A couple of years ago, I read about The Elders, a group of global leaders gathered together by Nelson Mandela in 2007 and founded by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel, who "offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity".
I was first shocked I hadn't heard of them earlier. I quickly browsed their home page and immediately fell in love with the idea: we are in a global village and, as it is/was the custom in African villages, the global elders guide and inspire us to create a better world.
Btw, the previus post Invictus displays an inspiring poem by William Ernest Henley, leitmotiv of the movie with the same name directed by Clint Eastwood and with the participation of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon. If you haven't watched it yet, I encourage you to do it as a source for inspiration.
Do you feel it as a foolish dream? or is it rather a manifestation of global awareness?
It's really a great idea, but I fear that it has not have success: who knows about this initiative?
ReplyDeleteFrom my point of view what we need is not to create a new institution or "influential" group but to reinforce the existing world institutions, mainly UN. In this sense, there is UBUNTU (http://www.ubuntu.upc.edu/index.php?lg=cat) that mainly aims to reform the world institutions. But it's clear that we, as humans, should do something to preserve not only humanity but a certain idea of life in all the meaning of this word.
Thanks for your comment and the link to UBUNTU, Pere!
ReplyDeleteIn fact, there have been some news in the main newspapers about The Elder. UN might be seen by some people and countries as an entity with unfair power distribution: only the western countries, China and Rusia are represented in the Security Council and there is a lack of representatives from other rising countries. Since most of the decisions with economic impact are taken in this council, even an eventual entry of India and Brasil would not change much the situation, for example, in terms of representation of African countries.
From my opinion, while UN and UBUNTU make important contributions, it is the sum of individual contributions and the result of their networking activities which results into tangible results at a long range.