How to Base Human Institutions on Reality

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 27 Jan 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

The Necessary Failure of Trumpism and Fascism

22 Jan 2025 – Donald Trump’s acolytes have worked out their “Project 25” that buckles down on the dismantling of what they call “big government” and restrictions on business by any serious forms of “environmentalism” or consumer protection.  They are for the empowerment of the “free trade” of billionaires, corporations, and the rich and powerful.  They are for an aggressive nationalism that uses national power arbitrarily to serve their own interests at the expense of other nations, the rest of humanity, and the planetary environment. They have linked these goals (somewhat arbitrarily) with their “base” of persons who are full of resentment, racism, sexism, religious fanaticism, nationalistic exclusivism (fear of immigrants), and simmering violence.

All these things are certainly not democracy.  They are not good for our planet and its future.  They are not good for peace, nor for justice, true freedom, or human rights and dignity.   They appear to deny the “progress” that the world has been making as it began to link the fragmented nations together in the League of Nations, to be further integrated within the United Nations, and steadily moved forward in the conceptual and value realms with such milestones as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

The nations of the world, working through the UN, by 1965 had nine human rights treaties in force, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Certainly, the realities on the ground worldwide contradicted these human rights agreements signed by the majority of the world’s nations. However, the vision and global understanding of the world’s thought-leaders has always served as a beacon drawing the “realities on the ground” forward toward ever greater coherence, interconnectedness, and universality.

After 1965, the UN continued to move forward with the vision of universality and dignity for all humankind, for example, with the establishment of the High Commission on Human Rights in 1993 and the Declaration of the Elimination of Violence against Women that same year. Since the year 2000, the UN has especially emphasized a “sustainable development” vision linking human social, cultural, and economic development with human rights and dignity.  It has coupled these themes with declarations such as the “Promotion of the Right of Peoples to Peace” (2002).

This planetary zeitgeist has begun to transform human thinking since its incipient emergence in the early 20th century with the advent of relativity and quantum physics. It has been repeatedly articulated by a host of advanced thinkers up to the present moment in the first quarter of the 21st century.  It is a zeitgeist of holism. The cosmos is an integral whole of fields within fields from the micro-atomic level to the levels of galaxies and galaxy clusters, and finally to the whole of the universe. Isolated atoms, or independent fragments of any kind, are an illusion. There are no such things, no such realities.  This sounds very much like the “Pratitya-Samutpada,” the “interdependent co-origination of Buddhism.

On the human level, it has been shown that the evolutionary process of the Cosmos (over some 13.7 billion years), and the evolution of life on Earth (over some 3.8 billion years) has given us an understanding of the cosmic telos towards complexity, consciousness, and ever higher, more integrated, holistic structures. Science today understands that the human being is the highest reality that we know of in the universe.  Our human bodies include some 37 trillion cells that combine together in specialized organs (stomach, liver, lungs, etc.) all of which integrate powerfully to make a whole, a living human being.

Similarly, at least since the time of Kant in the 18th century we have begun to understand the human mind as an evolving synthesis of subject and object, of consciousness and world, of self and other. Advanced thinkers since the late 20th century have realized that human beings form an emergent and evolving whole in which the cosmic consciousness and its fundamental intelligibility have emerged into our own self-awareness of the holism of ourselves and all things within the cosmic process.

This has been explained at length by thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ken Wilber, Errol E. Harris, and Ervin Laszlo and this is not the place to elaborate the dynamics of the unity of consciousness and world in detail.  But the point of all this is to emphasize that Trumpism is radically in conflict with the truth of our human situation.  They cannot succeed in making things better since they have no coherent conception of reality, and their policies are therefore running up against the reality of the world and our human  situation as revealed by science and philosophy.

As alternative media journalist Caitlin Johnstone concludes in a 12 Jan 2025 article on Transcend Media Service:

“Over the years I have learned that there are many people who just aren’t going to have anything worthwhile to say, because their worldviews are too clouded with confusion and bullshit for them to offer a lucid perspective on much of anything.”

Or, in reference to the dominant economic ideology, economist E. F. Schumacher declared:

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth—in short, materialism—does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited” (1975, 30).

The confused and clouded views of standard Republicans in the US have little or no relevance to our actual human situation just as their dominant economic ideology emanating from the USA, “does not fit into this world.”  To really wake up to the human situation is to become a nonviolent revolutionary for democratic world law under the Earth Constitution.  These confused and deluded people can, of course, create great damage as they rampage from positions of power according to their illusions.

On the other hand, the Biden-Harris administration had itself run aground on the same pervasive violence that is implicit in Trumpian neo-fascism.  Their ideological stance that we must “save democracy” from the ravages of Trumpism involves, from the start, an ideologically generated set of lies.   The Biden-Harris camp, like the Democratic Party in general, is run by one faction of the billionaire class while the Trump camp is run by another faction of the same class.

In neither case has there been, nor can there be, any authentic democracy in the sense of government designed to serve the people and their needs rather than the rich and their limitless wants.  Both sides embrace the “trickle down” or, better put, “piss on them” theory of economics.  The absurd dogma of a “right” to the unlimited accumulation of private wealth inevitably destroys democracy.  The super-rich inevitably buy up the means of communication and begin a propaganda system defending the unlimited accumulation of private wealth and ideological lies about this as being the foundation of “true democratic freedom,” their right of “entrepreneurship,” and the rest of their nonsense.

Democracy as a vision of human association that is free of violence is based on the truth of our human situation, the truth of human rights and dignity, the truth that the function of government is the common good of the people, the truth that we are all one sharing in the common intelligibility of our world, and the truth that our world is finite and requires a non-growth economics to mirror the reality of its ecological boundaries.  Ultimately, for these reasons, democracy will need to be planetary democracy, since the divisive violence of our fragmented global economic and political institutions violates the very real holism of our human situation.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats in the United States have transcended the absurd global economic system (based on the unlimited accumulation of private wealth) nor the truly mad global system of militarized “sovereign” nation-states trapped within endless arms races and wars.  Genocidal wars like the ones supported by the US and Israel in Ukraine or in Gaza are the meat and potatoes of both parties. Just as the unlimited accumulation of private wealth is structural violence pure and simple so the system of militarized sovereign states is structural violence pure and simple.

I won’t take up the space to document these assertions with extensive quotations from scholars. There exist many excellent books on these subjects by serious thinkers for those who care to find out the truth of holism.  As Errol E. Harris concludes: “The ‘subjective’ in this sense is confined to one special viewpoint and is, in consequence, only partial and provisional. That is why objective science is never the property of any one individual exclusively, but is forged by and belongs to a community of savants and ultimately to the total community of mankind.” Truth is an evolving expression of our common human project. There is no such thing as a “post-truth” world such as asserted by today’s neo-fascists and Republicans. Truth is real and has real meaning—and it belongs to humanity.

Neither party can boast of any serious thinkers because no serious thinker would be associated with either party.  Serious thinkers articulate various aspects of the reality of the cosmos and our human situation.  Neither party within the USA has much concern with the realities of our human situation.  They buckle down to the alter of money and power, values which necessarily preclude serious thought. This is why human extinction lies on the horizon of the current world system based on the illusion that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet and the illusion that nuclear armed national fortresses can live together on this planet without eventually blowing up the planet itself.

As noted above, during the past 125 years humanity has developed an advanced understanding of the nature of the cosmos and our place within it.  That understanding reveals the evolutionary holism of everything within the cosmos.  Atoms form into molecules, molecules into larger wholes such as living cells, cells form into organisms and organisms evolve into ever more complex and emergent wholes. A human being is an astonishing holism of some 37 trillion cells, and we live within the holism of civilization and the planetary ecosystem, the latter of which has been likened by top scientists to a living organism (often called the “Gaia” principle).

A human being is a monumental synthesis of numerous wholes, and we integrate in turn into the whole of humanity and the whole of our planetary ecosystem. Some of the Green parties around the world contain persons who understand this, and many environmental philosophers and scientists understand this.  Also, there are economists, like Schumacher, Herman E. Daly, or Kate Raworth, who understand this.  If humanity is to survive and flourish on this planet, our economic, social, and political institutions must reflect the realities of our situation.  Fragmentation means endless violence and systematic destruction of any human future.

I noted above that the UN has progressively elaborated a coherent understanding of our human situation through its declarations and conventions signed by many nations around the world. But the UN itself through its Charter remains structurally founded on the outdated system of fragmentation that stems from the 17th and 18th century explication of the world as an atomistically structured mechanism.   This reductionist philosophy is at the heart of both the unlimited accumulation of wealth system and the system of fragmented militarized nation-states.

The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), dominated by the USA, and the dogma of unlimited national sovereignty (also promoted at the UN by the USA) fragment and separate humanity from the reality of our situation.  Both are the collective illusions of deeply immature people.  The UN Charter was most fundamentally the work of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, whose goal was to maintain power over the rest of the world while preventing threats from others. None of them wanted a truly effective or united UN (based on the reality of the oneness of humanity) and all of whom had ideas about economics and national imperialism based on the fragmented theories of their day.

If we want institutions premised on reality we must turn to the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.  Created by people who understood the new holistic paradigm that has revealed the coherent structure of the cosmos and our human place within it, they built a governance structure for the Earth that embodies both human dignity and structural holism.  Like the human body that is an immense compound of wholes from the level of cells to the level of self-conscious mind, the individual organs of the federation (such as judiciary, executive, enforcement, parliament, etc.) are themselves structured as wholes and then synthesized at a higher level by the Federation as a whole.

The no-truth world feels entitled to hunker down on its puerile prejudices like nationalism, racism, sexism, Zionism, or fundamentalist religious dogmas.  They mock the “woke ideology” of the Democrats.  This “woke ideology” is clearly worthy of disdain because it is hypocritical in the extreme.  The Democrats claim to believe in tolerance, equality for women, human rights and dignity, or the oneness of humanity while they really are about little else besides money and power. Just like the Republicans, who are more honest on this score.  However, neither Trump and neo-fascism, nor the war-mongering Democrats, will make anything at all better—because they are living under a fog of childish illusions.

What is real is our common humanity and the dignity of each.  So-called “sovereign nation-states” represent merely a collective illusion of ignorant people.  What is real about democracy is that governmental authority derives from the people—all the people who live on Earth.  (As global thinkers, such as Mortimer Adler or Emory Reves, for example, have made very clear.)

What is real are individual human rights within the context of the common good of all.  Real democracy can only be global, because any attempt at democracy within our fragmented world system of money and power necessarily defeats democracy. To really wake up to the human situation is to become a nonviolent revolutionary for democratic world law under the Earth Constitution.

______________________________________

Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member,
TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu


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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 27 Jan 2025.

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