Why We Need A Civic Society-led World Government?

To 
The  Union Secretary (Higher Education)
Government of India
New Delhi, INDIA

Date: Sunday 03 March 2024

Subject: Challenges & Opportunities for Higher Education Institutions in India and the Bigger Picture of Civilizational Collapse

From : Chandra Vikash
IIT Kharagpur (B.Tech 1993) I IIM Calcutta (MBA 1997)
Convenor – Gaia Earth Sansad I Founder-Mentor – MaaS Movement Co.
Delhi National Capital Region

Dear Shri Sanjay Murthy,
Dear Distinguished Directors of IITs and IIMs,
Dear Rahul da,
Dear All,

Thank you Rahul da for sharing your thoughts (in response to the earlier post here ). As a proud and patriotic Indian, global citizen and human being, I would urge all others to share their agreement or disagreement and our course of action accordingly. I share the above graph on global average temperature anomaly data from Sat 02 March 2024.

This is just one of the indicators among several others of the ongoing collapse of the global industrial civilisation and mass extinction with the window for meaningful intervention closing fast. 

How did we get here?

“Hang the cost! Full speed ahead! Death or victory right now! Forward into growth! I guess that shows a faith that if we create too many problems in the present, the future will learn how to deal with it.” Kenneth Boulding, economist and former president of the American Economic Association called it ‘heroic ethic’. The economic ethic OTOH says: “Wait a minute, there’s benefits and costs. Let’s weigh the two. We don’t want to charge right over the cliff. Let’s look at the margin. Are we getting better off or worse?”

I am not surprised that zombies and sheeples, belched out by truckloads in the corporate factories in India will lap you up. ‘American Mania’ is sweeping across the globe powered by the dubious US dollar.

“Selfish behaviors are reward driven and innate, wired deeply into the survival mechanisms of the primitive brain, and when consistently reinforced, they will run away to greed, with its associated craving for money, food, or power. On the other hand, the self restraint and the empathy for others that are so important in fostering physical and mental health are learned behaviors – largely functions of the new human cortex and thus culturally dependent.”

– Peter Whybrow, AM April 2006

Yet, what you advocate is criminal abetment on 3 counts. One, this is intergenerational fraud. Costs are passed on to coming generations. Two, in a large highly iniquitous country like India – this is Flaw of Averages. Three, air pollution, water pollution, land degradation, psychological and spiritual degradation are all brushed aside as ‘negative externalities’.

(I share this note in response to a popular opinion shared here By Startup Investor Brendan Rogers.)

Getting the Conceptual Clarity

As the tide turns, we now need a ‘parallel structure’ with a civic society-led world government. John Bunzl, founder of SIMPOL, has great insights  that echoes with what António Guterres said on 16 Feb at Munich Security Conference and what Harman Daly had shared since long back:

1. We need a World Government

Today, we have a global market but only national governance. Given this “governance gap,” it is not surprising that Destructive Global Competition is running out of any control and continues to drive us all to destroy the planet on which we depend. The main barrier to solving global problems is that no government can move first or act alone because doing so would make its national economy uncompetitive, risking unemployment, capital flight, and economic decline. As former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “The blunt reality of the politics of climate change is that no country will be willing to sacrifice its economy in order to address this challenge.”

This remains true for all global problems. In a globalized economy, it will always be so. Governments are therefore caught in a “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” It’s not that they don’t want to solve global problems, but that they can’t. That, indeed, is why the wider movement has achieved little: because it demands change from those—i.e., governments—who are incapable of delivering it. Given its complexity and scale, the higher education system in India has a responsibility and opportunity to lead the formation of a world government, starting with setting up of Centre of Global Governance Studies, with ADCPS at IIT Bombay and CPP at IIM Bangalore as its nodal centres. As time is running out this needs an Emergency Response. Gaia Earth Sansad, a civic-society initiative that I founded 5 years back along with Global Academy for Indigenous Activism (GAIA) has been working in this direction since 2006. 

2. Hierarchies are natural and necessary

Our predominantly postmodern worldview that rejects all hierarchies and all meta-narratives, champions decentralization, diversity, leaderless coalitions, horizontal networks, etc. Set against this fragmented, horizontal, uncoordinated mass of global justice initiatives, we have the single, overarching dynamic of DGC: a global, unified, all-pervading, top-down, destructive, out-of-control dynamic. A decentralized, non-hierarchical structure can never succeed against this. Without acknowledging the need for unity and some hierarchy, we have absolutely no chance of forming a civic society-led world government.

We need therefore to understand that hierarchies are natural and indispensable. The trick, however, is to distinguish between actualizing hierarchies (i.e., healthy ones) and dominator hierarchies (i.e., unhealthy ones). Being a global dominator hierarchy, DGC can only be overcome by a unified, global actualizing hierarchy—that is, by some form of globally coordinated, cooperative, citizen-driven global governance process that transcends and includes nation-states: an actualizing hierarchy that puts us, citizens, in the driving seat, rendering us capable of driving nations to agree to a global hierarchy with a world government at its apex and the reconstituted provinces, community-states and grassroots governance institutions, cooperatively implement the necessary policies to solve global problems. India with its pluralistic society and rich diversity, led by the higher education institutions and its vibrant civic society, plays an exemplary role in the formation of the world government. 

3. Subsidiarity builds movement unity

Another thing we are missing is that actualizing hierarchies promote unity where it is needed and diversity where it is not. Every coherent entity in the world is held together by some form of governance, whether it be an atom, a cell, your body, or a nation. Governance structures are also multi-level because, as societies expand, existing governance structures eventually can’t cope, thus necessitating the creation of new, higher-level governance structures. The operating principle between these levels is subsidiarity: what cannot be solved at the lowest possible level is taken up to the next-higher level. This promotes unity where it is needed, while leaving space for independence and diversity where it is not.
In this overall context, it is my earnest plea to Shri Murthy to convene an Extraordinary Emergency Meeting at the earliest possibility.

Best regards,

Chandra Vikash
Convenor
Gaia Earth Sansad
chandravikash.wordpress.com

Founder-Mentor
MaaS Movement Pvt Ltd
www.maasmvmt.com

Why Civic Society-led World Government and not Civil Society?

Civil citizenship pertains to how people interact with state institutions (by voting or running for elected office, paying taxes, or having their rights affirmed under law), whereas Civic citizenship tends to focus on how people live and interact within a community, be it a neighbourhood, a city, an ethnic diaspora, or at a global level. In the Civic worldview, state is an integral part of the society and not separate from it, as in the case of Civil worldview.

Civil citizenship is always related to the nation, but Civic citizenship can reach beyond national borders and zoom out to macro level, global citizenship, or it can zoom in to micro, hyper local citizenship. 

This incidentally is the true import of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam or World as a Family/Village which also means Family/Village as a microcosm of the World at large.

Microcosm is Macrocosm. (Yatha Pinde Tatha Brahmande)

LACE-Gaia model promotes both global citizenship in global affairs for knowledge sharing as well as hyper-local or grassroots citizenship for our daily lives with ‘carbon sink’ lifestyles as Emergency Response to heal and repair climate and ecology and to manage our daily lives locally as far as possible.

Reference: 

1. LOCAL IS THE FUTURE @ Sustainable Cities Congress in Australia, Nov 2018

LOCAL IS THE FUTURE @ Sustainable Cities Congress in Australia

2.  A Better Way towards healthy, harmonious and holistic world order & indigenous ways of life @ World Council for Health General Assembly Meeting #37 on 18 April 2022

Presentation: GAIA Earth Sansad – A Better Way 

Video Proceedings: A Better Way to a Healthy, Harmonious, & Holistic World with Chandra Vikash of GAIA Earth Sansad

‘We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late’.

– Martin Luther King