Dear friends across the world,
For over a decade, Avaaz has fought and won battles to change laws, policies and politics. We've won huge victories.
But it hasn't been enough.
Because the truth is, there's something more powerful than laws and policies. Us. The culture, values and beliefs of people. And while we were trying to change policies, anger and fear and Facebook and the Kremlin have been changing people, changing us.
A great battle for the soul of humanity is being waged - between hope and despair, trust and distrust, truth and falsehood, fear and love, tribalism and unity, wisdom and what would seem like wisdom. And it's going on in each of us and all of us.
The shock troops on one side of this war are well known: the trolls. Whether it's the result of the wounds of shame and hardship they experience, or simple cash payment, they are spreading social poison at an industrial scale.
But who is on the other side? All of us. And that's where Avaaz comes in.
Trolls and the trolliness in all of us have taken so much from us - our social networks, media networks, much of our politics, even many personal and family relationships.
Let's make the 2020s the decade we took it all back.
And let's begin where we must - with ourselves - perhaps with a set of principles that we might try following, online and offline, to manage our own inner trolls and show the world a different way forward:
1) Strive to Untrigger - "triggers" move us to anger and fear - they steal our best and offer our worst. We all trigger all the time, but if we own our triggers as our own: "that's my insecurity about x" then we can stop blaming others, stop being trolly, and start acting from love and wisdom.
2) Listen for the voice within - when we're not triggered, we can listen for that quiet voice within that suggests wisdom to us. Call it conscience, wisdom, intuition, spirit, your authentic self - whatever. But it's there for all of us, if we just listen.
3) Be kind and strong - too many of us who are nice end up as bystanders, watching uncomfortably as trolls run amuck, or worse, reacting passive aggressively. But too many of us who are strong aren't kind enough, and become trolls ourselves when we stand up for others. We need to cultivate a loving strength - both 'yin' and 'yang' - to successfully protect everything we love.
4) Stop the Gossip, seek the truth - we can bring out the best or worst in each other. Gossip - or innuendo, fake news, smears, disinformation motivated by emotion and agenda and not care or truth - brings out our worst. We humans are fundamentally decent, but we're terrible at forming wise and accurate beliefs about each other. And most of the evils we do are in the name of such mistaken beliefs.