively remove from their previous programs all those policies which reflect promises which, in reality, can only be delivered via Simpol. That’s because they would instead be reflected in Simpol’s policy agenda, which they would officially adopt, so making it an integral part of the party’s policy. In this way, political parties would present what might be called ‘integral’, ‘differentiated’, or ‘two-dimensional’ manifestos.

[28] From a personal email to me dated June 11, 2002, for which I’m very grateful. Stewart also notes that “Simultaneous Policy has general similarities with all the major evolutionary transitions in which cooperative organisations were formed from aggregations of entities that were initially capable of evolving independently and that competed with one another. … What all these [transitions] have in common with Simpol is that the cooperative organisations were formed through the emergence of constraints that limit the independence of the independent entities. These constraints (e.g. governance, management, etc) restrain destructive competition and enable cooperation to emerge. And the constraints have to operate simultaneously across all the entities in the organisation. If any entity is not constrained, it will continue to compete, and destroy the organisation.”

[29] Ibid.

[30] The necessity and ubiquity of simultaneous governance can be noted, for example, by the fact that, at the level of nation-states, any new law is applied “globally”, i.e., to all citizens in the whole national territory, and simultaneously, since it comes into force on a certain date. It’s also worth noting that, at the world level, implementing policies globally and simultaneously need not mean “one size fits all”. That’s because, just as national income tax is progressive, global taxes or regulations (including any exemptions or compensations) could similarly be tailored according to the differing abilities and needs of each nation. In this respect, Stewart, in his email to me of June 11, 2002, points out that “…Simpol also has some differences to all the [major] previous [evolutionary] transitions. None of the previous transitions involved intelligent entities. As a result, the systems of constraints that emerged were not intelligently designed. In most cases they ‘over-constrained’ the entities. They restricted their freedom more than what was necessary just to establish cooperation. In addition, the transitions took millions of years to evolve by trial and error. Humans, through a process like Simpol, can intentionally and consciously decide to introduce simultaneous global governance to prevent destructive competition. And they can design constraints that do not restrict independence and freedom any more than is necessary to provide the benefits of cooperation.”

[31] Please see: The Handout by Ken Wilber contained in Integral Politics: A summary of its essential ingredients. Retrieved 7th July, 2009 from http://www.kenwilber.com.

[32] Please see People-centred Global Governance – Making it Happen! available for free download from: http://www.simpol.org/en/books/Books_FS.htm.

[33] As M.K. Gandhi once said: “It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist or attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.” M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1927, 1929.

[34] See Ken Wilber Online. Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1):
http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part31.cfm. Retrieved October 12th, 2004.

References

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Bunzl, J. (2001). The Simultaneous Policy – An insider’s guide to saving humanity and the planet. London, New European Publications.

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Stewart, J. (2008). The Evolutionary Manifesto -Part 3. Advancing evolution by enhancing evolvability: http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com/man3.html. Retrieved August 4, 2009.

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About the Author

John Bunzl is a social entrepreneur and businessman. He is founder of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation. Having conceived the Simpol idea in late 1998, he wrote his first book, The Simultaneous Policy – An insider’s guide to saving humanity and the planet (2001). In 2003, he co-authored Monetary Reform – Making it Happen! with the prominent monetary reformer, James Robertson. In 2009, John completed People-centred Global Governance – Making it Happen! He has given talks at various organizations, including the World Trade Organization and the Schumacher Society. He was born 1957, lives in London UK, has three children, and is a company director. He can be contacted at jbunzl@simpol.org

To Support the Simpol Campaign:

To sign on as an individual citizen, or to make a donation, please go to www.simpol.org.
If you are a national politician, please request a Pledge form and our Political Parties Prospectus.
If you represent an NGO, please request our Strategic Partnership Proposal.
Simpol accepts no funding from for-profit organizations. But if you are interested in how business can benefit from Simpol and can promote it, please request our Simpol Business Briefing.

The Simultaneous Policy

“I thought your proposal was an elegant idea of how change could occur. It reflects the core ideas of how to create consensus around change. This is the biggest challenge that we have.”

Ed Mayo

Former Executive Director, New Economics Foundation, London

“Your idea for a simultaneous policy is excellent. … Lets hope that people start to listen to this important message.”

Helena Norberg-Hodge

Member, International Forum on Globalisation and Director, International Society for Ecology & Culture

“It’s ambitious and provocative. Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try.”

Noam Chomsky

“The Simultaneous Policy is a creative proposal to accelerate progress toward a sustainable global economy. Many movements and grassroots globalists working for these goals can coalesce around such innovative initiatives”

Hazel Henderson

Author, 'Beyond Globalization: Shaping a Sustainable Global Economy'

“The concept of Simultaneous Policy is a wonderful way of implementing cooperation which is the new law of human survival in the globalized world. With it goes moral education inducing a new system of values to satisfy the requirements of the New Age.”

Dr. Farhang Sefidvash

Coordinator, Research Centre for Global Governance

“With his concept of Simultaneous Policy, John Bunzl delivers an important piece in the puzzle that governments around the world can use to resolve the pressures of increasingly integrated markets. ... It is, perhaps, one of the few workable solutions to bridging the sustainability gap.”

Matthias Hoepfl

Politische Oekologie, Munich, Germany

“From my vantage point as an evolution biologist, Simultaneous Policy is an idea whose time has come and an imperative if we are to evolve humanity from its juvenile competitive stage to its cooperative species maturity. A wonderful "no risk" strategy for finding agreement on important issues in building global community!”

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Author, ‘EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution’