A CALL FOR MORE GOVERNMENT NOT LESS

We, as a society, have not yet identified our own biological tendencies as a serious problem for our future. Individual mention this from time to time but we seem to avoid addressing the reality it from a political point of view. We talk about such things as global warming, and contamination of the environment but what about our propensity to reproduce uncontrollably, our attitude toward the sacredness of life, and our behavior toward each other. Humankind is like a car careening wildly out of control down an unchartered highway. We are going to have to gain control by facing the challenge of our own survival. I see this fault as a serious lack in the way we govern ourselves.

We are genetically primed to reproduce. In addition, instinct drives us to survive as individuals; we put self before group—individual self-preservation is our dominate sense or trait followed closely by greed. These are traits that allowed us to survive but in my mind are now causing problems. From time to time, someone acknowledges that we are heading toward disaster; like a colony of bacteria on a bacteriologist’s agar culture plate, we will eat up the available food supply and/or die in our own waste but do not identify the fundamental reason this things are happening. We have notable scholars, such as Jared Diamond, who have traced multiple cultures from origin to extinction. We intuitively know the problem is there, but we either deny or ignore our survival of humankind as a problem, like a battlefield solder hiding his fear behind the belief that the bullet may hit someone else, but it will never hit him.

We collectively look with disgust at concepts such as social engineering, social Darwinism, and eugenics. In addition, we universally embrace other concepts such as “human dominance over all things” and “life is sacred and must be preserved at all cost” as inviolable law. We see and recognize obvious and wide-ranging conflicts with biology with things we have in everyday society such as abortion, contraception, celibacy, suicide bombers, and war.

We sense there is hope in finding a way to “overcome” all human failings but recognize that individual solutions can not be the answer; we have to seek the answer through leadership of some sort. In organized society, leadership is affected through politics; still, we understand modern politics as being corrupt, unfair, as no more than the institutionalization of the exact same human failures we have to overcome; to repeat, we have to conquer our own reproductive behavior and greed.

A case in point is that we have a major political party representing half of our population supporting individualism above group—anyone telling us what to do is bad; therefore, when the government does what is suppose to do, which is to enforce the law, which makes it bad. We are individuals and have freedom as a basic human right but seem unable to put limits on freedom. It should be obvious to even the basest personality that without government there would be chaos—an impossible situation in even the most remotely living family let alone New York City. It should also be obvious without government there would be no ordered way to solve problems; thus, society would collapse—catastrophic, yes—but would the human race becomes extinct. 

Professor Diamond pointed out that Easter Island society collapse but failed to mention that Easter Island people still exist. That population collapsed to the small number of 111 individuals in 1877, but to this day, they exist in significantly greater numbers. The same is true of the Mayan natives, another society addressed by Dr. Diamond. Mayans are not extinct. The empire collapsed but the people exist as I pointed out to Mayan villagers where I lived for 20 years. Still they insisted on telling me the story how the Mayans “died out”, a story they learned from archeologists.

My point is this; with proper political leadership, we can identify and fix everything wrong with our society. However, we don’t do it. With the passing of each day, we are making the problem worse. All current evidence suggests we are moving in exactly the wrong direction; out political parties are not facing the hard biological truth; there is more to politics than raw power of one party over the other.

Survival of the fittest can be cruel at the bestial level but we are clever enough to use politics to avoid the harsh reality of the cruelty of starvation or dying in war. We have to face the realization that life is not “scared” and quality of life matters. A brain dead person is still dead; a handicapped individual that has to be taken care of is still a handicapped individual; of course, we can provide loving care for those who would not survive without help but also, we can prevent them from reproducing or being born by modern science—genetic testing for example. We can protect society from those incorrigibles who would do us harm using the death penalty to protect society just as we are justified in protecting ourselves in cases of justifiable homicide. We can control population density before we reach the point of “ecocide”, a word coined by Jared Diamond, which refers to the collapse of society following destruction of the environment. We have to realize that the earth is a self-contained small blue planet.

We are nowhere near extinction as a species nor will we ever become extinct—we are too clever for that—but we have to learn how to govern ourselves. We cannot deny there are 7 billion of us on planet earth. It cannot be denied; we have to have and accept more government, much, much more government, not less. 

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