IN A NUTSHELL Editor's noteBy our acknowledged partner Dr. George Lueddeke, forward-looking reflections here, where time is of the essence, through a wide lens recalling the past, the present and considering our collective futures. Originally from Canada, now residing in the United Kingdom, George Lueddeke PhD MEd Dipl.AVES (Hon.) is an education advisor in Higher, Medical and One Health education and global lead of the International One Health for One Planet Education initiative (1 HOPE) in association with national, regional, and global organisations
By George Lueddeke PhD
Global Lead, International One Health for One Planet Education & Transdisciplinary Research Initiative (1 HOPE-TDR)
Independent advisor in Higher, Medical and One Health education / research
Southampton, United Kingdom
‘A Dangerous Moment for America and the World’
Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of writing about the state of the world for PEAH-Policies for Equitable Access to Health and other exemplary news, opinion and sustainability providers. The overall focus has been on raising awareness of the increasing existential risks compromising global sustainability and all life on the planet – 4.5 billion years in the making and seeking solutions to the global threats we have created: climate change, biodiversity loss, freedoms, military conflict, poverty/ inequality, malevolent AI, to name several.
The forthcoming presidential election in the United States, the world’s oldest continuous democracy, could be a turning point not only for the nation but also potentially the world. While the choice on November 5 is fundamentally between autocracy (enslavement!) and democracy (‘right to choose leaders in free and fair elections’), it runs deeper and has become much more dangerous possibly impacting on all life on the planet as we know it.
At its most basic or critical, crucial to voting in the US election is to remember that the incumbent Donald Trump, who already faces “thirty-four felony convictions and charges of fraud, election subversion and obstruction,” rejects climate policy (protecting our biosphere -air, land, sea), called climate change a “hoax,” and does not believe that climate makes our extreme weather worse despite irrefutable scientific evidence to the contrary (think Hurricane Milton in Florida!).
While climate impacts have been increasingly felt in the US especially since the 1970s, Trump has warned that he will roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, “the largest investment in clean energy and climate action ever,” and unconscionably “promised to scrap climate laws if US oil bosses donated $1 bn-report.
The difference between Vice President Harris and Donald Trump on climate change could not be clearer or more alarming. It is, therefore, significant that “More than half of U.S. adults say they trust Harris “a lot” or “some” when it comes to addressing climate change…” and “About 7 in 10 say they have “not much” trust in Trump or “none at all” when it comes to climate.”
Going down this dictatorial, self-serving and treacherous path becomes all the more unsettling when we already know how things will turn out -more chaos, dystopia and potentially turning the earth to desert unless we prioritise the urgency to cultivate, as UNESCO advocates, “an active care for the world and with those with whom we share it.”
A transformation in our worldview is urgently needed. Shifting our socio-economic, geopolitical and environmental priorities from ‘it’s all about us’ (human-centrism) to ‘it’s about all life’ (eco-centrism) is no longer an option but a ‘survival’ necessity. Making this change calls for education (new learning) for sustainability at all societal levels (ESD) especially when seen through a wider lens recalling the past, the present and considering our collective futures.
Past
‘How the social structures of Nazi Germany created a bystander society’
“Fulbrook has shown how ordinary Germans were drawn into “processes of complicity”. Under Nazism, standing by as state-sponsored acts of collective violence were perpetrated gradually became the required norm. The personal risks of doing otherwise were very real.”
‘Law and Justice in the Third Reich’
“The Third Reich was a police state characterized by arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of political and ideological opponents in concentration camps.”
Today
“North Koreans face lives devoid of hope, UN rights chief says.”
“Today, the DPRK is a country sealed off from the world”. “A stifling, claustrophobic environment, where life is a daily struggle devoid of hope.”
‘A Time to Choose: Utopia vs Dystopia? Democracy is Key’ (2024)
“More than a third of the world’s population (8 billion people) is now subject to authoritarian rule and that only 6.4% (out of c. 200 countries) now enjoy full democracy” with most living in flawed, hybrid and increasingly authoritarian regimes“
Tomorrow in America?
‘What we know about Project 2025 – the ‘dystopian’ manifesto linked to Donald Trump‘
“It proposes a restructuring of federal bureaucracy, by creating a LinkedIn-style database – hiring 50,000 “loyal” appointees via the revival of “Schedule F,” an executive order initially signed by Trump in 2020, that would give the president unprecedented control over federal employees to build a “new army of aligned, trained, and weaponised conservatives ready to do battle against the Deep State…dismantling key agencies like the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FBI, rolling back LGBTQ+ rights and climate protections…banning abortion as healthcare and implementing the largest deportation effort in US history.”
What research tells us about abuse of power
UCL social scientist Dr Brian Klaas, after ten years of interviewing “despots, corrupt kingpins, crooked chief executives, power-hungry generals, cult leaders, abusive managers, bloodthirsty rebel leaders”, concluded that abuse of power comes down to three “big problems”:
- “power is magnetic to corruptible people…especially true for people with a particular destructive psychological cocktail known as the dark triad: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy”;
- “people who enjoy elevated power” tend to “eat impulsively and have sexual affairs, to violate the rules of the road, to lie and cheat …and to communicate in rude, profane and disrespectful ways”;
- “we give power to the wrong people for the wrong reasons …seduced by charlatans and strongmen, with roots in the ancient past of our species” as “our brains haven’t evolved much since the Stone Age” while our “societies have changed radically” and “our brains haven’t caught up.”
An autocratic America would benefit only those “who are willing to undermine democracy if it means protecting people like themselves (e.g., extreme far right–racism, antisemitism, xenophobia) from groups that threaten their values or status” even though they themselves might also become targets of a failed system of government (think Russia!).
Time to stop and think!
(poem written in 1946 by Pastor Martin Nielmoller, after he spent the last years of Nazi rule [1937-1945] in prisons and concentration camps, “argued against apathy — and for the moral connectedness of all people.”
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”
In “How Democracy Can Defeat Autocracy,” Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, reviewed autocracies across the globe and highlighted how its advocates deny “not only periodic elections but also free public debate, a healthy civil society, competitive political parties, and an independent judiciary capable of defending individual rights and holding officials accountable.”
Although autocracies are on the rise, he cautioned that their “superficial appeal…belies a more complex reality — and a bleaker future for autocrats”: people are increasingly recognising that “autocrats prioritize their own interests over the public’s,” regularly devoting “government resources to self-serving projects rather than public needs.”
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelly, 1818
(describing a ruined statue of an ancient king in an empty desert)
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By George Lueddeke on PEAH Re-Orientation to Sustain Life on Earth Betting on SDGs in a Disequal World Holistic Systemic Change to Care for All Life on Earth Earth Future: Time for a Global ‘Reset’! Reflections on Transforming Higher Education for the 21st Century: PART 3 The international One Health for One Planet Education Initiative (1 HOPE) and the ‘Ecological University’ Reflections on Transforming Higher Education for the 21st Century: PART 2 Development of a Global ‘All Life’ Narrative Reflections on Transforming Higher Education for the 21st Century: PART 1 The One Health & Wellbeing Concept Planet Earth: Averting ‘A Point Of No Return’? Tackling the Root Causes of Climate Change. If Not Now, WHEN? Commentary on ‘More for The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) – Impakter’ Rebuilding Trust and Compassion in a Covid-19 World The University in the early Decades of the Third Millennium: Saving the World from itself? The World at Risk: Covid-19, Global Sustainability and 1 HOPE Postscript – The World at Risk: Covid-19, Global Sustainability and 1 HOPE On this theme, see also FOCUS ON: Universities in the Early Decades of the Third Millennium: Saving the World from Itself? INTERVIEW – ‘Survival: One Health, One Planet, One Future’ – Routledge, 1st edition, 2019