Pathways to a New Civilization of Peace

By Jan Mortier

The human species is at a crossroads, we are faced with potentialities of competing socio- economic systems coming into conflict for resources and routes for resources so that their national economic machines can keep turning. We’ve been here before; World War II, World War I, the wars of Europe, the wars of empires. The challenge is always the same. A power arises in a land, dominates the people of that land, creates a nation, which develops and grows and reaches a critical mass where that nation can no longer secure resources domestically. Either it collapses or it forays to other lands and seas to take them, at which point it enters into war with other nations.

Historians eulogise the great conquerors and unifiers in history: Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon, but at what cost was their so-called glory? What toll of human life and suffering did they exact upon good and decent peace loving people? Millions died for their glory. Millions whose names we will never know and millions of stories of human lives that will never be told from their silent graves. National creation myths of glory, honour, victory and sacrifice conceal a more mundane story. One of economics, money, power grabs and resource extraction.

The World Economic Machine.

The mechanics of a nation’s economy is quite simple, as is that of the world. A cycle of inputs and outputs to “keep the economic wheel turning”. Humans are born into the system as input and they die as output. Energy is put into the system, used up and then outputted as waste. Resources are extracted as input into the system, refined, manufactured and outputted as waste through economic activity. Within this system there are cycles of investment in the industrial base and public services such as education and health. The variables of this system can be adjusted with predictable outcomes. The national and world economic machine works so long as it keeps turning and inputs and outputs are moderated. There is a broad correlation between the human lifespan of 80 years to long economic national cycles.

The challenge for leaders of nations is to keep their national economic machines turning so that their people are productive, happy and don’t overthrow them. In democracies that have regular elections, leaders may be good at campaigning and promising a better tomorrow, but this does not necessarily equate to knowing how to run an economy. In autocracies, leaders have more time to take a longer view for their national economic planning, which may explain the burgeoning national debts of the democratic West and the high GDP growth of the autocratic East.

The world economic machine requires occasional bifurcation boosts such as a ground breaking innovations like the auto-mobile, television, telephone or computer, to come along once in a while that changes everything and super-boosts economic activity to push a new economic cycle of activity. Reinventing and refining these inventions don’t do so much to keep the world economic wheel slowing and halting. The challenge is to prevent collapse.

In a consumer economy, genuinely new societal changing innovations are needed from time to time to give a boost and keep the wheel turning. These innovations transpire by chance of invention from within the individual human mind. They cannot be legislated for or summoned. With the hopes for European Green Growth having been a financial loss, they are presently trying to summon the demiurges of a thirty-year conventional war in Europe and Artificial Intelligence as an economic plan. Neither of these forays will give the boost to the world economy that will produce a genuine long economic wave of activity. Neither of these Pandoras can be controlled and both could lead to human extinction.

Notice though, in this explanation of the human world economic machine, that the human is not at the centre of the model. The human is just one aspect of inputs and outputs, like resources and energy. The globalisation system considers humans as a resource to be input and output, no more significant than energy, resources and waste.

In the present system, humans are therefore deemed replaceable and devoid of meaning. Hence the entry of cyborgs, apps and the AI agenda into the equation.

One could go deeper down the rabbit hole and find that the world economic system assigns humans a number at birth for later taxation. The first 20 years of a human’s life is spent growing and being educated (if they are lucky). The last 20 years is spent in a state of wisdom and entropy. So from 80 years, which is a generous lifespan for most, there are 40 years of human productivity and potentialities for extraction of money from the human through taxation, directly and indirectly. Taxation being originally invented to fund dynastic wars.

Humans are More than Units of Production.

State economists deem the old and the unwell as not only as “useless eaters” but as a financial loss and burden to the state, which is why neo-liberal national health systems kill off non- productive humans after a certain age. In my own case, my mother who had cancer was executed in 2006 by the NHS at the age 56 to save a few hundred pounds for the cost of a nightly hospital bed. They explained their methodology to me as the “Liverpool Care Pathway”.

This story is not so uncommon. I’ve spoken to many ladies of pensionable who are quite fiery and independent, but they fear getting apprehended by the local authorities on the false allegation that they are “confused”, so that the local authority can forcibly hospitalise them in old-age homes, make them sign over their assets, take their lives and then seize their properties and assets. One old lady told me this happened to seven of her friends and that this is an endemic and deliberate practice by local authorities for years.

Britain then has introduced the “Assisted Dying Bill” through an organised charade with a self indulgent TV personality, a prime minister who is a self-confessed atheist (Starmer), and a “campaigning” member of parliament who reminds one of the Angel of Death. Their contrived agenda is basically a way of saying the state has wasted all of the money so now they are going to kill off the poor and the unwell to bring down costs. It is effectively legalising murder by medical professionals. Europe has seen this before with Doctor Josef Mengele. No-one, including the established churches and religions —to their shame—have spoken out strongly against this new government’s fait accompli for the execution of the meek.

Disabled and depressed people in Canada are now also being offered state-funded euthanasia as an option instead of slightly more costly mental health counseling.

In America, hospitals are declaring people dead and sedating them while they are still alive to harvest their organs to sell to the highest bidder. This is not to say that such things don’t happen in other countries or socio-economic systems, they do en masse, but the narrative of the West during World War II was that the West was better than the other side, because of its values based on human life and rights for the individual. As these values have been constantly eroded, at what point will there be anything to rally the plebeians around in times of crisis or war?

Eastern societies have a totally different outlook to the West with regard to their elder populations. Elders are an integral and welcome part of the extended family and live in multi- generational households where the young care for the old and the whole family is enriched through a strong multi-generational bond. I was fortunate enough to be raised by my grandparents and in return I looked after them in their home for as long as was possible. This was not without challenges but my knowledge of history today is still more the result of my conversations with my grandfather—who served as an attaché to leaders in the Middle East with the RAF— more so than any official education could provide.

In the West, the young wishing to enjoy system presented hedonism and wealth discard their elders to “care homes” and visit them when their schedules permit, awaiting their inheritance. Yet our elders have so much knowledge and wisdom to pass on, if only the young would take the time to ask them. The next time you see an elder human, strike up a conversation with them, you might be amazed at what you might learn.

Societies Collapse When they Fail to Protect the Human.

The current socio-economic paradigm has, to all intents and purposes, broken the traditional family unit to our detriment and yet we wonder why social order is degrading and crime runs rampant in our cities and towns. In some cases it has become so bad, they just don’t talk about it and the media pretends it’s not happening.

When society degrades to the point of not protecting the sanctity and sacredness of human life, then that society has fallen below the standard of decent and good civilization and is no better than barbarism. Once the door to protecting human life is closed, then society can quickly degrade into a hellish state where humans become like quarreling dogs.

Every civilization, before it fell, was preceded by a state of decline characterised by elites, who were losing their grip on power; the devaluing of human life and increased social inequality. Collapse or invasion was sure to follow. It took Imperial Rome two hundred years to collapse but by the time it did, all the moneyed classes had long moved out of the city. Do we have a similarity throughout most western capitals today? We must guard against the precarious standard of global civilization slipping at any cost, lest we have nothing more impressive than the blood-stained Inca pyramids in an overgrown forest to leave as our testament to history. Our current civilization’s banal edifices of concrete and glass will not last as long.

The Miracle of Human Life.

The human being is a miracle of life and potentially unique in the universe. The complex processes that keep our bodies and brains going are still an odyssey of scientific discovery and no scientist has yet proven that life can emerge from inanimate matter. Therefore life, in particular human life, is something special.

Life is energy-based. As a young twenty-something, I saw this. Arriving too late to undo the second attempt of what the nurses and doctors had done, I watched as my mother’s body slowly shut down. For a brief moment the room radiated with a transient warm light and then it was gone. This had a profound and lasting effect on me as to the nature of life. Einstein said that “Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Matter is Energy...Energy is Light...We are all Light beings”. If we could create a new civilization that is based on a more subtle and deeper understanding of the miracle of life, not just humans who are clearly unique, but for all life beyond the current model of mere consumption and materialism, then human prospects may remain bright far into the future.

Why We Need a Culture of Peace.

The bipolarity of the human condition is exhibited by the wanton destruction of life on this planet on an industrial scale in the form of the obliteration of countless living ecosystems by the consumer economy’s industry and by countries obliterating countless people, families, women, children, boys and young men in mechanised war all over the world for resources and for glory. The reality is that there is no glory in death. In fact, the Japanese Shintoists believe that there is equality in death. Everyone, the rich and the poor alike, are the same in death. In World War I and II there were thousands of dead soldiers on miles of battlefields rotting with their eyes being pecked out by crows. Is that glory? 

Were we humans to travel through space to Pluto and find just one little flower there, it 

would be world news and proclaimed by the mass media and leaders as a new dawn for human consciousness and achievement. In our day-to-day lives and the traumatisation of the human consciousness by the media who endlessly thrive on and pump out the negative, we forget that the miracle of life is all around us every day, in each other, in nature and in all other living beings. Maybe if we took a break to be mindful and appreciate the gifts of nature and of life, that Mother Earth has given us, perhaps the human consciousness would start to change both individually and collectively.

How to Evolve Away from the Culture of War.

We need to find ways to evolve our civilization away from a culture of war towards a culture of peace. There are too many people and too few resources to compete over through war, especially with nuclear weapons added to the equation. At the first India-Japan Global Partnership summit in Tokyo, which I spoke at, the leaders there declared that five percent of the world’s population cannot continue to take ninety-five percent of the world’s resources. If the rising ninety-five per cent of the world’s population were to live —as they wish to and have every right to do so— and use as much resources as the five percent do, then the world economy will implode. So, either we choose to have a Babylonianesque war of all against all for resources or we commence a genuine dialogue for a culture of peace.

It is Time for Real Equality Between All Peoples.

We need a world economy that preserves rather than decimates cultures. How many great and unique tribes and peoples have been obliterated by colonialism and now globalisation? Cultural histories world-wide are becoming extinct as village elders try to preserve and pass on the histories of their peoples to dwindling youth, most of whom have left for the cities. We need to urgently preserve the living histories and languages of people’s cultures before we lose indigenous cultures forever.

A world civilization, should not be a homogeneous polity, but rather a multi-ethnic civilization of multitudes of cultures and peoples, each culture of which is equally valid and each with their own story, and all with the right of representation in the new world organisation.

A shared world civilization would need a New World Assembly as a Great Hall of the Peoples where all cultures, ancient tribes and industrialised nations alike can have an open debate and equal say in the governance of globalisation and the direction that the human species should take as a whole because presently this is being decided on behalf of the majority of humanity and without our consent and to our detriment.

This is not to say that we should not end the curse of Babel and all speak one shared language, have one single currency and one universal standard of civilization —a set of laws of universal rights and responsibilities of all peoples towards each other, the planet and our fellow species —but we should preserve and celebrate our differences, recognise all of the unique cultures as fully valid and worthy of protection and preservation.

It is Time for Real Equality for Women.

Industrialised economies have many people living longer, healthier and wealthier lives than, it is often said, some ancient kings. Yet millions of people in the developing world still don’t have access to electricity, clean water or nutritious food. Nearly half of the women in the developing world are essentially breeding farms and objects of lust for men who don’t believe women have the right to independence, education and development, or any more rights than the job of raising children. In rural areas women are also condemned during most of the day to do menial housebound work, cooking, cleaning, water and food fetching. Women are considered as possessions by their husbands. The actress Helen Mirren has pointed out that in some countries dogs and birds have more rights then women. A dog may sit on the front porch unaccompanied but a woman may not. A bird can sing but a woman may not.

In the 21st century, the human species is allowing nearly half of the developing world’s population—women— to be shut out from development, education and opportunity because of the misogyny of men. This is a huge barrier to the economic development and the prosperity of nations. It is also unconscionable. We need a new world economy where women have enshrined and enforceable equal rights to men; where women can easily divorce their husbands and be free to lead the lives they choose for themselves and not the lives that men seek to impose upon them.

It is Time for a Genuine Education for All.

For the first time in human history since the dark ages there are numerous young people in industrialised nations who have never read a book. They rely on their mobile phones for their information and now on AI chatbots to feed them information. The human capacity for searching; discovering; reading; imagining; thinking and the development of neural networks vital for human intellectual development and adult consciousness, is being bred out of the human population through the mass deployment of the mobile phone —which is effectively a microwave—with no regard to the risks to human health from Electro Magnetic Frequency poisoning of the human cells and to the causative changes in human consciousness.

Modern globalised civilization is racing blindly towards risks to human well-being and intellect that we cannot yet comprehend and have no collective mechanism to say stop and think about the implications of various technologies for humanity. In overly relying on technology, humans risk becoming an idiocracy —and it may already be too late. Humanity may never see another Mozart, da Vinci, Botticelli, Sartre, Wren or Rousseau.

There is a hypocrisy in ushering in AI, spending billions on energy and water consuming data centres, that often require their own power stations —a system of AI which will only enslave us in any case— while neighbouring farms are in drought and while energy poverty; food poverty; water poverty; resource poverty, and the right to human dignity is an unobtainable dream for billions of people still world-wide. We need a new world economy where there is education for all, not for government sponsored propaganda, or for teaching future factory workers to obey the summons of the ring of the bell, but a global education system that gives all humans the basic skills for a successful and meaningful life. Mathematics, Languages and Sciences will lay a solid basic foundation for reasoning for a happy and productive humanity in a new civilization.

We need a new world economy that also teaches Cultural History, specifically the histories of people’s cultures, their story of progress, conflicts and peace. A history which teaches only dynastic squabbles and lists of battles is a history of control. A history that teaches the indigenous story of a tribe or a people and their legends from the mists of time is real cultural history that will enrich future generations of their place in the new world civilization.

Fostering a New Human Consciousness.

Life is energetic and human consciousness is unique. We humans are the universe reflecting upon itself and witnessing the miracle of its own creation. We have consciousness different from the animals and the sentient beings we share this world with. They have a clear degree of consciousness also, but ours is of a higher factor, and therefore we have a higher responsibility. With the human consciousness we have realised —maybe all too late— that we have an infinite duty to our fellow species and to our shared environment. We also have a duty to each other and all of our fellow humans in an interdependent world of multitudes of unique and wonderful cultures. Humans therefore are special. We have an amazing past and will have an amazing future. We are far more than mere slaves bred to mine gold for Nibiru in ancient times. We are an eternal species with a consciousness and capabilities that we have only just begun to comprehend through our own scientific discovery over these last few hundred years.

It is a macabre state of affairs that a world of nine billion people has a global economic system enveloping it that takes no account whatsoever of the needs, hopes and aspirations of billions of human beings. Further, that there is no open and democratic system of governance presiding over this world economic machine, to steer the process of globalisation in the human interest. Instead, it is all units of currency and speculation, which ascribes no good or worth to either the environment or to the human being. This system termed by the late Federico Mayor Zaragoza as a plutocracy based on speculation has created the super rich and the super poor, and isn’t working for the benefit of humanity or for the Earth, nor for the global majority. We need a new world economic system that puts the human at the centre of the system, not as a mere facet or function within it.

The Duty of the Geo-political Powers.

A culture of peace should be based primarily on a culture of respect and reverence for life. This century we may need to prepare for a world of twenty billion people and less resources to go around. We are going to have to evolve into a civilization of dialogue, mutual hospitality and resource sharing if we, as a species, are going to survive the current and coming challenges.

Building a world of peaceful coexistence and respect for boundaries and spheres of influence among polarities is the only way that our species can survive until such time as we become a multi-planetary and hopefully, more advanced and serene civilization.

We humans are a very small part of a very big universe, there is still a lot for us to learn and experience in our human story, if we can only survive the birth pangs of the new emergent civilization and come to an arrangement among the geo-political powers for vital resource sharing rather than resource taking between civilizations. Do our leaders forget to look up on a clear night and realise that all the resources that their nations and humanity could ever need or want reside waiting for us in the heavens?

In nature, biological systems when coming into contact with one another either ultimately assimilate or destroy the other system. In the history of conflicting human systems it is never certain which system will prevail. Strength is indeed the prevailing factor, but as history has often shown, the outcome of conflict is often determined by unforeseen circumstances. It is better then that we humans, in the wisdom of our higher consciousness, realise that peaceful coexistence between our human systems is the preferred option to annihilation.

If we can develop this new human consciousness, then a human culture of peace might just emerge and could lay the foundation for a new civilization lasting aeons. The new civilization should be based on the fundamental principles of the uniqueness of human life, peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between all peoples that is maintained by meaningful, broad-based and sustained dialogue. If we can do this, then the ever evolving story of the emancipation of mankind as one human species and one human family will continue to unfurl far into the future.

End.

 
Jan Mortier is the founder of Civitatis International. He was also the Rapporteur for the World Political Forum- a discussion forum of former heads of state- in its early years. — Article published, Rome, 27 October 2026.