Human Values & Wisdom

As humans, values of some sort guide all of our behaviour. Information on values, and how it can be organized, is seen by the UIA as one of the keys to the global organization of knowledge about organizations, strategies, or problems.The Human Values and Wisdom section of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential it is an ongoing attempt to provide profiles of, and map relationships between, the different guiding principles of human behaviour - which often occur in value polarities of constructive or destructive values - in the hopes that a more comprehensive understanding would greatly enhance our ability to deal with current global challenges.

Take for instance the value polarity of Attack and Defense. This reality of the human condition has been recognized in the proverbs of lay-people such as "Attack is the best form of defence" to the quotes of famous leaders, including "It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war" by J F Kennedy. The "destructive" value of attack, necessary as it might seem, generates world problems including racial intimidation and verbal abuse. However, the "constructive" value of defense also aggravates problems such as excessive parental defensiveness. Both values in turn give rise to strategies, both "positive" and "negative", and this value polarity is part of a wider complex of values based around interaction, and other examples could include Support/Opposition and Neutrality/Compromise.

The Human Values and Wisdom section of the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential includes this value polarity as well as 3200 other value profiles and 120,000 relationships beteween them - from Anarchy, Boredom and Creativity, to Xenophobia, Youthfulness and Zealotry. The values presented are relevant to the aims of international constituencies (profiled in a complementary publication, the Yearbook of International Organizations) dealing with policy making for addressing world problems.