Project Common Vision: The Freedom Declaration for Peace

Restoring Civil Society

Over time, civil society has increasingly been reshaped into a  market society — a world where human beings are reduced to data points, community is weakened, and morality is pushed into the private sphere.  The market was meant to serve society. Instead, it has come to dominate it.

This is the result of a social experiment economist and historian Karl Polanyi called The Great Transformation where he warned:

“To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society.” 

Markets are extraordinarily effective at organising economic activity, but they cannot by themselves provide the values upon which civil society depends.

The Great Signing 

The Great Signing initiative is named in honour of two people whose work, in very different ways, helped shape the thinking behind the Yes, We Signed! campaign: Karl Polanyi, who warned more than 80 years ago of the social consequences of subordinating society to market principles, and Australia’s Rosie Batty, whose courage following the tragic death of her son helped sound the alarm about the human cost when the social bonds that protect us break down.

Their very different contributions point to the same fundamental challenge: the need to strengthen the values and social bonds that hold society together.

The Yes, We Signed! campaign provides a practical way to begin — bringing people together around a common vision that restores the primacy of human values over market principles and helps rebuild civil society.

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affirming Our shared human experience

When we look beyond the things that distinguish us — class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, ideology and belief — we discover something profoundly human: our desire for freedom, our yearning for peace and our hope for a better life. 

Across thousands of years and many different civilisations, humanity has wrestled with the same fundamental question: How can we live together successfully while remaining free? 

Different religions, philosophies and cultures have offered different answers. Yet beneath those differences lies a remarkable area of common ground.

Human beings need one another. Cooperation requires trust. And trust is strengthened or weakened by how we behave towards one another.

This Declaration seeks to identify that common ground — not by asking us to abandon our differences, but by recognising the values that allow people with those differences to live, work and flourish together. 

It is not another ideology, religion or political program.

It is a common vision based upon freedom, trust, responsibility and the timeless human values that make peaceful cooperation possible.

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The Freedom Declaration for Peace

1. We affirm that human progress depends fundamentally on our ability to cooperate freely and voluntarily for mutual benefit based on trust. Such cooperation requires essential freedoms, including freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom to protest.

2. Trust and genuine cooperation cannot flourish where power is concentrated and exercised without accountability. Freedom therefore depends not only on limiting coercion, but on ensuring that power remains accountable to the people it affects.

3. Over millennia of civilisation, humanity has learned that certain behaviours build trust while others destroy it. Across cultures, religions, belief systems and philosophical traditions, these lessons have been expressed as values and virtues, together with warnings against their opposites.

4. We therefore value and encourage love, loyalty, humility, honesty, generosity, compassion, kindness, decency, forgiveness, respect and selflessness, while discouraging hatred, treachery, vanity, dishonesty, greed, cruelty, resentment, disrespect and selfishness. The former build trust and strengthen our ability to cooperate; the latter destroy trust and undermine it.

5. Cultures may differ in how values are understood and expressed, but the consequences of behaviours that build or destroy trust are not merely matters of preference. Where honesty, compassion, responsibility and mutual respect flourish, cooperation becomes easier. Where dishonesty, cruelty, greed and hatred prevail, trust and cooperation become harder to sustain.

6. We learn these values through socialisation: beginning with those who care for us, developing through family and community, continuing through education and culture, and being refined throughout life by experience, reflection and our relationships with others.

7. Families and those who care for children therefore have a foundational role in nurturing the values, behaviours and relationships upon which civil society depends. Society shares a responsibility to support them in preparing each generation for the freedoms and responsibilities of adult life.

8. As these lessons are learned and internalised, they help us make better decisions and better life choices by expanding our awareness beyond immediate self-interest and self-gratification to include the wellbeing of others through love, compassion and empathy.

9. Across civilisations, the experience of the moral life has inspired humanity's deepest reflections on meaning, purpose, transcendence and the eternal. These questions have been explored through religion, philosophy, humanism and many other traditions of thought.

10. The moral life offers a pathway towards a deeper freedom: freedom through self-mastery rather than simply freedom from restraint; happiness grounded not only in gratification but in meaning, relationships and compassion; and an inner peace that many traditions associate with the deepest dimension of human experience.

11. Through self-reflection and experience, principles that may begin as external rules can become internal convictions. We develop conscience: the capacity to examine our actions, recognise our responsibilities to others and freely choose how we ought to live.

12. Religious, philosophical and humanist traditions understand this journey in different ways and use different language to describe it. Those differences matter, but so does their remarkable convergence around values such as compassion, honesty, forgiveness, responsibility, self-restraint, generosity and respect for others.

13. At their deepest, these traditions invite us to see beyond the immediate demands of the self and recognise our relationship with other people, with humanity across generations, with the natural world and, for many, with a reality greater than ourselves.

14. Freedom therefore carries responsibility. A free society cannot depend upon laws, institutions and rights alone. It also depends upon people developing the character and self-restraint necessary to exercise freedom without destroying the freedom, dignity or wellbeing of others.

15. We are more than vehicles for profit-making or creatures of narrow self-interest. Our humanity is most fully expressed when we are capable of looking beyond ourselves: through cooperation we build trust; through self-mastery we become more fully free; and through freedom exercised with compassion and responsibility we create the conditions for peace—within ourselves, with one another and with the eternal and unchanging, however each of us may understand it.​

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DESIGNING THE FUTURE TOGETHER

The American Declaration of Independence was the product of a small group of great minds, defining a nation and the American identity unilaterally.

In contrast, the Freedom Declaration for Peace can be the product of the collaboration of potentially millions of minds connected by the Internet.

As such, this is a work-in-progress and will evolve through feedback and discussion. 

Mitigating the Dangers of AI

The same principles can also help address one of the defining challenges of our time: artificial intelligence. 

We socialise people by teaching and reinforcing the values and behaviours that enable us to live and cooperate with others. As AI becomes increasingly capable of influencing human decisions, relationships and society itself, we can apply a similar principle to AI.

The values expressed in the Freedom Declaration for Peace can provide a common set of ethical guardrails — effectively hard-coded into the terms under which AI interacts with society. Through the concept of Reciprocal Terms & Conditions, the obligations would no longer flow in only one direction. Just as people are expected to comply with the terms imposed by technology platforms, those platforms and their AI systems would accept reciprocal obligations towards the people and communities they serve. 

In this way, we can begin to socialise AI as we socialise ourselves: not by requiring it to adopt a particular religion, ideology or political worldview, but by establishing common boundaries based on the values and behaviours that build trust, protect human dignity and enable peaceful cooperation.

The challenge of AI is therefore not simply to make machines more intelligent. It is to ensure that increasing intelligence remains aligned with the human values necessary to sustain civil society.

background information

​What is Project Open Democracy?​

​Reflection on Australia's failed Voice to Parliament referendum.​

For additional background reading please see the founding essay entitled: Towards a grand narrative for the post-everything society