The Utopian World Championship

Cyril Belshaw: From Youth Maturity to Global Government : The Utopian Tapestry

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Summary

We have the intellectual tools to create a practical Utopia by the end of the 21st Century.. A theory of innovation, and the vast socio-cultural changes of the last quarter-century, provide an anchor. There has been a growth in the power of peoples. What is needed now is for the peoples to influence institutions to take the steps towards a Utopian world.
In the first part I concentrate on changing education by means of Youth Maturity Institutes incorporating schools into wider organisations. They will bring together interests and expertise focussed on the growing maturity of the child as he/she learns to become adult.
It is here that we will have a chance to instil the central value of courtesy and to enable individuals to control the anger and violence that is bedevilling the world. Among a range of other goals will be such themes as creativity, risk-taking, the defeat of boredom: values essential to a balanced adult persona, and the absence of which are at the root of most social ills.
The second section emphasizes the notion of a holistic tapestry. We cannot expect a Utopian solution in one dimension of society to succeed unless it is articulated with the rest. Thus parental influences in the Youth Maturity Institutes will not be fully functional if the relations between men and women are dysfunctional. This essay is not the place to elaborate on all the many dimensions, from control of criminality to zero-based taxation and universal minimum income. Instead there is a summary list of the threads which must be woven to succeed
The third section jumps to the constitution of global government. Now we build on the confidence of the earlier sections to tackle world order.
Global Government emerges from an analysis of the weaknesses in the present system. It will be a true world government deriving its authority from an elected body based on population units. It is organised into functional departments rather than the present independent organisations. It has an elected Cabinet and Ministers and a monopoly of military forces.
We cannot depend on national governments. They still work in a culture of competitive power, and are mostly far behind the wishes of their peoples. We need an alternative source of movement to give power to the people. I suggest that the most likely form to succeed would be a Council of International NGOs, mobilizing opinion to push governments and the UN to take the necessary steps.

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I start with suicide in its several forms.
In many parts of the industrial world, high school age youths are committing suicide in increasing numbers. As their age group rises as a cohort in the demographic scale, so the g eneral figures of attempted suicide rise. In other words, the tendency toward suicide carries on into higher age groups.
Recently -- I do not know for how long -- the elderly had the highest suicide rates in such countries. Now the rates among the youth cohorts match those for the elderly. Unless there are fundamental transformations, the changing attitudes towards euthanasia coupled with the entry of present youth cohorts into the ranks of the elderly could produce a suicide explosion in forty years, if not before, that would shake the capabilities of society to respond.
I accept and advocate the right of the elderly to take their own lives, though I would prefer it to be in the context of psychological peace rather than age-induced depression. I do not accept it as a necessity in other age groups, for which the future is still an open possibility. That would not be my idea of the Utopia toward which we strive.
In Japan and other countries suicides take place as the young take their lives for fear of taking and failing examinations or similar tests. Family and peer pressure play a role: so do induced or real feelings of self-worthlessness in a demanding society.
A further from of suicide is ideological. This is particularly the case in Arab society, where young, well-educated people, especially including women, undertake acts of terrorism in which their own deaths are virtually certain – acts of martyrdom.
Close to suicide, perhaps virtually the same, thousands of young boys and girls are recruited into guerrilla and sometimes national armies, indoctrinated with the fever of killing, and thrust into the front lines where they are most in danger. It is well documented that many, indeed the majority, have been kidnapped to serve as cannon fodder. They are often in hysterical or drug-induced excitement, at the dangerous age of susceptibility. They take risks, voluntarily or under pressure, in which the likelihood of death, before or after episodes of looting and socially destructive seemingly inhuman acts, is high. They are removed from the world of normal society, pariah’s to civilisation.
And then there are those whose alienation is not that of the body, but of the mind and its spirit. These are the habitual criminals, so often so long behind bars that they are totally unable to function outside of prison, and who commit acts so that they return. They do not kill their bodies, but their way of life has become virtually suicidal – often, at a young age, because of experiences “inside” prison, that breeding ground of anti-social behaviour.

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