On April 13, 2017, I had the
honor of presenting my work to Rotary International's NYC Club, when I spoke
on a Systems Thinking approach to World Peace.
I want to thank my Rotary sponsor and club board member, Larry Cohen, for making it possible for me to speak at the Rotary Club that's been associated with the UN since the UN was created in 1945.
The main points I made in my 30
minute talk were these:
The world needs a new road map
for achieving World Peace, because our current approach - based on mechanical
thinking, where fixing broken parts seems to be the way to go - isn't working.
I told why my own life’s story
led me at an early age to seek out a better, more peaceful world and led me to
begin researching the subject more formally in 1979.
I explained (with help from
a video of Buckminster Fuller) how humanity must break free of the
fundamental belief in “scarcity of resources” that is the root cause answer to
the question “Why do we fight?”.
I discussed how Hollywood has an
essential role to play in teaching the public (“telling the story”) that
scientific advancement now permits humanity to replace scarcity with
abundance-based thinking… the kind of macro historic shift explored in
historian James Burke’s landmark “The Day the Universe Changed” TV series.
I made the point that this new
approach will show the public that sustainable development is about not just
healing the relationship between humanity and Mother Earth but healing the
relationship between humanity and itself.
And I ended my talk by referring
to Rotary’s “making a difference” theme for 2017-2018, how its history of
working to end the threat of polio is analogous to viewing achieving world
peace as a global mental “health challenge", and how (in the final film
clip I showed) film star Tom Hanks once said that achieving a “power of
cooperation” breakthrough - as existed during the Apollo space program - could
lead humanity to achieve “the impossible”.
Here is the video of my talk:
And here are the slides and videos I used:
