You may have seen the famous documentary, Four Horsemen.
In this film is this quote:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. ~ Frederic Bastiat
I ask myself why it is that we have written history to eulogize and applaud every rapacious bandit? Why is Alexander of Macedonia called, “The Great”? And a host of other bandits from every part of the world, whose only contribution was mass destruction, enslavement of innocent people and looting the resources of their countries. The British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and German Empires did their best to outdo each other in this race. Now the Americans are trying to beat the rest. I can’t be bothered to name all the others who I have missed not because of forgetfulness but out of contempt for this whole line of thinking and living.
As long as we continue to glorify war and plunder, we will continue to be plundered.
That is the paradigm and conversation that we must change.
I am not for getting too stuck in our own theories and start treating them like fundamental laws. They are not. They are theories; our attempts to make sense of our world. All power to those who postulate them and reflect on them. But they are theories. The world, the earth, is not something we understand completely – to put it mildly – for I believe we don’t understand it at all. Comparing the human race to rats or bacteria in a petri dish, only goes so far. These are not absolute conclusions to be applied to ourselves.
In any case, even if they are, we have two choices: Lie down and die, or work like hell to change the conclusions. I opt for the latter. I would rather go out on my feet fighting for a better world.
That is why I say to myself, ‘I will not allow what is not in my control to prevent me from doing what is in my control.’
Controlling world population is not in my control. But to reduce my own carbon footprint, to share my resources, to help others and many other things are very much in my control. So, I try to do all those.
As for the articles on population control, I have read similar ones for at least over 30 years that predicted the end of the earth at lower population levels (less than 8 billion). But we are still there. Also, all these are eventually talking about reducing the population in some remote land where the people are very different from myself. It is the concept of the ‘Other’, that makes it easy to conceptualize what are essentially culls of the ‘Other’. Easy to do because they are not like, ‘Us”. Shades of smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans?
We enable ourselves into this highly homicidal way of thinking because we think within the artificial and false boundaries of our nation states; lines on maps of our own making. We forget that the earth is not like this. Africa is not different from America or Asia because we decide to draw a line or because there is a ditch which we call the Atlantic between it and America. The earth is connected. It is ONE. Whether we like to accept that or not. What happens to one will happen to all of us, whether we like it or not. Ref: Butterfly effect.
The only way therefore that we can ‘save ourselves’, is by saving others. Not by culling them. Call it what you want but that is the conclusion that all these theories of ‘population control’ are leading to. It is this thinking – I don’t need to change, but the population needs to be reduced – that produces our Eternal War philosophy. Military Industrial States need war to survive and grow. They need to build weapons, places to use them with impunity and guess what, the reward is two separate lines of revenue; weapons sales and picking up the pieces later in the form of mines, oil, loot, slaves and land.
Who does all that go to? The 1%. Those same 62. At whose cost? All the poor dumb bastards who thought they were fighting for honour, to save their glorious lands from the marauding hordes of barbarians who don’t know the taste of a Big Mac or Pepsi. Okay, Coke. Same difference. It takes two to tango. In this case, the spin doctors who write the script to suit the 1% and the dumb, unwashed multitude who believes this complete crap and are willing to lay down their lives so that the 62 are not deprived of a single fish egg of their caviar. As long as there are those who are willing to be exploited, the exploiters will have a field day. That is why I say that it is high time we – the 99% – wake up. At least die with your eyes wide open.
I am of the belief that we need to change our lifestyles, which will stem from changing our values and rejecting the capitalistic, global domination model that we have been raised to believe. We must reject, greed and demonstrate that by ending our endless collection of garbage in the name of shopping, our addiction to self-aggrandisement and appeasing desires, our enslavement to accumulation of personal wealth at all cost and our world view which places us at the centre with everyone and everything else subordinate and subservient to ourselves. All of this is eminently possible with the right education starting in primary schools.
After all, if someone had told us to create a system where 62 people would have more wealth than the bottom 50% of global population, we would have laughed them out of the room. But that is exactly what we have accomplished and that too so subtly and quietly that I bet not one of us even realised it was happening. But believe me, we did it. We legitimized lying with full eye contact (recall George Bush and Colin Powell and Iraq’s unfindable Weapons of Mass Destruction), legitimized treating others like flies or mosquitoes, to be exterminated (recall Madelaine Albright’s comment on ABC: that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was ‘worth it’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE) and legitimized hypocrisy at levels perhaps never before seen. Come on people, wake up! Everything has an effect.
I say that because if we did this, we can undo it. We must undo it. It can’t last. It is a criminal, grossly unjust and utterly criminal way of life.
And finally, as I said earlier, we don’t even begin to understand the earth. The earth will correct itself. It will get rid of the cancer that is polluting it. It has seen many cycles of catastrophic (for its inhabitants, not for the earth itself) changes that completely altered the composition of those who live on it. And it can and will do it again.
So, let us get ready to change. Or get ready to be changed.