Learning Limits

stop

One of my friends sent me this email. Let’s call him P.:

Probably most of you have seen seemingly outlandish allegations about powerful Washington figures involved in pedophilia. They seem so outrageous that there is a tendency to reject them out of hand. However, there are a couple of corroborating facts. First there is Epstein’s island in the Caribbean and the Clinton’s documented trips there. Now, there is this: https://steemit.com/pizzagate/@gizmosia/art-podesta-admires-and-buys-you-may-never-sleep-well-again .

I don’t know whether the above allegations are true or not true. Is it all bogus or not — who knows?

I do know other bits of information as facts. Here’s one. The Clinton’s charge around $10,000 USD a year for their security guards to live on their compound (huge estate) in Chappaqua, NY. The security guards are there because Bill is a former US President needing protection. And guess who pays that amount (which is the same amount as their mortgage per year) — the taxpayer — the little people of whom many have incomes of the same amount of money.

Moreover, this huge expenditure relates to the deficit ranking up huge amounts. …

What a sweet deal for them and bad for everyone else, the ones who are paying for it. So the nation’s debt keeps pumping up due to assorted kinds of folly like this mortgage payment one and the military/industrial complex. So it goes:

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

While I find this all problematic, I see worse problems. It’s related to this comment from B. about the size of middle class houses in the USA, He wrote: “Why is the illustration of a monster home?”

He thinks that middle class homes in the USA are monstrous in size. He should see the “what’s more.”

He should see the homes with seven or more bathrooms to serve the number of barely every used bedrooms included. He should see the homes with breakfast nooks, family rooms the size of whole homes, dining rooms the size of homes and libraries the size of a small museum. He should see the fully furnished basements beneath such huge homes. Then he should see the compounds like the Clinton family compound, and he should see the vacation homes that these families have on top of all of the rest that they have … and they like it. They like living this way.

The problem with our species and unlike other ones is that we don’t know when enough is enough. Most (not all and I can attest to this personally) always want more and grander goodies.

Most want more resources, more carbon loading due to air travel and other means to load, more money, more of the high-life. Moreover there is little reflection about the ways that such personal advantages are achieved or the consequences of one’s choices relative to others on the planet.

Last year, one of my friends traveled to Hawaii, Colorado and Iceland. An older relative of mine told me that she fully intended to travel out of country to see the world before dying.

Others dream of owning expensive sports’ cars, multiple vacation homes in several states, making a killing off of the stock market and other ways to give themselves pleasures. With 7.6 billion of us, I don’t see the ways that people collectively can achieve all of their individual wants without a devastating toll to the natural world, a finite world, and to humanity as a whole. Do you?

The trend is for humans as a whole to always want more — more children, more resources, more money, more energy. It is because they equate more with happiness, I suppose, and tend to see the world through the lens of their own particular circumstances rather than the social whole or environmental constraints.

The fact is that endless growth on a finite world leads to collapse. It leads to climate change horrors and starvation. It leads to lack of the resources to even refurbish wind turbines and solar panels. It leads to the sixth great extinction. It leads to insufficient water supplies and whole regions of the Earth turning toward desertification, including ones with too many people at present to successfully provide for them all without massive inputs of goods, including food, from other regions of the globe. … One can only imagine about what will happen when fossil fuels run out and transportation all but quits when the human population is perhaps double the current 7.6 billion size. Then what?

Eventually all regions of the Earth that survive catastrophes will have to become self-sufficient in terms of resource creation and resource use. I personally doubt that mine in MA, USA  will do so well a hundred or a hundred and fifty years from now and this is because we are in a cycle of over-development with too many people being driven into my area relative to the natural world around us. So how could the number of people present here in the future times survive on account?.

Maybe on some sort of subconscious level, Donald Trump understands that Central America is going to collapse due to overpopulation, climate change, lack of sufficient resources and other factors. It’s coming.

So maybe this is the reason that he wants to build a southern wall on the US border. (Note that he doesn’t want to build a northern wall dividing the USA from Canada.)

Hopefully he will become aware that the Southwest, Southeast and Midwest in the USA is also supposed to collapse. Now where are we supposed to tend all of the displaced people? It surely won’t be in my already overdeveloping town. After all, a location can only subsume a certain number of people before it too is in dire overshoot conditions.

Most people are too busy attending to their daily affairs to be aware of current trajectories that the world is taking relative to major changes in conditions. When they are not working or attending to household and other chores, they choose entertainment to bring joy — entertainment like watching TV programs, watching sports games, going out to see plays — fictional drama, and the like.

It all follows the pain and pleasure principle. All living creatures try to avoid the former and seek the latter condition and entertainment is, well, fun!

This is the way to slowly boil a frog. Gradually make uncomfortable changes, but ones imperceptible to the public regarding the Earth and life as a whole. Then keep them entertained, which is what they want, anyway.

Under the circumstances. one can only bear witness and help a few people and other life forms here and there to have an improved life. The overall scenario is going to the place that it is heading and there is no stopping it on the scale needed in my opinion.

Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA.

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