Universal Humane Needs Assessment:

This blog is set up to explain the UHNA project, its goals, proposed methodology and to invite contributors & collaborators to help refine the project into a useable resource.  This is an organically evolving “systems” exploration project.

The fundamental assumption

The fundamental assumption this project is based on is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people on this planet want to live a humane lifestyle regardless of gender, religion, race, age, economic status, geographic location, political affiliation, country of origin or cultural influence.

A humane lifestyle might be described as: the ability of an individual or society to live with a satisfying balance of psychological, physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional security; or in other words to live a generally fulfilling and happy life.  Each of us has our own definition of what constitutes a humane lifestyle but wouldn’t it be nice if we had a common ‘language’ or ‘framework’ that we could all relate to so we could compare our individual understanding?

The fundamental goals

This project is an attempt to develop an intuitively understandable and universally useful:

• list of  ‘elemental universal human needs & experiences’ that effect our behavior and globally verify it by creating the world’s largest signatory document.

• set of contextual frameworks for describing and understanding the dynamic balance of relationships between any ‘elemental universal human needs & experiences’ which drive our behavior on a daily basis.

The fundamental hypothesis

Logically Speaking,

IF there exists a universal set of ‘elemental human needs/experiences’ that directly effect our ability to lead a humane lifestyle,

AND these elements can be simply defined, intuitively understood and globally verified,

THEN there exists the opportunity for people to start to understand what and how any ‘elemental human needs & experiences’ drive our own behavior through experimenting with their own contextual framework models

THUS, the creation of such a platform may empower individuals and communities to collaboratively create the conditions needed to support sustainable humane lifestyles based on a common set of principals that may be globally verified and evolving.

Project feasibility

Essentially, this scenario places everyone of basic functional psychological capacity potentially in the same target market of “people who want to live humanely”; thus implying it’s potential to universally motivate. People tend to cooperate and are more conscious of each other when they share a similar set of fundamental principles and goals.

The outline of this project suggests a methodology which can feasibly facilitate a fundamental shift in consciousness of the individual on a global scale towards empowering them with the means to live a humane life style, thus greatly improving the odds of preserving, expanding and evolving human/e rights within societies. Addressing these issues at their roots will also be useful in understanding the nature of conflict and reducing incidences of desperation and desperate action.

A review of Historical and theoretical background logic

Regardless of how many laws are created to preserve humane rights or how many declarations of human rights there are that get officially recognized by hierarchical organizations, those rights will never be realized into actualization unless the nature of those rights are clearly understood by the individuals in any society for whom the rights were intended to be guaranteed.

Therefore, it is logical to approach this subject from the perspective of consciously engaging the individual with an intuitively recognizable set of fundamental principals which empower him/her to be more successful in fulfilling their ultimate right to self determinately actualize the implementation of their human/e rights.

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”—Author unknown…