The Emerging Moral Humanity Movement (850 words)
By Wade Lee Hudson
Our social system spirals down toward disaster. The System encourages everyone for personal gain to climb social ladders and look down on and dominate those below — or submit to those above. It corrupts our institutions, our democracy, our culture, and ourselves.
Most Americans believe this country is on the wrong track. They’ve lost confidence in their leaders and their institutions. Angry and frustrated, many come to consider democracy itself expendable. Irrational fears trigger desperate and violent actions. Across the political spectrum, bitter efforts to defeat “the enemy” multiply. Many individuals despair and become self-centered.
The emerging moral humanity movement is reversing this spiral. Compassionate communities grow and become deeper. A cultural revolution blooms. Activists democratize and humanize social institutions. Young college-educated workers organize unions. Gen Z workers challenge arbitrary hierarchies.
These structural improvements nurture personal and spiritual growth. They harmonize with the life force, or God. Individuals undo divisive, selfish, and competitive socialization. They reject domination and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Single-issue, local and statewide political actions persist. Morally motivated activists fight for economic fairness, stop oppression based on identity, and call on each other to heal racial aggressions. They promote democracy throughout society.
Compassion-minded people help individuals cope and activists work on critical issues. They share a commitment to doing the right thing. They care about what’s ethical. They’re cultivating a more moral world. They constitute the emerging moral humanity movement. However, they’re fragmented. They unite only during Presidential elections.
The time is ripe for a broad-based, united, democratic, independent, nonviolent, grassroots movement similar to yet stronger than the union, civil rights, and women’s movement. Tens of millions are primed to unite, transform themselves and society, and demand that governments honor the people’s will. Based on the Gandhian principle, “Be the change you seek,” a moral humanity movement can fill this void.
Imagine, for example, millions conducting a one-day work stoppage demanding a ban on assault weapons, followed if necessary by a two-day work stoppage the next month. Joined by the unemployed and retired, these workers take a day off to march, go to rallies, visit their elected representatives, make phone calls, engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, and speak out on cable news. After each victory, they focus on another top priority…one issue at a time.
This proclamation points the way to how to build this moral humanity movement, one that is committed to serve humanity, the environment, and life itself.
Members of this emerging movement fight for justice and compassion, improve themselves and support others, unlearn oppressive social conditioning, engage in spiritual growth, respect each person’s equal worth, cultivate bottom-up hierarchies, nurture co-equal partnerships, and ensure each person can meet their basic needs.
Ever more individuals identify with the moral humanity movement. They unite and support each other while maintaining focus on their primary issue. They accomplish more together than they can alone.
The movement is based on small teams whose members affirm the movement’s core values and support each other. Informal teams spring from relationships with friends, relatives, colleagues, or group memberships. As the movement matures, formal teams at least monthly share responses to this question: In what way have I worked on becoming a better human being? Some are affiliated teams whose organizations affirm and promote the movement.
These teams facilitate peer learning, self-reform, collaborative teamwork, political action, and mutual support. Members become better listeners and speak honestly. They balance the needs of the individual and the needs of the community.
The movement is diverse and pragmatic, focused on short-term achievable goals within its long-term transformative framework. They push institutions to live up to their highest ideals and serve the common good. This approach builds unity that sustains lasting change.
Rather than assume a leader is someone who can mobilize followers to do what he wants, the movement cultivates collaborative leadership and democratic teamwork. Anyone can have an impact on others at any time.
Movement members challenge oppressive top-down structures and policies. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
The emerging moral humanity movement strengthens trust and love, counters fear and hate, and channels anger into action using Dr. King’s principles, which seek reconciliation and the Beloved Community. The movement affirms the rule of law and supports the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter for Compassion, and the Earth Charter.
It is a multi-issue, other-centered, spiritual movement that cultivates economic and personal security, relational equality, equity, and respect inspired by the Declaration of Independence’s conflicted “self-evident” truth of the equality inherent in human dignity.
It promotes freedom from discrimination based on religious, ethnic, or sexual identity, and steadily helps to transform our society into a compassionate community. Reconciliation takes place with individuals, communities, corporations, and nations.
As this transformation ripples through society, a compelling vision forms on the horizon: a society that looks, feels, and is NEW!
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