What’s possible if Truth Keepers unite?
Organizations and individuals on this list are usually siloed truth keepers and seekers. Neil deGrasse Tyson offered humankind a uniting cure for “Truth decay”. By recognizing there are three kinds of truth:
- Our personal truth—what we believe about God or morality.
- Our political truth—the favored tribe we belong to and defend.
- Objective Truth— the kind you can trusted with your life and needed for sustaining all life.
When two people disagree, Tyson suggests there are only three possibilities: I’m right -you’re wrong; You’re right – I’m wrong; We’re both wrong! Let’s go find the answer. And if an argument lasts more than five minutes, you’re both wrong. If it lasts a thousand years, both are defending a favored mental concept and violating the Golden Rule. Or, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” suggested in 1776.
We invite Truth keepers and seekers from the three progressive movements (peace, environment, and economic/social Justice) to unite! And make the ‘Health of People and Nature’ humankind’s shared agenda. This may be the only objective truth that all three movements already agree on. And already approved, affordable, and achievable collectively prioritizing the SDGs now in need of urgent action.
The ‘Peace’ movement and the thousands of organizations within it have often stated ‘If we had world peace, we could finally end hunger and address all other planetary priorities’. This is a political truth. But not an Objective Truth. Humanity has always had the knowledge and the resources to feed every person a healthy, sufficient diet sustainably. But humanity has only lacked the “political will”. This was the conclusion of three major global peer reviewed studies between 1978 and 1980, The Brandt Commission, the National Academy of Sciences’ report, and President Jimmy Carter’s bipartisan Presidential Commission on World Hunger. Each summarized humankind had the resources, solutions, and technology. And only lack “political will”. Their warnings proved correct. And we now suffering from the growing costly and lethal interconnected polycrisis consequences because of that failure.
Truth tellers existed long before these objective bodies. Indigenous cultures lived by principles of reciprocity long before formal religions shaped doctrine. Every major religious tradition grounded itself in compassion and justice within the Golden Rule. Philosophers and writers—from the ancients to Thomas Paine—reinforced the same ideal: a legitimate government protects the freedom and security of all people. Jefferson echoed this in the Declaration of Independence, and the world reaffirmed it in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, political and religious truths repeatedly overwhelm and trump objective Truths.
The Peace movement is mathematically correct in its aspirations. Yet in practice it has never succeeded. And the number of conflicts has risen since 2000. Ignoring this reality is not objective, it’s avoidance.
At the root of most global failures is the human mind’s resistance to the “Truths” that many minds hold as “self-evident” as gravity. Or a child should not die before their parent(s). But, too minds defend concepts it invented. These then overrode our DNA’s biological social instincts. Cooperative patterns that evolved and sustained life for millions of years. The spirit that animates life is visible not in our arguments, but in our actions – whatever name we give that higher power nourishing all life on earth.
The Environmental movement must join in defense of the three of the most complex, complicated, and intricate systems in the known universe:
- Nature itself, which sustains every species and our living spirit.
- The immune systems of all living organisms—refined through billions of years of evolution.
- The female body, which births and nurture’s every generation.
The economic and social Justice movements must join because they see the daily consequences of global political and economic systems prioritizing power and profit over people and planet.
The Objective Truth is simple: if these three movements already committed to the survival, thriving, and flourishing of life — united under one shared banner — instead of different names, we could finally build a sustainable, sufficiently civilized, and prosperous future. Rooted in Truths rather than political comforts or good feelings. Project 250 is not an organization. It has no website or staff. It is simply an ideal to bring organizations out of their silos – to achieve progress on local community priorities globally.
What has prevented this workable unity? Our progressive mind’s attachment to siloed priorities that compete rather than cooperate and coordinate. But sustainable future progress requires a holistic and comprehensive approach the SDGs offer. This is where local communities can come together to decide their highest shared priorities within the framework of the 17 SDGs. Identifying their top 1, 2, or 3 goals within the SDGs 169 subgoals. No community can do all 169 at once. But each community can choose one, two, or three priority targets—and leverage these for global good – while aligning their actions with 46,000 Rotary led communities in over 200 nations doing the same.
Humankind could have moved in this direction in 1948. Instead, powerful nations created a global UN system with no power — except to protect the national sovereignty of powerful nations. With humanity suffering the consequences- with some now worsening – due to this intended purpose from the start.
The only sane path forward is ‘we the people’, our organizations, and movements, finally uniting across borders, budgets, and beliefs – and generating the ‘political’ and ‘capitalist’ ‘will’ to fund the SDGs. Money is not the barrier. The world’s economic wealth is unprecedented – and widely unfair for billions of people. Only a collective commitment to prioritizing the value of fundamental human rights and planetary health over the narrow national or partisan interests of wealthiest and most powerful.
National sovereignty can never guarantee freedom or security in a world built on irreversible interdependence. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Once humanity has the courage to accept this wisdom and change its mind, we will have the power to change these flawed systems from the bottom up — to halt and reverse the growing chaos.
Then—and only then—can we create the “heaven on earth” that every generation has hoped for. Unfortunately, nuclear weapons and other forms of WMD that our runaway technologies created by human minds are expanding faster than our wisdom evolves. And our window for success is narrowing.
AI will inevitably surpass human intelligence. Guided wisely AI could achieve the wisdom that only a few humans have ever demonstrated, then hold some accountable for destructive actions. Like our minds weaponizing everything and us become the architects of our own undoing. Our choice is stark: Humankind faces a trilemma. We seek freedom, security, and independence. Objectively we must pick two. Independence is an illusion – making us delusional in ignoring global Objective Truths. And time is running out. United we stand a chance. Divided, we are unlikely to make it another 25 years.