Humanity's Dilemma: Reconciling Two Paradigms
By Jason G. Brent
12 January, 2011
Countercurrents.org
When George H. W. Bush was President of the USA he was the most powerful man on the face of the earth. At one international conference he made the statement that America’s way of life was non-negotiable. A small voice at the back of the room said “George who”. That was the small, but powerful, voice of nature’s paradigm. Everyone heard the voice, but no one on the face of the earth understood or acted upon the voice of nature’s paradigm. In the last few years Pope Benedict went to Africa and told the Africans to have sex without a condom and again the voice of nature’s paradigm said “Pope who”. All of humanity heard the voice of nature’s paradigm, but no one understood or acted on the voice that was loud and clear.
The problems facing humanity today are not those in the news or on anyone’s lips. No person on the face of the earth has written about the real problem facing humankind in its struggle for survival. There is only one problem facing humanity today in its struggle for future survival and it is not overpopulation, running out of oil and/or other fossil fuels, running out of water to drink or grow food, global warming, destruction of the soil of the earth which is used to grow food, pollution of the oceans, loss of fish as a source of food, the chance of war and the struggle for peace, or anything else.
The only problem facing humanity today is how to bring the human paradigm into agreement with the paradigm of nature with the least amount of death and destruction. And the agreement must last as long as the human species exists. At present the two competing paradigms are attempting to control the future of humanity and they cannot be reconciled. One paradigm must lose out to the other paradigm. Humanity’s supposed intelligence will not change the determination of the winner. As an aside which is not important in relation to this essay is the fact that humanity’s intelligence is vastly overstated---just look at the portion of the American population which denies evolution and believes in creationism.
At this point I will not discuss all the areas in which they disagree, but will limit my comments just to the two main areas of disagreement. Nature’s paradigm includes the fact that the earth is finite and, therefore, both population growth and economic activity must reach a limit in the very near future. Nature’s paradigm understands that the earth cannot and will not support continued population and/or economic growth. Humanity’s paradigm requires continual and never ending economic and population growth, in direct conflict with nature’s paradigm.
In the current economic crisis almost every country and probably all the industrialized countries have taken steps to stimulate their economies without making a determination as to what level of economic activity is best for the long term (say 5,000 years—in reality a very short period of time when you consider that the dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 160 million years) survival of humankind. While many people understand that population growth must cease if humanity is to survive, no action has been taken on a world-wide basis which will insure that population growth is reduced to zero within the next fifty years. Nature’s paradigm cannot and will not wait even twenty years before the horrible destruction of humanity commences.
Since life of any type began on this planet, nature’s paradigm divided life into two groups—those that survived to reproduce and those that died before reproduction. Once a species reached the maximum number individuals that could be supported by the niche which it occupied, the species was divided into the two groups referred to in the previous sentence. Over time those individuals which were best suited for the environment of the niche were the ones to reproduce. Those individuals who were less suited for the environment died before reproducing. This occurred billions and billions and billions of times without a single exception. The determination of who survived to reproduce and who died before reproduction was always made by violence and death.
Humanity’s paradigm believes that everyone should have the right to reproduce even though many individuals are genetically deficient and don’t have the necessary skills to function in the environment occupied by humanity. This belief is based on two erroneous concepts---1) morality and 2) the inability of humanity to determine the skills which are necessary for survival and reproduction. To be very blunt—nature’s paradigm does not give a damn about humanity’s morality and does not give a damn about humanity’s inability to determine the necessary skills to function and reproduce. If humanity does not immediately change its concept of morality and make a determination of the skills necessary to survive and reproduce, nature’s paradigm will do it for our species as nature has always done it—by violence and death. Except in this case nature’s paradigm has weapons of mass destruction which were created by humanity. Nature’s paradigm will not merely cause death and destruction by disease, starvation, predation and the other horrors it used in the past to determine who will survive to reproduce, nature’s paradigm will cause the determination to be made by ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, wars (with and without weapons of mass destruction) gang raping to death millions of women and other horrors beyond our imagination.
While in the past nature’s paradigm destroyed the vast numbers of species, (perhaps more than 99% of all the species that ever existed on the planet have been destroyed by nature’s paradigm and no longer exist) that destruction has usually occurred over an extended period of time. Nature’s paradigm now has weapons of mass destruction which can kill billions of our species almost instantaneously. The supposed intelligence of humanity will not prevent that destruction.
In order for humanity to conform it’s paradigm to nature’s paradigm every aspect of humanity society will have to be evaluated and most likely changed. Every aspect of morality, charity, government, religion, politics, philosophy, etc. will have to be evaluated and revised in almost an instant of time. That is the problem facing humanity.
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