Human Needs in Politics

The Charter of Human Needs in Politics offers ideas on how to build a more common sense world in the light of new knowledge about our innate physical, psychological and emotional needs and the different ways our brain hemispheres pay attention to the world. Providing an antidote to the ironically anti-human world we are devising and living in – if it can truly be called living – it begins where we must, not where we have ended up (through lopsided development) live, in tune with our innate needs. This will be the very basis of human flourishing.

This is a new reference point for politics and government, which casts a lateral light onto the way bureaucracy functions, policy decisions are developed and leaders guide us. From that angle, our politics appear dangerously random, peculiarly obsessive, and sometimes downright pathological.

The idea that political systems and decisions should aim for our health and welfare, and that they can be humane, may seem a fantasy given the dark fascination with power, conflict and the metastases of bureaucracy that we see all around us. However, the risks presented today, whether conflict across the globe or an ethically empty if efficient overregulated technological planet, urgently call for a more sensible world rooted in our psychological and material wellbeing.

Time is one of the most misunderstood and abused elements in politics. To satisfy the rapid media cycle or respond to critics, answers and solutions are required immediately – whereas the best policy recommendations will inevitably require much more time and reflection to develop. It is almost certain too that much time will be needed for the ideas in this Charter to be absorbed and serve as ferment for a new way way of managing institutions or international relations. This therefore speaks, above all, to the need to put human givens ideas forward now.

Do please share this Charter with whoever you think may be interested – you can download it here >

You can find out more about the Guild’s work at: www.conciliators-guild.org/