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  We started this journey searching. We knew there was a better, more fulfilling way of living. Now the Principles have given us a direction and a focus for our lives.

  Let’s pause for a moment at the threshold of our new lives and allow that focus to zoom right out across our fragile Earth to the 7.3 billion people we share our planet with.

  Imagine how it would look if it were truly governed by spiritual Principles.

  How different things could be if, across the world, a desire to be fair rather than to have more became our primary motivation.

  How would things change if compassion replaced judgement and if being kind became the new cool? If we all sought to abide by WE’s manifesto and put spiritual Principles at the center of our lives.

  Just as each of our individual lives has been blown off course by thinking that externals could heal internal pain, so many of our institutions and governments have been governed by doctrines that exacerbate rather than solve the challenges the world faces.

  Suffering is an inevitable part of being human. But what about suffering that is avoidable, caused by inaction, neglect, or greed?

  We want to see the changes that have started within us translate into external shifts—not just for us but also for all those who suffer across the globe.

  Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

  —MARGARET MEAD (1901–1978), cultural anthropologist and author

  This is not a manifesto in the traditional sense of the word. It’s a rallying cry to commit to a new way of life: one that is based on spiritual Principles.

  It’s a call to apply the tools we’ve now learned to every aspect of our lives: at home, at work, in the polling booth. To let them govern how we live, how we do business, how we raise our families, how we deal with our neighbors.

  It’s a call to a values-led existence that puts love at its center. One that refuses to discriminate on the basis of race, class, creed, or gender.

  It’s a call for love to become a way of life. To let it dictate our choices, our actions, and our interactions.

  This manifesto will take commitment on your part. It will mean practicing these Principles on a daily basis. Like swimmers in deep water, we have to keep moving in order to stay afloat. Any time we stop using them, we’ll start to slip back into old patterns of criticism, competition, and judgement. But if you continue walking this path and practicing the Principles in your daily life, they will keep you resilient and focused, and build your compassion and connection.

  Practice is key. We are practicing. None of us gets to be perfect.

  Perhaps you will want to work through the chapters again, maybe even with someone else to share what you’ve learned. At the very least, continue to meditate, practice gratitude, and take action. Put kindness to yourself and others at the center of your life.

  This journey has no end—we’ll be working on ourselves, our attitudes, and our actions for the rest of our days—but if we walk forward together, one woman at a time, amazing things will come to pass both for us individually and for the world in which we live.

  A WORLD IN NEED OF LOVE

  It doesn’t matter how strong your opinions are. If you don’t use your power for positive change, you are, indeed part of the problem.

  —CORETTA SCOTT KING (1927–2006), civil rights leader

  The challenges that the world faces are, in many ways, analogous to the challenges each one of us faces internally.

  Fear and resentment cause the global equivalent of synthetic pain. Just think how different our world would look if the West’s response to the tragedy of 9/11 had come from a place of concern and compassion rather than fear and judgement.

  And how different would our world look if economic goals were focused on sustainability rather than harnessed to a model built on “more,” with its thirst for ever-increasing levels of consumption and debt?

  The quick fixes we reach for when we’re emotionally out of kilter are similar to the short-termism that drives much of today’s politics. Just as many of us may battle with greed and pride, our governments, too, fail to end the arms trade for fear that someone else will get the profits or risk unpopularity at the polls by tackling the oil lobby.

  Our collective preoccupation with the self has legitimized greed and prioritized individual advancement over the greater good. In place of the value systems that religions once provided for most of us—is a gaping spiritual void, which we’ve attempted to fill through the pursuit of material well-being. As a result, the richest have grown wealthier, and the rest have been left behind.

  * * *

  A WORLD APART

  In the United States, the gulf between rich and poor is now wider than at any time since the 1920s, leaving the richest 0.1 percent owning as much as the bottom 90 percent. More than one in five American children now live in poverty1—the highest rate in any developing nation.

  Globally, the wealthiest sixty-two individuals now own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.2 Fuelling this extreme inequality is a global network of tax havens. As a result, poorer countries lose at least $170 billion a year—money that is desperately needed for vital services such as health care and education.3

  * * *

  None of this is inevitable. It’s about choices.

  Our current system leaves us polarized. It’s a binary system where some of us are winners and, as a result, all of us are losers. Where those of us with jobs often work insane hours, while those who are out of work languish at the perimeter of society. Where the opportunities that the computer age promised for shorter working weeks and a fairer division of labor have been ignored in favor of a deregulated labor market, resulting in zero-hour contracts and round-the-clock working. Where wealthy nations battle with rocketing scales of obesity, and yet 800 million people go to bed hungry each night.

  * * *

  HUNGER AT HOME

  Hunger is not just a problem in the global south. In the United Kingdom, as a result of austerity policies, there’s been a massive rise in the numbers turning to food banks to survive.4 In the United States, 48.1 million Americans now live in food-insecure households, with African Americans twice as likely to be food insecure as their white non-Hispanic counterparts.5

  * * *

  Those of us who are okay for now and have managed to achieve a degree of security find that it’s increasingly accompanied by a nagging sense of unease. Deep down, we know our current system isn’t fair and that while we’re winning, someone else is losing. While our child rips open a mountain of presents on his or her birthday, elsewhere someone else’s child has none. While we scrape edible but uneaten food into the trash can, others are starving. Increasingly, we’re unable to square the lie that we’re not all connected; that our actions don’t have an impact on each other.

  If we made kindness the governing Principle of our own lives, how much better could lives be across the globe, and how much happier would we, as individuals, be?

  Study after study shows that it’s not how much we have absolutely that governs our levels of happiness, but the levels of equality—including income equality—within a community. On an international level, global inequality causes wars and mass migration. Domestically, it contributes to higher crime and societal divisions.

  * * *

  HAPPINESS VERSUS WEALTH

  Bhutan, a small land-locked kingdom nestled at the foot of the Himalayas, has pioneered another way of doing things. Instead of using gross domestic product (GDP) as a measurement of success, it uses a gross national happiness index, and its policies prioritize individual well-being and spiritual values over consumerism. Although it is one of the poorest nations on the planet, it regularly ranks in the top ten happiest nations.

  The United Nations is now investigating how Bhutan’s model could be used across the globe.

  * * *

  The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it;
but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

  —MADAME DE STAËL, 1766–1817, French intellectual

  Our current economic system has a twisted set of values. All the money that changes hands to drill and sell oil counts as a positive, irrespective of the cost to the environment. And when there’s an environmental disaster, the money spent clearing it up gets counted as positive economic activity and added to the GDP as well.

  We count as positive the money the arms trade adds to our balance of trade but fail to set against it the catastrophic human and financial cost of the wars that result. Across the world, we now have cities in which children, asthmatics, and the elderly can’t breathe, but the cost of treating them isn’t taken into account when factoring in the value to the economy of private cars—let alone the cost in terms of human suffering.

  WE’s 9 Principles provide a new way of calibrating what matters most to us and our planet.

  Equal Means Equal

  The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

  —CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP, obstetrician, gynecologist, and author

  As women, of course, we have additional battles.

  Our fight for equality is far from won. And now America has elected a presidential team that threatens to turn the clock back still further.

  The United Nations enshrines equal rights in its charter. But out of its 191 heads of state, only 12 are women.

  In the British Parliament, fewer than 3 out of 10 MPs are female. In the United States, there are more CEOs of leading companies who are named John than there are women CEOs. And less than 1 percent of statewide elected executives are female and black.6

  Across the globe, the work of women is consistently undervalued. Worldwide, when unpaid work such as housework and family care is included, women do 75 percent of the work, receive 10 percent of the pay, and own 1 percent of property.7

  We are told business backs equality, but the movement toward equal pay has stalled across Europe, leaving women’s pay lagging behind men by roughly 26 percent.8 And in the States, if you’re a black woman, the pay gap is 32.4 percent, rising to a scandalous 44.1 percent for Hispanic women.9

  The United States is alone among developed nations in not providing paid maternity or parental leave across all its states—the other two in the world are Papua New Guinea and Oman. That leaves nearly one in four American women returning to work within two weeks or less of having a baby. About half of those women were back to work in under a week.10,11

  Caring professions such as teaching and nursing, traditionally dominated by women, pay far lower salaries than careers that contribute far less to society but are dominated by men. And although Western economies would collapse without it, the work of caregivers isn’t factored into the GDP at all. In the United Kingdom, caregivers (mainly women) would cost the country £119 billion if they had to be paid for—that’s three times the defense budget.12 The Canadian government has estimated the value of unpaid caring contributes over 30 percent to the country’s GDP. Imagine what would happen if we all went on strike!

  * * *

  TOGETHER WE CAN!

  In 1975 Iceland’s women went on strike, as 90 percent of them walked out of their homes and jobs. The country ground to a halt. The following year, a law was passed that guaranteed equal pay. Five years after that, Iceland became the first country to elect a woman president, and it now has the highest gender equality in the world. Despite the landmark legislation, in 2016 female pay still lagged behind male pay by 18 percent. So there was another strike. At 2:38 p.m. promptly, women left their places of work—giving themselves the 18 percent of the day they weren’t paid for.

  * * *

  We are living in the modern age, and we believe that nothing is impossible.

  —MALALA YOUSAFZAI, Pakistani activist, Nobel Prize laureate

  In the West, men’s contributions in the home are increasing, but women still do the bulk of household tasks—which amounts to an extra nine hours’ work per week for women living in the developed world.13

  Further afield, economic reform has similarly failed to deliver women what it promised. In China, capitalism has created greater gender inequality rather than less. While pay was roughly equal under Communism, by 1988 women earned 87 percent of men’s pay, and now they’re down to 67 percent.14

  In India, growing economic prosperity has actually resulted in an increase in honor and dowry killings among the middle classes.15

  Across Asia over the last three decades, 163 million female fetuses have been aborted or killed at birth on the grounds of their gender.16 That’s more than the entire female population of the United States, and the resulting spike in surplus males has resulted in an increase in trafficking and bride purchasing from poorer countries.17

  Around the world, 603 million women live in countries where domestic violence isn’t considered to be a crime. And a staggering 200 million women have undergone female genital mutilation.

  Nearer home, one woman is sexually assaulted in the States every two minutes, while in the United Kingdom women are murdered by their partners each week, yet rape convictions are falling. A British woman who has reported being raped has only a 5.7 percent chance of her attacker being convicted,18 and in the United States, only 2 percent of rapists spend more than a day in prison.19 The vast majority of rapes are never reported.

  While genuine equality eludes us, warring ideologies seek to contain and define us. One requires our bodies to be waxed, tucked, and sliced, the other that we be hidden behind veils.

  Our current way of living has failed catastrophically to provide freedom from exploitation and violence.

  * * *

  AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

  Not all cultures prize youth and physical perfection in the same way as the West. For example, in Japan, the aesthetic of wabi-sabi places a higher value on age and imperfection than it does on youth. Wrinkles and signs of aging are treasured as unique and precious and viewed as adding to a woman’s beauty. How great would it be if we could choose a different attitude that saw our life experience as beautiful rather than something that made us increasingly culturally and sexually invisible?

  * * *

  Equality: A New Paradigm

  We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons . . . but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

  —GLORIA STEINEM, women’s rights activist, magazine publisher, and author

  As women, we want equality, but we also want to live in a society that reflects our real values and the truth of who we really are.

  We want fifty-fifty, but we have to ask, fifty-fifty of what?

  Too often we’ve found ourselves fighting for our fair share of systems and institutions that leave us obliged to choose between our career and our family. They were designed around a workforce that didn’t give birth to children and wasn’t expected to nurture them. They don’t work for us as women or for men, or for the generations that will come after us.

  We don’t want an economic system that puts profits ahead of people and limitless growth ahead of what’s sustainable. That model fails to place any value on caring.

  We don’t want to lean in to win our share of systems that don’t work for us.

  We want a new model, one that is based on the reality of who we are and what we need. One that gives us the opportunity to be real and messy and whole. That recognizes the value of our unpaid labor as well as conventional measures of financial gain. That enables us to be honest about who we are and to build systems that are fairer and meet all our needs—of whatever gender, creed, or generation, and wherever we live in the world.

  WE Together

  You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.

  —MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund

>   Before walking this path, many of us have felt powerless and insignificant. We’ve often been told there was nothing we could do to make a difference, and we believed it. At some level, it may have let us off the hook. But now we know—from our own personal journeys—that action really can change things. We’re no longer prepared to tolerate the knowledge that others are suffering due to problems that have solutions.

  Think again about what would happen if we really did each decide to subject government policies to the same spiritual test we’re starting to apply to ourselves. If we collectively made kindness our guiding value in every aspect of our lives.

  Our economic priorities would shift. Protecting the planet would be put ahead of maximizing short-term profits. Refugees wouldn’t be left to drown at sea. Caring responsibilities and child rearing would be accorded their real worth, and we’d share work more evenly so that we could all work to live rather than live to work.

  The solutions that already exist to tackle poverty, inequality, and the threat of runaway climate change would be implemented.

  We’d elect wise, spiritually whole politicians with a mandate to end world hunger rather than perpetuate it. There is enough food to feed the world’s starving. The problem isn’t a lack of resources, it’s a lack of will.

  Blueprints exist for how it can happen: 193 countries have agreed to the United Nations’ Global Goals, designed to end world hunger, inequality, and climate change. But they won’t be implemented unless we start speaking up and saying we’re willing to have less so that others can have enough. And vitally, our voices will need to be heard above the hum of those whose vested interests our current systems reflect and serve.