return to top page The Radical Declaration
We therefore declare as follows:
UNITY
We are the people of the Fourth World, we represent a broad global spectrum ranging from ethnic, cultural and linguistic, to religious, economic ecological and community concerns, many of which have been submerged to one degree or another by the disastrous onrush of giantism of the last two centuries or more.We are united in our determination to defuse the prevailing anarchic crisis of power by seeking to create our own social, cultural and economic patterns as we see fit in our own localised communities.
LOCALITY
We declare that it is only through small social units, which are capable of being subject to the control of their members that the peoples of the world will ever defeat the dangers of global war.We call for the breakdown of all giant nations into entities of no more than ten million or so, and for all nations to practice and respect the principle of non-centralised, human-scale, democratic decision-making at the village level.
We insist that the political and economic power within each nation shall be so localised that no central government shall ever again encompass the capacity for any large-scale act of military or economic aggression against its neighbours.
NUMBERS
In the same way it is only by such means that they can resolve the problem of excess human numbers, make effective a proper respect for their material environment so as to defeat the ecological peril, and end the curse of alienation from life and fellowship which now afflicts millions upon millions of people in many parts of the world.We and our neighbours seldom desired this development of giantism, very often it was fiercely resisted, it was rarely accepted and now we proclaim of it our total repudiation.
GOVERNANCE
We assert in its place our inalienable right to live as free, independent, autonomous and self-governing peoples and we reject the validity of any arrangements, however long-imposed, especially by giant political units, which seek the continued denial of this right.AUTONOMY
We further assert our right in our own villages or urban parishes to operate and control our own schools, hospitals, police force, banks, industries, commercial trading and transport arrangements, forms of taxation and other matters of community concern as seems best to us, without external interference or coercion.CO-OPERATION
We accept the need for many forms of association and co-operation across local and national frontiers, if only to realise the potential enrichment of human life such co-operation can achieve; we are happy to acknowledge this need and whilst repudiating the bleak, unthinking nonsense of 'world government', which could only be a global dictatorship based on a monstrous bureaucratic nightmare, we look to a far greater degree of transnational co-operation in specific political, economic and social spheres than prevails today.We affirm our readiness to participate in such co-operation wherever the mutual or general interests of the people are thus best served, but in so doing we reserve to ourselves the inalienable right to decide in what ways we shall participate, and the full freedom to withdraw from any such arrangements at any time.
DANGER
In general terms we assert that any state which exceeds modest, human-scale dimensions is at serious risk of being unable fully to control its own affairs and is thus a danger to its own and other people in terms of war, ecological excess and economic dislocation: the bigger the state, the bigger the danger.
SHARING
The grim lesson of political life of the 20th century, which has already inflicted more murder, suffering and infamy on the common people than has been perpetrated in any previous period, is that the only safe form of power is shared power.We therefore further affirm that even within such human-scale nations, in order to overcome the dangers of war and the overgrowth of human numbers, to check the spread of the spiritual void of mass alienation, and to widen the boundaries of freedom, there is an urgent need for a new respect for the rights and powers of decision-making and control of both political and economic institutions by the members of localised communities in their villages, wards and parishes as the case may be, in every part of the world.
Such a programme of non-centralised political and economic power as is here envisaged is an essential safeguard to prevent the power of the state being seized by any group for the purpose of war, aggrandisement or oppression.
DECENTRALISING
For the same reason we hereby affirm our unreserved opposition to any attempts to increase the size or the scale of political units or any moves towards further governmental centralisation.We denounce such trends as likely to lead to yet a further loss of human control, to result in further assaults on freedom and a further increase in the prevailing global dangers.
WAR
We call on people everywhere to end the curse of global war by repudiating the uncontrollable giantism which is the chief cause of it.We urge the dismemberment of all giant entities of power into sensible, human-scale, controllable nations of no more than ten million people which shall be governed on the basis of the maximum degree of non-centralised power by vesting all powers of government in the hands of village communities.
ECOLOGY
Unless we transform our life-styles and make a more realistic appraisal of the resilience of the mutual support systems of the biosphere, large parts of our planet could, in a few more generations, become uninhabitable.We urge every village and village-sized community in the world, especially in the advanced world, to examine the impact of its mode of life on the ecology of the planet and order those changes which will ensure that what is now ecologically malignant is made stable and benign.
RESOURCES
The life-style of rich nations is making demands on the finite resources of the planet, which can only widen the gulf between rich and poor peoples and beggar the posterity of both by degrading the habitat.We call for an immediate reappraisal of this life-style, especially by communities in rich countries, in all particulars where finite resources are being consumed, in order to establish a way of life, which is beneficially sustainable for all peoples.
LIMITS
We call for an end to waste and an end to policies, which presume a subservience of the resources of the habitat to a quest for unlimited economic expansion.We call instead for a profound sense of reverence for all the elements of the natural order and a deliberate policy of thrift and careful husbanding of all planetary resources, in place of the present policies of exploitation and abuse, with their dangerous disregard of the consequential effects on the interlocking equilibriums of the biosphere, on which the well-being of all life depends.
WASTE
We condemn the rapacious manner in which the finite resources of the globe are being squandered, as evidenced particularly by mass air travel and mass motoring as being ignorant, foolish, wasteful and immoral.We urge the adoption of standards of consumption which make a minimum demand on such resources, and which are served by a maximum reliance on self-renewable resources.
We urge people everywhere to reject products, which make needless demands on finite resources, which constitute the heritage of all our posterity temporarily in our keeping.
POPULATION
The largely unconscious biological mechanisms, which control numbers in the animal world were also operative in human societies until quite recent times. They operated on the basis of decisions made consensually (and frequently instinctively) in small groupings. Today there is a need for those responses to be reinforced by a conscious process of reasoning; instead we have largely destroyed the small communities, which were their basis.This is the real cause of the population crisis.
No small self-governing community threatened to be swamped by its own numbers would fail to do something to prevent it if it had the power to do so.
We declare that the need for base power in our village societies is imperative if the crisis in human numbers is to be resolved. No government of a mass society can solve this problem except by means, which are totalitarian and an assault on human dignity.
Community responsibility for community affairs is a precondition for the control of community numbers. It follows that community power is a precondition for community survival.
ALIENATION
Human fulfilment is a product of religion, work, culture and relationships; the blind pursuit of economic growth as an end in itself, and the giant forms of organisation it promotes, puts a discount on moral principle, degrades human labour to being a mere appendage to organisations or machines, devitalises culture by destroying the power to create and to decide, and undermines the basis of family life by substituting money measurements for the bonds of mutuality and reverence for relationships which are the core of any worthwhile civilisation.We denounce this process as being inevitably destructive of human happiness and well-being.
CONCLUSION
We call on people everywhere to repudiate the march to giantism and loss of social control, to affirm their membership of the human family and their duty to advance its well-being in terms of peace, freedom and ecological sensibility by joining with us to establish THE FOURTH WORLD, a world where power is fully shared by people in modest-sized communities which enable the social process to do full justice to the inherent majesty of the human spirit and to serve the noblest potentialities of its creative genius.Copies Of This Document May Be Obtained From 26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.comUnbeatable value at only £2
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