MANAGING SIX-BILLION PEOPLE (October 11, 2008)

(This is the second essay I posted approximately five years ago. Somehow, it seems even more appropriate today than it did then.)

If you happened to observe a couple with four or five children having some difficulty (financially and personally), you would very likely be tempted to suggest that they had too many children. But if they were getting along splendidly, you would be less likely to say such a thing. In the same way, if the world were getting along splendidly, you would not likely even think of the population issue. (The world’s population, by the way, is currently over six billion.)

Now, I don’t know about you, but from what I’m seeing and hearing lately, the world is not getting along so splendidly. You think maybe the population crunch is rearing its ugly head? How much different do you think the world would be if its human population were only three billion, one-half its current number? Do you think we’d feel a little less crowded and breathe a little easier and be a lot less stressed? And not be entangled in so much haggling (i.e., warfare) over the resources, especially oil?

The problem is not the sheer number of people, but managing them (and the resources they need). If we could do that properly, we wouldn’t be saying that there are too many.

And the fact that we are saying it should only be viewed as an indication that we desperately need to improve our people skills. We need to learn how to manage six billion people. But how could we ever do that? It’s an awful lot of mouths to feed.

Indeed it is, and there is only one way that such a large number of human beings could ever be managed properly: with a single sovereign government, as opposed to a multiplex of them. As long as we insist on maintaining our national identities, we will continue to wallow in all the distinctions - and prejudices - associated with such identities. Nationalism fosters separatism. I am an American; I’m French; I’m German. And so on.

I know that it surely rankles anyone who is proud of their national heritage to hear this kind of talk, but ask yourself a simple question: which is more important, to be American, French or German, or to be a human being? Which is primary? We are, after all, human beings first, citizens second. You have to be a living breathing human being before you can be placed into some kind of nationalistic niche. Since our basic humanity is the fundamentally important thing, it seems the wiser course of action to start paying more attention to that than the national history that frames our psyche.

(The financial situation that we are currently dealing with is a global one. It seems that as America goes, so goes the world. Six-billion people are being affected, not just three-hundred million.

There is an old saying: money talks-and bullshit walks. It will be interesting to see just how the money talks in the current dilemma. Is it going to talk its way out of the mess, or end up blabbering bullshit?

Money is indeed the problem, and it is a problem because we use it in the first place. We are far too technologically advanced to keep on using such anciently-derived token currency to access the resources. In spite of the fact that there are six-billion people in the world, there are still enough resources to properly clothe, house and feed them all. The only thing that's keeping it from happening-and I mean smoothly and evenly- is the fact that we use money to access and manage those resources.

If you have not yet done so, I highly recommend that you read the essays at this site that deal with the intricacies of money and the hindering abstractions that attend it. You might want to begin with the Alan Watts essay Wealth vs Money)