Question What the hell is wrong with everyone???

- We poison our water and air

- We kill off the incredible biodiversity around us that exists nowhere else in the universe (AFAWK)

- We spent countless hours watching the plague that is 'reality TV'

- We argue and fight over trivial, irrelevant and ultimately meaningless things such as race, gender, religion, nation, wealth and cock size (lol)

- We spend nearly every minute of our lives working to earn a currency that has little purpose outside what we as a species have invented meaning for. In other words, the universe ain't telling you that ya need money. It's just the nature of society.

- We kill each other in the millions in pointless conflicts and refuse to selflessly work together unless there is a political, financial or cultural reward for doing so.

- We bind ourselves in red tape and bureaucracy, something that I fail to understand the purpose of. Seriously, someone shoot the frakkin asshole beancounters!!! They're holding us back!!!

- We = the human race

People are too preoccupied on the hamster wheel to notice anything is wrong, let alone ask the tough questions.
Each of us - hopefully, wants the same things: happiness, peace, and security.
We all have the same needs: food, water, shelter. Rooted in our desire to stay alive.
Yet all there is is conflict from a lack of what? Compassion, community, cohesion.
We’re called the human race, what is it we win at the end?

Politics and religion are the great dividers, and not spoken of on this site - for good reason, reason is tossed out the window when speaking on those subjects.

Star Trek was based upon having alien contact reshaping mankind and bringing about unity, that set it apart from most sci-fi who would just see another enemy to fight. It seems that a change needs to happen to get people to stand up and notice all you’ve pointed out as being wrong and decide this isn’t right.
I would hazard that change needs to start within the individual for it to become a movement of will and effect change around us.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We poison our water and air

Why son, that's called 'Progress!'

- We kill off the incredible biodiversity around us that exists nowhere else in the universe (AFAWK)

But that's what Super Predators do!

- We spent countless hours watching the plague that is 'reality TV'

Because feeling better because someone else's life is so...so much worse and watching them getting exploited is the most cost-effective form of entertainment.

- We argue and fight over trivial, irrelevant and ultimately meaningless things such as race, gender, religion, nation, wealth and cock size (lol)

Hey! You forgot catty comments about clothing choices, breast and butt size, hair, and life choices!

- We spend nearly every minute of our lives working to earn a currency that has little purpose outside what we as a species have invented meaning for. In other words, the universe ain't telling you that ya need money. It's just the nature of society.

To be fair, currency simplifies commodities and removes the need for a barter society.

- We kill each other in the millions in pointless conflicts and refuse to selflessly work together unless there is a political, financial or cultural reward for doing so.

But there is oil and gas (or water, or valuable trade routes or arable land) in them thar hills!

- We bind ourselves in red tape and bureaucracy, something that I fail to understand the purpose of. Seriously, someone shoot the frakkin asshole beancounters!!! They're holding us back!!!

But they know better than you. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in that position in the first place, now would they? Not everyone can be an Alpha, there are Betas and Gammas and even Deltas have their place in our society.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We poison our water and air

Sure, but don't forget that the average human lifespan is twice what it was before despite the pollution, and we're no longer slaves to food production either. Industrializing was a very worthwhile trade-off.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We kill off the incredible biodiversity around us that exists nowhere else in the universe (AFAWK)

It's a bummer, yes. But don't forget that a lot of what biodiversity there is would not exist without us, either. Dogs and cats, for example. We made those. Many types of flowers. Pretty much all our food. When we finally reach the point where lab-grown meat is cheaper than growing cows, cows are going to go nearly extinct other than the few who will end up in zoos. And as we start venturing out into space, we're going to bring a lot of life with us. The net result will eventually be an increase to the total biodiversity of the universe.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We spent countless hours watching the plague that is 'reality TV'

Frankly, reading Whateley is just as much a waste of time as watching reality TV or football or Star Trek. It is a sedentary form of entertainment, not a productive activity. You just happen to personally enjoy a different subset than other people.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We argue and fight over trivial, irrelevant and ultimately meaningless things such as race, gender, religion, nation, wealth and cock size (lol)

Not all of those things are trivial, irrelevant, and ultimately meaningless. Religion, for example, is a very powerful delusion that has caused a lot of good and a lot of harm over the years, and it has both toppled and birthed nations. It's a thing worth arguing about. Of course, you could play the nihilist card and claim it's all meaningless in the end, but you're clearly not some nihilistic twit or you wouldn't be upset about damage to the environment and ecosystem.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We spend nearly every minute of our lives working to earn a currency that has little purpose outside what we as a species have invented meaning for. In other words, the universe ain't telling you that ya need money. It's just the nature of society.

False. The specific forms that currency takes are arbitrary, but it does serve a useful purpose. It's a token that represents time and energy in order to facilitate trade. Trade is necessary when communism doesn't work. Variants on communism do work sometimes, or Wikipedia and Linux wouldn't exist, but it's not a universal solution. When you have to trade, it's a hell of a lot more convenient to do so by abstracting our time and energy into a lightweight or even digital currency than to use the barter system.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We kill each other in the millions in pointless conflicts and refuse to selflessly work together unless there is a political, financial or cultural reward for doing so.

Pointless? No. Wars are expensive. People do not go to war for no reason. They need, for example, a political, financial, or cultural reward.

Oh, and we do work together selflessly. Remember Wikipedia and Linux? But we also need to eat, there's a finite amount of time in the day, and it is inefficient for everybody to grow their own food. So, we try to optimize how we use our resources. Naturally, that results in a tendency to not do things that don't help keep us fed unless we've already met our basic needs, in which case we tend not to do things that we don't find personally rewarding.

I mean, if you want you could boil this down to the point where even love is just a selfish desire to feel good about the fact that you helped other people. But if literally everything everybody does for any reason is selfish, then calling things selfish has no meaning. So, why bother? It's just philosophical masturbation. Might as well watch reality TV.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We bind ourselves in red tape and bureaucracy, something that I fail to understand the purpose of. Seriously, someone shoot the frakkin asshole beancounters!!! They're holding us back!!!

It's frustrating, yes, and it very often goes overboard. But what would you have instead? Anarchy? Humans are unfortunately not all sane, rational actors with consistent needs and values. We use rules and protocols to organize the chaos, otherwise we can't have important things like hospitals, space programs, and the internet. How does your computer talk to the server to download a Whateley story if the two computers don't share a common communication protocol and follow standards in their implementation of network signals?

Some rules are necessary. The trick is getting the right balance, especially given that people have widely varying ideas about what that balance is.

Pele's working as hard as she can but the humans keep getting away. If someone would wake the toyawo up and get them to stoke the fires under that oversize paint pot of theirs, we could make some real progress.

Well, technically humans have a build in preference to to short and middle term linear thinking. We're not build to naturally do long term planning and to account for exponential trends. A population explosion having all a lot of negative consequences for pollution and biodiversity is not something people naturally account for, and they will prioritize shorter term things like their current job and food on the table. In theory politics is supposed to compensate somewhat for this deficiency, like with giving government pensions and healthcare, but there also the short term gain is outweighing the long term planning. The problem there is that from the perspective of evolution, that tendency for short term thinking and personal gain mostly works. Good guys often finish last, also with passing on the good guy genes.

Some of our tribal nature manifesting itself doesn't help. People do have a tendency to make a pecking order based on characteristics (like race, religion, money, skills) and to perceive those not falling within those characteristics as lesser beings, sometimes with the conviction that they need to be put down. There is a long road to go there.

Money is a way to do business with people that you don't trust. It's a necessity to deal with more people that you can monitor yourself and gain trust. What you're really need to look out for is actually how money is created, interests asked and debt. Those are the chains that binds us.

Bureaucracy is also a something invented to manage a large system made out of people you don't fully trust, or in a number of cases give the illusion of control.

DasVals wrote: Some of our tribal nature manifesting itself doesn't help. People do have a tendency to make a pecking order based on characteristics (like race, religion, money, skills) and to perceive those not falling within those characteristics as lesser beings, sometimes with the conviction that they need to be put down. There is a long road to go there.

It's more than that. I remember reading something about the tendency of humans to form factions being a hunter-gatherer survival trait.
The thinking goes like this: the area a tribal group can exploit for food is limited by how far one can walk in a half-day (so they can be back home at night). Adding more members to a tribe does not enlarge that area, it only increases the intensity of the food-gathering depleting the sources faster. Eventually the tribe is forced to move when there's no longer enough food to be collected to feed the tribe.
Larger tribes, therefore, have to move more frequently. And moving has a cost in terms of lost days of food-gathering, of not allowing sick and injured members to recover properly, etc.
So a tribe that grows too much needs to split in two smaller ones. But this is not an instinctive reaction: a larger tribe seems intuitively strong against threats (enemy tribes, wooly mammoths, whatever). Also, the tribe is basically all of your friends and relatives, you don't want to lose track of half of them.
So you first need to find some reason to dislike the "other half" of the tribe. A tendency to split any group larger than, oh, let's say forty, into factions acts as a check on the undesirable growth of the tribe. Great for hunter-gatherers... terrible for an agricultural/industrial society.

Summed up nicely here

I see no reason to drastically reduce the population. We're nowhere near the limit of what the planet can support. Just stabilizing would be sufficient.

Food distribution is the big fail, in my opinion. The breadbasket nations can feed the entire planet. The major problems are:

1) Food waste during transport
2) Only "Perfect" food is what is sold in supermarkets (e.g. some irregular looking produce never even leaves the fields and rots there).

I read a fascinating history article about Clarence Birdseye (of the Birdseye Frozen Foods brand) where the introduction of flash freezing changed the availability of food to North America permanently. It's kind of a shame that marketing has shifting the United States away from frozen foods and back to "fresh only," (read: picked unripe and aging on a boat from who knows where) which also reintroduced waste.

CrazyMinh wrote: - We poison our water and air

- We kill off the incredible biodiversity around us that exists nowhere else in the universe (AFAWK)

- We spent countless hours watching the plague that is 'reality TV'

- We argue and fight over trivial, irrelevant and ultimately meaningless things such as race, gender, religion, nation, wealth and cock size (lol)

- We spend nearly every minute of our lives working to earn a currency that has little purpose outside what we as a species have invented meaning for. In other words, the universe ain't telling you that ya need money. It's just the nature of society.

- We kill each other in the millions in pointless conflicts and refuse to selflessly work together unless there is a political, financial or cultural reward for doing so.

- We bind ourselves in red tape and bureaucracy, something that I fail to understand the purpose of. Seriously, someone shoot the frakkin asshole beancounters!!! They're holding us back!!!

- We = the human race

Hi Crazy Minh,

It really sounds like you need to take a Media Fast, and, try some different sources of news.

No, i am not saying that the problems do not exist, or, that they are not as serious/intense as you say.

What i am saying, is that they are solvable, and that there are people who are actively working on fixing these problems.

A very good example that lays out an alternative way of looking at these things can be found here, https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts

The increase in literacy, and, increase of self-empowerment through education, means that population levels will stabilise, same as they have done in Europe, and the other WEIRD countries.

As soon as the population levels stabilise, then the eco-systemic energy foot-prints that we all generate will stabilise as well, so the damage gradient will be reduced.

More to say in another reply.

Kristin Darken wrote: Nobody likes it, but the only real solution to any of it is eugenics.

At the very least, we need several generations of every culture/government in the world accepting the condition that every one person alive gets a 1/2 credit towards population growth. They don't have to personally have that child, they can contribute their half to someone they think will be a wonderful parent, they can sell that right to someone who is willing to pay to have more than one child.

If we can reduce and maintain our world population at around 1 billion while continuing to work on the recovery of our ecosystem and the use of green technology and industry? After two or three generations of limiting our birthrates to 1 per couple, we can allow it to rise to 1 per person on average and sustain our population.

In general though, we need to turn the process of having a child from something that we do as much as possible for survival of the species or because its culturally expected... into a process in which every part of society prioritizes and elevates the importance of having a child. Corporations hiring employees because they have yet to meet a partner or have a child yet, so that the child can be supported and brought up under the sponsorship of that company. Having communities built and designed towards providing the best support for new families, for educating kids.

When we have a society in place that focuses on making sure that every new child has the best support and opportunities available... the entire society will rise to greater heights in just a few generations.

Eugenics is a really bad idea.

With the current neo-monkey power structures that we have in our societies, the Alpha's will out-breed everyone else.

"Rules are for little people."

There are countless studies that show how easily mono-cultures are overcome by disease, or, changes in climatic conditions, and, monoculture is what we will get through eugenics.

---

As for the food supply issues, we have the technological capability to feed everyone on the planet, with a population level approaching 9 billion. Extending these techniques could increase the amount of farmable land by 40% world-wide, and that's without doing any more damage to the eco-system, so a population level of 12 billion would not be infeasible.

There are similar initiatives within energy supply systems, communication systems, manufacturing systems.

You may not see this if you are reading the mainstream news, but these figures are widely reported in the technical journals.

Mister D wrote: You may not see this if you are reading the mainstream news, but these figures are widely reported in the technical journals.

This is one of the reasons I routinely check phys.org.

The problem with eugenics is that it ultimately aims to reduces genetic diversity, by fostering "desirable" traits and breeding out "undesirable" ones.

In the long term, a more genetically uniform population is also more vulnerable to new strains of diseases. Look at what is happening to bananas, for instance.

And our knowledge of genetics is still barely on its infancy, not nearly good enough to make an informed determination of what good targets for eugenics selection are. Wrong choices could have very bad conequences.

Poster child: sickle-cell anemia. Yes, it is an undesirable genetic condition... which gives resistance to malaria for the non-manifesting carrier. How many other genetic "diseases" may have species survival traits related to it?

Sir Lee wrote: Poster child: sickle-cell anemia. Yes, it is an undesirable genetic condition... which gives resistance to malaria for the non-manifesting carrier. How many other genetic "diseases" may have species survival traits related to it?

That argument has been put forward w/r/t ADHD and autism, as traits that - while not desirable in full force throughout the population - are extremely useful to a social group so long as a minority can express them.

Sadly, while people with one or both syndromes (or who express one of the personality types that correlate highly with either one) perform well in the physical sciences and IT, they seem to top the "woke" internally-maintained blacklists at places like Google.

Kristin Darken wrote:

Mister D wrote:
Eugenics is a really bad idea.

said no animal breeder ever.

Not really wanting to be argumentative. But how many 'undesirable' animals are destroyed every year due to undesirable traits showing up. In a best-case scenario, they are merely neutered. Many well-known breeds of cats and dogs have medical issues that would be very detrimental if they had to survive in a natural environment.

When you are free to euthanize unwanted results Eugenics can work, sort of, we tried that with humans. Did not play well to the masses.

peter wrote:

Kristin Darken wrote:

Mister D wrote:
Eugenics is a really bad idea.

said no animal breeder ever.

Not really wanting to be argumentative. But how many 'undesirable' animals are destroyed every year due to undesirable traits showing up. In a best-case scenario, they are merely neutered. Many well-known breeds of cats and dogs have medical issues that would be very detrimental if they had to survive in a natural environment.

When you are free to euthanize unwanted results Eugenics can work, sort of, we tried that with humans. Did not play well to the masses.

Yes, it was called the Holocaust, and Hitler was responsible for it. While Eugenics SOUNDS like a reasonable idea when dealing with animals, it is quite morally evil when applied to human populations. Honestly, this conversation has taken a turn for the worse.

Which is why we so strongly try to keep the topic on the school and the stories, and leave the politics elsewhere. This thread is now closed.