The Malthusian Conspiracy?, The Possible Big Picture Options

[Timothy Osman]

In 1798, Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834), a 19th century pessimist, after reading about goats on Galapagos Island, published his essay Principles of Population. The essay extended his observations of goats to humans, and maintained that populations are unprincipled and have no internal constraints toward growth. Now, in the first half of the 19th century in Europe, members of the ruling classes met subsequent to the publication of Principles of Population to discuss "the population problem." Before Malthus, populations were considered to be an asset. After Malthus, the concept of land acquisition to support "future large populations" became a motivating factor for war.

Another aspect of Malthus' theory is that is maintained that "all animated life was governed exclusively by the sexual-reproductive drive. Like Freud, Malthus reduced a complex interplay of factors to just one factor-sexual drive. Reducing any issue to just one factor is reductive determinism, which on its face has little or no scientific merit. Although the Malthusian doctrine was one of the most influential of modern times, it never had any scientific basis. The Malthusian doctrine later came to the attention of Charles Darwin, who read Malthus' essay in 1838. For Darwin, who was familiar with the viewpoint of Thomas Hobbes, "life consisted of a struggle, one against all." The Malthusian idea of existence also incorporated this Hobbesian viewpoint, and it appealed to Darwin. When applied to populations and society, it resulted in Social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism appealed to the European elite, who saw it as prima facie justification their "evolutionary superiority." The elite adapted the Malthusian principle of "management of unprincipled populations"- population control. Moreover, Darwinism achieved orthodox status among his friends in the British Royal Society, two of whom were Thomas Huxley, president of the Royal Society, and Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin. Galton founded the eugenics movement, which later expanded in the United States and subsequently in Germany.

Darwin's vision of existence as a "purposeless struggle", after 1859, quickly replaced the Judeo-Christian vision of human life as a purposeful, divinely guided moral struggle. This idea of "life as a meaningless struggle" played a decisive role in the brutalization of the Western world for the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries. Social Darwinism prompted the enlargement of colonial empires, and also conditioned a struggle for power on an unprecedented scale. The principle targets of war switched from enemy armies to populations themselves.

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardt...ian_premise.htm

This is just an article which describes how we got where we are in a simple way IMO. It does explain the dog eat dog world we accept in which over Two Billion people have no access to electricity and are blamed for being a burden on the planet.
Could it be that today we have an elite who as their core belief is the Malthusian idea of humans as randy goats shagging their way to oblivion. That the control of energy resources, the only way of currently maintaining affordable food for all is central to this elites plan. It's hard not to see 911 as a means of securing the middle and central east energy producing area's, not just to exploit them but to control and diminish supply.
When I look at the origin of the other scam which is working in tandem to artificially inflate the price of energy through carbon taxes and seeing the architects are the same old suspects. Without going into a pyramid hunting rabbit hole I thought I would start with this bloke.

Maurice Strong.

THE Kyoto Protocol was the work of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians. But no one person is more responsible for it than a Canadian named Maurice Strong.

Strong organized the UN first-world environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 and has never stopped pressing for a world where UN resolutions would be enforced as law all over the Earth.

Strong went on to chair the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio and to become senior adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary general. Not bad for a kid from Oak Lake, Manitoba, who dropped out of school at age 14.

But Strong is different than other social butterflies who flit from one UN conference to the next. He is a powerful businessman, who has served as president of such massive energy companies as Petro-Canada and Ontario Hydro, and on the board of industrial giant Toyota.

He is a huge political donor, not just here in Canada, but to both the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. as well.

At age 29, he became president of Power Corporation, fusing his destiny to Canada's wealthiest and most influential families - including Paul Martin Sr. and Jr., now heir apparent to the prime minister.

Strong hired Paul Jr. to work for him during a vacation from university. "We controlled many companies, controlled political budgets," Strong said of his time at Power Corporation. "Politicians got to know you and you them."

Strong hired Martin into Power Corporation's executive suite. He helped guide Martin towards unimaginable personal wealth - and even predicted Martin's path to becoming prime minister. But Strong's influence reaches farther than Canada.

Indeed, compared to Strong's American and European friends, Martin is a small star in the constellation.

Strong sits on boards with the Rockefellers and Mikhail Gorbachev and chairs private meetings of CEOs, including Bill Gates. He hobnobs with the world's royalty, too - and with dictators and despots.

He once did a business deal with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and wound up with a 200,000-acre ranch in Colorado - which his wife, Hanne, runs as a New Age spiritual colony.

He told Maclean's magazine in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology." He warns that if we don't heed his environmentalist warnings, the Earth will collapse into chaos.

"Do we really want this? Do we want Marx to be proven right, after all?" Strong asks. He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade outside a global conference, he's the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.

Strong has always courted power - but not through any shabby election campaign. He was a Liberal candidate in the 1979 federal election, but pulled out a month before the vote.

How could a mere MP wield the kind of international control he had tasted in Stockholm? Journalist Elaine Dewar, who interviewed Strong, described why he loved the UN.

"He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda," wrote Dewar.

"He told me he had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: He didn't have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect lives."

Strong prefers power extracted from democracies, and kept from unenlightened voters. Most power-crazed men would stop at calling for a one world Earth Charter to replace the U.S. Constitution, or the UN Charter.

But in an interview with his own Earth Charter Commission, Strong said "the real goal of the Earth Charter is it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments. It will become a symbol of the aspirations and commitments of people everywhere." Sounds like Maurice was hanging out at his spirit ranch without his sunhat on.

There has been no one like Maurice Strong before, except perhaps in fiction - Ernst Blofeld comes to mind, 007's round-faced nemesis in You Only Live Twice. But Blofeld sought to attack the world order, to challenge it from some remote hideaway - not to co-opt it, and transform it from the inside as Strong does.

Blofeld would threaten a meeting of the UN; Strong would chair the meeting and script its agenda. Strangely, Strong once indulged his inner Blofeld, musing to a stunned reporter about a violent plot to take over the world through one of his many super-organizations.

In 1990, Strong told a reporter a fantasy scenario for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland - where 1,000 diplomats, CEOs and politicians gather "to address global issues."

Strong, naturally, is on the board of the World Economic Forum. "What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?...

In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?"

http://www.taxtyranny.ca/images/HTML/Mauri...g/article1.html

[George Hayduke]

Sure Tim. How 'bout you let me take you camping. We'll go out in the woods and I'll point out some things to you. Like the plastic trash that can be found in supposedly the most remote areas. Like the dead animals around cell phone towers, now on every hillside and mountain. Like the lack of amphibians or crickets or apex predators. We'll walk around under the trees and I'll point out how they're almost all exclusively new growth; how old growth vegetation is almost extinct; and how the new growth is predominantly non-native, meaning subject to vulnerabilities and alien to the local ecosystem, thus setting that system up for collapse. I'll point out how every body of water on Earth is now undrinkable unless treated, a phenomenon that has arisen only in the last 50 years.

Sure, environmentalism has been politicized by the slave masters. I can see that. But let me make one thing clear, we're f*cking this planet up in a major way. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. The bath water is the politicization of environmentalism. The baby is, the Earth is a living thing and thus something that can be killed.

I tell you what. I'll make you a deal. You come here and I'll take you to the three nearest rivers. They're all basically sewers now with flotillas of garbage and films of petrochemicals and the stench of dead fish and with mutated amphibians on the shores. You can pick one of the three. And jump in, bro. Take a swim in that brown, sludgy goodness. Why with a nuke plant up river and with a factory farm up river and with a couple of huge cities that dump their parking lot runoff into the waterways, and with the sewers all ruptured and flowing into the aquifer, you jump on in there big guy. You swim around in it, you know diving down and getting that good, clean water in your eyes and ears and mouth, chug some of it, stay in it for an hour. Get you a few swallows of it for good measure. You do this, and I'll give up environmentalism cold.

The lesson is the fucks invade everything and wreck it. They infiltrate every movement. This doesn't mean the movements are bunk. This doesn't mean they don't have a point. This doesn't mean they aren't right. It just means that they will seek to control everything. Everything.

Cancer is everywhere. Everywhere. And this is a new phenomenon. It is due to pollution. Plastic in the food chain. Strontium in the air and soil. Don't dis environmentalism.

And yeah, I'm a depop guy. I think there are way way way too many dipshits out there. I'd rather cut the head off a moron than cut down a tree. And I feel like this because I spend time among the trees, which I bet you don't. Because if you did, you'd hear what the trees say. They have something to say. And what they say is, don't cut any more of us down. There are too few of us as it is. Once, they say, there was a time when Mr. Squirrel could go from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without setting foot on the ground, going from treetop to treetop. I also spend time among morons. They say some stupid sh*t, like the Earth can just give and give and give ad infinitum. I've found out I prefer the trees to the morons. That's just me. Enjoy your cancer. Embrace it. Because your cancer is your alienation from your Earth mother manifested.

Keep cutting down the trees and see what happens to ye! If you can escape my wrath, you likely won't escape Mother's.

[painter]

. . .
Keep cutting down the trees and see what happens to ye! If you can escape my wrath, you likely won't escape Mother's.

In 1970, one of the lesser known but nevertheless great geniuses of the last century, anthropologist, sociologist, biologist, psychologist and one of the founders of Cybernetics, Gregory Bateson, presented the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture. Alfred Krzybksi was the founder of General Semantics and coined the phrase "The map is not the territory." Bateson's lecture entitled, Form, Substance and Difference, was an attempt to bring together the concepts inherent in General Semantics and that of Cybernetics, where Bateson had been working to establish "the essential units of 'mind'"

This is a long excerpt and admittedly intellectually dense but the point I wish to make with it is that the problems we are facing today were being considered a generation ago -- and at very high levels of academia as well as very deep levels of the human psyche. The question is, given that some of the best minds of the time were aware of these problems -- the whole connected relationship between the individual and social groups and social groups and the larger, planetary environment -- how is it that little of it rose to the level of leadership and policy making that might have helped us ameliorate if not avoid the predicament we find ourselves in today?

The bold, below, is mine. The italics are in the published text.

. . .

Having sated this relationship between biological part and whole, I can now go on from the notion of creatura as mind in general to the question of what is a mind

What do I mean by "my" mind?

I suggest that the delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to understand or explain. Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant.

Consider a tree and a man and an ax. We observe that the ax flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in this central nervous system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the ax flies, to the differences which the ax then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation (for certain purposes) will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought.

The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems but essentially this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

But what about "me"? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.

But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating that you want to understand.

And in addition to what I have said to define the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of memory and data "banks." After all, the simplest cybernetic circuit can be said to have memory of a dynamic kind—not based upon static storage but upon the travel of information around the circuit. The behavior of the governor of a steam engine at Time 2 is partly determined by what it did at Time 1—where the interval between Time 1 and Time 2 is that time necessary for the information to complete the circuit.

We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic systems—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an individual mind.

But this picture is precisely the same as the picture which I arrived at in discussing the unit of evolution. I believe that this identity is the most important generalization which I have to offer you tonight.

In considering units of evolution, I argued that you have at each step to include the completed pathways outside the protoplasmic aggregate, be it DNA-in-the-cell, or cell-in-the-body, or body-in-the-environment. The hierarchic structure is not new. Formerly we talked about the breeding individual or the family line or the taxon, and so on. Now each step of the hierarchy is to be thought of as a system, instead of a chunk cut off and visualized as against the surrounding matrix.

This identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical.

It means, you see, that I now localize something which I am calling "Mind" immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure. If this identity between mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts in our thinking.

First, let us consider ecology. Ecology has currently two faces to it: the face which is called bioenergetics—the economics of energy and materials within a coral reef, a redwood forest, or a city—and, second, an economics of information, of entropy, negentropy, etc. These two do not fit together very well precisely because the units are differently bounded in the two sorts of ecology. In bioenergetics it is natural and appropriate to think of units bounded at the cell membrane, or at the skin; or of units composed of sets of tiers at which measurements can be made to determine the additive-subtractive budget of energy for the given unit. In contrast, informational or entropic ecology deals with the budgeting of pathways and of probability. The resulting budgets are fractionating (not subtractive). The boundaries must enclose, not cut, the relevant pathways.

Moreover, the very meaning of "survival" becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in a circuit. The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Socrates as a bioenergetic individual is dead. But much of him still lives in the contemporary ecology of ideas.

It is also clear that theology becomes changed and perhaps renewed. The Mediterranean religions of 5000 years have swung to and fro between immanence and transcendence. In Babylon the gods were transcendent on the tops of hills; in Egypt, there was god immanent in Pharaoh; and Christianity is a complex combination of these two beliefs.

The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.

If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the prescybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."

The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.

And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.