We’ve covered overpopulation and its role in ecocide, and in turn in throwing us into tyranny, before on this blog.
It’s worth also mentioning that our dominant paradigm does not permit us to think of solutions that involve limiting the rights of people like us, which is why we are paralyzed on global warming because we feel no sense of efficacy in making decisions when we are manipulated. Even more, it’s worth pointing out that population growth produces people who are less intelligent and healthy rather than more, guaranteeing a slow civilization decline.
These are the problems of overpopulation: too many people, and by definition for any species that breeds out of control, those people are of low intelligence. It’s nature’s way of surviving a cataclysm: 1% will survive, so create as many as you can so that 1% is a high enough number. Yet with technology in our hands, that can be a fatal path.
And now today, someone makes an even stronger statement:
Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth’s “limits of sustainability”.
Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.
Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton.
“We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people,” Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing “wild lands”, and in particular water supplies.
Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: “There are probably already too many people on the planet.”
Among populations with above 100 IQ points as the average, population growth is already negative; these populations have stabilized and are declining. It’s the under-100s worldwide that are booming, even when they exist among populations of higher IQ. Remember, it’s not where you were born that determines your IQ; it’s who your ancestors were. IQ cannot be raised by education and is only marginally influenced by a first-world diet.
Our philosophy, humanism, prohibits us from sacrificing any individual for the collective good. That’s the conservative part of it. That induces individuals to form giant mobs, or Crowds that demand increasing rights and “equality,” which translates in reality into the ability to tear down those above them and enforce equality.
It’s not just socialism — our pretty scientific and academic terms mask an ugly part of our simian heritage, which is known simply by the term envy. We don’t want a universal land of plenty; we want to destroy those who did better than us. It seems to me conservatives and liberals alike fall prey to this, as do members of any philosophy. It’s only those who achieve a Zen-like ability to act for themselves yet with total selflessness who are immune, and those are rare.
It’s one thing for an advisor to the Secretary of State to understand the problem of overpopulation. Implementing national policy to address it is an entirely different matter. If she believes that the U.S. is overpopulated, then a good start would be to convince the administration to reduce immigration to a level that matches the rate of emigration (about a 95% reduction), removing it as a factor in U.S. population growth.
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”
Pete: Immigration caps don’t need to match emigration, they need to match whatever numbers are needed to maintain the population at a stable level (which may be zero if national fertility increases). When non-zero, selective immigration of the best and brightest is a good thing even if it exceeds emigration.