Quote:
Originally Posted by CastleBravo
Judging a 15th Century person by 21st Centuriy morality is a flawed paradigm,
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My first thought was something like this, too, but I then deleted it because the basic drives of civilisations do not seem to have changed over centuries, if not millenias. Or maybe one should more neutrally say "the ways in which civilisations rise, culminate and fall, often from their own hands". The gaining of new ressources needed at home to support growing populations has been a prime motive from the first tribes to the latest empires.
The problem often becoming obvious here is that additional ressources not often resulted in stockpiling them for times of shortness, to support the population then and enable them to survive despite the failed harvets, for example, but that new ressources always get invested for an ever growing population size. By stockpiling ressources I also mean to maintain agriculture and use of natural ressourceslike wood in way that preserve them not only for the next five years, but for the next dozen of generations, or longer. In other words: no matter how much you win and gain - it simply never will be enough. It necessarily leads to a condition of lethal environmental destruction (disappearing forest, erosion of soil, lacking animals that could be hunted) where the excessively grown population got reduced by hunger, unrest, war, disease. And if the technical status of the civilisation in question already had reached the maximum of it's possible geographical reach and no new areas of potential ressources were accessible, the whole civilisation collapsed and died.
We are too damn many people on earth. That makes any call against birth and population size control a capital crime against humanity, imo.