A reporter named Jared Diamond has just published a book entitled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Succeed. Being a global warming advocate, Diamond believes that evil humanity destroys the natural environment, thereby destroying itself. That, I suppose, is the meaning of "chose" in the subtitle of the book.
This column was going to be on the greenhouse effect, manufactured in the 50s by an hysterical astronomical community to counter Velikovsky's accurate prediction dealing with the heat of Venus, a scientific fabrication that eventually led to global warming. I will cover the subject in a future column and it is already the subject of Chapter 6, The Outrage of Ignorance in Let's Talk Flying Saucers.
In this column, I wanted to complete the thought that concluded the last column dealing with the Earth cooling off and dying. One of the most prevalent examples of mirrormensis, the tendency of the mind to see the exact opposite of what exists in reality, is the ability to look from the moon at the blue ball of the Earth sitting in the cold, dark emptiness of space and conclude against a science that measures heat flowing from hot to cold, that the Earth is heating up.
This delusion is placed on top of a prior delusion created by the evolutionists that has the Earth existing for billions of years so that there was time for species evolution to occur. This delusion required the creation of the concept of thermal balance in the atmosphere, the unmeasurable and therefore strictly empirical determination that for billions of years the Earth has been giving up exactly the same amount of heat that it receives on a daily basis from the sun, the stars, and any comets that might be passing by.
I suspect that proponents such as Diamond, who believe that the Earth is heating up as a result of the human invention of production, think, if they think at all, that the extreme heat of Venus results from some ancient Venusian civilization's overuse of the Venusmobile to the point the temperature destroyed the Venusian environment.
I wouldn't bother even mentioning a standard diatribe like Collapse except for one fact. Diamond, while blaming the United States for the global warming that resulted in the reduction of resources, actually placed the blame for the Ugandan tragedy on too many people and too little food. That is precisely what humanity has faced for the last 3,000 years, and it is what we will face in the future as the planet grows colder and is unable to keep up with the resource production of an expanding population. The danger to the planet is not humanity's production destroying the planet, the danger to the planet is humanity's inability to understand that it is facing a struggle over diminishing resources that can only be overcome by mastering production and the distribution of that production.
Another prevalent example of mirrormensis is the claim, made by members of a prosperous society, a society that provides the ability for its members to travel the world, both vicariously and in reality, a society that provides its members with the freedom to pretty much do what they want when they want and where they want so long as they respect the rights of others that they would have others respect of themselves, is the almost universal claim made by the members of that society that they live paycheck to paycheck, that they can never get ahead.
Three hundred years ago, and for all the time that preceded the invention of production, we died where we were born, we ate what we could grow, we starved if we couldn't grow it, and we were bound to the land that was owned by a feudal lord who protected both the land and ourselves from being raped, enslaved and murdered by others who would take our resources from us so that they could themselves live.
There has never, in recorded history, been enough resources to go around, and as a result, the societies that have formed have formed around agricultural communities that could elect the strong to protect the land from invaders who would take what resources they had. Slavery, whether in the form of shackles, or in the form of land dependence, has been the story of recorded history up to the 17th Century when the Agricultural Revolution vastly increased the amount of food that could be produced on a given amount of land. The Agricultural Revolution was a direct result of the plague, in which the number of hands that could work the land was so severely reduced that feudal lords had to create private ownership, in England, an entirely new class of citizens called yeomen. Because these people owned their own land, their return depended on their labor with the resulting innovations that led to the Agricultural Revolution.
However, the Agricultural Revolution was a blessing in disguise as it removed the need for the farmers on the feudal estates as the population began once again to increase. With no need for the farmhands, the feudal lords did not know what to do with them. The contract between the feudal nobility and the people who occupied the land they protected was one in which the people were fed in return for protection from having their food taken by invaders. The basis of the contract for food was, someone worked, they got fed. They didn't work, they didn't get fed.
Therefore, the feudal lords had to come up with some sort of way to provide work for the no-longer needed farmhands, and this led to the invention of production. This invention occurred at the beginning of the 18th Century, and has been written off as the Industrial Revolution. However, the invention of production is one of the most significant events in recorded history because it increased the amount of goods people could have and it increased the number of people that could have those goods. In short, it increased prosperity.
Prosperity is a two-sided coin. On one side prosperity exists and with that prosperity, the freedom to do what we want to do. On the other side of the coin, prosperity does not exist and without prosperity, there is no freedom, we are dependent on the environment, on what we can scrape out of existence. Prosperity is freedom and the absence of prosperity is slavery.
In the 300 years since the invention of production, approximately a fifth of the worlds population, a billion people, have become free and prosperous. Before the invention of production, it is doubtful whether a fraction of a percentage of the worlds population were prosperous, and thus in 300 years, the invention of production has spread prosperity to a wide section of humanity. It hasn't been easy. We didn't know that production was not a resource like land that could be fought for and won, but rather a resource that, once created, had to be protected and expanded. Mistaking production for land, we spent hundreds of years and millions of lives fighting for it, and we attempted to subject the source of resources and the markets for the production those resources produced. Production was a new tool of humanity, and humanity didn't know how to use it. We are only now learning how to use production and it has been a costly learning process.
But, and here is where making a difference comes in, we have yet to learn how to distribute production. The Ludditic ignorance aside, the attempts by the ignorant to limit production using fear tactics such as global warming to return society to its former state of feudalism in which the Luddites will presumably be the nobility and the rest of us their slaves, we now have the ability for unlimited production. I don't even want to argue against those who cry out against peak oil, that we are running out of energy. We all know that there is a lot we don't know and that one of the biggest expenses of production, energy, is dependent on an understanding of gravity, an understanding that doesn't presently exist. When we have a science that doesn't bother to address the basic questions of reality, the questions of force and motion, controlling the creation of our technology, our technology is in its infancy. We have demonstrated, and we will continue to demonstrate, that we can use technology to overcome production limitations, even if we have to overcome empirical dictates to do it.
The problem I am referring to, distribution, is much more serious, and perhaps insurmountable, because it deals with basic human nature. While the Bank of England went a long way to solving the needs for a medium of exchange flexible enough for the widespread distribution of production, fractional reserve banking, it took the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in the 20th Century to create the absolute means of production distribution. It allows the money system to reflect the production, balance the need of production for the exchanges necessary for that production to get into the hands of people.
Like production, however, reserve banking as a means of distributing production is new to humanity and we do not yet know how to use it to distribute production to everyone, which is the goal. There are two problems involved. Production eliminates jobs and jobs are the historic method by which resources are distributed. If production eliminates the very basis for its distribution, then increasing production will become self-defeating. We have to find a way to distribute production without reference to work.
This raises the problem, there are people who will be getting the fruits of production without working. How will this give others the incentive to work? The answer is in the nature of production. Production produces unequal resources. It always has. Even in feudal societies, those that provided the most valuable work received the best of the crop. There are always people in society who want to work, that are driven to work, and the number of those people will probably always exceed the work available. Therefore, the incentive to work in a production-based society can be the ability to obtain the best resources production has to offer.
But this presents another problem, the problem of jealousy. Those who are benefiting from the prosperity of society, but not from the cream of society's resources, become jealous of those that do benefit from the cream of society's resources. If they can see why the greater benefit is accruing, the person is a performer, an athlete or a national icon, then the jealousy won't manifest itself. However, if the contribution is not so apparent, then the jealousy will rise up to destroy the people enjoying the unequal resources. The most prevalent group whose contribution is invisible, of course, are the very people producing the production, and therefore, prosperous people attack the source of their prosperity, the corporations and the people who run them, that are the source of their prosperity and their freedom.
That is the problem we face in a prosperous society. But we face an even greater problem in being a prosperous society when eighty percent of the world remains mired in feudal poverty and slavery. The rulers of those people, themselves enjoying the best of the unequal resources feudal societies have to offer, have no intention of giving up their positions as feudal lords and as a result, attempt to turn their people against the production based societies where prosperity breeds the freedom that would destroy their feudal fiefdoms.
In my opinion, our goal, as a prosperous society, is to expand that prosperity to as many people as possible. After all, we would not ourselves be prosperous and free if our ancestors had not tackled the seemingly unsolvable problems of production and the distribution of production. And what else is there? When we see the poverty of the world, either vicariously or up front and in person, it is painful because we see ourselves in those who don't have what we have.
And while those who don't have anything and never have had anything, might appear happier than the prosperous, who have everything to lose and therefore may not appear as happy, being well fed, warm, and healthy is not an option when we have the means of making it possible.
It is an absolute imperative for us, as a prosperous people, to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and to do that we have to master production and its distribution so that we can distribute the best standard of prosperity to the most people without reference to contribution.
How that is going to happen, I don't know, but we have a whole generation of people growing up professing to want to make a difference. Helping one person will make a difference all right. It will result in a reduction of resources. Expanding production and finding ways to distribute production is what will make a difference, not to just one person, but to the four or five billion people on this planet who have yet to experience prosperity and thus have yet to experience freedom.
It is a challenge, but it is one that is going to have to be met and overcome.
We are living on a planet that is slowly growing cold in the coldness of space and as it grows cold, its ability to produce resources is diminishing. We are the sentient beings that evolved on this particular planet in this particular solar system in this particular galaxy in this particular corner or nook or cranny or spatial point in the universe.
We did not evolve minds so that we could be controlled by our environment. We evolved minds so that we could alter the environment to extend our range of survivability. Sure, we have to come up with an accurate, a consistent picture of physical reality in order to effectively alter our environment to our benefit, but when it comes to the statement, "our benefit," we have to recognize that "our" is all of us.
All of us on the planet!
Greet the challenge.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com