Imagine a World United

Imagine a world where our shared priorities were solving hunger and homelessness. Imagine if we put our egos aside for a greater future for humanity.

There’s a story of biblical origin that I sometimes think about. From the time that I was a small child, this story confused my thinking. I suppose I’ve always applied reason to my belief systems, to try to understand better. The story goes something like this (and it’s Christian in origin):

Once upon a time, all the people of the Earth shared a common language. They built cities that were magnificent, and trade flourished among them. As they blew past obstacles, they began to believe that greater and greater things were possible, so long as they worked together. This prompted within them some curiosity, because they believed that heaven was above them, and they wondered if, with their growing power and collaboration, they could build a tower high enough to reach the heavens. They began building immediately and were fairly successful at first, laying brick upon brick as their tower rose into the sky. God, looking down, saw what they were doing and saw their unity as a threat. Being together, they could accomplish anything, He thought—nothing would be beyond their grasp. For this reason, He confounded their languages, creating different languages and dialects, and scattered the people to the wind as the tower was abandoned.

Recognize it? It’s the story of the Tower of Babel, the origin idea of such cool things as the Babelfish, for starters. The “devil” is in the details. There are competing lessons here:

1. Humans can achieve things that even match the Gods if they collaborate and work together.

2. God doesn’t like humans doing great things.

This isn’t one of my essays on the dangers of religion, so I’ll leave that second point for later. The first, though, is intriguing to me, and points us toward today’s Imagine series idea: if we work together, we can accomplish anything! This is a truth that we can’t afford to forget, though many of us have. The reason for that is that working together is a messy business. People have different moral and ethical boundaries, and this has been true throughout history. I’ll explain using two different philosophies: deontology and utilitarianism.

Let’s go back in time to the mid-to-late 18^th century. Immanuel Kant, attempting to make sense of the world and examining the question of what it means to be good, decided on a concept eventually called deontology. This framework wove together two key principles: humans had intrinsic ethical obligations, and the litmus test for any decision is the universality of the outcome. Focus on the duty part, though. Humans have an ethical and intrinsic duty to society, a debt to society, if you will. Nearly a century later, a different decision-making framework popped up called utilitarianism. In this notion, the idea was that human ethical obligation begins and ends at the goal of increasing human happiness and well-being. That’s a much simpler framework, but much more difficult to apply because the definition of happiness and well-being is somewhat ambiguous and different. Imagine two people, one from each of these philosophies, attempting to agree on whether forks should go in the dishwasher tines up or down.

Can you imagine it? I imagine it would go something like this:

Deontologist: Put the forks with the tines down.

Utilitarian: Tines up makes me happy.

Deontologist: Perhaps, but tines up also makes it possible for someone to stab themselves. You have an ethical duty to do tines up.

Utilitarian: I’m not the only one who likes tines up. Hundreds of us do. More people will be happy if I put them in tines up than tines down.

Deontologist: But…duty…

…and on and on. This is a made-up example, and any resemblance to events past or future, to this conversation is purely coincidental, but you get the idea, right? Multiply that conversation times three hundred million, and you begin to have some sort of idea as to how ridiculously difficult it is for humans to work together. And yet, we know how powerful doing so can be. What is a corporation except for a contract among people in large groups to work together? How many hundreds of people does it take to build a data center? How many does it take to build an aircraft carrier? More than you think. I’ll bet you’re thinking about the immediate act of building these things, but what about mining the raw materials? What about trade routes to get those materials to the same place so building can even begin?

And yet we build aircraft carriers. And we build data centers. And we build cities, and empires, and nations too. We build because we are builders, and we build stronger, better things when we work together. If we turned our might in intellect and reason and kindness toward creating a world where we can all thrive, it’s within our grasp to do so. We simply have to focus, and we have to compromise from time to time.

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. Imagine the heights we can achieve if we can agree that, before the next rocket ship is built, perhaps maybe focus on making sure children don’t starve, or that people don’t go into medical bankruptcy. These things aren’t sexy and aren’t the types of ego-driven things that billionaires like to put their names on. But there are only a handful of them anyway. They can stand by and watch us make them irrelevant, though I’m guessing once the greater part of us are pushing in the same direction, billionaires, too, will come along for the ride.

Imagine what’s possible.