(Publisher's Note: The following text accompanied an honorary World Passport issued to Nobel Laureate John F. Nash, Jr. by mail on February 1, 2002. Sylvia Nasar's bestselling biography of Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals in chapter 38, "Citoyen du Monde," that Nash, in 1959, influenced by this writer, tried to renounce his US nationality in Leichtenstein as a gesture of alienation to nationalism and for world citizenship. "To effect his makeover," Nasar writes, "he wished to trade his American passport for some more universal identity card, one that declared him to be a citizen of the world." Fulfilling the ancient adage that "All things come to he who waits," John Nash now has his wish.)
John F. Nash, Jr.
Your revised Game Theory, known by the provocatively auspicious term "win-win," has its spiritual roots in hoary and perenniel wisdom traditions revealing the geo-dialectical equation of the one and the many as bi-polar realities in a unified universe.
The advent, in the last century, of the discovery of nuclear power with its potential of total destruction of earthly life through the abstract mathematical equation: e=mc2 , rendered the preceeding game theory, with its "zero/sum" result, obsolete. Winners and losers were no longer relevant after August 5, 1945.
Scientists in general–including Einstein, the "father" of the Nuclear age–and mathematicians in particular, were confounded by the new and unprecedented political dilemma occasioned by Einstein’s earth-shaking and elegant equation.
You, John Nash, broke the theoretical bottleneck by recognizing the essentially holistic character of any conflict between seeming adversaries. The mutual advantage expressed in "equilibrium points" led to the dimensional expansion of von Neumann’s original thesis–like a metamorphosis–into the majestic and noble atmosphere of winners all!
The one element lacking from your Game Theory as applied to the politics of nationalism was the "referee" assuring its full compliance for mutual benefit. Indeed, the then prevalent "Cold War" between the United States and the Soviet Union–a classic geo-dialectical "zero/sum" example –hid the self-evident truth taught and lived by humanity’s holy men and women from time immemorial: that humanity itself, in its world govermental mode, is the self-evident "referee" between opposing and deadly national forces.
In trying to reject your own national citizenship in 1959 to seek a dynamic and immediate identity with that humanity–"refugee" being your choice as the political symbol of freedom from the national legal and stifling"cocoon"–you became a living icon of your own break-through Game Theory equation.
As you yourself intuitively realized, the political expression of that identity is world citizenship.
It is with gratitude, admiration and respect that this honorary World Passport is issued in your name by a global government of individuals, innocent inheritors of your "win-win" mathematical equation as they are living expressions of the inalienable human right of sovereign political choice. It represents the free domain of the common space sheltering and mirroring humanity itself.
The scientists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and other thinkers who, in trepidation, continue to serve the nationalistic "zero/sum," or "we, winners/they, losers" game theory now rendered mortal by the nature of the alleged "weapons of mass destruction," hair-triggered in many national arsenals, can instead, with your sanction, join us, as world citizens, to help fulfil the majestic "win-win" providential destiny of peaceful human exstence on this, our home planet Earth in dynamic unity with the cosmos.
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Garry Davis
World Coordinator
World Government of World Citizens
February 1, 2002