The World Constitution: What We Owe to Our Children, Present and Future
About this ebook
She is right. Somebody always decides. This book is the argument for deciding differently.
The World Constitution: What We Owe to Our Children, Present and Future is a work of constitutional philosophy, psychological diagnosis, and civilizational urgency. It examines nine of history's most consequential constitutional moments — Philadelphia 1787, Paris 1789, Bonn 1949, Tokyo 1947, New Delhi 1950, Cape Town 1996, Beijing 1982, Moscow 1993, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — asking what each civilization believed was most inviolable about the human person, what the historical crucible of their moment forced them to protect, and what they could not see.
Every constitution in this book proclaimed the floor. Not one fully built it. The pattern is not accidental. Through five documented psychological mechanisms — kin selection, Terror Management Theory, compassion fade, the posterity problem, and moral licensing — voluntary human psychology will never maintain a universal floor. It must be structural, funded, enforceable, and permanent.
But the deeper failure is older. The framers of every democratic constitution inherited three thousand years of monarchical psychology. Citizens who had never expected positive action from a king could not demand it from the governments that replaced him. The floor kept becoming a favor. The favor kept becoming a bargaining chip. The game of thrones persisted inside the constitutional language that claimed to abolish it.
Now, at the threshold of technologies that can either deliver the floor to every child on earth or weaponize the scarcity that keeps them from it, the window for a world constitution is open. It will not stay open long.
This book proposes the architecture: the duty framework, the ethics of power, the renunciation of war, the accountability of every institution to the child with nothing between her and what the system does. And the first article — not as aspiration, but as the recognition of what was always already true.
The framers of the world constitution are alive right now. They may not know they are framers yet.
Discover more
About the author
Ravinder Nath Bhalla, MD, is a retired board-certified adult, adolescent, and child psychiatrist based in South Orange, New Jersey. Over four decades of clinical practice, he treated thousands of patients across the full lifespan — from early childhood through the final years of life — developing the frameworks for human development and constitutional advocacy that run through his body of work.
He is the author of the Abundance Series, a multi-volume work spanning child development, psychiatry, social policy, constitutional philosophy, and civilizational architecture. The Abundance Life: A Guide from Birth to Posterity (Book Seven) and The World Constitution: What We Owe to Our Children, Present and Future represent the series' culminating arguments: what every individual child needs, and what the civilization they are born into owes them.
He lives and writes in New Jersey.
