Please consider joining the Voices of Humanity list of pledged participants. We need at least 100 participants promising to use the new VoH app when it is released later this year. It would be better if we can get 501. When we get 101, we will have a zoom meeting and perhaps that will spark the outreach needed to get to 501. To get more users, we need more users. This is the hurdle that Voices of Humanity must overcome.
The future looks dim for humanity. Wealth inequality is huge. Wildlife populations are down 69% in 50 years. Eighty percent of climate change scientists are agreed on at least 2.5C degrees of heating coming our way, a global disaster with unimaginable consequences. Then there is the horror of war - the atomic doomsday clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight. Adding it all up, civilization could collapse as early as 2040.
Nuclear weapons have locked humanity into an us vs them world. That is the underlying problem. As a result, the nations are not cooperating on global issues as they should. If they/we are willing to use these weapons, what does that say about them/us? If they/we are not willing to use nukes, then why do they/we have nukes? At the same time it is clear that nuclear disarmament cannot happen without complete and general disarmament. Somehow we must persuade the us vs them world to disarm - not an easy task.
“Collective communication” as implemented by Voices of Humanity uses voting on messages to give collective voices to groups. Geographical levels from city to province to nation to global are easily selected. Thus the cities and the nations each have a collective voice. At every level there is a breakout by gender and age, so women, men, youth, middle-aged and seniors will always have their say. The religions also have collective voices, as do each of the United Nations goals.
We won’t know for sure until we get going, but it seems likely that highly rated messages at the global level will be consistently kind, intelligent and spirited. Generous, smart, and upbeat messages are what people like. Hateful, dumb and dull messages will not make it to the top of the list. Hardliners will stay away from a forum structured to support the goals of the UN, and in any case, messages will be monitored and explicitly hateful messages and their authors removed from the process.
Still, in the us vs them world that we share, the voices of the nations and perhaps of the religions may well be less than kind on occasion. We can expect this tendency to be restrained by the overall tone of the forum. Also, leagues of cities at the national level will be helpful. Cities are consistently in favor of nuclear disarmament and peace. They are the targets and they don’t themselves have nuclear arms.
Kind, intelligent and spirited - this matters because the highly rated messages will tell us that the human race is on our side. Participants will develop a sense of togetherness at the global level. As participation grows, so will morale for collective nonviolent action to persuade the nations to disarm. My guess is that a global women’s strike is what will make it happen. Please join the list of those who promise to use the new VoH app when it is released later this year. You will be notified with info for a zoom meeting when we have 101 signed up.
#nvaction #voh
