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    "We live in a world of overabundance." [sic, ffs!] First line of Abby's voiceover. Almost stopped Archived Message

    Posted by Rhisiart Gwilym on April 15, 2019, 10:27 am, in reply to "Giants: Who Really Rules The World?"

    listening right there! But it's Abby Martin, and interviewing a genuine inequality researcher, so worth some perseverance.

    Peter also confirms the 1%/20%80% arrangement [yes I know, that adds up to 101%; but you get what I mean.] That's to say, the split of the Pampered Twenty Percent (PTP) and the Abused and Deprived Eighty Percent (ADEP), which has developed throughout the - brief, wholly atypical - period of freeforall economic-growthforever over the past couple of centuries or so, as an allegedly-sane economic doctrine; and which is now coming to its absolutely inevitable, non-negotiable end. (The Wholly-Unnecessary Hyper-Rich - the Worthless WUHRs; the Davosoids - are always with us, it seems, like a sort of intractably-persistent tapeworm, at least for the past ten millennia or so...)

    There's a huge problem with the 'abundance of basic necessities like food' thesis, of course. Yes, it's true that humankind currently produce enough food and other basics to give every human alive now a modestly-decent life, at the very least. But no, it absolutely isn't true that this arrangement is in any way sustainable. Current production-rates of basic life necessities simply can't be sustained. We're eating through resource reservoirs such as energy, fertile soils, the all-important forests, metal ores, and so on, much faster than they can be replenished by the natural astro-geo-ecological processes that produced them in the first place. Once we've eaten the cupboard bare, we then begin to get starved of basic necessities. The often-observed end-game of temporary population overshoots - of any speicies - is just such a scenario, always resulting, so far, in a period of population die-back, until things eventually crawl back into balance, after the crash.

    Identifying and - you have to hope - abolishing the WUHRs would make some useful difference. But it doesn't confront that underlying problem of overshoot. That scarcely registers even with today's radicals. I've always been in favour of making excessive wealth literally illegal, with total confiscation and wide re-distribution of these parasitical wealth-piles, as standard procedure. I'd also put the holders of excess wealth, once they've been stripped of it, to work for mandatory periods of low-level public service, pour encourager les autres. But this doesn't at all address the underlying problem that humans are now in gross population overshoot, and eating up the world like locusts. And apart from a few realist ecologists we're barely acknowledging that fundamental reality, let alone doing anything effective about it. Everyone just knee-jerks into the 'Malthus was wrong!' get-out. But no, the ecologists say, he wasn't; just a bit off in his timing. We're determined, it seems, to ignore it till it's too late, and to leave it to Mam Gaia's always effective, but cosmically-grim, curative negative feedback loops; with lots of inevitable dog-eat-dog horrors falling on everything in the process. Mam Gaia isn't always a sweet, kindly all-nurturing goddess like the mother of Jesus. She just survives - using the evolutionary art of the possible. The "tough b1tch", as Lynn Margulis called her.

    And we -hom sap - are in no way essential to her persistent life-web. What are we like! I wouldn't expect my dog companions to grasp and deal with this problem, because they simply can't do it. But we, homo-allegedly-sapiens can, yet we effingwell won't! We just refuse primly to think about it. So - die-back, here we come!

    Still, solid kudos to Abby and Peter for this small but heavily-information-dense shuffle in the right direction. And thanks Mike for the headsup!

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