The Magic House
Billy Faier
There
was a magic house in our
neighborhood; a very old, very large house. In it lived a family of people
who had never lived anywhere else. In fact, because the house provided them
with all their needs, they were completely unaware of anything outside of the
house. Unlike other houses, which are built by people, this house created the
people living in it. Their life was hard. From the very beginning, lost in the
mists of their memory, their numbers grew. The one single thing in that
world that did not, could not grow, was the house itself. Nor could its capacity
to provide sustenance increase, though, in the beginning, that capacity seemed
enormous.
As their numbers grew, the people slowly filled all the rooms in the
house. Each branch of the growing family staked a claim to the use of some of
the rooms, which seemed to be countless. And, using the bounty and substance of
the house, they created silverware which made everyone's life more pleasant than
it was in the harsh beginnings. But the substance of the house was being used
up for this and the people quarreled among themselves as to who got to use it.
These quarrels caused heat which set fire to the house. When last seen they were
arguing over who got to keep the silverware while the house burned down around
them, ending their existence.
This is a work in progress.
The Earth is finite!
We are now reaching the limits of the number
of people the world can sustain.
With the exception of the few remaining
primitive groups who live in harmony and balance with their environment,
all economic systems depend upon steady expansion to maintain their viability.
This is because all 'civilized' people seem to always want to better themselves.
They want their kids to have a 'better life' than they did. Unfortunately this
better life is most always symbolized by the acquisition of more physical
objects, land, control of others, bigger, better, faster stuff, etc, all things
that use up the substance of the Earth but do nothing to improve the quality of
life except to make it physically easier and faster to get the job done so that
they can have more time and energy to 'enjoy' life. And in their enjoyment of
life, these same folks need more bigger and better stuff like motorized sports
vehicles, snowmobiles, jet skis, motor boats, bigger and better houses--all
things that further use up the substance of the Earth and consume enormous
amounts of energy.
Growth seems to be their constant aim of the
politicians and the economists.
"Unlimited growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell."*
Both Capitalism and Communism suffer from the
same defect. As the Earth's bounty becomes scarcer it becomes more valuable.
More control is needed to ensure its fair use and distribution. That’s the
best case. The worst case is a slave economy. Both cases mean more and more
control. Without room to expand they become totalitarian. But there is no more
room to expand.
Therefore Population Control is the most
pressing problem the human race faces today. Involving ourselves in any and ALL
other problems, without concentrating primarily on Population Control is
insane. It is exactly like arguing about who gets the silverware while the house
is burning down around us.
The Earth would be a Garden of Eden were there
only about a billion people on it.
How to deal with it all. The business of
providing life's basic necessities: food, water, health care, shelter, and
education must be on a non-profit basis and run by altruistic leaders and World
Governments. In a Garden-of-Eden world of only one billion people these
necessities could be almost free. The biological life of the world is
self-renewing, but only at a set rate. That rate can support a billion people,
no more, and perhaps even less.
In an infinite world education would not be
one of the basic necessities but in this finite world it is of supreme
importance. It is only through education that we can hope to deal with the many
problems that hypnotize us while the invisible fire of population expansion
consumes our world.
Most of these problems are caused by our
differences. The first step in dealing with our differences is to eliminate all
borders. We must eliminate nations, laws that attempt to control morality, and
all other conditions that keep us apart.
Nationalism and Patriotism are vices the world can no longer
afford. We must be indifferent to
differences.
It is education that will bring this about.
The preservation of our Earth through
Population Control must be the primary cause for humanity.
No one wants to be told how many children they
can have. In a free society it is a decision that must come from the heart based
on the person's education. By education I mean instilling in all of us the
consequences to the world of our most insignificant acts.
All people, by virtue of the fact that they
are human, have equal right to the Earth's bounty. The only way to raise the
general standard of living is to decrease the population to a point that is
sustainable. Until that happens we, in the richer countries, must be prepared to
accept a lower standard of living in order to provide a livable standard to the
less fortunate. Otherwise they will always try to wrest it from us by force.
Basically, that is what is happening in the world today.
Individuals and nations have worked for what
they have and therefore feel they have a right to it; they own it. They will
defend this attitude to their death, if necessary. And that is exactly what will
happen--- it is happening today. This process can only lead to the extinction of
our species---or the Brave New World of complete totalitarianism.
Population Control must come in two stages.
The first stage is to reduce the population of the world to a number which can
be easily sustained by Mother Earth. The second stage is to keep that number
steady.
Stage One. It will never be necessary for
individuals to actually give away part of what they feel they have earned and
own. What is necessary is for us to eliminate all borders and allow anyone to
travel and live and work wherever they are able without the restraint imposed by states
or any other political entity. An immediate flood of people looking for a better
life will cause many of us, who have always lived on the top of the heap, many
hardships. But none of us will starve or die of curable disease, as is the case
with many of our world's underprivileged. This lowering of overpopulation
pressure in the third world will help the people in those areas to improve their
lives with their own resources rather than having to depend on the miserable
handouts we now give them in order to assuage our own guilty consciousness. Our
standard of living will go down; theirs will go up. When this is accomplished
more people will be able to accept the reality of the danger of overpopulation.
Sex is the free entertainment of the poor. When there are less of them,
population growth will slow. And with the spread of real education the growth
will stop and begin to decline.
Allowing all people to come to our shores and
compete for available work and exporting many of our jobs are two
ways of evening out the standard of living in the world, a prime necessity if we
are to survive. I am a sincere admirer of Barak Obama, our
president, but I am distressed to hear him, in his speeches, citing growth of
the economy as one of his goals. I was also distressed to
hear him shout an unqualified "No!" when asked, during his campaign if
he believed marijuana should be legalized.
Spending
untold billions of dollars of our money in the attempt to stop the drug
trade is the most stupid thing our government has ever done. It is
criminal! And it doesn't work. Prohibition does not work. It didn't
work for booze. It doesn't work for drugs. The Government may as well
try to outlaw food or sex. Drug addiction is a medical or
psychiatric condition. Drug use, despite the anti-drug insanity, is
as common now as it has ever been. The War on Drugs fills our jails
with millions of harmless people. Thousand of people are killed every
year in the drug-producing nations to the south. They are on the verge
of civil war between different Drug Lords, fighting among themselves for the
billions of dollars we, in the richest nations, spend on marijuana, cocaine,
heroine, and amphetamine. The overwhelming majority of these dollars
do not come from the occasional pitiful addict seen on the streets, but from
the average businessman, policeman, lawyer, doctor, broker, man or woman,
government worker, congressperson, teacher, engineer; people from every walk
of life who know how to use drugs intelligently and not get caught.
Furthermore the Government and all its agencies, police forces, Border
Patrols, armies, navies, all know these facts. But fighting drugs is
the biggest business in the world. It never ends. Even
bigger than War. At least Wars occasionally end, if only to give
nations time to re-arm. As much money is spent on interdicting
drugs, as is spent on the drugs. By legalizing the use and trading of
drugs we would, in one fell swoop, eliminate these two huge, nonproductive drains on our
resources, our energy, and our lives.
These
are good examples of how we deal with real problems in our lives. We allow FBI
statistics, buzz words like addiction, sensational media treatment, etc. to form
our opinions, instead of going out and finding out for ourselves what is really
happening. Your personal experience is the only thing you can really trust.
If your lifestyle is such that you come in contact with drug users, you must
know that for every addict you see there are hundreds of users who never get
busted and whose lives are not ruined by their drug use. Alcohol and nicotine,
both legal drugs, are each responsible for thousands of times more deaths than
drug overdoses.
Another
huge drain on our economy is the cost of legal drugs; those provided by our
pharmaceutical and medical establishments. Good arguments are
increasingly being made that they cause as much harm to us, in the long run,
as the good they do. The pathogens in our environment that sometimes
infect us, are becoming immune to our antibiotics through the process of
evolution. And so we must develop stronger and more expensive antibiotics. In
other words, our species is becoming addicted to drugs. If you doubt any
of this ask yourself why the television ads for prescription drugs devote as
much time to warning you of the possible adverse side effects ("including
death") of their wares as they do to the benefits.
The
biosphere of the Earth is a living breathing being. As in our own
bodies, its health depends on all the different parts living in balance with
all others. When one part of our body grows out of proportion to the
rest we call it CANCER and unless it is stopped, it will overwhelm our body
and cause its death. This is exactly what is happening on our Earth, and we,
the homo-sapien species, are the Cancer. Our enormous presence tends
to destroy other species, all of which are necessary to our own survival.
The first sign of most infections and diseases in our bodies is usually a
fever. GLOBAL WARMING IS THE FEVER HERALDING THE SICKNESS OF OUR PLANET'S
BIOSPHERE. There are simply too many of us for the world to support.
Since
the beginning of the Earth, carbon-dioxide has been emitted by volcanic
action, along with many other gases. Through the process of photosynthesis,
plant life has separated the carbon from the oxygen, leaving the oxygen to
sweeten the atmosphere and locking the carbon into the forms of coal and
oil, both underground. These concentrated forms contain billions of years of
sunlight energy. In about two hundred years humanity has released
practically all the energy stored in oil and perhaps most of the energy
stored in coal back into the atmosphere, by recombining it with the oxygen,
causing Global Warming. This upsets the balance of heating by the Sun
against the cooling of the Earth through the radiation of heat back out into
space. Life on Earth depends upon that balance. Only through the complete cessation
of human activity or the moving of the Earth out into a slightly larger
orbit away from the Sun can that balance be restored. Neither option is
practical, though the former is a possibility if we continue on our present
course. But by reducing the population to a billion or less, humanity can
fit into the small margin of variability allowed by the biological activity
in the biosphere which provides a small, but certain flexibility in the
balance.
Probably
the most difficult concept for most people to understand is that, in a
finite overpopulated world, ownership of land is theft. Ideally, in a
balanced functioning world, we are custodians, not owners, of the world. The
only thing we truly own is our own bodies. The only way to save the world is
by bringing the population down and sharing the bounty of the earth,
regardless of who the custodians may be.
This
has to happen soon. The gap between the rich and the poor is steadily growing
and the middle class is fast disappearing. This is because, in a world of
declining resources, it becomes more and more expensive to maintain any given
lifestyle.
Stage 2 will be relatively easy once we
accomplish stage one. A couple having more than two children will be severely
criticized. Adoption will be the solution to those wanting large families. There
will be no more homeless, parentless children.
This does not mean that we will all be 'the
same', 'cast from the same mold', or any of the other labels that are
commonly used in the place of rational discussion of our problems caused by our
differences. We must all learn to accept other's differences no
matter how we may feel about their lifestyles. And once the peoples of the World
start to mix freely these problem-causing differences will disappear. I, for
one, do not believe in the divinity of Jesus but I have total respect and love
for those who do because, like me, they are devoted to a cause higher than
themselves. My religion, if it can be called that, is the preservation of our
Mother Earth and us, her children.
_____________________
* I forget who said this first.
Overpopulation,
the most severe problem facing our World today, is never felt on a day to day
basis. Most of us are totally unaware of it because it never interferes
with our daily lives--a complete abstraction. And yet, it is the cause of all
of the problems that do consume us. It is the root cause of inflation, global
warming, the rise in the rate of the disappearance of different species of
plants and animals, all necessary to our survival as a species.
All
the other problems that consume us are made ten times worse and harder to
solve because of overpopulation.
1.
The
following is an attempt to summarize and trace the human story from the
earliest beginnings to the present and to show the inevitability of
conditions, as they are today, which lead directly to the extinction of the
human race.
2.
This
will be followed by an attempt to offer a solution enabling us to circumvent
this inevitability through the use of education, technology, and most
important, common sense.
The
most basic attribute of life is MOBILITY. Whether it is the
mobility of animal life in its search for food, mates, the construction of
shelter or the mobility of
seeds for the reproduction of stationary plant life, motion is required.
And that motion takes energy. It is an interesting thought that even if the
world were twice as large, the situation would be exactly the same because in
a twice-as-large world we, all life, would be twice as heavy, and therefore it
would take twice the energy to provide the necessary motion. Carrying this
thought to a ridiculous extreme; in an infinite world we would all be
infinitely heavy and would need infinite energy. Of course the most widely
accepted theory of the birth of the Universe, The Big Bang Theory, postulates
all matter and energy confined into a singularity of infinite smallness. No
room for economics, racism, or any other differences there.
In
its earliest beginnings life came from non-life. In the almost infinite
complexity of energy and matter interchanges occurring as the planet cooled, a
unique event occurred, whether an accident or at the direction of a supreme
being. This unique event differed from all previous atomic or molecular
energy exchanges in that it caused a bit of matter-energy to replicate
itself, drawing on other matter-energy in its surroundings to create copies of
itself that were not simply another haphazard result of the constantly seething froth
of matter-energy exchanges. To describe and understand this unique event
is the Holy Grail of all the physical and biological sciences because it is
the moment that biology emerged from physics; the beginning of life.
My
own lack of education in the sciences prevents me from intelligently
theorizing what happened next except to say that the same matter-energy
exchanges which created life now caused it to mutate into more complex, higher
forms. But my intuition tells me that this process was extremely
self-limiting; that it wasn't until it started consuming--eating-- other life
forms; that true biological expansion started. This is because the other forms
have already begun to transform the original matter-energy exchanges into
living, organic substance; a much more efficient use of energy for the
consumer; more bang for the bite. And so death has come into the picture. The
living lower form is food for the higher form. And the dead higher form
is food for the lower form. Only one step remains to complete the picture as
it is today; the beginnings of awareness.
At
some point this growing number of replicating life forms mutated to a
condition which made it necessary to consume only other life forms to continue
living (it would be millions of generations before the consumption of water
and oxygen and other inorganic elements would be needed to live). No longer
could our new life forms exist on the matter-energy exchanges which originally
created it. Living food was needed and the processes of evolution dictated
that those individuals that absorbed more living food and less inorganic
material were more likely to reproduce thereby creating individuals with ever
greater needs for living food in order to continue the process of expansion
and growth which seemed to be inevitable and natural. Somewhere in all
this came the ability to recognize and select organic over inorganic food, the
raw beginnings of awareness.
The
die is cast for the next three billion years. Eat and be eaten. As different
species began branching off from the original bit of life, awareness grew to
include recognition of species. Those who did not eat their own species
tended to reproduce more then those who did. When sexual reproduction came
into the picture awareness included recognition of the opposite sex. And so
on! But there never were any sharp dividing lines in the development of
behavior. There may still be cannibals today. Most of us don't eat each other,
but we certainly kill. In the earliest times killing was
sufficient to control population. This worked for many hundreds of thousands
of years.
Then
came the opposable thumb. Before the thumb there was little or no reason to
pick up anything with claws except to eat it. Now the parents could
handle their offspring, leaving them free to groom them with tooth and tongue,
ward off enemies with their teeth, examine them from all angles, generally
take better care of them; thus insuring their likelihood of survival.
The opposable thumb also aided in maneuvering through the trees which gave the
thumbed animal tremendous advantage. And, finally, the thumb made possible the
dawn of technology, the use of tools; the ability to hold and use something,
an advantage not provided to any significant extent by claws.
In
the earliest times awareness was the same as memory. Those individuals
able to repeat a successful act were the ones who survived.
In
a closed system, in which survival depends on eating other living individuals,
plant or animal, the health of any species depends upon the availability and health of its food.
As
human activity reduces the number of species it is also reducing the
availability and diversity of necessary elements in its food.
Life
is possible on Earth because the rate of cooling equals the rate at which the
Earth is warmed by the Sun. The inferior planets, Venus and Mercury, are too hot for
life as we know it. The superior planets, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune
, and Pluto, are too cold. Life on Earth is completely dependent on our
ability to maintain the exquisite balance required by physical law and our
place in the Solar System. The Sun, of course, will continue providing us with
energy for a few billion more years so, at present, we may consider it
endless. But the rate at which the biosphere of the Earth can
transform that energy into living matter is set. That rate is just
as important to life as the rate of energy from the sun. It cannot increase
because of the limited availability of land and water, necessary to this
process. There is plenty of salt water available to maintain life in the
sea. But most, if not all, life on land is dependent on fresh water to
survive. Our fresh water is limited to the present amount. It requires
an enormous amount of energy to desalinate sea water. The creation and
utilization of this amount of energy will greatly increase the pollution of
both the atmosphere and existing fresh water and increase global warming.
Anything that we do in an attempt to solve this problem will only
increase the problem elsewhere. It is like Mickey Mouse ears. You
squeeze one and the other pops up. But unlike Mickey Mouse ears, each
time you squeeze, the other pops up a little bigger than before; because the
squeeze puts more energy into the system. More and more people use more and
more energy. Burning fossil fuels, coal or gas, further increases global
warming. Clean Coal is a lie; I find it hard to believe that President
Obama has bought into this. Nuclear Power, aside from the inevitable
accidents--even without these accidents--creates an impossible to solve waste
problem and further increases the background radioactivity of our world,
which, in the long run, may prove to be the worst problem yet.
And
what about the long run? Technology can only postpone the inevitable end; a
world of disease, inflation, war, discomfort. It cannot prevent it. And
so we leave to our future generations a world in which all energy and effort
is devoted to mere survival; exactly as it was a hundred thousand years ago,
but without the jungle, the forests, the pristine oceans, the blue sky, the
snow capped mountains, the beautiful world of that time. That future struggle
for survival will be surrounded by technology, machinery, chemical foods,
plastics (everything is going to be plastic), mountain tops stripped of their
underlying coal and other commodities, more and
more noise; nothing that makes life worth living
according to today's standards. It will be an insane institutionalized life.
To prevent this we must reduce the population of the world to
a billion people or less, and keep it at that number forever.
The
process of evolution, which determines the way life grows and changes, is
totally unrelated to the physical laws that govern that process. That is
to say, there is no 'purpose' behind evolution. Evolution does not 'know' that
the world is limited. It will continue to operate as long as the energy comes
in and the space lasts. But we are running out of space. If things keep
on this way the population will grow until wars, epidemics, starvation, and
the like balance the population. For every person born, someone will
die.
That
is the way it should be as long as the population is low enough to be
supported by the biosphere. But with overpopulation the biosphere is
already changing. It took four billion years for the biosphere to grow and
develop the incredible complexity necessary to support our life. In less
than four hundred years we have crippled it to a point where it's basic nature
has changed. The Industrial Revolution has raised its average
temperature. With our great numbers we are crowding out a growing number
of plant and animal species, all of which are necessary to the continuation of
life as we would like to know it. This rate of change is speeding up
while its cause, the expanding population, continues to grow.
The
loaded gun is in the hands of the small child who believes it to be a toy!
What
can we do about it?
I
do not claim to have the answer. I don't think there is any one answer.
But certain things are obvious. The world, being the way it is, divided
up into hundreds of smaller factions, cannot arrive at the answer unless a
majority of people agree that overpopulation is the most important problem in
the World that must be solved if the human race is to survive. If humanity
disappears the World will adjust and go on. If we are to survive this
crisis we must agree to fundamentally change the way we live in the World.
We must completely end the ties between ecology and economics. Ecology
is the breath of our human life. Economics merely the silverware we use
to make it easier to live.
I
personally believe that the elimination of borders is a necessary first step
that will encourage the mixing of populations in order to even out the general
standard of living in the World. If we, in the developed countries, share our
wealth and resources simply for the greater good, rather than for profit, it
will eliminate all wars. Religious fanaticism will lose its appeal
when all people can live and eat well. That world will be ready for the
education that will lead to humanity lowering its numbers to the biosphere's
sustainable level.
THIS WORLD IS MY WORLD
THIS WORLD IS YOUR WORLD
WE MAY NOT LIKE IT
BUT ITS ALSO THEIR WORLD
THE ONLY WAY THROUGH ALL THIS FUSS
IS 'THIS WORLD BELONGS TO US'
BUT IT WASN'T MADE FOR US.
IT MADE US!
(apologies to Woody)
This is a work in
progress.
I
do not intend to get into a religious debate. I have already stated that I do
not believe in the divinity of Jesus which many will interpret as disbelief in
a creator. But respect for the opinions of my readers forces me to make a few
statements about my beliefs.
I
cannot imagine a God that would create us and not want us to use the abilities
and gifts given us. Our brain, the greatest gift of all, is the seat of
our intelligence, our reasoning, our feelings, and perhaps, our soul.
Could this marvelous instrument of life, with all its capabilities, it's
ability to learn, it's APPRECIATION of life, have been created for the sole
purpose of adoring it's creator? I doubt it. But if you believe
that the Earth was created by God for us, what greater demonstration of faith
in that god could be shown than preserving it in its beautiful, bountiful
state, rather than what we do today; ravishing, exploiting, destroying its
life and its beauty in the hopeless belief that Jesus, or any other messiah,
is on his way and will make it all right. There may be an intelligent
being, or creator, watching it all happen. But this I believe; our destiny is
completely up to us. There is no help out there.
