Human Needs in Politics
A new Charter from the Conciliators Guild
“Twenty years ago, Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin, the founders of the Human Givens paradigm of well-being, wrote the Human Givens Charter, an attempt to apply Human Givens and human needs to politics. Recently, Ivan Tyrrell updated that charter for today. I hope you’ll find interesting and thought provoking — a new way of perceiving and rooting politics when our old systems seem to be melting away.”
(John Bell, Founder Director of The Consciliators Guild)
The Charter of Human Needs in Politics offers ideas on how to build a more common sense world in the light of new knowledge about our innate physical, psychological and emotional needs and the different ways our brain hemispheres pay attention to the world.
Providing an antidote to the ironically anti-human world we are devising and living in, the Charter begins where we must: with our innate needs – the very basis for human flourishing – not where we have ended up, through what can be seen as lopsided development. It offers a new reference point for politics and government, which casts a lateral light on the way bureaucracy functions, policy decisions are developed and leaders guide us. From that angle, our politics appear dangerously random, peculiarly obsessive, and sometimes downright pathological.
The idea that political systems and decisions should aim for our health and welfare, and that they can be humane, may seem a fantasy given the dark fascination with power, conflict and the metastases of bureaucracy that we see all around us. However, the risks presented today, whether conflict across the globe or an ethically empty if efficient overregulated technological planet, urgently call for a more sensible world rooted in our psychological and material wellbeing.
Time is one of the most misunderstood and abused elements in politics. To satisfy the rapid media cycle or respond to critics, answers and solutions are required immediately – whereas the best policy recommendations will inevitably require much more time and reflection to develop. Time is also needed to absorb the many profound ideas in this Charter so that they can serve as ferment for a new way of managing institutions or international relations – but it would be time well spent.
The recently published Human Needs in Politics – The Charter was picked up by The Montréal Review, who feature an insightful article by John Bell and Ivan Tyrrell on the unstable state of the world and what we urgently need to do to redress it.
“It is rare to live through a shift in history as significant as today’s…”
Read article >
Ivan Tyrrell, co-founder of the human givens approach, is a Founder Director of The Conscilliators Guild.
To find out more about the Guild’s work, visit: www.conciliators-guild.org/
March 2025