Money

Money underlies all human power struggles. Money is sustenance in a modern world. This is not an idealist picture of life. This is simply reality...and an increasing reality in a world dominated by anti-socialist capitalism. Perhaps this is the way in which the human species will attempt to deal with its overpopulation. The haves, at the top of the money food chain, will survive and prosper. The have-nots will gradually become less and less likely to afford to reproduce. Machines will fill the hard-labor gap, once plugged by the poor and desperate.

 

Human beings who reproduce cannot objectively look at human overpopulation with a clear mind. Their brains are conditioned to believe that maintaining overall population is equivalent to maintaining their own progeny. Their behavior is quite different. They strive to be at the top of the food chain at the expense of the progeny of others. They resent paying taxes to support burgeoning population needs. They soothe themselves with the twisted concept of "healthy competition" while adulating people like Lance Armstrong.

 

The indirect monetary approach to dealing with overpopulation and associated environmental deterioration may succeed if technology continues to enable the wealthy and undermine the position of the less wealthy. It will take a great deal of time, of course. Whether the species has that time is the question.

 

Modern China is an example of how this process may not work out so well. Mao Zedong, while a monster on many levels, had the intellectual foresight to understand that China's population of poor, uneducated peasants was unsustainable. He implemented policies which largely underlie the current prosperity of some in China. He put substantial, if indeed brutal, brakes on China's population and established a process of planning food production in relation to population.

 

Contemporary Chinese are in the process of unraveling Mao's vision in favor of anti-socialist capitalism. Communism in China is morphing into Fascism at a meteoric pace. The rest of the world cheers as they are showered with the products of China's descent into wild self-centered materialism. History does not support a rationale for this enthusiasm.

 

We, as a species, are emerging from an era in which religion swayed politics and finance. In lieu of sin, heaven and hell, educated human beings now obsess on shares, retirement funds and plastic surgery. What if education became the determining currency of the human species? What if science was the determining factor in the planning of politicians and governments? It is possible that the human species will eventually unite in peace around rational planning for a shared quality of human life on this planet. Perhaps, but I doubt that money will take us there.