We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
We humans need a new way to look. We need to see ourselves as one species, and develop a big picture view and a grounded vision to guide us.”
–Anna Stillwell, The Human Project co-founder
That statement was reached after two and a half years of research putting together many issues facing humanity into one big picture, as part of The Human Project.
The Human Project – An App For Humanity
The Human Project is a free iPad app in the making, an app, as co-founder Erika Ilves states, “to build an epic conversation on the future of our species” around the big questions:
“What do we, as a human race, need to accomplish in the 21st century?
Who do we want to become as a species?
Where do we want to head next?”
The Human Project’s project proposal on Kickstarter, after only five days, reached its funding goal of $25,000, and has since expanded its goals. Here’s the project proposal video:
Also, here’s an exciting promo video for The Human Project with Jason Silva:
I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an Emperor, that’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me I say “Do not despair”. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people, will return to the people and so long as men die liberty will never perish. Soldiers: don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate, only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers: don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty. In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written: “The kingdom of God is within man” Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men; in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let us use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future, and old aged security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill that promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves, and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day. Those who spent on other people are much happier than those who spent it on themselves.”
— Nic Marks
Founder of the Center for Well-Being, an independent think tank at the New Economics Foundation, in London, Marks is particularly keen to promote a balance between sustainable development and quality of life. To investigate this, he devised the Happy Planet Index, a global index of human well-being and environmental impact.
The results made headlines: People in the world’s wealthiest countries, who consume the most of the planet’s resources, don’t come out on top in terms of well-being. Which raises the question: What purpose does unfettered economic growth serve?
5 Things To Do Everyday To Be Happier
According to Marks’ analysis of well being and happiness, what are the 5 things you should do every day to be happier?
1. Connect
Connect with the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbors. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day.
2. Be Active…
Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.
3. Take Notice
Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savor the moment, whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.
4. Keep Learning…
Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favorite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.
5. Give…
Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.
If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global hunger, and obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade.”
Jane Mcgonigal, Ph.D., a game designer, has been making online games for over ten years, and she has a plan. Her goal for the next decade is to make it as easy to save the world in real life, as it is in online games.
Right now, we spend 3 billion hours a week playing online games, she says. But according to McGonigal’s research at The Institute for the Future, that’s not nearly enough to solve the world’s most urgent problems, because
gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real world work” and “games are a powerful platform for change.”
When I look forward to the next decade” she shares, “I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So I say, let the world changing games begin.”
Watch Jane McGonigal’s Ted talk [20 min.] about how gaming can make a better world:
Why Are Games So Essential To The Future Of Humanity?
The first thing gamers get good at according to McGonigal is “urgent optimism,” extreme self motivation, the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with a belief that we have a reasonable hope of a success.
Secondly, gamers are virtuosos at “weaving a tight social fabric.” “It takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone, so playing a game together builds up bonds and trust and collaboration, and we build stronger social relationships as a result.”
Thirdly, gamers experience “blissful productivity.” According to Mcgonigal, we know when we’re playing a game, that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings to do hard meaningful work and gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they’re given the right work.
Lastly, there is a sense of “epic meaning” in gaming: Gamers love to be attached to awe inspiring missions; to human, planetary scale stories.
In McGonigal’s view,
These are four super powers that add up to one thing: gamers are people who believe they are capable of changing the world.”
McGonigal has created games that attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. “This is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we’re supposed to, but if you immerse them in an epic adventure, and tell them:
We’ve run out of oil! This is an amazing story, an adventure to go on, challenge yourself to see how you would survive”…Most of our players have kept up the habits they learned in this game.”
Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, and who once conducted the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment, recently related the results of that 1971 experiment to the abuse discovered at Abu Ghraib. He said,
When the images of the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were revealed, immediately the military went on the defensive saying it’s a few bad apples. When we see people do bad things we assume they are bad people to begin with. But what we know in our study is: there are a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they could never have imagined doing.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted over a six day period in a mock prison environment in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford University. It demonstrated how ordinary people can perpetrate extraordinary abuses when placed in a cruel environment without clear rules, as shown in this short documenatry [13 min].
What Happens When You Put Good People In Evil Places?
Dr. Craig Haney, a social psychologist participating in the Stanford experiment said of it,
We frankly didn’t anticipate what was going to happen. We tried to really test the power of the environment to change and transform otherwise normal people. Much as Milgram had changed or transformed otherwise normal people in an obedient situation, we wanted to do it in a prison-like situation.”
Experiment Participant Relates To The Guards At Abu Ghraib
Dave Eshelman, who played the role of a prison guard in the Stanford University mock prison experiment, said of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos,
What I first saw those photos, immediately a sense of familiarity struck me because I knew I had been there before. I’d been in this type of situation. I knew what was going on – in my mind.”
“It’s all hands on deck” is the clarion call of the Post Carbon Institute in this fast paced 5 min. video, which takes us on a wild ride through the industrial age and our dependence on fossil fuels – culminating in the need for some tough changes to be made:
If we do nothing we will still get to a post carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people, and ecosystems with millions of other species. One way or another, we’re in for a ride of a lifetime.”
What Is The Solution?
In short, the Post Carbon Institute recommends,
we need to live within Nature’s budget of renewable resources at rates of natural replenishment.”
They further suggest the following:
Learn to live without fossil fuels.”
“Adapt to the end of economic growth as we’ve known it.”
“Support 7 billion humans and stabilize population at a sustainable level.”
“Deal with our legacy of environmental destruction.”
Do We Have A Choice?
The Post Carbon Institute makes the following arguments:
Alternative energy sources are important, but none can fully replace fossil fuels in the time we have.”
“We’ve designed and built our infrastructure for transport of electricity and farming to suit oil, coal and gas. Changing to different energy sources will require us to redesign cities and manufacturing processes.”
“We’ll have to rethink some of our cultural values . None of our global problems can be tackled in isolation and many cannot be fully solved.”
Nicholas Boyle, a Professor of German history at Cambridge University, claims in his book, 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis, that his study of human history has led him to conclude that major defining events, for previous centuries, have occurred within the second decade of those centuries; and that these great events were to define the course those centuries took.
For instance, in 1914 World War I began and this, Boyle claims, set the course for
…international discord throughout the 20th century.”
He says,
If a century is going to have a character it is going to become apparent by the time it is approaching 20 years old, the same is true of human beings.”
Here is Boyle speaking on 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis [6 min.]
Boyle sees the global financial crisis as being the trigger for this next “Great Event” and the United States as the pullers of it; stating,
The U.S. will become the key player in a series of make-or-break decisions and either condemn us to a century of violence and poverty, or usher in a new age of global cooperation.”
He sees the U.S. as having this position due to the combination of their economic influence diminishing and their military power being unparalleled.
The answer? Boyle suggests that nations must today realize that the previous reign of nation states has ended and that global governance must now take its place.
It is a profoundly hopeful sign that we begin the 21st century with very many more international and intergovernmental organizations than we had at the start of the 20th,” he says, and getting back to America, “The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal is through a continuation of the pax Americana.
But both the world’s understanding of America, and America’s understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved.”
Is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane?”
Professor David Harvey, PhD, researches to
figure out the role of crises in the whole history of capitalism and what’s specific and special about the crisis this time around” by looking at “the internal contradictions of capital accumulation.”
An Internal Contradiction Of Capital Accumulation
Financial profits in the United States were soaring after the 1990s” while “profits in manufacturing were coming down … you can see the imbalance … you’ve screwed industry to keep financiers happy,” and as a result “the wealth of the rich … has accelerated.”
How Did This Happen?
Since the 1970s, we have been in a phase that we call wage repression.”
If you diminish wages, where is your demand going to come from?”
The answer was, well … get out your credit cards.”
Capitalism Never Solves Its Crises Problems, It Moves Them Around Geographically
Out of this comes a theory which is very, very important: that capitalism never solves its crises problems, it moves them around geographically.”
In other words,
you had a finance crisis … you sort of half solved that, but … at the expense of a sovereign debt crisis!”
Occupy Love: A Film That Captures The Global (R)evolution Of Compassion In Action
Occupy Love will be a moving, transformative feature documentary that asks the question: how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?
A profound shift is taking place all over the world. Humanity is waking up to the fact that the current system that dominates the planet is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning. The dominant paradigm is based on separation, as exemplified by the financial system, and the corporate emphasis of profits before people.”
This crisis has become the catalyst for a profound transformation: millions of people are deciding that enough is enough – the time has come to create a new world, a world that works for all life. We have experienced an extraordinary year of change, from the Arab Spring, to the European Summer, and now, erupting into North America: the Occupy Movement.
This is a revolution rooted in compassion, direct democracy, and shared power, as opposed to the ‘power over’ model of the corporate world view. The new story is one of Inter-dependence. Love is the movement.”
For more information, updates and videos such as the one below, visit occupylove.org
Surviving Progress
Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.”
Ronald Wright, Author of A Short History of Progress, the book which inspired this film “If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.”
Jane Goodall, primatologist “Arguably, we are the most intellectual creature that’s ever walked on planet Earth. So how come, then, that this so intellectual being is destroying its only home ?”
Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I’m an optimist.”
Simon Johnson, former chief economist International Monetary Fund The bankers can’t stop themselves. It’s in their DNA, in the DNA of their organizations, to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapse…”
Marina Silva, senator & former Minister of the Environment, Brazil It is impossible to defend models that cannot be universally applied because we would have to start from a premise that some people have rights and some don’t. Thus there is no technological problem, but an ethical one.”
David Suzuki, geneticist / activist Money doesn’t stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world. Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.”
What I would consider the tragedy of our times is that we are more connected than ever, and yet, we don’t realize it and don’t truly live it.”
Michael Wesch, PhD, a Cultural Anthropologist, stated the above at the end of a talk at PopTech where he shared insights from an exploration of one of today’s most defining characteristics – the development of online culture.
Here is a 6 min. clip with highlights from the lecture:
At the start of the lecture, Wesch clarifies the significance of media in shaping human culture and relationships:
Media is like an environment, it takes us over, and sort of consumes us in many ways. Media are not just tools, they’re not just means of communication, media actually mediate our conversations. Media, in some ways, determine or dictate who can say what to who, what they can say, how it will be said etc. And so, when media change – our conversations change.”
He later adds that the really deep question that he and his students are trying to get at is
not only how our conversations are changing but how our communities might be changing, and even how our selves are changing.”
In contrast to old forms of media, Wesch analyzes the nature of new social media as:
• not controlled by the few, • not one way, • created by, for, and around networks, not masses • having the potential to transform individual pursuits into collective action.”
Towards the end of the presentation, he shows the most responded-to video in the early days of YouTube – an anonymous video that encouraged people all over the world to share messages of love and oneness.
I hope it doesn’t come off as blind optimism,” he says, “because, in fact, these people would not be writing these messages if these things actually existed. If we were one world and one people and all those types of things, then they wouldn’t need to say it.”
