A movement for global solutions

Human Rights.

Even if it is troubling to admit, the idea of human rights is only fairly recent. It is troubling because we see human rights as something basic, something fundamental, something essential to our nature - yet for most of our existence as a species it never existed.

It's troubling to admit, because it might suggest that we're wrong. That human beings are simply not built to treat each other with dignity and respect, and the reason why we've neglected it for so many millennia is because we are simply cruel by nature.

Confronting this problem is hard, but thankfully, one that we don't have to deal with. We simply have to look at the world around us, and we can see the tremendous progress made towards human rights over the last few centuries. We can take relief in the fact that most people today see human rights as a good thing, and that violating human rights is a bad thing. We may be outraged by violations where they occur, we may be frustrated by the lack of progress, but all of us know that the hardest battle of all - the battle for hearts and minds on this issue - has already long been won. We can take comfort in the inevitability of human rights, knowing that it's just a question of better implementation and structures, knowing that we can tap into the public soul to get stronger action on these issues.

This wasn't always the case. These victories were hard won, by people who were told they were wrong at every single step of the way. People who were laughed at and told that slavery reflected the correct and natural order of the universe, or that women would be incapable of voting, or that genocide was an acceptable method of handling indigenous people. Underlying the cynics' beliefs was one central belief - that ultimately, the public was not going to care, and that they were going to be voices speaking into the wind.

This belief is the greatest fear of any visionary. It is a fear that for all their ideals, they will be eventually be confounded by 'reality', and that the pointlessness of it all will become clear. Many give up at this point, and run for the hills, burying themselves in a life dedicated to self-preservation. Some persist, but weighed down by this fear, are ineffectual in their actions. The only ones who succeed, those visionaries who shaped the world around us today, are the ones who confronted and destroyed this fear directly.

I say all this, because I am talking about you, the person here reading this blog. It is so very easy to separate history from ourselves, or to think that the legends of history were somehow endowed with super-human talent, but the truth is that they started just like you - looking out over a world that seemed cruel and unjust, wanting to change it, but afraid of their own seeming inability, balking at the seeming enormity of the task, and uncertain of first steps.

Undoubtedly, today's problems are different. We seem to face devastation from every possible angle - from terrorism to financial meltdown, from climate change to nuclear war, from poverty to genocide. It can be quite overwhelming to think about all these, until we slowly begin to see that there is a single root cause beneath all these problems. Humanity already has the knowledge to solve these problems, so for them to not be solved yet means the problems are rooted in the structure of global problem-solving - that is to say, in the structure of global governance.

In drawing the mental connections between these different issues and advocating for better global policy and governance, we are no different to those visionaries who saw that all affronts to human dignity were just that - not separate issues of women's rights or slavery or genocide, but the single issue of human rights.

And like them, we too will be called out as foolish, or utopian, or useless dreamers. Like them, we will eventually be forced to confront our worst fears, if we are serious about changing the world.

Confronting a fear of "reality" means more than just embracing a vision. It means coming to understand that it is not our job to change the world, or even to change humanity, but to awaken a vision which all people already share- that our vision does not belong to us, but is hidden away in all people, simply waiting to be uncovered. It requires deep faith in humanity's inherent greatness and the inevitability of our vision because of it - a faith which transcends the failings we see today on a daily basis. It is a faith which may seem difficult to justify by looking at the world, but one which is vindicated by a thorough understanding of human history.

Guided by this, we have nothing to fear anymore. We are no longer confronted by the monumental task of trying to change things, but by the thrill of drawing out what is already there. We are not fighters, but catalysts, helping people understand their own transformative power.

Should we ever need proof to sustain our own beliefs, we only need look at my generation - a generation which cannot understand divisions of race, ethnicity or nationality, and knows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the world is run. We know there is a problem, we just need a voice to articulate its nature more clearly, to give us a platform for collective action and to inspire us to believe that we are capable of extraordinary things.

I believe Citizens for Global Solutions is that voice. Or rather, I believe it can be, once we choose to see it that way and begin to articulate it as such.

So as my time at CGS comes to an end, I leave filled with the most profound sense of hope. I know that we are only at the very beginning of this journey, but that in truth we have already won. I can no longer see people as our opponents, but only see those who know they're on board , and those who are yet to realize it. I look out the window and see millions of people - people who I once thought ignorant of the issues that mattered - and see raw human potential. Future leaders who will inspire another generation and generations to come to see that there is only as much despair in the world as we are willing to tolerate, that there is no structure or institution which can rival the power of our collective beliefs and that we alone have the power to shape our world.