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

You say "the problems just might arise from intolerance of diversity and greed for other people's property."

This is correct; all social problems are problems of wealth, not poverty.

It would be easy to solve all the problems by returning to a hunting/gathering lifestyle, but unacceptable because it would entail the reduction of the world's population by a large factor. So in the absence of a cataclysm we have to live with greed and intolerance, the inevitable results of settled farming and its corollary, population explosion.

By live with I mean deal with. We have brought them on ourselves, it's time to unload them.

That is what many religions attempt, with varying success. (By which I mean approximately none.)

I don't really think many people are advocating returning to a hunting/gathering economy, although it could still and probably does supplement things in different parts of the world. For better or worse, we're sort of stuck, as you imply, however, the present system probably needs to be more equitable, especially because of burgeoning populations.

Currently, the average person in a developed country requires the equivalent of 20 acres in land or resources to provision herself/himself. That leaves about five acres each for everybody else. That's not going to fly for very much longer. The people in the United States consume over half the world's resources while constituting less than seven or eight percent of the world's population.

This is why I have suggested the problems might arise from intolerance of diversity and greed for other people's property.

We are more or less constantly vexed by calamities, many caused by the shortsighted domination policies of Euroamerican governments. Populations don't explode just because of settled agriculture. In fact for much of their history agricultural communities have been pretty stable. So what's changed in say the last half millenium?

Well, for one thing, infant mortality has been reduced significantly although longevity hasn't been improved that much. Having uniformly younger populations causes a good deal more reproduction than can be balanced by attrition even at relatively young ages. The average age of my people is under 20, for example, and our population is growing and has been since it hit nadir around 1910. The average age of most populations in the Third World is typically around 15-18. So I think you can see why there's a population problem.

This is further aggravated when people are deprived of land and resources and must therefore seek employment in urban areas. These people need larger families to support themselves, and that's sort of contrary to the usual paternalistic view that they're simply sex-crazed idiots who don't get the concept of birth control.

Given all of the above, I think it's pretty simplistic to assert that greed or intolerance are the inevitable result of settled farming and increased populations. Greed or intolerance are deliberate strategies that prevent people from sharing the land and resources and consequently tend to concentrate title to and control of those things in just a few hands. That's something we can no longer afford to indulge, and that has very little to do with religion.

At current population levels, we could probably just get by if some nations weren't engaged in looting the rest of the world to meet their own provisioning desires. Notice I said "desires" not needs. That's an important distinction more or less summarized by the slogan, "Feed you need, not your greed." If everybody did that, virtually no people would be exceptionally wealthy but neither would there be exceptionally poor people.

In America, for example, Americans are wealthy because indians are poor. This situation is a direct result of Americans gaining control of land and resources in contradiction of treaty and therefore without just compensation or consideration. If only treaties were honored, the distribution of wealth in America would be much more equitable and there would be considerably less cause for complaint. However, as long as the ideology persists that wealthy people in America are wealthy only because of their own talents or initiative, this out of balance situation will persist.

Failing to acknowledge the true costs makes things look better on the balance sheet, but doesn't even address the problems that arise from such creative bookkeeping. The debts never go away either. They are simply deferred to future generations, one of which will eventually have to pay, at which point the civilization will probably collapse as its forebearers have in the past, repeatedly.

That I believe is the sort of calamity you're referring to and it's not going to be a discretionary item if people don't wake up and learn to share, play fair, take turns and tell the truth.

I agree with what you say. I feel like shutting up and going away to think about it, but this is a conversation site so I'll put the whitey's side for argument's sake.

If "people need larger families to support themselves", that is a source of catastrophe in itself; akin to a pyramid scheme which needs new members to pay the old members. It need not be vicious as pyramid schemes are, but the problem remains. In a sense all life and all culture are pyramidal, they expand until the environment can't support more growth, at which time much pain is inevitable.

"Greed or intolerance are deliberate strategies" seems like fighting words. What living thing is not greedy and intolerant? Only an enlightened person, I would have said.

"Americans are wealthy because indians are poor" -- again, this is counterintuitive. If everyone is poor, no-one is poor. Indians are poor because Americans are rich, I would have thought; but I concede the point, because such developments evolve like chicken-and-egg, and it is hard to tell cause from effect.

I am with you entirely in "wake up and learn to share, play fair, take turns and tell the truth" -- my reference to religion was to say that all religions include this call to altruism somewhere. They have not been spectacularly successful.

The issue with large families is the reason they're considered a good thing or a bad thing for that matter. We're often told that if people would just use birth control like good Americans, we wouldn't have any problems in the Third World, but that's sort of disingenuous because the problem isn't exactly large families per se, but any size family without visible means of support.

As I mentioned, when you deprive people of land and resources, there's only their labor to fall back on and if they can't get a living wage, which is often the case even in the First World nations, then they have to increase the number of workers who contribute to the general fund. It's a flawed strategy of course because each additional worker imposes additional overhead, but it's about all they can do and I haven't heard any brilliant or practical strategies for getting around this other than restoring the land and resources they're been deprived of. This of course is sort of a problem with the people or corporations who benefitted from the deprivation in the first place.

This is similar to the plight of the small farmer who, in the face of declining commodity prices, must produce more, just to break even, or go bust, but producing more further depresses commodity prices.

Whatever the nature of fighting words, greed and intolerance are most definitely deliberate. People don't just unconsciously do that sort of thing although I'm confident there's plenty who use that excuse when confronted with their own perfidy. You ask what living things aren't greedy or intolerant and my answer is most aren't, having developed survival strategies, for whatever reason, that include toleration, observance of and respect for territories, and similar things. While some predators have been observed to occasionally kill more than they can eat, this is unusual enough to merit extraordinary documentation.

That Americans are wealthy because indians are poor is no more counterintuitive than asserting a bank robber has the bank's money in his bag because he stole it. It didn't just magically appear there, although, again, he might suggest that as an excuse or explanation, however incredible it might be. So it's hardly a chicken or egg issue, really.

The egg predates the chicken by millions if not billions of years and likewise the use of the land and resources by indian people predates the whites by thousands of years.

The colonial population started out very low and has since expanded into hundreds of millions of people. The indian population started out in the tens of millions and is now barely a million or two. The percentage of indians in the general population started out at 100 percent and is now less than two percent. The percentage of colonists in the population started out as less than one percent and is now 98 percent or more. I shouldn't think there would be much difficulty in distinguishing causes from effects in this situation.

What's especially interesting is that the indian people's original title to the land was acknowledged by the English and French colonists almost from the beginning which is why they made treaties with indian tribes. Those treaties gave them legal title to the land. That title is derived from those treaties. It has no independent legal existence.

Therefore, everything that derives from the use or application of that title, including use as collateral to obtain and expand credit, as well as extraction of minerals, growing food, or whatever, also derives from the title and ultimately the treaties.

So there is a direct and quite intuitive relationship between what the colonists have gained and what the indian people have ceded or been deprived of.

In those societies I'm familiar with, that coincidentally, I'm sure, don't have words for religion, the altruism has been quite successful and sustainable. This is why Senator Henry Dawes, among others, was inclined to complain that indian people lack that one important prerequisite for "civilized progress", selfishness. It's probably not a missing gene or something, but more likely the way you're raised that determines such things. Once again, I suspect selfishness, like greed and intolerance, is a learned behavior.