We Begin: The World POEM Mark Reibstein
It is with boundless joy and love that I greet you – all of you on this lovely Earth, where, today, every living being has triumphed, and we celebrate the most significant turning point in human history!
In 1969, we made a giant leap and landed on the moon. On this day, April 22, 2050, humans arrive here on Earth, for Earth, as never before. Today’s passage of the Global Armistice for Earth Accords (GAEA) joined by every member of the United Nations, and your endorsements of The World POEM’s three planks, mark Adam’s and Eve’s return to the Garden of Eden – no longer as ignorant children, but as wise, compassionate, and powerful caretakers. On this day, we find Shiva, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, Jesus, the great gods of indigenous peoples everywhere, and countless other prophets and sages alive in each other’s eyes. As we recognize our ancestors’ great works and visions, which led us here, we also know how far we’ve come. Hallelujah!
How did we get here? You are how we got here. When, 25 years ago, The World POEM became a political party – The World Party of Emotional Maturity – that was the formalization of something in all of us, which has been reaching out for each other since the inception of our history, as a species – the same primal urge that bonds every mother and child, every pair of lovers, and every friend. Despite fears and limitations, we have been inching towards this moment for millennia. Human civilization – from the smallest village agreement, artifact, and vision to our most global arrangements, games, arts, and communications – has been a step towards species-unity, motivated by fellow-feeling and the wish for mutual thriving. Today, it allows us to recognize Earth as our mother and our fellow creatures as brothers and sisters – to know this as both ancient wisdom and the fruition of scientific exploration and analysis. Modern humans arrive today, to take their place in the family of Earth!
So, while we cannot point to a single person or moment as the origin-point of this journey, let us affectionately recall recent landmarks along its way, beginning with that playful exercise by an obscure writer of children’s books, which caught the imagination of people around the world. For that world, which was on the brink of ecological collapse, with self-aggrandizing, tiny-egoed, frightened leaders escalating human divisions and hostilities, he proposed a political party of the emotionally mature – it was time, he said, for the adults in the room to step up and link arms!
He proposed, furthermore, its first gathering to take place that July 14, 2024, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Polo Field – the site where, 57 years and six months prior, there had been a “Gathering of the Tribes Human Be-In” – with no purpose other than to gather, in connection. He called the event “A World POEM Be-In, 2024.” It was to feature no speakers, no agenda, and no leaders. Those must emerge, in time, to serve the movement – for this must never be a movement that served its leaders.
Who showed up? About eight thousand people, it turned out – from around the world. Why? What they told the media was that they wanted to save our species – by putting aside all geographic, ethnic, religious, and racial considerations. What could humanity accomplish, they wondered, if it thought and acted as one? The United Nations was founded on a noble idea, but it was bound by all the loyalties and interests, which had justified countless wars, plunder, and exploitation for millenia. They wondered, what could a World Party of the Emotionally Mature – an organization of like-minded people, in defiance of national, ethnic, and religious boundaries – accomplish? As musicians and poets performed in small, impromptu gatherings, people looked for answers to that question, chatting and connecting, both with the others who had come and, electronically, with many others who were at that time merely curious.
I was there. Among us, there was a small sprinkling of those who had been at the Be-In of 1967, and while I was not among those, I was among many who had been alive to watch the lunar landing – and the analogy came to our lips often. There was that spirit of collective endeavor in 1969 – exactly what the Be-In in 1967 had hoped to initiate – a sense of a movement sweeping across the world. The lunar landing, of course, was perhaps due mostly to national competition – if anything, diametrically opposed to hippie politics – but there was an almost mystical sense of consonance for many of us, when the landing occurred – captured and popularized by the song “The Age of Aquarius” from the musical Hair. “Peace” and “love,”the words on our lips then, were clearly the only rational responses to a world where atom bombs had been dropped and were proliferating. It seemed fitting that we were landing on the moon, when humanity itself so badly needed a leap of cosmic proportions (on a personal note – the Mets, Jets, and Knicks were champions in ‘69 and ‘70 – what other signs of cosmic alignment did a boy in NY need?).
Those of us who attended the World POEM Be-In, in 2024, could already feel that the current we were jumping into was powerful and swift – one which would sustain and carry us to our needed destination – from our differences to the commonality at our source. We had political discussions – but our goals were never to convince or complain – always to understand and be understood. What followed from that first gathering was a single commitment – continued, yearly, in an increasing multitude of places.
A small band of technology experts, led by Suzanne Taylor, undertook the management of a World POEM site to keep discussions going. A logarithm allowed any group of 150 people, following Robin Dunbar’s “Rule of 150,” to choose places to gather at the following World POEM Convention, in 2025. As sites and groups were shared and finalized, so were procedures and methodologies devised and confirmed, for on-line collaboration. On July 14, 2025, from roughly one thousand sites around the world, the World POEM convened its first political convention – the numbers had increased by more than tenfold in a year. In many cities, the groups of 150 gathered at the same spot, creating happy, harmonious crowds in the thousands and globally replicating the Be-In of ‘24.
And what has happened since? As you well know, exponential growth of our party, every year, in increasingly diverse locations, with an increasingly robust culture of participation, in keeping with its spirit and goals. What happens at these conventions? We share what makes us who we are – food, music, stories, art. Friendships are forged. Love blooms. Games are enjoyed. Meanwhile, on line, we have moved slowly, collectively, and surely, towards a consensus set of platform planks, while successfully fending off those who, for a multiplicity of reasons, would attempt to destroy what was being built with a strength they could not comprehend.
And all that brings us to today: the moment when the number of people who have confirmed their dedication to the three principal planks of our party exceeds one half of the extant human species, world-wide.
I was blessed to be asked to speak on this occasion. I know you are with me, on screens across the globe, as we rededicate ourselves to those planks out loud, together. But I want to take this opportunity to speak a little more, before we do that, to those who might be watching, and who might not be with us yet.
First, I want to explain how we know this is not a movement that is going to recede with the tide of time. “Is not history cyclical?” They ask. “Is not progress a matter of fits and starts – steps forward and sometimes even more, taken backwards?”
Our response is the perfect certainty that what we need is ahead and not behind us, in the human story. Maturity works like that. In idle, regressive moments, we long for childish comforts, but by and large, adult humans love and work as adults, satiating adult needs.
Secondly, I feel I must explain the concept of the 50/50, which is at the heart of the first plank, and without which species-awareness is impossible to experience as individuals or collectively. It involves a personal leap of faith, but that does not mean it cannot be understood rationally within the framework of human cultural history.
The 50/50 has made possible today’s evolutionary leap – a kind of singularity – where the whole of our massed potential far exceeds the sum of our parts. At its heart lies a paradox, which makes us, through World POEM participation, more distinctly free, as individuals. How is that possible? Of course, it is the same paradox at the heart of all religions; but my favorite articulation of it is from two centuries ago, when the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of something he called the Oversoul, in an essay by that name, which I urge you to read at your leisure.
But a full understanding of the 50/50 requires some psychology – specifically, a theory of the ego and its relation to lives of purpose and value. What must be clear is that it is the ego’s breadth that is of consequence –not, as many religions have conceived it for so long, its eradication. For millennia, humans believed animals were below us and God was above. We thought our sacred obligation was to rise above the one to find the other – to transcend or sacrifice the ego entirely. Early psychologists suggested, rather, that we must recognize and value the animal self – what Sigmund Freud called the id – and the consciousness of the social worlds we lived in, or super-ego. Our egos, as they conceived them, were merely navigators between those urges and constraints. This correctly dispensed with supernatural deities. But for what purposes did we navigate? Besides pleasure – or escape from pain – and approval, was there any way to distinguish a meaningful, well-lived life from one that, apart from all appearances, might be narrow or malignant?
What that psychological model missed was an appreciation of the ego’s breadth on that spectrum it navigated. We now know that value in life is found to the extent that one goes in both directions simultaneously: satisfying one’s animal self, while expanding one’s identification with others (i.e., loving and being loved). Small egos, which navigate only at the intersection of id and superego, live shallow, mean lives. Egos sustained only by the id are destined for isolation, frailty, apathy, and pain. Those that surrender fully to the super-ego, or collective conscience, may be seen as saintly, but they can no longer experience or give authentically. The challenge is to become a healthy and satisfied animal, feet on the Earth, feeling one’s way towards unity with others through love, service, and sacrifice.
That is the essence of the World POEM’s first plank, the 50/50, a personal commitment to moral discipline as well as a guiding principle for public policy– from our most intimate decisions to our stewardship of nature on Earth, the latter realized in a commitment to the proposal of E.O. Wilson known as “Half-Earth.” The elegance and clarity of the 50/50 is revelatory: take one half of whatever it is coveted for oneself; give the other half away. Seek personal success that is in perfect harmony with public good. Whatever good you do for yourself, do equal good for others. We mine, from what folk wisdom has for generations referred to as “the golden rule,” real, pure gold: our best selves, to drive personal decision-making and public policy.
So – grab a glass of something – clear, clean water is fine – and raise it, as we toast the first plank in the World POEM platform. Please pronounce it out loud, with me, before you take your drink:
Plank #1: Our guiding principle in moral, political, and environmental affairs will be the 50/50.
And as you drink, I will read aloud the Ancillary Commitments for Plank #1, to which you all have agreed:
→ With no act made without consideration of its effect on others, we commit to realizing, to whatever extent possible, equal benefits and costs between our own interests and the interests of others.
→ Because this extends to our use and care for the natural Earth, we also commit to realizing Edward Osborne Wilson’s “Half Earth” by 2060 and maintaining it in perpetuity afterwards.
Before we move on to Plank #2, I want to respond to what has been said about how the agreement you made to commit to this plank was a personal decision – non-binding and therefore meaningless. Perhaps its power, at this point, isprincipally aspirational, but that is no small thing. This is not a discipline that can be enforced from without; it must be chosen, as it has been, by you. If there is sacrifice realized when the 50/50 is enacted, it must be experienced by you as a gain, rather than a loss, or the practice will not endure and become the habit that it must. In regard to public policy, democratic pressure, it is hoped, will be put on every government to live up to first plank precepts – particularly the environmental regulations and enforcement necessary to realize “Half Earth” before this decade is out. Nations, like individuals, must find their way – and only enlightened individuals can lead them. The first plank is three things at once: economy, morality, and governance. In other words, it has the potential to become the practical religion of a future that suits this coming age of our maturity, here on Earth.
I think we are ready now to raise our glasses again and recite the second plank in the World POEM platform:
Plank #2: From this point on, our politics, sciences, and faiths will be global.
And as you drink, allow me to review your Ancillary Commitments to Plank #2:
→ We will distrust and discourage national policies that compromise the welfare of other nations. Mutual thriving is our principal goal.
→ Our work in the academies will be motivated by pragmatic concern for the flourishing of all humans and the natural world, with improvements in the education, health, and dignity of all peoples and preservation of Earth and all its life forms prioritized.
→ Looking upon humanity’s flaws as loving parents do their children’s and with reverence for the genius of humanity, we dedicate ourselves to our species’ improvement. Inspired by a faith as deep as any hitherto given to supernatural, superhuman divinities, we will seek to meet or kindle that faith in others.
→ In the face of any policy that runs counter to these principles, we vow to follow the practice first described by Henry David Thoreau and later enacted by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Through civil disobedience, we will withdraw our support from that action, in an attempt to suspend it.
You – individuals in countries throughout the world, committing yourselves to the three World POEM planks above, have made the third plank, which I am very excited to read now, possible. You have raised your eyes above boundaries and divisions of every sort, to acknowledge each others’ presence and the fact of your majority. You have discovered the power of your collective voice – before which, national governments bow and tyrants, sensing their obsolescence, cower. Ultimately, your patience and perseverance will wrest power from the dangerously immature, who would otherwise destroy us and the Earth we love.
How do we know we will triumph? Because, having accessed our own species’ wisdom, we know we must. Every species seeks to thrive. Super-colony species, such as ants, tapped into the power of species-identity eons ago – and they have since thrived like no other beings on this planet, to live in ways that suit them. This is the thrilling dawn of our collective experience – the awesome power of love – and the full realization of our destiny as humans! Our story is not over, though – it is just beginning, as we newly inhabit this place. We are a young species still, but we have finally grown up… and that, of course, is the essence of Plank #3.
So hold your glasses even higher – and sing, even louder, what we want the stars to hear:
Plank #3: “The time has come! We have arrived!”