Publicly wishing for anything to “take out”, well, me is disappointing.
Further, if you think that the collapse of the global financial system, and the related economies and areas of trade, would be a big problem solver, you may want to reassess. Would people take better care of the environment if they were (in many places) starving or freezing? Would transferring a lot more power to those countries where crude oil (for example) bubbles up and lies around in puddles (e.g. Kazakhstan, Kuwait) be a whole-hearted improvement?
People are, on average, well known for being very dim. And the “market” that it is so easy to despise dispassionately is entirely composed of people, mostly demonstrating their usual level of wisdom. Getting rid of (say) foreign exchange dealers or the rather disturbing carbon-emission-trading brokers or whoever is not likely to increase overly the wisdom of humanity. And the essential problem is not rich or selfish or even wholly unpleasant people per se, but the total volume of human stupidity.
To calculate the volume of human stupidity, one need only multiply the average amount of stupidity per person by the number of living people at any given moment. 6 billion very smart people might well be perfectly sustainable alongside a planet that they like the look of (with whales, breathable air and so on), and one billion who were (on average) idiots certainly did a non-terminal level of damage to the like-ability of the planet and the numbers of species thereon – but the combination of the newly huge numbers and the expanded ability to affect the environment and the same level of daftness as we have always had causes grimness.
The problems that we have in the world of an environmental nature (like all the major problems that are of wide consequence) are complex (which necessarily means, via Poul Anderson’s maxim, that simple solutions will always be wrong), and caused by people – not by their means of exchange. And crude misanthropy is of course almost always a safe starting point, like cynicism or even nihilism, but it does not anyone very far in terms of actually doing anything.
A word on misanthropy. Neil Young sang 30-something years ago that “Even Richard Nixon has got soul”. It is fair enough to spit on Nixon’s grave, but our Neil has as usual got a point, and a way of earning admiration in his careful phraseology and thought. It is just people, like it always was, or something of the sort.
And don’t worry how the earth will cope with human over-population. The earth will do fine, even though we will get a world where the numbers that starve (as a proportion of the total at least) will stop falling and start rising fast, and even if we keep exterminating species that we rather like to have around the place. And, sooner or later, one way or another, the over-population will go away. My personal guess is that epidemics aplenty await us in the New Millennium – and, from a global perspective and a genuinely long term view, quite right too.
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timeasmymeasure
Your hovercraft is full of eels
Date: 2007-06-21 09:37 pm (UTC)Publicly wishing for anything to “take out”, well, me is disappointing.
Further, if you think that the collapse of the global financial system, and the related economies and areas of trade, would be a big problem solver, you may want to reassess. Would people take better care of the environment if they were (in many places) starving or freezing? Would transferring a lot more power to those countries where crude oil (for example) bubbles up and lies around in puddles (e.g. Kazakhstan, Kuwait) be a whole-hearted improvement?
People are, on average, well known for being very dim. And the “market” that it is so easy to despise dispassionately is entirely composed of people, mostly demonstrating their usual level of wisdom. Getting rid of (say) foreign exchange dealers or the rather disturbing carbon-emission-trading brokers or whoever is not likely to increase overly the wisdom of humanity. And the essential problem is not rich or selfish or even wholly unpleasant people per se, but the total volume of human stupidity.
To calculate the volume of human stupidity, one need only multiply the average amount of stupidity per person by the number of living people at any given moment. 6 billion very smart people might well be perfectly sustainable alongside a planet that they like the look of (with whales, breathable air and so on), and one billion who were (on average) idiots certainly did a non-terminal level of damage to the like-ability of the planet and the numbers of species thereon – but the combination of the newly huge numbers and the expanded ability to affect the environment and the same level of daftness as we have always had causes grimness.
The problems that we have in the world of an environmental nature (like all the major problems that are of wide consequence) are complex (which necessarily means, via Poul Anderson’s maxim, that simple solutions will always be wrong), and caused by people – not by their means of exchange. And crude misanthropy is of course almost always a safe starting point, like cynicism or even nihilism, but it does not anyone very far in terms of actually doing anything.
A word on misanthropy. Neil Young sang 30-something years ago that “Even Richard Nixon has got soul”. It is fair enough to spit on Nixon’s grave, but our Neil has as usual got a point, and a way of earning admiration in his careful phraseology and thought. It is just people, like it always was, or something of the sort.
And don’t worry how the earth will cope with human over-population. The earth will do fine, even though we will get a world where the numbers that starve (as a proportion of the total at least) will stop falling and start rising fast, and even if we keep exterminating species that we rather like to have around the place. And, sooner or later, one way or another, the over-population will go away. My personal guess is that epidemics aplenty await us in the New Millennium – and, from a global perspective and a genuinely long term view, quite right too.
(Your wish etc.)
N