First I will address your question. The reason a global government is more malevolent than a national government is because it would be a monopoly. By definition if it is global it must exclude every other alternative. Correspondingly it would deny a voice to any dissenters and would actively seek to suppress any opposition. What keeps some national governments vaguely within the bounds of reasonableness is the knowledge within the jurisdiction of comparative conditions in other jurisdictions, and the freedom to move and travel to those jurisdictions. What undermined consent most effectively in the former Soviet Union : the visible evidence that negative value added was so universally persistent and living standards were visibly declining both in relative and absolute terms under the communist regime. A global government of any persuasion would lack any competition and this would lead extremely rapidly to corruption and tyranny. The only people who support this dangerous nonsense are people who consider themselves as part of the chosen elite, with a self-appointed divine right over every action of the mass of humanity. Their attitude is surprisingly akin to the medieval church, which was (at least in Christendom) a retrograde form of global government.
What is also akin to the medieval church is the dogma of the modern environmental movement. Your breathless description of the imminent catastrophe is one put forward by every rabid environmentalist (and is very similar to the medieval church's description of hellfire). Curiously the catastrophe is always some years removed but is always so potentially serious that it justifies the removal of all civil and individual rights and of course many, many new taxes all of which seem to find their way (via the government and publicly funded quangos) into the pockets of these very same environmental illuminati. Unsurprisingly most of these people support global government as a fast track to the imposition of 'emergency' environmental measures and taxes (though they never seem to apply to them personally).
Another aspect of the environmental movement that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval church is the elevation of 'the planet/the ecosystem' to the status of a deity. Of course in this you are also harking back to the ancient religions of the past: in advocating extreme population control for the sake of the environment you are effectively calling for a modern form of human sacrifice to pacify the gods of nature or the rain or the moon or the sun. How very curious. And to return to the analogy of the medieval church anyone who dares to oppose this stifling consensus is to be insulted and tortured until he recants or condemned to die on the stake. As evidence in response to any questioning of the environmental consensus of imminent disaster I know I must expect environmentalist replies full of threats of eternal environmental damnation for daring to challenge the will of the goddess of nature, taken straight from the medieval churchbook.
As an aside climate change is the latest narrative these people have come up to justify the imposition of a vast range of taxes and regulations on human action. Ian Plimer's book seems to me to have completely shredded the climate change propaganda but of course this and other thoughtful sceptical contributions are ignored and belittled by the catastrophe campaigners who instead prefer to manufacture fraudulent temperature data and draw hockey stick graphs (pure fraud on the front cover of the IPCC report) that they then broadcast at top volume in the mainstream media in a meretricious attempt to justify their continued funding and ever more extensive regulation on everyone else. And of course the narrative ties in with support for Keynesian moneyprinting: as economic activity grinds to a halt as a result of the imposition of idiotic environmental targets and taxes on growth the solution is always to print money. This distorts economic calculation and reduces growth and capital accumulation still further but to explain away the increasing stagnation there is always a pseudo-intellectual Keynesian justification usually centred around the bogus concept of the output gap. This in turn justifies yet more moneyprinting.
Naturally the same people who are so eager to enslave the existing world population are all desirous of also suppressing future generations. And the natural desire of most human beings to procreate. As most human beings find out sooner or later that children are the only thing that make sense: our link with the past and the future, effectively life itself is the meaning of life. Planning to deny this to current and future generations is effectively to seek to deny human life: environmentalists should be more accurately labelled as anti-human, in that the logical extension of their argument is that they would prefer that no human beings existed and the planet was left entirely in the hands of polar bears and plant life. Then the ecosystem would indeed be completely 'natural' but presumably we and they would not be around to observe this perfect utopia. Or perhaps only a chosen few would be permitted to remain in heaven on earth and enjoy whilst the rest of us are condemned for eternity – thus the environmental movement strikes me as atavistic and medieval.
On a very specific note I am sure we should all be very grateful your mother chose to have you – she chose life and I imagine you are grateful that she did so. Otherwise we would all have been deprived of your unique insights. Without children what will become of your unique views, your unique self – it will be gone with the wind and there will be nothing left. On a different note when reading your diatribes on population control I always wonder exactly which people or nations you would see suppressed. If a growing population is so dreadful and must be immediately stopped by edict then who is going to decide who survives and who is to be sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions. I wonder if you and those who share your views would care to publish the exact mechanics of your proposed population control programme. Perhaps you are waiting for the installation of global government, after the next World War. There is something rather chilling about highly privileged and comfortable people (usually already having had their own children) calling for the neutering of the mass of humanity simply so their own monopolistic privileges can be preserved (these privileges largely being anchored on impoverishing these same people through imperialist moneyprinting by the Empire).
As for supporting the one child policy in China I am afraid I must also part company with you. This policy is a heinous crime that has resulted in the effective murder of thousands of live human beings. The policy was only introduced because of the failed central planning policies of Mao and the gang of barbaric thugs who succeeded him - they were surprised to find themselves unable to generate sufficient agricultural productivity through murder, brutality and dogma. As always the one child policy has had and will have huge negative unintended consequences e.g. a large preponderance of angry young men who cannot find female partners.
It is generally the case that as people get richer they have fewer children. And as more capital is built up there are more resources for extensive environmental protection. Have you noticed the birth/death ratio is far lower than replacement in Norway , Germany , Italy etc? It seems more likely to me that in 30-40 years some governments will be desperately seeking taxpaying citizens and economic agents to fill the vacuum from the absence of people in their countries than thinking of ways to eliminate sections of the world population. Generally people are highly rational and have more or fewer children not because they are stupid or selfish as you and the population suppressing elite appear to believe but because of the prevailing economic incentives (or lack of them). It is not human beings who are maladapted to life on our planet but the current hypocritical global elite. If reducing population growth is truly the aim then the best way of doing so naturally and voluntarily is to encourage capital accumulation instead of moneyprinting, fostering peace and stable prices instead of promoting war & inflationary finance, and freeing the world from the burden of taxation of the recycling mechanism/reserve accumulation/ debt slavery that is imposed as a result of the global fiat money regime that privileges a few leveraged speculators at the expense of the rest of the world.
ED
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Original post:
Thank you for your robust and passionate note!
Let us first establish the parameters for debate: considering that the likelihood of a global government coming into existence before the entire ecosystem collapses is precisely nil, we are here engaged in an exercise of what the French call
Politique fiction (by refernce to Science fiction) - a pure intellectual exercise with no real-world implications.
I disagree with you entirely!
First of all, I see no reason why a global government would be more malevolent than a national one. I do not think that the European Union is any more "evil" than the governments of Belgium , Germany or Italy …
And the dystopian concentration camp universe you speak of can be readily enough applied on a small scale – and I think that a larger multinational entity would tend to dilute out ideological and nationalistic tendencies.
But this is all neither here nor there.
The point is that, time is running very short – the physical/biological system which allows the fineries of competing currency systems and parliamentary government is being rapidly destabiliized to the point that one has to be wilfully blind to imagine more than another couple of decades of meta-stability. The system is breaking down NOW…climate, energy, agricultural production – the destruction of the oceans, upon which I spend a large part of my life, defies description. In 30 years, we have gone a good way towards destroying what took many hundreds of millions of years to develop. No, I do not exaggerate.
If there is a single recurrent theme to my writing, it is the danger of ideology, which like the sorcerer Circe turns men to swine.
Also, the deterioration of intellectual life to the mouthing of empty phrases and buzz-words. My un-favourite is "democracy" Apparently, it cures all ills everywhere and always. And when it doesn't….well, we must reinterpret the results - just like a doctrinaire Marxist would do with any data which tended to disprove the ultimate truth of the dialectic.
A second buzz-word is "Freedom. " It is taken as the ultimate good – free people will be good people, will be honest and productive people, will builid stable and sustainable societies… and…for Chrissakes, Adam, you accuse ME of being Fabian!
In fact, people will freely opt to drive large cars, clear-cut forests, to consume as much as physically possible, to destroy the environment for short-term gain, to assert their power over their weaker neighbours, and to happily engage in unsustainable lifestyles without concern for the consequences elsewhere. We all do - you and I and everyone else we know!
Individuals and famliies and countries may choose to produce children at a disastrous rate – for the individual in question it is nothing more than an exercise of free will. For the world, it is nothing short of a catastrophe.
Indeed, among the developing countries, the Chinese example of population control has been overwhelmingly successful – one of the only bits of good news I can think of as we toboggan into self-made obliviion.
The results of the "free–market" approach adopted by India defy description – population growth totally out of control.
The consequences of this model are there for all to see in Egypt , and across the Middle-East. And that's just the starter…the problem is that, in the good old days, these countries, having made the wrong choices from themselves, would be left to suffer the consequences. Given globalization, they will export these problems – emigration "of biblical proportions" being just one consequence
The problem with the ideologically–based Ayn Randish system you seem to advocate is that it takes no account of the externalities of our acts.
Great – so we have small, self-enclosed communities – democratic as you may wish - who happily dump their toxic waste on their neighbours. Who deplete the oceans, who build nukes along fault-lines, who pump C02 into the atmosphere and ignore the obvious consequences, while in the "developing world," other small, democratic societies aspire to nothing more than the lifestyles you and I enjoy - despite the obvious fact that they cannot conceivably attain them without irreparable damage to the planet.
It is unfortunate that we live in a finite environment. It would be so much easier if it were non-finite, and we could simply focus upon enhancing growth. In fact, like bacteria depleting their milieu, that growth will prove our undoing.
Yes, the victories of the multinational approach are modest and few. The United Nations has a few victories to its credit (obviously, I do not refer to the Security Council, corrupted by the interests of a few preponderant countries).
The whales have, amazingly, been saved – for now. Perhaps so will a couple more species – the survival of the photogenic. The release of ozone-destroying gases has been halted (that wasn't too difficult).
Were our brains configured differently, we would be desperately thrashing around for solutions – however uncomfortable in the near term – to keep the system working. In fact, our brain evolved for a vastly different environment, one very similar to the one you advocate (tribal) - they are manifestly maladaptive for the world we now inhabit.
Après moi – le deluge!
UM
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