Common Sense And Survival (William Kotke)

  (Speaking Truth To Power) -- The graph line of the global population explosion now goes upward almost vertically. The graph line of reserves of resources that fund that explosion falls precipitously. The point at which population crosses the food production line is the point of the beginning of the coming mass die-off of human population.

   Since Babylon, the type of human culture that we live in has featured an emperor or surrogate who is surrounded by a handful of wealthy militarist/financiers. These people own and rule the realm. This class has historically gained their power and wealth by feeding off the people and by growth/conquest. This class has always urged growth as the means to increase their power and wealth. There were always new fertile lands to conquer and peoples to enslave. The configuration of the culture of empire which we call civilization, has not changed in six thousand years. Today in the U.S.A. less than one per cent of the population has more than three quarters of the wealth. Certainly they have enough wealth to buy and run the government and have a land ownership pattern that rivals the land barons of Guatamala. 

   This culture has increased its population by running a net deficit of the fertility of the earth. The soils, forests, fish stocks, pure water and over-grazed and desertified landscapes have been sacrificed to the god of growth. Now there are no more fertile lands to conquer and exploit, but the population continues to grow and the fossil fuel production reaches peak and begins to decline. The culture that has no vision of the future and no purpose other than material consumption hits the wall.

  In the past few centuries the elites have gained a new method of growth/conquest. The lever of Science/technology has been used to further their power. Through the creation of industrialism, we now live in a manufactured environment. We civilized people have created machines and been conditioned by the machine world until we begin to act in a machine-like manner. Powerless, we are thoroughly dependent upon the machine for our food and shelter survival. Alienated and atomized, we move around trying to fit into a niche in order to obtain survival. The pressure to move to a job breaks nuclear families apart and certainly precludes the existence of extended families. We have become interchangeable ciphers in the industrial machine. We have been culturally conditioned from birth to have great regard for non-living manufactured items and have been alienated from living things. We have more regard for the dead wood of a church than for a living forest.

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