Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Most religions make it imperative to continue the roster of worshippers. To decline in numbers is an offense against the deity or deities, because it implies skepticism in the goodness of Creation. There is of course a narrowly parochial and political bent: if our religion out-breeds yours, our creed eventually comes to dominate yours. We win! But politics aside, a village that rejoices in its supposed consonance with the will of the divine, will seek to multiply its numbers, even if the harvest is occasionally bad, or resources are otherwise constrained.
Simply put, there is an evolutionary pressure. Imagine a religion that was dour and incredulous about the magic of being alive, of doing god's will and so on. So the practitioners take an antinatalist view. Eventually, they die out. Natural selection ensures that such religion goes extinct.
What happened between 1964 and 1974 was THE PILL became available and widely used. During those ten years much of the news was very disturbing; the Cold War with mutually assured destruction, the Vietnam War, and various other bad news like recessions in 1969-70 and 1973-75, etc. Such negative news puts a wet blanket on people's optimism about their future prospects of raising a family.
coschristi wrote: "I'm proposing introducing pro-family propaganda to counter the falling birthrates..."
We've had many versions of pro-family propaganda over the years ... all those old TV programs like Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, I Remember Momma, the The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and many more, all of which portrayed an idyllic American family life. To this day we're told about "The American Dream" where lovely couples live in a nice house on a tree-shaded lane with a picket fence, nice car, 2.5 kids and a dog. People no longer believe the propaganda when they see the world around them and when one political party that bloviates about "family values" won't put a cent on the table for all those things that support families; all we get from that party is lip service and BS propaganda.
100% agree. Meaningful support like adequate maternal/infant health care, affordable daycare, paid maternity/paternity leave may incentivize some. The rest is just feel good nonsense that nobody is going to fall for.
Thousands of years ago people did whatever they needed to do in order to survive. What we know from that era is oral folklore, handed down in repeated tellings, and like most fish stories they grow with each retelling. They had no science, they had no idea what that bright thing up in the sky was all about so they made up the answers since the human mind craves certainty. So ancient people made it all up, and in just 6000 years of recorded history we find at least 3700 gods were invented, all fictional. Wikipedia has a list of at least 40 sun gods invented by ancient peoples to explain what was unexplainable; procreation, birth, life, death, sun, moon, wind, rain, fire, bugs, animals, etc, were all the creation of some invisible sky daddy. The Romans had 3 gods just for their sewer system. And all sorts of bad things like floods and plagues and toothaches and dying in childbirth were all attributed to a god's wrath or some 'end times' horror laid on us by some angry god. Total fairy tales; then and now. Craving certainty is why we had the Watergate Break-in back in 1972, the Committee to RE Elect the President (CREEP) craved knowing, for sure, what the other side was up to in the upcoming election.
First thing a group does is define who's in charge, which is something we see even today in a modern office or shop when a set of people are assigned to work a problem or produce an outcome; they have to have a leader, either one given them by the boss or one they choose to make their leader.
Then they set up their rules of engagement (aka ten commandments), limits and boundaries, norms and standards, givens and assumptions. Over time these are codified; in a bible, in a law book, in an etiquette book, in a how-to manual, etc.
Every local clan, tribe, city-state, nation-state, military force, or isolated group of people all practiced these things -- who's in charge and what are the rules. Within the past 20 years explorers went into the deepest, most remote parts of the Amazon rain forests and found a tribe never known to the outside world, and they had this exact construct, a set of rules that equate to the ten commandments even though no missionary ever preached the gospel to these jungle dwellers. Be it subsistence natives in the jungle or gold-encrusted priests in massive cathedrals it's all the same, we gotta have a scheme by which we all may get along for the survival of the community. My billiards club here in the retirement community has a leader we elected and a set of rules to follow.
Religion belongs in the dustbin of history, it's a pox on humanity, the source of endless conflict and pain.
I cringe when I see masses of dirt-poor, illiterate, destitute types showing up at our southern borders, carrying a bunch of babies on their hips, wearing a crucifix and talking about god. It makes me want to scream GET A FREAKING EDUCATION so you can solve the problems in your own nation and have a decent life there.
The society (assuming mankind survives) 400 - 4000 years from today, may look at the science we have and remark, they didn't know a damn thing. However, we won't be around to know, much less care.
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth, contracted. Scientist today are monitoring the Sixth mass extinction that is taking place over the next 300 years. It is believed that man may be apart of it. Scientist predict it will be a most devastating extinction, since the days the dinosaur was wiped off the planet.
Just because someone knows something someone else doesn't ... that doesn't mean the person is uneducated, as they may know something the other one doesn't. Just means they are educated differently, that's all.
Cultures change over time; traditions, as well ... it's called social evolution and that is what we are experiencing today and watching happen. Darn it, I won't be around to see how it ends up. But looking at ancient culture and civilizations that have come and gone, I can get a pretty good idea, how it will play out.
Those that believe today is the same as yesterday and tomorrow, will be the same as today are in for a surprise as time moves forward. Evolution waits for no man, (to learn) it just keeps moving forward.
...............I cringe when I see masses of dirt-poor, illiterate, destitute types showing up at our southern borders, carrying a bunch of babies on their hips, wearing a crucifix and talking about god. It makes me want to scream GET A FREAKING EDUCATION so you can solve the problems in your own nation and have a decent life there.
This was discussed in some detail in "The Accidental Superpower".
It simply will never matter how educated the people of a jungle-filled Central American or African country become. They will never have a temperate climate, never have broad plains friendly to agriculture, never have winters to kill off the insects and never have navigable rivers which can be used for easy transportation, and never have access to their own refined oil for fuel.
They are victims of their geography, and little else.
It's easy for Americans, here in a temperate climate, with the largest agriculture plain in the world, with 14,000 miles of navigable waterway and with ample oil/gas/coal reserves to believe we created all this ourselves. But we did not. We are incredibly lucky, and it will be to here - North America - that humanity will slowly migrate as they abandon most of the rest of the world, including nearly all the tropical jungles.
That's not to say the rest of the world will be unpopulated, but much of it certainly will cease to function as countries as populations dwindle.
Living as a modern human takes many more resources than some countries have. For many, many decades some countries with few food reserves have thrived because the rest of the world has insured the delivery of food.
And for just as many decades some countries with no energy reserves have relied on energy deliveries from foreigners.
It could be that children born today, 2022, will live to see it all come to a halt. We have lost the ability to be self sufficient and that ability cannot suddenly be regained.
It may begin with the Russia/Ukraine war and the withholding of millions of tons of food grains, or this may simply pass as an inconvenience. But either way, we are seeing the problems facing the enormous human population all trying to become modern humans in so many different places which do not have what is needed.
This was discussed in some detail in "The Accidental Superpower".
It simply will never matter how educated the people of a jungle-filled Central American or African country become. They will never have a temperate climate, never have broad plains friendly to agriculture, never have winters to kill off the insects and never have navigable rivers which can be used for easy transportation, and never have access to their own refined oil for fuel.
They are victims of their geography, and little else.
It's easy for Americans, here in a temperate climate, with the largest agriculture plain in the world, with 14,000 miles of navigable waterway and with ample oil/gas/coal reserves to believe we created all this ourselves. But we did not. We are incredibly lucky, and it will be to here - North America - that humanity will slowly migrate as they abandon most of the rest of the world, including nearly all the tropical jungles.
That's not to say the rest of the world will be unpopulated, but much of it certainly will cease to function as countries as populations dwindle.
Living as a modern human takes many more resources than some countries have. For many, many decades some countries with few food reserves have thrived because the rest of the world has insured the delivery of food.
And for just as many decades some countries with no energy reserves have relied on energy deliveries from foreigners.
It could be that children born today, 2022, will live to see it all come to a halt. We have lost the ability to be self sufficient and that ability cannot suddenly be regained.
It may begin with the Russia/Ukraine war and the withholding of millions of tons of food grains, or this may simply pass as an inconvenience. But either way, we are seeing the problems facing the enormous human population all trying to become modern humans in so many different places which do not have what is needed.
I'm noticing a trend with your post on this topic. Everyone else in the world is doomed but America will always be okay. While true America has been blessed with awesome geography, it is not as independent from the rest of the world as you think or immune to global problems. There are also a host of problems that could derail the country at any point. Basically, what I'm saying is I would be leery of always assuming America will be good and come out on top. That way of thinking typically proceeds the fall of empires.
I'm noticing a trend with your post on this topic. Everyone else in the world is doomed but America will always be okay. While true America has been blessed with awesome geography, it is not as independent from the rest of the world as you think or immune to global problems. There are also a host of problems that could derail the country at any point. Basically, what I'm saying is I would be leery of always assuming America will be good and come out on top. That way of thinking typically proceeds the fall of empires.
The trend of my posts is to quote and sometimes interpret informed sources. I did not have an opinion of my own before I began studying the subject, and I usually credit the source when I express myself.
Lots of things can derail and destroy America, some of them natural and some of them political. The subject here is the coming population collapse. We in North America are much better equipped to deal with it than any other place. That is one reason we have migrants flooding across our borders. They may not be as well read as some of us, but they do know the score.
But most of them come here because we are their next door neighbor. North Africans will go to Europe, whose Northern European Plain (NEP) is only a fraction of the North American Great Plain so it will be hard pressed to feed a burgeoning population. We are already seeing an energy struggle in Europe, and that is thought to be a long term problem with no real solution.
I will not apologize for pointing out North America has a much superior geography that almost any other place on earth, since it is a fact. Of course, I never said "America will always be OK", so there will be no need for me to justify that.
The trend of my posts is to quote and sometimes interpret informed sources. I did not have an opinion of my own before I began studying the subject, and I usually credit the source when I express myself.
Lots of things can derail and destroy America, some of them natural and some of them political. The subject here is the coming population collapse. We in North America are much better equipped to deal with it than any other place. That is one reason we have migrants flooding across our borders. They may not be as well read as some of us, but they do know the score.
But most of them come here because we are their next door neighbor. North Africans will go to Europe, whose Northern European Plain (NEP) is only a fraction of the North American Great Plain so it will be hard pressed to feed a burgeoning population. We are already seeing an energy struggle in Europe, and that is thought to be a long term problem with no real solution.
I will not apologize for pointing out North America has a much superior geography that almost any other place on earth, since it is a fact. Of course, I never said "America will always be OK", so there will be no need for me to justify that.
No need to apologize for anything. I never asked you to. I don’t dispute your points about U.S. favorable geography, but geographical advantages today can become geographical limitations in the future. I recall before COVID reading a chart listing country most prepared for and able to handle a virus outbreak. No surprise the U.S. and European nations were ranked at the top. Sub-Saharan nations were ranked near or at the bottom. We all know how that turned out. Who leads the world in COVID deaths? Point is don't develop tunnel vision thinking that the U.S. will always be okay regardless of what occurs in the world or that it will benefit from world troubles. The Qing empire committed that mistake and China suffered for over 100 years as a result.
That's not what I was proposing at all. I'm not talking about anti-gay propaganda, or even about stifling the pride propaganda. I'm proposing introducing pro-family propaganda to counter the falling birthrates, which was achieved by a global policy to use anti-family propaganda to induce lower fertility rates in 1974. You have to combat it with how you started it. And it WAS started. It was a global policy funded by USAID to change the messaging in the media in the developed countries & incentivized money to less-developed countries.
Third world countries would be given money ONLY if they achieved goals of fertility reduction in their population, via sterilization, abortion & birth control campaigns. That's called economic coercion.
Propaganda is & was effective because it doesn't try to tell people what to think, or to incentivize their actions. It takes a plausible theory & expands on it via repeatedly upgraded messages. Propaganda makes you think the message was an idea of your own conception when it was actually the product of subliminal influence, which is why it is so hard to combat & can only be done so using reverse propaganda.
Nothing could be further from the truth but who I am has nothing to do with historical fact. I'm not left, right OR Libertarian & if I were, has nothing to do with a thread in Great Debates anyway. POC maybe but not here. I don't belong to any religious denomination. I'm an ultra existentialist. I find the truth that shapes my opinions based on historical, political & scientific research & my spirituality isn't something I'm willing to delve into here but rest assured I don't follow pastors or thump a Bible.
That's the trouble when debating a matter with a propagandized population, ugh, it's like brainwashing & they immediately revert to an appeal to authority & ad hominem attacks. You don't know me at all & immediately assumed I'm some mega-church attending, denim jumper wearing, homeschooling mom, who got all her opinions from her pastor, instead of decades of personal experience & research of archived political publications.
I was a teenage mom in the 1980s with a 9th grade education who put herself through college & I spent decades being a single working mother. In the 1990s I started working in the sex industry as an independent call girl. My 411 rating was one of the highest in the country, my clients came from all over the world & you'd recognize many of them. It was that experience that made me start wondering what had happened to the dynamics of the family unit, most especially; the men. What had happened to the men? You know, they weren't actually hiring me for their own sexual gratification ... The vast majority of them were hiring me to put on a show & make them feel like desirable, sexually potent bastions of masculinity. Why were the majority of them "Boomers", while the men my age (Gen X) seemed to be reluctantly accepting of their place as "not really necessary" & why were my young clients (millennials) much more likely to fall into the Incel category? What happened to our MEN?
That's what motivated my research into global population policy: The disenfranchisement & depedastilization of the strong, family man. That's how I discovered that the strong family unit had been under attack for decades, subliminally, for the purpose of decreasing population growth, which is what this thread is about & it really has nothing to do with "opinions" but actual fact.
No, see, that's actually what already happened. To attain population decline it was necessary to take women out of the home & put them into the workforce, to utilize them as laborers for the state. That's why the propaganda was aimed at women being able to "do it all" & "not need a man" back in the 1970s.
Additional labor was to be gained from immigration, to reduce the number of "young, brown & black feet" available to defend their home country from the planned takeover of natural resources from their less developed countries.
(Mods please remove if not allowed, I view these as historical documents, not political but my apologies if not appropriate)
It was orchestrated. World Bank document from 1975:
110 countries organized to orchestrate this in 1974 but World Population Control Conferences had been organized since the 1920's, organized by the League of Nations and Margaret Sanger but paused during WWII due to uncomfortable associations with Nazi eugenics.
A detailed explanation of "Utilization of Mass Media and Satellite Communications" being installed to achieve this can be found on page 117.
Despite that I consider myself & my children victims of the anti-family propaganda, the fact that I had as many children as I did might mean that I might be a little less susceptible to propaganda from a psychological standpoint & therefore, makes my opinion a valuable contribution to this discussion. I came with facts. Facts are not an opinion.
Rep you for that line alone. Never heard it put that way but it makes total sense. Kind of reminds me of the line "a lie with enough time and repitition eventually becomes the truth."
...It's easy for Americans, here in a temperate climate, with the largest agriculture plain in the world, with 14,000 miles of navigable waterway and with ample oil/gas/coal reserves to believe we created all this ourselves. But we did not. We are incredibly lucky, and it will be to here - North America - that humanity will slowly migrate as they abandon most of the rest of the world, including nearly all the tropical jungles. ...
The geographical advantages are fantastic for agriculture, but far less so, for human residence. Iowa is great for corn and hogs. but for people? Coastal California – not so good for agriculture – is fantastic for human habitation, at least in the sense of climate and geography. With advancing technology and with even more interconnected trade, enlightened humans can relocate to where it is more pleasant to live, leaving to the robotic-farmers the vast fertile agricultural plains, the oilfields and the coalmines.
Just look where some Americans are retiring. Parts of Latin America are popular destinations. They would be even more popular if they weren’t so crime-ridden and had better infrastructure (clean water, paved roads, reliable banking and commerce,…).
A vastly smaller human population, could abandon entire continents to wildlife or to mechanized automated farming. Africa goes back to its native fauna. The American Midwest gets ceded to AI-enabled farming machines. The remaining humans cluster in those parts of the world more pleasant for human habitation… the coast of Western Europe, the UK, western North America, parts of South America, New Zealand, areas of the Mediterranean coasts, and so on. If global warming gets bad, the remaining humans retreat northward, into Canada, Alaska, the Baltic coast of Europe, Scandinavia.
Imagine a human population one hundred times smaller than it is today. That’s about the current population of say Germany. Redistribute these remaining humans into the more pleasant places, leaving the vast majority of earth’s land-mass to wild animals or to farming or energy-extraction, with all of these tasks done by networked machines reporting to a centralized master-computer. Dystopia or utopia? I vote the latter.
The geographical advantages are fantastic for agriculture, but far less so, for human residence. Iowa is great for corn and hogs. but for people? Coastal California – not so good for agriculture – is fantastic for human habitation, at least in the sense of climate and geography. With advancing technology and with even more interconnected trade, enlightened humans can relocate to where it is more pleasant to live, leaving to the robotic-farmers the vast fertile agricultural plains, the oilfields and the coalmines.
Just look where some Americans are retiring. Parts of Latin America are popular destinations. They would be even more popular if they weren’t so crime-ridden and had better infrastructure (clean water, paved roads, reliable banking and commerce,…).
A vastly smaller human population, could abandon entire continents to wildlife or to mechanized automated farming. Africa goes back to its native fauna. The American Midwest gets ceded to AI-enabled farming machines. The remaining humans cluster in those parts of the world more pleasant for human habitation… the coast of Western Europe, the UK, western North America, parts of South America, New Zealand, areas of the Mediterranean coasts, and so on. If global warming gets bad, the remaining humans retreat northward, into Canada, Alaska, the Baltic coast of Europe, Scandinavia.
Imagine a human population one hundred times smaller than it is today. That’s about the current population of say Germany. Redistribute these remaining humans into the more pleasant places, leaving the vast majority of earth’s land-mass to wild animals or to farming or energy-extraction, with all of these tasks done by networked machines reporting to a centralized master-computer. Dystopia or utopia? I vote the latter.
The period of population decline which is coming has never before happened in history. Demographers expect it to last a very long time.
Economists expect it to be disastrous, with supply chains breaking and countries no longer functioning as countries - that is, with no meaningful imports or exports. Average age grows and working population shrinks. A permanent recession ensues, with every year producing less than the year before.
The formula by which the U.S. ascended to its current status of the world’s wealthiest society and sole superpower was predicated on over two centuries of continuous and exceptional population growth, unique among Western countries in tempo and scale. . . What happens when that growth reverses is the subject of THIS DISCUSSION. He discusses labor force participation rate, which has been going down and will continue to do so.
The retirement destinations you envision will probably no longer exist as appealing places to live.
On the other hand I think you are exactly right in your vision of large swaths of the future planet being left to nature or being farmed on large scale. I worked out the figures once and saw where if everyone moved to one place with a population density of Singapore, that place would take up Texas plus a little more. The rest of the earth could be used to provide whatever is needed for the super city. People would never do that, of course, but it does show just how spread out humanity is.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
