Wombaticus Rex » Sat Sep 14, 2013 2:56 pm wrote:Lord Balto » Sat Sep 14, 2013 7:41 am wrote:This all goes back to Malthus, who got his numbers wrong, but was dead on when it comes to understanding the concept of overpopulation.
This is a very salient point, and one I only recently came around to. My primary introduction to Malthus was twofold: 1) being taught a For Dummies version of his work in school and then, 2) reading Robert Anton Wilson dismantling the work of Malthus.
Then I actually read some of his work and realized, as is often the case with RAW, I was witnessing the dismantling of a carefully calibrated strawman. I think Balto's summation above is both correct and important.
While I still believe that "overpopulation is a horseshit meme for rich people," that's more about how they frame it and promote it in the Think Tank class. Beneath that lies a serious problem with no serious solutions.
You are talking about the notion that if there were just fewer of "them" (dark people) and more of "us" (light people) then things would just be peachy creamy? Something very similar to this actually came out of the mouth of a drafter I once worked with--a generally nice guy but a member of what one might call the conservative underclass--the supporters of conservative notions who don't actually gain very much from their policies. If I recall correctly, his statement went something like, "There are just too many of the wrong kind of people."
The problem with the professor from Baltimore quoted above is that he buys into the consensus reality notion that human development has been linear and that our current problems are just another bump in the road on the way to interstellar hegemony, whereas there is growing evidence (see Samir Osmanagic in particular) that human development has been episodic and that we have come to the brink many times before, and fallen/been pushed over the edge again and again. This has always been a "New Age" notion but it appears to be on the verge of finally breaking through into the mainstream. Such notions as the Golden Age, Atlantis, Eden, etc. all appear to be dim memories of the very end of the last of these periods, circa 2950 BC. My own research (see my Typhonian History of the World, especially the chapter on the flood story), would indicate that the cause of the last major event was cosmic in nature, but I would suggest that the larger the population and the more complex the society, the more difficult it is for that society to survive a global catastrophe. This goes especially for such technological "solutions" as solar energy, where the entire civilization would be dependent upon clear skies and unobstructed sunlight, whereas as recently as AD 536, the sun was reduced to shining rather dimly for 4 hours a day over a period of more than a year.
