When you look at the banner on the top of the Unite website, you see these four figures: 
If you’ve been reading previous blogs, you know that purple is people; green is nonprofits; blue is businesses and orange is governments. While they are intentionally linked, they are also independent and in application are a formula: When the purple, green and blue link, and use their combined clout to show their support for an International Bill of Rights enforceable in the courts of all countries, then the orange links with them – the first three are the leaders, the governments follow.
This may seem counterintuitive – we often think of governments as our leaders, but a Bill of Rights is the rules for those who govern. We can’t expect those who presently govern to write those rules – the first three figures need to do it so the forth will follow. Herein is the great conundrum: How can people, nonprofits and businesses lead their leaders? The answer is by reaching an agreement to live together – by thinking for themselves.
The result, if you pause and think for a moment, is that you have great power – well beyond just voting, or sending money to a particular candidate. These things are important, but they are not the most powerful – the most powerful is to think about the world you want, and uniting with others to write the rules that will give that to you.
And it takes one minute! One minute to get on the globe. It’s a powerful minute.
You see, the situation today is that the people on Earth are more ready to have an agreement to live together, and protect the environment we all share, than their governments are.
What we lack is an international social movement that facilitates the exercise of our collective power. Unite does not create this movement, it enables the genuine desire that already exists among people, nonprofits and businesses to live together based on the rule of law, not athoritarian rule by force. Very few of us, in our quiet personal moments, want athoritarian rule to control our lives, yet it grows: as you read this in March, 2025, humans have crossed the point to where more than half of them live under athoritarian governments.
Time and again I hear “people want different things” and this is true, they do, but there are many of the same things they want as well.
I’ve asked thousands of students in different countries and classrooms to look at a chockboard, or a drawing board, and raise their hands to offer the rights they would want in a Bill of Rights. It’s remarkably similar; environment, education, free speech, equality… to name a few, always come up. The only reason we haven’t found what we have in common is that no one is asking within a structure that can actually work, as a Bill of Rights does with enforcement in court with independent judges.
The most powerful part of participating in humanity reaching an agreement to live together is a shift of consciousness: a belief, either new, or present for some time, that humanity can do better than the war, want and waste we presently have and are typically told this is the best humans can do. We can do better. As Malcolm Gladwell has written “The world we could have is so much better than the one we’ve settled for.” In a minute, on the globe, you can significantly help change that.
Leave a Reply