I'm actually completely serious when I say I don't believe in charity.
Human beings are possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet, we consume, we pollute, we multiply, then we migrate and do it all again.
Wherever there are large numbers of people starving, or suffering from diseases like polio and leprocy, there must be a root cause. The two main root causes I can think of are that the people are living within a political system that isn't supporting them, or are occupying a land that is unable to produce enough valuable resources to sustain them.
If the land can't sustain the people that occupy it, then it's a clear indication that there are too many people. Therefore I see this extreme poverty as nature's way of keeping our species at controllable numbers. When we give to these people, we are helping to sustain them within a land that can't. Without charity, peoples choices would be to migrate to greener pastures or die, and while I know it initially sounds heartless, these deaths are necessary for the sustainment of the earth itself, and the people who inhabit it.
If people are living within a political system that either doesn't care about its citizens in poverty or is incapable of helping them, whether it be an autocracy or any other system of government, then I believe charity won't help. In autocracies I would be pressed to believe that the charity is going to where it is needed, and even if it does I imagine it would stand a high chance of being 'taxed' or confiscated. In a democracy in which the numbers are so large that the charity is un-fixable, then surely no amount of charity can sustain its people indefinitely, so all we end up doing is extending the misery of people in poverty, or worse still, allowing them to further multiply to even more un-sustainable levels.
So I don't believe in charity.
I recently had the privelage of travelling to a democracy with a very high level of poverty. I thought this would be an excellent test of these values, because if I truly believed them I should be able to look the poorest of people in the eye and tell them not that I couldn't help them, but that I wouldn't. I had people in the depths of despair come to me and ask me for money, men with no hands, children living on the streets, mothers of young infants and I didn't give money once.
And no, I don't believe I'm heartless. I would go to great lengths to help a friend in need, those in my community are very important to me, but I feel no such compassion for those outside it.
After all, survival of the fittest is the natural order of things, but if the fittest continue to sustain the weakest, then all of a sudden we will find the world populated to its capacity and filled with a genetically weak species.
And let's face it; the world is sick, and as Agent Smith would say; we are the virus. She's getting a fever (I refer of course to global warming) and if we don't get the virus under control soon, her immune system is going to start killing it, be it by fires, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes or viruses.
Theoretically wrong
14 years ago
4 comments:
How shock-jock of you, Dan. I like it!
There is no land where humans can't live, given sufficient application of knowledge and energy. Heck, we've managed to live where there is no land at all - space.
So what matters most is the social, political and economic context, as you rightfully identify.
You do hit on some themes that are well-established - charity in the form of international aid has at times perpetuated bad situations (like civil war) that otherwise would have ended sooner. And aid in general has a very, very poor record. Sometimes it is the squandering ruling class of an aid-recipient nation that is at fault, as you mention, and sometimes it is a lack of institutions or markets to sustain any benefits from aid.
I disagree with your views on genetic weakness - as I said, I think it's the society that matters, not the genes - but it reminded me of the Bene Gesserit outlook. Have you read 'Dune' by Frank Herbert?
I can't say I've read Dune.
I agree that people can live anywhere, but there is a limit to the numbers of peole that the land can sustain.
Allow me to attempt to demonstrate what I mean:
Think for example that a small community occupies five square kilometers of land, the land provides them with food water and shelter. In this example, let's assume that this five square kilometers is all there is, that there is 'no world' outside of its boundaries, so the people can not migrate. Each person needs to eat and drink a certain amount, needs space to live, needs a place to dump their refuse etc.
If disconnected from the rest of the world, the population of these people will grow to the point at which they need every little piece of their land to sustain them, if they grow beyond this point there will not be enough food for everyone and some will starve, the 'strongest' will survive as they are the ones more able to take the resources they need to live. The popularion will temporarily rise above the number which the land can sustain, however not for long because eventually people will die.
Now assume another community of the same size, occupying the same amount of land sits adjacent to our first, however their land is more fertile, it provides more food and water to its people and as such each person requires less of it to survive. The people in this new land see those in the land adjacent starving, and decide that as they have plenty of resources, they will give some of them to their neighbours to help them survive.
So now, the people in the first land, after milking their land for all it is worth start to take resources from another land. So there is no poverty and famine and the population continues to grow well beyond that which their land can sustain.
Eventually the population grows so large that even the help provided from their neighbours is not enough to sustain them, and people start to starve and die again.
Meanwhile, the people from the adjacent land are also growing in number, eventually their population reaches a number so large that they have no spare resources and can no longer afford to help their neighbours. The number of people who can be sustained in the first land drops back to its original value and all the poeple who were being sustained by the charity of their neighbours starve and die.
This is the most basic logic; people require resources to survive, land, food, water, air etc, all these resources are finite, therefore the population can not continue to grow indefinitely.
I believe in terms of nature, people should let it run its course. It is the natural order of things that some live and some die.
Dan, what you describe is called a Malthusian world, and was the reality for the majority of human existence. However, the Industrial Revolution and the achievement of economic growth have made it obsolete.
Take Australia as an example. Before modern technology, it could support a few hundred thousand hunter-gatherers, and agriculture wasn't possible. Now we produce enough food to feed 40 million people (though obviously not without problems).
And regarding limits (carrying capacity), I think they are often overstated. Theoretically, with enough energy available to apply to matter, we will only run out of resources when the universe succumbs to heat death. Clearly our technology is nowhere near that kind of sophistication, but we've already moved beyond a strict need for wood, for example. We can make salt water fresh just by applying power in a certain way, we can replace oil with electricity, grow crops without soil, etc. When we perfect nanotechnology (and picotechnology), we should be able to transmute rock into bread!
Lastly, it may be natural for people to die, but there's no reason why we shouldn't try to delay death.
I agree, we have come a long way, technology has grown and things we once needed are obsolete.
But look at the cost of our advancement. We are using up the world's natural oil, turning it into harmful gas and pumping it into our atmosphere, increasing greenhouse gases which is causing global warming. Countless animal species have become extinct in a remarkably short time and likely due to the influence of people.
And turning rock into bread??? I think you're reading a little too much sci-fi there Jesus. And even if it were possible, we can only run out of bread before we run out of places to stand.
Regardless of the advancement of technology, population numbers can only grow to a certain point before they become too large, even thinking about physical space.
The universe works on a theory of coservation of energy. The earth itself is made up of natural materials that have a mixture of chemical energy, atomic energy and heat energy. The earth also recieves an in-flux of thermal and radiation energy from the sun, this energy helps plants grow, which helps animals and people grow. People take in energy from plants and animals to live, a human body transfers this chemical energy into kinetic energy and heat.
You said that with enough energy we will only reach our limit when the univers succums to heat death. There is no way you can apply energy to create any kind of resources without producing heat as a bi-product. If we start using too much energy, sucking it from the universe we run the risk of boiling the earth we live on.
Your views are very utopian, and I think it's admirable that you strive for such a world, but I can not see an end to famine and poverty, I can not see world peace on our horizon and if by chance I could, I would see it as a worse fate for humanity than any we have faced so far. Evolution, survival of the fittest is not only a reality, but it is a necessity. If we change from survival of the fittest to survival of all, we are no longer a race but a virus.
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