Think Local, Act Global

In a conversation the other day I was trying to describe some of my viewpoints and some of my aims. The person I was speaking to came back with, “sounds like the 'think global, act local' concept”. I agreed in short before a quick pause and then said, hold up. That is not what it is, it is exactly the opposite. While I greatly appreciate and support the 'think global, act local' movement, I definitely come to it from a different point of view.

If we spend all of our time thinking about things on a global scale (and it is wonderful to realize that our small footprints can have a large impact on the world as it exists beyond our typical site line), then we never really learn the intricacies of the multitude of varying 'locales' in the world. This is the problem with thinking globally, is that what exactly do we really know of the globe? How many of us have really been out and about it? Most likely our 'think global' concept comes from someone else's concepts, someone else's viewpoints. Not that this is all bad, but think about it in the terms of you letting someone else interpret the world for you and then giving that already digested info to you for your usage. The world as we see it is shaped entirely by the information that is presented to us after someone else has already picked and chosen how to see it and explain it.

Now think about it locally in your 'line of site.' You know the people, the culture, the norms, the generally accepted practices, the niceties, etc. You understand the area, you understand the people, and you know how they 'function'. Now think about humanity in general. We have an infinite amount of cultural nuances and variances, yet we all still wake up in the morning and all pretty much put one foot in front of the other, we look to eat, to keep ourselves clean and warm, search for company in others, etc. The world is not such a different or mysterious place, people like it when others are nice to them, they like to be able to control their own interactions with others, live in a secure setting, etc. On a grand scale these things make sense to us all as we ourselves are human, and we know what human emotions and situations feel like.

The variances really come in different ways of doing things, different cultural conclusions and different view points. So in this way I would say that what we really need to be doing is to be thinking about the local things that go on in the world – everywhere. We should all be striving to go to as many places as possible, to learn as many things as possible, and then try to draw our own larger ideas from this. We should figure out how it is that people all over the world do the same things and then try to find a global system that allows for the most inclusive and amicable system to allow people to be people. Take ideas from all over the world (not just the ones that are presented to us through they eyes of an opinionated journalist, an over educated academic, or an adgendaed politician), but those of local people, dealing with a multitude of locally unique, yet humanly similar, issues to those seen all over the world. There are some many brilliant ways of doing things that we don't even no about. We need to find them, search them out locally, and then try to incorporate them into our global ideas and actions.