Dear Participant of the recent past 76th World Health Assembly (Geneva, 21–30 May, 2023) and decision-making organ of the World Health Organization know that the World Philosophical Forum, is extremely lucky to have the support of Hygiene the goddess of health, the force of persuasion, Peitho and the Priestess Pythia at the center of the world. We also have Socrates who saw that our paramount aim is to know our own soul and to care for it. Maybe I weary you by saying there is a lack of interest in classical philosophy even though it is a creative force that can help restore diminished autonomy to institutions, act as a vehicle of humanism and an antidote to despair. Injected into education it will result in more lives lived with meaning. Our three girls knew that philosophy could be used in governance to deal with calamity, but it would be resisted. Consequently, the World Philosophical Forum stubbornly and consistently tries for its acceptance and recognition.

For one fleeting moment the international community came close to calling on its use with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon but he abandoned it some miles from Ithaca. He picked up on the concept of human consciousness in pronouncing a new world-dimension initiative, Education First, with civic education as more important than literacy and numeracy.

Perhaps the U.S. announcement of a $250 million planned contribution to the Pandemic Fund will give you courage but it is a little short of the 36.1 billion.

Even so, I hesitatingly address you. Hesitatingly, because so much has been said by individuals with much greater prestige; so many have called for a change in human consciousness, for a socio-political transformation and have advocated that we remember our humanity, and forget the rest. But who listened? Maybe like Yeats sailing to Byzantium, which he never reached would be better.

Even though limited in resources like the World Social Forum and World Philosophical Forum are signals lost in the noise, sometimes their own.

We persist though because prestigious awards given for good reasons can be upended by future events for example in the Sudan where today a dreadful situation prevails and Al-Sadik Abdul Rahman Al-Mahdi Former Prime Minister received the Gusi Peace Prize. Social dementia provides no vision of enlightenment, no olive branch to wave and no culture to inspire, just a button to be pressed by accident or intent when the lights of the world go out.

If man is wiped out his planet earth will still turn according to the laws of nature of the universe and it will get by without mankind. Horses in drinking water, cradle to grave, forget the rest, emotions and outrage, population health will have no meaning. Gravity, the red shift, e=mc2 and blackholes will still exist and rainbows will occur but spectacles, binoculars and telescopes will not register their majesty. With respect to Glen Martin’s question on war what do future generations matter when weapons corporations rake in billions in profits; no baby cries, no hope for youth, no memories for or of grandparents. Should that awful moment come survivors if any, will be homeless, hungry, in darkness, cold and contaminated.

Your decisions are of vital importance to global wellbeing; the rule of law and rationality. So let me start out with a thought bubble of Norbert Wiener the father of Cybernetics who said the future will not be a comfortable hammock in which we will be waited upon by our robot slaves… we fool ourselves thinking we have our technologies firmly under control. Let me also ask whose rule of law and say that I believe, rationality like the laws of nature are universal, which does not rule out irrationality one source of today’s social dementia.

Thinking beings have to wonder which system will collapse next. To cease upon the midnight with no pain is the poet’s understanding of that dramatic moment. Midnight is also the awful moment when a button can be pressed, a key turned, a leaver moved and weapons of mass destruction are released from the world’s large stockpile. One hour later modernity has lost its focus, culture dies, languages fall silent, books are no longer read, and radio and television fail to broadcast. No baby cries, no cherry ripens and there is no further need for any olive branch. At that apocalyptic moment, millions of years of evolution unravel and the complexity to sustain human consciousness disintegrates. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. At the end?

Despair was never better expressed than by Aeschylus: pain so intense, not forgotten, even in sleep, falling from the heart, drop-by drop, until in our despair, against our will, Wisdom comes, through the terrible grace of God is no longer a word and wisdom withers.

The wisdom in Aeschylus is philosophy, which provides a road to peace. The West’s identity was emergent as Europa a girl with the wide-eyed gaze from Tyre, clung willingly to the back of Zeus on their way to Crete. Two and half millennia ago the concept of Western civilization emerged following on from the Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis with the overcoming by the few over the many, on land and sea. It divided East (Asia) and West (Europe) and lead to the free development of Mankind based on classical philosophy and Socrates. In Eastern Persian poetry it was Suleica. Know thyself was first uttered by the father of philosophy, Thales. Know thyself, and you will know the universe and the gods from Delphi. Greek became the mother tongue of European civilization and the crafty philosopher beame rich through knowledge.

The International Community as a system dear participant and all systems need periodic retro and forward retro fitting to provide reorganization and new shine. Retrofit and feed forward should take precedence over reshuffling or reset. Certainly upgrading happens and happened during the Seventy-sixth World Health Assembly! It results either when information is no longer significant or newly acquired and convincing information is acquired and always involves feedback. To cause change on ocassion requires fewer birds of a feather and more nightingales. Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, told top brass get the horses out of the drinking water and they did.

Well ahead of the Declaration of Independence of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness a legal code was written in the rarefied air of the high Himalayas that stated if the government cannot create happiness for its citizens it has no purpose to exist (1729). Today such concepts are repeated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization subscribes to a God-given right to life, liberty, and security of person. At this most critical, of critical times this according to UN Secretary General we should all be strongly interested in supporting the World Health Organization. We should be pushing for a contemporary revolution in public heath on several different levels. WHO for all - All for WHO. We have little or nothing else. I repeat there is little else.

Permit me to return you to the issues of the fragile link between health and peace and the need for philosophy as an instrument for progress. I will make some comments, present questions and offer you a couple of thought experiments. Should you take up my challenge your response can find a platform within the confines of the dialectical symposia of the World Philosophical Forum in Europe and in Asia. How much money is being lost to education and health by the absence of peace?

Peace is the beauty of life; warm sunshine, the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father and the togetherness of family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, and the triumph of truth, this according to Anwar Al Sadat of Egypt. My banner is the triptych, population health, education and health from cradle to grave and for all personal fulfillment throughout life and value added philosophy to benefit all three complex issues.

Cybernetics provides insight into complex systems; self-organizational properties within them, emergent entities and properties, learning, cognition, and adaptation. It has been defined as the science of control and communications in animal and machine. The word was first used by Plato relevant to the governance of people. In the 1830s Ampere used it to denote the science of civil government. It entered the Larousse, but was later dropped out. Other insightful definitions include; the science and art of understanding, the science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control, the art of steersmanship and the art of creating equilibrium in a world of constraints and possibilities, which would fit the needs of the World Health Assembly. But steer clear of fallacy!

Philosophy however is seldom used in capacity-building, in advocacy and awareness-raising or in peace keeping. Consequently, once again we urge you to appoint classical philosophers to controversial and complex activities to help you pave a practical way out of our socially demented world as well as to remind you that the World Health Organization has miles to go and promises to keep. Philosophy appropriately applied is a far better algorithm to a meaningful future than any suggested new world order. First know thyself is a much better way than being identified through collossal files of information collected from the profiles of others through AI.

My challenge to you dear participant comes by questions and thought exercises as the world goes mad; nuclear weapons, climate change and artificial intelligence, from Russia’s threat to use them in the Ukraine or plan to station them in Belarus, to President Biden’s promise to defend South Korea from a nuclear attack and receding hope for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The questions:

  • In the plethora of meetings and sideline opportunities for doing, thinking and reflection (Geneva, 21-30, May, 2023) you had the opportunity to note how you would demonstrate that the World Health Organization dwells among people competent to think philosophically; would you agree that there are those who know well what is going on and what it is all about but are pushed aside by politics to make way for those who know little and as little as nothing.

My mind storming or thought exercises for peace, global health are also for fun:

  • How would Hygiene, Pythia and Peitho would impact Pandemic Preparation Response. Having access to Heracles they would bypass a Scottish douche of 31.1 billion, not theirs to spend. They would however offer some guidelines for its spending. My first cut would be one third each for our three girls as a dowry leaving 0.1 billion for related education. Pythia (oracular priestess giving the God's answers, pure from all private faults) would have the portfolio for Risk, Peitho (tender eyed goddess) for Vulnerability while Hygiene Hygeia would prevent illness from occurring by working on Hazard. Athena would be around to ensure peace, asking not for a bottom draw so as not to anger Zeus. Together they will bring health damage from a threat to zero= ƒ (Risk)X(H)X(V). These young ladies can point to signposts to the future and cover all bases between pre-Event preparedness of society (P) and vulnerability (V) mitigation of the population. Management will advise on what to do in readying for an event and what to do if the event occurs.
  • Think of our world with a population P as being cloud covered by a miasma whose scientific name is social dementia. Only 10% of the population receives light and and are vitamin replete. The miasma prevents light from reaching 90% of the population. This imbalance is the basis on which the government provides reseach funding to academia. A maverick philosopher is defrocked by the academic community because of a published paper stating that the cause of the 9 to 1 ratio is a result of an unspecified degradation of decision making in man’s brain from the neocortex to a much lower one that he names reptilian augmented by a variable loss of empathy. Reptilian is used in keeping with Einstein’s use of it expressed in a letter to Maria Curie. He was enraged in the manner in which the public, or rabble, concerned itself with her in a lust for sensational hogwash. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles (the 90%) is certainly happy that we have such personages in the 10%. These are dark times, but thankfully with silver linings; our senses will never have enough of seeing, hearing, sensing; our cultivated cognition of striving in the direction of knowing, will never cease. History changes as a result of ideas (enlightenment), knowledge (latent heat and steam) revolution (Industrial, French, Russian), riots (so many) and battles (Vienna) as landmarks that define its flow and what follows.

Dear Assembly particpants you can add purpose to life if you listen to the voice of philosophy and find a way to turn the World Health Organization’s gaze to it.