Dieter Heinrich

In my early teens, the concept of the hippy commune was still current and cool. I had also heard the phrase global village. Marshal McLuhan was a local intellectual in Toronto.

In my late teens, I read a book called Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. I began to develop a philosophy of, not communism, but interpersonal communalism. It began with an empirical philosophy of oneness. The basic idea is that while we are separate 3 dimensional physical beings, our oneness lies in the unity of all processes in the dimension of time. This was and remains my simple little way of explaining to myself how we are all part of one another. To that I grafted an ethical component that chose to celebrate the fact of our unity and made it a goal to be consciously furthered, nurtured, and developed.

I was a progressive, in the sense of believing in the need for change in society, especially on peace and environment issues. I disdained "The Establishment" and expected my generation to naturally overturn it in a "green" revolution. I came to see that conservative and liberal politics of individual rights and freedoms only address part of our reality, and need to be balanced with a social politics of community, collective good, and responsibility.

I also became infected with a sense of historical progression toward unity. I was exposed to ideas by Teilhard de Jardin and read Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke. I did not think there was a purpose to history, but a dynamic toward order and complexity that just was a fact, and which I sought to align my life with.

At some point in my early 20's I read a book called, I think, Building the City of Man, by someone named Wagar. I remember not agreeing with some of his bigger proposals, but I felt that here was someone thinking on the same scale at least.

A few years after that, this would be about 1978, I heard Jim Stark talking on the radio about nuclear disarmament. I may have connected with the World Federalists of Canada through Operational Dismantle's literature. They may have been a project of WFC at that point. I knew by the end of the 1970's I wanted to work as an activist for world unity and that I would begin within the framework of WFC when I returned from travels to Europe, India and Southeast Asia.

In an effort to live and express my beliefs in a practical way, I did just that, spending the 1980's working very actively with the World Federalist Movement, seeking modalities for human unity on a global basis, which I continue to think is the number one political, ecological and ethical task of our age. My vision is of a world community of democracies, federated from the local to the global.

Dieter Heinrich
Toronto