The Third World Where Is It?: Forgotten Corners of the World but We Have Life and Space

By Unity Elias Yang

A new civilisation focused on correcting the destructive errors of the present civilisation needs to be cultivated and implemented in the third world. This new civilisation will entail preserving current moral and environmental levels existing in the third world.

Unity Elias Yang, also the author of A Global State.

vLike the Third Estate in France, the Third World has nothing, but wants to be something, for both have been exploited.

Alfred Sauvy, French Demographer 1952.

No new light has been thrown on the reason why poor countries are poor and rich countries are rich.

Paul Samuelson, 1976

Does the Third World Point to the Future?

Trevor Burrowes, Author 1990.

The black race shall prevail.

Mouammar Kadhafi, President of Libya, July 1999.

They go naked as the day they were born; the women as the men. We Christians said they were remarkably beautiful men and women. This beauty was moral as well as physical. . . . They are the most pleasant and peaceful people in the world.

Christopher Columbus, Spanish Explorer comments on American Indians 1492

Born on 20th May 1974, Unity Elias Yang is the first African member of the Board of the Organization Vote World Parliament (VWP) in Quebec-Canada. He is also the Author

of a Global State through Democratic Federal World Government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467893442

Unity Elias Yang

n/a

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Bibliography

Biography

I dedicate this book to my parents

Preface 

The third world is not considered underdeveloped in a vacuum - it is with respect to the so-called developed world that it is perceived as such. At the time the now developed world was at the same level of development as the present third world, no one could define the terms developed and underdeveloped. If the present civilization is a blessing, then, the third world is fortunate to be developing faster, compared to the time it took the developed world to attain its current level of progress. Fortunate because, rather than progress by grappling with unknown concepts and, you may say, grouping in the dark, the third world simply needs to build on the experiences of the now developed world as did the erstwhile German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck to whom only Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience. At their time, the developed world had no experience to learn from and had to develop by daring and doing and learning from their own failures. It would be senseless, therefore, for the third world to strive to reinvent the wheel instead of drawing from what already exists. This book is a wake-up call to developing countries, to prepare to participate fully in the global stage with dignity and prosperity, in a new social order that is oriented towards global governance through participatory collective leadership. The United Nations is a step towards effective world government in which the developing countries have to participate and contribute. Presently, on the world stage, the countries of the developing world are perceived as beggars and complainers but they alone have to work to change this sorry image. Why can third world effort not fix Somalia, Palestine, the Western Sahara and North Korea?

However, special efforts are being made by Third World leaders to trace a path to the future, from the Nonaligned Movement to Continental and Regional organizations, aimed at fixing the future of the third world. African leaders relentlessly strive to stamp the continent on the world, despite its being considered the sick child of the planet, through initiatives like the new African Union, NEPAD and forums for reflection like the Africa 21 Conference held in Yaounde. Perhaps, these are appropriate therapies to cure the sick child of the planet.

Acknowledgements 

My deep appreciation of His Excellency Philemon Yang for the books in political philosophy and positive thinking he provided to my dad, which I picked from here and there to read during my late primary and early secondary school days, considered to be the roots of inspiration for my writings. His additional books and brief comments and advice reshaped the scope of this book. Professor Angwafo III Fru, my boss, has been the motivating moral machine, his brief remarks and words of optimism drove this book to maturity. Jim Stark, the author of Rescue Plan for Planet Earth: Democratic World Government through a Global Referendum and founder of the Quebec-based organization Vote World Parliament was my mentor, whose suggestions oriented my approach to writing and publishing. Unlimited thanks to the BBC World News and World Service what I call the BBC University for bringing the world into my small room, from where many chapters and paragraphs of this book were generated. I am grateful to all authors and speakers whose ideas could not be missed out in this book. Many thanks to L. Drucker, editor for Authorhouse United Kingdom, for his great work to fix this book to readable standards. I thank Gilbert Banboye for proofreading the entire manuscript, not forgetting Kenkoh Eugene Nai for typing the work. Maya Lang, the Authorhouse agent, facilitated access to the respectable services of the institution.

Introduction: 

This book is about the ‘people in the forgotten corners of the world,’ to quote US President-Elect Barack Obama in his victory speech that was broadcast the world over. Many could only listen on radio for want of a television set; others watched him live on the morning of 5 November 2008. Yet this book is more about those ignorant of Barack Obama because they lack even radios. These are the peoples constricted to their immediate and limited environments, who exist in oblivion of the outside world and invisible to it, for the most part—these are the peoples who are stricken by neglect, poverty and loss of communication. These are ‘the people’ who, along with their ‘corners of the world,’ actually are the ‘forgotten.’

The world is made up of two peoples: the prominent power wielders and decision makers, who are seen and talked of always in various strata of society; and the forgotten speechless and missing peoples, withdrawn to the backyards of society, and hardly heard of, thought of or listened to. Ultramodern telescopes capture images from the moon and faraway stars, but fail to detect the human species existing in what may be considered the abyss of Planet Earth, in which is what physical science might describe as a black hole in modern civilisation.

The need to depict the characteristics and challenges of the geopolitical entity described as the Third World is a prelude to prepare it for unequivocal identification and participation in the new global order. In a community of rich and poor, the uncontrollable phenomena of inferiority and superiority complexes will always hover around. There is no psychological equality when the rich and poor meet, and any psychological equality can only be established by levelling up standards; that is, by raising the status of the poor to meet the standards of the rich, because it will be unorthodox to reduce the rich to poverty in order to establish equality. Even though Jesus Christ asked some of his followers to give up their wealth and join him, these disciples knew that Jesus had more to offer.

In an increasingly globalising world, with an increasing drive towards global governance through an inevitable institutional world government, it is important for the Third World to begin fixing itself so as to step into global participatory governance with dignity and stamina, and not as miserable beggars as they are perceived today by the developed First World. As the bearer of the future of mankind, the Third World needs to be preserved, protected and respected. Therefore, a new civilisation geared towards correcting the destructive errors of the present civilisation needs to be cultivated and implemented in the Third World. This new civilisation has to touch on each of the following: a new politics for all the nations of the globe; a new human protection code; new human and environmentally friendly technologies aimed at preserving the modest, acceptable way of life in the Third World; and global justice institutions to protect the vulnerable people and the exposed environment from all injustices and misuse. Above all, a new civilisation has to create favourable conditions for the young to grow and the poor to come out of misery, while protecting the status of the rich, to prevent them from reverting to poverty to begin the vicious cycle all over again.

What is wrong about the Third World? Are its underdevelopment and poverty such permanent phenomena that they cannot be fixed? Moreover, are these phenomena attached to Third World countries and peoples in perpetuity? Are these phenomena God-made, or are they simply the result of a lack of human will to turn the tables? Does poverty entail only the lack of basic needs, or is it accompanied by unbearable suffering that may question the raison d’être of living as a human being? Do poor people see value in the human person that they incarnate? Do they discover a reason or a way to keep on with life, hoping for the unforeseen better days ahead? In God’s creation agenda for man, was there a definition of wealth and poverty? Did God in any way attempt to divide the world into rich and poor peoples, with the former located in the upper part of the planet (Northern Hemisphere), and the later in the lower part (Southern Hemisphere)?

We may never find truly satisfying answers to any of the foregoing questions; perhaps we fulfil our duty as humans merely by acknowledging that we at least need to ask these questions and try to find answers. For, if it can be demonstrated that God has no hand in such a divide, then the problem will be exclusively human. After all, there is convincing evidence that, the ‘black,’ ‘white’ and other colours of humanity’s races is not the direct work of God, but the result of climate differences and evolution over long periods of time. The laws of God are the laws of nature, characterised by the persistent search for equilibration, stability and balance.

Newton’s Laws of Motion explain, in terms of physics, the equilibrating character of God’s natural law, applicable not only to the world of matter and objects, but also to the social, moral and political aspects of human life. Newton’s First Law states: ‘Every body continues to be in a state of rest, or to move with uniform velocity, unless a resultant force acts on it.’ If this law of physics was to be transposed to the contemporary, and even post-contemporary, political and economic life of humanity, we realise that the Third World ‘continues to be in a state of rest’—a state of inactivity, a state of not knowing what to do—whereas the developed world ‘moves with uniform velocity, with progressive resultant forces acting on it,’ and accelerating it into further immeasurable progress and development.

Newton’s Second Law of Motion explains the first: ‘The change of the momentum per second is proportional to the applied force, and the momentum change takes place in the direction of the force. Momentum is the ability to move weight (mass) at a given velocity (speed in a given direction).’ According to this law, while the Third World moves slowly under the weight of its responsibilities and problems (low momentum), the developed world flies at rocket speed (high momentum), despite the weight of its responsibilities and problems.

The Third Law concludes the story: ‘Action and reaction are always equal and opposite.’ This is in conformity with the biblical adage that you can only reap what you sow. The level of action invested by the Third World in its development is low and feeble; hence, its low level of development. Conversely, the developed world is simply reaping the fruits of hard labour. The true historical presentation of the effects of action and reaction, inaction and non-reaction, sowing and reaping, as applied to human social, political and economic life can be found in David S. Landes’ Book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, which theorises ‘why some are so rich and some so poor.’

Similar dispositions can be developed in the Christian Bible, where it is unequivocally stated in a three principal dicta, as follows: ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.’ [Mathew 7:7] This totally vindicates God, who has made everything apparently possible for everybody, and neither partially favoured the North against the South, nor the white race against the black race.

The discrepancy between the rich and the poor is certainly neither natural nor permanent; rather, it is because of the disproportionate—or, better yet, insufficient—application of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and the neglect of the three biblical dicta that are believed by Christians to be the direct words of God. The way forward for the Third World is to kick off.

1 

The Peoples of the So-Called Third World

Our Planet Earth is described by cosmology as a tiny part of a universal whole, with man occupying an infinitesimal portion of that gigantic whole. Cosmology makes unimaginable suggestions about the size of the universe: It is vast and composed of parts and particles with dimensions ranging from ultramicroscopic to supratelescopic spaces.

Who owns this planet? Irrelevant question, indeed. Man has lived in the world for more than or less than the number of years so far predicted by various experts, depending upon which of those experts’ predictions is consulted. What is man’s mission here? Man claims to be the most intelligent of all creatures existing in the universe, at least for the time being, yet he seems the only creature that suffers moral and psychological stress from his fellow man, as opposed to other species that fear only predatory attacks and/or food shortages.

Is man intelligent, when he has to work for a living and pay for all that he needs, unlike other living creatures, which simply live and survive as part of their natural existence? The human being is not living life on earth his way, where his purported intelligence has imposed great illusions to confuse the true nature of life, which was supposed to be characterised by natural existence. Existence, a natural phenomenon, is the best for human life on the planet. The Judaeo-Christian Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve, believed to be the first human beings on earth: God provided enough food for the couple in the Garden of Eden and never required them to do any form of manual work—the only taste of utopian paradise to which man ever had access. The Garden of Eden was natural, and its occupants were expected to just exist and do no manual labour.

Having rejected existence, man moved on to change the environment, guided by his greed and vision, and he is being entangled in his own trap. Changing the face of things on the planet against the will of nature has made man a great enemy of nature. The more change man brings, the more change is needed to sustain previous change. On the contrary, systems that conserve their original forms do not fear change because nature makes them more resistant and self-sustaining. Change transforms a system by moving it away from its original status, and the farther away a system is from the original, the closer it is to destruction.

Who owns the world should not be a real question, as the answer will not convince everyone. Appropriate questions of interest to this writing are: Who lives where? Who is keeping what on Planet Earth?

Where we live defines our anthropology; makes what we are; designs our physical looks and our way of doing the many things of life. Human beings have diverse physical features attributed not to the taste of the creator, but to a phenomenon called evolution. Evolution is a kind of change, taking place slowly over a long time. This change is effected at nature’s pace and within its control, resulting in homogenous outcomes with all necessary considerations taken. Change initiated by man is always short-sighted and spontaneous, and is usually accompanied by devastating short- or long-term side effects.

For example, ultramodern biological experiments aided by the application of intensive digital technology have been conducted by the extraordinary American researcher, Dr Venter Craig. These experiments, which involve manipulating human genes to build new biological structures, are greatly admired, but feared at the same time, because of the possible negative implications on man and the environment that might result from these new man-made biological structures. Living space, it should be noted, has to be allocated for these new artificial human organisms being created by the experiments conducted by the Venter Research Institute, as well as other similar initiatives going on around the globe to try to re-orient human biology.

The time and space factors that act on human existence have transformed many components of our species. The conditions of space have induced diversity in human systems more so than have the conditions of time. An extremely cold climate imposes a skin colour on man that is different from that imposed by an extremely hot climate. Space by its nature is diverse, and so are its occupants. Specific life species are associated with specific spaces: the white race in the Northern Hemisphere; the black race in the middle or equatorial sphere. Consider the suggestion that, either the equatorial heat might have burnt the human skin, changing it from white to black, or, that the freezing cold of temperate winters might have destroyed the melanin pigment that produces the black colour, thereby transforming black skin to white. In either case, it is clearly spatial, not temporal, conditions that have caused the diversity.

The lifestyle of each people is defined by culture, and the elements that make up a culture are always directly connected to the environment. Culture is neither invented nor discovered in the way that science is; rather, it develops from repeated daily activities not motivated by a preconceived intension. In other words, culture is a collection of acceptable possibilities particular to a given community. Activities that are possible are those the immediate environment can support, not those that intelligent minds can craft. Human knowledge cannot go beyond the environment’s capacity and stock of opportunities.

Human intelligence is the basis of human culture, and it is guided by the material elements of the space in which they are found (i.e., our immediate environment and the vastness of space that surrounds our planet). Our wisdom and knowledge are nurtured by what we see and touch, but never by our imaginations. What we see is not more than what our environment provides. Man goes to the moon because he sees it in the sky; he combines scraps of metal from left and right to make a space vehicle to carry him to the moon. Nothing is ‘created’ as such; ‘the seven wonders’ here is what comprises the magic of rocket science.

Geography teaches us that the earth has the shape of an egg placed upright, with the pointed ends representing the North and South Poles. Midway between these two poles is an imaginary ring called the Equator. The climate of the earth changes as one moves from the Equator towards either of the poles, because of the inequitable reception of the sun by different locations on the planet. A change in climate results in different environmental conditions for the various regions spread across the globe from one pole to the other. These disparate conditions across our planet have imposed variations in human culture, in which each culture is defined by its territorial location on the world map.

The region of origin of a person can be identified at the global level, from the skin colour and other physical expressions. At the community level, cultural attitudes better identify people. It is frequent to hear one say, ‘Tell me your culture, and I can tell where you come from,’ or, ‘tell me where you come from, and I can tell your culture.’

The diversity in human culture is to blame for the social, economic and political problems of man. Everyone represents a culture, and when people have to interact, cultures come into play more than the physical human bodies. Questions such as: How do you do it? Or, how is it done here? Are followed by: We do it this way; my people do it the other way. Man must be tolerant and diplomatic in order to accept new ways of doing things in life. Diversity means differences; disagreements are caused by differences; wars are provoked by disagreements. Cultural difference is certainly not a good thing to have happened to the human system, the component parts of which are interdependent upon one another; that interdependence is crucial to the system’s survival.

By analogy and reasonable conclusion, the question that follows, Who is living where?, must be, Who is keeping what and with what value? The value of each culture will represent the potentials of the environment where it is practised, and such potentials will translate to physical wealth. It is possible to conclude, therefore, that rich cultures thrive in rich environments.

The poor countries of the world have been systematically grouped into a Third World in order to differentiate them from the First World of the rich and a faint Second World of the former Soviet bloc and its cronies, which flourished during the days of the Cold War. When Alfred Sauvy, the French economist, first evoked the notion of Third World (Tiers Monde in French) in 1952, it was to describe the underprivileged class in France, differentiating them from the first class of citizens (priests) and the second class (nobles). All of this had to do with the living conditions of each class. The concept was later developed following the Bandung Conference of 1955, which was held in Indonesia with representatives from Asia and Africa in order to describe countries that were not allied with the capitalist First World and the then communist Second World. Generally, Third World countries are the ‘underdeveloped’ nations in Latin America, Africa, Oceania and Asia.

We can only keep what we can see and touch, but never what we can only imagine or wish for. Therefore, who keeps what must be underscored by that fact that a man can only keep what he finds beside or close to him, and what is not disputed by a second party. What we keep defines our wealth in the manner such that the more you keep, the wealthier you are, and vice versa.

All that we can keep is the wealth of the world, as it is not yet evident that extra affluence is importable from other planets—or if any such extra affluence even exists—nor does it appear that we will know one way or another in the near centuries. The world in which we live operates independent of any external influence (other than the sun and moon, that is) and with mathematical precision certainty. It still behaves without noticing man, its number-one pest. Despite man’s ability to harvest excessively from the earth, he has not been able to control the natural actions unfolding on that earth, the provider of all this wealth and the energies that create it. This implies that accumulated human wealth will never surpass the earth’s wealth; unless explosive scientific adventure imports extraterrestrial wealth. Thus, the upper limit to human riches is no more than what this planet can generate—at least for now.

Who keeps what also defines who is rich and who is poor. This relationship is by no means limited to individual humans, rather but to the socio-political sphere as a whole; that is to the collectives called nations and states, or better yet, nation-states. A nation-state is a political creation that is determined by precise parameters. As termed by political scientists, the principal characteristic component of a nation-state (or a state or nation) is territoriality. This implies the existential space, the body politic or citizenry that exploits the space, as well as the political arrangement mentored by a government acting as facilitator of the efforts of the citizenry to exploit the resources enmeshed within their space.

The nation-state as a componential arrangement is dependent on the force of its population, which, bilaterally interacting, provokes what can be termed a direct proportionality in well-being. That is, the manifest rhythm of how one relates directly to the other. A responsible citizenry projects a responsible state and government that guides the collective actions of its masses. A rich state constitutes a rich populace. Nevertheless, what we cannot explain is how or why the distribution of material and intellectual wealth was done as it was; for, the attribution to the existing locations is, in most—if not all— instances, irrational.

Rational or not, man is endowed with certain mental or intellectual faculties that enable him to share within a politico-economic interdependency. This interdependency is not any human invention, but rather, an imposition on human systems by the natural rules of economics, as inspired by the sociology of our existence in a so-called social enterprise in which things are done not for subsistence and survival only but with the extra desire to attract admiration and respect from the unconcerned observers.

How you see yourself is exactly how you want others to see you, and how others see you makes your personality, and personality redefines society into models composed of classes. The social human being is the one phase of man that governs the world. If man were to abolish his self-invented social posture, then he would revert to mere existence, which is at the lowest energy level of activity, where survival is cheaper, easy and natural. There is no confirmation as to whether the additives