The Year 2050
By Peter Goodchild
07 September, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Looking back on the early 21st century from its midpoint, historians (of a sort) will regard it as the Age of Insanity. Who would believe that such a large proportion of the world's grain harvest would be turned into fuel for automobiles, each of which was a colossal example of inefficiency, a 1,000-kg metal vehicle with a single passenger? And who would believe that most newspapers would laud the efforts of “our peacekeeping forces,” who marched into countries where they did not belong, committing acts which were blatantly offensive rather than defensive, all in the name of a euphemistic “hegemony”? Hadn't such thinking gone out with Adolf Hitler? And who would believe that the top mannequin, the President of the United States, would tell the citizens that the solution to multi-trillion-dollar debt was to go further into debt? And who would believe that the US would surrender its manufacturing to other countries, leaving itself nothing but a nation of service industries, oblivious to the fact that nobody wanted to be “serviced”? (And why does this word remind me of prostitution?) And who would believe that in a world literally dying of overpopulation, the topic would receive less coverage than a Hollywood divorce, since it was an issue that both the left and the right regarded as inconsequential?
The bookmakers will have had fun with World War III. In “McMafia,” Misha Glenny explains that in the Soviet bloc there was never such a thing as “law” in any normal sense of the word. Western concepts of law are very complex, very detailed, and they were built up over many centuries. The Communist equivalent for law was little more that bullying: what the boss said was about the closest thing to a law, and what his own boss said was an equally vague “law.” Consequently, when the Soviet world fell apart, but had neither law nor law enforcement to fall back on, the so-called mafias filled the vacuum. Russia is therefore dissolving in anarchy. China's threat to the rest of the world will disappear as it loses all its resources: while the West believes China has its fingers into everything, the reality is that China is geographically almost identical to Canada but has 43 times the population. China will be fatally short of rice, water, coal, and almost everything else. The only competitor with the US for “global hegemony,” if some problems of cooperation can be solved, will be the cluster of countries that are either Arabic or Muslim – often, but not always, the same thing. Unlike Westerners, many people in those countries know the oil is running out, and that they will have to nationalize everything before too many more American fortresses are built in their lands.
One great weakness of the West is the sad farce of democracy. It was always a wonderful idea, but the present concept of the “vote" now tends to undermine the whole effort. Some people say democracy is all about money: who can be bought, and for how much. Other people say it's based on power: one power group vs. another, one lobby group vs. another ("You take the model railroaders, we'll take the birdwatchers"). But "money" and "power" are basically the same thing. In its present form, in other words, democracy is merely a struggle for popularity; such matters as truth, freedom, and justice get lost in the brawling. At the same time, “communications technology” has become a misnomer, as the endless innovations are largely used to deceive the populace. The final blow is that democracy works smoothly only in small groups anyway, as the ancient Greeks could have told us. When the “voter” can no longer look the “politician” in the eye, it's inevitable that the liars will take over. "Dunbar's number" is 150, the maximum practical size for human association: with a population of 312 million, the US is far beyond that number, and China has never even bothered to be democratic.
There are people such as Jared Diamond, R.B. Ferguson, and Peter Salonius who have good arguments for a sustainable global population of something like one million. That was the population about 10,000 years ago, just before agriculture was invented. Not only was agriculture detrimental to the land, but the resulting population explosion led to urbanization, which led to major socio-economic differences, which in turn led to warfare, and the overcrowding of the urban areas led to epidemics. That figure of one million would be 1/7,000 of the present population, or slightly more than the present population of Fiji. In the year 2050, when oil production falls to a small percentage of its present level and mechanized agriculture collapses, we won't need a doomsday virus to adjust those numbers. While the results will be horrifying, there will ultimately come a redemption of some sort: a little peace and quiet.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild{at}gmail.com.
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