Sustainability: Create Jobs, not Wars

The Olympic flame, a symbol of peace and unity, has begun its journey from Olympia to Paris, the home of the 2024 Games. Despite the long history of Games, we really miss the feeling of peace and unity worldwide. And this is not a Banksy irony.

No Ball Games

Year:2009

Location: Tottenham High Road and Phillip Lane, London, England

The irony of No Ball Games critiques the rules that Banksy believes restrict society on a daily basis. He mocks overprotective governments, or “nanny states,” interfering with personal choice, implying that even innocent, everyday children’s activities like playing ball outside are controlled by the state. University students, accused as terrorists and prisoned, for example. Obviously, the children should be taken more widely as symbols for people in general, constantly under surveillance and regulation by a higher authority against the artist warns us.

Alongside moral discourses, too many art exhibitions, thousands of books, and lectures for liberties, peace and unity, our World, experiencing months-long wildfires, back-to-back hurricanes, devastating floods, and heatwaves is in 2024 far from walking the sobering talk.

While expensive Business Schools continue to systematically educate leaders to become ‘pre-destined’ to make a ‘difference’ in the World, art and literature are not enough in our business ideas, social insights, and weekly newsletters to include an unbiased global historical roundup, with a roadmap amid top sustainability research.

Wars make headlines but not ideas for cooperation, peace, and societal creative happenings throughout the global community based on an ethical code – that can be accepted by millions of Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, as well as by Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Hindu atheists – to encompass the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsibility. 

Today a greater part of Africa's population can't afford a healthy diet than any other regional population. Food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa is caused by climate change, high levels of poverty, rapid population growth, low economic growth, inadequate infrastructure, and conflicts.

Who cares?

Women do.

They are the backbone of agricultural labor in the region. The problems of limited access to land, water, and technology faced by these women also worsen food insecurity and the spiral goes on.

Sadly, big economies or big companies do not have such a common focus but moreover eager to advance in ‘business as usual’ – in today’s terms, the future profit-promising sector: generative AI. 

No surprise that lots and lots of capital are being suddenly invested into the development of AI, with the technology being welcomed with open arms as a “revolution”—but not many see it as an existential threat.

Generative AI cannot explain why -despite massive protests against climate change and ‘business as usual’- ongoing brutal wars are becoming part of our daily lives, an everyday issue.

Only we humans can. Because only we humans care and can care.

Screen time affects the health and well-being of children and young people around the globe and the more negative so, the more wars make headlines. The mental well-being of our children is our future, so we need to protect them today.

As the best strategy for protection, ordinary people always railed against war historically. But today the voice of ordinary people seems to be systematically silenced. No doubt art and literature have made progress, yet their message has not made its way to the executive level.

So, where we are today makes us think:

On May 24 2018, the United Nations (UN) Security Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning the use of food insecurity and starvation as a tactic of war. It was the first time the Council had ever addressed the issue, acknowledging a threat to the lives of tens of millions of people. Aimed at countries currently engaged in international or civil wars, the resolution implores all parties to leave food stocks, farms, markets, and other distribution mechanisms intact. It demands parties in conflict permit humanitarian aid workers unimpeded access to populations in dire need and states that “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare may constitute a war crime.”

So, where we are today forces us to cooperate:

We must stop war crimes.

So, where we are today shall make us agree:

We must stop the root cause of wars in the first place…

The above resolution makes us remember what was published almost half a century ago by the Club of Rome. Their study pointed to the upcoming ‘limits to growth’ as a key factor leading to the eventual downfall of society. 

To be precise, the scientists claimed that the year 2040 is the potential time when society might face challenges. The message of the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, was eye-opening. Today we might have hit the ‘Business As Usual Wall’ already… on the more pessimistic side, thinkers such as author and historian Yuval Noah Harari argue "There is a scenario that we are already living in the midst of the third World War and we just don't know it."

Like those in 1914.

We know today for sure: 

Many of the worst contemporary wars are accompanied by mass starvation. In some cases, starvation is used as a weapon. 

Dear Friends of Earth, how much time is left for us all so that we can make things better together with innovations in business, along with new developments by governments and civil society?

Continuing to update old thinking and dinosaur business models to provide another perspective on the challenges and opportunities we have to create a more sustainable World?

The list of today’s current conflicts and wars is long – but fearsome is the fact that it’s not shrinking but growing. 

"The global liberal order has been attacked and destroyed“, says Harari. "We are sliding back to the jungle“ summarizing the current situation and warning that we must not forget our secret to success: cooperation.

For those big TECH already in a position to dominate the potentially groundbreaking sector of generative AI, cooperation is not the best rewarding strategy. For those big TECH the risks of generative AI are only partially perceived – and the opportunities are too enticing to miss.

Too enticing to miss is on the more cooperative side 60th Bienalle in Venice this year for art lovers:

The Türkiye Pavilion presents Hollow and Broken: A State of the World, a site-specific installation by Gülsün Karamustafa, one of Türkiye’s most influential and outspoken artists, at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. 

“What I am dealing with” Gülsün Karamustafa, the artist representing 2024 Türkiye’s pavilion, says of this work, “is the state of a world hollowed out to the core by wars, earthquakes, migration, and nuclear peril unleashed at every turn, threatening humankind while nature is ceaselessly scathed and the environment made sick. 

I attempt to physically and emotionally summon into existence this phenomenon: the emptiness, the hollowness, the brokenness produced by the devastation that has become commonplace, whose pace becomes ever more impossible to keep up with, by the unimaginable grief that keeps on striking again and again at relentless intervals, by empty values, identity struggles, and brittle human relationships.” 

Visiting the biennale one is inclined to imagine:

What if we'd get a second chance to start a new life? 

Considering the tragedies unfolding in the whole world, this is a tough question. Nevertheless, the voices of social democrats in Europe and around the world need to be echoed.

In the end, we created this world in which we live, and therefore it is upon us to change it.

To give us hope for cooperation, we must begin with our neighbors. 

Globally this can also work. There is a need for social democrats to act together against the rising far-right and authoritarian populism in Europe and around the World.

If there is a will there is a way.

Oddly, the historic victory of the social democratic CHP in the March 31, 2024, local elections has redrawn Türkiye’s political map and overturned established truths about Turkish politics, believed to be condemned to permanent authoritarian right-wing rule. The CHP got a blessing from the majority of the 61 Million voters because it combined an inclusive stance toward conservatives and ethnic minorities with a humanistic and centre-left message. But to reach national power, Turkey’s new leading party will need to show audacity and be prepared to take on entrenched economic interests.

Create jobs and not wars – a slogan that can offer a way out of Turkey’s democratic impasse as rampant inequality needs to be addressed, encouraging Turkish and Kurdish long-forgotten working and lower classes to cooperate: to make common cause. 

Similarly, can social democracy show the Way to a Different Future for our World to make common cause? To protect our children from people who think they’re better than others? To work for providing a credible an answer to 'Why is the world so unfair?'

Visitors seek shelter in Venice from pessimism as art is one of the most influential messanger for younger generations. 

And in the case of Gülsün Karamustafa, she does her part: Through her art practice, spanning over fifty years, she focuses on such topics as the modernization of Türkiye, uprooting and memory, migration, locality, identity, cultural difference and gender from an array of perspectives. She champions the use of disparate materials and methods within her works, which stem from both personal and historic narratives.

So did literature:

‘Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

Jalal ad-Din Rumi