kel@ea.UUCP (02/18/85)
/***** ea:net.politics / brl-tgr!wmartin / 12:04 pm Feb 7, 1985 */ > In this case and many others in which a landed > aristocracy owns most of the land, much of the land goes idle. It is left > idle both for the enjoyment of the aristocracy, and because there is little > incentive to make it productive. The thing is, it is BETTER for land to be left "idle" and "unproductive". Then the natural processes and growth may continue unimpeded and undamaged by interference from humanity; light use, like individual hunting for subsistence (as the Amerinds did), will not damage it, and fits in with the other natural predation. Why do we feel compelled to upset this situation? Because we have enough people to feed that we find it "necessary" to engage in unnatural practices like agriculture, dam and road building, etc. All of these degrade and harm the land and the environment in general. What all this arguing about social organizations, libertarianism vs. anarchism vs. socialism vs. whatever, and trying to find fault with this or that system, is ignoring is that the cause of all the problems is simply excessive people. Without excessive population, the whole concept of "government" and "social order" is moot. There is never any need for government if you live out your life without coming into contact with or interacting with other people, because the "problems" (which governmental systems have been created to solve) that have been artificially created by having large numbers of people forced into contact with each other never arise in the first place. All these "solutions" which net.politics is debating are for "problems" which we have created ourselves, and which will vanish if this mass of humanity were to vanish, and be replaced by a dispersed group of human beings which are of limited enough numbers that will fit into the natural environment without damaging it. The only reasons I have ever seen for there being more human beings than there are grizzly bears or blue whales or any other creature at the top of its food chain have been religious ("go forth and multiply" divine orders) and self-aggrandizing ("I want a lot of sons to carry on my family name and support me and give me power and strength"). I don't find those reasons valid or defensible. Note that this does NOT mean that humans have to live a subsistence hunter-gatherer existence, and have the classical "nasty, brutish, & short" lives of primitive peoples. Ther is no reason why we cannot devote our technology to devising automated support systems, using non-damaging sources of power like geothermal energy, robotic repair and maintenance, and underground systems of production and distribution (coupled with airborne), that will provide each member of such a limited human population with a life of luxury and ease, which they may spend in artistic effort, scientific research, or contemplating their navel, as they choose. (See some of the Well-World books of Jack Chalker for a description of the thought-controlled Markovian planetary computers which supported his fictionalized race of beings who had such an existence.) I find nothing outlandish in this as a "racial goal"; it requires a fundamental change in our present value system, in which we seem to ostensibly ascribe some arbitrary high "value" to human lives, and verbally claim that it is good that people are alive or living longer, while at the same time devoting effort to kill off this or that group of people. This is merely hypocrisy, of course. Any amount of people over a certain level have not only no value, but negative values. (That level seems to me to be about 100,000; arguments about this being too restrictive a gene pool are easily countered by keeping extensive gene banks (or sperm & ova banks).) I've done my part in this; I've been sterilized and have no children. If we merely redirected the wasted efforts we now are expending on useless nonsense, we could achieve this (I would call it Paradise) in a few generations. This does not preclude the concomittant expansion and dispersion of humanity throughout space, either. Will Martin /* ---------- */