THE SECRETARIAT PANEL

Donald Keys: It’s an information gathering session as far as the Secretariat is concerned. After the dust settles, and after we know the feelings and wishes of the Congress, of the contact persons, of people who served on the Coordinating Council up to now, of the organizations which have been supportive, then we’re going to be able to draw a profile which will match the information we then have. We don’t have that information now. This meeting is going to be extremely important in terms of that information. Two of these people are up here for a very specific reason. I want to honor them. I want you to honor them. Because they are primary figures in the two organizations other than Planetary Citizens which have given very substantial help to the Planetary Initiative—Fran Macy, now the executive officer of Association for Humanistic Psychology, and Bill Bahan, a leader in the Society of Emissaries. Without the support we’ve had from these groups, I doubt very much that we would be meeting here today. We’ve also added Gehart Elston who’s an organizational wizard and member of the staff, and Sven with a Scandinavian, European perspective. But that’s only the opening of the package. The major contents come from you. I’d like to begin with Fran and have his comments, move to Bill and Sven and then Gehart and I will be in the clean-up box. And then over to you because we want to hear what you’re thinking and feeling.

Fran Macy: This has been one of the finest collaborations that I have ever known. I think everyone in this room, at least from all the contacts I’ve made, is very active in not just one organization, but in a number of organizations on the local, national and international, multinational levels. And I think many of us try to work in collaboration with other organizations. In all frankness, it often is not very easy. For one thing, they’re the preoccupations of our own demands within any given organization. That makes it hard to o be other directed, if you will. Secondly, every organization has its own optic, you see the world through particular eyes and glasses coming out of an organizational setting. And that’s another kind of barrier. And let’s face it, many organizations become competitive.

Many of those many of us are trying to attract the resources of energy and attention and money from the same clientele of people who are on the edge of change in society. Well, I hope you recognize those factors or features. Those are ones I recognized. And that’s what makes me so surprised at the quality of collaboration that we’ve enjoyed with Don personally and with all of his staff.

The Planetary Initiative organization is a truly open system. I think many of us are in general systems theories these days. From the very beginning of its planning activities, Don invited the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and the executive director—my predecessor, and then I when I came on the scene—to participate in all of the planning meetings, not just to receive minutes or you know, to be told after the fact or asked to ask to sponsor something that in some fashion that had been planned by others. It was invitations from the very beginning. Secondly, the collaboration has worked in practice in an open way and action. We have in fact participated in a number of your meetings Don, haven’t we?

Secondly, we’ve collaborated in in a very nuts and bolts kind of way, which is what often makes organizational efforts survive or fail. We swapped great batches of thousands of addresses, labels for example, that otherwise would have cost each of us a great deal of money. Because we’re, we’re having our annual meeting immediately following this—and I should go back to that collaboration actually, our board changed the date of our organization’s annual meeting, which is normally in August to be in June, which created some organizational hardships. I think you know that Don—because we had another meeting in the East and May and that makes two major meetings almost within a month, but it seemed like the collaboration was worth just tweaking our calendar somewhat. And here we are, and we will be in this room with the Association of Humanistic Psychology when this gathering is open (over) and I and I’ll take this occasion to invite all of you to stay on and participate with us. We’d like to have you do so. We’re focusing on networking for action.

So other ways that we did act together was publicizing each other’s programs, and I remember telling my staff Don, that when one of your newsletters came out and I opened it up to read it, here was a description of the Association for Humanistic Psychology that I wish I had written because it showed more in many ways more insight into the nature and history of our organization that I have been able to express so succinctly and actually. And we have in our publications talked to good deal we about Planetary Initiative and Don was interviewed for our last issue for example. Then on each other’s programs we have participated. Here I am on your panel. Don will participate in our opening ceremony on Wednesday night and report from you to our association, on what you have we what we have experienced here and how that how that might be carried on in some way, how it might inform what our association is doing. So I’m hoping that in some ways this could be a model.

Bill Bahan: I have attended planetary initiative meetings. I’m just thinking about it now. In Canada, United States, Ireland, England, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand— Planetary Initiative has gone around the world. It’s made an impact. These were wonderful meetings all over the world. Before I get into saying something about this, I’d like to say that first of all, the old adage about if you want to get something done, you know who to get. That’s the one who you can depend upon. Those people who sometimes say, well, they’re too busy, that’s the kind you don’t want. It’s a busy person who’s gonna get something done. And I noticed this particularly with the staff of the Planetary Citizens, I mean they’ve done a masterful job. I’m just, my heart is filled when I think of those folks of Planetary Citizens and the hours that they’ve put in to allowing this particular Congress particularly to come together.
I think the human mind usually needs a form, to pin on something that’s happening at a level that the human mind, particularly the conscious mind, can’t grab hold of. I think that the Planetary Initiative has provided that form. I know that one of the words that’s been used constantly here, and I think it’s a word that we really need to look at, is processing. We’re in a process. And I think that this is what’s been happening. I think that a process has been working out. One of the forms that we found to put on this process has been called the Planetary Initiative. Everything is processing. I mean, kids go along, they don’t have measles anymore. They’re memeasling. And people aren’t cancer, they’re cancering and trees are treeing, everything like that. There is a process that’s going on and as far as this Planetary Initiative is concerned, I feel that it’s been a form that’s been very useful, to allow this process to continue, particularly if the human mind needs a name to put on something. And I can see this particular form— I think it’s got a lot of use yet. I don’t think we’ve really used this form in the process that’s taking place as effectively as we can use it.

I think it’s providing, first of all a point of orientation, a wonderful point of orientation. It’s in neutral ground, so it can meet people from all sorts of backgrounds and strata. Also, I believe it’s providing a point of education—excellent point of education. And primarily it is definitely providing a point of service. So, people ask me prior to coming up here whether the Planetary Initiative should continue, and my attitude was, well, I wanna see what happens at the Congress. After having been at the Congress here now for what, two days or so, I say Amen. It’s going, and we have something here that we can definitely use to be a blessing to this world in which we are responsible for.

Sven: When I first read Donald’s ideas about the Planetary Initiative in the fall of 1980, I somehow envisioned both the preferred future and the process, and you know how this could happen—which brought me to Stony Point in January of 81. After that I struggled for a long time trying to do the bridge building process, the coalition building process in Scandinavia with not very much success, although I think I made some seeds for future work, which is initially one reason why I personally see the need to continue.
I in many ways feel that other Europeans ought to sit here today at this panel, like Michelle, whom you heard this morning, who had a wonderful story about everything that had happened in his country, in Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe. Somehow the momentum there has been stronger and faster. However, to me this Congress is a confirmation of not so much of the culmination of a whole planetary movement that I think Donald was envisioning, where actually almost every community had representatives in a new United Nations. So that’s the quantity aspect of it, which I think has not happened. But the quality, which I think is more important, because the quality when we are talking about the future, has to not just to contain the vision of the preferred future or the vision of the of goodness, beauty, spirituality but somehow it has to contain the rigor. It has to contain the disciplined aspect of life that is in all biological life. It has to contain within it the ingredients of structure and function. So I’m sort of seeing the planetary Congress as, that we are building the DNA of the future. Because I think this is the first time and we of course are reaping the fruits of a lot of other organizational work and people that have been done over the last twenty years or hundreds and thousands of years, of course, and to touch on thinking and understanding what life and nature and evolution is about. But the fact that we have grasped the ingredients and managed to fit them together in such harmony, in such a way with the understanding of the nuts and bolts and the pragmatic and very good discipline is there as well as the spontaneity, the visionary aspects and the spiritual, open-ended, ever evolving process.

But this is a viable seed that can create a new evolutionary animal. And that animal is a new way, a new process., a new form, a new structure for participatory democracy that encompasses within itself the global values, the global necessities and a positive vision for the future. Now I think the next step, if this isn’t the culmination, this is the culmination of the creation of the seed perhaps. Now we have to plant it and we have to again use rigor and the combined, the combination of spontaneity, vision, you know, what you call brainstorming, and a sense of rootedness in the real political world, I think that’s where Madison’s story made a valid point today.
You know, we have to really see whose interests we are serving, and we have to make sure that we’re not playing another nice game for ourselves in an age of unemployment where maybe people were highly educated don’t get any work. So it’s nice to play this issue exploration game. But what are we actually achieving? So I think we have to bear this in mind. And then I can see eventually how this can through true intelligent work contribute to the building up of an organization that has a head and a body and has good solid features to stand on—and it’s swift and not just an elephant or a dinosaur. Elephant is a beautiful animal, but dinosaurs are dead, aren’t they extinct? So we don’t want to build a dinosaur, but we want something that’s swift but also that is solid. That is how this can be filtered down into public policy. And that’s where I think the real hard work from now on has to go, is to see how we can translate the ideas, the visions and this see how this can grow and differentiate into all levels of society globally. Thank you.

Gerhart Elston: Can you hear me like this? I’d like to try a slightly different tack, because my assumption when I started participating in the Planetary Initiative planning and then in coming here at all, was that this wasn’t worth doing, that it would end merely in another conference. That doesn’t mean that it should continue. Because we may have failed. And there are other organizations and meetings that I’ve been involved in where euthanasia was a merciful ending. But you don’t plan for that in advance, do you? Should we continue? The touch stone on that one, is would we have to reinvent something very similar if we did away with it? And I think we, and I think the answer to that is yes, urgently. The question is, do we have the capacity? To live up to this. I myself believe considerable burden of responsibility that we have loaded upon ourselves merely by having come together, because we now have a potential of power. And a potential, not of partisan confrontation, but a positive force of spirit and therefore power for good in the world, that if we don’t use it, we are really responsible for the gap that we will create. And this is why I stopped thinking of do we continue and what does that mean and how do we do that?

Is this conference successful? You never know that with a conference until about 2-3 years later. And that depends on whether we all are all willing to get our hands dirty now. And I trust enough of you really want to do that. And I think there’s enough trust created here among enough of us to continue doing what has been, I think, our major contribution, namely, to be a catalyst that brings people together and allows a growth and outreach to folks who haven’t seen where they should take hold. And who may not know that or beginning to at least grow up in the right direction.

I actually came with several possible options for the future. And some of the options have been voiced around and about, but I am fundamentally a human rights activist. I just happened to believe that human survival, humane survival indecency, happens to be a fundamental human right. And to me, the fallout is the—what comes as the result? What do we achieve? Do we contribute something to the play? And we can do this in several ways. And Don and others I’m sure will talk about the incredible limitations that made this meeting quite impossible. And it’s kind of a marvelous thing that we’re here anyway. And I think the continuation of this organization without funds and so forth is quite impossible. I think we’ll do it anyway. There are, however, of course, the hard facts. And we could simply go with our minimal holding operation and maximum local development activity and then a network of communication. We could be, as a second option, merely a network of communication—and say what happens is what you people do and you do the maximum you can. And communicate.

I think we have a greater potential. And I’ve mulled a sort of visionary option for ourselves since we’re envisioning a better and preferred future for the world. May I just take a minute or so to envision my preferred future for the Planetary Initiative? And it comes from several of you for the most part. The most striking proposal one of you gave me was that we need a dramatic use of drama. I mean literally, we use the arts creatively here, to help people reimagine humanity. And with the disillusion and the depression that is abounding, at least in the United States and I think in a lot of other places, this is the moment to go to the campuses and to the cities and towns and do a public festival and invite people to reimagine humanity, and have speakers that we have enough people who can draw an audience that they will pay for and you could fund, I trust, if that really worked and if we had enough energy to do it in lots of places, quite a movement on that basis.

And the other way to fund the movement, of course, is the way that organizations like churches and communities have always been funded from the bottom up. People raise money and contribute to share. I think we can do that. If we did that, then we would have to deal, like tomorrow, with the prevention of a nuclear Holocaust the day after and the gradual erosion of our water and land resources. I happen to think that governments and nationalities and national boundaries are in the way, but I also know they’re not going to melt away by tomorrow or the day after. So we have to raise in people’s minds the security issue, personal, family, communal security, and see this is important and weapons have created insecurity. So how do we create security and what images can we create of what the community is? Because the community is important, and in most nations the national government does not protect all its communities. And so the national security state image, which was of very recent European origin and has failed in two monstrous world wars, is an idiotic image to say, draw national boundary, say in Africa where they cut across all natural affinities. We know this is outdated. And yet we can’t have something more sensible immediately. So what does one do?

One gets very political. And we can hear more about this and other hours here. You were told this morning that we had a discussion in another room in a corner where the phrase came out, the system can be had and then yes, but who wants it? But it isn’t just the system. If we can be sufficiently political not just to convert politicians and talk with them and persuade them., but to get people with our kind of vision to get their hands dirty and take the nomination at the local precinct.

You know, never mind who’s going to be president if we had a Congress that voted by 2/3 not to ratify the military budget. The president can make handstands in the United States. This is the ways of doing that in every nation, even in the totalitarian. It takes people. It does not take a majority. But it takes a critical mass. I don’t know which of us is the 100th monkey, but we already have 500 here. I don’t know what the critical mass is. In most countries I know in the United States during the Vietnam War, it was somewhere between 18 and 24% of the population before Congress cut off the funding. We knew that from the beginning. That’s what we did. That’s what we accomplished. I think we can change the world that way and take over if we are willing to use ourselves in this movement as a tool. And if not, someone else will, for good or ill. And if we have self-fulfilling prophecies, let them for once be positive. And let us take hold. Why should somebody else fill the vacuum if we are capable of believing ourselves, that we have a better story. So let’s spend a lot of hours and a lot of time figuring how to do it. But let us pledge ourselves would be my suggestion, to accept the fact of who we are together and just do it.