In my experience it is quite normal to refuse to believe that you are about to be engulfed by a cataclysm that will change your life forever — or kill you.

(Tim Judah)

As citizens, we must prevent our politicians from pursuing insane brinksmanship.

(John Scales Avery)

A step in the wrong direction and social dementia today will pale in comparison with eons of evolution unraveling and the failure of complex systems that prop up human consciousness.

(Jeffrey Levett)

Humanity is reaching the end of Hellenistic reason, morality, justice and responsibility and has abandoned wisdom implicit in Greek philosophy. Mr. Putin you have pushed the world towards a more aggravated state of social dementia, which let me define as: a sapping of global empathy and a madness not entirely of today’s choosing. As a permanent member of the Security Council, charged with upholding peace, you have flagrantly abandoned the principles of the United Nations Charter. Unfortunately you are not the only one. You are threatening with the use of nuclear weapons. Mobilizing the world to hate Russia or denigrate its culture is a reminder of the WWI era when propaganda was given a boost as it helped change British sympathies away from France, now an ally to Germany - the enemy.

With a more objective and honest comparison and assessment of events, Cyprus and Serbia would have been recalled. We do have an obligation to de-falsify false historical narrative. You do know that resentment simmers, inequality grows and there is a greater economic asymmetry between center and provinces. Russians, like all people, want to eat better, live better in a healthy environment and breathe freer in a secure community. Ordinary Ukrainians want peace.

In June 2021, I asked for your change of heart without failure and proposed that with one stroke of your pen Alexei Navalny can be free. I referred to Lena saying to the colonel, “they don’t report the truth to Stalin, it’s all plans and plans but what about us human beings?” Now you are the recipient of misinformation. My earlier appeal to you Mr. Vladimir Putin was made in the name of the Athens based World Philosophy Forum, when I wrote that the world’s population needs relief from inequality. It was made as a concerned global citizen and as an officer of the Forum.

In 2018, the World Philosophical Forum (WPF) was honored with a laurel leaf by the Greek authorities in the person of the Minister of Tourism who is now a member of the European Parliament. In 2019, the Forum appealed to the Greek Members of the European Parliament, to Members of all Member-States and candidates of all political parties asking for their full support as well as the support of the UN, WHO, EU, and the Council of Europe to help stop the growing social dementia by the immediate act of reviving Classical Greek Philosophy in lieu of the predominant Scholasticism. Since then we have appealed to the UN and the Greek Parliament, with little response.

We live in a world of enormous beauty and of depleted empathy and rising social dementia. The dire predicament of our existence and the scientifically extrapolated horrors to come, together with already witnessed outcomes from Hiroshima to Chernobyl to Fukushima and forest fires and city flooding, may give momentum to our disregarded and unexamined solution implicit in classical philosophy. In the dismal reality of bombs falling on the Ukraine and the elected Prime minister of Myanmar in prison, protestors and activists like Navalny are trapped in the dungeons of state, and with democracy assaulted by state leaders what we propose may seem overly romantic or vague to some, unrealistic and meaningless to others. Yet what we propose is a small step in the right and only direction. It is humanity's safe passage to the future. We do so knowing that it is no panacea and that all mitigating solutions have had little effect and left little light at the end of the misery filled tunnel.

Unfair rules the world; an unfair peace maybe the best we can ever hope for. On 20th January 2022, the 75th anniversary Doomsday Clock announcement was made, remaining at 100 seconds to midnight. My setting in 2021 was 90 seconds. This year 2022, my setting is 60 seconds to midnight. In 2022 the world still needs a safe passage for its children and the whole of humanity to the future.

Protection of the vulnerable becomes a more feeble currency and safe passage more difficult in a background of violence and trauma and becomes a more high-risk undertaking. With scholasticism alive and well and social dementia growing fast, survival of humanity is a race between global civic education and global destruction. The wages of scholasticism were paid for at the expense of Greek classical philosophy. Its revitalization over the long term may just be the means to stem the ongoing madness. We see no other way! To help forestall crises is the best we can hope to do. Igor Kondrashin has just posted A Call to Reason. As president of the World Philosophical Forum, he estimates the world is 30 symbolic seconds until its End.

Having just posed the question ‘when will the world be worthy of its children,’ and looking out of a high rise window in New York, 2011, a few moments later a rogue plane hit the twin towers. To have a world fit for children and for youth, all wars must cease, violence must cease and culturally sensitive models of education linking appropriate socioeconomic development to peace must be designed.

War again in the Ukraine is a continuation of a consolidated world order where shaming of nations to take a stand is in small print on the menu of strategies. In a multi-pronged attack, a boy was killed when a residential complex was bombed, a neonatal intensive care unit shifted into a bomb-shelter cellar and half the members of a small company in the Ukraine praised Russian aggression while the other half shamed them. In Russia, two young protesters worried for grandparents and friends and relatives under threat in the Ukraine, respectively. China says that such military action does not constitute an invasion. Only some things seem certain, an invasion is not an invasion and the people of Ukraine will go it alone. The Ukraine is neither a member state of the EU nor of NATO.

The clock can only be turned back by ridding the world of nuclear weapons and by politics that recognize the true dimensions of climate change. In our current world, no one can predict with digital era accuracy, which system will collapse next: a city in response to flooding or an earthquake, the environment as a result of climate change, health from another global pandemic, nuclear ignition as a mishap of war, or the collapse of an economic or banking network or some other unexpected disaster. No one can say whether authoritarianism will prevail over democracy or whether governance by politics controlled by a level of consciousness and behavior well below that of the higher and finer levels of brain function will win out.

What happens next no one knows, but it will happen.

Once again, the WPF in Athens, Greece, raises its small voice in a note of grave concern that homo sapiens are on a fast track to extinction. We do so in the belief that classical philosophy is a vital and unused universal instrument for solving existential problems facing our world and a beneficial investment to active listening, a more worthwhile way of living and a route to reduced social dementia through improved civic education. The WPF can benefit civil society and encourage the presence of an Earth civilization in every region, on all continents, by reinforcing concepts of a culture of peace, a society for all ages, a health for all strategy and the principles of human security. It does need listeners! It does need donors. Those with a functioning brain wanting a more equal shaping of their world in the direction of equality the next decade and beyond should pay attention to the World Philosophical Forum and ignore the rest.

We can provide no greater, more powerful sentiment than the words of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955 on nuclear disarmament: “remember your humanity, and forget the rest”; words more relevant than ever. Words lost in scholasticism and social dementia. The Forum’s stubborn, persistent, unheard and ditched appeals resulting from what it perceives as dark overwhelming and exceedingly complex processes that are driving our world towards biological annihilation and the dominance of social dementia in earth societies, it believes that to pull humanity back from extinction and the planet away from collapse, demands enormous sacrifice and a colossal effort which will make the effort to end the pandemic and bring it to endemic proportions.

Not to make coordinated sacrifices today is akin to sacrificing our children’s children tomorrow and their children the day after to sudden or slow demise. Concrete actions are needed to promote global civic education and the sincere emergence of a culture of peace through global citizenship. Surely this is better than mutually assured destruction. But it is not happening!

It is very much touch and go whether social dementia can be held in check in our extremely interactive and market oriented world. Unfortunately, Geneva, a fantastic chance to avoid the dangers that threaten humanity, left no signposts to the future.

In the absence of a miracle our proposal will drown in a sea of appeals or lost in a pounding noise of deceit. In the short shadow of a nuclear nightmare and the long shadow of global warming, doing nothing is not an option. As recklessness outweighs diplomacy and the higher brain cortex of politics is squeezed out by more dominant lower centers, the World Philosophical Forum cannot just stand by. Mr. Putin on this, my third address, I say think of your daughters and your children’s children, the ordinary lives of Russians today and tomorrow and put your humanity ahead of concepts of territorial expansion.

The alternative to no seconds left and choice having evaporated the only remains will be ash prints of the dead blown by unfriendly winds over the planet’s desert surface, once populated with life, abundant vegetation, circling round the Sun in the boundless ocean of the infinite space of the Universe.