SERIOUS/HUMOR
Politically Incorrect?
But here’s how to save the human race
Saving our planet has never been the issue, notwithstanding rants from scientists and activists. The planet is going to save itself, and it will do so by eliminating the rampant human infection that continues to multiply uncontrolled and smother its surface.
The Solution: Reverse population growth. This is the most crucial, and also the most difficult, strategy to implement, and it needs to happen right now.
The rules: Both women and men will be allowed to have two children, maximum. After that, sterilization will be mandatory. Accidental pregnancies will be terminated. Existing “child credit” programs will cease to exist. Any encouragement—financial or otherwise—to have more children will end.
The difficulties: Several religions encourage large families and/or prohibit abortion or contraception. Some frown on having sex at all if it’s not to procreate. Governments, corporations, and Elon Musk also support population growth.
Why? Because bigger families produce more taxpayers and more donors to support “the Church” and “the Corporation.”
The entire world economy is based on the principle of “growth.” There are several ways to produce economic growth:
- Increase the amount of physical capital goods, which means increasing productivity of the labor force.
- Technological improvements allow us to make things better, faster, cheaper, or otherwise more productive. Consider the discovery and subsequent applications of petroleum, for instance.
- Grow the labor force! (Have more babies!).
- Increase human capital, which means increasing “productivity.” Do more, do it faster, do it cheaper, thereby increasing profits. (In other words, exploit the labor force.)
I once heard Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House, say on national television that “the most important way to shore up the economy is for Americans to have bigger families.”
The bottom line: Today, growth, value, technology, investments, corporations, and you-name-it, measure their growth in terms of cold, hard cash. CEOs of major corporations are fired if the shareholders aren’t seeing enough return on their investments.
The graphic above shows how the primary factors causing most of the world’s problems today (including the current war in Ukraine, and all other wars) are driven by greed (“do more, better, faster, cheaper, and increase profits at the expense of everything else”) and religion (“Go forth and multiply and cover the earth.”).
Covering the earth is what rampant blackberry vines do. Not a good thing.
The demand for corporate growth puts pressure on the population to grow to feed its engine. Both corporate growth and population growth put pressure on the Earth itself with increased demand for space for humans, their agricultural system, mining and other exploitations, like cities, roads, and Mar-a-Lagos.
And all this adds up to “killing the Earth.” What’s happening is the planet is warming—which in itself gives rise to a host of deadly consequences. Combined with habitat loss and other types of pollution, entire species are going extinct at a rate never seen since the last great comet took out the dinosaurs.
It has to stop. But if we don’t fix this right now, Mother Earth—who has given us the most incredible, unique and beautiful home—is going to kick us out. She’s already sending deadly viruses, storms, and floods, and melting the polar ice in preparation for her grande finale.
If any of this offends anyone (and I’d love to hear all your thoughts, for sure), the offended ones need to get real and quickly exit their denial bubble before it’s too late for the rest of us.
But meanwhile, in addition to stopping our rampant planet-destroying exploitations, here’s one more thing we can do to save our species and return to a more gratifying, peaceful, simple life:
Use CRISPR technology to edit the genome of all human embryos so that no child will be born with an opposable thumb. This improvement will prevent the invention and continued use of sophisticated tools that cause the earth to be mined, blown up, drilled, deforested, and paved over.
Humans without thumbs will become more like our beloved cetaceans, which are even more intelligent than we humans are. They’re social, friendly, musical, communicative, curious, and easy to get along with. They live in Nature rather than fighting and exploiting Her. They prefer to play, sing, and make love rather than making war.
“Growth” in terms of population or the economy is not a good thing. Happiness, peace, and stability are good things. Growth and world peace are mutually exclusive concepts.
Think about it.
Note from Author: For readers concerned about uncontrolled growth, there is another way. Read David Korten’s approach to a new economy based on community and No-Growth: https://davidkorten.org/kinsl392/
Thanks for reading!