h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Let's rank these things. Place the following in the order that you would least like to cause harm to come to them.

1. Your father
2. Your mother
3. Your best friend's father
4. Your Significant Other's prize gold fish, Dave.
5. Your SO's hamster, Squeeky
6. An annonymous dolphin
7. Flipper
8. An entire colony of ants
9. An entire colony of termites
10. A jar full of cockroaches
11. A lab rat
12. 5,000 lab rats
13. A 1 inch long alligator
14. A 1 foot long alligator
15. Your two year-old brat of a sister/brother when you were 5.
16. A 12 foot long alligator
17. The steer at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
18. The steer being slaughtered to make steaks for your table
19. A head of lettuce.
20. A King Cobra
21. A small house spider
22. A large Tarantula
23. Your sister/brother now that she/he knows you are wasting yourself
24. Your last SO
25. The rabbit that died to tell you you're pregnant
26. The rabbit that died from the mascara that might have been sold
27. The rabbit that you got for Easter.
28. The rabbit that ate its way through your garden
29. The rabbit that the wolf ate instead of your 9 month-old baby.
30. Your dog
31. Your neighbor's dog
32. Whichever dog it is that's barking very loudly at 3:00 AM
33. Your cat.
34. Your neighbor's cat
35. Your SO's cat
36. The cat that left the dead bird on your door step.
37. The horse that does incredible tricks on TV
38. The horse that drops huge piles in front of you in the parade
39. The worm on the sidewalk after the rain
40. The worm in your bait bucket
41. The worms in your lawn
42. The worms in your field
43. A butterfly
44. A moth
45. A bird
46. A bat
47. An eagle
48. A pigeon
49. A vulture
50. Yourself

Choices are governed by circumstances, needs, and understanding.

One of the comments out her mentioned that there are computer programs and chemical testing methods that make it cheaper and more practical than testing on rabbits. Even it that were true (which I doubt) we have to recognize that animals were killed to verify that those methods were equivalent to the same tests done on animals.

Each of us will make and accept sacrifices for the sake of what we hold more dear than that which is being sacrificed. If a man will give up his own life to save a baby in danger, can we not understand that he will give up the life of a rabbit, a monkey, a dolphin for what he percieves is a similar issue?

I would love to live in a world where such choices are not necessary, but I will not exclaim with absolute faith that no one should harm anything.

I WILL try to pick from the low end of the list.

Barton

Choices ah? If there was a devil, he'd be in the choices. The life of your child or the lives of these other 10 children? The life of your child or the lives of these 1000 chimps? The life of your child or ... It's probably fortunate that these choices aren't laid out before us so starkly.

Or that the Mr/Mrs average Jo Public adopts an emu attitude (ie burying their respective heads in the sand).

You say you would choose from the low end of the list. The problem is people don't see the choices like that. Many people who like eating meat or wearing fur or whatever would not be willing to kill an animal themselves, but it is conveniently done for them by other people. First worlders happily condemn slavery and trumpet human rights but Third-world countries are exploited by first world countries, robbed of their resources, their economies are held down by the strong markets and stockbrokers, their people are kept powerless and ignorant, so that from frustration and helplessness they can do nothing but wage war against each other and themselves, so that they can get diseases and die in their millions, so that the rich folks can still keep on robbing them of their diamonds, gold, platinum, copper, zinc, vanadium, chrome, silicon, ivory, wood, oil... so that they can be made to work for extremely little money and under horrible conditions in mines and factories so that the rich and comfortable and fun-loving folks in the first world, far away, can have the products they want, in abundance and cheaply. The choices nowadays are of this nature: our comfortable materialistic lifestyles versus the misery millions of future humans (not to mention animals and plants) are going to suffer as a result of the depletion and pollution of the earth's resources and the disruption of the planetary ecological balance. Many people choose the former.

Decent rhetoric. Somewhat jingoistic, but decent. Do you have a solution to propose? Do you expect that the greedy masses will somehow suddenly grow shameful of the soft and squishy lives they lead? Do we simply need to stop all trade with these people and places? Will that solve the world's problems? Will that save the world's resources for future generations?

I most emphataically do not say that we should choose from the lower end of the list. I suggest that every one of us will order the list in a different way and that that order will change as our circumstances change. The choices I offer here are trivial. The problems you want to address are so much more central to structure of our societies that any possible answers fall into areas of political philosophy that have not yet been solved and have barely been addressed.

Perhaps the answers seem self-evident to you and that is why you do not offer them. Perhaps you believe that, if you simply shame us enough, we will suddenly begin doing the 'right thing.' Even a few moments consideration whould show you that the changes required to solve these problems require a complete change in the way things are done, in the way that countries deal with countries, in the way that people deal with people. Perhaps you are so lost in your vision that you believe that all of us must be utterly indifferent to the comparative life styles between what you call the first world and the third world. Perhaps, you don't care what we want and need because you are so lost in what you percieve that these other people want and need.

In any of these case and many more, you are simply not saying anything useful because you are not saying it in a way and in a place where it can make a differnce. Who do you think is reading what you write? We are the people you are accusing of having no sensitivity. The 'rabble' who might be aroused by your words don't have access to the internet, they have to wait weeks for the arrival of batteries to power the radios given to them by minons of the 'first world' in order to arrouse the sort of desires and lusts in them that will enourage them to work in mines instead of fields. They don't have computers. In fact, they don't have, period. The simple concept of owning land is completely foreign to most third world societies. They have no philosophy of saving the worlds supply of vanadium because their society has no need of vanadium.

Now you've got me doing it, dealing with your hodge podge of arguments as if refuting any number of points from your diatribe would have any relationship to what you seem to be saying. You cover so much ground and mix so many issues that I have to suspect that you think that they are all tied together in some way that can be resolved by dealing with some single thing you find wrong with the world you live in.

Do you know what it is?

Does it have anything to do with being sentimental about animals?

Will you tell us?

Barton

I'm not trying to shame anyone, or to rouse any rabble. I was making a comment about the nature of your list: many people do not see priorities as clearly as that. And I want to extend the thinking about animals to people. People and animals are mistreated similarly, and what harms the one, harms the other. All life on this planet is interdependent.

I just want that people should be aware of what's going on, and not live in dream-worlds. What I wrote is what is going on. I do not propose solutions because I don't know of any. But I do believe that if people become aware of the problems and start thinking about them they are more likely to come up with solutions than when they are blissfully unaware of them. What I wrote I wrote for the people of h2g2, nobody else. Many people over here do not know what is going on, and I would like to help inform them. It is after all supposed to be a Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything.

What do I find wrong with the world I live in? Do I know what it is? What does it have to do with being sentimental about animals? Will I tell you? Answer to question 2 and 4: Yes. Answer to question 1 and 3: We are ignorant and complacent, we do not know enough about ourselves and each other and the world we live in, and we don't care enough about ourselves and each other and the world we live in. Does that give the clue to a quick and easy solution? No way. Like I said, I propose no solutions, I'm just trying to inform people and make them care. Maybe you don't need it - you seem to be informed, and the intensity of your reply indicates that you care. But you're not the only person who's going to read this.

Well spoken and I thank you for your compliment whether or not it was stated sarcastically. I acknowledge your point about complacentcy and the implied plea for universal empathy, which quality seems to have utterly disappeared from our culture, lo, these many years now. Certainly people are animals and, equally, certainly we can show sympatahy for certain portions of that class disproportionately while seeming to ignore other, often larger, portions of it (Convicted murderers, for instance, versus starving chi;ldren.) But, if you are offended by the outcries for a class you execrate, you need simply turn around to find another set of outraged screaming about issues you hold sacred.

I allow that you will find many who do seem to react to anything beyond their individual, miniscule circle of interests. I do not, however, expect that most who read these entries fall into that category. H2G2, by and large, does not seem to be a place for illiterate, uncaring sheep. Furthermore, I doubt that it is a place visited much by such self-centered exemplars of what was once termed "the silent majority," save by accidentally scoring on a search engine while hoping to find something juicy to snare for their mp3 player.

I'm afraid that what you view as complacentcy should more accurately be viewed as apathy. Much as I personally loathe, the apathetic life-style, I need to acknowledge that the only thing that keeps the world from tearing itself to tiny scraps is that a significant portion of humanity (anywhere from a third to a half or more) simply doesn't care about any signifcant portion (anywhere from a quarter to a tenth) of the issues that call out for our attention.

Furthermore, the world, from the viewpoint of an admitedly parochcail US citizen, is currently structured in such a way that we are being trained on a daily, even minute by minute, basis to learn to ignore the very pleas that you are hoping we will hear. Consider the advertisments and commercials that bombard us throughout our waking lives. Techniques are being steadily improved with which to catch and hold our attention. We in simple self-defense are learning how to simply shut them out in order to simply get on with what we are doing. The messasges crying out for help which intrude on our often necessasry breaks from the daily madness either go completely unnoticed or provoke a Pavlovian button push on the remote control.

"Certainly, there are people less well off than we are," we tell ourselves "Certainly, they are deserving of our attention, our concern, and, even our charity. But, I really did give at the office. I already have cut back on those things I feel guilty about. Leave me alone! I'm not sure about tomorrow. I NEED these re-runs of 'I Love Lucy!'"

I mentioned that I miss the kind of universal empathy which once seemed a real part of our social structure. I admit that for every person who is worried about feeding his family there seems to be, at least, ten who are woried about which brand of clothing they can bear to be seen wearing in public. And the levels of concern are probably higher for the latter group. I don't pretend that their vast number makes them right. My problem is that *MY* empathy forces me to want to see things from their point of view as well. I do not share their ethics and I do not share their morality but I do understand it.

So, here is what I suggest to you: If you want to get their attention, turn your cause into a game show or an entertaining and, mostly, mindless movie with lots of explosions and special effects. Don't use guilt techniques. Make them want to keep everyone else from being able to enjoy their apathy. Consider how the anti-animal testing groups have captured the minds and souls of their Moonie-esque groupies. (I'm not talking about the average sympathetic people who are torn between buying a leather belt, for the sake of the cattle, buying one made of plastic, for the sake of the oil, or buying one made of rope, for the sake of the anti-hemp movement. I'm talking about the people who are easy to label as fanatics: the anti-fur folks who carry spray paint cans just in case they happen upon someone wearing fluffy dead skins or the anti-abortion folks who study how to make pipe bombs on the internet and believe that they are totally entitled to get what they want however they want to get it.) Learn patience. like the anti-smoking folks who learned from the failure of the anti-alcohol group. (Morality doesn't matter. Ethics doesn't matter. Make people hate smokers not tobacco.) Start with the children, make them ask mummy and daddy if they can send their fluffy bear to the little children in Ethiopia.

Mark Twain once wrote that no one ever passed a law to stop himself from doing anything. What does that suggest to you? I'm guessing that sport is the most viewed programming on television in England as it is here. What does that suggest to you? How much content do you see on a daily basis that deals with the ills that you choose to single out?

What I started out to say in this thread was that the issue of man's cruelty to animals or sympathy for their suffering is directly proportionate to that creature's importance to the person making the decision. I included people on the list because they *are* animals to my way of thinking and that is one of the reasons why we *can* rank other animals below those we care for. I did not include every person in the world on the list because it seems to me that, firstly, there are people I rank lower than rabbits and rats and, secondly, I don't believe that that issue needed to be brought into this discussion.

You clearly feel differently. You are articulate enough to be able to make your point and you made it well. But having made it, where do we go from there? Pointing and saying, "That's a bad thing," and then following it up with an explanation saying that that was all you wanted to say doesn't do much more than suggest that, in your opinion, no one else is capable of noticing that situation. If you are a caring person, and you seem to be one, and if it really matters to you, and it seems that it does, then the next thing for you to do is to try to do something to correct the problem. Saying that you don't have an answer is not adequatte. It suggests that you believe that your responsibility ends with your having had the intelligence that we all lack to have seen the problem and pointed it out.

I suggest that a more appropriate statment on your part might have been to say, "I don't have the answer yet." I suggest that you modify your rhetoric to the extent that you add the word 'we' in strategic locations and thereby tie yourself into this cause in your thinking as well as your words. I suggest that you stop shouting so loudly about 'them' and develop an attitude that doesn't make it so easy for you to stand by the sidelines while others make the plays and exert the real effort.

Having said all that, I still say, well spoken.

Barton

The posting I made I never intended to stand on its own. I fully expected to be challenged and in responding to the challenge I intended to make my intentions and proposals clearer, which is what I am doing right now, thanks to the opportunity you're giving me.

I have been on h2g2 quite a time and I have an idea of the kind of people to be found here. And I have found that people over here still have lots of misconceptions about the Third World and what is going on here. Even people who are literate and read newspapers and care about the outside world often do not quite know what things are really like over here. Your view of "third world societies" does seem to be somewhat simplistic. For instance in my city you will find right now many black people who drive in Mercedes cars and own houses with satellite dishes, and not far from them you will also find many black people who live in shacks built by their own hands from scrap metal and who get their household water from the same river they dump their body wastes in. There are many people over here with computers, and news can be spread across the continent quite easily. There are no communities that are so isolated that they never feel influences from more affluent outside regions. But there are millions of people dying because of a lack of opportunities and means to do certain necessary things. If our governments had more economic power we would be able to save many people from dying horribly, to raise standards of living, and to even depress the rate of population growth. But our economies are at the mercy of the manipulation and oppression of stronger economies. We don't have nothing - we have a lot; only it is not enough because the problems we have to deal with are extremely large.

It is precisely *because* people here at h2g2 are willing to listen, to learn and to think that I state my message here in the way that I do.

Getting back to animals: I mentioned the example of humans to show that there is a similarity: people who eat meat don't see animals killed and slaughtered. When they eat a juicy steak, they don't have in their minds images of cows bleeding and dying. The problem is removed from their sensibilities and therefore they don't worry about it. But actually, caring is a natural response for a human. Suppose you take a meat eating family and give them a little calf to raise. The kids will quickly grow attached to the calf, give it a name, play with it and so on; when that calf is grown up, suppose you now told them to slaughter it. I am betting that they will not slaughter it. They have come to care for it, and this was a natural outcome of the situation. To enable us to eat animals, we hold them at the greatest distance we can. Even the farmers who raise them, interact with them as little as possible, avoid attachments to them as much as possible. Not many farmers will give names to animals intended to be slaughtered, or spend lots of time with them and learn the quirks of their individual personalities.

The problems of the Third World are similar. If the people in the US or the UK were daily confronted with people dying under miserable circumstances, they would care and try to do something about it. The closer we can bring the "victims" to the attention of the people who are able to make a difference, the more likely a positive response will be. If people can become attached to animals, then certainly they can care for humans. But because the problem of global injustice is (at present) too distant from the perceptions of first-worlders, they care very little about it.

This is the connection between humans and animals. If we can realise that there is something bad about the current situation of animals OR humans, we can do something to bring this to the attention of other people. This in itself will already be a positive step. You think about TV, but there is now something that will soon become much more prevalent than the TV - I mean the internet. This medium will work to bring the problems of Third-worlders to the attention of First-worlders. How? Simply by stimulating closer contact. Suppose many people in America started to correspond with many people in Africa, or Asia, or Latin America. Then they will start to care about the people in those countries, through their contacts they will learn about all the things going on in those countries and will no longer be able to remain apathetic. The country of America for instance will no longer be able to focus only on "American interests" because so many Americans will have intimate links with people in other countries that the interests of those countries will become their interests as well.

Again note that the interests of animals and even plants also overlap with the interests of people. This is something the First World can learn from the Third World, and vice versa. The "animal issue" that troubles me most of all is the rapid extermination of species especially in the Third World. This leads to a change in the balance of ecosystems with consequent environmental disasters that we suffer from with increasing regularity.

Many people in the US and the UK may be apathetic right now, but this is only because they have been able to escape dealing with the consequences of their deeds so far - but there always comes a time when the piper must be paid, and then they will start worrying and frantically looking for a way out. *Then* something can be done with them. In the meantime I am not targeting the apathetic majority, because whatever they do will not be likely to help anyway. I am targeting a smaller group of people who are a little bit wiser and a million times more likely to achieve a positive effect.

I said I don't have solutions, meaning that I do not know of any single strategy that will make the problem go away. But I know of many strategies that can be used to make the problem a bit smaller, and I am personally trying out many of them. What somebody else chooses to do or not to do is not my responsibility.

Because I live close to animals I have a higher view of them than many other humans do. Because I live in the Third World I have a higher view of humans than many people in the First World do. Now, when circumstances become harsh, organisms - whether animals or human - either adapt or die out. When we can see that many are dying we must consider that some are also surviving, and those that survive are the strongest of the species. This is happening with insects like malaria mosquitos and other so-called "pests". It is also happening with humans. If you live here you will really discover just what a wonderful thing a human being is, what incredible circumstances people can adapt to. While the average US or UK citizen is becoming soft, lazy, stupid, the average African is becoming stoic, intrepid, sharp-witted, resourceful, stubborn, aggressive and damn near indestructible. That's what the average African needs to be in order to survive. I cannot speak for other Third-world regions but I suspect the principle of evolution by natural selection works the same everywhere.

There is no fair competition in the world: those who have, keep on trying to put those who don't have at a disadvantage. To do anything or get anywhere we have to do ten times as much as the more fortunates. But this is backfiring because we are adapting to this inequality, like people who have to battle uphill all the time eventually develop huge muscles. Compared to the First-world citizens we're becoming superhuman. We're going to solve our problems with or without the help of the Americans or the Europeans. They're either with us, in which case, good; or against us, in which case we're going to flatten them, at which point it will be much too late for them to cry: "But that's unfair!!!"

Nature works the way it does. There is justice built into its laws. You get mad cows, foot-and-mouth disease, food shortages, environmental crises, super-mosquitoes and super-rats when you exploit animals or 'nature', you get wars, social misery, super-misfits and super-terrorists when you exploit people. You can't escape having to deal with consequences forever. What I'm doing here and elsewhere is shoving the consequences into people's faces which I hope will help cure them of their apathy. The more people who do this, the better.

All of this may seem a bit off-topic seeing as we're talking about being sentimental about animals, but so far the House Rules haven't outlawed good old topic drift!

I somehow missed your eloquent reply. It must have happened while I was otherwise occupied. Now that the furor over this thread (such as it was) has died down I'm not sure that now is the time to start it up again.

Let me just say, that I agree with much that you have said and take exception on only minor points.

I myself have had bad and good years in this life and while I have never been so low as some of the people you describe, I know people who have. Suffering is not reserved for the Third World though I make no claims that it is as widespread here and to such a degree as it is there. We effete oppressors of the down trodden masses in the US are as much proud of that as we are shamed that there is still as much suffering as there is.

I agree with you that to a large extent we are amplifying your problems though I will not allow that we are responsible for them. You may say that the West came at you while you were technologically primative and took advantage of the situations and I will not argue at all. But, do not forget that you just bragged that you are not that far behind us in technology and threatened a third worlder behind every tree on the internet 'real soon now.' You didn't get there without that same interference from us First and Second Worlders.

If you turn your head and see people drinking out of open sewers, don't be so sure that you can accuse us of refusing to turn and see the same or similar conditions here. If I can point to people who's only water supply is also their toilet, and I can, then the problem is most certainly not all reserved for Africa. If I you cna point to people who have been abused by the West for the last two hundred years and more, I can point to ancestors who have been abused by the same culture for the last two thousand and more.

The issue isn't that you and those around you are being bred into supermen, the issue is that you are training youselves to hate. And what other choice do you have?

Well, for one thing, you can put a lower priority on computers and a higher one on water processing plants.

I agree that if you don't advance rapidly in the technological world you will continue to be left behind. Alright, allow yourself one computer for every million gallons of processed water. And make sure it doesn't sit around most of the day doing nothing the way that I, opressor of the masses, am doing since I have about fifteen of them most of which aren't even wired up to work, though they all could. Are they all super duper extra special bet-you-wish-you-had-em computers. Hell no! Would they be useful to you where you are even using obsolete software that no one here will buy anymore? Hell yes!

Why do I have them? Because no one walked up to me and said, please mister, if I carry it away can I have it. No, but I have heard people say, if you don't mind too awfully much would you deliver them to me, I suppose I could force myself to use an old Kaypro, but does it have Flight Simulator? It's a Commodore 64? Doesn't it run Windows? If you *need* to dig a ditch and you can't afford a backhoe then you might consider the offer of a couple of dozen shovels. If you already have shovels, and you really *need* that ditch then why aren't you shoveling?

It doesn't matter the color of the skin of the people driving the cars or building hovels. The fact is that the disparity is there. Right there. Why are you pounding on my door? Why don't you pound on that car owner'd door and say, I know someone who has computers all I need from you is the money to get them here. You can keep your car, I just want the shipping money. Otherwise, I know 50 or 60 people who would love to camp on your lawn and wash your car and windows for you, just to have a chance to drink the same water you do.

You're right. We here are selfish, self-righteous, cold-hearted, and unwilling to give you the 100th part of what we have so that you can be ever so much better and we are only slightly less well off. Well -- here it comes, the Westerner's bible-thumping, self-important cry of imagined pain -- I give my fair share. I earned what I have. I need to feed my family first and make sure that my children have all the opportunities that I didn't have. Yadayadayada.

Forget all that. If I really cared for what you seem to represent, I'd bend over backward for you. But you seem to think that all you need to do is complain loudly enough so that people who keep dogs will be shamed into feeding people who would be happy to have a dog to eat. Is there some reason, other than the bortherhood of man because you threw the brotherhood of man out the window when you threatened to bring your muscle bound evolutionary masses to wipe my rear end off the map, why we should want to help you compete with us while impoverishing ourselves and our children to make good on a system of exploitation that I personally never participated in and am already trying not to benefit from. I'm already guilty about the slavery in this country that is still being put behind us, yet my family came here 5o years after it had been made illegal and suffered from the same mentality or close enough during, at least 25 years after they arrived.

Of course, people are suffering. I'm happy that it pains you so much that being an obviously intelligent person, you set aside your intelligence to threaten someone who might have helped you but seems too supercillius to be touched any other way. Good. It shows passion. It shows emotional commitment. It shows your frustration.

Now answer me this? What can you do to make me WANT to help you? What can you do to make those like me want to help you? It won't do good to threaten, you can't shoot me by firing into your computer. And if you can afford to come over here to do it then that's, I don't know, how many people with food and clothes better than they had? I know that I can't afford to come over there. So you would be better off than I am.

Sure I make a heck of a lot more here than you or those you are so eloquent about can for the same work assuming you could find someone willing to pay for what I do. But, it costs me more than it does you too. How much is a loaf of fresh bread there? It's $1.79 +/- $.20 here for an off-brand mass produced 1 pound loaf with little nourishment. How much for a gallon of milk? It's $2.50 +/- $.50 here ours is homegenized, paturized, and vitamin enriched but I could live without it, I'm just not allowed to boy it any other way. How much is a suit of new work clothes. I have to guess for here because my work clothes are more for appearnace than duarability, but pants, shirt, and shoes buying as cheap as possible I can't imagine getting for less than $35.00 but I couldn't keep my job if I wore that sort of stuff so for me it would have to be at least $70.00. There are times when we don't buy certain things because the price goes up, but here My wife and I pay $1,300/month for our mortgage but we could shave $300 if we rented an apartment. There are four of us living there is reasonable comfort (read luxury by third world standards) I could cut way back and move into bad neighborhoods and save another $400 while we all live in very cramped quarters. Or I could save it all and go build a shanty down by the river except that the river is prime commercial real estate and we'd be run off. And of course, there would be no place to park our car. I have to have a car or there would be no way to get to where I work. There would be no way for my wife to get to work either, Our economy assumes sthat we must have a car. The car payments are $350 a month since we just had to buy a new one. The old one is dead in the driveway and we may give it away to a charity since that would be cheaper than trying to have it removed, Then there's the gasolene and other upkeep. Our gas here is cheap, less than $3.00/gal. usually much less, but not for long. I spend $35.00 on gas every week just going to work. Groceries every week for three adults and one baby runs about $150,oo but we eat very well and wouldn't care to stop. If we chose to we could get buy with $105 per week and have when things were tough. We still weren't starving. Others may have been but we weren't. Phones, electricity, heating gas, water and sewage, doctor, etc. other things that most people there probably don't have but which we are required to have either to get our work done or by law which sets minimum standards for living conditions. You know what minimum standards are don't you? Right they're what it takes to stay alive. Here it's what it takes to satisfy the lawmakers. Remember this, I'm not crying. I'm reasonably happy, though I'd love to work less for more money. We all have dreams.

How much do you pay for your computer time? Who do you pay it to?
How do you get to work? What was the cost of your education? How much time did it take you to earn it or pay it off? Do you have a car? What does it cost you to drive it? Do you live in the city or in the country? Do you own land and can you sell it? Exactly what country do you live in, there? How long has it been independant? What is your form of government? Do you participate in it? What are you doing to help yourself that you could be doing to help others? If I don't know anything about you and I admit that I know very little, what do you really know about me?

I don't have a point to make here? If you can see your problems and don't have an answer, why should I have one. Is all you need money? Get it. Are people hurting? Stop it.

Do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. Practice. I can't do it for you.

Show me something that will work and I'll see if I can help. I really do care. I just don't care enough to do it for you. After all, what I think you need might not be what you want. You've clamed it isn't.

Time for me to feed my two dogs.

Barton

Look Barton, you're right, I'm frustrated, and I don't know what I can do, and I don't know what anyone can do. I would just like it if people thought about these matters a bit more, and if people took it really seriously. I have nothing against you personally, I don't have anything against America or Europe, but I honestly tell you there are lots of people in badly-off countries getting very exasperated. And I really do care about animals, and I think that the natural world is suffering very badly because of problems caused by people, mostly affluent people, mostly in the First World. I know for a fact that there are people right inside America who are also having hard times, I know that even people with lots of money have a hard time keeping up because of the lifestyles they need to follow because they have to. I know all that. But somehow somewhere something is gonna give. What do you do when you *cannot* keep up any more? What do people do when they have no constructive options left to them? What happens when the global economy or ecology collapse? I'm sorry if you feel I am victimising you, I know you don't want to worry right now about these big problems, but somebody has to. I did not ask that you should answer all my questions and face all my accusations, this is a public forum, it is aimed at anybody in general who wants to respond. It just so happened that you were the one who answered every time. Look, don't worry about it so much, don't worry about what I say, I am only one person, half-crazed as it is, you can find lots of alternative views. Just do me some favours - think about it, find out about it and talk about it. I mean about the problem of conflict between people and people, and between people and nature. It is a problem, and it is important.

Of course it's important. And I'm sorry if I made you think that I thought otherwise. I admire your sense of commitment and your sense of empathy. These are both qualitues in short demand these days.

What I don't admire is that you seem to restrict your commitment and your empathy to only this one problem. Sure, it's your cause. I'm glad you have a cause. But, just because you have a cause and others don't share it in the same way you do doesn't mean that you have the right or duty to inflict others with what amounts to selective blindness.

I went to your home space and read what you had written. I wrote things there that I regret. I am not going to bring your personal maters into what I had tried to keep to a deliberately impersonal discussion with a philosophical base. You came here and shattered that. I expect that means that you were successful.

I will take the time to say this about what you did. In effect, you said that these matters should not be impersonal, that they should be discussed on an emotional level. And I can respect that position, largely because it is not that far from my position, that the individuals choices are necessarily individual and personalized and should not be generalized.

You clearly feel that they should be generalized. You feel that you have a moral obligation to shout out your charges and because these issues are moral issues they are matters of faith and coannot be challenged or debated. More importantly, you feel that I should have an ethical obligation to join your cause. While, to my thinking, ethical issues are debatable, you are not willing to debate them.

In retrospect, you were not threatening me with third world supermen, you were warning me about them. I have my own judgment of what lies behind your alarm but that does not change the fact that I owe you an apology on that false charge. I apologize.

I still need to point out the flaw in your approach. If I need to be warned about my(our) coming conquest, then what you are asking for is not aid for these people but appeasement on the one hand and subversion on the other. Either, don't get them angry, you'll loose. Or, if we hand out the trade beads now, they won't know what we've done to them.

I know that that is not what you mean to say, but that is the meaning of what I am hearing when you make that threat. You probably feel that becasue of your experience where you are, that you are simply making an observation, but when you threaten my security, I must make plans to preserve it.

You are backing off a bit by saying that you didn't mean me specifically, that you were speaking out to the affluent in general. If I didn't think you were reasonable enough to be able to allow that the class is heterogenous, I wouldn't have bothered to reply. My response to your previous message was to point out that your message is too shrill. I don't believe I said it well.

What do I do when I can't meet the demands? I don't know. I do know that more and more people have opted not to keep up. They have chosen to abandon the values of our society except for the value we place on life alone. They wander our streets, more or less mentally competant. They survive as best they can and they resist being brought back into the 'real' world. If we feed them, they accept it. If we don't, they accept that too. If they can be warm at night, they will be. If they cannot, they do the best they can.

Some of them, called, cruelly 'bag ladies' push around shopping carts that they have stolen or carry grocery sacks filled with things that others have thrown away and that most can find no reason to retrieve or retain. It's a cruel parody of our American way of life. We see them on the streets at any time of the year. We ask ourselves, what can we do about them. The more compassionate ask, what can we do for them. But, in both cases, the answer is, we don't know.

The answer there, it seems to me, is to figure out what it is now that was not before. What has happened that caused this result. I suspect, the problem is too much pressure, not enough concern for the fact that we are people.

The world, sir, has gone to hell in the proverbial hand basket and is busy looking for some place else worse.

But, I trust collective labels even less than the more specific ones. Humans run in herds and herds run in one direction then they stop to graze before they run in another direction. There is safety in the herd but that safety is only real when you consider the herd as a single organism. The indivudual members of the herd are still at risk; from predators, from loosing track of the herd, from being trampled in the next stampede. There I go using collective nouns again.

Humans are also hunters because human herds are really tribes. Tribes are more like hives but with different politics. Hunters hunt for the tribe. Farmers farm for the tribe. etc. When the tribe doesn't need hunters, the hunters still need to hunt. The farmers still need to farm. etc. More generalization.

I don't feel that you are deliberately victimizing me. I'm just standing her trying to get your attention because I think I have something to teach you. (I happen to like to teach and teachers need to teach.) I'm to proud in my individuality to think it proper to tell you what to do. But, I have absolutely no qualms about making sure that you know what it is you are doing -- in detail. I have no qualms about showing you other ways of doing things. I have no qualms about explaining why what you seem to be doing is doing something else, to me.

Don't try to apoligize away what you feel is right. Don't shuffle your feet and scuff your toe in the dirt while you say, I didn't mean to do it. Not, when you were doing what you thought was right.

Either you are right or you aren't. Either you get what you go for or you don't. Either you are a responsible adult willing to take whatever comes from his actions or you aren't.

Of course, you are just one person. That's all any of us are. I'm pretty darn important to myself just as you are to yourself. There's nothing wrong with that. All I ask is that when you feel responsible and empathetic and committed to one person, remember that I am a person too.

Of course, you may ask the favor. I'll go you one step further. I have already thought about it. I thought about it, I'm willing to bet, before you were born (I'm 53 years old.) I didn't have an answer for the problem then and I don't have one now. That doesn't mean that I've stopped thinking about it.

Take care.

OK, thanks, I also responded to your other posting. You know, I just wanted to come up with a kind of image that might stick in people's minds, when I talked about the Third World becoming strong and determined and aggressive and 'flattening' America and Europe. I just wanted you to imagine the kind of domination I am perceiving coming from 'your' side onto 'us', coming from 'our' side onto 'you' (notice quotes, I don't actually want us to be divided into separate sides). Just a change of perspective. I got carried away with it, though. The fact is this economic competitiveness is not a good thing. If you force us to play by your rules, we just might end up winning you by your rules, with you the losers getting nothing like we the losers are currently getting nothing. But that will still not be a good thing. In actual fact nature is not that competitive, and economy shouldn't be either. People shouldn't have to justify their lives by the amount of money they can earn, as if their lives are being held ransom by the state, or by the banks, or big corporations or whatever. People should be able to just live and take care of themselves and still have time left for meaningful interaction with other people. That goes for everybody, right around the world. The 'First World'-system is brutal, also for inhabitants of the First World.

I have more than one cause. They all come down to respect and appreciation for and responsibility towards life, in all its forms. Its a cause I think everybody should at least have a marginal awareness of.

How am I inflicting blindness on people? I just mention a subject in a forum, I don't restrict people's ability to look at other subjects in other forums. I don't compell anybody to do anything - if they feel morally compelled, it is their own morality and compassion that compels them. If I encourage that and stir it into action, is it wrong, is it a kind of manipulation or domination on my part?

For me every matter is one of emotion and personal involvement, in fact I think that apparent impartiality is always illusory, because behind all arguments there are people with viewpoints that actually matter to them. And all those people are subjectiv. When they say something as if it was an objective fact, it is still subjective, but people, including themselves, may be fooled into thinking it is actually objective and impartial while in fact it is not. Like this paragraph.

I don't know if there ever will be Third-World supermen. What would be worse, the Third World finally becoming strong enough to rise up and challenge the First, or the Third World forever remaining at the bottom, powerless to rise up? Why can't we just figure out that in fact we have lots of mutual values and interests and it is not necessary that we antagonize and work against each other? Drop the competitive model entirely. People will not suddenly stop doing any work, competition is not the only motivator. There will be plenty of challenges for us to keep us going and making progress. Just staying alive is already going to demand that we all work hard.

My message is shrill, yes. When we are in distress we scream shrilly because the sound penetrates and is likely to be heard.

What's wrong with collective nouns? And anyways using your metaphor of herds, the herd as a whole can be in different states of safety - the herd can be attacked or threatened very regularly, with a rapid loss of members and a rapid replacement of members, so it stays the same size though the individuals are at risk. Or the herd can be attacked or otherwise threatened almost never, and all its members can live long and be healthy and happy, and the birthrate stays low so the herd doesn't become too large. Humanity as a whole will not die out, but it can easily happen that people live mostly in misery and die very young to be rapidly replaced by many new kids. Or we could all live very long, with a low birthrate and a high standard of living. I say seek a situation where the herd is very safe and the individual members also, seek maximum quality of life for everybody.

I believe that with better planning and co-ordination of its various initiatives humanity can attain a high quality of life for everybody, enough justice and equality to keep things in balance, not degrade our irreplaceable natural resources, and still leave individuals lots of time for their own pursuits. I believe creativity is one of the best pursuits that can make people feel that their lives are meaningful, and if people had more time and valued creativity more we could really turn this planet into a paradise, with everybody being creative and making everything more beautiful and/or interesting.

I don't want to threaten anybody's security. I do want to help people rid themselves of false and useless forms of security. Modern societies have so many systems supposed to provide people with security but in fact doing nothing much for them; there are still many ways in which their lives as they have been leading it can come to an abrupt and catastrophic end. I would rather that we strengthen again the security systems that are more reliable, less dependent on wildly fluctuating factors: being situated in an intimate community of friends and family members, being able to get along with other people, being trustworthy and able to trust others, being adaptable and resourceful, knowing the world and the environment you find yourself in and feeling at home there - those things are security, they help you face the world and life even despite all the uncertainties. I mean this generally again, not directing it to you in particular.

I can apologize when I think I did something wrong. I am an adult, but I am not totally self-assured and I don't think it would be good if I was. I will face the responsibility of what I do and say, but that includes recognizing and acknowledging mistakes. It was never my intention to offend anyone.

Okay, you think about it ... do you talk about it as well? I don't know you very well so I can't really characterise you, but your style seems to be to mull the problem over in your head ... mine is to jump straight into it and try to sort out the mess even though I don't quite understand what I'm doing, and don't have a nice answer. That doesn't mean I don't try to understand, it just means that the mess is a quite awful one and I'm not gonna wait until perhaps someday I understand it in detail and have a nice neat answer, I'm gonna start trying right now and even if I have to slap in an ugly-looking patched together thingummabob to make it work I'll do that, so at least I'll have bought some time until I can fix it nice and neat. And of course I'm not fixing the entire world on my own, I'm just now focusing on a few small but still vital bits of it and that I feel I can do something about.

The reason I brought up the herd (and I'm not so sure how much a metaphor it is) was to suggest that nature and evolution do not work on individuals, they work on species. If nature kills off weak members, then the benefits only accrue if they breed and carry forward in their genes the qualities tha allowed them to survive. A herd is a meta-creature, a rather stupid meta-creature.

It seams clear that man, as a species, grew from a herd animal to a tribal animal. The only real difference between these two meta-creatures is that a tribe has specialized, mutually dependant yet independant members. There is no real specialization in herds.

In passing, a hive has the same qualities except that there are no independant members (treating male/female pairs as one reproductive creature in both cases.)

It is the development of the individual that has made us what we are today, but to nature we are still simply a tribal meta-creature.

To the extent that we develop a social conciousness, that is the extent that we as individuals can work toward adding intelligence to the meta-man.

The trouble with tribes is that they are evolutionarily limited in size. Beyond a certain point tribes become too large and become meta-men as members of a meta-tribe we might call a meta-meta-man in turn. At each level of meta-ness the tribe partakes of the qualities of the men that make it up. (There is no reason to believe that this expansion must or can go on forever. Issues of communication seem to be the limiting factor.)

You must bear these observations in mind if you want to get the attention of meta-men. Remember that each 'man' must either have survival at the root of it's character or it will loose to the competition. This is why I warn you against threats.

What you seem to be feeling is, in these terms, a high degree of social involvment to those around you. That is, you care. Good for you and good for me, because I care too. But remember, that just because we are all men, that does not mean that we all belong to the same tribe. I believe you will agree that history bears me out on this point.

Yes, everyone devoted to art and or beauty with little or no competion seems like a pleasant image. But for there to be no competiton, does it not make sense that there must be no competitors? How does this then stack up with the image of man somehow triumphing over his baser nature living in complete harmony, without clearing the planet of other species of animals and plants that also have an imperitive toward survival? If man ceases to compete he must first insure that he has no competition. This is a basic lesson of nature.

Alfred Bester, I believe it was he, made an observation that seems quite compelling in this context. He came up with this formulation: The amount of creativity and technology in a society is directly proportional to the amount of calories available per capita. If you think about it, it really makes sense.

"I don't want to threaten anybody's security." I mispoke, I should have said my "sense of security.' And of course, that, you want to treaten. Be careful. The rest of what I said on that subject, I stand by.

What's wrong with collective nouns? We as people have a talent for characterization. We see a pattern and we name it. Then we can use that name as a tool. And, along with other names we come to be able to describe our world according to these patterns. The problem comes in when we for get that the fact that we have named something doesn't mean that we understand it.

The classic warning is, the map is not the territory.

If I can point to England on the map and, in fact, the word 'England' is printed right there. What in fact do I know about England? All I know is that it is on the map and the map is supposed to be a representation of the land masses of the world or perhaps the political organization of the world, or perhaps places not to go without a towel.

I don't need to take the time here to explain just how specialized maps can be. The point is that, too often people think that because they know the map, that they know what the map is representing. That is the danger of collective nouns.

If I say, "people do this." Then whether or not I meant to say that I am speaking about people in a gerneral statistical way. There is danger that I or you might generalize even further without considering the inaccuracy of the first generalization. Beware of collective nouns if you want to be understood.

Take care.

Barton

One of the things that I have to do is to disspell misconceptions about nature and about evolution. Evolution is not all about competition, and also, the individual takes part in it as well, not just the species. When considering groups, they do in fact form 'organisms' consisting of numerous smaller organisms. Organisation goes right to the top, which is the entirety of the biosphere of the Earth. Within this 'organism' there is no more competition than within the cells of your body or within your brain. Everything works together to ensure the survival of the whole. When individual creatures die it's similar to when cells of your body die, it is for the sake of the survival of the greater organism. So even when our bodies die it is for the sake of the greater living system of which we are parts. Every cell dies, but even so the healthier a cell is during its lifetime, the better it functions, and it is best if every cell serves out its full natural lifetime.

Once we realise that every kind of creature on Earth contributes to the global ecology, that we all have shared interests, then we needn't eliminate anything to eliminate competition. If it was really necessary to eliminate all competitors in order to eliminate competition your example doesn't hold; even after other species have been eliminated there would still be more than one human, wouldn't there? So the humans need to keep fighting until there was only one person left, then there would be no more competitors. But suppose humans can agree among themselves not to see each other as competitors. Then they could also agree not to see other species as competitors either. No other species is really a threat to us, there is no reason why we have to eliminate any type of organism in order to survive.

I think the example of meta-man and meta-meta man is interesting, but I disagree about the expansion not being able to go on forever. If you think communication will be a problem, it may be because you see time from your own perspective instead of considering very long periods of time. A very very big collective mind might still work coherently even though the communication between its 'neurons' (in this case individual people or individual groups) happens slowly because the mind will exist for many millennia. If a small brain can work coherently a big brain can also work coherently. There are no absolute limits, everything is relative, everything can be scaled up or down in space and time.

Pain is also a warning against threats. Pain is not pleasant, but it is necessary. A big problem of our current society is that people want to eliminate pain rather than the problems that cause the pain. I see this as a sign of our disconnection from our roots, our natural state. But I think that we will in time heed the message and correct our mistakes. I think we will survive our current problems, we may suffer a great deal of pain in the process, but we will pull through.

There are different ways of understanding things. There is the rational way, and then there is the intuitive way. Intuition results from the subconscious parallel-processing of thousands or even millions of 'facts'. It is possible to have an intuitive understanding of things, which means a kind of representation that is 'true' to reality, even though this understanding cannot be formulated rationally. It would in fact be impossible to process all of these pieces of information consciously and rationally.

Language use is a rather mystical thing. I have thought about what goes into the use and recognition of words many times and I still cannot make the slightest rational sense of it. But intuitively I manage to use language and words, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. When I make a mistake in language use I am also intuitively aware of it before I am rationally aware what the mistake was. I place rather a large amount of trust in emotion and intuition. Consider that over these fora my argument has been that we should be *more* sentimental about animals and about humans as well - I have to practice what I preach!

Thank you for having given me some comments to think about. I hope I have done the same for you!

Of course, you have given me things to think about or I wouldn't be here typing.

My feeling is that you are fooling yourself if you don't believe that a desire/need/instinct for survival doesn't lead to competition. I DO agree with you that I wish this weren't the case.

You are correct to say that everything works together, in the sense that all things are dependant on all other things in a balanced system. Ecology is the study of that interdependance. When I suggested the elimination of all competition as a way to permit mankind to live without competion, it was intended somewhat sarcastically for the very reason that you cite. As to whether man can live with man without competing if a reasonable portion of his needs are met, you yourself call that into question.

So long as two organisms require, or simply want, something that has a limited supply, there will be comptetion. Arguing that this need not be the case to non-rational creatures is futile. Certainly, if placed in an envrionment where each creature's need is fully met, it is possible to place a lion with a lamb and still have both animals for days and weeks to come. But, let that lion get hungry and he will eat that lamb.

Yes, in the wild that lion will not try to kill for, not pleasure, but rather for the sake of proof of domination as man seems to do. And it will not even waste its energy on things it knows it cannot catch or which will not feed it enough to ofset the effort. This is not cognitive judgement but instinct and experience.

But can you meet the need of such a creature be it lion or man, if part of its function in nature is to kill and consume what is killed. Is there some portion of it's nature that requires it to compete. Would you be willing to live with a lion trusting that you fully understand and can meet its needs or would you keep it caged away from yourself when you need to relax? I, of course, cannot answer for you, but I would rather honor the lion by allowing to do what nature has bred it to do -- so long as it lives far away from me.

I agree with your estimation of what would happen if man had nothing to compete against ezcept himself. Except that I believe that just as some men seem to desire to be leaders others seem to desire to be lead. It's a symbiotic relationship since neither can exist without the other. So to achieve your nirvanna it would seem that we must change the fundamental nature of man. Something I'm not sure we have the right to even contemplate. In short, there lies a line that *I* will not cross.

I'm afraid then that the only way to eliminate competition for those things we need is to scale back our desire to dominate this world and allow all of nature to decide which creature will survive from moment to moment. I don't believe that even you would be willing to give up all pursuit of personal security, specially since your argument is that security is precisely what the African peoples are lacking.

I'm afraid that so long as nature rules the world every species is dedicated to survive and change to better be able to survive. The essence of things, as ecologists, both scientific and political, point out there is no such thing as unlimited resources. And there is no end of the plants and animals that depend on those resources to survive.

It is clear that the way the world is presently arranged came to be over hundreds of thousands of years. As the world changes so does the life that can live in its conditions. The danger is not that we use up these resources but that we do so faster than the living world can adapt to the changes. The natural result of this is that we will *use* ourself out of existence and we will probably take what ever else is here with us since we force the whole world to live in our waste products. Nothing can live in its own waste products. This used to not be so significant. But Meta-Man as a species is now large enough that his waste products cannot be dispersed in the environment enough that they can be consumed and transformed by the other forces of nature. The irony is that the large the mass of Man on this planet, the greater the need in nature for something to consume this mass. Meta-Man instinctively understands this and fears it. He attempts to guard against it and the result is that what he cannot tame, he is forced to destroy for the sake of his own survival.

I do not believe that a perfect balance is possible. I do not believe that man, who has no natural predator, will remain immune from predation. But, even if such a thing were possible, then man would still have to face the fact that he cannot have all of what he wants. There isn't enough there to have particularly so long as the mass of man continues to increase. It's a simple fact, there is only so much biomass available. The more that is tied up in man, the less there is available for the rest of the planet.

The result? Nature will win and man will go or man will win and nature will go. Nature has designed man in such a way that he must bow to nature which will then set the limits to man's available biomass or man will totally subvert nature and become responsible for whatever life he permits to live.

That is where your statement that anything can be scaled up or down fails me. I do not see how man can continue to grow beyond the point that everything else must suffer. The Earth is a closed system, at least so far.

If a bigger organism is slower it will be eaten by faster organisms to the limit of that organisms ability to do its job. or, for that matter, if we view nature as an organism, the biggest and slowest know by us, that doesn't mean that it can't be killed by virtue of its slowness and superceeded by something un-natural.

Your point about intuition is well taken, but you need to take it one step further. If man exists largely on intuition which he certainly did before he invented rationality, then we must face the fact that man is essentially irrational and it is only through irrational behavior that he can become again a simple part of the ecology.

That, however, is a sacrifice that I will not willingly make. Even if man were to still be the most dangerous predator on the Earth without his rationality, he would only exist as an animal and in that sense thinking man would be extinct.

So, the problem then is how can man continue as a rational animal, an oxymoron if ever there was one, without poisoning his own enviroment and bringing about his own death and probably the rest of the world with him. I have a simple answer to that question:

I don't know.

You are young and energetic while I am older and very much a skeptic. I encourage you to flail about in any direction that seems to hold promise for your needs and wants -- so long as you don't want the ground I'm standing on. The youth of any generation is the future of that generation, but you will gain ascendence at the cost of displacing those who came before you. We have grown accustomed to that as you will in your turn. I wish you well, but I still want to die very worn out and with a full stomach. I'm sure it's selfishness on my part, but that's prety much the way most organisms seem to approach life.

Do continue to speculate about language, how we use it, and how it is possible that we can use it. It is, as you say, a mystery, but it also a barrier in the map vs. territory sense.

We seem to be a species that thrives on communication, so it seems to me that communication should be a major area of study. That may, of course, just be the mistake I made so many years ago.

Take care.

Barton

I will not respond to *everything* in your posting, because I don't want my response to become too long, but here are a few notes on some of your points:

About competition in nature: it exists, but not as much of it as is commonly supposed. Everywhere you will find co-operation along with
competition, because in the long run co-operation leads to less overall waste of resources. Different species will go to the greatest possible lengths to *avoid* competition. This is why creatures diversify and fill different ecological niches and adapt to specialised food sources
and habitats - so that between them they will use all available resources as economically as possible and waste as little as possible and not come
into unnecessary conflict that is costly to all sides. Within
this framework competition only occurs sporadically and locally. Animals will aim to breed according to the availability of resources - when it
is a good year they will have many young, and when it is a bad year, few. But when they miscalculate for some reason - the year may start out good
and turn out bad - then there is competition between offspring for food and many may die. This is the exception rather than the rule. In nature
especially the more 'sensitive' or 'intelligent' species such as mammals and birds will aim to lead rather comfortable and peaceful lives for
the vast majority of time and evolution has resulted in lots and lots of different species with the ability to do this and interfere as little
as possible with the wellbeing of other species.

The relationship of predator and prey is actually not one of competition! It is one of interdependence.
Lions and zebras do not compete for the same food resources - the one needs grass and the other needs meat. Between them they ensure that
natural resources are used optimally. Predators ensure that herbivores do not become too numerous and destroy the vegetation on which they
themselves depend. Also consider the situation from the perspective of the zebra. The vast majority of healthy, adult zebras never get caught
by lions. They will only ever be threatened by lions for a few hours total in their entire lifetimes. But suppose they get really sick or
injured or old and decrepit. Then they will be suffering badly. A zebra cannot repair a broken limb, and will have no choice but to limp along in great
pain for the rest of his/her life. The only way out of this painful situation is the relief of being caught by a lion or other predator. This
is in fact a mercy killing, as I have seen badly disfigured animals many times in nature reserves that are kept free from predators and it is
obvious to me that these disfigured animals are very miserable. Also it is clear that the kind of consciousness a herbivore has is not of the
kind that is very concerned with individual survival. While alive every creature wants to live a high-quality life, but when faced with
inevitable death they accept it without much distress. Getting a bit metaphysical, it seems to me that in being eaten by a lion, the zebra
gets a chance to have a part of his 'soul' become a part of the lion, while the rest of his soul is carried on by his herd and his descendants.
If a zebra has no soul then of course one doesn't even have to worry about its death. But it seems to me that natural death that fits in with
the cycles of nature, ecological balance and the interdependence of species is no very bad thing.

I regularly go to areas with wild animals, and I do not worry very much about the prospect of being killed by a wild beast. I have heard about
people who have been attacked by animals, and in most such cases the people don't blame the animal. I would rather be killed by a lion than
by a human being, because in the case of the lion it will be an actual, necessary,
life-or-death matter while in the case of the human I will probably
be killed for the sake of some senseless, needless, fabricated, petty political cause. A human will not kill me because we are competing for
the same resources because I will share my resources as much as possible or work together with other people for the attainment of resources
and I will even prefer to die rather than take resources away from someone else for my own sake alone.

I don't want competition to be completely eliminated. I want it to be put in a meaningful context. In 'wild nature' competition does not exist
for its own sake, it is constrained by its context. In human society we ourselves get to determine the context within which we compete. Our
choices may be close to the way of 'wild nature' or far from it. The
current context of our economic belief system is one of competition that 'automatically' results in improvement and where the 'winner takes all'.
This naturally leads to a condition where there are a tiny majority of people who win huge and a vast majority of people who lose huge.
Although the people who promote this believe it is founded on laws of nature, it actually is not; nature allows it but it is by no means the
best possible choice. The current imbalances of power and security in the human world lead to an unstable, undesirable situation. If we do
not like it we can choose to make it different. We can choose to see competition as not
all-important, and we can emphasise co-operation more. The result of that will be a society that is more just, more stable, with a more
economic (less wasteful) distribution and utilisation of resources.

Why are humans 'out of balance'? Why do we not fit in so neatly with the patterns of interdependence found in established ecosystems? All I can
think of is that we are a new phenomenon, an 'experiment' of nature. We are unprecedented, we have not yet been around for long enough to adapt to the cycles of the rest
of nature, or for the rest of nature to adapt to us. While we are in this situation of being 'disharmonious' we are a threat to the rest of
nature and also to ourselves. The more rapidly we can come into a situation of 'harmony' the better for us and for everything else. Not
everything in nature is guaranteed, so the outcome of the 'human experiment' cannot be presumed - it can turn out really really bad. It depends on
us. Nature does offer us the tools to achieve success, but it is up to us to choose to use it wisely or not. Speaking for myself I will try and
convince people that they have this responsibility to themselves, to their descendants, to other humans, and to other species, to ensure that
we achieve balance and the most economic use of the Earth's resources as quickly as possible. I do believe that at least *potentially*
we have the ability to choose, the intelligence to make good choices, and the willpower to follow them through.

Talking of security, every individual human needs some security, just enough -
not too little, not too much. This 'just enough' varies from individual to individual, but again those who needs the most ought not to need
very much more than those we need the least. The people who honestly need the greatest amount of security are those suffering from ill health
or other impairments, such as physical disabilities, or mental retardation, or diabetes or something else. A healthy human being ought not to
need massive amounts of security and support. There should be an equitable, just distribution of support among humans, those whose needs are
the greatest getting the most.

The same goes for power. Those humans who can apply power the best should have the most, and there should also not be a huge difference between
the people with the most power and those with the least power. It may be true that some people are natural leaders and other natural followers,
but at the moment the people who get to lead are not those most fit to lead.

This is all idealistic and you will rightly say that in real life it does not work like that. But if you study history you will see that if,
in real life, the distribution of power/security becomes too off-balance, the result is something to correct the imbalance, usually rather
drastic and catastrophic. The French Revolution, Marxism, the First and Second World Wars, the current crisis in the Mid East, and a small
but relevant example - Apartheid and its overthrow in my country - all have happened as a result of imbalances that went past the point where
people were willing to tolerate them. I see that the world right now is again becoming critically imbalanced and so many people are getting
fed up with it that the next redressment is bound to be a particularly drastic and catastrophic one. We can avoid all the trouble if we only
choose to do things the right way from the start!

Your way of thinking seems to me to be influenced by ideas that are proving/have been proved to be inaccurate. I mean the whole deal of 'man against
nature'. We see ourselves as being apart of nature instead of as a part of nature. This view is the one I am going to try and correct. Humans will never
ever 'triumph' over nature for the simple reason that nature is built into us - any triumph of ours is a triumph of nature. We have been wrong about our
own essential nature. We have been wrong about the nature of nature! I am going to try and convince people of this. We can decide for ourselves to be in
balance with the rest of the global ecology. We don't have to be constrained from the outside - we can choose to be responsible for ourselves. Many species
in nature do this. There are many kinds of animals that do not suffer from heavy predation. On many tropical islands there are bird species that exist
without being threatened by anything, not even diseases. They regulate their own numbers by breeding very rarely. Where a mainland bird will breed every
year and lay six eggs an island bird will bread only every six years and lay only one egg. Did the birds rationally choose to do that? What does it matter?
The fact is they survive and stay in balance as a result of their own behaviour, not predators or other outside forcing factors. Many other examples
can be found in nature. Why can't we do the same?

I envisage a world where humans and animals live together in peace. We humans keep our numbers to the optimum, whatever that turns out to be, and the rest
of the biomass of the earth will be filled by as diverse a mix of other species as possible. The greater the biodiversity of the Earth, the greater the
potential biomass as well, the greater the ecological stability and the more optimal the use of resources. At the moment humans make up only a tiny tiny
amount of the biomass of the planet. It can never be otherwise because we depend on so many other creatures for our survival and so it will always be,
unless we start photosynthesising and/or eating each other!

When I said everything can be scaled up or down, I said that it was in a relative way. I did not mean in an absolutely unconstrained way. No
*restraint* is absolute either. You said
the size of a 'meta-man' would be limited by communication, and I only meant that communication is not an absolute restraint. The size of humanity is
limited by relative factors, but not absolutely limited by anything.
If we become space-farers and can colonize other planets then we will have more resources
available. There is no absolute reason why we could not do that. We may never do it as a result of our own stupidity, but if we are less stupid we can
do it. We can potentially colonise the entire universe, if we are granted enough time and if we use it wisely. As long as there are habitable planets
for us to spread to, we can keep on growing. Earth is not an absolutely closed system.

But if we ever become spacefarers we will need to be very much *more* in tune with nature than we are now. As soon as we leave the Earth our survival will
become very much more difficult than it is here and will depend very much more on co-operation, responsibility and wisdom.
I cannot conceive how it would be possible to go into
space on a large scale while we are still a 'warlike people'. A spaceship will be an inherently easy-to-destroy thing at the same time that traveling to
stars will require amounts of energy vast enough to instantly destroy entire planets. The intricacy of the technology needed to reach and colonise habitable
planets would constrain us to co-operate completely and universally. If we are still bent on destruction we would not be able to do it.

Also we would need a complete and practical understanding of ecology or we would never be able to transform a planet into one benign to human life. The
understanding necessitated will also mean that we will no longer be destroying our own planet's ecology and this means that we will be smart enough not
to destroy alien ecologies and replace them with Terran ecologies either. If we are still as stupid as that we would never make it into space on a large
scale. Nature imposes the constraints, we cannot get around them. If we seem to be 'getting around' any constraint at all it simply means that it was not
an absolute constraint imposed by nature in the first place. In fact many of the constraints we are under we impose on ourselves and they are entirely
unnecessary. The more we understand the ways, the patterns, the cycles of nature, the more we are empowered to act freely.

I also disagree with you about intuition being irrational. If anything it is supra-rational. Intuition augments and is augmented by rationality. I suspect
that rationality combined with intuition will be the next stage of
humanity's intellectual evolution. It will not depend on genes or on competition and will happen as a single, worldwide, huge leap forwards thereby disproving much of what was mistakenly concluded by Darwin and his followers about the way evolution operates. We're also going to learn things about our non-human companions that we never would have been able to imagine earlier. Animals are much more than we give them credit for. By 'we' I mean 'modern scientific' people who of course would be considered old and unscientific by the enlightened generation of the future! I am going to try to be one of the pioneers of this new generation. My own thinking is still very much entangled in the old ways, so I do not know how far I will succeed, but I will at least try!

This is getting nicer and more interesting now, isn't it?

See ya!
The Case

All very good and well reasoned points. I think that we are in agreement on much of this and that much of what we seem to be in complete opposition is really a question more of semantics and the generalities that we have been using.

When you say that most species do not compete but rather spread into the space available to them so as to avoid competition, I do not agree but I do not disagree. The problem is semantic. It seems obvious that if there is no competition for a particular resource required by one species that that species will expand into the area of non-competition until the competition within its own kind for the same resources limits its ability to expand (upwards if not outward). Thus, the birds you describe that breed differently on the island than on the mainland demonstrate evolutionary processes not natural co-operation. As you yourself point out, the birds do not decide to breed less. Nature steps in and through a process of natural competiton insures that birds that instinctively lay large clutches of eggs will simply breed themselves out of existence.

Viewed from another point of view we can see that two possiblities could have happened. The fast breeding birds would out breed the slow breeding birds with the result that they have a much higher competition for the available food supply and their lives being destressful and more chancy would have shorter lives and there would be fewer nests on the island in any given season. The result of this would mean that with fewer nests the island population would be more likely to be wiped out by some disaster.

The island will sustain the same number of slow breeding birds as of fast breeding ones, however, the number of birds that actually breed would be higher with a larger number of nests on the island and a corresponding greater resilience to disaster.

On the mainland with higher predation, it is more important to have more babies so that the few that survive can breed in the same fashion. Since predation effects the nests as well as the birds themselves, having fewer nests is the definitive survival factor as well.

Certainly, the fact that resources are unevenly distributed on this planet is one of the major reasons for biodiversity. And, equally obviously, the best method for reducing competition from outside a species is to insure that each species has everything it needs without having to take it from a neighbor. This is all fine except for that fact that most species of animals on this planet are not essentially vegetarian (and competition for vegetable resources largely kept in check by predation, but only largely) but rather live by predation. Some predators have direct competition for their food, others adapt by eating food that more prevalent predators discard. In any case there is an inherent limitation by the availability of suitable/available food.

As you point out, as much as possible, predators prey on easy food and this has the advantage of culling the herd of sick and wounded animals. You neglect the class of feeble animals, a relative term indicative in itself of a form of competition that improves the general quality of the herd, which I have pointed out in earlier entries, is actually the basic unit that nature is working on. (The individual units are important for their breeding functions but the herd is what is being maintained.) Part of the reason that individuals have the size, strength, and agility they have is because that is the optimum to balance their consumption of limited resources against issues of predation.

The lion does not pick on the slow and the weak because that is its nature. The lion eats the prey it can catch efficiently. If it goes after prey it can't catch, it doesn't eat.

The vegetarian species grow in numbers till they cannot find enough to eat then they die or they migrate to better food supplies. But, each species eats what they have evolved to best suit what can be found. Those animals that eat the same things are in direct competition even though they may graze on the same plain seemingly at peace. Whatever a zebra eats cannot be eaten by a wildebeast and the reverse is equally true. They have evolved to the point that their breeding cycles reflect the probable amount of food for them that season. And herds of wildebeasts will easily out eat the smaller herds of zebra with the result that while individual members may intermix in good times, the individual species will go their own ways taking advantage of their particular evolutionary talents to maintain the herds or family groups.

Why don't the lions breed till they can eat all the vegetarians? Because the evolutionary process that looks like co-operation is actually a pressure that insures that the lions will have enough trouble killing and eating a wildebeats, for example, that if they bred faster a proportional number of lions will die hungry. The result, the lions that naturally breed at approximately the right rate for the food supply live to have more lions.

To go another step, the herds of vegetarians only eat what can be taken without damaging the ability of the grasses, trees, and shrubs to recover, on average, from what is from their viewpoint, predation.

The question then must arise, what happens when nature spawns a creature that has no natural checks, that eats far more than natural competition (which term includes both predation and available foodstuffs) can cope with. Sheep for instance are reputed to so destroy the plants they feed on that they must be rotated over relatively vast areas to allow for full recovery from their browsing. Nature's solution is to insure that sheep do not breed into huge herds. It is man that breeds them so.

And of course, man is himself the epitome of the creature that takes more than nature can replace. To some extent, man is sensitve to his enviornment. Man will breed less when he there is greater liklihood that his offspring will grow to maturity. (Maturity being defined as the age of reproduction.)

And if man only bred and died and lived as a natural meta-animal there would likely not be a real problem. But, man is not content to be simply a member of his tribe and only serve as a part in meta-man. Man insists on living as a significant individual. He believes that he is important and he believes that other men are important. The result is that the death of a man is not just a natural occurence. The death of a man is an act that calls for retribution.

Man is self-aware and acts against his environment not with it. This places man in direct competition with nature which favors life, any life so long as it accepts that every life is life. Man believes that this philosophy is wrong and demeaning and man will not be demeaned.

This I suspect is where you and I truely go our different ways. You seem to believe that man should recognize that life is life and to the best of his ability should make his life conform to that equivalence. I don't believe the opposite, but I am enough contrary to say that I don't believe that man, by his own nature, can allow himself to fall back to that level of non-sentient blind subservience to nature. I don't believe he is capable of it.

There is clearly a danger, as you have so eloquently pointed out, that man will exhaust the resources available to him. The fact that man has always preyed on his fellow men simply indicates that man's tribal nature justifies that to him. Now that man has grown less locally tribal, there is hope that he will set that instinctive (?) behavior aside. But there doesn't seem to be much hope that man is capable of setting himself aside in favor of nature.

Moreover, there is no indication that any other creature of nature has such a quality bred into it. However while every other creature takes all that it needs and then stops, man, having a sense of the future and an anticipation of future needs will keep on taking even though he no longer needs. Additionally man seems to have a positive talent for inventing new needs, to such an extent that it seems that he can never be more than momentarily satisfied.

So, that is where I see our mutual separation. You see the co-operative aspects nature as dominant and controlling the competative and I see the reverse. You see that animals can be satisfied with what is sufficient and I see that man cannot. And there we stand. I see nothing wrong with your hopes, philosophically, in fact, I admire them. I just don't see them as a real possibility. And, given, that we both see disaster on the horizon, we are both motivated in different directions.

And that brings us to man as a rational creature. I don't believe that he is. I believe that rational thought is a tool that man can use when he chooses. History seems to demonstrate that if he does choose to use it he will use it in defense of non-rational behavior.

If intuition is a rational function or even a potentially rational function then there may be hope for mankind as you posit. This is because man's emotional and intuitive functions have run hand in hand since the stone age. Intuition is that talent that permited man to figure out that the rock falling would hit him, which his experience told him would hurt him. It was also intuition that led him to understand that the rock could also fall on his enemy. Logic, which I halfway believe is simply a tame emotion, has then led him to better ways of making the rock hit and hurt.

Of course if logic is an emotion then there is no reason why intuition may not eventually become tamed enough to be used in the same way and freed from man's survival-first essential being.

But intuition is not logical and it is super-logical only in the sense that it supercedes logic. A primitive man will trust intuition before logic simply because it is faster and it has saved his life more often. Modern man is so seldom in situations where his survival depends on a decision made without consideration that he has grown out of trusting intuition. Today, if a man has an intuition, he will say, "here's an idea, let't test it to see if it will work. Let's apply logic and the scientific method and prove that I am right." That is, unless intuition says "duck!" in which case man will duck or, eventually, he will die, perhaps without keeping his genes in the racial pool otherwise they will most definitely be eliminated. This follows because it is better to duck and be wrong than it is not to duck.

Ultimately, intuition appears to be an old and less developed thing. It does not require rationality. It seems to involve the brain in non-sentient thinking, insofar as sentience is a logical process. So, while I believe that science is trying desperately to understand intuition, it is very resistant to methods of thought that depend on logical processes.

Perhaps you are right. Perhaps, it is not irrational. Perhaos it is arational. If this is the case and if man is to pursue it, he mus abandon his logical approach and find another method of mechanical thinking. abd, by mechanical, I mean not 'by machines' but rather 'by a describable and reproducible process that my be emulated by machines which follow such processes.

The result, if we survive to that point, should be very interesting and very alien to how we live today.

Do not put too much faith into space travelling man. Certainly, I hope to see man out among the stars. I hope that man can find places where he can survive and multiply, because it is only by such efforts that man can be assured that meta-man has reproduced and new meta-men will assure that man can survive even the loss or destruction of Earth.

But, if we do not find a method of travel as cheap and easy as connestoga wagons or sailing ships there is no way that a significant portion of the population will ever leave earth. In fact, it would have to be even cheaper, it would have to be as easy as walking down the block. Consider how few people actually were transported out of Europe to the 'New world' relative to the total population.

I certainly would love to think that I might someday walk on the soil of an alien world and smell scents that could not be found on earth blown on the breezes. I will dream that it will happen but I will not give it more credit than I give a dream.

Yes, you are right, nicer and more interesting, every time.

Take care.

Barton

Hi again! I largely agree with the first part of your reply, so I won't go into that now, except to note that I believe that there are a few more factors
at work in nature than are recognised at the moment by mainstream science. But I would like to comment on your idea of humans being contrary to nature. You
say that to accept himself as a part of nature man has to fall back to a level of non-sentient blindness. I would say that we needn't be non-sentient and
blind. We can still be sentient, we can still have every bit of our rational awareness. We will not contract our vision, we will expand it. Our idea of our
own identity will need to change, but it will be a change for the better. I believe we are capable of doing that.

Your view of man inventing new needs and taking more than he needs at the moment and never being more than momentarily satisfied is not a view of man in
general, it is only a view of a particular group of humans. It is the view of modern members of the consumer culture. The vast majority of present living
humans are not like that, and the vast majority of humans who lived in the past were not like that, and I'm hoping that the vast majority of future
human beings will not be like that. Yet, they all are/were/will be human and believe it or not, they
all are/were/will be extremely sensitive, aware and rational. All human beings are rational and capable of forethought. Any human being can work to become
more rational and more considerate. Our rationality and forethought
should enable us to see that we cannot indefinitely keep on taking more from nature than nature can replace. If we really consider the future we will of
our own free will stop consuming so much, because we will realise that we are jeopardizing future generations. What we need is a way to expand our sense
of individual identity to include future generations as well. I think that is possible and that is something I would like to contribute to.

I think that both competition and co-operation are important in the world. There are both bottom-up and top-down ordering processes at work. When these
processes clash there is destruction and disruption, but when these processes reinforce each other there is creativity and stability.

It might clear up a few things if I told you how I envisage that humanity might come back into harmony with nature. This is only an idea, it is not reality
- it is a map, not the territory - but I think it can still be a rough guide to the territory. When we actually travel over that territory we'll see how
accurate (or not) it was. But here goes:

Note right at the start that nature is extremely resilient, and so is humanity. They can bounce back after massive disasters. So let's imagine a worst-case
scenario. Global warming and pollution, working together, might disrupt the global ecology. Large areas of land are flooded, millions of humans die. Climate
patterns change, so some agricultural areas turn to desert, and in other areas rainfall increase, the levels of lakes and rivers rise, and many more areas
experience floods. Huge amounts of topsoil are washed into the sea leaving more agricultural regions infertile. Note that a single inch of topsoil needs
about six hundred years to form. Along with the topsoil lots of chemicals are also washed into the sea. Floods disrupt toxic waste dumps leading to a
further release of poisonous chemicals. So many chemicals end up in the ocean that its general chemistry changes in a way that harms the marine algae. At
the same time on land the disruptions from climate changes on top of the past destruction of forests lead to extremely low levels of living green
vegetation. So in the oceans as well as on land vegetation diminishes catastrophically. Oxygen levels decrease, carbon dioxide levels increase - dying
vegetation releases carbon dioxide. Global warming increases even more, and oxygen levels decrease so much that warm-blooded animals have a real problem
getting in enough oxygen. What happens? This: about 99% of humans, and 99% of individual mammals and birds, die. Who survives? Among humans, the Tibetans
and some Bolivians and a select few from other countries. One percent of six billion is sixty million, so there will still be many humans around. Among
mammals rats will probably survive, and also a select few from other species. I would say that about a thousand mammalian species could remain, plus
about two thousand species of birds. That is quite a lot. What happens afterward will be that algae in the oceans will adapt to the new chemistry and
new species will again become common and increase in number. On land plants will also adapt to the climate changes and new species will start growing
in new forests. So the earth will gradually start recovering, oxygen levels will rise again, carbon dioxide levels will go down, and whatever
pollutants are in the environment will merely become factors to which everything else adapts.

How long will recovery take? I'd say from ten to a hundred thousand years. After such a time we will be more or less back to the same level as we are
right now. Cosmically speaking it is a very short time. The earth might exist for another four billion years. A hundred thousand years is only one forty-
thousandth of such a period.

Now the sixty million humans who remain will not descend into complete barbarity. There will be records of what happened. There will be a huge amount
of human cultural artefacts that will remain after the decimation of humanity. From what remains the people left over will know what happened. In the
future it will not be possible for people to argue that global warming does not happen, or that pollution does not cause important problems. From a
purely selfish perspective those people will realise that they ought to take good care of the way they use the world's resources because they will know
that if they don't they will be harming themselves and their descendants very badly.

This is a worst-case scenario and also an extreme simplification, and also it does not take into account what possible other disasters might happen
after the recovery from the first global disaster. I mainly wanted to indicate the resilience of nature and of mankind, and that we will be able to recover
even from an extreme disaster within a relatively short period.

But I want that humanity should avoid the worst-case scenario. We can choose not to wait until we are past the point of no return. We can choose to turn
around now. What would it entail for humans to be more in harmony with nature? Only this: we willingly limit our consumption of resources.
We willingly limit the rate at which we reproduce. We willingly co-operate with each other within countries, and between countries, much more intimately
than we do right now. We willingly try to achieve the most optimal use of resources between us. We share as much as possible. We use a large part of our
time and energy to learn about nature, about animals and plants, about ecosystems,
and to protect them, and to interact with them. We incorporate more non-human living
creatures into our cities and suburbs. We plant lots of trees and shrubs and herbs and grasses in our living areas, we allow small and large, even dangerous,
animals to inhabit them alongside of us, we learn how to manage them as
effective, living, changing and growing
ecologies rather than as the static, dead places they are right now. In all of our insititutions we aim for a more organic structure and
functioning. We accept more uncertainty and risk in our undertakings. We stop worrying so much about individual death. We expand our sense of identity
so as to be more in touch with generations of the past, generations of the future, other people and other creatures.

How can an individual human being right now already start to work towards such a future? This is my general prescription:
by first of all interacting more harmoniously with other humans.
Value friendship and communication more. Get to know people, don't be afraid to try and get to know them *intimately*, and on all levels: physical,
emotional, rational, spiritual. Communicate - really communicate, share and exchange ideas, right down to a deep level. Interact - influence people, and
be influenced by them. Do not be afraid to change. Try to understand people who are different from yourself - the more different, the better. Try to
sympathise and empathise with people. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Use your imagination. Respect their difference from yourself. Learn about yourself,
your body, your mind and the way it works. Learn about your own history, your ancestors. Become aware that you are a small piece in a huge puzzle. That
should not diminish your importance, but rather enhance it!
You are the focus point between millions of people from past
generations and millions of people from future generations. Learn about other cultures and their histories. Learn about the history of life on Earth. See
yourself as being a part of this huge web. Realise that you are related *by blood* to every single creature alive on this planet right now. Start to
become aware of the millions of subtle or not-so-sbutle influences that you have on absolutely everything that you meet, interact with or are even aware of.

This is the kind of attitude that I think more people need to build.
I believe that there are natural processes at work that will automatically move humanity towards this new kind of attitude. Like I said earlier, I believe
that we are a new phenomenon in nature, not yet in equilibrium with the rest of it. But as time goes by, as we influence nature and as the rest of nature
influences us, we will move towards equilibrium. I believe that our learning is part of that process. I believe we will learn a less destructive way of
life. I do not believe we will need to sacrifice our rationality or our individual interests. I do believe we will have to change the way we think of
ourselves and of each other and of other creatures, but I think that we can do it. I think it is already happening. By one process, or by another, we will
be forced to learn what we need to learn. Either we willingly decide to change, or nature will kill off those individuals that fail to adapt, those ones
who are too competitive and destroy the resources they themselves depend upon.

I will talk more about intuition later. For now I just want to say that we can use intuition in a positive way. I use intuition to try and understand
what is happening in the world right now, why people act the way they do, how people might act in certain situations, what would be the best way to act
in any given situation, and what the future may hold for
us. In intuition emotion is important. The strength of the emotions attending pieces of knowledge determines how much those pieces of knowledge will
contribute towards an intuitive understanding. During intuition thousands or millions of different bits of knowledge will compete against each other
in the subconscious and those that are strongest and/or most numerous will win out and make it into the conscious, rational mind. We use intuition in
all of our thinking processes: understanding language, recognising the things we see, making choices... our conscious mental processes are only the foam
on top of a huge and turbulent sea. The absolute vast majority of processing done by the human mind happens subconsciously. For now I just want to say we
must make better use of our subconscious minds, and we can do that by involving emotions more and better whenever we learn and think and make decisions
and communicate and interact.

I do think that generations of the future may think and behave in a way that may seem very alien to us today. However I have come to understand that any
particular human being today can also think and behave in a way that may seem very alien compared to the rest. I think my own mental processes are very
different from those of many other people. For instance my sense of individuality includes other people and non-human creatures. Any kind of injury or
harm to another person or creature that I am aware of I experience as injury or harm to myself. I am honestly incapable of feeling hostility towards another
being; first of all it would entail, in my mode of thinking, that I be hostile towards myself, and secondly, I cannot be hostile towards myself because I
know myself well and identify intimately with myself and am very sensitive to my own needs. Whenever I act harshly towards my individual self or towards
someone else, it is because I believe that to be in my own interest and/or the interest of the other person. I have a sense of life that goes beyond the
level of the individual without negating or diminishing
the individual. The group that the individual belongs to is important, and the individual is also important, and
the importance of the one enhances the importance of the other. I am a member of humanity, humanity is a part of the web of life on Earth. If I die it's
not so bad because my 'greater self', which is humanity, goes on. Even if humanity dies out it's not so bad because its greater self, life on Earth, goes
on. Individual interests don't disappear, they are not sacrificed, they are only safeguarded within the interests of greater wholes. If we can bring
ourselves to think and to act in accordance with this we would make life infinitely better and more meaningful for ourselves and for everything else. We
will be freed from fear. We will understand that we all contribute towards each others quality of life. We will have a sense of existence that is much
less limited than it is now. We will even be able to see beings from alien planets as belonging to the same living family as ourselves. We will not fear
ourselves and we will not fear any other living creature either.

We will make it to the stars. Our whole history has been preparing us for it. The entire history on Earth has been heading towards that. Life by nature
refuses to be confined, it expands to new areas, it makes its home wherever it can. Before we make it to other stars we will need to colonise the rest
of the solar system, though. But like I said before, when we do that, we will evolve a new kind of consciousness. We will have to. We will have to
co-operate much more closely. We will have to learn the value of all living creatures in ecosystems to enable us to make other planets liveable. We will
come to realise how much we need other species and each other. We will have to learn how to make the absolute best use of very limited resources. Like I
said, the instant we step off earth survival becomes very much more difficult. In facing extreme difficulties we will have to co-operate one hundred percent!
Imagine astronauts in a spaceship fighting against each other when their very lives depend on actions co-ordinated down to a split second! They'll simply
die, and the next team of astronauts who get along better with each other will survive. There you have the result of competitiveness enforcing co-operation.

*When* we will make it to the stars is another question. We will probably continue fighting among ourselves here on Earth for a great while longer yet.
We will
probably bring down a number of disasters on our own heads. I think there may be a war fought within the United States soon, or between the US and other
countries, or between big corporations and NGO's worldwide, or whatever. Or there may be worldwide environmental disasters caused by global warming, or
pollution, or
genetically engineered organisms. But people will survive, and rebuild, and learn from what happened in the past. People will invent new ways of life when
the old ways don't work anymore. I think that, if things work out well, within the next thousand years
we will be settled off Earth in the solar system in fairly large numbers - say
a million people in space. Within another thousand years small groups of colonists might depart for the stars. A colony can start out with a thousand people,
but from there it can grow. If such a colony doubles every century there will be a million after a millennium, and a billion after another millennium.
I would
say that within one to ten million years humanity might inhabit every earthlike planet around a sunlike star in the entire milky way. Unless there are
other guys already living there. If there are, we would be wise enough to leave them alone. If they are more advanced than us, we would be wise enough
not to meddle in their affairs, and if they are less advanced than us, we would be wise not to interfere with their development and traumatize them. But I
suspect that there will be a general base-level of development that will allow for communication and interaction between different space-faring species.
I believe that any species that reaches the space-faring level will be more or less on the level of knowing all the really
important things about life and about
the universe, so that no such species will be pitifully ignorant or primitive relative to the others.

I take such scenarios seriously. It does not matter to me if those things happen long in the future. Because my sense of self also includes future
generations it is enough for me to know that the people who come after me will be able to do and experience those things. I think we need to dream, we
need to imagine where we want to go and where we're headed, we must have a wide, long-term outlook, noble ambitions and ideals for ourselves and for
each other. This will determine how we live in the present, how we face our current challenges, which kinds of solutions we try. If we work with a view
to the long-term future, if we keep coming generations of humans and other creatures in mind, and if we do that well, we will come up with good and
lasting solutions and mankind can really go forward without having to look back and getting stuck all the time. I think we
need to give more credence to our dreams!

Okay, I hope there are a few challenging notions in there!

I'm going to start by saying that I will not comment on most of what you wrote, it is my fixed policy not to attack anyone's religious beliefs and what you laid out here is nothing less than a proclamation of faith. It is based on things which are True to you and though I do not believe or have faith in them, I have no right to say that you cannot. That does away with the first third of what you wrote.

Please note, however, that I will tell a religious fanatic, to get away from my door and not bother me. And, I'm afraid, that is what I am about to do.

Your next section deals with a solution that is predicated on man having gone on with what he is currently doing to the point that the human population of the world is reduced to the point that for all intents and purposes the world will take 10-100 thousand years to recover (which is in itself a bit optimistic). I won't comment on that since it is no solution to the current problem, it's just based on dubious assumptions that the whole race will manage to store away records of these past mistakes for 10-100 thousand years which records were so permanent and now are ready to be read and understood by people without the technology to put the indestructable irridum disks on the record player and hear the voices of the damned recorded long ago in a language no speaks any more warn their future children not to make the mistakes that would allow them to have the technology to hear what is being played at that very moment. Sorry, no. That just doesn't work at all.

But, you say, "we don't need to go there, you trembling mass of terrified jelly. All you need to do is stop thowing away all that alumnium foil. Recycle that plastic bottle. Give away half of the calories you consume so that one tenth of the starving population can double their daily intake and still want to have as much as you while you'll be moderately hungry and uninclined to help anyone anywhere."

You want rhetoric, I can show you rhetoric.

Peace, Love, Brotherhood? Is that your epiphany? It sure hasn't worked before.

If we just learn to see each other as people equal to ourselves and worthy of our consideration we will naturally find the right road? Listen to what you are proposing and compare that to what you heard from adults as you were growing up and I think you will understand that what I hear from you is not a solution, it's just a reaction.

I have to say what I said before, I resent being accused of the sins of your fathers!

Sure, I ran around in the '60s in handing out flowers and saying things like, "Peace, Love, and Brotherhood." You're entitled to say it, too. (Well, I didn't but I hung out with people who did . . . and I thought it.) (You've said it, go away.)

Stop and consider a few things that seem very real to me. Answer my concerns as to means and methods (which I know you don't know now, because you said so back when we started this discussion -- find out.) If you cannot set your lovely dreams in perspective long enough to start finding an active way to make some changes, then face the fact that you cannot expect a sudden religious conversion from every single human on this planet and start working toward that.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that is what you are doing right now. If that is the case, then there is no point in my continuing to seek inspiration from someone who has no idea other the the equivalent of saying, "Fall on your knees and pray for salvation!"

It is a fact that man forms permanent communities whenever he is able to and that those communities through high population density and the attendant needs of that population exhaust the natural resources available to them locally, particularly if that society exists in any significant part of a technological world. Then,, rather than move on and allow the area to recover, these towns and cities simply expend more and more energy over greater and greater areas till it collapses from exhaustion or from conquestby younger, more energetic civilizations. This has been the pattern of most societies from earliest recorded times till now.

The few human societies that do not follow this path lead primitive lives, those being the highest energy configurations possible to such societies. Herdsmen are one prototype, having to be (relatively) constantly on the move with their herds, goods, and chattles, as an area is despoiled. The other type, hunter/gatherer cultures, live at even lower energy levels with even lower population densities so as not to ever exhaust their food supplies. These two life styles are very stable so long as no other group or event intrudes on their resources. They do no permanent harm to their environment but they cannot afford a high energy, technologically advanced society, though they may benefit from one, if one is within occational reach. If such a society becomes dependant on technology, it collapses.

These are the constant patterns of the world's development. We are doing nothing particularly different today, we are just doing it faster and on a large scale than has ever been possible before. If the problem is the scale, then you must convince the advanced countries to go slower, which will delay the end, or to stop, which will end those countries as viable cultures. When growth stops, we call that death.

To achieve a viable society of man that does not despoil nature, we must find a way that permits man to live without damaging the environment on any permanent basis. So far, the only instances we have of such cultures are the two I mention above. The total world population of man is already vastly more than such cultures could sustain even at bare subsistence levels.

All you need to do is figure out how much a man must have to survive one day, divide that into the amount of food available without technological support of any kind and you have the maximum number of men this planet can support in complete harmony with nature under optimum conditions. I'm sure the pertinent figures are available from the World Health Organization.

But under those conditions you could not have any technology that cannot be maintained with muscle power and with out any form of social organization larger than a tribe or clan.

I said that by virtue of man having a sense of future need, he tends to take more than he needs at the moment. That is the core of what I meant to say, at least. Man plans ahead. You too want man to plan ahead, but you want him to ignore immediate and near future needs for the sake of the far future needs of the world. This is rational and understandable, but not terribly true to man's expressed and demonstrated character and history.

"All human beings are rational and capable of forethought." This sounds like a good working definition of human beings with the addition that if they are capable of forethought that they exercise that forethought and act on what they have anticipated. Now, you need to prove to me that all people are human. After that you need to demonstrate how far ahead *all* of these humans need to think to be able to save the planet. It isn't tomorrow, or next week, or next season, or next year, or even the next century, particularly if you are one of the 'have's as opposed to the 'have not's.

Your dream calls for everyone to suddenly realize that that man in africa or that family in China whom he has never met and couldn't understand if he spoke to them, that each of those people are so important that if any one of them were to die because he had a good breakfast that morning and planned a fine lunch, and a better dinner before he went to sleep in a comfortable bed with a solid roof over his head, if that happened, his world would be significantly reduced? Go knock on his door and the response will be, "Can't you read? The sign says no solicitors!" followed by a slam.

If no one wants to starve then why should he or I want to? Just to be one of the gang?

I'll sacrifice. I've got $30/week I can give up with some hardship. You show me an organization that can make use of it and the check is in the mail. But that money better be going to something that makes sense and makes a difference for tomorrow and not for something today. It better go for a solution to all the ecological and sociological issues that you have been harping about. And, it better not be going to someone who just needs to buy the food to find the strength to be able to keep on praying for a miracle. But, that is all the sacrifice I can manage for a dream. I have a family to feed and you don't. I'm not going to ask them to starve, and I'm not going to weaken myself so that I can't work for them and myself. I'm really not interested in achieving equality by lowering the entire human race to the level of hunter/gatherers. Find me another real achievable solution that makes sense in terms of calories per person/day and show me that the solution is implementable without killing aignficant number of my neighbors, then I'll join-up (if you have need of a programmer or actor and are willing to see that my family won't suffer in order for me to join your cause.) Does that sound selfish? Sorry.

I, like you, don't see a real way to work a lasting solution. I'm older than you but I'm no stranger to idealistic causes. I'm afraid that there's no point to marching against gravity. Shortly, I will be wearing a T-shirt that reads "Stop Plate-Tectonics," If you can get the joke, then there's still hope for you.

Barton

(puppy dogs and Hare Krishnas!)

I'm sorry I did not respond sooner, I really had a lot to do lately. Look, I'm not trying to sell you anything, I'm not asking any of your money, I thought we were just having a conversation! There's rhetoric there, yes, I'm just exercising my argument muscles; maybe one day I can look back on all this stuff and find some good ideas among the nonsense. I'll respond at greater length later because I still have a lot to do, it's really late now and I'm very tired! About idealism: the idealistic spirit is infective, and if we can just pass it on to the people who come after us maybe they will be able to use it better than us! Maybe every new generation can learn a bit more than the past ones and figure out a few ways to make the dream schemes practical!

I'm not saying we should try and defy the laws of nature; I'm saying we still don't know perfectly what the laws of nature are; we don't know 100% what's possible and what's not, so it's still a good idea to try something in order to find out if it's possible!