“I believe that our sickness is not in our biology but in our politics. Not in our synapses but in our system. Not in our genes but our governing. We have the intelligence, the mastery of resources to feed, clothe, shelter and rationally to control the populations of the world. [...] Have we the political will? And I might add, the political imagination and the political courage!”
Our Quote of the Week is a reminder that we have the resources we need to create a more peaceful, prosperous society—we just have to have the will and the courage to do it.
In 1969, Sargent Shriver gave the Milton Eisenhower Lecture at Johns Hopkins University. He was serving as US Ambasssador to France at the time, just as international hostilities towards the US were intensifying over the country’s role in the Vietnam War. In the lecture, Shriver reflects on international perceptions of the US and of humanity overall, and interrogates whether a fundamental “sickness” has befallen humanity. He asserts, however, that humanity’s failure to progress does not lie in any deep flaw within ourselves, but rather, in the ways we shape and deploy our political systems—something that is entirely within our control to change.
If politics is the practice of administering resources and deciding on priorities for the collective, it is our responsibility to ensure that a political system benefits the many and not a select few. Sargent Shriver stressed that systemic change has to involve all of us, that it is up to each of us to know our skills and to deploy them in the service of our communities. In this way, we will be forging what he refers to as “a union, not of nations—but of man.”
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