Beneath many of the headlines today there lurks a tension few see: Communities of people fighting for autonomy from the massive nations, and multinational corporations, that work together to control them.

• Hong Kong students fight for democracy against China, and against the multinational corporations that support the totalitarian Chinese regime.

• Catalonia seeks to secede from Spain, as nationalists like President Trump criticize the move.

• Indigenous resistance helps lead the fight against U.S. backed corporate forces at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, as the federal government and the corporations behind it impose the climate crisis on vulnerable communities around the country.  

Our default tendency is to see these struggles in three dimensions – as groups of people struggling against one another. That would not be accurate. All groups of people are in constant demographic change, with new members being born and old members dying. The struggle is in this sense four-dimensional, though its hard for our human brains to perceive this. This seemingly mundane fact could hold the key to opening a new front, or more accurately limitless fronts, in the struggle for human rights and democracy, and the creation of truly free communities where everyone has an effective voice.

How so?

Four-dimensional freedom

The climate crisis had laid bare serious mistakes in the way the world has connected the concepts of family planning and human rights. The modeling was deeply flawed. The mistakes enabled nations and multinational corporations to rise to their hegemony by treating future generations as economic inputs, and exploiting the explosion of a world population who necessarily sees itself as confined to economies, rather than democracies where they play an effective role in their own governance.

If we correct for those mistakes we arrive at a surprising, but apparently unavoidable, conclusion. There is no conception of human freedom – including equal opportunities in life, a voice in one’s democracy, and the liberty and safety of nature – without intergenerational secession. We have to free future generations from the hegemony of, and unlimited control by, the generations that are alive today.

And as such, truly human rights-based family planning models give us something new: Shared values, conceptions and language for an emancipated future – a new normative vocabulary that cuts across fundamental political ideologies like liberalism and communitarianism, joining the two. Under this new modeling we can begin to “constitute” communities of free and equal people in ways we never have before.  These new models also have the quality of lexical priority, because we are before we do, and as such they override the property claims and tax obligations that prop up the massive nations and their multinational corporate allies. We have the necessarily antecedent and superior right, and obligation, to constitute free communities before turning to any of the rights and obligations that functioning economic systems require.

In other words, seeing freedom as four-dimensional and reforming family planning systems and policies accordingly, give us new and deeply compelling reasons for people of all political ideologies to target top-of-the-pyramid national and multinational corporate leaders in to order to decentralized their power – in a new four-dimensional pathway – into future generations. These compelling reasons include finally making sense of social contract theory in a way that appeals to a broad swath of values and thereby justifies governance, and the incomparable impact doing so would have on improving child welfare, reducing inequity, building democracy, and mitigating the climate and other ecological crises.

This new process and understanding of freedom redraws the battle lines as between pre-constitutional, subjectivist, and economically-minded systems and their supporters (or “precons,”), and democratically constituted systems comprised of free people.  The demand at the front becomes simple but forceful: A cooperatively arrived at fair start in life for every child defined by five objective and irrefutable values.

Next steps

The first step to opening the endless fronts of an intergenerational secession starts with a simple statement by the Secretary General of the United Nations acknowledging the mistakes the UN made, and moving towards better modeling. TAKE ACTION: Urge him to open the fronts.