It has often been pointed out that we seem to appreciate human life less today than we did in the past. I recently heard an interview of a WWII veteran who seemed appalled at how today in combat people take lives without as much concern as they apparently did during WWII. [I find that particularly humorous since there were MILLIONS of people killed during the four years of WWII yet there were only hundreds of thousands of people killed in the ten plus years of the Viet Nam War or the Afghanistan war.]
Still, the point I want to make here is that given the law of supply and demand, the more supply you have of something the less value that something has, it is only natural that with the ever increasing population of humanity our appreciation and valuation of human beings will naturally decline.
We value water excessively in a drought but in a flood water is very cheap. This planet is being flooded with human beings so it is only natural that we will value those human less than we did before the flood.
Of course, we may not like this fact because it confronts our own survival instinct, yet it still is a fact and sooner or later we will have to face it.
I was interested to note that in many countries of the world, particularly Middle Eastern countries, over seventy percent of the population is less than thirty years old. That means that in the last thirty years their populations have increased approximately three fold. So is it any wonder that the young people of those countries are so willing to commit suicide? And since there is no movement in those countries to counter the population explosion there we can only expect much more of the same from people.
I remember once listening to what is called ‘gangster rap’ whose main audience seems to be poorer people of color. It was pointed out that a lot of the themes of this type of music seem to be hostility toward women and other people of color. It seemed only natural that this would be so since from a global perspective it is poor people of color who are doing most of the baby making in the world. And, although we really don’t like this idea, women are the controlling factor in baby making. The poor people of color are the first ones in society who are experiencing the effects of the explosion of population, and they feel it at an instinctive level, even if they are not fully conscious of it.
Why are women the ‘controlling factor’ in baby making? Well, imagine we have two islands some place some place in the world. On one island you put one hundred women and one man while on the other island you put one hundred men and one woman. Now come back in a year and see what you get. On the first island you will have one very happy man and probably one hundred and sixty or more other people. On the other island you will have probably less than fifty men who will have survived and no women. Obviously the quantity of women is the controlling factor in our population growth.
I would say this plays out in both India and China today where people generally value female babies less than they do male babies. Since both of these countries are heavily over populated and are feeling the crunch of that overpopulation, the people will naturally value women less. Unfortunately women are blamed for something that in most cases they have little control over, yet their very existence is a controlling factor.
I would also like to point out that various subcultures, particularly religions, still promote the idea that baby making is very important. These cultures cling to outdated ideologies from a time when survival was dependent on increasing populations. That time has surely passed but these subcultures still cling to these now unhealthy (unholy) beliefs. So naturally the people of these religions are getting the brunt of people’s animosity. We see this in the increased conflicts between religious peoples and the more civilized world.
Another primitive ideology that contributes to this ever increasing problem is our over emphasis on keeping people alive. We hear stories about nature taking its course in various parts of the world where people are starving to death because there are too many people in that area because the land cannot produce enough food to feed them. So the compassionate but narrow minded people rush in foods to support these people, which only add to their problem. For these people then become dependent on those food contributions and they go about making more babies, compounding the problem further.
We all see this ideology at work in our hospitals and medical industry that is making every effort to keep old or sick people alive long beyond the time when the quality of their life was worth living.
These stupid ideologies are in direct confrontation with the gut feelings of most people particularly those who are experiencing the negative consequences of our population explosion. Hence, poorer cultures and subcultures are becoming more violent toward one another. And in the so called developed world we SAY we value human life but we are increasingly voting either with our money or our votes to make less effort to save lives and we are even making conscious and unconscious choices that are leading to the destruction of human lives.
Naturally an intelligent solution would be to make a conscious effort to decrease our rate of population growth. In both China and India they have done just that but in the rest of the world we are not doing it. In fact, in many places like the US they are still making a conscious effort to INCREASE population growth. In the US that is mostly a product of reactionary influences of the conservative (religious) cultures. The more educated (and therefore less religious) people tend to have less children but they still support the unconscious ideology of saving lives at every cost, a product of their immature attachment to their own bodies or lives.
As it is in China, education seems to be of the greatest value in confronting the problem. But also, as it is in China, that education will have to be ‘forced’ upon those who are the least interested in listen to a rational solution, those baby making subcultures of poor people of color and religious people. This education process can start by raising the level of debate and discussion in our societies. Part of this process will come from starting to judge people who are having more than one child per couple and publicly ostracizing them. This may seem harsh, but as my step-father always used to say, “Sometimes you have to hit a jackass over the head with a two-by-four to get its attention.”
Yet, most people resist the idea of judging one another since they themselves are afraid of judgment, or afraid of themselves and their reactions to judgment.
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