POPULATION, ECONOMICS, CHOICE and MORALITY
I didn’t get to complete my thoughts on this in the last post because of a keyboard problem. Countries that have invested in female education and family planning have demonstrated major drops in total fertility rates. Regardless of which counties are used as comparisons (e.g. Iran/Iraq, Haiti/Dominican Republic, Pakistan/Bangladesh, Malawi/Kenya) it is clear that investing in women and families and the infrastructure they live within pays off in deceased population and increased SOL with a good quality of life associated with it. I also talked about how investing in the LDCs would help them move through the Demographic Transition (DT) quickly rather than taking many decades, thereby reducing pressure on resources as the population slowly reduces and stabilizes over time.
Lester Brown has calculated that to provide universal primary education, eradicate or minimize adult illiteracy, provide school Lunch programs for the 44 poorest countries, give assistance to preschool children and pregnant women in those 44 poorest countries, provide reproductive health care and family planning, provide universal basic health care, and to close the condom gap would cost about $72 billion dollars a year for a ten-year period in which they would move quickly though the DT. Before you go off about spending $720 billion, think of what we and our governments that give lip service to, about wanting to improve humanities QOL overall. We claim we want to do it but we cannot afford it and that we have limited resources. All a feeble excuse to do very little really. Regardless of all the hyperbole expressed about limited resources, we do have enough for all the human population on Earth to live comfortably. What we lack is a will to make it happen. We also have a belief structure, reinforced by an insane economic system, that is built on the premise that resources are limited (economics is defined by the allocation of scarcity). This promotes greed and hoarding, and another insane belief that is based in competition (focused on a survival need) instead of cooperation.
Let us not forget the controlling hierarchical cabal that works endlessly to ensnare and entangle us in their lies, deceit, and carefully crafted illusions (I have covered this quite a bit in earlier posts). Let’s return to the $720 billion amount. That is a staggering amount and the hierarchy would have you believe it is an impossible amount to give to this solution. In the USA, the DOD Pentagon budget alone is slated to be $639 billion for 2018, up from $606 billion in 2017. (I understand that about half of that is not accountable – black ops and other secret needs for instance.) Then consider the Bank bailouts of 2008. The USA almost overnight spent about $850 billion without a second thought it seems to bail out the U.S. Banks. All others MDC counties did similarly. It’s a lot like riding a stretch-limo through a homeless area to the airport to fly your private Lear jet to Las Vegas to gamble all your money and saying you have no money to help out a needy person. We had a priority for the bank bailout to support the illusion that the world would end if the economy didn’t continue its present course. Yet, the mention of an amount to solve most of the world’s problems is poo-pooed as ridiculous. Imagine if each of the G20 countries contributed a reasonable and equitable portion of that $72 billion a year to solve the worlds problem. I can just hear the many voices screaming “what about the poor in the G20, let alone the LDCs.” POVERTY is a Consequence of the deliberately manufactured insane economic system controlled by the hierarchy. We must not forget that WE are responsible for the problems our governments create and propagate – at least in most MDCs we select our representatives through elections. The fact that we let ourselves get bamboozled by how big money and politics coops us all is another problem, let alone the corruption that is driven by the hierarchical Cabal. We disempower ourselves because the hierarchy make us believe we have no power. Like I said four posts ago with an ANTZ quote, the reason they spend so much money to coopt us is because they realize what would happen if WE all woke up to how much power we ALL have, individually and collectively.
Reformationists (Old Minds with good intent) want to work within the system and make changes incrementally to better society. Transformationists (New Minds) want to change the system to one that works for everyone. Why do we pay taxes that barely fund what we want, and then our ‘representatives’ turn around and give OUR money to the uber-hierarchy with the strange yet persistent belief that it will somehow trickle back down to us? When we give our ‘choice’ to someone else to make, we still make a choice. If we want to solve the worlds problems we need to collectively make choices that make things better for everyone, not just for ourselves at that moment. Letting hierarchy’s – whether they be unrestrained corporatocracies or centrally planned governments – has never worked well for us. Vision means seeing the world we want and then choosing things that make that happen. The path to sustainability is actually deciding to start living sustainably through our own moral compass, and our shared compassion for life, not through laws and regulations that tell us want to do.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “Money, not Morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.” Religion is often used by the hierarchy to control us, “You don’t need religion to have morals. If you cannot determine right from wrong, you lack empathy, not religion” Anon. Ganghi said, “Morality which depends on the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our heats.” Recognizing what works and what doesn’t work is a spiritual aspect, which is why I have emphasized spirituality so much in earlier posts. One of the comments posted to this blog wanted more ‘normal’ stuff, but it is what we do not know that keeps us imprisoned in the insane system we accept as normal. I will get to looking more at technological innovations, which is the normal part of sustainability we understand, but I will also continue to push the esoteric to try and wake everyone up. Let’s aim for 100% of what we want and stop settling for 15% because its all ‘they’ will let us have.
“We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of Love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central” Iris Murdoch.
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