Living Together Research Proposal

Living Together is the name of a multidisciplinary, collaborative research project spanning the social sciences, business, philosophy and information technology. After experimenting with different formats we are now exploring this topic within the format of an academic paper. The researchers involved share an holistic world view and are drawing upon the holistic thinkers and concepts within the aforementioned disciplines to address the question:

“On planet Earth, can we live as one human family in peace, equality and prosperity?”

We have broken down this overarching question into more specific sub-questions; these give us the main sections of this paper.

1. World Government - “Can a system of world government help to overcome world conflict and foster equality and prosperity? If so, how would it operate and how would it be structured?”
2. Universal Values - “Within cultural diversity, can common values be found which can serve as a foundation for world government? Further, which values support the expression of human potential in a way that benefits society to achieve peace, equality and prosperity?”
3. Implementation - "In terms of organisation, what does it mean to apply universal values and holistic governance?"
4. Transition - "How can holistic organisations be implemented in the context of current society?”

Aims

The main idea behind Living Together is to examine the question of what kind of global society would be possible if we applied modern information technology to create organisations, guided by universal spiritual and philosophical values. Further, once the requisite values and technologies have been outlined, we will address the implementation of such an ideal within the context of the current global situation. This overall aim can be broken down as follows:

1. To draw together multiple strands of research from various disciplines and create a platform for further research and related projects.
2. To create a vision for a peaceful, just and prosperous global society which inspires the public imagination, by creating stories and scenarios based on the findings of the paper.
3. To create or promote prototype tools and organisations which will help us move toward the vision.

World Government

“Can a system of world government help to overcome world conflict and foster equality and prosperity? If so, how would it operate and how would it be structured?”

We will begin with a review of current political science thought on the issue of world government and isolate the main concepts, functional elements or assumptions involved in the creation of a system of world government. We will perform a critical analysis of these assumptions with a particular focus on how it is proposed that peace, equality and prosperity can be achieved. For this purpose we will introduce principles from holistic thinking to use as guides for assessing the current ideas on world government. We intend to contrast the notion of a centralised, top-down world government with an holistic, grass-roots democracy global government. We anticipate this discussion leading to an ideal vision for a system of world government which is aligned with holistic principles. This vision would encompass the main functional elements and technology required for such a system and include scenarios for dealing with a number of common political and economic functions such as policy-making, resource distribution and the provision of currency.

Universal Values

“Within cultural diversity, can common values be found which can serve as a foundation for world government? Further, which values support the expression of human potential in a way that benefits society to achieve peace, equality and prosperity?”

This section is devoted to a compilation of clearly agreed upon values to base a system of global government upon. If there is to be a world wide system then clearly the values underlying this system need to span the majority of cultures and religious, spiritual or ethical beliefs. Such values would be universal values since the majority of humanity could agree to abide by them. The golden rule or "law of reciprocity" is an example of this. Further, many spiritual traditions describe wise people, prophets or sages, whose example should be followed and who are in harmony with spiritual and natural laws. It follows that there is a deep-rooted belief in a "right way" or path that should be followed.

If there is an objectively ideal path that someone can follow in any given situation, which will be of the most benefit for that person and society, what does that path look like? We believe that the old spiritual and philosophical traditions hold the answer to the question of how the individual should relate to society and how society should relate to the natural environment. For instance in Taoism there is great emphasis on the "Way of Harmony", or "Tao", which is considered to be said ideal path. There are also modern disciplines which contain similar ideas such as holism, systems thinking and integral thinking.

We intend to outline a number of generic universal values, or principles, which together comprise the "way of harmony" can be applied in today's society to further peace, equality and prosperity and can form a framework against which to judge methods and tools for the creation of an holistic global government.

We will also address the question of personal empowerment and which elements this comprises, since in a system which operates bottom-up power flows from the individual out to higher levels of governance. This necessitates a discussion of concepts such as awareness, personal responsibility, choice and commitment to truth. We intend to discuss methods by which the individual may attain empowerment as well as ways in which a system of governance may support personal empowerment.

Implementation

“In terms of organisation, what does it mean to apply universal values and holistic governance?"

The philosophical and structural ideas are unified here for their practical implementation. We intend to compile methods and tools which can be applied in a scalable way from personal empowerment right up to the formation of holistic organisations. We will discuss the kinds of organisations that might comprise an holistic world government and the methods and tools that would be required to allow them to operate in accordance with the values outlined in section two and the systems requirements from section one. We assess the requirements they will need to fulfill such as personal empowerment, decentralised project management, currency creation and provision of identity and trust.

Transition

"How can holistic organisations be implemented in the context of current society?”

We will deal with the the issue that there seems to be no top-down way to implement bottom-up solutions. We intend to tackle this issue by finding existing organisations which are already in alignment with universal values and assess which tools would help these organisations move toward a full expression of universal values; in other words "How can existing organisations be unified and harmonised?". We will close with a look at current technologies that can help us achieve this goal, with the requirements from the "Implementation" section in mind. We intend to focus on web-based technology to facilitate collaboration, workflow systems, the semantic web and peer-to-peer technology. We will recommend areas of further research and development to move toward software that facilitates personal empowerment with an intuitive interface and also allows the easy formation of holistic organisations. We will assess the feasibility of creating prototype organisations or working with existing, aligned organisations, which could help us further refine the design specifications of the software.

Key Terms

• Holism
• Systems thinking
• Golden rule
• Integral thought
• Centralisation
• Subsidiarity
• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Political power
• Empowerment
• Secrecy
• Transparency
• Universal values
• Social ecology
• Human ecology
• Peer-to-peer
• Open source governance