One of leadership’s most challenging tasks is connecting perceptions to sensible responses.
You are watching your favourite TV programme and a message comes through that a tsunami is heading your way and will wash through your neighbourhood in a couple of hours. (please forgive technicalities and focus on the essence of the exercise) It is highly likely that there and then, watching TV becomes history.
A recent global warming report – this is now for real – warns that the consequences of not doing enough are far more calamitous and nearer in time than currently contemplated. It also includes a statement that reducing the world population and usage of livestock is a crucial part of the urgently needed action.
So, you must cease – or at least reduce – consuming meet and limit your family planning to one child.
How many people, do you reckon, will do just that upon reading the report? It’s just too downright inconvenient for all sorts of reasons. In some cultures, it is tantamount to downright impossible. And anyway, it may not really concern you so personally. It is a global issue. This makes it just too personal.
Or is it?
How to get people to translate clinical perceptions to constructive timely responses? How to get the world to reduce the estimated number of cows from a billion and a half to half a billion and less? How to get the world to grasp the fact that a big part of its many ills is sourced to out of control over-population?
How to persuade and lead the world into radical behavioural change?
Because switching to all-electric cars will simply not do the trick. To what degree are people mindful of the pollution caused by mining, processing, manufacturing and recycling the technologies that depend on the necessary metals and rare earth elements? Next to the well-known issue of long-term nuclear waste contamination from nuclear power stations? And then, as a side note here, there is the as yet unaccounted for – many would say suppressed – harmfull electro-smog pollution that electric cars generate in the cabin; as does modern technology in a modern home, office, schools, universities, hospitals, shopping centers…
The core of the problem is not the imminent calamity caused by global warming. It is not in the first place about reducing greenhouse gases, ceasing to consume meat or reducing the world population. It is about tackling head-on the subject of bringing about a fundamental attitudinal transformation towards life itself. We need a new value system to be put in place, that frees people en-mass to explore why the human is on earth in the first place. Be assured that the reason why has little to do with what the 21st century is about.
In the absence of a new value system, we are witnessing a constantly deteriorating diversion, slipping away from the root of the issue; largely due to lack of education that properly addresses the subjects of self-awareness, values, accountability and responsibility already from a young age.
Follow closely the processes surrounding the Paris Accord or any other internationl forum. It’s largely an arena of power-plays between delegates, representing political and regional interests that are largely disconnected from the core of the problem.
The greatest peril facing humanity is loss of values and sheer ignorance about the purposes of living
The world desperately needs the arising of a global assembly of self-accountable, responsible grown-ups that are capable of impartial thinking and are able to rise above possessive self-interest and seek for new ways forward; to unify humanity in a constructive missions and facilitate the creation of bright new futures for all? Sounds like a utopian vision, doesn’t it?
The good news, though, is that there are millions of individuals around the world that share this sentiment. The problem is that they live in a deeply divided world and are not gathered in conversations at the right level.
The rise of social networks created the no-boarders blue-print of people from around the world sharing their story. Imagine the impact of people from around the world engaged in a cross-cultural discovery conversation of updating shared values about what really matters for the future of the world we live in.
The yellow-vests movement that we are witnessing in France and now also in other nations will not solve the problem because it is reacting to a corrupt system that cannot be changed. The world needs a new system to be conceived outside of the current system, in a way that can then super-impose itself upon it.
The world needs a new conversation about its future.
David Gommé
World Copyright 2018© David Gommé