ABOUT US – MISSION

ABOUT US   –   MISSION  – BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION OF HCW FOUNDERS

Humane Civilization Worldwide (HCW)    Domestic  501(c)(3)  Corporation,  Texas  11/2017  (We are an operating foundation primarily doing educational work)    DONATIONS    

Organization of   Activists for Sustainable, Humane Civilizations NOW  –  pursuing radical, ethical reforms based on extensive studies. 

ABOUT US:

Humane Civilization Worldwide (HCW) grew out of a lifelong pursuit to understand what is important in people’s  lives and what guides people’s emotions and behaviors. The founders of HCW are two brothers, both European-trained physicians.

HCW is working on comprehensive plans and blueprints for model economic, political, educational and other institutions which bring the best out of human nature, promote humane cultures, and protect the environment; our plans are based on studies of relevant research about human behaviors, ethology, cultures, functioning of the brain, ecology, etc. HCW seeks to improve institutions, since institutions influence people’s character and behaviors more powerfully than inborn factors and moral teachings; institutions largely create the cultural environments that influence or shape the expressions of the instinctive-emotional system including addictive potentials, and also ethical and compassionate behaviors. Our goal is to spread knowledge and to initiate a movement. (Our website [previously humane-civilization.org with dash] was started long before incorporating as an educational non-profit organization.)

Presently, the climate crisis demands extraordinary efforts – much more radical changes are needed than what has been discussed and planned.

MISSION OF HCW:

The mission of the organization Humane Civilization Worldwide (HCW) is to work towards humane, sustainable civilizations by creating and continuously improving blueprints or model frameworks of economic, political, and other societal institutions, and by providing relevant education. Guiding principles are sciences, an understanding of human nature, and ethics, most importantly broad compassionate empathy without us-versus-them thinking.
The organization makes efforts to involve many people and organizations who agree at least in part or in principle with the goals of HCW. Since the world’s leaders have failed to take effective steps towards halting catastrophic global warming, addressing the climate crisis has become a high priority of HCW.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION OF HCW FOUNDERS:

The founders of HCW are two brothers, European trained physicians. Both had an interest in finding what is basically wrong in the word – how institutions cause and maintain a lot of misery. They have been interested in the developments of abuse-addiction behaviors, and developed theories about psychological-behavioral abuse-addiction patterns including addictive consumerism (particularly credit-buying with overvaluation of material goods), pursuit of conspiracy theorizing and/or unethical thoughts, and the pursuit of wealth and power.
At HCW we are particularly interested in science-based, broad ethics that considers human nature, and the need to reform legal systems, education that includes the teaching of peaceful conflict resolution; a healthy, ecological lifestyle and data from happiness research; and the influence of economic institutions which work like a bad behavior modification program.
Our thinking is that we do best rethinking institutions “from scratch” as if starting a completely new civilization; thinking unconventionally “out-of-the-box,” then considering how this more humane civilization can be created.
More recently, a central interest has been ending the pursuit of goals that are misguided and grossly inadequate, and, instead, describing a feasible comprehensive plan to address the climate crisis.
The world must start reversing global warming within years, not decades.

To summarize:
The organization grew out of the HCW founders’ lifelong pursuit to understand what is important in people’s lives and what guides people’s emotions and behaviors. Their goal is to spread knowledge and foster a movement with the goal to improve society’s institutions. Our conclusions, based on observations and broad anecdotal evidence: institutions influence people’s character, thinking, and behaviors more powerfully than inborn factors and moral teaching. Additionally, it is self-evident that writing and “preaching” does not change the majority of a population – different, better institutions will.
The founders are mostly self-educated with regards to the issues that relate to HCW’s work. Since before medical school both had read much about ethology (research of animal and human behaviors, such as findings of Konrad Lorenz, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, etc.,) anthropology, primate research, psychology, brain research and neuro-sciences. They made particular efforts to understand the influence of economic systems and institutions on people’s character, behaviors, and on cultural developments. The primary author of these texts has been particularly interested in economics and the nature of money in an “ideal” economy, ways to prevent individuals and countries from getting into debt-traps, and how to avoid recessions and depressions. I thought much about how poor economies should be able to improve without repeating the mistakes of Western- and Soviet-style economies. For instance, I felt it was wrong for economists to assume that India and Bangladesh (and also the Soviet Union) had to go through similar stages of development as Western countries, rather than directly learning from most advanced economies and copying or re-inventing modern devices and products. Gunnar Myrdal expressed that India was hardly making progress, that there was little hope for poor countries to ever catch up with modern economies; however, most economists did not seem to recognize that it is much easier to re-invent and improve what is known to be possible than to figure out what kind of research may bring valuable results. A people can “jump” within one generation from Stone Age to modernity, and the failure of the top-down Soviet economic system is no indication that capitalism holds the only viable form of economic development (we know of course that the Soviet Union was very successful in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its development of a space program – most scientists and inventors are employees, not entrepreneurs, and they should never depend on venture capital or politically motivated funding of university laboratories).
One of us studied more neurosciences and brain research including the works of Joseph E. LeDoux and Antonio Damasio.
Also important for our studies are thinkers that have interpreted developments in novel ways, including  James Martin, Steven D. Levitt, Bill Bryson, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Noah Harari, Jared Diamond; and researches in the fields of biology, evolution, and neurosciences.