Tag Archives: overpopulation - Page 2

A Small Light Bulb Moment

Posted by on February 10, 2014 No comments

Add to the list of soon-to-be-obsolete things: automotive high-beams.

A little over-dramatic, sure, but give it some consideration.  When is the last time you got to use your high beams?  Ok, that’s a loaded question.  Some people would say “all the time!” and some would say “never!”  It depends on how populated your area is.

I was driving home one evening and I was able to use my car’s high beams for the entirety of one span of roadway.  I never saw another car.  And that made me think back to my previous living location where you’d never get a chance to use your high beams because there were cars on every road at every hour of day.

As we become more overcrowded in this world, our high beam usage is going to become diminished, possibly to the point of being irrelevant.  Then again, we’ll probably have self-driving cars by then and we’ll all be shuttled around in cars having nothing more than marker lights on them.

YOLO

Posted by on March 19, 2013 No comments

Just a little behind the times on this one.  I’ve heard a lot of this “YOLO” thing going on, and after some consideration, I’ve chosen to redefine it.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Theosophy, the main point of it is that, as souls, we are constantly evolving through the process of reincarnation.  With each life, we are put here to learn lessons and pay back Karmic debt built up over previous lives.  As you go through these lives, you build inherent skills, which are displayed as natural talent; wisdom, which is shown as common sense; and other intangible skills like spirituality and tolerance.  “You can’t take it with you” is only for material goods.  Your soul’s qualities persist.

So, accepting the teachings of Theosophy,  you can imagine there have been souls who have been through many different lifetimes.  Some have learned their lessons well and gained all the skill, wisdom, and wholesomeness from each lifetime.  Others haven’t learned and still continue to be cruel, greedy, and intolerant.  The world is full of both types of people, you can’t doubt this.

But the world is also full of many more people.  More people on this Earth than ever before.  More bodies, more souls.  These bodies must be filled with young souls, those who have not had the experience of many lifetimes to learn how to be good.  Many that have to pay back Karmic debt through lack and suffering.  Some that are learning from their current situation, and a lot that are not.  It takes a long time to learn some lessons.

You can see this in the attitude of the younger generations.  You can see it every day in so many people.  It’s a sense of desperation.  Even driving in the city, you can sense the desperation in how people drive.  They must pull out in front of you, because they feel if they don’t, they will never get in.  Never.  That’s how the world is behaving.  Now or never.

These people don’t understand that this life is nothing.  There will be so many more lives to enjoy if you live this life right.  If you don’t, you’ll make up for it next time.  And hopefully, you’ll learn it that time.

So, for all the desperate people and their rally cry: “You Only Live Once!” I respond knowingly, “No, You’ve Only Lived Once.”

Why, Baby, Why?

Posted by on February 11, 2013 No comments

The other day, while working around the house, I heard children screaming in the neighborhood.  I idly thought to myself, “Why do people have children?”  Then I thought a little more and got more serious about it.  Why do people have children?  They say that the people who decide not to have and raise children in their lifetime are being selfish, but when I got thinking about it, it seems the opposite is true.  With a little brainstorming, these are some reasons I came up with:

  • To continue the human race
  • For the experience of raising a child
  • Because your parents want grandchildren
  • Because you need help working your farm/business
  • You need a male child to continue your family name
  • You grew up in a big household and want to have the same experience
  • Babies are beautiful
  • It’s the thing to do/all your friends have babies
  • You’re getting old and having babies when you’re older is risky
  • Your spouse wants a baby
  • You don’t have a spouse and don’t want to be alone
  • Your spouse is going to war and you want something to remember him by
  • It just kinda happened

Of this entire list, the only reason that is not selfish is the first one, and I haven’t heard anyone use that one before.  The last reason is irresponsible, but that’s a different post.

The typical rationalization of parents is “You’ll never understand the feeling of unconditional love,” which is false if you’ve ever owned a pet.  Another common statement is regarding the wonder of watching a child grow and learn.  Yeah, anyone can get that anywhere from any child.  “But it’s different when it’s your own.”  Hear that?  “…your own.”  When coming from a parent, it’s a statement of “Look what I made.”

Obviously, parenting is filled with pride – selfish, dangerous pride.  When you have a child, you give up your own identity and start projecting through your children.  To be fair, this isn’t always the case, but the parents who don’t do this are classified as poor parents or uninvolved parents.  Then, it is recommended you live through your child.

But, isn’t that the proof that child-raising isn’t selfish?  Despite the initial reason for having the child, you have to be selfless and sacrifice everything to raise the child?  Quite the opposite, because by doing just that, you are burdening the child with creating your happiness as well as their own happiness, your success with their success.  Their problems are amplified because they become yours, too.  This is why so many parents (mothers, usually) have extreme separation anxiety at college-time, because suddenly they’re alone with no life.

If people would ask “why?” before having kids, and really look at the reasons and be honest with themselves, maybe we could manage this population crisis.  After all, the first listed reason is well taken care of.

Ayn I Rand. I Rand So Far Away.

Posted by on January 22, 2013 No comments

For a while, I’ve been watching “patriots” circle-jerk over Ayn Rand and I never understood why.  So, I took a short amount of time and read a short book of hers called Anthem, which I assumed would be typical of the Rand philosophy.  I can say I have no further desire to read a Rand book.  For as much as conservatives scream about the evils of socialism and communism, the world that Rand wants is just as evil, just in the other direction.

To me, Anthem is a tribute to selfishness and hubris.  The final chapters are filled with an excess of “I”, “me”, and "my”, which is meant to contrast with the whole rest of the book, where the primary character refers to himself in the plural, “we”.   This book’s story is set in an absurd world, because it’s the only world that you could even begin to justify the main character’s actions and beliefs.  Some future world where humanity has regressed to the dark ages and is controlled by a collection of councils, who have mapped out everything so there is no personal choice.  And somehow, people today think we are moving in that direction?

As I neared the end of the book, knowing what was going to happen, I thought I would write a blog post as an epilogue to the story, describing what would happen when this extreme individualistic philosophy grew.  Turns out I didn’t need to.  The book already had it covered.  The primary character took over an old house, claimed all its possessions as his, planned to convert it into a fortress, planned to build an army and wage war on the existing community, make his house the capital of a new world and be the absolute leader.  This is a good thing? 

At the turning point in the story, where the character begins to learn at a hyper-accelerated pace and surpasses the entirety of humanity in knowledge, it is not dwelled upon that he stole items from various councils to accomplish his learning.  While it sounds understandable to break the laws of an absurdly oppressive future world, the general message, reinforced in the closing of the story, comes across as “Do whatever it takes for your own benefit.”  This is something to strive towards?

The problem with this book and the current flavor of individualism is the inherent exclusiveness.  Coming along with that is the despise and near hatred for fellow humans.  In this mindset, everyone is out to get something from you and you’re not going to share anything with anyone you don’t deem worthy.  In this mindset, you have no need for anyone else – unless you need something from them, of course.  The viewpoint that a person has no value whatsoever and contributes nothing to society is the default instead of the exception.  Trusting no one but yourself is the overriding belief.

So what becomes of a society of individuals?  How does anything move forward?  How can there be any progress without shared resources?  Consider a bunch of individuals living by a stream, each using the water for daily life.  A new person comes along and dams the river upstream so he can do whatever he wants to with the large pool.  That’s his right; he’s doing whatever his individual desires want.  The others downstream suffer.  Without any governing body, I suppose the dam owner would simply be run out or killed and the dam destroyed.  Sounds like an incredible world to live in, where whatever you make is yours and only yours.

The concept of radical individualism like portrayed in Anthem and in the equally absurd previous example are possible when there is no overpopulation crisis.  If someone cramps your individual freedoms, simply move farther away.  This, accurately, is how America got started and is how and why it grew so powerful.  but with as crowded as America is now, we have no choice but to be socialistic.  We do not have the space nor the independence (as in lack of dependence on others) to make this happen.  Maybe being a farmer in the rural Midwest would be suitable for such people, but not everyone can attain this.

There’s always such a big cry from the people who feel they’re being repressed.  “Why can’t I?”  “The government won’t let me (insert anything here).”  The answer is that what you want is not good for society.  Not everyone can go and start building a nuclear power plant, because not everyone will get it right, then we all have to pay for the mistakes.  The answer this book purports is that it doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is that it is good for me.  Although in the closing chapters the book came very, very close to using this phase, it didn’t.  The phrase, usually reserved for unmentionable acts, is “The end justifies the means.”  And to have a society built on that belief would be a terrible one to live in.