Why Civilization Is Causing Increasing Dysfunction.
It is alarming to realize that only a dozen lifetimes ago planet Earth was largely a natural wilderness thriving with life. Written accounts describe how life was so plentiful that herds of animals and flocks of birds would stretch far beyond the horizon; vast forests were abundant with wildlife, and pristine oceans were teeming with sea life. Since then, the population has grown from 500 million to 8 billion people who are increasingly consuming and polluting the Earth. Every day, on average, 100,000 acres of forest are cut down or burned down. Every day we burn up into the atmosphere 100 million barrels of oil, 20 million tons of coal, and over a billion cubic meters of methane gas. Every day we consume100,000 tons of sea life, and in exchange for this depletion of life we have dumped so much garbage in the oceans that floating masses cover thousands of square miles, and millions of tons wash up on shorelines. Half the essential life generating coral reefs are gone, half the essential oxygen producing rainforests are gone, and half the world’s vertebrate animals are gone. The question that must be answered is, why exactly are we destroying our life system? The fundamental reason is that Earth’s life system has evolved to a time when adaptation is restricting instinct at an accelerating rate. For over a billion years the unrestricted instincts and adaptations of nature generated an increasingly abundant, balancing life system on Earth. Eventually adaptation produced our species, and we then developed the adaptation of civilization to help us survive. But civilization has an inherent contradiction in its function. It cannot develop unless our essential, instinctive survival function is restricted, and the more civilization grows, the more it inexorably restricts. The increasing adaptations of laws, regulations, technology, population growth, and social control restrict the instinctive survival drives and instinctive survival responses that are essential for our full system, balancing function. Actual metabolic functions, including oxygen assimilation and sensory awareness, are increasingly repressed into our unconsciousness over generations of civilized development. We attempt to compensate for our reduced function with increased consumption and reproduction. This perpetuates the development of more civilization, which causes more restriction of instinctive survival function, more dysfunction, more consumption, on and on. We are consuming and degrading our finite, magnificent life source as we become less alive. The reason we are not aware of our increasing dysfunction is because from the infancy of our lives, layers of defense mechanisms in our brain block traumatic, life repressing experiences with targeted psychological / chemical restriction of oxygen assimilation, so everyone, by varying amounts (due to different degrees of nurturing) becomes less aware they are less alive, while no one knows how alive each other is. This increasing repression of our natural function results in fear driven, compulsive survival that perpetuates our addiction to consumption. We will keep surviving at the increasing expense of Earth’s life system, and at the increasing expense of our own naturally balancing function until civilization collapses, only for the cycle to start again. All systems require balancing to function, from solar systems to metabolic systems. Life is most alive when function is balanced, and natural behavior is necessary for balanced function. No matter how much civilized man tries to make unnatural behavior natural, it will never be natural, so the only way we will be able to stabilize our civilized condition while regenerating Earth’s life system, is by making the one necessary compromise to our behavior that will reduce the direct cause of the system imbalance. Yes, the secret to life, at this stage of system development, is population reduction. If we steadily reduce the world population from 8 billion to one billion people, simply by deciding to have one or two children in a family, then 3 positive results will happen:
1) The reduced population will significantly decrease system degradation, while allowing more freedom of our behavior for more balancing, fuller life function.
2) Nature will greatly regenerate life on Earth.
3) The smaller family size will allow for better child nurturing. The development of civilization must be a compromise between helping ensure our individual survival and keeping our natural behavior. Population reduction is the only adaptation that will save Earth’s life system. Jim Morton