Many people today are beginning to understand that the world is headed toward either an all-out nuclear war that ends humanity or a progressive climate change with runaway global warming until the surface temperature of the Earth is so hot that it—ends humanity. Our neighboring planet Venus is an example of run-away global warming. The surface temperature on Venus is about 900 degrees Fahrenheit. At even a fraction of that heat, our planet would be a cinder. The forests all burnt down; the rivers evaporated: nothing can live in such extreme heat.

But humanity refuses to rise to the challenge of really devoting our significant resources and ingenuity to controlling global warming. Instead, we continue to cling to our tribalism: “my nation, my culture, my religion, my race, my narrow ideology, or my single-minded system of “free-market” fragmentation, exploitation, and domination. Our one-dimensional thinking not only prevents human freedom and dignity from emerging anywhere on Earth, but it today threatens our very survival and any possible credible future for humanity.

For the global ruling class, centered in the USA, this is not the central issue. They have an imperial world system to run, and their extreme wealth makes them feel impervious, even to the threat of a 900-degree surface temperature. They are the heirs of history, and history apparently gave an unprecedented gift to their American-centered Empire with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The global struggle against “godless communism” in the Soviet Union was over and the US was now free to rule the world—punishing, blockading, or overthrowing all those whom it perceived as a threat to “free trade” and the unlimited accumulation of private wealth by billionaires and multinational corporations. In his book, The American Trajectory, David Ray Griffin reviews the ideological split that took place in Washington, DC, over how to solidify the empire after the fall of the USSR.

One side advocated overt military imperialism against any and all nations opposing the new world order under US domination. The other side advocated “soft power” of persuasion and economic coercion with military intervention as a last resort (2018, 327-28). The latter side argued that the US had already refined its “soft power” to a methodology of exceptional sophistication with the creation in 1984 of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),” a fake NGO that was really a cover for CIA and Washington-based manipulation of peoples and nations worldwide. In his book Manifest Destiny (2018), F. William Engdahl documents the effects of US propaganda manipulation in countries around the world, including in Russia before and after 1991—until Putin took power and put a stop to it at the end of that decade.

In country after country, supposedly “pro-democracy” movements were engineered using social media and slick Madison Avenue-type images and logos to install pro-American oligarchs in the name of democracy, for example, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, or the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan. These same methods were also used with great success (along with bombing) to overthrow the socialist government of the Yugoslav Federation in the late 1990s and to engineer the “Arab Spring” of 2010-12. The “soft power” game plan is to get rid of rulers not pleasing to the empire and install “free market” oligarchs who allow natural resources to be extracted, cheap labor to be exploited, and the wealthy to rule their country.

Engdahl calls this procedure: “installing fake democracy.” The empire has always ruled through “fake democracy,” even within its own borders in which the voting public is presented with a non-choice of one war-criminal supporter of oligarchy versus another clone of the same mold: George Bush vs Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney, Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. All clones of the ruling class, all imperialists and warmongers. No real choice is ever permitted to American voters regarding world system policy. Our political “freedom” is restricted to internal issues only. Fake democracy at home, and now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, fake democracy for the world.

The USA is effectively run by billionaires like George Soros (who promotes fake democracy) and the Koch brothers (who want to abandon democracy altogether). It is also run by multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex which ended up solving the debate at the end of the Cold War of whether to use soft power or hard power to rule the planet by joining both options together in a comprehensive global strategy of domination from which no country escapes notice. The drive for a truly planetary empire proceeds unquestioned and unseen by most of the population.

The attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001, engineered an opinion change in the American people, prepping them for perpetual war and expanded militarism. The effectiveness of the Washington-engineered “Color Revolutions” in many countries formerly under Soviet hegemony empowered the “soft power” advocates. The US system directed toward global domination appeared to the ruling class as a seamless confluence of overt power coupled with effective propaganda.

The univocal voices of the US mass media demonizing Vladimir Putin and glorifying the NATO-sponsored imperial war in Ukraine reflect the one-dimensional effectiveness of this system. If there are dissident voices allowed, they are not the ones that question the system itself. The system remains invisible to most people. As Herbert Marcuse put it in his book One Dimensional Man: “The total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality has coordinated the means of expression to the point where communication of transcending contents becomes technically impossible” (1964, 68).

Most people think that human beings are faced with only one choice: either some form of dictatorship under a “command economy” or the system of perpetual scarcity, extremes of wealth and poverty, ruthless competition, and exploitation, that the mass media in the USA calls “our democracy.” The US ruling class has always been OK with “free-market” dictatorships such as the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, Chile under Augusto Pinochet, or Iran under their brutal, hand-picked “Shah of Iran.” And they also might be OK, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, with a free-market dictatorship in the USA (since capitalism and fascism are very much cut from the same mold).

However, ultimately the “soft-power” strategy of propaganda, innuendo, and social-media manipulation may be more effective in the service of domination than jackboots and heartless shooting down of Black-Lives-Matter protesters. Hard-power repression makes it more likely that a few will wake up, sort of like Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984 became awake to “double-think,” whereas soft-power helps keep people hypnotized and one-dimensional in their thinking. They cannot imagine genuine alternatives. As in the recent USA hit movie, Barbie, there is the Barbie-doll-world of sheer fantasy, then there is the “real world” of patriarchy, in which the patriarchs inform Barbie that they are still very much in charge but that today they are much more sophisticated in how they present and manage the patriarchy.

The Washington Post, long associated with the CIA, and the New York Times, long associated with the Atlantic Council and Western imperialism, frame this one-dimensional reality in an intellectually respectable jargon that allows even the educated classes to wallow in the alternative-free capitalist mud-hole. Human beings have no choice but to live under a capitalist oligarchy no matter where they reside on the planet. Human beings have no choice but to hope and pray that “free-market” chaos and greed can deal with the climate crisis before it is too late. They must hope and pray that the one-dimensional nightmare of nuclear weapons does not, against all odds, wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.

In the Barbie movie, the Barbie-doll comes back to the “real world” from her imaginary world and finds that there is only one world there, a one-dimensional reality that she can struggle to influence, but that offers no credible possibilities for revolutionary change, for truly non-violent transformative change. But climate change and the threat of nuclear war have indeed changed everything except our way of thinking, and our one-dimensional thought process. They have changed everything because some people are beginning to see that we have no hope of survival under the one-dimensional world system. The one-dimensional system has created climate change and the threat of nuclear war, as well as this global system of exploitation and domination—and, for this very reason, it cannot provide a solution.

We must transcend the one-dimensional assumptions of this world system. We must think outside the box—beyond the rule of extreme wealth and the struggles of militarized nation-states. Beyond this self-encapsulated system lies the oneness of humanity and the practical-utopian vision of a fundamentally “classless” world system of justice, peace, freedom, and sustainability, promoted by serious thinkers from Immanuel Kant in the 18th century to Albert Einstein in the 20th century. Beyond this one-dimensional system lies the Constitution for the Federation of Earth—one humanity united, with the liberty, equality, and community of authentic planetary democracy. The one-dimensionality of fragmentation is replaced by multidimensional human wholeness.

The Earth Constitution actualizes our higher potential as human beings to transcend both the festering swamp of capitalism and the threat of fascist dictatorship, both of these forms of one-dimensional fragmentation. It functions, not as a “planned” economy, but as a continually “planning” economy directed toward ending all war, disarming the nations, protecting universal human rights, and creating a sustainable vibrant economic system that benefits everyone. As I show in my forthcoming book called Human Dignity and World Order, this is because the Constitution is based on multidimensional human dignity rather than one-dimensional power and greed. If we want a future on this planet, we will need to move beyond one-dimensional thinking to the multidimensional and universal perspective of one world, one humanity, one planetary ecosystem. That is both the meaning—and the power—of the Earth Constitution. Let’s do it.