Destructive chaos or humanist revolution
The environmental disaster generated by a few requires, in order to overcome it, the union of all the humanists of the world.
Since 1978, the United Nations (UN) has celebrated World Environment Day on June 5.
In the theses that support the theory and practice of our federation, we affirm that human beings at birth find ourselves in a certain vital situation that we have not chosen. We are born submerged in a natural and social environment, with physical and mental aggression, which we register as pain and suffering. The tendency of our species is to mobilize against these aggressive factors trying to overcome them.
We human beings expand our bodily possibilities through the production and use of "prosthetic" instruments. In our actions against painful factors, we produce objects and signs that we incorporate into society and that we transmit historically.
What we produce organizes society and in continuous feedback, our societies organize production. We are in a natural, social and cultural environment very different from that of insects and other species that transmit their experience genetically.
We exist in an environment where our own body is part of nature and at the same time there is an environment that is not natural, but social and historical, purely human, where everything we produce and generate is "charged" with meaning, intention, of what for
The expansion of the time horizon that characterizes us as a species, where past-present and future are simultaneously articulated in our consciousness, allows us to defer the responses we give to the environment, choose between situations and plan our future.
This freedom has allowed some human beings to illegitimately appropriate the social whole, to deny freedom and intentionality to other human beings, reducing themselves to prostheses, to instruments of their own intentions.
Therein lies the essence of discrimination, its methodology being physical violence; economic; racial, psychological and religious. Evidently violent minorities have reduced humanity to natural objects.
That anti-humanist minority that promotes the catastrophe of the natural and social environment is strongly concentrated in large private financial capital and in the chain of destructive industries and companies, very close to the military-technological-media complex.
To mention some data that illustrate the situation of concentration in few hands of the environmental disaster, we know that between the years 1751 and 2010 only ninety companies were responsible for 65% of the accumulated carbon emissions.
The most critical current deterioration situations in the natural environment are located in the Cryosphere with: the melting of sea ice in the Arctic, in Antarctica and in the Greenland ice sheet. In the biosphere, violence against the natural environment is notorious on a large scale, in the devastation of boreal forests, the Amazon rainforest, warm water coral reefs, plus the thawing of the permanent frozen ground layer: permafrost and the alterations of the Atlantic marine currents (between the Caribbean and the Sahara).
In the social field, humanists point out that we do not need to abound in arguments when we emphasize that the social environment has been around for decades. it is in sufficient technological conditions to solve in the short term the problems of vast regions in terms of employment, food, health, housing, education. Only the monstrous speculation of big capital prevents it.
In 2020, a report by the NGO OXFAM maintained that the 2,153 most billionaires in the world have more wealth than the poorest 60% of humanity (about 4,600,000,000 people). The concentration of wealth accelerated with the passing of the pandemic.
This year the UN convenes under the slogan, "One Earth". It states that "the earth is facing a triple planetary emergency: the climate is warming rapidly; habitat loss is leading to an estimated one million species being threatened with extinction, and pollution continues to poison our air, land, and water."
Then they conclude from the UN "Getting out of this quagmire implies transforming our economies and societies to make them more inclusive, fairer and more respectful of nature. We must go from damaging the planet to healing it. The good news is that the solutions and the technology exist And they are becoming more affordable.
In coherence with what was initially said in our theses, we disagree with the responsibilities that the UN attributes to the human race. We point out again that it is not the entire species that is responsible for environmental damage. Not even a majority, but a small oppressive minority that promotes a materialistic culture, which has placed the accumulation of wealth and power in very few hands as the highest value.
In the present, after going through the worst stage of the Covid 19 pandemic, which exposed the inability of capitalism to provide comprehensive and satisfactory collective responses to humanity, we are now facing a war in Ukraine, between the leadership of Russia and the NATO, with destructive consequences that can ultimately be devastating on a planetary scale.
In the spheres of international relations, it is announced that we are heading towards food shortages and probable new famines in different parts of the planet, while an enormous amount of human and material resources are absurdly destroyed and squandered. Powerful minorities, alien to the feelings of the peoples, are putting humanity and life on the frontiers of extinction, when the possibility arises that the escalation of war could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
As a political expression of our Universalist Humanism, from our Federation of Humanist Parties we affirm that it is necessary to create a new vision of the future, which promotes collective actions in a revolutionary direction to overcome all these anti-humanist, anti-life and anti-nature expressions. .
We need to advance in the construction of a Universal Human Nation, governed by personal freedom and social solidarity, where we establish a balanced relationship with that acting force that is nature.
We propose a re-conceptualization of human life and of the relationships of the human being with his own natural and social environmental ecosystem, overcoming the conditions of violence generated by powerful violent minorities until today. We propose the reorientation of the resources that today are destined to destroy life and prey on the natural environment, to resolutely put them in function of the pillars of the humanist revolution: comprehensive health and education.
We face the dilemma between the destructive chaos to which a few lead us or the humanist revolution that the majorities need to build. A profound human revolution is urgently required that has among its priorities, changing the conditions of existence in favor of forms in harmony with the natural environment and simultaneously producing a psychic-social and cultural revolution that allows us to leave behind the current prehistory and enter in true human history.
A growing humanist popular power is the non-violent force we need to oppose the tyranny held by big capital. We need, in the broadest sense of the word, the unity of action of all humanists in the world.
International Coordination Team
Federation of Humanist Parties
5-06-2022