Beyond global order

Patriarchal disciplines dominate in territorial species when they outgrow environmental habitats. This started for mainstream human societies some 6,000 years ago. A few food gatherer-hunter communities still inhabit stable ecosystems. Arts, crafts, languages, creeds and other traditions launched them into cultural diversity. This brought about territorial distinctions. With territorial challenges came uniquely human destruction, conflict and instability. Competitive male-dominated crafts progressively controlled and eliminated species, ecosystems and rival cultures to increase the progeny of dominant males. Technologies, including verbal hierarchies, peculiar to humans, create power pyramids converging in transnational elites. They invade and erode the resources and self-sufficiency of more egalitarian communities, which then strive defensively to join the elites. We need goals and institutions to develop a multiculturally tolerant, intergenerational and ecologically sustainable global co-operative with widening participation and inculcation of social value standards beyond money and male-centred dominance. Some promising techniques are emerging.