I have just finished reading The SimPol Solution by John Bunzl and Nick Duffell. This newly published book outlines a minimalist solution to our global difficulties that looks doable.
Underlying the SimPol strategy is the recognition that international commerce has broken free of national regulation. Each nation must bow to the necessity of being internationally competitive, which leads to such devastating consequences as the ongoing destruction of nature, growing inequality, and inadequately controlled financial markets.
The authors’ excellent idea for coping with the situation is to sign up people (that’s us) to the underlying notion, politicians to the possibility, and eventually nations to the actual simultaneous implementation of policies which if undertaken together benefit all nations, while if undertaken separately hurt those nations that take them up first. I have signed up here: http://simpol.org.
The authors realize we need a global sense of human unity to underpin the SimPol process, so our Voices of Humanity efforts might well be useful towards getting SimPol off the ground. “The building of sufficient international trust is an absolute prerequisite to implementing significant global agreements and sticking to them.” -- page 144. Also consonant with the VoH approach, the SimPol authors are looking to individual participation from around the world to develop the details - ie exactly what proposals will be implemented simultaneously. They reference Watkins and Stratenus’ book Crowdocracy as a way to develop national level policy proposals, which would in a later stage be taken to the global level.
I hope we can build a community of SimPol supporters here on Voices of Humanity. Next up I will try to get in touch with the authors.
#gr8transition #simpol
