Is self-destructive behaviour a natural response to the need for a cull of humans?

[8ball]

I so hope you're right, lbj. Then again the transhumanists think we're just the sex organs for the singularity.

<looks around to see if anyone doesn't understand this post...>

 

[yield]

<looks around to see if anyone doesn't understand this post...>

Obviously didn't explain that well. The transhumanists think that humanity is an intermediary stage before something else.

Not that I believe that. But I know a few.

 

[8ball]

Obviously didn't explain that well. The transhumanists think that humanity is an intermediary stage before something else.

Not that I believe that. But I know a few.

Yeah, am aware of that. But you wouldn't call the little rodents of the Jurassic era "the sex organs for the Anthropocene".
Well, I wouldn't.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Obviously didn't explain that well. The transhumanists think that humanity is an intermediary stage before something else.

Not that I believe that. But I know a few.

That's a good example of the thing Daniel Dennett calls a 'deepity'. It's either not true or, if it is true, it is trivially so (as in 8ball's example).

 

[trabuquera]

Looping back to the original question:

No. And the terms of the question itself indicate a slippery slope to full nazi thinking. The premise that there are "just too many people" nearly always tips straight into picking the sort of people you think the world's best rid of.

You're arbitrarily calling some behaviours 'self destructive' when it suits the argument but leaving many others out. (And what does 'self destructive' even mean, anyway? Suicide? Smoking? Riding motorbikes? )

It's also blindingly illogical even on its own stupid terms: if true, if there is some sort of subconscious response where overcrowded humans get stressed out and destroy themselves, then rates of suicide, murder, whatever, should be highest in the world's most densely populated places. Which they are measurably not.

So: no.

 

[8ball]

That's a good example of the thing Daniel Dennett calls a 'deepity'. It's either not true or, if it is true, it is trivially so (as in 8ball's example).

I'm sceptical of Dennett. He's a bit like Dawkins in that he's too sure of things that I'd expect such clever types to be more tentative about.
But I like the term Deepity.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Me too. For the same reason. But I like deepity, and I use it when I can, such as now.

 

[yield]

That's a good example of the thing Daniel Dennett calls a 'deepity'. It's either not true or, if it is true, it is trivially so (as in 8ball's example).

Interesting. Never come across deepity before.

 

[8ball]

"Age is just a number" is probably my most hated deepity.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

I've only just encountered the term 'deepity' and it's already losing its novelty value.

 

[SpookyFrank]

"Age is just a number" is probably my most hated deepity.

'Everything happens for a reason'

Well yes, causality does exist, but that doesn't imply the presence of some benevolent guiding hand, or any deeper meaning. If anything it rules them out entirely.

 

[David Clapson]

If someone believes that overpopulation is an issue, how does it affect their thinking? They might react by reducing their own emissions. Are there additional effects on their psyche? Do they question their own self-worth more? Or brood about the meaning of life? Or just fume about Jacob Rees-Mogg?

I think technicians and scientific types do less brooding and don't suffer from much self-doubt. The models tell them that the human population will peak at 10 billion and level off. As infant mortality declines, so does the instinct to have a large family. So all we need to do is organise ourselves to feed 10 billion. Which is definitely doable. So let's get on and make it happen. But if you're not one of the people engaged in making it happen, I think you tend to brood more. Poets vs physicists.

Then you add in the 2020 effect, one depressing disaster after another, more and more hardship, everything going backwards. The hardship will breed desperation. Dangerous. The doomsday clock was moved forward in January. Given all the crap since then, how much will it move next January?

Doesn't all this make you feel hopeless and worthless?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

As infant mortality declines, so does the instinct to have a large family.

It's not instinct. Our instinct is to fuck, and many of us are strongly driven to want children as well. But families moderate their size primarily due to economic imperatives. As people move to cities, space becomes expensive and uneducated children become economically worthless. It makes sense economically to have fewer children and invest more resources in each child. And more and more people are living in cities. That trend will continue, and birth rates in growing cities such as Addis Ababa are already plummetting.

Other stuff, particularly women's rights, is important here as well, but if you want people to have smaller families, the first thing that is needed is an economic imperative to have smaller families. Luckily this coincides with all kinds of good stuff - improved housing, job opportunities, health services, education, women's rights and reproductive autonomy all have the end result of fewer children per woman. If you work towards improving people's lives, slowing population growth comes out of that process as a byproduct without even trying for it.

 

[NoXion]

When other species overpopulate they are culled by starvation and disease. Humans use technology to defeat this natural mechanism. But when we try to escape a natural law there are always consequences.

Perhaps this is why self-destructive habits are becoming more popular? Overeating and addictions are obvious ways in which we shorten our life expectancy. I suspect that conspiracy theories (including religious belief) are another. If we reject science, medicine and mitigation of climate change we are also choosing a shorter lifespan for ourselves or our descendants. If we reject government and authority, perhaps for laudable reasons, the next step is often rejection of science.

There's a very long list of accepted causes of self-destructive habits, including childhood neglect, isolation and mental disorders. But maybe a principal root cause is that we sense that there are too many of us, that we as individuals are surplus to requirements?

What requirements are you talking about? The Earth doesn't set any. Nature doesn't care about anything, let alone the number of humans on the planet.

If self-destructive and other behaviours with a negative impact are on the increase, then I lay the blame firmly on the wretched conditions fostered by late capitalism. Economic insecurity for the greater majority, increasing mutual distrust between the state and citizens, and too many long hours spent working stressful jobs aren't exactly a recipe for a happy society.

 

[tim]

Whenever I'm in a plane flying over Southern England I realise how few of us there are even in the most densely populated bits of one of the most densely populated countries in the world

 

[Mation]

If someone believes that overpopulation is an issue, how does it affect their thinking? They might react by reducing their own emissions. Are there additional effects on their psyche? Do they question their own self-worth more? Or brood about the meaning of life? Or just fume about Jacob Rees-Mogg?

I think technicians and scientific types do less brooding and don't suffer from much self-doubt. The models tell them that the human population will peak at 10 billion and level off. As infant mortality declines, so does the instinct to have a large family. So all we need to do is organise ourselves to feed 10 billion. Which is definitely doable. So let's get on and make it happen. But if you're not one of the people engaged in making it happen, I think you tend to brood more. Poets vs physicists.

Then you add in the 2020 effect, one depressing disaster after another, more and more hardship, everything going backwards. The hardship will breed desperation. Dangerous. The doomsday clock was moved forward in January. Given all the crap since then, how much will it move next January?

Doesn't all this make you feel hopeless and worthless?

I think you're beginning to answer your own question.

This year is shit. Its effects are patchily horrible or tolerable (or sometimes good), but it doesn't require a species-wide imperative to particular behaviour in response to a personal worry to explain that.

Prescription: don't listen to another word David Attenborough has to say on the subject of overpopulation in humans. On that, he is toxic.

 

[Serge Forward]

I've only just encountered the term 'deepity' and it's already losing its novelty value.

Sounds like the sort of word Trump might use, bigly deepity.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

If someone believes that overpopulation is an issue, how does it affect their thinking? They might react by reducing their own emissions. Are there additional effects on their psyche? Do they question their own self-worth more? Or brood about the meaning of life? Or just fume about Jacob Rees-Mogg?

I think technicians and scientific types do less brooding and don't suffer from much self-doubt. The models tell them that the human population will peak at 10 billion and level off. As infant mortality declines, so does the instinct to have a large family. So all we need to do is organise ourselves to feed 10 billion. Which is definitely doable. So let's get on and make it happen. But if you're not one of the people engaged in making it happen, I think you tend to brood more. Poets vs physicists.

Then you add in the 2020 effect, one depressing disaster after another, more and more hardship, everything going backwards. The hardship will breed desperation. Dangerous. The doomsday clock was moved forward in January. Given all the crap since then, how much will it move next January?

Doesn't all this make you feel hopeless and worthless?

It's a dodgy assertion to make that we can feed 10 billion. It ignores all the evidence about human degradation and destruction of ecosystems around the world. Let alone the effect of climate change. Even if we all as a species overnight started using sustainable energy, we all became veggie or vegan, stopped flying etc etc climate change won't go away. And even if a social revolution resulted in a socialist/anarchist ecologically aware society we would still have a problem with human population size. Every human needs food and water, clothing, housing, social infrastructure etc which all takes up space which can be used by other organisms, marginalises them and increases pressure on nonhuman species. Adding a few more billion humans will make matters so much more difficult.

 

[Cerberus]

Whenever I'm in a plane flying over Southern England I realise how few of us there are even in the most densely populated bits of one of the most densely populated countries in the world

Interesting (genuinely). I’m often unnerved at how many of us there are - in this little part of one of the most densely populated countries on earth! As well as the sheer amount of visible humans, it’s also the scale of the infrastructure that has arisen around them/us - planes in the air at any given time, container ships, traffic jams, industrial estates, relentless construction works - which on occasion, can fill me with anxiety....

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It's a dodgy assertion to make that we can feed 10 billion. It ignores all the evidence about human degradation and destruction of ecosystems around the world. Let alone the effect of climate change. Even if we all as a species overnight started using sustainable energy, we all became veggie or vegan, stopped flying etc etc climate change won't go away. And even if a social revolution resulted in a socialist/anarchist ecologically aware society we would still have a problem with human population size. Every human needs food and water, clothing, housing, social infrastructure etc which all takes up space which can be used by other organisms, marginalises them and increases pressure on nonhuman species. Adding a few more billion humans will make matters so much more difficult.

We've done this on here at length before, so I'll try to be as brief as I can be.

In no way do I seek to underplay the seriousness of today's problems wrt environmental destruction, climate change, mass exinctions, shrinking biodiversity, etc. But your argument is a variant on Malthus, essentially. And he has been proved wrong before.

Humans have been amazingly successful as a species, colonising every continent bar Antarctica. A truism of nature is that niches do not get left empty. You don't have a pond with life only on one side. So a state of constant near-crisis is not a surprising one - we have filled the spaces we were capable of filling. There is a challenge now to effectively underachieve today in order to protect tomorrow. We're not doing too well at that atm, but we are at least clever enough to recognise it in principle. We do have the ability to refuse one marshmallow now in return for two later.

This year the trend has reversed somewhat due to covid, but for many years now, malnutrition among humans has been decreasing as a percentage of the population. More people than ever before are well nourished today, and there have been huge strides forwards in this regard on every continent except Africa. But the bit of the world whose population is still growing rapidly - sub-Saharan Africa - is not the bit of the world responsible for the overwhelming majority of the degredation, which is the fault of the bits of the world where population is no longer growing (has already grown) but consumption continues to grow. There is a real danger here of blaming the poor for the problems created by the rich, both at a global scale and within regions. (Sadly, as noted above, David Attenborough falls into this trap.)

And as I've said before, there are two sides to the equation, and this does not get mentioned by the Malthusians – each extra person is both a drain on resources and a resource him or herself. There are eight billion human brains in the world now and eight billion pairs of hands. Malnourishment sucks ability from those brains and hands, so solving it needs to be top priority, but that is a massive resource. There was a model farm in India a few years ago that broke records for productivity. It went one stage further than traditional crop rotation, and created intensively farmed fields with many different crops growing next to one another at the same time. Native Americans knew about this kind of thing with their 'Three Sisters'. Suburban gardeners know about it when planning their vegetable patches. Scaled up to full-sized farms, this approach is extremely labour-intensive but extremely productive. Well, there is no shortage of hands.

Will we change our ways sufficiently to avert disaster? I don't know. Could we do so with the collective political will? I'm confident that we could, yes. But there is a need to identify the problem correctly first - the problem of unsustainable consumption is related to population growth, but not always in straightforward ways.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

We've done this on here at length before, so I'll try to be as brief as I can be.

In no way do I seek to underplay the seriousness of today's problems wrt environmental destruction, climate change, mass exinctions, shrinking biodiversity, etc. But your argument is a variant on Malthus, essentially. And he has been proved wrong before.

Humans have been amazingly successful as a species, colonising every continent bar Antarctica. A truism of nature is that niches do not get left empty. You don't have a pond with life only on one side. So a state of constant near-crisis is not a surprising one - we have filled the spaces we were capable of filling. There is a challenge now to effectively underachieve today in order to protect tomorrow. We're not doing too well at that atm, but we are at least clever enough to recognise it in principle. We do have the ability to refuse one marshmallow now in return for two later.

This year the trend has reversed somewhat due to covid, but for many years now, malnutrition among humans has been decreasing as a percentage of the population. More people than ever before are well nourished today, and there have been huge strides forwards in this regard on every continent except Africa. But the bit of the world whose population is still growing rapidly - sub-Saharan Africa - is not the bit of the world responsible for the overwhelming majority of the degredation, which is the fault of the bits of the world where population is no longer growing (has already grown) but consumption continues to grow. There is a real danger here of blaming the poor for the problems created by the rich, both at a global scale and within regions. (Sadly, as noted above, David Attenborough falls into this trap.)

And as I've said before, there are two sides to the equation, and this does not get mentioned by the Malthusians – each extra person is both a drain on resources and a resource him or herself. There are eight billion human brains in the world now and eight billion pairs of hands. Malnourishment sucks ability from those brains and hands, so solving it needs to be top priority, but that is a massive resource. There was a model farm in India a few years ago that broke records for productivity. It went one stage further than traditional crop rotation, and created intensively farmed fields with many different crops growing next to one another at the same time. Native Americans knew about this kind of thing with their 'Three Sisters'. Suburban gardeners know about it when planning their vegetable patches. Scaled up to full-sized farms, this approach is extremely labour-intensive but extremely productive. Well, there is no shortage of hands.

Will we change our ways sufficiently to avert disaster? I don't know. Could we do so with the collective political will? I'm confident that we could, yes. But there is a need to identify the problem correctly first - the problem of unsustainable consumption is related to population growth, but not always in straightforward ways.

I'm not trying to do a Malthus, just stating the obvious really, that in the absence of any ecological plan unrestrained human population growth has been, is and will be a disaster. Sure, technology and intelligence can help us a bit, and maybe a lot. But so far it hasn't helped enough to avert looming catastrophe. Bit gloomy, I know, but I feel gloomy at the moment.

 

[IC3D]

There is nothing wrong with being gloomy. Being hard wired to look for positive outcomes is an inate aspect of our nature and an irrational attachment. I wish more people were gloomy cos looking on the bright side is fucking stupid.
The dubious vaccine miracle being hyped now is such a clear example of this.
Technological advancement without looking at the downsides, unlocking millions of years of energy into the air via carbon dioxide. Nothing in life is free. We will pay for the current level of growth.
Dieases and environment destruction. Chaos.
Hace a good weekend guys x

 

[tim]

There is nothing wrong with being gloomy. Being hard wired to look for positive outcomes is an inate aspect of our nature and an irrational attachment. I wish more people were gloomy cos looking on the bright side is fucking stupid.
The dubious vaccine miracle being hyped now is such a clear example of this.
Technological advancement without looking at the downsides, unlocking millions of years of energy into the air via carbon dioxide. Nothing in life is free. We will pay for the current level of growth.
Dieases and environment destruction. Chaos.
Hace a good weekend guys x

Tedious millenarian Malthusian toss.

 

[Doodler]

There is a trend for human fertility rates to decline as population density increases. Causes include higher incomes and levels of education in urbanised areas compared to rural ones.

Most people will live in vast megacities by the end of this century so global population growth might end or even start to fall below replacement levels. Alternatively, if individual differences in fertility are heritable then declining rates may eventually be reversed, for obvious reasons.

 

[NoXion]

There is nothing wrong with being gloomy. Being hard wired to look for positive outcomes is an inate aspect of our nature and an irrational attachment. I wish more people were gloomy cos looking on the bright side is fucking stupid.
The dubious vaccine miracle being hyped now is such a clear example of this.
Technological advancement without looking at the downsides, unlocking millions of years of energy into the air via carbon dioxide. Nothing in life is free. We will pay for the current level of growth.
Dieases and environment destruction. Chaos.
Hace a good weekend guys x

Looking on the bright side isn't stupid. If our ancestors had met with gloom and pessimism every winter made extra harsh by some volcanic eruption on the other side of the planet, then we would have died out before leaving Africa.

If your mindset is pessimistic, then you won't bother exploring for potential solutions to your problems, because you've already decided that things are hopeless. Then, your doom is certain unless you can break out of Eeyore's chains in time.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm not trying to do a Malthus, just stating the obvious really, that in the absence of any ecological plan unrestrained human population growth has been, is and will be a disaster. Sure, technology and intelligence can help us a bit, and maybe a lot. But so far it hasn't helped enough to avert looming catastrophe. Bit gloomy, I know, but I feel gloomy at the moment.

Best I can say, then, is to be gloomy about the right thing. Be gloomy about unsustainable consumption rather than population growth.

 

[platinumsage]

Paul R. Ehrlich is the modern-day Malthus, and literally everything he's predicted since the 60s has been wrong.

 

[8ball]

It's a dodgy assertion to make that we can feed 10 billion. It ignores all the evidence about human degradation and destruction of ecosystems around the world. Let alone the effect of climate change. Even if we all as a species overnight started using sustainable energy, we all became veggie or vegan, stopped flying etc etc climate change won't go away. And even if a social revolution resulted in a socialist/anarchist ecologically aware society we would still have a problem with human population size. Every human needs food and water, clothing, housing, social infrastructure etc which all takes up space which can be used by other organisms, marginalises them and increases pressure on nonhuman species. Adding a few more billion humans will make matters so much more difficult.

We were producing enough to feed 10 billion in 2012. The population bottleneck (after which population is set to decline) is also looking to be less than anticipated if we don’t fuck it up.

There, dodgy assertion made.

We might well fuck it up, though.

 

[Doodler]

If someone believes that overpopulation is an issue, how does it affect their thinking? They might react by reducing their own emissions. Are there additional effects on their psyche? Do they question their own self-worth more? Or brood about the meaning of life? Or just fume about Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Chicken and egg problem: maybe people who are gloomy for other reasons gravitate towards gloomy ideas and predictions.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

We were producing enough to feed 10 billion in 2012.

Yes, but with what consequences for biodiversity, climate change and other environmental impacts? I'm not arguing for any kind of cull of my fellow humans (with a few exceptions messrs Cummings and Johnson ) but it's not being pessimistic to see that population size has an impact which is difficult to circumvent. If our global population were now 500 million, for example, climate change would not be such a problem and would be easier to deal with. If it were 20 billion the difficulty would be insuperable without some catastrophe.