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''' '' THE MANKIND TAP '' '''
ANNE FRANK'S SADNESS AND MEMORY FOR THE GLOBAL FOUNDER FRAMERS OF THE WORLD STUDENT SOCIETY : ''HOW wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.''
Rabo, Dee, Haleema, Zilli, Lakshmi, Sahar, Saima, Dantini, Merium, Aqsa, Hussain, Shahzaib, Salar, Vishnu, Ali, Hamza, Sanan, Zaeem, Danyial, Haider and Little Angels, Maynah, Maria, Hanyia, Merium, Eden, Mustafa, Mujtaba, and Sofia?
For the students of the entire world : this above quote is from student Anne Frank, German-Dutch diarist in hiding, awaiting her cruel fate at the hands of the Nazis. The World Students Society rises, it's head bowed in shame and sorrow.
TECHNOLOGY VERSUS GLOBAL COOPERATION : NOW REMEMBER : Mankind's survival depends on working together. And the entire universe depends on The World Students Society succeeding. Even though the Internet has made it much more difficult.
At the broadest level human history is a story of cooperation. Individually, we big-brained, hairless primates are fairly ridiculous creatures, easy pickings for any dad-bod Simba roaming the plains. But get us together and we achieve domination over land and sky.
Reluctantly, violently, often after exhausting every other possibility, people keep stumbling toward one another to get pretty much everything done. From the family to the village to the city, nation-state and global mega corporation, cooperation and coordination among groups of increasing size and complexity is, for better or worse, how we all go to now.
BUT what if we've hit the limit of our capacity to get along? I don't mean in the Mr. Rogers way. I'm not talking about the tenor of our politics. My concern is more fundamental : Are we capable as a species of coordinating our actions at a scale necessary to address the most dire problems we face?
Because, I mean, look at us. With the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, humanity is contending with global, collective threats. But for both, our response has been bogged down less by a lack of ideas or invention than by a failure to align our actions as groups, either within nations or as a world community.
We had little trouble producing effective vaccines against this scourge in record time - but how much does that matter if we can't get to most of the world's people and if even those who have access to the shots won't bother?
Global failures of cooperation are, of course, nothing new; we did have those two world wars. But now we're facing something perhaps even more worrying than national enmity and territorial ambition. What if humanity's capacity to cooperate has been undone by the very technology we thought would bring us all together?
The Internet didn't start the fire, but it's undeniable that it has fostered a sour and fragmented global polity - an atmosphere of pervasive mistrust, corroding institutions and a collective retreat into the comforting bosom of confirmation bias. All of this has undermined our greatest trick : doing good things together.
It is true that each of us is affected differently by a changing climate and Covid-19, but with both, our fates are linked; what happens to each of us is tied up with the actions of others. Often the links are blurry. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest could well affect the sea level in Florida, but it's probably difficult to forge much common cause between poor farmers in Brazil and retirees in Boca Raton.
Sometimes. though, our fates are so obviously intertwined, you want to scream, Vaccines work best when most of us get them. Either we all patch up this sinking ship or we all go down together. But what if lots of passengers insist the ship's not sinking and the repairs are a scam?
Or the richest passengers stockpile the rations? And the captain doesn't trust the navigator and the navigator keeps changing her mind and the passengers keep assaulting the crew?
I should say there is a good chance my take is too dreary. There has been a great deal of scholarship on how humans coordinate their actions in response to natural threats, and a great deal of it has echoes my pessimism - and been wrong.
In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin published a famous essay arguing that because people tend to maximize individual utility at the expense of collective good, our species was doomed to blindly exploit the world's resources.
He called this the ''tragedy of the commons,'' and the following years he was among a group of intellectuals who advocated tough measures to avert the common ''population bomb,'' among curtailing the ''freedom to breed.''
But Hardin was proved wrong both on the theory and on the prediction. [He was wrong about a lot of other things, too : He opposed immigration and global famine relief, and he maintained an interest in eugenics.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says that white nationalism ''unified his thought.'' The population bomb never went off. The world's birthrate declined as the poorest people were lifted out of poverty. And as the political economist Elionor Ostrom showed over a lifetime of research, there are countless examples of people coming together to create rules and institutions to manage common resources.
People aren't profit-maximizing automation; time and again, she found, we can make individual sacrifices in the interest of collective good.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on State-of-the-World, Mankind and the Future, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Farhad Manjoo for his opinion.
With most loving and respectful dedication the Heroic Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, and then Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
Good Night and God Bless
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