So, I've worked in politics for a very long time and especially on the Middle East.
I've been a Canadian diplomat, a United Nations diplomat,
at the moment I work in conflict resolution with non-governmental
organizations where we do the same work as diplomats but in an informal basis.
And throughout my work for over 25 years I've always thought there's kind of a
missing piece in our work. The Middle East, as most people know, is not going
very well. For 25 years we've worked on it, and it's just gotten worse as
everybody can see. And I was observing things throughout my work, watching and
realizing that something was missing. And I always thought it was somehow related
to human motives. And now we look around the world and we see that things
are falling apart not just in the Middle East but all over the place. We have
conflicts all over. Whether it's the rise of new presidents in the United States
of America, or corruption across the world, of increasing conflict, people know
something is wrong. And from my experience and from my dealings with
people, and my learning... I slowly learned that a paradigm like human givens is
actually a very very useful one for us to get to grips with how to start to
prevent these conflicts. What's important for us to really pursue right now is to
understand what's behind our problems. What's really behind them. And what I've
learned through my work is that really the one unbelievable thing that we
ignore is the human being behind all our problems. Most of our politics really
works at the level of almost political froth. Most of us are captivated by the
media, were taken by the media, we can't get our eyes off social media, and we're
taken by the soap opera, by the dynamics, of competition. But the fact is that the
answers don't lie at that level. And we forget that there are human beings at
every single level from the leadership to the citizen, in politics, and it's
there that the real work should begin, and will be. And that's where human
givens comes in, in my view. What human givens does is it can explain to us
what are the motivations behind our politics. So in a way it's like thinking
of ourselves, sadly, like puppets. And that where we're
not completely unconscious of some of the things driving us, especially into
conflict and into making huge mistakes in our political life or for example in
pursuing corrupt and greedy practices throughout the world. So if we look at
them, and we look at some of the human givens, we can see that basic needs,
such as security, the need for autonomy, the need for meaning, the need
for competence and status, and to belong to a community. These are such basic
human needs that if people don't have them they will pursue them, including
politically, through very very strange and bizarre actions. Let me give you just
three examples of what I'm talking about that I've either worked on or
experienced or have studied. The first and very tragic one that we've seen over
the last four or five years is the rise of Isis, a terrorist group. Now there are
a lot of reasons behind this, including many people look for conspiracy, and all
such actions do need money, they need organization. But the fact is that this
group was able to recruit people from across the world to come to Iraq and
Syria and work with them. If we look at the human givens, we'll see that this
group is actually providing people with a tremendous number of them in one shot.
Number one, and above all, is meaning . This group makes people feel that they're
doing something important and good. Ugly as it is, disgusting as it is, quite often
at the same time people are motivated towards a higher cause. They want to be
stretched, they want to feel like they're doing something important, and Isis has
been able to convince young people that this is one road to go. But it's not even
just that they give them a sense of competence by giving them tasks to do,
they give them status within the community. It's a whole series of human
givens given by an awful group. But we can see how if people have a need that's
missing and they don't firmly or properly go about getting them met, then
they can easily be sidelined into a group like Isis. We can look at another
example - Israel-Palestine, which is what people call an intractable conflict
and irresolvable one. And there are many reasons why it may be irresolvable.
But if people started to understand that behind the
intractability are some pretty basic motives. For example, Israelis have a need
for security. From Jewish history etc this need for security is paramount for
Israelis. If they don't have that met they can't even think straight or
properly to come up with the right policies and answers to deal with their
neighbors. Similarly Palestinians have a need for
independence. In a dependent State or in terms of human givens, for autonomy to
have control over their lives. If they don't have that, you're going to have conflict.
It's very difficult for these two sides to see each other's needs. Yet if they
did, that would be a much better starting point than starting at other points in
negotiations. Because these being universal human needs, it's actually in the
end possible to see that if I have them, someone else can have them. And then
let's look at one final example, and that's the rise of Donald Trump in the
United States. Love him, or hate him, it's important for people to know what's
behind the people who voted for Donald Trump. And I think this case is
especially telling. Many people who voted for Donald Trump, are doing,
they're doing only one thing - and that is screaming that they want to take
their life back, they want control back in their lives. They didn't see another
candidate providing that for them. They see a huge distance between them and the
elites and they demanded to have control again. So in a way if we first understand
that, that that need is basic and absolutely essential in any human being,
that's a good starting point. One can argue though, that maybe
they made the wrong choice, after that beginning need. And that's as important
as recognizing the need. So in other words this is two-step process here
politically. The first step is recognizing what need is missing,
in a population or in individual. And the second step, equally important, is how
you get it met. As long as the need is not recognized, then the step of how to
get it met won't get done anyway. But the first step is to know that people are
seeking meaning, and sadly they may join Isis. People are seeking autonomy and
sadly they may vote for people that some of us don't like, or find difficult.
The how is important. And that's an education process of how people get
their needs met politically. But the crucial point for human givens that I
find really useful, is that it is a starting point and a reference for
political negotiations, for ending conflict, for ending the many problems
that we have in front of us, from corruption to conflict across the world.
The important thing to realize, whether an individual or collective, is that when
when needs aren't met, people get very emotional. And when they get very
emotional their ability to think through something properly is lost. I've seen
this time and time again whether in negotiations, or in mass movements where
people simply are, once they get angry and upset, they lose the capacity to be
able to deal with others empathetically, they lose the ability to
think through things rationally. I've seen it in talks between enemies and
I've seen it in many levels of politics and conflict in the Middle East. In other
words there's a cycle here, a kind of sequence of events where if we don't
have our needs met, we become anxious, we become highly emotional. Some people find
this very exciting in politics, and lead us in that direction. We have to become
aware of that, that they're actually doing that on purpose to captivate us.
But once any population, any society, any culture, hits that level, it's going to be
very hard for them to find sensible and rational and durable solutions. Instead
violent conflict becomes almost inevitable. So the high emotion that
arises out of the lack of needs being met is an essential dimension of us
understanding how human givens can affect politics, if met. And that's the
other point that I think is really worth stressing,and investigating even much
further. There's a lot of work to be done in this. And that is that if, if needs are
met, whether an individual or in a collective, then the fact is that almost
by definition you'll have a healthy society. People will be calmer. They can
think through things more properly. There will be inevitable differences, there
will be inevitable competition over resources, these are the inevitable
challenges of life. However, we come to those challenges, we will come to, them
much more sober minded, creative, and open-minded approach. But without that
baseline being met, and our emotions jacking way up, within a way, we've
already lost the game. And this is what we're seeing, I think, across the world.
And I think many people are worried about this. They know something is wrong
they just don't know where the answers are. From my experience after a
quarter-century working in the Middle East, there will be no answer until
unless we begin to attend to the human being that is behind the the issues and
the challenges ahead. The human being has these absolutely basic motivations and
needs that need to be addressed. A lot of people who work in politics, don't want to
work at this level. In fact it's not just the people working in politics, many
citizens are captivated by politics, it's greed, as a soap opera, as competition.
Many people don't believe politics will ever be anything but that. But the fact
is that if we're gonna bring any sanity our politics, into anyone out there who
really wants to have a relatively well-functioning and healthy society,
then these things will have to be addressed. There are people out there in
my world in the world of international relations of diplomacy
who have an open mind and they do want to pursue these things. They know that
these are the areas that we do need to investigate and deepen, and that's why a
very solid, steady, long-term process of education about these issues is
absolutely necessary, so we all begin to digest them, see how they fit into our
political lives. Again, use them as a reference, as a starting point and take
it from there. Otherwise we're gonna be trapped in the labyrinth that we are
trapped in - which is to just compete for power, to have tribalism rule us, for our
groups to go for glory and meaning and to get excited about it, and then
basically go off the cliff. And one group may rule for five years, then another
group rules. In the inevitable cycles of history there's a lot of death and
destruction and suffering that arises out of all that, that can be diminished
if we only attend to that one basic unit in politics that's not properly being
attended to - and that's the human being.