Syd Baumel

I basically "dreamed world government up" one day around 20 years ago during a prolonged ponder of the seemingly insoluble problem of war. I'm sure I'd heard the term before, but Ihad no knowledge or insight into it, as is still the case today for most people. So my case is an illustration of how reason can lead some, perhaps many, people to the conclusiont hat yielding our national warmaking capabilities to a higher political power can get us out of the cycle of national and global wars.

Of course, it's more complicated than that - there's civil war too; and world government is about much more than international security. And my initial "discovery" wasn't a federal model (that didn't occur to me); it was a unified world state.

I find that when I logically lay out the idea of democratic world government in conversation, most people don't come after me with hammer and tongs. But neither do they jump tot heir feet and shout, "where do I sign!" There's that passive, learned helplessness glaze that comes over them - the glaze of the politically disenfranchised. Nice idea, maybe; but so is walking on water and curing cancer." So it seems to me we need two kinds of "buy-in" to make this movement come to life:

People, en masse, have to accept that democratic world government is, or could maybe, be a good thing (i.e. at least seriously worth studying, debating, modeling, reality-testing).

People have to believe that their WILL to see it happen canindeed make it happen. The only political power in the world is people power; the rest is just whom we delegate it to, and we can take it back - comparatively very easily in open, democratic societies like those of the developed world.