A Global Governance Paradigm Shift: First Principles First
(Edited from Original article in KosmosJournal.org) by Joni Carley Given that our old normal didn’t turn out to be a viable survival plan, the global call to “build back better” is misguided. We need to build forward by seizing this transformative historical moment to go for our highest vision of a just, compassionate, happy and well humanity living on a thriving planet. Now is the time to go all in on what is at the core of every religion’s teachings, and in “first principles” documents including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations Declaration and Programme of Action on the Culture of Peace, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and the Earth Charter. We cannot accomplish first principles, like equity, justice, freedom and dignity, by just fixing what’s wrong. By definition, fixes perpetuate norms. Focusing on fixes leads to maintaining a status quo that is not fundamentally engineered to fulfill on first principles, in part because it relegates them as unrealistic and secondary to maintaining economic and social norms. Despite all the good work done in the name of sustainability, it is not even time to sustain because sustaining the way things are would be suicidal and there is no equitable basis for who gets to decide what gets sustained. Merely sustaining is a low bar is also not very inspiring and is not even a biologically sound idea because the nature of life is that it is always changing and the nature of the human spirit is that it’s always reaching for higher expression. Too often, when we think primarily in terms of fixing or sustaining, we are diverting resources from new and different social and economic conceptual frameworks and delegating them to perpetuating dysfunction by patching it up. We cannot fix or sustain our way to a more equitable and just future because our fundamental conceptual framework, our paradigm, doesn’t hold the requisite valuations for first principles like equity and justice. We now have the unprecedented capacity, resources, connectivity and urgency to stake claim to a reality that reflects our highest vision of who we can be as a species. This historic moment is an epoch opportunity for the world to move beyond fixing and sustaining by actually putting first principles first such that our systems hold them as core accountabilities in decision-making and action-taking.
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