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Integral response is great, but is it massive enough?

Posted July 30th, 2010 by Colin Wood
In Reference to:
An Integral Action Proposal in Response to the Horrific Human Rights Violation of World Wide Slavery

 Dear Marc & Dianne, thanks for putting this together, this is an issue of enormous gravity for me.

The frustration of knowing that something is wrong but not being able to do anything about it is massive. I think the approach you have outlined is complete and could go a long way to addressing the issue, but I worry about it's ability to succeed. Other non-integral bodies, several of which are mentioned in your piece are already involved with trying to tackle this problem, and certainly, though their approaches may not be Integral, there are several points of commonality between the approach you have outlined and the ones already being followed.

I worry about our effectiveness in this endeavour (which I will support 100%) because of the significant obstacles mainly in organizational inertia that you have already mentioned in your article. Even a host of well intentioned people have limited power when trying to budge things like the "US National Interest", or any other special interest for that matter. 

The Integral Community is a powerful force for good, I don't question that, but it also a small force, and it is widely dispersed around the globe I should think. To bring about the change we want to see, I reckon we will need to deliver more than a box-full of petitions to a government official to get them to move - think for a minute about the type of action that made the civil rights movement impossible to ignore. I don't suggest violent or anarchic action, but I do think that a massive campaign of education, galvanisation and mobilisation in the orders of hundreds of thousands if not millions, is the only way to get this escalated to the level of attention it should be receiving and then keep it there until the problem is addressed and solved.

Have you considered alliances with any other organisations such as the ones that you have mentioned so that there is one unified, giant shout for attention instead of several moderately powerful voices which are perhaps easier to ignore?

Avaaz.org for example has the reach and membership base to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people informed about this issue, (and they have to some extent see http://www.avaaz.org/en/fight_rape_trade/) but there is still no organised and massive action. I can only imagine the power of your approach carried by an alliance of organisations with a single and voluminous message too large and too loud to prevent or ignore - a Black Swan dare I say of "National Interest" being described by more than economics, to include a "Human Interest" too.

This issue has made news recently on the other side of the pond here in the UK, and there is some renewed awareness, but you are right, we can't sit here waiting for someone else to get this solved, we need to do it and we need to do it urgently.

Much respect and support

Colin

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data?

Posted July 30th, 2010 by stefano
 
 
A simple integral analysis of the slavery problem suggests that the core causes of human trafficking are rooted in three basic issues. These issues are structural and inter-related. They are poverty, global migration, and the globalization of the world economy.
[...]
Immediate Action
[...]
The first is to determine if products were made with slave labor and prohibit their use in the US.
[...]
Secondly, we need to implore that the UN launch a major education campaign so people will (a) become more aware of the problem and demand solutions; (b) recognize slavery and know what to do if they see it, and (c) avoid getting into a situation where they or others will be forced into slavery.
[...]
Third, we need to demand the the US government impose rigorous sanctions against countries who fail to impose anti-slavery measures and justify our failure to impose sanctions on those countries. And finally, we need to make the public aware of the countries who fail to comply.
 
 
I quoted this section because it is specific about action. What I found perplexing about the rest of the article is where is veers into ideals. 
 
Naturally that's just a reflection of my own lack of moral development -- "imperative" means nothing to me.
 
But then I've had one or two experiences in life that, you know, as troublesome as they were, nobody could fix.
 
Action is fixing it. Activism is blaming people for not fixing it.
 
If something sounds like activism, it gets real stale real quick.
 
So let's see... products made with slave labour... well let's say prostitution. How's the USA doing with banning that? Any other country? Anybody?
 
How about products that come from zones where warlords use child soldiers...? Anybody got real data on that? OK, maybe time we banned all mobile phones. Yes?
 
Rigorous sanctions against countries that do bad stuff.... well we saw Apartheid South Africa and how long that took and how that turned out. Y'all invaded Iraq to make that better. Now we have to ban North Korea... which was doing other bad stuff anyway... and there's a long list of countries that the UN is supposed to be doing something about... 
 
I don't wish to be mean to very highly principled and talented and hard working people. It just sounds like we are still waiting for someone to figure out how to fix this stuff?
 
It would be interesting to hear an Integral analysis of how the United Nations works, what it does, what its processes are, and who are the power players. We don't want another agenda that gets possibly co-opted by other agendas. cough*global warming*cough
 
I'm not trying to be facetious. How does the UN perform in integral terms?? Can anyone answer that? How much can we realistically expect of them? 
 
We the people are actually very much in the dark about this stuff. I used to give money to charities until I discovered a few things about what that money was being used for, on account of various NGO agendas and basic 1st tier altitude politics. 
 
I just think we need more data. Not on human trafficking, but on the UN and the NGOs who we're supposed to be enlisting to help. 
 
I asked a guy who was trying to sign me up to a charity for helping drug users. He told me the programme was amazingly effective. The guy was really enthused. I asked how many people stayed off drugs after 2 years? He had no clue and didn't like the question. His colleague thought the question reasonable so she called her boss. He had no idea. No data. We don't collect that data. So how did they know it was effective? 
 

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