Good news: the Swedish Post has issued a stamp featuring Greta Thunberg. Bad news: even an educated, well-meaning high school student deeply committed to science and biosphere protection has had delusions and guilt pressed into her head — burdens from which it will be a serious psychological task to free herself and to learn the facts.

“… these people generally believe that so many children should not be born, because there are already too many in India, Africa, and China. Yet the fact is that most people on Earth do not live in a way that uses more than what is available to them. It is we who do this, precisely people like us, here in Sweden. We live as if we had four planets at our disposal, and we are the ones saying there are too many of us.”

(I Am Greta, p. 262)

On the contrary — these are not facts, but widespread delusions, with which schools, religions, movements, politics, media, etc. waste the goodwill and energy of youth on futility.

Sweden uses only two-thirds of its own territory’s biocapacity — not more than what is available.

By contrast, India — nearly one-fifth of humanity — overloads its biocapacity threefold, using three times as much as is available. And why? Because since independence in 1947, its population has exploded nearly fourfold. http://footprintnetwork.org

Why should Swedes or Hungarians live ever more poorly because in other countries women are oppressed, girls are not allowed to study, contraception is banned, and thus population explosions occur? – This is the question the BOCS Civilizational Planning Foundation in Székesfehérvár has been asking for many years. It began supporting the girls’ educational opportunities in India back in 1977.

In 1961, the Earth still had 3.12 global hectares of carrying capacity per capita; today only 1.63 remain (about half), due to those who force reproduction, oppress women, and drive population explosions.

The Swedes do not set a bad example with consumption, but with reproduction (though even this is only a 30% increase in sixty years — one-tenth of India’s explosion).

Hungarians are the best! If everyone lived like Hungarians (who already stopped population growth by 1980), there would be less than half as many people on Earth (!) and by the turn of the millennium we would have already recovered from the global ecological crisis! (Instead, we are drifting toward final destruction.)

July 29 is Earth-Overshrinking Day, not “Overconsumption Day”

It is in the vital interest of the developed world to help hundreds of millions of oppressed women — treated like breeding stock and struggling for liberation — with the kinds of contraceptives that can be hidden from men. This is also in the interest of the poor, and above all of the future generations yet to be born.

It is in your interest, too. Calculate the carbon footprint of your lifestyle, business, or organization with our calculator and offset it: this is how you can help most effectively! Get in touch with us.

Greta is not to blame, but the immature-green movement, which for decades has repeatedly derailed the energies of countless well-meaning young people. This could have been another huge opportunity for wealthy youth to finally be in solidarity (!) and compassionate (!) with the poor majority of their own generation. This is the key to the ecological crisis. The largest adolescent and youth generation in history has hardly any right, knowledge, or means of contraception. Scientifically it is clear: the Earth’s overburdening was caused solely by population explosion.

Gyula I. Simonyi | BOCS Civilizational Planning Foundation

The post What Delusions and Guilt Were Pressed Into Greta’s Head? appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Source of image https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/2233226

The man and the woman were both naked, yet they felt no shame. But the phallus was more crafty than any animal the God created.

The phallus said to the woman, “Did God really say that you, being already distinguished among the animals, can now no longer enjoy each other’s bodies?”

The woman replied, “We may still enjoy each other’s bodies, caressing, kissing, licking, sucking and fucking what we have. God only said about the sperm: ‘From now on, don’t let it into the vagina, or you will die.’”

Then the phallus said to the woman, “You will not certainly die any more violently than you did before, like animals. God knows well that your eyes have been opened, you have become like gods knowing good and evil. So if the sperm enters your vagina, you humans will create, rule, decide on life and death. God wants you to procreate and multiply and rule over every living creature on earth.”

She knew that the phallus was pleasurable, pleasing to the eye, and she loved to feel it in her vagina when he orgasmed. So she was still not careful, and she told the man that there was no need to be careful. So the sperm got into her vagina and she was now pregnant as a human.

But with their eyes already open, they were shaken by the heavy responsibility of becoming parents. They realised they were naked and that they had become like gods, knowing good and evil. They can multiply, create humans on Earth, and decide which beings they want to displace from existence. What they had experienced with animal unconsciousness, the relentless cycle of procreation, suffering, death, now horrified them. They sensed the low brutality of earthly evolution, driven by forced reproduction.

They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then they heard the sound of the God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the God among the trees of the garden. But God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

But he said: “Who told you that you were naked? Though you have risen above the animal level, have you ejaculated into her vagina, which I forbade?” The man replied, “The woman you put here with me, still did not want to take care, so didn’t I.” God asked the woman, “What is this you have done?” She replied, “The phallus deceived me, that’s why I did it.”

So the God said to the phallus, “Because you have deceived human, you have lied that evolution is God, you have encouraged procreation and domination, you will be cursed, the plague of overpopulation on the world. I will put opposition between you and woman, she will shrink from even pleasure, terrified of pregnancy. She will not trust you and you will have to trick, brainwash and force to get her pregnant.”

And to the woman God said: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you, especially if he has already made you pregnant.”

To the man God said, “Because you have continued in animal negligence with the woman and ejaculated into her vagina, although I have forbidden it, cursed is the ground because of your overpopulation. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. You cannot reach the Garden of Eden until you have tamed your phallus, which evolution’s reproductive compulsion has mastered, into a human penis, a player of pleasure.”

Then the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. But he will not easily give up the destructive power of procreation. Let us see how long it takes him to recognize the brutal inferiority of earthly evolution driven by the compulsion to reproduce. Then he will again abstain from irresponsible procreation, break the inexorable cycle of procreation-suffer-death, die out from the Earth, die up to the Garden of Eden.”

(Based on Genesis 2-3 chapters, by Gyula I. Simonyi)

Simonyi, Gyula I.

The post Breaking the inexorable cycle of procreation-suffer-death appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Therefore, to talk about sustainability in a narrow-minded and short-term way is contrary to the meaning of the word. For example, a project is “sustainable” if its activities can continue after the grant has ended. Population is ‘sustainable’ if there is no population decline. Financial “sustainability” means only the resources to cover expenditure. Moreover, social, economic, etc. sustainability cannot be placed alongside ecological sustainability, since it is ecology that will make or break them.

Sustainability without quotation marks is long-term and systems thinking. E.g. it takes into account if expenditure is partly covered by a legacy that is dwindling. Or part of the income is provided by arable land on which the soil is thinning, etc.
Since the present civilisation is unsustainable (i.e. destroying its very foundations), sustainability without quotation marks can only mean, correctly, that we cannot continue in the present way, but must turn in the opposite direction. But how can sustainability be measured? What shows the right direction?

1.Definition of sustainability: ecological footprint is less than biocapacity

For decades, the calculation of ecological footprints (environmental pressures) and biocapacity (carrying capacity) has been improving, backed by a vast international scientific network. Both are expressed in global hectares (gha, the carrying capacity of an average hectare), so they are easily comparable.
In particular, the website https://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/ compares countries’ ecological footprints and biocapacities since 1960 on an annual graph, divided by population per capita. You can see how, over time, more and more countries are becoming unsustainable, with an ecological footprint (the red line) that already exceeds (often by several times) their biocapacity (the green line).
Mankind as a whole exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity in 1970 and is now nearly double that. The graph shows that the ecological footprint per capita has not increased for decades, and the red line is no higher today than it was in 1970. Thus, the overshoot is essentially caused solely by the population explosion, with more and more people sharing the Earth’s carrying capacity. The green line is sinking due to the population explosion, with less per capita. It’s not overconsumption, it’s overcrowding.

How is it possible to consume more than is available? Biocapacity is the annual yield of an ecosystem that can be consumed in such a way that it can be produced again. An ecological footprint larger than this consumes the ‘capital’ or ‘heritage’ accumulated over millions of years: forests, soils, water, wildlife are destroyed, the climate is disrupted, toxins and plastics are dispersed…

2.The carbon footprint is the largest and most manageable part of the ecological footprint

The ecological footprint of cities, companies, products, events, travel, websites, etc. can be calculated, but reliable data sets for calculating biocapacity are more likely to be available only per country. Therefore, on a smaller scale, carbon footprint calculations are more common, e.g. with a calculator like this: https://bocs.eu/karbonlabnyom-szenlabnyom-kalkulator/
The carbon footprint measures greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. CO2 emissions are more important in industrialised countries, methane etc. (livestock, fertiliser, rice paddies etc.) in poorer countries. The carbon footprint accounts for more than half of the ecological footprint, so carbon neutrality is a crucial part of sustainability.
The carbon footprint can be easily calculated for small things, companies, products, events, travel, communication. And there is no need to bother calculating their biocapacity and comparing them. Simply zero the carbon footprint by reducing it and offsetting the rest.
Only that which has an ecological footprint smaller than the available biocapacity is sustainable – and whose carbon footprint is partly neutralised.
We could say that only development that improves quality of life and reduces the ecological footprint, including neutralising the carbon footprint, is the only way to go! And since infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet, especially if we are already almost doubly overburdened, to use the term “sustainable growth” is ignorant or fraudulent

3.The ESG on its base resembles a cake

The three elements of ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) are not side by side, they are not equal. Society is a subsystem of the ecosystem, the economy is a subsystem of society, the financial world is a subsystem of the economy, governance (at least in the profit orientation trap) is a subsystem of the financial world, and this limits its scope.
So ESG is not three letters side by side, but is upside down on its base. On the base of the E (Environment, Ecosystem) stands or falls the fate of Society. And Governance cannot be a mere icing on the cake, but must take over from above. It must break free from the short-termism of narrow profit orientation, to redirect the currently destructive economy and financial system towards a sustainable direction, rather than serving it.

Source : https://fenntarthato.bocs.eu/

This hierarchy holds in the longer term. In the short term, the temporary abundance of fossil fuels has overpopulated humanity, making living energy very cheap and thus making overconsumption affordable. The costs can be externalised for a time, passed on to the poor, women, children, the living world and future children. At the level of governance, it is barely felt for a short time that the earth has been overconsumed for the last half century, grossly overconsumed by humanity.

4.Governance for sustainability instead of destructive profit

So-called “donut economics” goes beyond narrow economic and financial thinking. It shows social deficits in the inner circle and ecological excesses in the outer circle. Governance is caught between social demands (Social) and ecological constraints (Environment). The ecological ceiling should not be exceeded, but at least two thirds of the 9 vital areas are already severely degraded.

Source: https://medium.com/@PeterManthos/doughnut-economics-in-amsterdam-77a34da95434

Profit-driven governance does not even deserve the name Governance, as it is just a puppet of the money system. Even the now obsolete CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) has difficulty in extracting resources from it for social good. Moreover, this S without an S, CSR that serves social demands often does more harm than good: it achieves small and large social improvements often with a damagingly large increase in its ecological footprint. For example, what we do for children now often has an eco-burden that disproportionately exacerbates the hardships they will face later.
Governance should therefore not be about management pandering to the unsustainable demands of employees, customers, clients, owners, etc. It must look beyond them to alleviate their impending suffering, the ecological crisis. Therefore, the first task of management is to train management and all stakeholders in sustainability.

ESG already puts the ecosystem at least first. And the EU’s concretisation of ESG, the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), although similar to CSR as an acronym, is the opposite: S without E, i.e. it correctly subordinates everything to sustainability.

5.Can social demands be reconciled with environmental constraints?

As the ecological footprint calculation shows, the Earth has been overburdened by overpopulation. We don’t hear much about this because, as Sir David Attenborough puts it in the BBC film How many people can the Earth support? Fortunately, overpopulation is not caused by people wanting to have lots of children, but by women’s lack of opportunities to learn, work and use contraception. The UN estimates that every second, around 4 women realise in despair that they have become pregnant against their will. Hundreds of thousands of children are born every day to parents who did not want them.

So you don’t have to be an ascetic to alleviate the ecological crisis. It is enough to be compassionate, to help girls and women who are deprived of education and contraception. The other big problem, overconsumption and waste, is also limited precisely by slowing and reversing the population explosion. In China, for example, population decline has already started, and not as a result of the one-child policy, as fertility rates had already fallen a decade earlier. As soon as there is no oversupply of labour, wages rise, overconsumption becomes increasingly unaffordable. No more cheap Chinese dumping, only Africa is exploding.
Contraception is the magic wand that can untangle the tension between the three areas of the ESG. Numerous scientific studies support that

1. contraception is a human right (UN, 1968)

2. the most effective climate protection

3. the most effective protection of the environment and nature

4. the key to lifting people out of poverty

5. key to empowering women and educating girls

6. key to reducing maternal and infant mortality

7. key to the physical and mental health of future children

8. reducing the risk of epidemics

9. mitigates conflict, migration and violence, and strengthens peace and public security.

Carbon neutrality in the environment is the main thing to do: what can be reduced, the rest offset by carbon credits. Fortunately, there is also a carbon credit that prevents GHG emissions by helping people without contraception and avoiding accidental deaths: the Quality Family Planning Credit (QFPC). The figure below shows the beneficial effects of some different carbon credits on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). QFPC is the best multisocial carbon credit, so it is useful in all three areas of ESG.

Source : https://ouroffset.com/karbon-piac/

In the Social area, we have to be very careful not to make a big ecoteher to do some small good. As the ecological crisis worsens and environmental awareness grows, image improvement can backfire.

In the governance field, managers need to train hard to navigate a rapidly deteriorating global crisis. Those who only make their companies profitable may soon regret having done so with serious ecological consequences. The key is training for sustainability: preparing employees, customers, suppliers, owners, all stakeholders for a rapidly worsening ecological crisis.

A better understanding of a rapidly changing world gives the power to enforce the Environment against the pressure of money: it enables wiser, better decisions in all three areas of ESG.

Gyula I. Simonyi
President, BOCS Civilisation Design Foundation

Published on:https://www.zipmagazin.hu/a-fenntarthato-nem-fenntarthato-az-esg-talpraallitasa

The post “Sustainable” is not sustainable: recovering ESG appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

The message of the BOCS was already clearly seen in the 1980 TAB (Reflections on Wage Labour, other title Economy of LifeHarmony) study, which argued that the economy is often damaging – but that it does not address the most important needs. Hence, work is often unnecessary, even harmful, immoral – but valuable work is rarely valued by the economy. Work is often at odds with vocation and service. The Little Prince life strategy, non-material wealth, non-consumptive happiness, can help to free us from this predicament.

In the decades since 1980, it has been proven that the economy is built on the robbery of the poor, of wildlife and of future children. They are weak to defend themselves. The system is based on population explosion, slave production, force to reproduce, overproduction of living forces. The children who grow up are in a forced situation, they are cheap, superfluous, their bargaining power is weak, they have to fight overpopulated competition, to toil for their livelihood. Helping those without contraception is the most effective way to transform a devastating (and now self-destructing) economy.

Content

I. Raising the Problem

1. The Catholic’s Official Attitude to Work in Earlier Times

1.1. Catholic Ethics 1930
1.2. Some Initial Questions

2. What Does the Gospel Say about Work?

3. What Do the Communities’ Writings from the Seventies Say about Work? Back to the Darkness?

II. Consideration of Reality

4. Fundamental Concepts

4.1. Two Systems of Production
4.2. Basic Needs in Order of Importance

5. Problems of the First System of Production

5.1. Hunger and Orgy
5.2. Destruction, Lying, Propaganda
5.3. Exploitation of the Future
5.4. The Physicists’ and the Workers’ Responsibility
5.5. “The Harvest Is Great But There Are Few Workers to Gather It in” (Matt 9,37)
5.6. The Non-institutionalized Creation of Independence
5.7. Summary of the First System of Production’s Character (see fig. 2.)

6. The Roots of the Problems

6.1. The Train of Thought of Revolutionaries
6.2. The Gulf Between Power and Morals
6.3. The Missing Hero

III. The Christian Call

7. Worldly? Lay? Civilian! (The Difference Between Priests and Laymen)

7.1. Harmony of Life
7.2. Taboos Which Cause the Absence of Heroes
7.3. Suggestions on How to Awaken a Call

8. The First System of Production: the Part It Plays in the Christian Call

8.1. The Correct Measure
8.2. Choice of Profession
8.3. Are Our Hands Clean?
8.4. Reaching Towards a More Humanitarian Direction
8.5. Towards Our Co-workers and Clients
8.6. Non-fixed Worktime, Independent Work-sphere

9. Preparing to Follow the Call

9.1. Its Importance
9.2. To Prepare for Harmony of Life
9.3. Choice of School
9.4. Positive Ethics

10. The Second System of Production

10.1. Why Do We Call It ‘System of Production’?
10.2. What is Necessary?
10.3. The Second System of Production: Three Important Areas

III. Consequences

11. To Be Poor, to Be Humble, to Be Unprotected

11.1. The Pivotal Question: Are We Brave Enough To Be Poor?
11.2. Poverty Is the Instrument to Save the World
11.3. The Spirit of Poverty
11.4. Basis for All Our Educational Powers: Self-sacrifice

I. Raising the Problem

1. The Catholic’s Official Attitude to Work in Earlier Times

1.1. Catholic Ethics 1930

The following paragraphs represent Dr. Antal Schütz’ thinking on this question. (His book, Catholic Ethics, was published by the St. Stephen Society – the main official Catholic publishing house in Hungary – in 1930.)

Work is duty because God calls upon us to be active (Genesis, John 5,17), our disposition is to wish to create. Life (nature) forces us to work, and work has its blessings (joy of creating, rest is only good after work, work is the origin of many virtues). Therefore people who do not need to work for their living have to find some activity: they may work at home or in the interest of public welfare. The privileged people have to work as a good example, to show that they respect work. It is a great satisfaction to people who must work for an income to see the privileged people working hard and voluntarily, even though they do not need to work for a living.

How should we work? We need to be conscientious in our work so that our lack of care does not cause mishaps or even catastrophes, and because we work in the presence of God and for Him. We should work as hard as we can, make the best use of our talents, and find joy in our work.

Every person should earn enough with honest work to provide for himself and his family. It is permissible, in fact praiseworthy, to earn more than is needed, to invest much time and energy in money-making. Because the wealthy man has less occasion to sin and because he is independent of money, he can affect public life more, broadcast his belief, increase his knowledge and thereby bring honour to the name ‘Catholic’, and lastly he can do much in the service of truth and love for his fellow men. Jesus does not disapprove of money-making, He only reminds us that in it there are dangers to ?The soul.

1.2. Some Initial Questions?

Does it not matter who the employer is and what work he gives us? Is our employer’s word, the voice of our pay, the same as God’s word?
– God asks us to be active, our nature inspires activity, and there are blessings in it. Is this activity the same as working for pay?
– Is it natural that some people need not work while others have no other choice?
– Could a question of conscience cause a man to leave a job if, for example, his work contributes to the destruction of nature?
– Are our talents the same as our productive capacity and our professional knowledge? Did Jesus neglect his own talents in this direction?
– Is it true that rich people have fewer opportunities to sin?
– Is it true that they can be more devoted to their convictions than poor people?
– Is it true that the wealthy can bring more honour to the name ‘Catholic’?
– Is it true that the privileged in particular can do much for truth and love?

2. What Does the Gospel Say about Work?

(The following paragraphs are quotations from the four-volume book “Seek the Kingdom of God!”‚ abbreviation KIO‚ by György Bulányi.)

We must not seek material gain. Material gain is the enemy of God. Genesis says that work is necessity and suffering, but Jesus promises us renewal; He promises us a different yoke, a yoke that is easy and useful‚ activity worthy of human beings. This renewal can happen in any kind of technical, scientific, or financial work. When Jesus speaks of work, He points out the difference between man’s toil for material resources and the work He, His Father and His disciples do for the Kingdom. (The KIO translates the ‘ergon’ Greek word-family into the following words “creation, to create”, and the ‘kopos’ Greek word-family into words such as “work, to work”. The KIO does so to avoid the confusion of ideas.)

Jesus prefers activity for eternal life to working for our daily bread. (“Do not…, instead…!” John 6,27) We may only be engaged for the Kingdom, we may only seek the Kingdom, this is the condition of renewal.
When man was created, he received two tasks: to take care of the earth and to love his fellow man. Instead, history is the story of man’s domination over the world and over people, all in the name of progress. Jesus calls this economic advance at the expense of love, Mammon. Mankind cannot blossom because of the myth of progress. Mankind could make real progress if it followed Jesus.

“Man cannot live by bread alone…”, man is a creature who has a need for God. Jesus wants to make it. His task to fulfill man’s need for God. When we feed the hungry we serve God, who is starving, in his need (Matt 25). But greed makes us unclean before God (Luke 12,15). We cannot serve two masters. If we want to love God, we must hate and despise Mammon, Money (Matt 6,24; Luke 16,13). On the day of reckoning, God will not ask us to give an account of our productive activity and of the work that duty calls us to do. The man who can only give an account of such activity is a fool. Doing our duty is not the same as growing rich in God’s sight (Luke 12,15-21); in fact, if it fills our lives it is an obstacle to growing rich in the eyes of God. We must not worry about status, food, drink, clothes, the future, our life. The trouble is lack of faith, and lack of trust. The Father gives us the necessities of life and the capacity to work. To worry about resources is like being a plant that is not content with photosynthesis, but wants to try to work for its livelihood. The condition for receiving the Father’s care is that we seek the Kingdom, then everything else we need will be added. If we seek material things only, like the savages, then there will be starvation. Trust and hope are incompatible with worry.
Science and production mainly serve those in power. Nationally as well as internationally, the distribution of resources and material wealth is unfair. The rich prepare arms to defend the status quo, the poor prepare arms to change it. Therefore work serves the privileged classes, it promotes the use of the military to support injustice, thereby also destroying its own achievements. So it cannot be sufficient for us merely to work, firstly because God has entrusted more to us, and secondly because more is needed to benefit mankind. If we do our daily work, we have not yet fulfilled our duty to serve. We must not believe the myth of progress that promises welfare and peace as a result of work and military preparation. If we are honest, we can not believe in the myth of progress, with which we formerly identified ourselves, after our historical sins have been revealed and the promises of progress have become obsolete. Work is our destiny, but not our vocation.

Work is neither giving nor taking; it is only a means of acquiring an income as individuals or as a group. What good will it be for me if I gain the whole world, yet forfeit my soul? Even if we cannot find pleasure in our work, we should nevertheless do it well; and earn only as much as is necessary to live on. Our work can become our vocation at least in part, if there are opportunities to serve and proclaim the gospel. (Our pay would be the same, whether we approach our work as a service or not.) Our task is giving, but we need not worry about how to obtain the means to give. We help the heavenly Father by distributing what He gives. Only those who decide to live according to the law of giving can reject the myth of progress!

3. What Do the Communities’ Writings from the Seventies Say about Work? Back to the Darkness?

(The following short quotes come from articles in the underground Catholic almanac series entitled ‘Christmas Present’.)
– Confusion of ideas: is creativity the same as paid work? We read; “building of the world”; “making the world more humane, more useful, more cultured”; “a task from God”; “the unfolding of our creative personality” etc. Many people tacitly identify these with paid work.

–  Confusion of ideas: is paid work the same as service? We read; “Work is service, too, although not in the same sense as Jesus spoke of it, because we get money for it.” Then we should not refer to both “work” and “service” as “service”. The word “service” is a catchword in our time: a minister is a servant of his people; the pope is the servant of God’s servants; and everybody does a service, from a soldier to a conductor. In the Bible, however, the word “service” is never used for paid work offering financial independence. (Dufour: Biblical Theological Dictionary, page 1131.) There are some spheres of work where a true service can be done, but it is important to see the difference between paid work and service in such a sphere, so that we can stress the element of service in it.

– Confusion of ideas: does our standard of living require eight hours of work a day? We read; “Work should not be an end in itself”; “greed should not be unlimited, uncontrolled”; “rank should not cause unfaithfulness to our convictions”; we should not be “money-grabbing” or “careerists”; “do not work overtime”; we should not work “all day long”, instead “only for our living”; “eight hours should be the limit”. Should we not rather consider, how much paid work our vocation permits us to do? There is a decisive difference between customary social goals and the life of a true Christian.

– Idealizing: is the outcome of our work “a message of love for other people”? Is a television set, for example, an unambiguous “message of love” Though it usually acts like a “drug in the center of the home”? (M‚rleg, 1980/3.) Or like a bottle of wine, which can “gladden men’s hearts” (Psalm 104,15), but which has often led to the frightful destruction of life? Can we consider work simply as “the production of ‘bonum practicum’“? The reality of work does not change when we use such beautiful words for it; it only changes when we draw a sharp distinction between the good and the bad elements in it.

– Superficial aesthitics: design of an atom bomb? “The product of man’s work, the arch of a bridge, a highway, a hotel, they are all beautiful.” That is true (although each one of us will probably have a different opinion about building highways among the mountains). But the beauty must not make us forget the more important questions: What is it good for? Why did we have to build and create so much? Who does it all serve?

If the Steelman (a pylon, as personified by Sándor Sík, a Hungarian poet, and Catholic monk) pondered what the energy carried through his cables is used for; if he realized that this energy operates electric chairs which destroy lives, runs movies which destroy souls; if he realized that it is wasted where people neglect to turn off millions of unneeded lights, and used by regular consumers to get their many machine-slaves to work and create comfort for them causing them to drift far away from God; if he realized that it makes the lives of many scandalously rich and so-called “great” people glitter and seem representative of society as a whole; if he realized that at the same time forests are being destroyed in a radius of a hundred kilometers around the undeveloped edges of towns, and that people even burn sundried manure (resulting in the deterioration of the soil ), because poverty is actually caused by the lack of energy; if he realized that he cannot direct the cables to those places where people really need the energy‚ then maybe he would break himself off from the delightful line of cables, and would rather try to shock people into more humane lifestyles (he would probably have more success in homes where there are candles instead of fluorescent lights, a broom instead of a vacuum cleaner), or he would go to the poor who might use him more profitably as scrap-iron than as a proud carrier of gleaming cables.

– Are petty bourgeois conventions the same as Christian morality? We read, “Work is a sure foundation for the growth of our souls.” This statement can be easily misunderstood. If the sons of Zebedee had thought along these lines, would they have left their nets? If Jesus came now, would only the loafers follow him?

“A sluggard is unworthy of the Kingdom of God.” Can we accept such a generalization? What about employment in the chemical industry which poisons nature to the point of destruction? What about employment in the ‘war-machine’? Would it have been better if Einstein or B‚la Hamvas (great Hungarian philosopher in the communist period) had not worked secretly, hiding their notes under the desk at work or in a drawer in the store?

“Our output should be praiseworthy.” This statement too can be easily misunderstood. Whose appreciation should we receive and for what? We cannot do any unchristian thing to receive the appreciation of non-Christians and to make them accept our witness better! “Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world…” (Romans 12,2)
The world’s scale of values with regard to work is often deformed. For instance, the world acclaims the accomplishments of leading sportsmen, although they are mostly useless. The world envies pushy people and those who profit by their position, but laugh at Michelangelo or threaten to give him the sack (in the ‘Falanster’ scene of ‘Tragedy of Man’ by Imre Madách, which shows a possible inhuman, mechanical society in the future) when they find him in the chairleg carving shop meditating about the face of Moses, wishing that his statue would inspire people to crave for the wisdom of God.

– Who will really profit by our work? One of the community writings quotes Attila József (a Hungarian proletarian poet): “Do not be rash! Other people profit by your work!” But this quote is used only to caution against “never-ending drudgery”, as if an average man, who works eight hours a day, were immune to the same injustice which hides in the reality of paid work.

– Do pleasure and ambition feed on paid work? True, it is important to “work joyfully”, and it is an important factor in the choice of profession, but maybe we could discover joy in the vocation we feel called to. “Service shall be my joy”, we pray in the Prayer of Faithfulness.

It is also true that “if our ambition dies in the sphere of paid work, it will adversely affect our whole character”. Ambition in the sphere of paid work, however, does not necessarily affect the rest of our lives. “Just one thing is needed” (Luke 10,42) If we are ambitious in this “one thing”, in our calling, it will surely shine in our whole life. If it cannot shine in our paid work as well, it will press on us until we find a suitable job, because this “one thing” cannot tolerate that we waste a considerable part of our lives. We should beware for fear that we compensate our defeats in the Kingdom by seeking professional successes.

– Confusion of ideas: are our talents the same as our professional capacities? Is “profiting by our talents” the same as paid work? Did not Jesus have talents to create scientific, economic or artistic work? Talent is usual capacity, like a seed-bud, it blossoms where man concentrates his energy a long time: in his vocation.

– Idealizing: is it true that “duty to ne’s status is the same as love”? Is it all the same, who gives me this duty, who employs me, which status I have chosen for myself? Even if I am forced into a status, I cannot do it withut thinking of the duties which come with this status (“I have done it under order!”).

– Confusion of ideas: is social justice the same as eight hours of work a day? “As much as we get from the common basket of society, that much we have to put back into it too.” This is true, but if we get out only a little, we should put in only a little too, not a full eight hours. “I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out. Your master probably does not want me to make a living by robbing or cheating, yet I can make it by hard work, with these five yoke of oxen. I do not intend to give up this life-standard only for an invitation, so please accept my apologies.” (Luke 14,19 with addition) On the other hand, people are watching us carefully lest we get more from the common basket than we put into it. If we “waste” our inherited privileges in our solidarity with the poor, and we ourselves do not use the different cunning kinds of violence, we will surely only be able to get less.

Therefore, what role does paid work play in the Christian calling, which comprehends the whole life?

II. The Consideration of Reality

4. Fundamental Concepts

4.1. Two Systems of Production

The complicated worldwide organization of the interaction between supply and solvent demand, we call ‘first system of production’ (1. sp.). This type of employment, designed for making money, is what we name ‘work’ in regular speech. To avoid the confusion of ideas we will speak about it as ‘paid work’.

In the ‘second system of production’ (2. sp.) insolvent human need meets helpfulness. This activity is service.
Why is this distinction important? The first system is our natural self-support, a (theoretically fair) ‘giving-receiving’, which fits into the division of labour settled in society. But the second system is unrequited giving. It is important to make a distinction between them, since we are susceptible to believing ourselves true Christians because of our fair paid work. However God is not satisfied with paid work, instead He calls us for service above all:

“When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors, for if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid; but when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14,12-14)

If certain conditions exist, the activity done at the paid work place in paid work time can be service too. For ‘insolvent’ need does not mean only that the claimant does not have enough money. It also may mean that the demand can not be paid for by money. (For instance, money can pay only for the outward duties that a nurse performs in the care of a patient, but the patient can’t get by money the nurse’s healing love – more than its appearance – which springs from her heart and which the patient truly needs for his recovery.)

Therefore the 2. sp. can appear in the 1. sp.’s workplaces and worktime, too, if the need, which is fulfilled by paid work, is firstly human, and secondly, cannot be paid for by money. When a worker puts into his paid work this priceless extra, without which his pay would not be any less, nor his duty unfulfilled, then he is partly doing true service within his paid work place and paid work time.
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4.2. Basic Needs in Order of Importance

What is in the preceding definitions ‘human need’, as opposed to ‘consumer need’? Evidently we can not fulfil all kinds of needs by our work: we can not undertake a murder for pay, or fulfil a duty which serves an unnecessary luxury need.
In psychological literature we can find different lists of necessities. Now I use the simplest of them here, which has been defined by Jesus. It divides human necessities into two parts: the first part serves the bios’ needs, the second part serves the “dzoe’s” needs. (Both of these Greek words mean ‘life’.) A humanbeing lives by ‘bread’ and ‘the word of God’, namely he needs mortal and eternal values.

The connection between the two groups of needs is important. Jesus thinks the serving of others needs (hunger, nakedness, homelessness U) very important and makes it our task, while on the other hand He thinks that richness is a power which (logically) removes us from God. Thus according to mortal values the humanbeing can be either destitute, poor, or rich. It is right not to want to be destitute, but it is not right not to want to be poor, for the needs over and above honest poverty do a disservice to the other group of needs; the eternal values, the richness in God, the gladness of the humanbeing.

Therefore we can define the ‘human need’ as a group of needs for poverty in mortal values and for immense richness in God.

That is represented by the figure 1. The vertical, broken line separates the two groups of needs. The column of the right side of the broken line (the church tower, if we compare the figure to an outline of a church) ends in a pinnacle like an arrow, showing that a sound, humane person who is created in God’s image has a need for God, and this need is infinitely great. We divided the mortal values on the left side into two again: the need for material goods and information. This part of the church (a rectangle) represents that these types of need of a humane person are limited: they work as a foundation for the infinite blossoming in God. Accordingly, we call ‘consumer need’ the need for material goods and information which grows over and above honest poverty. The consumer need, the need for posessions, necessarily causes a disease on the need for God, because the one who loves and values material goods, then hates and despises God (cf. Luke 16,13).

The attribute ‘humane’ I used in the definition of the second point. In the sense of this explanation, the attribute ‘humane’ is key in that definition. “Fool, …are those who pile up riches for themselves but are not rich in God’s sight.” (Luke 12,20-21) “Happy are you poor!” (Luke 6,20)

5. Problems of the First System of Production

5.1. Hunger and Orgy

The hunger of the poor is not a solvent demand, nor does it attract labour. The share of agriculture from the whole produced value was reduced from 38-39% to 19-20% in both capitalist and socialist developed countries between 1950 and 1970 (M. Simai: Towards the third thousand years). The wealthy people cannot eat more, therefore labour centres on other spheres where there is a demand, (the consumer need of wealthy people) and therefore money, for instance in the airplane industry. If the wealthy can pay for travelling, and the poor can not pay for bread, then logically the airplane industry is more important, so it will be more likely developed. An even pithier example is the agriculture of undeveloped countries. It becomes a monoculture. It is of no value for big landowners to grow rice for the local poor population, therefore they grow coffee, for instance, for which the wealthy people of the world will pay a high price. In Java, the best rice-lands have given way to the spreading coffee-plantations. This is how the people’s traditional food-production foundations dissolve (T. Csupor: The paradoxes of nutrition). This is how our luxury need becomes more important than the poor people’s necessities for life. This is how our life style causes the suffering of poor people. But we have the possibility not to take part in this. For example: not buying coffee (unless it is necessary for a health reason), but rather sending the saved money to the hungry, so their hunger shall become a solvent demand. Generally: to give, to put our strength into the 2. sp., instead of the 1. sp.

We can realize also in other spheres of the 1. sp., that the wealthy people’s consumer needs are more important than the poor people’s necessities for life. For instance, scientific research serves the interests of the privileged, making the poor even more defenceless. “For the most part research has been done in the developed countries, and is financed by their governments, foundations, universities and industrial companies. It would be absurd to suppose that, in their research and development, they do not look after their own interests… The developed countries’ technological advancement tends to make the poor countries’ commercial situation continually go from bad to worse.” (Gunnar Myrdal: The Challenge of Our Time: World-wide Poverty) It is a myth that scientific advancement will end world-wide need. It only makes the wealthy stronger. In Myrdal’s explanation, there is also evidence that it is not enough to refuse buying those products of poor countries which were produced in a monoculture; that in itself may make them more disadvantaged. The 2. sp is what really helps, and that is what the refusal of consumerism guarantees resources for.

One more home example: while lots of people struggle with the fundamental difficulties of homelessness; weekend-houses and public buildings have been built quickly and with luxury quality for the privileged (F. Kozma: Welfare on the Socialist Way).

On the sphere of intellectual values, we call ‘noise’ the information which is ultimately not needed by the person who gets it. These ‘informative noises’ are damaging, because they squeeze out or leave unnoticed the really important information, fill the people’s minds with ‘plaster mush’. Just think how much we know about distant countries’ so-called ‘high’-politics, while we do not get any information about, for instance, our own town’s problems with environmental protection or urban-development, or about the discussions of the experts. How many people study technology and economics books in the colleges, (often while holding a job, and raising a family whom they may neglect because of studies) but have never read a book about educating children or themselves. How much time do they spend dazedly watching the television’s deluge of information, when a conversation with their spouse or friends would be much more worthwhile. In the 1. sp. many people are employed in making ‘noise’.

Summarized: in the 1. sp. the privileged people’s (consumer) needs are the determining factor rather than poor people’s necessities for life.

The work in the 1. sp. cannot summarily be called useful “building” work, the making of “bonum practicum”. In the 1. sp. these three activities go on to an unbelievable degree:

Destruction, and senselessness: weaponry, military exercises, because of group interests which are against the interests of mankind; scheming, hindering each other’s work, waste, production of throw away merchandise, the ruthless use of the common resources and tools can become a paid job, work of controlling apparatuses and security forces; which are supported by peoples’ selfishness and unpeacefulness.

Lying, and misinformation: false advertisement, and irrespondible elements in the media and education.
Propaganda: ideologies which are against the Good News.

5.2. Destruction, Lying, Propaganda

Why did we make two categories? What is the difference between ‘Lying’ and ‘Propaganda’?
‘Lying’ represents every type of misinformation which makes exploitation possible. Misinformation influences and controls people by deceit; and in the hands of secular or religious ideologues, media-producers nad spokespersons, misinformation can be used to sanction existing regimes of political, economic, religious, or other forms, of power. For example, a Roman emperor supports a religious organization which justifies slavery as an institution ordered by the gods; and which influences the slaves.
Propaganda does not begin with material interest. In the previous example, the emperor and the religious organization both profited by the oppressed condition of slaves, but let us see an example of a propaganda-machine; a statue of the emperor which is placed in every town and the people are forced (by reward or punishment) to adore that statue (namely the emperor). The emperor does not support this propaganda machine only for material interest; but rather out of personal vanity, prestige, longing to be great, and as a means of controlling his subjects.

5.3. Exploitation of the Future

During the second half of the 20th century, the production and consumerism of developed nations have been growing to such an absurd degree that they hang menacingly over the future of human beings.

The world we leave to our children and grandchildren is irreversibly sullied and destroyed, is unsalvagably exploited and bled white, it is uncontrollably dangerous.

We live in an addicted civilization: In the interest of our mindless consumerism, we eat and destroy our own descendants’ life necessities, like alcoholic parents, who drink away even the cost of bread as prisoners of their addiction, while their children are starving.

(In 1980, these statements seemed unbelievable exaggerations in Hungary. Therefore this article – wanting to support them – quoted other writings which were available in Hungarian. Now we leave them, for these sentences are not unbelievable anymore, with due appreciation to our brothers who made known the book entitled Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher among the communities, and who already in 1977 translated the Concilium and other valuable writings, including the Mérleg (Balance) which in 1979 and 1980 published book reviews with such titles among others: Will We Survive the Future?; The Necessity of Recreating our Civilization; Are We Going Towards a World-wide Ascetic Culture?)

The problem of the future’s exploitation does not mean only the damages caused by arming, nor only the damages caused by the recklessness and waste of production. Instead, it means that even the most ideal producion destroys the earth if it caters to foolish, sinful consumerism.

“The Earth could grant everyone what they need, but it can not fulfil their greed!” (Gandhi)

5.4. The Physicists’ and the Workers’ Responsibility

The throwing of the first atom bomb revealed with a terrible power the importance of the scientists’ and physicists’ responsibility: at whose disposal will they place their fearsome knwledge? Maybe Dürrenmatt’s drama entitled The Physicists shows it most clearly: “Our science has become terrifying, our research has become dangerous, our knowledge has become deadly. We physicists have only one possibility: … we have to get back our knowledge!”

Since this time, the responsibility has widened out: not only do the scientists have it, but every person who pushes the same economic-scientific-technological process (I purposely do not write progress or advancement!) by his small daily work. The scientists push this self-demolition process in huge steps, the workers in small steps. But the workers are far more numerous, so this process can end in a catastrophe even without a war.

“The undoubting trust (which had existed since the renaissance) in a science which makes us the ruler and owner of nature, has now become questionable. Mainly following 1968, the destruction of nature’s energy sources, the estrangement and manipulation of man, the environment’s pollution which causes death, and the illusions of blind faith in progress which make us slaves became obvious! This scientific-technological-economic process cannot be the sensible purpose of our life and history!” (Roger Garaudy: The “basis” in Marxism and in Christianity, Concilium, 1975, number 4.)
“There was no other society before which propagated to such a degree its own productions’ importance. On the other hand, there was no other society before, which to such a degree destroyed the biological balance of the Earth, exploited the mineral resources of the Earth, sullied its continents and seas with dirt and damage, non degradable derivatives, which mankind will probably never be able to get rid of.” (Hubert Lepargneur: The critical function of the church as opposed to the death ordered by the society, Concilium, 1974, number 4.)

Sorry to say, the physicists’ freedom in decision is not more than – in a fortunate case – deciding which power they want to serve. For the research of today requires many special tools and investments, and so much money that it can be financed only by one of the powers. It is also no solution for the physicist to get back his knowledge, for “every unknown thing will be found out sooner or later!” (Dürrenmatt, Epilogue, point 19)

The workers’ freedom in decision is even less. “The basis is what produces the richness by its work; however, it can determine neither the reason for production, nor the organization of the work, nor the division of the profit.” (Roger Garaudy, ibid)
Before we look for a solution through Christian faith, let us see the fourth large problem of the 1. sp.

5.5. “The Harvest Is Great But There Are Few Workers to Gather It in” (Mt 9,37)

Who’s duty is it to fulfil people’s hunger for God in the 1. sp.? To be able to answer, we should look through the forms in which the need for God appears in as a solvent demand. As example, five such forms are listed here:
a) The need of mentally sick people for services which cure and preserve the health of soul (ie. psychologist).
b) The need of anguished people for insurance of eternal life (ie. church tax, price of sacrament-administering).
c) Parents who want help in their task to educate and who look for teachers able to offer more than mere instruction (ie. religious education, schools which have a reputable teaching staff in demand).
d) Christians’ donations for mission make a missionable territory’s need for God (which is insolvent in itself) solvent.
e) Christians support financially (make independent) certain persons (ie. priests), so they would then be mediators to God for them (preaching, sacraments, taking care of souls, creating communities etc.). We will return later to the problems of making somebody independent.

Let us look through the insolvent needs for God.
x) The poor’s need, who do not have money even for bread.
y) The wealthy’s need, whose master is Mammon, which they will not give up easily for just anything. First we have to make them learn about God at no charge (many times they do not want it even free).
z) The realists’ need, who know that if somebody is willing to preach the Good News for pay, their message is not worth much.
The solvent need for God, from paid people, is mostly not serious at all. They care for this need so little that it does not disturb the production and consumerism in their lives, which are arranged far away from God. They do not want the psychologist to make them human beings who know how to love. They want him to make them winners in a competitive society and thus able to enjoy life.
Most of the people who pay church tax (in addition to the other kinds of insurance, household, car etc. which cost much more than the church tax), as a payment for ‘insurance for eternal life’ or (in addition to the monthly lottery) as a payment in a game of chance (making a mockery of Pascal’s thought: “In case God exists, we will come off well”) do not want God to be the lord of their life, merely they want to reassure their conscience, to buy off God, who might exist.

Most of the parents, who – as it is well-known – like to substitute personal care with material gifts for their child(ren), do not seriously wish for their child the knowledge of God when they send him to religious education. (For if they thought it important, they would need God for themselves, too, and then they themselves could give religious education to their child.) Instead, they buy some hour-long educating personality for him, in place of their personal care. Other parents expect religious education to give their child – whom his selfish parents (maybe not even consciously) educated to be selfish by their example – a moral impression which would cause him to be respectful towards them and to take care of them when they are old (but nonetheless be a hard fighter in competitive society). They expect the same from a good educator (supposing that they expect something above instruction).

On the side of the paid people (psychologist, teacher, priest, generally: the educating staff) the real service in the need for God is problematic, too. One of the large temptations is not to serve the real progress of soul, but to give the people what they expect. This is how education becomes mere instruction, psychology becomes a setting free from conscience, a personage becomes a center of cult, a boutique of sacraments, Christianity becomes a religion which is laced with material and political interests.

The other large temptation of the paid educating staff is hypocrisy. If they get enough money, they will produce the outward manifestations of education, but it will not come from true, self-sacrificing love. How many priests would be devoted pastors of souls if they had to support themselves by regular work? Hypocrisy was a widespread disease among Israel’s educators, the Pharisees: they did their duty as the raising of their prestige and income demanded, they prayed long ostensibly, gave to the poor publicly, swaggered in the teaching chair of Moses, arranged huge ceremonies and public duties, and made the people finance their hocus-pocus.

In summary, the people the 1. sp. pays (at least theoretically) to raise people toward God (or in the wording of an unbeliever: toward love, humanity’s common life), have to face what the 1. sp. places before them: the demands of the clients who pay them; the demands of the ruling staff which pays them; and the temptation to hypocrisy.
How many people can lace their daily duty with service; a service without which their income would not be less, in fact because of which their income would definitely be less, and their troubles and burdens greater?

How many missionaries were brave enough to contrast the colonizers, who hired them, with the Gospel and suffer the probable consequence of being labeled heretic, and possibly killed? And how many of them have been canonized for it? How many priests will be brave enough to show their success-seeking audience in the temple the main point of God (supposing that they were made to seek this point) if they do not want to “become a sign of contradiction” in the sight of the people who are financially supporting them? (An experience of a Brazilian missionary: “The rich people who go to the church are indignant with the way a priest dares to intervene in social and political questions! They do not pay church tax, saying: ‘These inciting priests will come to us if they get short shrift, and will promise to be good, then we shall pay again!’“) (A home case: “Parish father, why do you not buy a car? Do not put us in shame. If you want it, just tell us, we will pay for it!” What priest undertakes to make the consciences of the people who support him uneasy by his clothing, food, furnishings, going by bicycle, by train, by bus? Because “do not put us in shame” actually means: “Do not make our conscience uneasy! You should live in overabundance too, let us believe that God likes this!”)

In case of d) and e), there is an additional problem which makes the giving of true Christianity more difficult for those who do it for pay. One of the main points of Christianity is that we all serve the needy, expecting no reward, but how can a paid educator teach the service which expects no reward? If he asks somebody to do something, that person may think to himself: “I will do it if I also get paid for it!” How could a priest share the tasks and the responsibility with his basis people, if the people think to themselves: “Are we paying him just so he will make us do the tasks?” If a priest tries to educate the believers to be grown-up, professional Christians, a “holy priesthood” (1Peter 2,5), he will experience his own financial independence as a stumbling block. But who will give up his material privileges?

In sum, I want to stress this statement: to serve the people’s need for God and to build the Kingdom, which Christ entrusted us to do, are quite problematic tasks within the 1. Sp., that is to say, through labor attracted by solvent demand.

5.6. The Non-institutionalized Creation of Independence

To backtrack slightly, I would like to outline briefly how the problems of financially supporting educators can be warded off in certain circumstances. It seems there are three conditions:

– The person who is paid depends on the expectations of the people who pay him. Therefore, the pay can be accepted only from those people whose motives or purposes one can identify himself with. The ‘believers’ can not financially support the priest, because the priest’s very profession is to purify the people’s outlook who go into his church, to turn them towards God (conversion). However, a priest can be supported for instance, by a group of priests in which the members earn a living by regular work, relieveing each other alternately; or by a community in which the priest is a member but not the leader.

– To reduce the danger of hypocrisy as much as possible, the people who support him should know him well and help him on the right way by praise and reproof, day by day. This is possible only in a small community.

– The pay he gets must not be the equivalent to his educating work, but rather for the assurance of his living, which sets him free to do service which does not expect reward. From this evolve two consequences: 1) He who “works better” cannot get more money for his work from the community. (The surplice-fee depends on how many sacraments a priest administers. It does not make anybody interested in the quality of the work.) 2) The ‘pay’ cannot be more than just necessary for covering the priest’s (or in case of a layman: the family’s) living in honest poverty. These two rules, in the sight of an economist from the world, produce complete disinterest. However, we have seen before that we cannot count on the pushing power of money in this case. If somebody does not have enthusiasm caused by the Spirit, he will not be able to build the Kingdom anyhow. A true Christian does his service with all of his heart and Spirit, whether in addition to his regular work or while being supported by a community. It is enough guarantee against “idleness in a job without demands” (which is not rare in the current practice of financial independence) that the community will stop supporting right away when the weighty reason for independence stops.

I would like to represent the traits of non-institutionalized support by some quotations from the Didache, an early Christian teaching:
“However, not every man who speaks in the Spirit is a prophet, but only if he has the manner of the Lord. Thus the false and the true prophet shall be known by their manner of life. … Further, every prophet who teaches the truth is a false prophet if he does not do what he teaches.” (XI. 8, 10)

“Every apostle visiting you shall be received as the Lord. He should stay only one day and if it is necessary a second day also. If he stays for three days, he is a false prophet. When the apostle leaves he shall not accept anything except bread for the time until he reaches his next night’s lodging. But if he asks for money he is a false prophet.” (XI. 4-6)
“Anyone who comes in the name of the Lord shall be received. You will then test him and you will know him, for you will have the understanding to decide between right and left.” (XII. 1)

“Elect for yourselves overseers and servants worthy of the Lord, men of gentle disposition who are free of the love of money, honest and tried, for they are those who, in serving you, render you the service of the prophets and teachers.” (XV. 1)
“Every true prophet who wishes to settle among you is worthy of his food. Likewise, a true teacher is just as worthy of his food as a laborer. Therefore always take the firstfruits of the produce of winepress and threshing floor, of cattle and sheep, and give these firstfruits to the prophets. If however you have no prophet, give them to the poor.” (XII. 2-4)

5.7. Summary of the First System of Production’s Character (see figure 2.)

We characterize the 1. sp. by drawing on the figure 1., in the illustration of a man’s justified needs as a main network. The sphere bordered by the thick curved line represents the needs which the 1. sp. fulfills.

Figure 2 The individual production system

It pertly fulfills the man’s justified material needs (M: Material needs), and it partly does not (S: Starving). It partly fulfills man’s justified informative needs (T: Teaching) and it partly does not (I: Illiteracy). But it fulfils consumer needs on the sphere of materials

(C: Consumerism), and on the sphere of information (N: informative Noise).
These expressions, such as Starving and Illiteracy, are symbolic, they have wide meaning. For instance, Illiteracy does not mean only the lack of knowledge of how to read and write, but the lack of a known material (this is different in different cultures) that is necessary for a life which is worthily human.

The way the S, M, T, I, C, N spheres are drawn, is explained by point 5.1.
The spheres of D (Destruction), L (Lying), P (Propaganda) spread under the horizontal line (it represents that they are definitely negative). These activities do not fulfil, but destroy the needs for materials, information and God. Point 5.2. spoke about them.
Finally the sphere E (Education) represents the answer of the 1. sp. for the solvent needs for God (listed in point 5.5.), and the sphere G (hunger for God) represents the insolvent needs for God (listed in the same place).

The spheres of E and P do not really belong in the 1. sp., for money does not have real power from the right of the vertical line, it can cause only outward manifestations. On the sphere of P people take part, for instance, in the celebration of worshipping the emperor, but it is only the outside, hypocrisy caused by interest or fear. This, taken to refer to the sphere E is explained in the point 5.5. As money is the motivation behind, worship of the emperor and routine sacraments are weak and formal. The sphere E (and the sphere G) can be filled with content, power, sincerity only by helpfulness, which experts no reward (goodness, commitment, enthusiasm), namely the 2. sp. While the sphere P can be filled with content by a kind of third system of productivity, in which the intention of evil and destruction is looking for the weak points of man. Thus the Snake’s action with that apple also can be generalized as a system of productivity, but we do not study it in this article.

6. The Roots of the Problems

6.1. The Train of Thought of Revolutionaries (Ruling is no solution)

“Five people can produce bread for a thousand. One worker can supply 250 people with cotton, 300 people with wool material, a thousand people with shoes. In such circumstances, we should believe that the man of this age lives incomparably better and more carefree than his ancestors, but in contrast to this, what do we see?…” (These percentages from before the World Wars have been multiplied in consequence of the progress of engineering. On the other hand, the destitution has become much more dreadful than is written by Jack London about America in the beginning of this century.)

“Everything is available, all that is necessary is the right direction… Who is to blame? The capitalistic class, which always boasts of its economic expertise and organizational ability. The dictators of our economic life run the productivity not only selfishly, but with sinful neglectfulness! …You have demonstrated that you cannot be trusted with leading society. Therefore we will take it out of your hands!” (Jack London: The Iron Hoof – 1944)

Disregard now that the ideal man, which was the basis for the revolutions, is considerably different from the ideal drawn by Jesus. The following sentence of Jesus: “You can not serve God and Mammon” radically opposes using political, violent means to build a just society. A solution of power cannot use other tools, only money and domination to carry out its purposes. These tools, however, cannot serve purposes which are different from their inner laws. On the contrary, money and power force into their own service the people who choose them as tools.

6.2. The Gulf Between Power and Morals

“Let me remind you of one of the laws in mankind’s history which is about the relationship between intellectual values and material-economic values. In this relationship, the intellectual values are outstandingly primacy… This primary is the foundation of a just peace… and it guarantees that the material-technological progress of civilization is serving what man is created for.
… In the last century this civilization helped the progress of material resources drastically more than in any time before, while helping to develop many behaviours by which people’s sensitivity to the spiritual dimension of man’s existence decreased. It is a result of such propositions which reduce the meaning of man’s life to material-economic factors, the requirements of productivity, marketing, consuming, stockpiling, and the bureaucracy which tries to control all of these.” (II. John Paul pope)

Thus the root of the problem is that man has tremendous power in the sphere of science and economy, but the ethical progress has lagged far behind the level necessary to correctly use this power. The gulf between the scientific-economic state of development and the ethical state of undevelopment hides horrible risks in itself. The development of civilization urgently demands the development of morals, but then why does mankind not grow in humanity?

6.3. The Missing Hero

In the world’s system of productivity, the 1. sp. serves a type of person with deformed needs, and forms the new generations likewise into such a type of person. At the same time, the deformed person, with his deformed needs and demands, supports and “develops” a more deformed world as in the 1. sp. The deformed world reproduces deformed persons, and deformed persons reproduce a deformed world.

Many people realize that the root of problems is the gulf between power and morals. For instance, it is a natural conclusion, that if the youth is decaying fearfully, the number of lessons on subjects connected with world-view and education should be increased. Yet this will still not be a solution; not only because basically false world-views cannot educate people with a healthy soul, but also because even Christianity itself cannot carry it out, where it has become an ideology of power. Staying within the 1. sp., it is hardly possible for mankind to grow in the dimension of spirit, community, and love (cf. point of 5.5.).

If this is “hardly” valid for people who work in the sphere E, then how much can a producing-consuming person serve this growing in love, who has no chance, no time, no strength to discover, consider, tell the Truth; whose character is not an example, whose life is not charismatic? (For the replacement of personal values happens mostly by identification with, or attraction to a magnificent personality!) A person who is deformed in the 1. sp. is far from lifting others up, he himself loses God (or does not find Him at all), he has no true friends (only pals and colleagues), he damages his marriage (or cannot even create a good marriage), he spoils his children, his mental life becomes empty (has tunnel vision); he is unhappy or insensitive emotionally.

As we can see in the figure 2., while we stay inside the 1. sp. we can only increase the gulf between power and morals, although “the Catholic church and the whole of Christianity find their specific task in discontinuing this gulf” (II. John Paul pope, ibid.). Thus we should develop the 2. sp. among us, which can efficiently serve the fulfillment of Starvation, Illiteracy, Hunger for God. The Christians hold in their hands the key to the secret, the solution: we should continue our Master’s service which He has entrusted to us, so that people “might have life, life in all its fullness” (John 10,10).

Why is there so much destitution, either in peace or in war? Because, excepting a few heroes and saints, the Christians have not recognized their specific vocation for a long time, instead they have been working within the 1. sp. with vocational zeal. Even today “in such an hour when the lightest brains of the scientists publish serious considerations about the gulfs and deadlocks of the contemporary technological ‘progress’, the big choir of Catholics is satisfied with saying repeatedly [the biased myth which, using for example Chardin’s sentences, confirms work and ‘progress’, and, S. Gy.] the idyllic version of Gaudium et Spes’ reconciliation with the world! … We would expect the church as guard of history’s eschatological dimension to have more foresight and sense of the future!” (H. Lapargnaur)

The main reason for this tragic blindness is that very few people (even apart from the Christians) can recognise the true way to heal the world, which may be that, as Christ worked on the world’s salvation as an unpaid wandering teacher harassed by hate and persecution, so in the same way, the healers of the world (the workers of the 2. sp., whether they are Christians or not), who walk in His footsteps, have the same destiny.

E. Hankiss (a Hungarian sociologist) in his book entitled Societal traps writes about “traps” where everybody comes to grief because of the selfishness of individuals. Yet it is worth it for the individuals who are selfish, because in this way they do not come to as much grief. On the other hand, if most individuals chose selflessness, everybody could come off well. The root of the world’s general crisis, which is growing from bad to worse: the heroes are absent!

“The grape is so small a fruit,
Yet it needs a summer to ripen.
The earth is a fruit, too, a large fruit,
And if the little grape needs a summer,
How many summers this large fruit would need…

The grape ripens by sunbeams…
Beams likewise ripen the earth, but
These are not beams of the sun, but spirits of people.
Every great spirit is such a beam, but
only the great spirit…”

(Petőfi: The Apostle, paraphrased translation)

III) The Christian vocation

7.) Secular? Lay? Civil!

7.1 Harmony of life

We must first of all live a life rich in God for ourselves, so that we can help others to do the same. It is a beautiful manifestation of the intelligence of Creation that the way of life that is most fulfilling and happy for the individual is also the most beneficial for the community, for humanity, and the most good for others.
This God-rich life, which is therefore the best way both for the happiness of the individual and for the service of others, to which God created and calls us, is called the harmony of life. The following schema gives a sense of its structure:

– Spiritual life (God is the source and impetus of our existence: prayer, evangelism, silence, self-education…)
– Spiritual life (“truth sets us free”: wisdom, education, knowledge…)
– Community life (“love one another”: friendship, small community, large community, ecumenism, cooperation…)
– Family life (love, careful upbringing, parents…)
– Apostleship (“You are the light of the world!”: witnessing, community building…)
– Helping, giving (“You did it for me!”: time, money, personal…)
– Living in nature (self-support, earning money, housekeeping, physical education, rest…)7.2. The taboos that cause the lack of heroes

What was pointed out in point 6.3 as a Christian vocation is often recognised by priests, male and female monks, and it is obvious to the pious faithful that these “ecclesiastical” people are not (in principle) freeloaders, that their occupation is not useless, but on the contrary, that they perform a service which can be far superior in importance to secular occupations. (This is well illustrated by the fact that of the secular professions, only medicine and teaching have the colloquial status of “vocation”.) But what is the reason why 999 thousandths of Christians, the ‘secular’, do not generally recognise this vocation?

The very use of the word is very wrong. ‘Secular’ – especially as a counterpart to ‘ecclesiastical’ – suggests worldliness. The primary meaning of ‘laikus’, although simply derived from the Greek word ‘people’, is in Hungarian: incompetent. Let us use the word ‘civil’ for non-clerics. Its connotation ‘non-militant’ is very good for Christianity, which is intertwined with power.
To uncover the taboos that stifle vocations, let us look at the four – independent – dimensions of the realisation of vocation:
– material situation: independent or self-sustaining (and family);
– role basis: actual service or appointment;
– nature of the role: specific task or all-embracing position;
– marital status: family or celibate.

The two poles of marital status and financial situation speak for themselves, but let us see an example of the two bases and two types of role.
The basis of the role is appointment, for example, in the case of a priest who is appointed from above as a leader for the faithful of an area, regardless of what he is qualified for and what he actually does, and regardless of who actually needs him and in what functions. In contrast, actual ministry is the basis of a small-community leadership role that exists only as long as there are those who actually do it and those who actually need it from him.
The nature of the role is that of an ‘all-roles position’, for example, in the case of a priest, without whose direction nothing can happen in the field (because it is considered a sectarianism). In contrast, there is a specific task role for, say, a ‘little angel’ who manages the camp equipment of a community group.

According to these four dimensions, there are four common taboos:
– First, in the popular consciousness of the mass churches today, Christian ministry is the work of the unaffiliated. This can be understood from point 5.5, since if the church pays someone for their ‘ministry’ (which is in fact now paid work), it stifles the germs of unpaid ministry in others.
– Secondly, they believe that ministry is the work of the appointed and that appointment is essential to it.
– Thirdly, they often regard as a vocation only the all-embracing priestly profession, which over time has absorbed almost all Christian tasks, in theory, since in practice this is impossible.
– Fourthly, in the public mind of Roman Catholics, the concept of the Christian vocation is also closely linked to a non-family life, which implies passivity on the part of the great majority (of those with families). This stems from the structural sin of allowing only celibates into church leadership.

7.3 . Proposals for vocational training

How can we ensure that the appointment is awarded on the basis of actual service, i.e. to close the gap between the two bases of the role? Either by becoming the true spiritual parent of the faithful in his territory (cf. “Through the gospel I have given you life in Christ” 1 Cor 4,15); or by rising from within, through his service accepted by the community, to become its leader (cf. “By the laying on of hands choose for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy to be called by the Lord…” Didache XV.1). But this is only possible in parishes of much smaller size than those of today, i.e. when the leaders of a few small parishes form a nourishing small parish and its (actual, not supremely appointed) leader is ordained priest. Then some of these priests form a small community of a deeper level, the (actual!) leader of which must be ordained bishop (by the community and the bishops of the surrounding communities, cf. Schillebeeckx, The Christian Community and its Officers, Concilium, March 1980).
Let me draw your attention to the seemingly small term used here: ‘deeper level’. Jesus impressed upon our minds that leadership among his people could not even remotely resemble worldly power structures (cf. Mt 20:25-27). Therefore, we do not even use the ascending pyramid to represent “leadership” communities, as we usually use to represent corporate organizations or church hierarchies. Rather, the relationship between communities can be likened to a bush with older and stronger branches underneath, holding and nurturing the newer shoots that have grown upwards from themselves. The functions of the lower, strong branches (‘leader’ communities) are thus to grow, carry and nourish fresh shoots (with nourishment ‘from the roots’), and also to transmit other kinds of nourishment (assimilated in the leaves) between the parts of the bush, i.e. a two-way chain of information, the incessant re-establishment of unity against the whims of individualism, the coordination of cooperation.
This change of scale would of course require many more priests and bishops than at present: a thousand faithful would thus need about a hundred community leaders, ten priests and one bishop. But if celibacy were lifted, there would be someone to ordain. After all, where life is flourishing, where there are communities, there are already so many leaders, but they are not ordained.
This is a very important phenomenon. It shows the loosening of the second taboo, which reached as far back as the Second Vatican Council: ‘Christ himself gave the apostolic vocation to his lay faithful.’ (AA 3.) Until the ecclesiastical-institutional order of ordination and appointment is restored, Christians living their vocation must be encouraged to discover in their hearts the ordination and appointment already received from Christ and recognised by their community. At the same time, the restoration of this order should be encouraged, because the constructive power of the ministerial role needs to be widely accepted if it is to be fulfilled.
A very beautiful example of the harmony of the two directions is the inclusion of St Paul in the collegial unity:
– on the one hand, the mission is given by Christ alone in the interior of the soul: “Do I want to please men? … The gospel I preach does not come from men, nor have I been taught it … When he called me by his grace…, I did not seek counsel from flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who had become apostles before me… After three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and stayed with him for fifteen days. But of the apostles I saw none but James…” (Gal 1:10-19);

– on the other hand, it is important to be included in the collegial unit: ‘Fourteen years later I went up to Jerusalem again… I went again to Jerusalem, and presented the gospel which I preached to them, and I presented it to the authorities, so that I might not labor in vain, and so that my efforts might not be in vain. Nor was Titus, who was with me, forced to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek, for the sake of the false brothers who had come among us, who had only come in among us … to make me a servant…” (Authoritarians cannot rule, nor can they diminish Christian liberty!) And the persons in authority did not oblige me in any way. On the contrary, they acknowledged that the gospel of uncircumcision was entrusted to me, just as the gospel of circumcision was entrusted to Peter.” (They also acknowledged the difference!) “For he who gave Peter power for apostleship among the circumcised, gave me power for ministry among the Gentiles.” (The converts are the apostle’s credentials, i.e., the established community by their very existence consecrates him to be an apostle, cf. 2 Cor 3:2-3) “And when James and Cephas and John, who are called pillars, recognized the grace given to me, they gave their hands in agreement to me and to Barnabas, that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised.” (No human recognition is required, only recognition, which is the duty of those in authority.) “They only asked that we remember the poor.” (They did not demand dogma – but a commitment to love!) (Gal 2:1-14).
Where there are not so many community-building and nurturing leaders, where there are not yet communities, the few professional Christians (even the priest himself) must begin
– renouncing institutional independence, in a self-sustaining way of life and
– personal and small-community concentration
to cultivate vocations. He may have only half the time and only a tenth of the number of people he will be able to deal with, but he will achieve ten times as much, because he can raise up professional Christians not only from celibate boys (who make up less than a thousandth of the youth) but from many, and they will not expect independence to be necessary to get involved.
This last is the decisive result, because the Christian vocation can be effectively realized and transmitted in a state of self (and family) sustenance (or at most in a state of non-institutionalized independence as described in 5.6).
In summary, let’s go beyond the four taboos:
– The taboo of independence: that is, the Christian vocation involves a minimum level of self-preservation: nothing more, nothing less.
– The taboo of appointment: i.e. to serve independently of appointment, on the basis of a call directly from God, and to welcome those in “authority” as actual community builders.
– The taboo of the “single vocation”: i.e. there are a thousand specific tasks in the community, and correspondingly a thousand different talents, charisms, from God.
– On the taboo of celibacy: i.e., family and celibate are called to the same full Christianity and everyone is to be valued according to their service, not their status, in the community.

8) The role of the 1st trs. in the Christian vocation

8.1 The right measure

The world does not need to be given material and information treasures!!
If the Man of Steel stands out from the ranks of those who hold the wires, he need not worry about the consumers. In a jiffy, another power pole will be put in its place. And the Man of Steel need not worry that a simple light pole will not carry the wires on its shoulders with such love. After all, the electricity he carried with love would just as soon not reach the poor and be wasted on the hands of the rich as electricity carried by machine. There is unemployment all over the world. In the gigantic scientific, economic processes, no disruption is caused by a handful of Christ-followers switching to other ministries.
In case anyone is worried about what will happen to our daily bread if millions of Christians realize their vocation and will therefore ignore the 1st trs, think about it: if there are hundreds of millions of holy heroes, they will heal the world, and the 1st trs. F, T, R, H, P will disappear, there will be no Hunger and Illiteracy, and people will find the God of Love … and then the distinction between the two systems of production and this whole study will become obsolete … This study aims precisely to have its findings invalidated one day by the healing of the world.
At present, the world is in a tight spot, like a drawer that has been pulled out of one side. Although pulling the drawer outwards is apparently useful from the point of view of pulling it out, on reflection it becomes clear that pulling the pulled side outwards only increases the tightness. The other side must be pulled to straighten the drawer. The gap between forces and morality is only widened and thus the problems are only exacerbated by any work that promotes scientific-economic growth.
Working in R, H, P, F, T areas is absolutely harmful. To work in areas K and O: to keep pulling on the jerky side of the drawer. To work in the N area is to “muffle” and educate in a mixed, “cryptic” way, with little preface of example. The ecclesiastical position, institutionalised independence, can also be classified here.
The world desperately needs our service (tr. 2). More than anything else, it is a necessity of existence for humanity, for it is in danger of its life. And since there are very few who are able and willing to work in trs 2, it is indeed a crying folly for them to pour their energies into trs 1.
The optimum solution is self and family support with a right amount of wage work in trs 1. And the right rate is earning the minimum money necessary for Christian poverty.

8.2. Choosing a career

In Utopia, Tamás Mórus writes that if only meaningful professions existed and a good number of people did not work in the service of armaments and the luxuries of the rich, then it would be enough to work three hours a day. The career choice criterion illustrated in Figure 3 is to look for occupations in the fields of K and O, and mostly in N.

Figure 3. Main aspects of career choice

Of course, this does not mean judging people in any occupation. It is possible to come to Jesus from any position, from any profession, and at the time it seemed that tax collectors and street women were easier to come to than high priests. At the same time, those who had awakened to their Christian vocation had obviously not gone on to become tax collectors or tax collectors.
With practical caution, it is likely that within these three (especially N) areas there are occupations which are largely interspersed with the service of the 2nd trs. We will return to the possibilities of this in a moment.
8.3. Are our hands clean?

Of course, it is not that by choosing to do what we do, we are no longer contributing to the harmful effects of trs 1. This is impossible, since whatever work we do in the 1st trs, i.e. for money, we have put our labour into the hands of others to dispose of it for their own purposes, and these purposes cannot be different from or better than the people who pay us.

To illustrate this, let’s look at an occupation in Area K: how the baker’s beautiful service of giving bread to people is distorted in trs 1. First, the bread he bakes is only for those who can pay (not for the hungry: letter E). Second, in Hungary, for example, we eat 23% more than is healthy (Dr. Simai, p. 293) and 40% of people are considered fat (with its biological and psychological disadvantages: letter F). Third, in Hungary we throw away enough bread to feed a small African country (letter R).
Not to mention the fact that all national income goes into a large common treasury, from which it is distributed according to the established principles and practices of trs 1 (see Figure 2), so that whatever work we do in trs 1 inevitably contributes to the prosperity of areas F, T, R, P, H.
Is Babits right: “Life is dirty, only nothing is clean” (Desires and Never)?
I think it is not our job to wash our hands. “Nothing can enter a man from the outside that can contaminate him. It is what comes from within, from the heart of man, that makes man unclean.” (Mk 7,15) It is not that our wage labour for our humble living is used for the evil of others that defiles us, but that we work more than absolutely necessary in the 1st trs for our welfare, or out of sloth and conformity even instead of service. A clean hand justifies no one. Only action can justify us. The act of healing the world. The Jesuit.

8.4. For more human governance

We will now look at the ways in which we can infuse our Trs 1 workplace and working hours with Trs 2.
To the extent that we have a say in plans, budgets and the use of human labour within working time, let us seek to influence these so that trs 1 better meets the healthy human needs of trs 1 in Figure 1. So let us strive to increase K, O, N and reduce F, T, R, H, P. We try to adapt our own work and tasks in the first place.
More human management can probably be achieved in a higher position. But Jesus called leadership in the kingdom of this world dominion (e.g. Lk 22:25-26). How do we judge whether a position is dominion? Since the ladder from slave to king is continuous, it would be difficult to draw a line. We will try to give some clues to the considerations of individual conscience and community in specific cases. In any case, we should beware of ‘spiritual’ considerations that allow for any social situation or objective action (e.g. it is all right to be rich, but remain spiritually independent of material things; it is all right to stab one’s enemies, but do it without feeling hatred).
A position can still be a non-domination if
– remain poor and merciful (it is okay to have a large salary if you use it for giving);
– it is not required to have a representation that makes its solidarity with the poor impossible, hypocritical;
– remains meek and useful (time is not spent on drilling, drill-baiting, sucking up, hypocrisy, lying, fighting narrow group interests, etc.);

– things do not outweigh people in your life;
– his main concern remains education in love (and he has time for the necessary learning, fellowship, prayer, etc.);
– he can follow Christ, who cried woe to the rich etc. and was executed by ‘justice’, combining goodness with prophetic criticism.
Further and even more specific points of reference can surely be found in one’s individual conscience or basic community.
Let’s see an example of how trs 1 is improved. Some of the tasks that Jesus emphasised, then still largely in trs 2 – such as the Good Samaritan, welcoming the traveller or supporting elderly parents – are now much more integrated into trs 1 in rich countries (ambulances, hospital, hospitality; restaurants, hotels; pensions). Of course, the wealthy enough used to have access to an age-appropriate escort, a doctor, an inn and a wealth reserve to ensure a peaceful old age; and ‘of course’ the destitute masses do not have all this today. The nature of the 1st Trsz. has not changed in substance, but its ‘shape’ (see Fig. 2) has, and in this respect it has changed in a favourable way. Probably the main role in this was played by the growth and organisation of material resources: the travellers on the Jericho road already pay in advance for public safety in the form of taxes, ambulance and hospital cover in the form of social insurance and passenger accident insurance. (At the same time, the more abundant material resources are much more available for armaments than in the past.) But there was also a certain role for leadership decisions at various levels, for the spiritual development of the wider population, and above all for the followers of Jesus.8.5. Our staff, clients

Our employees are among those with whom we spend the most time. We play a significant role in their lives, even unconsciously. If the circumstances and the task allow, we can talk to them in good conscience during working hours. The pleasure of working together and the personal development that comes from the work is as much an outcome as the finished product.
And the jobs where we work with people have great potential for service (foster care, child care, boarding school, nursing home, social worker, doctor, nurse, paramedic, physiotherapist, teacher, kindergarten teacher, psychologist, patron, etc.)
There are also many opportunities for people to meet people in their homes (e.g. statistical surveyor, bookkeeper, postman, etc.).
Such a service, initially hidden in the hours of paid work, can grow and, by overshadowing paid work, extend to the whole day. Let us take an example.
Jesus describes the Holy Spirit with the Greek word ‘Parakletos’ (meaning: advocate, lawyer, comforter, called upon, helper, intercessor) (e.g. John 15:26). Experienced from the inside, there are certainly many ministry opportunities in the legal profession (and in other professions where people come to us for help) that are similar to the work of the Spirit.

To mention just one: many couples seeking divorce turn to lawyers. Some of them do so simply to sort out the legal formalities of a divorce that has in fact already taken place between them; but a good number of them (unspokenly) prefer to seek help. This is shown by the fact that around 40% of them abandon their divorce (at least for a while) after the first conciliation meeting. If a lawyer, with the right spirit and preparation, takes the fate of families in crisis to heart, he or she can help couples who approach him or her by visiting them in their homes, talking, writing, inviting them to programmes, testimonies, group meetings, prayer, etc. He can help them a lot and in some cases achieve complete healing (they can become converted Christian families living in community). He obviously cannot ask for money for this extra work and visits, as they have not asked for it and if he did it out of their pockets, they would certainly refuse. And if at the end – happy with the result – they wanted to show their gratitude in money, he could not accept it either, because then he would lose much of the power of his example, he would be doing half-finished work, he would not help his ‘clients’ to become sacrificial loving people themselves, helping those in need without expecting anything in return.
At the same time, the work of such a lawyer for a salary is greatly reduced, as family therapy takes a lot of time. With such thoroughness, he can only take on a quarter of divorce cases. He becomes a “professional”, “full-time” lawyer (or more precisely, a “facilitator”), but his money-earning (1st trsz.) work is reduced (or rather, because of this).

8.6. Flexible working hours, independent work

A lawyer could not do all this so easily if his work were not essentially individual. Thus, although they work in teams, they have a great deal of freedom. But how does one who works in a brigade, where the others are “driven”, money-loving, exempt himself from what the “Gentiles do” (cf. Lk 12,30)? This is why it is important to look for jobs where one has the freedom to work much less (and thus, of course, earn much less) than the average. Such occupations are, for example, in intellectual work (translator, journalist, computer science, etc.) or in backyard farming (e.g. raising pigs, planting trees, planting foil, etc.)
It can also be a solution if you choose an occupation well below your abilities. In this way, he can easily do what others do and still have time and energy for other services. The sons of the world, on the contrary, aspire to high positions for higher pay that are beyond their abilities.
In many workplaces, part of the time is spent waiting or hovering. I don’t think it’s worth the front of the house if we don’t try to fill these times more slavishly than the rest of us with wage labour. Of course, they will only appreciate us (and we will only be a good influence) if we spend our time not gossiping or being bored, but in meaningful, useful ways: if they see that we are passionate about a good cause and that this permeates our working hours.
To sum up, we can do the level of paid work necessary for our poverty (see point 8.1) with a good career choice (see point 8.2) with a good conscience, as part of our vocation, just as we can do the washing up at home. If we have transformed our life into a harmony of life to please God, then we should carry out every aspect of it with the ambition of holiness of life.

9) Preparing for the profession

9.1. Very important

If a Christian adult with an old-fashioned work ethic, who is highly skilled in his profession and very conscientious in his work, tries to do something more necessary, he will probably soon find with disillusionment that he is of little more use to mankind as a bumbling catechist, for example, than if he were to pursue his profession with all his energy and competence. He will have to work hard to prepare himself for life again, because in the decade and a half or two decades he spent preparing himself in his youth, as a result of the distorted one-sidedness of the education system, he was almost only prepared for the profession.
Of course, the interests of mankind are paramount, so if one realises that one’s energies must be put into the 2nd trs, one cannot avoid ‘retraining’ oneself. After all, if, for example, more oat weavers are trained than necessary, the problem is not solved by building a new oat weaving combine, but the graduate oat weavers have to throw away their degrees and knowledge and, annoyed at the lack of planning in the education systems, retrain themselves for a more necessary trade.

But in reality it is not so clear. A common example: many women spend years studying, earning a degree, but this does not prepare them for the role of wife and mother. It is a scientific fact that one of the prerequisites for the mental health of a young child is a close, uninterrupted, loving mother-child relationship in the first years. So it should be a priority social need for mothers to care for their children in the early years. Yet so many women with higher salaries and degrees do not go on childcare, saying that because they get paid more for their work, it is surely more important to society than childcare. They do not see that there is little correlation between solvent demand and important needs. Others argue that they will not throw away their degree to wash nappies instead. But they would stay at home to make people, which would require more preparation than anything else. If they also had a degree in child-rearing, it would not be so strange to see their other degree lying fallow for a while. Some of the priests also have professions and degrees, yet (in the case of non-institutionalised independence) we do not consider it a crime not to practise them.

Since the human image of those who design the educational systems and the forces that shape them is not the same as the image of Jesus in Figure 1, the annoyance and self-conversion of Christians who are becoming aware of their vocation will be very frequent and intense – unless we can gradually awaken vocation in young people at the pre-career age!

9.3. School choice

“Why didn’t you become a veterinarian?” his teachers asked in astonishment of a Christian boy who is the only student of colour in an agricultural college, even though he only learns as much as he tutors his peers. His abilities and the knowledge he had acquired in his boyhood in a large parish were well weighed in choosing a school on the basis of the criterion mentioned in 8.6: it is worth while to choose a school, a profession, a trade, a position, below ability, thus foregoing more money and social grandeur, and freeing oneself for many services besides a respectable livelihood.
Will not the consequence be a general lack of ambition and dullness? Will not the swelling sail of scientific and economic progress become limp?
In one apocryphal passage, Jesus says to the man who breaks the Sabbath: “Blessed are you if you know what you are doing. But if you do not know, you are cursed.” Likewise, if it is a vocation that gives rise to this ability-under-choice, then there is no danger of the danger posed in the question above. Then a very healthy change happens: young personalities become more harmonious, instead of being distorted into one-sidedness in over-stretched learning; the over-stretched pace of scientific and economic ‘progress’ slows down somewhat, and at the same time people’s mental health, family happiness, multi-faceted culture and friendships increase; and the sense of vocation, no longer paying attention to why they are paid, stretches its shoulders to the most pressing problems of humanity, instead of dragging the already strained side of the ‘drawer’ further.

In school, both selfishness and vocation can appear outwardly in the form of both diligence and negligence:
– Selfishness can be diligent (I study to get into the graduate elite) and it can be neglectful (I don’t study because I am lazy).
– Vocation can also be diligent (I study to help, to be a “Parakletos”) and (in this respect) lacking in energy (I need this knowledge to make a modest living, but I study the skills I need for my vocation extremely diligently outside school).
Of course, even a candidate for Parakletos does not study everything indiscriminately and diligently. In some subjects, he is content with a level 2, and he also learns – outside school – things that are necessary for his vocation but not included in the curriculum. But can students choose wisely, or will their natural laziness make most of what they learn superfluous? Let us not lose sight of the fact that this study encourages ambitious Christians to redirect their energies and the unambitious to become committed Christians who are ambitious in their vocation. For those who choose laziness, this study offers no justification. But an ambitious student knows how to choose wisely what to study, because it is this very ambition that necessarily leads him to practise his vocation during his student years. It is in this practice that he or she gains the experience and the judgement of the kind of preparation he or she needs.
Still, those who find little in their studies that is relevant to their vocation should think about whether they should choose a profession and school closer to their vocation, and how they could still apply their knowledge in the 2nd trsz.
Another important aspect of school (and career) choice is to find a paid job in the place (geographical location or sociological context) where one’s vocation calls for it. Often the vocation calls to the village, but the occupation is linked to the town. Or the vocation may call you to a particular social stratum (workers, peasants, tramps, gypsies, etc.), but the occupation surrounds you with another stratum. It is much harder to change later than to think ahead. (Many young people ‘work their way up’ to a more glamorous, ‘elite’ environment rather than discovering their mission to their own people.)
History presents us with a series of great pedagogical saints (e.g. St Joseph of Calazanti, St Philip of Neri, St John Bosco of Don Bosco). Even today, many young Christians find teaching the profession closest to their vocation. Unfortunately, the semi-official view is that Christian men are ‘not suited to educate future generations in the right spirit’. Yet we should not give up the N field at all if we can work there courageously and uncompromisingly. There is a possibility to do so. For as a matter of law, those who produce material things are always paid more than those who educate people. That is why people with teaching qualifications often prefer to go into better-paid non-teaching jobs. Thus, schools (especially in the ‘vacuum’ created by social upward mobility, e.g. in small villages) are happy to accept unqualified teachers, and such a job can even allow someone who has not been admitted to college because of his religious beliefs to graduate

On the subject of courage and non-negotiation: in some cases, accepting the consequences can have a much greater educational effect than continuing to teach by silencing the conviction. For example, in Mexico in 1926, elementary school teachers were required to make a declaration in favour of atheism. Out of 400 teachers, 399 chose unemployment. Today 96% of Mexicans are Catholic.

9.4. Positive ethics

Our task is not to banish wage labour from our lives, but to make ourselves available to those in genuine need, out of passionate love for God and humanity, without expecting payment. In this way, by constantly taking on more important services in place of those who are more indispensable, harmony of life is developed and wage labour is reduced to the minimum necessary for subsistence.
On the contrary, if one does not serve sometimes almost to the point of overwork, it is to be feared that he will use the dethronement of wage-labour merely as a self-justification for his lack of ambition, his talents will fall into idleness between the two systems of production, and he will be thus reduced to the status of a “lazy, idle servant” (cf. Mt 25,26).

10.) The 2. trsz.

10.1 Why is it called a “production system”?

“The process of humanization on earth, though not identical with the development of the Kingdom of God, is included in it. Our mission is therefore not only religious but also human. The Christian message is addressed to all the labours of man,” comments Schillebeeckx in Lumen Gentium (Concilium, June-July 1968). Others, seeing this impossible separation, include wage-labour in the Christian vocation, but only in principle, superficially, with a sprinkling of holy water, without reflecting on and changing the reality of wage-labour according to the requirements of the Gospel. Unlike these two extremes, work must be made a real part of vocation:
– by revising and excluding from it all that is non-Christian
– and by discovering forms of work that are only apparently similar to the work of trs 1, because we do it differently and for others.
The essence of this difference is that in trs 2 we are not looking at whether a need is solvent, but whether it is pleasing to God. We want to make people healthy (in the sense of trs 1) by serving healthy needs.
The term “production system” implies that we need to serve on an “industrial” scale because the need is huge. In addition, trs 2 must provide work opportunities (not wage jobs, but perhaps incidentally so) for people willing to serve (good examples are the works of Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer, in which many people find trs 2 work opportunities. But a bush commons or a life around a parish can also develop in this direction.)

The characteristic of trsz 2 is that it creates community among those who serve in it. Another is that its purpose and means overlap: it makes people who are half-healed healthier by giving them the opportunity to serve others. In this way it satisfies the healthy human need to “want to serve”. Special mention should be made here of women who, for various reasons (including voluntary choice), have not started families. For them, there is much less institutional framework for life than for men who choose celibacy. Special care must be taken to help them find their place. This means a more fulfilling life for them and can be a significant resource for 2nd trs.
Flexibility is an important feature of the 2nd trimester work schedule in general. Between the obsession of working mothers and the life-grey dichotomy often felt by those who have children, the 1st trimester does not find much of a solution. Neither working from home nor part-time employment is sufficient or appropriate. However, services can be provided at home and, if necessary, outside the home.

The concept of a production system also expresses the need to do the same maximum preparation, time input, etc. as others do for wage work. Today, we first arrange our lives according to our occupation (schools, jobs, settling down) and in our free time, almost as a hobby, we “build” the Kingdom of God. We need to turn it around: our vocation is the basis of our life, and it is subordinate to it, adapted to it, and even deriving from it, that we must choose our schools (and within them, what we learn deeply and what we learn more), our occupation, our place of work, our place of residence.

Figure 4 The second production system

We must be professional in our profession, but not as a slicer, a barber, but in the full harmony of life. It follows that in trs 2 there is not an elite group of professionals working in a particular field, but they simply bring together and direct the work of many. For example, someone who is a specialist in marriage therapy will naturally go to a patient’s house to clean up with a brother who regularly visits; and when healing a couple in difficulty, he will also enlist the help of his ‘amateur’ brothers and sisters in a good marriage.
“Training for ministry must also be appropriate to the ‘production system’: not just individual, but regular, collective and organised (e.g. courses). At the same time, it must be closely linked to practice. The 2nd TRS itself must be organised and planned, based on a thorough analysis and knowledge of social reality.

Two differences should be highlighted where the term ‘production system’ is misleading. Firstly, the whole of our service is essentially directed not at things but at people. If we are to heal the world, we must heal the hearts of people. For all ills come from man. And the other difference is that we must engage in our ministry with our whole personality. The world has enough unredeemed redeemers. Only when we become saints will we sanctify the world.

10.2. What is needed?

Without any particular order, here are some examples of the reality and vision of a small group of communities around a parish. First of all, many leaders who create and nurture small communities are needed, because a small community group can be a universal organisation for ministry and preparation. And the development of small communities is facilitated by such ministries as: pastoral care, lectures, courses and practical training, pastoral leadership, liaison between different churches and denominations to work for unity and to share experiences of the most dynamic movements, interpretation…
Organising and running camps for the education of young people (to support and supplement family education), drama and its many supporting activities, singing, music and its supporting activities, physical education and games…
To help the needy directly, organising charities (and making everyone available for small occasional or regular help), social workers; organising a hunger mission..
The intellectual life, essential for action, is supported by such services as: librarian with a good knowledge of the specific literature of the 2nd trs., book distribution, editing, contemplation, typing, translation, writing studies and books, photography, tape recording, creating art, making songs, creating board games …
A large number of people are needed for healing participation in social problems:
– pastors and many catechists who, by contacting “heathens” who need religious solemnity at life’s turning points, can lead them to committed small-community Christianity;
– missionaries to villages, homeless people, gypsies, workers, the state care system, tourists, people in spiritual crisis (e.g. telephone helplines), etc;
– counsellors for couples in crisis, for those raising children, for those about to start a family, for those about to choose a career, etc.
The thousands of needs of the 2nd trsz. can benefit from almost all skills, whether in the humanities (e.g. doctor, lawyer, psychologist, sociologist), technical (e.g. architect, computer technician) or manual trades (painter, carpenter, electrician, plumber, plumber, heating engineer, plumber, household appliance repairer, driver, etc.).

10.3. Three main areas of trsz. 2

The first is direct assistance. For example, getting a TV set for a single lady on a pension, or taking care of the official affairs of a disabled person, or introducing a young person seeking God to Christianity. For the reasons explained at the end of point 8.4, here in the richer part of the world, direct help is largely I, and to a lesser extent E and A. Here, the “sheep without a shepherd” are the greatest object of the prudent mercy, and on them “his heart is set” (cf. Mt 9:36).
The areas E and A (which are almost always interspersed with the need I) are mainly to be found in the ‘vacuum’ left by social upward mobility (e.g. farms, small villages, the lower classes). A French example: a community of three couples moves to a remote village where there is no priest, no doctor. They are well prepared, including a teacher, a doctor, a farmer. A community capable of facing up to all difficulties. The village is blessed by their work, their helpfulness, their missionary service.
In addition to the direct help, there are also a number of background activities, such as the production of spiritual products for the letter I.
Another area of trsz. 2: giving money to support the brothers and sisters working on geographically distant problems (e.g. Mother Teresa, missionaries, etc.)
Whenever this is mentioned, someone always brings up the idea of looking around us for those in need, because giving money is easy, but loving personally is harder. And indeed, there are certainly some for whom sending money is as much a sop to their conscience as paying church taxes is for others (cf. 5.5). Yet we must see that direct help and remote help are not at all contradictory, but are directly consequential. For if I am truly concerned about world hunger, I will obviously try to win others to this cause, and I cannot do so without personal charity. At the same time, however, it is of no use if I make an excellent Christian of myself and others, if we are not capable of taking on the burden of poverty for our brothers and sisters (for example, in Australia, Chinese migrant workers earn a good living, and are surrounded by advertising, shop windows and the consumerism of others). Yet they always send home most of their wages, living on a handful of rice just like the extended family at home).
It is now a well-known fact that world oppression arose because the armed white man used the resources of other peoples for his own ends. “If, at the touch of a magic wand, all that had been built with the profits extracted from the colonial peoples would disappear, whole cities throughout Europe would vanish without a trace.” (György Makai: The Third World) If it is within the reach of the 1st trs. to plunder and destroy, it is necessary that the 2nd trs. should also have the Third World close at hand to help!
The third main area of the 2nd trsz. is the internal help in the community. For example, if something is broken in the house, I can fix it myself (if I can, slowly and unprofessionally) or I can call a professional (which is expensive and who knows if he will do it properly), but often the best thing is to call a brother or sister who is good at it and has tools (because it is his profession, or a handyman). The latter is internal helping.

There are three advantages:
– it takes him much less time than it takes me because he knows how;
– He does it professionally and honestly (and probably cheaper);
– the money stays in the community.
So, if we think of the community as a big family, trying to do its internal things in a way that best serves the outside world, then it is reasonable to have everything done by the most competent person (least time and best results). There is also an opportunity to rebuke each other: “This is your need to be by far the consumer, I’m not doing it for you.”

It is a difficult question to decide whether we should pay each other for this internal help. If we truly trust each other (that the other will give all the money they have to give as much as I do), then internal payment is like putting money from one pocket into another. But still, my need is solvent (letter K) and my brother has the right to prioritize the truly needy over me (in fact, it is our common goal, I should encourage him to do the same!). If, therefore, I am not poor like the insolvent poor, I had better pay some respectable price for the service within; and if he will not accept it, I shall put it without fail into the coffers of the hungry, for thus my brother’s helping me becomes a service to the truly needy.

I do not wish to give a further, detailed, specific description of trsz 2. It is born out of the willingness and resourcefulness of communities to serve, and to know and adapt to their social environment. Ideas abound when you look at reality and think with your heart. A Taizé letter, the Lives of the Saints, a psychological or sociological article analysing human or social problems, a newspaper article, a conversation in a pub – followed by responsible community discussion and prayer – and a blessed enterprise is born.

IV. Conclusions

11) Poverty, pettiness, defencelessness

11.1 The key question: do we accept poverty?!

The situation of clergy outside the cloister is today most similar to that of lay people who take their Christian vocation seriously. How do they manage to ensure that their livelihood does not come at the expense of their – obviously more important – priestly activity? They look for jobs that require little time (e.g. extermination, cleaning, boiler heating, translation, etc.) and reduce their financial needs to a level that allows them to make a living. St Paul is also known to have supported himself by weaving tents from time to time.
With practical prudence, surely there are many ways to work less for less money. For example, only the man or only the woman may be in wage employment, or they may work part-time, or they may be freelance, self-employed, free-lance, working in the backyard, etc. Or we can consider the larger unit than the family, the small community, as a farming unit, and invent various forms of non-institutionalised independence, of alternate subsistence.
It may be worthwhile at some point to examine in a study the advantages and problems of the division of labour within the family (or small community) in terms of male and female identity, children, marriage, community and service.
We have seen that we have no responsibility to promote scientific and economic progress, but that the 2nd trs. is our responsibility. This, however, is only the conscious condition for taking the vocation seriously. The key question is whether we can live on a lot less money for the sake of service.
In our practice, Christian poverty is primarily the result of giving money. After all, those who do not have Material Goods as their god (and who have already solved their housing problem) can find plenty of their normal monthly income for giving. The practice of counting money is also so important in order to control our monthly self-enrichment.
The poverty of Jesus and the apostles, on the other hand, was the result of leaving their livelihood, their occupation (Jesus the carpentry, the apostles the nets, the customs, the land, cf. Mk 10,29) in order to invest their labour in the 2nd trs. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Mk 1,17).
A beautiful but still one-sided form of Christian poverty, invented for passive ‘seculars’, is to give more and more of our monthly accumulated wealth, according to the measure of our hearts. We are of much more use to the world and the Kingdom if we do not put ourselves in the 1st trsz (and give from the money we receive for it), but in the 2nd trsz. “I have neither gold nor silver, but what I have -” is worth much more: my time, my energy, my charisms, my service, my love, my self (cf. Acts 3,6).

11.2. Poverty as a means to save the world

Poverty is not just an unfortunate consequence of vocation, but an integral part of it, a means to an end.
This is not to diminish the importance of giving. An important service of the 2nd trs. is the giving of money to the hungry. (For the needy in developed countries and for community purposes only in exceptional cases! It is very common that the needs of the “needy” in this country already fall well into the F area! Just think where our housing needs lie on the scale between a multi-million forint townhouse in Rosedomb and a small village adobe house costing a few thousand forints. And how needy is someone who spends thousands of forints on furnishing his home – when less fashionable furniture can be bought for free. These “rich people supporting each other” broadcasts are mostly the result of a guilty conscience: “If I can afford such a standard of living for myself, what right do I have to consider his similar needs as unjustified?” Poor to poor does not give money for foolishness, only for human need.
And the same applies to the use of Community money. No small part of the money that flows into the official church framework serves individual and collective consumer needs that are scandalous in the face of the Gospel. The church, which has millions of hungry members, may maintain its buildings in vain, but those who decide on its money are “inwardly full of greed and wickedness” (Lk 11,39). The temple will not be clean and beautiful as long as it is a den of devils and robbers (cf. Lk 19:46), as long as the income of the temple is not given by merciful men to the needy (Lk 11:41)! When a say in the use of money is at most formal, it is best to send the church tax straight away to support the poor churches and to inform our own parishioners of this, so as not to offend them (Mt 17,27).

Poverty as an independent service has enormous significance in stopping the current future exploitation and destruction of the earth. It is no coincidence that Saint Francis of Assisi became the patron saint of ecology. Countering the self-accumulation of capital, Marx declared that the only value-creating force is human labor. Humanity had to learn at its own expense that this proposition is only valid in the opposition of capital and labor. Human labor is only minimally value-creating compared to the fact that the greatest part of values is the Earth’s ready-made treasures. Schumacher tries to make economists understand that their system consumes its capital, thus rushing towards certain bankruptcy. Humans are only similar to the housewife who shops in the store and prepares the food. Therefore, it can be said that in today’s situation, the more a person consumes beyond the level of simple subsistence, the more they harm the Earth than what they use for their work in return. The poor, by their poverty alone, are more useful than those who consume and produce beyond the level of poverty. (Our ideal, of course, is not just passive poverty.)
Our life, rich in God and poor in material things, must be immensely attractive and compelling. The ascetic world culture is the only answer to the historical question, “Will we survive the future?”
Therefore, we must not only accept poverty as a consequence of giving and a vocation not worth pursuing for money;
but we must also strive for poverty (because consumption at level F is destructive);
and we must educate towards poverty, for it is the only way to ensure that humanity’s life is not one of war, exploitation, and ecological destruction; and that our life and the lives entrusted to us are not a sad departure from Jesus (cf. Mk 10:22), a contempt for God (cf. Lk 16:13), and unhappiness.

11.3. The Spirit of Poverty

What motivations does the Spirit call us to poverty with?
• Say no to the destruction of the Earth.

• Say no to the exploitation of the poor.

• Share the fate of the hungry. In the body of Christ, “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Cor 12:26). But not hypocritically, rather genuinely, effectively: “He takes our burden, our care. To take it on his shoulders is not foolish!” – says Attila József.

• Represent those whose cries are even suppressed. Be a burning candle stub, so that “people see better” the distant conflagration. Myrdal, the 1974 Nobel laureate writes: “In people’s minds, there are two incompatible lines of thought present simultaneously: on the one hand, they recognize that the masses in underdeveloped countries suffer terrible misery and that they need substantial help; on the other hand, they selfishly refuse to make any significant sacrifice for this help. This contradiction necessarily has a devastating effect on people’s sense of reality!” Personal impact must restore people’s sense of reality. Where we live, in the midst of the wealthy world, we must represent reality with our way of life.

• We want to live richly in God. Life harmony is only possible on the soil of poverty. And we want to give everything to our children: namely, God first and foremost, a community of love, a merciful heart, the ability to love. We can only give them this in a family of poverty.

• Help with what you give up. (Like the Chinese guest workers, see section 9.3.)

Many misunderstand, misinterpret, or mock poverty. But the Spirit of Poverty, love, finds the right way of life. They say that families cannot achieve poverty. But Mother Teresa feeds seven thousand children every day in Calcutta, and this large family is not an obstacle to her poverty. Giving our children nutritious food: this is not wealth, but service to the hungry. Indeed, the daily hunger of those entrusted to us is the same “need” as that of the distant hungry. But if I provide for my children with the awareness that I have not even fed many of their “adopted” siblings, then I will not destroy my own with more material things than absolutely necessary, but rather feed the adopted ones. (Yes, destroy! Because one cannot serve two masters, and if I give prosperity to my children, then I cannot give them God!)
Let us think practically about how we can free up resources for service. Love does not strive for representative poverty, but for effective poverty. In today’s human life, the four biggest material items are housing, cars, vacations, and home furnishings. Therefore, the most significant questions of poverty are these:
• What kind of housing am I satisfied with? Do I also strive for where most people strive, and where, consequently, everything is more expensive? Instead, do I seek the “vacuums” created by social ambition, where I can get housing much cheaper (and where there is a much greater need for service)?

• Can I truly serve more with a car than without? After all, operating a car consumes enough resources (money, time, energy) for raising two children, feeding two communities, or educating 7 Indian children! And besides, it is perhaps the most versatile and effective tool for destroying the Earth! Is my additional service made possible by the car worth that much? And if sometimes a car is justified and I buy it, do I consider before each trip whether it is absolutely necessary to go by car?

• What does vacation mean to me? A bus tour, Lake Balaton, a hotel, driving? Or a friend’s house in a small village, a bike tour, camping, a western trip with hitchhiking and a sleeping bag? Does it mean consumption, laziness, snobbery? Or silence, conversation, beauty, prayer, preparation, the adventure of new types of service, play…? And if I have my own vacation home (if I already have one), do I help others who need such a vacation (usually families with small children)?

• Today, almost every necessary piece of furniture can be obtained for free or much cheaper with patience and inquiry from less valuable legacies, people moving into new homes, houses about to be demolished, consumer-minded acquaintances, etc. Therefore, someone who furnishes their home very cheaply does not require deprivation. Normal aesthetics can also be created cheaply, at home. One only has to endure the gaze of others. But if we are afraid of the gaze of others, then it is better not to claim ourselves as Christians in words, because the contradiction between word and lifestyle only brings shame upon Him. If we are afraid that they will see the light, and therefore cover it with a “home decor veil,” then why did we light a light at all? (cf. Mt 5:15) An expensively furnished home (if not a remnant of a pre-conversion lifestyle) is a testimony that can destroy, discredit any apostolic endeavor.

11.4. The Basis of All Our Educative Power is Sacrifice

The smallness, poverty, and defenselessness born of love, embraced for the sake of vocation and in harmony with God’s will (and in some cases – not because of some rule, but because the nature of service requires it – renunciation of marriage), in short, sacrifice, without which there is only wormy, unripe fruit. “The student is not above the teacher.” (Mt 10:24) We cannot raise better disciples than we ourselves are to the Master! (At most, if they seriously seek the Kingdom of God, they will outgrow us.)

Gyula I. Simonyi

The post Economy of LifeHarmony: is the economy harmful, is work immoral? appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Helping those millions with unmet need of Human Right of Contraception (UN, 1968) helps to avoid unintended pregnancies, i.e. avoid significant CO2e emissions. This very effective climate protection can be measured e.g. by the Quality Family Planning Standard (QFPS TM), and ensuring demand, access and use of contraception and other health services can be improved with the birth equity entitlements described below.

We call on the President and Delegates of the COP28 to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning to address human rights obligations, rising global inequality, gender inequity, ecological overshoot, and the climate crisis.

Governments, NGOs, and major foundations are failing women, children and future generations. There is a lack of a multilateral agenda for population policies in the midst of a climate emergency, especially affecting the vulnerable majority in the global south. Without a universal effort towards equitable and sustainable family planning, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), FP2030
commitment, and Human Development Index benchmarks cannot be achieved, and human rights will continue to suffer. Already the MDG5b (“Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health!”) justification stated: “Unmet need for family planning undermines achievement of several other goals.”

However, current political, religious, economic, and cultural pressures to increase births, and obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril.

Today, almost half of all pregnancies are unplanned. The United Nations declared contraception a human right already in 1968. The ICPD Cairo Programme of Action (1994), MDG5b (2005), SDG 3.7 and 5.6 (2015) all call for contraceptive access for all. Nevertheless still hundreds of millions of women are without access to contraception.

Worsening inequality, in large part driven by children born into unplanned and unjust conditions, is a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe. The severe consequences include psychological trauma, lack of education and health care, high maternal and infant mortality, poverty and vulnerability to violence.

Avoiding unintended pregnancies also means avoiding significant CO2e emissions. The emissions avoided can be measured e.g. by the Quality Family Planning Standard (QFPS TM). This standard is based on data from UNFPA, IPPF, MSI and the Guttmacher Institute. There are billions more humans on this planet than Earth can support in an ecologically sustainable way. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, contributes to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation.

Nearly half of the world’s children are at an ‘extremely high risk’ of the impacts of the climate crisis.
– UNICEF

For the past two years we have been collecting sign-ons for iterations of a letter to the COP. We are making progress. The COP27 made a historic move to establish a Loss and Damages Fund. Such climate reparations are what we need but they are insufficient if they do not improve the birth and development conditions of vulnerable children.

Read our COP28 letter here.

The most effective way to protect the communities and regions who will be most harmed is by ensuring all children a Fair Start in life.

The current COP model externalizes the true costs of wealth on women and children. This is a call to pay them back.

• The fundamental policy model leadership is using is killing innocent people.
• That model violates human rights because it does not ensure all children minimum levels of wellbeing.
• Leadership misled those at risk about the efficacy of their fundamental policy model. A better model can save millions of lives, and is simply based on prioritizing loss and damage payments as ecosocial birth equity entitlements – the first and overriding human right.
• This correct model is already being practiced and is effective.

PLEASE SIGN to take powerful action by adding your organization’s name here.

Cute Native African Women Carrying healthful Water in a village

Sign On Now

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The population explosion – a problem kept secret

As has been previously mentioned, the earth’s population is currently growing by 1.2 percent annually, an increase which, if it continues, will double the number of people in two generations – or in 58 years to be exact.

The population explosion is one of the main reasons behind climate change and it also accelerates the process. For example, growing population increases demands for energy and food production, which means greater need for farming land and pastures, resulting in deforestation, which causes increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmental damage, the second of our megaproblems, is also affected by population growth. For example, when population increases there is automatically less per person of already over-utilized renewable natural resources. There is the threat of famine, and more severe water shortages. Other consequences of a greater population will be greater pollution, more damage to nature and faster depletion of biodiversity.

In addition, a sharp increase in population can transform normally useful and desirable advances into negative or dangerous changes. This could mean that technological developments and improved living standards – both of which are generally viewed as most advantageous – could increase demand for more energy and natural resources. If these normally positive developments occur simultaneously with a great increase in population the consequences can obviously be serious environmental damage.

Sharp population growth also increases hostility between ethnic groups and nations, as they clash over diminished resources. This would contribute to the weakening of political stability and lead to greater risk of political violence. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is a terrifying example.

The final point in this brief inventory: the population explosion is the most important cause of poverty. Poverty and population growth together create a vicious cycle. A small family farm can possibly support one family, but when land is inherited and divided up by several children, each with his own family, it can no longer support everyone. The result is worse poverty in the farmlands or in shanty-towns outside large cities. Measures against poverty are offset by greater population, which, in some nations – especially in southern Africa – result in a decrease in the percentage of poor while the actual numbers of the poor continue to increase.

It should be emphasized that most problems do not grow proportionally with the increase of population but much faster. For example, if there is a 10 percent water shortage in an area to start with – that is, water supply is 10 percent below that which is needed – then a 50 percent increase in population would mean the water shortage climbs by 500 percent to 60 percent.

What is the reason behind the obviously detrimental population explosion and why have we not taken serious measures to stop the growth (with the exception of the actions taken in China)?

One of the most important reasons for the rapid increase in population in poor nations seems to be poverty in itself, with its resultant low education level and non-existent family planning, due to ignorance and/or traditional and sometimes religious reasons.

Lack of equality between the sexes in many developing nations can also greatly contribute to high birth rates. Many young women become pregnant against their will, and parents may place greater value on sons than daughters, with births continuing until the desired number of sons is reached. High unemployment rates among women in developing nations also contribute to high birth rates.
At the start of this discussion, we noted that three closely linked critical explanatory factors are behind mankind’s four mega-problems. The population explosion – the invisible, rarely discussed basic villain in the drama – illustrates this thesis. Lack of understanding of the problems, faulty deliberations and flawed judgment are the main reasons why political leaders have never seriously attempted to halt the extremely rapid growth of population in a number of nations, despite the fact that it has created many severe problems.

To be more specific, we can point to some plausible reasons:
• The public underestimates the significance of population growth. Some even view it as positive. Some see the increased number of people primarily as a growing market for their products.
• Many believe it is not politically correct to demand and take measures to limit population growth. Some seem to believe it is a human right to bring as many children as possible into the world.
• Politicians seem to consider population growth as a natural phenomenon that mankind should expect and that nothing can be done about it.

Even the present world political system with sovereign national states contributes to population growth since the system can effectively stop any outside attempts to influence growth. All nations today can insist that population developments and high birth rates are matters of internal state affairs.

Obviously, nobody knows today how many people can live on the earth and enjoy decent living standards in harmony with the environment. This depends, among other things, on developments in agricultural technology, future energy and water supplies, what is meant by “decent living standards”, and, not the least, on the effects of climate change. But we do know that based on existing knowledge and technology the earth cannot in the long term support today’s population enjoying standards that the “wealthy” nations’ inhabitants are accustomed to and which all others try to attain. This means that the only rational development would be to try to adjust the number of people in relation to existing and foreseeable opportunities. Allowing wishful thinking or being resigned to the situation to guide decisions in this question means inexcusable risk-taking.

If allowed to continue, the population explosion can very well be a main cause for mankind’s devastation by enormous catastrophes.
…
What can be done about rapid population growth? Indeed, the key to the solution is obviously the general public’s understanding of and attitude to the problem. Therefore, in the near future, the worldwide public must be conscious not only of the dangerous consequences of the population explosion described earlier but should also know:
• that the rapid population growth is not any one nation’s “internal domestic affair” but something that can harm humanity’s most important interests,
• that it cannot be considered a human right for a woman to have more than two children,
• that the earth’s resources are not even enough for the existing population if all were to enjoy industrialized nations’ living standards – and that the situation will be much worse as early as within two generations if the world population has increased by several billion,
• that we cannot count on people in the poorest nations continuing to accept living on so much fewer resources than people of industrialized nations,
• that a “normalization” of average life expectancy to that of industrialized nations would in itself mean that the number of people on earth would increase from today’s 6.8 billion to 8.0 billion.

It is unrealistic to believe that such an educational campaign would be undertaken by political initiative, given the nonchalance with which this problem has been treated so far. Instead, the public must first be clearly aware of the great risks connected to the population explosion and demand counter-measures before the matter finally gets priority on the political leaders’ international agenda.

Only then can we hope for an action program worth the name; that negotiators from the rich nations agree with colleagues from the fast-growing nations to adopt the most effective efforts in education, improved health care, greater employment for women, family planning and other measures to curb the birth rate.

https://globalchallenges.org//app/uploads/2023/06/The-Greatest-Challenges-of-Our-Time-2009.pdf

The post The population explosion – the problem that is kept secret appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Abstract

A biological system can be defined as a collection of interacting elements, organised together with a common function(s). This framework can provide valuable insights into the problematic interactions between humanity and the rest of life on earth. Life is composed of a nested hierarchy of systems, united into a vastly complex, global system of ecosystems, the biosystem. The function of the biosystem and its components is the sustainable reproduction and evolution of life. Humans have many of their own systems, including a global, commercially oriented system of corporations and social structures, which we term the corposystem. A major aim of the corposystem is endless growth for profit, which depends on endless human population growth: not sustainable on a finite planet. These two global systems are clearly in direct conflict. To preserve the biosystem, including humanity, we must align the corposystem ethic with the reality of the biosystem’s needs

Introduction

Our ‘blue-green marble’ – our living earth, blue waters and green plants that support the lives of animals, including us – is turning brown. Areas of brown earth, as seen from space, spread across the continents: places where lush vegetation can no longer flourish. The substance of life, the biomass, is draining out of life and into the cities (West, 2018), which cannot recycle it into living matter. Planet Earth is being depleted of life, with mass species extinctions (Kolbert, 2014), as well as climate change and degradation of soil and other ecosystems. David Suzuki, David Attenborough, William Ripple and many more biologists, with astronauts, agriculturists, medics, foresters and more, have seen that planetary lifeis crashing, and they have warned us (Ripple et al., 2022).

The concern is valid, the danger clear and present. But much of public opinion has minimised these warnings because: (1) we have an outdated, misleading view of evolution;(2) we believe that we can use technologies to save us as we have done with great success since Homo sapiens invented agriculture or used fire; (3) many people do not realise or believe that the current global crises are largely caused by human overpopulation (Bajaj and Stade 2023; Rees, 2023);

(4) we believe the consequences will not be all that bad and we can adapt to any environmental changes; and (5) many people reliant on social media have learned to expect simple answers to our complex problems (Bajaj and Stade, 2023; Crist et al., 2022; Salmony, 2023; Wolf et al., 2021; Rees, 2023).This article aims to summarise a more current view of evolution, of life relative to its environments, and of human relationships with them(Lamoreux, 2021), which may help to understand why the above five views are mistaken and how we may more appropriately address our current planetary crises. We propose that urgent and radical changes are needed in human behaviour and in our dominant social system, to move away from the unsustainable goals of profit and endless growth, and align ourselves with the overall needs of life on earth.

Biosystem and corposystem

Here we introduce key concepts: the biosystem (and how a living system can be sustainable), and the corposystem. A biological system can be defined as a collection of elements that interact together with a common, evolved function (Meadows, 2008) in support of life (Figure 1), although the idea of function needs qualification at the ecosystem level and above (more below). The components of a system can themselves be systems, and so on, as happens widely in biology (Figure 1).

Figure 1. System and subsystems

The outer circles represent systems, which could be living systems. The coloured circles represent components of each system, with one expanded to show that the components are subsystems – e.g. species within an ecosystem, organ systems within an animal or organelles within a cell. The solid lines represent interactions / communication between the components (such as between flowering plant and pollinator). The arcs on the outside represent emergent properties (such as shape and colour, see text later). The interactions between components will involve emergent properties.

Living cells are systems composed of organelles and molecules. Organs and organ systems are composed of cells and tissues. Likewise, individual living organisms are composed of organs, species are composed of individuals and ecosystems of species. The solid lines represent the highly evolved and balanced interactions/communications among the components, whether components of a living cell or of an entire ecosystem. These living systems are also complex adaptive systems. Complex means that their subsystems are disparate (not all the same), and adaptive means they can respond to their environments (Meadows, 2008). An ecosystem that is not in evolutionary steady state, for example where an invasive species has been introduced, may also become a ‘complex maladaptive system’, where its subsystems are in conflict (Wilson et al., 2023). Such systems will generally be unstable. The entire planetary biosphere is composed of countless interacting and overlapping ecosystems that have evolved naturally over billions of years, from simple toward complex (although not monotonically but occasionally via catastrophes and mass extinctions), to work efficiently and sustainably together; so we call it here the biosystem. Ecosystems and the global biosystem can be said to have a function, since natural selection operates on them and continues to select the current version. In this sense, their function is the sustenance of life. The biosystem plays an active role in the biogeochemical (combined biological, geological, and chemical) cycles of Earth (Turner, 2018).

At each level of organisation, we find emergent properties – properties of an entity that are not found in its component parts (Figure 1). The emergent properties of a living system are responsible for that system’s particular functions, including communication with specific other systems. Examples of emergent properties at the planetary level are the global distribution of species and their migrations, and the atmospheric levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. At a less complex level, an emergent property of an enzyme in a cell might be a specific form of catalysis.

A defining characteristic of the biosystem is its ability to sustain itself using recycling processes, while responding to changing environments using evolution (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Requirements of a sustainable living system.

Yellow/incoming arrow: Energy from the sun is captured, through photosynthesis. Green/outermost cycle: Organic chemical energy cycles through life (food chains). Black/next cycle in: Organic matter recycles, carrying biological information and energy within biological structures. Blue/two innermost cycles: Genetic (and other biological) information, determining the processes fuelled by the energy, recycles over long timescales, modulated by evolution. Pink/arrow leaving: Energy released as heat, after doing work maintaining life.

Figure 2 represents minimal requirements of a sustainable living system (an ecosystem or the biosystem). Importantly, all these functions are carried out by the organic molecules of living cells, each function exquisitely tailored to the requirements of ecosystem members.

1. To capture energy from the sun (yellow/incoming arrow in Figure 2), convert it to organic chemical energy, and convey this appropriately to every living process that requires energy (green/outer cycle);

2. To recycle and propagate the information that directs life processes, including genetic information, with modifications over time in response to its environmental system (evolution) (blue/inner two cycles), and

3. To recycle the materials of which it is composed (black/intermediate cycle). Living systems recycle, making no pollution.

Because the energy input is from the sun, a sustainable living system must include organisms that can capture light energy and convert it to the organic energy of life systems: plants and some micro-organisms. For sustainability, ecosystems and the biosystem maintain and require an intricate balance among their component systems and subsystems. Importantly, animals such as humans are not sustainable on their own, but require a complete ecosystem providing food and recycling waste.

Homo sapiens is a global species, participating in many ecosystems. We have diverse interactions with other life, which are vital to our survival. The biosystem generates the many food chains that feed us, using solar energy, and is crucial in recycling much of our vast output of waste.

We humans also organise ourselves into various types of interacting human systems, though still within the biosystem – such as families, villages, colleges, orchestras, nations, social systems, corporations and so on. One global, market-oriented social and economic system, however, has come to dominate the behaviour and beliefs of many populations on the planet. This we term the corposystem(Lamoreux, 2021). For many humans it has replaced the biosystem as their primary experienced environment. We defined a system as having a function(s), so can the corposystem be said to have a function? Arguably, as an emergent social system, it has evolved and been selected for relative success, like living organisms and ecosystems. In this case its ‘function’ may be seen as what has made it survive (so far) and develop as it has: growth for profit, through competition and domination. Thus, perpetual growth is intrinsic to the corposystem and many of its subsystems and it has become, over time, better and better at promoting growth as well as normalising the idea that growth is necessary. This produces the dilemma Homo sapiens faces today. The growth of the corposystem is now in conflict with the balance of the biosystem. The goal of endless growth is causing massive changes and loss of balanced interactions among the systems of life, beyond the capacity of the biosystem to adapt or evolve

What is evolution?

Evolution of a living system, as currently defined, is a change over time in its genome (meaning all the heritable information in a particular system: biosystem, ecosystem, species, individual or cell). Evolution is not primarily, as many imagine, ‘survival of the fittest’, if fittest means strongest or most dominant (Feldman, 2022). Unfortunately, this ‘red in tooth and claw’ image of evolution is misleading (Ripple and Bescha, 2012; Ratajczak et al., 2022; Bishopp et al., 2010), and has contributed to a widespread and influential view of ourselves, humans, which ‘portrays our basic nature as selfish, with competition as our fundamental drive’ (Jinpa, 2015). The concept has probably played a significant part in establishing the corposystem attitude that self-centred competition is natural and good.

Science, however, does not see evolution as survival of the strongest individual specimens. When current physics and systems thinking (Felder, 2022; Goldsmith, 1981; Lloyd, 2008; Margulis, 1998; Page, 2009; Schumacher, 2015; Strogatz, 2008) are factored in, evolution of living systems can be described much more accurately as a collaborative balancing act (Lamoreux, 2021). As Dawkins (1982) has noted, we can speak equally correctly of natural selection acting on genes, on individuals or on interacting groups; but it is crucial to note that the first two never happen without the third. This kind of interactive evolution is called coevolution (Medina et al., 2022). As Bateson (1972) also pointed out, the principal unit of natural selection is a relationship between an individual system and the environment within which it evolved, represented as lines in Figure 1, such as flowering plants and their pollinators which coevolve to fit each other, in addition to more complex networks. Darwin’s finches evolved different beaks and behaviours on different islands in relation to their different environments. By fitness, Darwin meant suitability, not strength or dominance. Like a developing embryo, and in the absence of major disruptive processes, the biosystem can propagate and evolve for very long periods, sustainably and resiliently, because of the precision of the cross-talk among the component systems and their components, honed by long evolution. As we will argue, this resilience is under major threat from humans.

It is commonly imagined that evolution always leads to improvements, or that evolution is primarily about numbers of offspring, but that is not so. True, if there are insufficient ‘replicators’ then a system (species or other inherited system) will not survive (Dawkins, 1982). However, a system that overpopulates or is otherwise destructive to its environmental system is also unlikely to survive, and the environmental system also may not. Or systems may become incompatible with their environments. Compatibility with the local environmental system is the measure of evolutionary survival.

When a living system becomes extinct, all of its genetic information is lost, including communication links that bind its components together, such as species into interacting sets or ecosystems, and ecosystems into the global biosystem. This information loss is also evolution and, unlike adaptation, it is permanent. The current mass extinction threatens dangerous reductions in genetic diversity in many ecosystems and loss of essential elements of the biosystem as a whole: essential in the longer term to preserve many forms of life including humans from our planetary impacts

Evolution in terms of systems and information

We characterised life above as a system of systems of systems (etc). We introduced emergent properties (Figure 1) – those properties of any entity that are not properties of its component parts. For example, zebras are striped, but their component organs, even hairs, are not striped. It is interesting to notice that the shared emergent properties of a given type of living system (species, organ, etc) include its phenotypes: the name in genetics for genetically encoded physical traits. Communication between and within systems involves these phenotypes/emergent properties. For example, colour patterns can be used within an ecosystem for male-female recognition, or camouflage against predators, or attraction of a pollinator. Within our own bodies, chemical and electrochemical phenotypes are used by the organs to sustain their proper interactive balance. Communication can be defined as receiving and/or sending any kind of information. Colours, touch, chemical changes, sounds, the genetic code: these are all relevant information (Ben-Naim, 2022: Schumacher, 2015; Meadows, 2008).

Since life began, evolution has generated progressive increases in complexity, information content and levels of organisation of living systems, as well as increasing diversity. Indeed, this concept can be traced back through the physical evolution of the universe, where, since the Big Bang, there were progressive increases in local complexity and information content of structures, through subatomic particles, then atoms, molecules, gas, stars, solar systems and galaxies (Lamoreux, 2021 and recently analysed by Wong et al., 2023). With life, there is additionally the process of natural selection of genetically transmitted traits. Here evolution has often involved recombination of simpler systems (Margulis, 1998). Cells evolved with organelles, some of which came from primitive bacterium-like cells. Simple multicellular organisms arose by combining cells. Then there were evolving interactions between species (e.g. prey-predator), self-sustaining multi-species ecosystems and eventually our overall planetary biosystem, which continues to evolve

In this way, evolution has generated a progressive increase in genetic information content and biological complexity. The genes encode interactive behaviour as well as structure and metabolism. We cannot directly measure all the information in an organism in bits or bytes (except the genetic code, but that is only part of it). Information is also constantly flowing between living system components at each level; for example between organs in a body (neural impulses, hormones etc) and among interacting species in an ecosystem.

For sustainability, ecosystems and the biosystem maintain and require an intricate balance among each other and their component systems and subsystems. Species must be able to interact well within their ecosystems, or they will not survive, because evolution (coevolution) selects systems of which the interacting components function best together (such as a flower-pollinator pair). Lloyd (2008) proposed that the complexity of the biosystem is so great that it would take a quantum computer as long to describe it as life itself takes to live it. Indeed, the biosystem and its components are vastly more complex and precise than we can understand in detail, an important point that has contributed to our species’ falling out of balance with the biosystem. Anyone expecting simple answers to this crisis will be disappointed

Evolution, adaptation and climate change

Adaptation by living systems is their genetically programmed ability to sense and respond to their environments. In winter, deer migrate down mountains and trees shed leaves, then both return in the spring. Each species communicates with its environment in crucial ways, as discussed above. Many people believe that we and the biosystem can adapt in this way to climate change. They may therefore not be very concerned about environmental issues because, if it could so adapt, then our biosystem could one day return to its former fruitful cornucopia of ‘environmental services’ within which humans evolved. However, the recent human-associated changes, including rapid climate change and many kinds of overgrazing (abetted by corporate agriculture), are too dangerous to be ignored, because a large part of the change is evolution rather than adaptation.

We have increasingly been changing or destroying environments to which living systems are adapted, and either replacing them with our technologies and monocultures or reorganising them using foreign species. Species are out-competed through human hijacking of their food sources and habitats, to supply our billions of humans with food, habitation and transport. Other species are thus becoming extinct at a high rate (Kolbert, 2014). Such changes break the inborn links, the intricate web of naturally evolved communication among species and organisms, the result of billions of years of evolution. This leads not to adaptation but to the irreversible changes of evolution, including disruption of the balance and communications among the species that is required for the sustainability of the entire biosystem. With species loss, heritable information is lost forever.

Technology, biosystem and balance

The only proposed reaction among far too many corposystem leaders (company boards, national politicians) to our biological crisis is to ignore overpopulation, grow more, and attempt to rebalance the resulting biological imbalance using human technologies. This is inadvisable for two reasons at least: it further unbalances the biosystem, and human technologies cannot be specifically designed to efficiently address the needs of biological interactions. Life is more efficient than our technologies can be (West, 2018).

Homo sapiens has not until recently considered making major efforts to retain the ecological balance of our environment; instead, many of us are proud of the global changes that we have made in the fabric of life. Historically, humans have responded to ecosystem feedback loops and limiting factors by using technologies to eliminate them. An example is our invention of farming, producing more food and supporting many more people (Hopfenberg and Pimentel, 2001). Another is our medical technologies that counteract infection and disease. Probably the bighttps://bocs.cf/wp-admin/admin.php?page=meta-keywords-descriptiongest boost in our populations came with the industrial revolution, based on ancient sources of organic chemical energy, fossil fuels, which are now generating massive pollution and global heating and need to be discontinued as soon as possible.

As a result, our population has exploded. To imagine that this would not affect our relationships with the biosystem is so unrealistic that it qualifies as denial (Turner, 2018). We need to acknowledge that humanity is experiencing a classical out-of-control overpopulation event, as global population is already well beyond what is considered a sustainable level and still growing even so (Tucker, 2019; Rees, 2023). Such overpopulation events result in population crashes when a species reaches an inescapable limiting factor, such as a completely exhausted food or water supply. The population typically then crashes to well below the previous sustainable level, after which it may or may not survive.

Up to now we have used technologies, as in the Green Revolution, to extend or eliminate limiting factors. However, because of the complex interdependence of the biosystem and living systems in general, we can no longer continue this practice. The efficiency of our technologies cannot match the overall efficiency of living systems, perfected over billions of years (West, 2018). The solution to our overpopulation must not be to try further to change the biosystem, which supports our life, nor to increase energy generation, whatever the sources, as that would risk resulting in yet more people (Hopfenberg and Pimental, 2001). Further increasing efficiency of human food production is also no longer a solution; this would cause even more competition with other life forms, accelerating species extinction and irreversible loss of genetic information. If we want to sustain Homo sapiens within the biosystem, we must now use our brains and technologies, particularly birth control technologies, to restore or replace the checks and balances that we have overwritten with previous technologies. Otherwise, nature will ‘control’ us, and the suffering will be enormous.

The corposystem problem

The goal of the corposystem is not to save human life, but to make as much profit as possible, through growth, as mandated by typical corporate charters. Economic growth (say of a nation) means more total production and more total consumption over time, which requires population growth. With a stable population, economic growth would require the average individual to continue consuming and producing more each year forever, which is of course impossible. Accordingly, the corposystem needs, and often actively promotes, human population growth, requiring ever more resource provision from the biosystem. On the contrary, for sustainability (Figure 2), the biosystem requires balance among its component systems, rather than nearly all its global resources going to a single species, humans. Moreover, with a stable or falling population, total consumption and production can stabilise or fall with no loss of living standards.

We will need radically altered economic goals if we are to rescue life on earth, including humanity. Unfortunately for its own survival, the corposystem works hard to oppose this concept of overpopulation, even to the point of demonising the word. It supports only those so-called ‘solutions’ that allow its continued growth, and actively denies that overpopulation threatens the balance of the biosystem. It is a growth machine, and will not voluntarily stop.

The corposystem, through extreme human expansion, has already markedly unbalanced the biosystem, with major changes and mass extinctions. After four or five billion years of success, the biosystem seems unlikely to collapse altogether. The corposystem, however, requires endless growth, which is impossible, and thus it is highly vulnerable to collapse. Various activist organisations aim to make the corposystem less harmful, which is admirable, but it is crucial that they also work to support the biosystem.

Addressing symptoms of overpopulation

Before this century we were using ‘spare’ biosystem resources that, like body fat, could be regenerated, as long as we did not exceed carrying capacity. But as of 2000 (data from the World Wildlife Fund), humans have been consuming more resources than can be regenerated by the biosystem. As a starving animal metabolises its own body, we are now consuming the muscle and organs of the biosystem.

To ecologists and many others, human overpopulation is clearly the underlying cause of our many resulting crises, including climate change, famine, territorial wars, pollution and so on. Yet many of those in power, and even some activists and scientists, still deny the role of overpopulation, and focus on treating only these symptoms, if anything. The symptoms will of course continue to worsen unless we also acknowledge and eliminate their common underlying cause.

We should not relax and imagine that nature will take care of the problem. Nature will of course; it already is. The next limiting factors are here and expanding: famine, war, pollution, plague and social and economic disintegration. We are of course advocating only the humane approach to overpopulation, active reduction of birth-rates. This can be politically very challenging and can reduce population only over long time-scales, so that active reduction of consumption per capita especially in rich, highly-consuming nations is also crucial to support the biosystem (Steffen et al., 2015; Samways, 2022). Both types of action are urgent, including reduction of food waste where possible and dietary changes away from land-, water- and carbon-intensive items.

Some faith communities are being told that all is well because God will save us. But if God is the Creator, would this not be asking Him to save us from His own laws that govern the Creation? This seems inconsistent. As Lyla June Johnston (2022) says, ‘When you break a system that the creator has made, you break a system that was designed to support your life.’ This understanding is indeed basic to our major wisdom traditions and religions (Antal, 2018; Jinpa, 2015; Johnston, 2022; Loy, 2010, 2019; His Holiness Pope Francis, 2015; Rasmussen, 1998; Salmony, 2023). Basic science is of course much younger than the wisdom traditions, but has been forced to recognise the same limitations (Bishopp et al., 2010; Goldsmith, 1981; Ripple and Beschta, 2012; Ripple, 2022; Ratajczak et al., 2022). We humans are not the centre of the universe, or of life. There are more powerful realities that we must consider as we try to save our responsible place within the biosystem. Ignoring the reality will not change that reality, nor will it solve our problems.

The more people there are, beyond sustainable numbers, the more suffering results. While it is rewarding to help suffering people, it is heinous to increase their numbers knowingly. The danger from treating only the symptoms of our overpopulation is that, in future, the suffering people will be everyone.

We can no longer fix our problems with technologies, for reasons explained above, especially when in reality they are used to deplete the biosystem further to make money for the corposystem and/or to support ever more humans. This will intensify the problems, by further disturbing the exquisite balance that the biosystem requires for its own wellbeing (Lamoreux, 2021). Instead, the long-term cure for Homo sapiens is to change our corposystem-based behaviours and attitudes (Johnston, 2022, for example), towards managing our birth-rates and consumption worldwide, as recommended by Tucker (2022) and Earth4All (Callegari and Stoknes, 2023) among others. Only thus can we return our species to a size and to behaviours that are compatible with the welfare of the planetary biosystem

According to Tucker (2022)

There is a large community of thoughtful practitioners who have spent decades building data-driven foundations for their programmes’ effectiveness who would simply argue, ‘Give us the budget to do it, and we will achieve the goal – ethically.

In conclusion, if we want our children to survive, we must demand that our governments, media and the United Nations explain, promote and fund the urgent need to reduce our populations

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Russelyn Connor and Shodo Spring for important critical reading of the manuscript, to David Samways for valuable editorial comments and to Bare Bones Biology.org for backup and support.

https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/view/698

M. Lynn Lamoreux1 and Dorothy C. Bennett

Samways, David. 2022. “Population and Sustainability: Reviewing the Relationship Between Population Growth and Environmental Change”. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 6 (1):15-41. https://doi.org/10.3197/JPS.63772239426891.

The post Scientists’ Warning on the Problem with Overpopulation and Living Systems appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

Sport is a major contributor to health and happiness and therefore a desirable activity, but what if you are putting yourself at risk by its emissions? For example, skiing will be a dream in a few years’ time because there will be no snow. Fortunately, there is huge potential for this footprint to be reduced, or even eliminated.

In the year of the Olympics and the football World Cup, this is particularly important, as this year the Earth’s climate is on a shocking trajectory, with sea temperatures rising to unprecedented levels that could bring a series of weather disasters.

Major sporting events are primarily a burden on the environment because of the travel and accommodation of spectators and participants, while the carbon footprint of everyday sporting activities is made up of three main components. These are the travel associated with sport, the footprint of building and operating sports facilities, and the smallest footprint of manufacturing sports equipment

These already show where there is the greatest potential to reduce it. Professional TV coverage of a sporting event that attracts a large number of spectators can be far superior to on-site attendance, saving millions of people travelling. Today, lightweight battery-powered drones can often replace kerosene-flying helicopters for coverage, but reducing the number of sporting events can also significantly reduce the carbon footprint.

The carbon footprint of an installation is primarily proportional to the amount of concrete installed and its energy consumption. Therefore, efforts should be made to reduce energy consumption through passive house quality architecture, the use of renewable energy sources and increasing the occupancy of the facility.

Unfortunately, there are some sports where this is not possible, which might be better forgotten, such as golf courses with their huge carbon footprint due to intensive turf management, skydiving with its megawatt electricity consumption, or indoor skydiving with its megawatt electricity consumption. But it also includes motorised “sports”, car racing, cross-country skiing.

For sports equipment, durability and repairability are key, as the carbon footprint of production is reduced per unit of time spent playing sports.

It is crucial to measure the carbon footprint of sport, both at individual and event level, to see where potential interventions can be made to reduce it and how much voluntary carbon credits can be used to offset the remaining carbon burden to reduce it to zero.

In some cases, sport can significantly reduce the carbon footprint, such as when someone replaces driving to work with cycling, walking or running. These need to be encouraged at company and public level, for example through tax breaks, subsidies, provision of secure bike storage, changing rooms, showers, free company bikes and other incentives.

Péter Lenkei

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For many years I volunteered at planned parenthood, zero population growth, and the Sierra Club action groups on population, because this is the ONLY way to reduce the 9 existential threats we face: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, erosion of topsoil, depletion of fresh water, ozone depletion, land-use change, altered bio-geochemical cycles from overuse of fertilizers, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, atmospheric aerosol loading, and the phosphorus cycle (Steffen et al 2015, Rockström J et al 2009). Not to mention fewer traffic jams, less noise pollution — can you think of a single problem that wouldn’t be helped by fewer people?

Fossil fuels are how we were able to exceed these boundaries and overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, with world population growing from 400 million before coal to 8+ billion today. But it looks like world oil production of both conventional and unconventional peaked in 2018, coal in 2013, and possibly natural gas in 2019, almost as serious as peak oil, since fertilizers are not only made out of natural gas, but use natural gas to create the tremendous heat and pressure to get inert nitrogen in the air to combine with the hydrogen in natural gas — fertilizer that keeps at least 4 billion of us alive today (Fisher 2001; Smil 2004; Stewart et al. 2005; Erisman et al. 2008).

Today the Supreme court undid Roe V Wade, at a time when the carrying capacity of the planet is about to go back to 500 million people and birth control and abortion are the only way to get there besides the four horsemen of the apocalypse…

Also see: Lochhead C (2013) Why is linking population growth to environmental stress politically taboo? San Francisco Chronicle.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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“There is no need to decide whether to stop the population increase or not. There is no need to decide whether the population will be lowered or not. It will, it will! The only thing mankind has to decide is whether to let population decline be done in the old inhumane method that nature has always used, or to invent a new humane method of our own.” Isaac Asimov, 1974.

“Unlooked for but swift, we have come on like a swarm of locusts: a wide, thick, darkling cloud settling down like living snowflakes, smothering every stalk, every leaf, eating away every scrap of green down to raw, bare, wasting earth…There are too many men for Earth to harbor. At nearly seven billion we have overshot Earth’s carrying capacity”. Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First.

1) Consumption

The famous equation to describe this is I = P x A x T, which translates to Human Impact (I) on the environment = (P)opulation times (A)ffluence times (T)echnology.

The United States uses 7 billion tons of minerals a year. Per capita that’s 47,769 pounds per American: 1400 pounds of copper, 9 tons of phosphate rock, 300 tons of coal, 16 tons of iron ore, 700 tons of stone, sand, and gravel, and so on.

Although there are some who blame only the wealthiest 2 billion, the poor also have a large impact on the environment:

• Slash and burn farmers migrate deep into rainforests on illegal logging roads and cause massive biodiversity loss, wild fires, erosion
• Deforestation due to illegal timber harvests and to cook food
• Overfishing
• Desertification
• Competition over scarce water
• Sewage and chemical pollution due to lack of treatment
• The poor escape by migrating to wealthy nations, increasing consumption, and lessening the need for birth control
• The best and the brightest leave poor nations, opening the door to autocracy and mafia rule by gangs, who cause even more to flee to rich nations to escape them
• World Population Growth 1950-2050 Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, The 2008 Revision.
• World Population Growth 1950-2050 Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects, The 2008 Revision.

2) It’s taboo to mention the link between poverty and population

Much of the misery and starvation in Niger is caused by having the highest birthrate in the world, which clearly reduces the slice of resources per person (and everywhere). But reporters never mention this connection since it is not politically correct.

3) Don’t worry, America’s birth rate went down

By 1973 the birth rate dropped below replacement level, so the media ran headlines declaring that the population problem was solved and that America had reached Zero Population Growth.

Not true! The population in the U.S. was, and is, still growing. So what if the rate of increase is less, it’s still a hundred times greater than when we were forced to live within limits before fossil fuels. And with 8 billion people, half of them under 30, a lot more babies are born every year than ever before, 80 million a year now, with 3 billion more people expected by 2050.

4) Feminists and Human-rights groups took over the Sierra Club

After feminists and human-rights advocates were put on the population committee at the Sierra Club, they fought to have empowerment of women as the main goal. Dave Foreman was on the committee and opposed this since the goal was population stabilization and then reduction. Empowering women might be a key path to that goal, but was not the goal itself.

The newcomers replied that any implied restrictions, such as a goal of population stabilization, was an assault on women rights to choose how many children they had. The mere mention of limits to growth was coercive.

The takeover of the Sierra Club population platform by people unaware or unable to understand “The Limits to Growth” and “The Tragedy of the Commons” was a tragedy. The Sierra Club was instrumental in making the topic of population taboo and politically incorrect.

Another big factor in why the Sierra club abandoned it’s population position was because David Gelbaum, who had given them over $100 million dollars, demanded they take this position or he wouldn’t continue to give them large donations (Weiss).

Since the 1980s there’s been little media attention to population growth, and close to none since 1994.

Not only did the Sierra Club and other environmental groups stop writing about population issues, they stopped reminding people that overpopulation is responsible for every single problem they were trying to “solve”. Clearly all of these problems would be reduced if there were fewer people:

• Climate change
• Oceans: acidification, overfishing, pollution
• (Rain)forest destruction for agriculture, cattle, construction
• Biodiversity loss (6th mass extinction)
• Providing a good education to children everywhere
• Feeding everyone
• Making jobs available for record numbers of unemployed youth                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Martha Campbell puts this even more strongly – she sees hostility towards mentioning the population question due to universities teaching students that even discussing the connection between population and environment is not a tolerable topic of discussion and politically incorrect to even suggest that slowing population growth might protect the environment for future generations.

5) Cornucopians and Leftists Environmentalists also destroyed immigration and population stabilization goals

You’d think the Left would support conservation, but there are splinters who saw talking about overpopulation as blaming the world’s poor for their plight. Better to stop wealthy countries from consuming so much.

In 1998 the Bay Area Marxist group “Political Ecology Group” succeeded in killing a Sierra Club immigration-lowering initiative. Leftist ideologues also suppressed talk about overpopulation at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment because Chinese and India’s attempts to gain population stabilization were seen by them as coercive.

6) The American public is not scientifically educated and ignores warnings from scientists

Anyone who denies overpopulation is a problem ought to be called a population denier, just as those who insist there’s no climate change are called Climate Change Deniers. For some reason just about everyone, scientifically literate or not, ignores warnings about population:

• 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus
• 1968 The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin
• 1968 The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
• 1973 Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows et al
• 1980 Overshoot by William Catton (especially Chapter 2)
• 1992 World scientists’ warning to humanity. 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued this appeal
• 1993 The Arithmetic of Growth: Methods of Calculation by Albert Bartlett.
• 1995 The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons by Hardin
• 1999 The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia by Garrett Hardin
• 2001 Global Biodiversity Outlook
• 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
• 2006 The Essential Exponential: For the Future of our planet by Albert Bartlett (video)
• 2014 Nobel laureates call for a revolutionary shift in how humans use resources. Eleven holders of prestigious prize say excessive consumption threatening planet, and humans need to live more sustainably.

7) Educating Women to lower population a nice idea but…

As far as lowering population, Virginia Abernethy has some valid criticisms about whether this will work in “Population Politics: The Choices That Shape Our Future”.

The main reason it won’t work is that it’s too late. We’re too far into overshoot beyond carrying capacity once fossil fuels start declining.

Though it’s still a good idea, so that as energy, natural resources, and population decline, educated women perhaps will fight the loss of their rights because they’ll know it doesn’t have to be that way.

8) Only humans matter, screw the other species on the planet

Nearly all the optimistic books written with the general theme of “YES WE CAN SUPPORT 10 BILLION PEOPLE” ignore other species on the planet. All that matters are human needs. The human-caused mass 6th extinction is well underway. The idea that we can kill off most other species and maintain a population of 10 billion is absurd.

9) Anyone who wants to limit immigration or population is portrayed as a racist

Have you ever seen anyone on TV or in newspapers who stated their reason for wanting reduced immigration and population was their concern over loss of biodiversity, increasing pollution, declining aquifers, fisheries, forests, energy, and other resources? And if they were allowed to speak about environmental issues, they would still be accused of hiding their REAL motivation, which was racism.

Hell no. Only hateful racists are interviewed and their views linked to eugenics, genocide, and colonialism. They are portrayed as not trying to curb all growth, but only that of undesirable people such as the poor or undesirable races.

Many systems ecologists have estimated that without fossil fuels, the United States could support at most 100 million people. The media should be asking people how we can go from 320 million to 100 million without birth control, abortion, and limiting immigration.

I personally think it’s less than 100 million due to what we’ve done to our topsoil, aquifers, massive dieoffs of marine life from eutrophication (due to fertilizer runoff), the lack of land to grow food on once the 4x to 5x intensification of food produced due to natural-gas fertilizers is no longer attained, phosphorous depletion, invasive species, and a whole lot of other ecological showstoppers covered elsewhere on this site.

10) The Sierra club and other environmental groups abandoned immigration level goals in 1989 the Sierra Club’s stand was that “immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.”.

But in the 1990s conservationists feared alienating leftist and racial rights groups and dropped immigration to stabilize population from their platforms.

Since then immigration has grown immensely. Until 1965 levels were about 200,000 a year. In 1965 it leapt to 1,000,000, and in 1990 to 1.5 million.

Immigration is now the main cause of increasing population growth in the United States. Between 1900 and 2000 the population almost quadrupled (76 to 281 million), with the largest 10 year increase between 1990 and 2000 (32.7 million).

11) We must have more population growth to fund retirees and grow the economy

That’s clearly a crazy Ponzi scheme that can’t go on forever on a finite planet.

It is also a way to have cheap labor once you’ve got many people competing for jobs, and perhaps the real reason why the elites wanted population growth.

12) Immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want

Who benefits from immigration? Businesses that want to pay people less. Everyone else loses. Wages would be much higher if there weren’t so many people competing for every job, which drives wages, safety, and working conditions down.

Free-market economics likes the high population growth in low-income countries abroad as well, which further acts to depress wages worldwide.

13) We’re wealthy, so we’re obliged to offer shelter to immigrants, and we are a nation of immigrants

Just because we can’t control other nation’s population policies doesn’t mean we should reward them for reproducing beyond their carrying capacity. Since developed nations consume many times more resources, immigrants from India to the U.S. magnify resource depletion 40-fold, since Americans consume 40 times more per capita than Indians.

14) Nature keeps us alive

People are brainwashed by viewing the world through economic filters, forgetting that forests, fisheries, wetlands, aquifers, healthy deep class 1 and 2 topsoil, and other resources are essential for survival, and can be diminished and even depleted.

15) 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development

The Catholic church and well meaning but ecologically ignorant activists at this conference shifted the goal of population stabilization and growth to empowering women. They labeled attempts by China and India as coercive, and thereby killed family planning, replacing it with empowerment and reproductive rights and health, because now family planning was spun as being coercive.

Perhaps they forgot that women are coerced into unwanted pregnancies and often die or are severely injured in childbirth. One of the results of this conference is that many poor women have little or no access to family planning and as a consequence are unable to control their bodies, how many children they have and when they have them.

This conference discouraged discussing the connection between population growth and environmental destruction, because to do so was seen as anti-woman. Anyone who persisted in talking about population growth was dismissively labeled a Malthusian.

16) Standard demographic theory

It was assumed that women would want fewer children as their nation modernized and more women were educated.

A better theory and one that matches reality, is that if men and women can gain easy access to birth control, they will have fewer children.

For example, in Thailand, where family planning is easy to obtain, women with no education used birth control as much as educated women. In the Philippines, where birth control is hard to get due to the Catholic Church, uneducated women don’t use contraception because they can’t get it.

If women could gain access to birth control, the population growth rate would go down.

Women aren’t stupid, they know that childbirth is dangerous – the risk of death or injury is very high. Women would rather stay alive to take care of their existing children. One million children are left motherless every year – childbirth kills 287,000 women and injures another 10 million every year according to the World Health Organization.

17) It’s Human Nature not to worry about overpopulation

In the end it may be that we’re not wired to worry about this issue. Everyone loves babies. We’re tribal. We’re optimistic.

18) Don’t worry: the fertility rate and disease are driving population down

Worldwide, family planning brought fertility rates down from 5.5 to 2.5 children per woman. Therefore the media reports: the population explosion is over. But the rate is still above replacement, the population is still growing exponentially. Just a bit more slowly.

19) Propaganda from anti-abortion activists, religious leaders, and right-wing think tanks

The most extreme are not only against abortion, but even family planning. Catholics and Right-to-Lifers strategized to convince people that there was no population problem, since that’s one of the reasons many people supported legal abortions.

Islamic countries are thought of as living in the Dark Ages, but some Muslim countries are the most advanced in family planning. In Iran, subsidies stop after a third child and classes in modern contraception methods are required before a marriage license can be obtained.

Capitalists have succeeded in painting environmentalists with negative terms such as being overly concerned about the environment, which threatens jobs and that their concerns about pollution and endangered species are overblown.

20) Many people don’t understand how powerful exponential growth is

Population doubling times

Years                             Billions                               Years to add 1 billion more people
1800                                1                                            200,000
1930                                2                                            130
1960                                3                                            30
1975                                4                                            15
1987                                5                                            12
1999                                6                                            12
2011                                7                                            12
Source: Scheidel (2003)

21) Republicans cut funding for international family planning programs

Not to mention how hard they’ve fought birth control and abortion at home. Reagan, Trump, and George W. Bush all harmed efforts to provide women in developing nations with birth control and abortions. Because of lack of birth control and abortions, Mexicans and other central americans have far more children than their nations can support, so of course they come here, as do legal immigrants from overpopulated nations. The U.S. functions as a safety valve for nations that can’t control their own population and delays revolution and starvation a bit longer.

22) It’s easier to blame climate change than do something about population

If politicians really wanted to make a difference, they’d put limits to growth in their city limits, based on water availability and so on. In two thirds of California counties, humans sparked 95 to 99% of the fires, not climate change, according to professor Keeley at UCLA. He said “To me, climate change is a distraction from the population problem…they’re comfortable with global warming because they can’t be held accountable, whereas population growth is something that much more directly affects their constituents, right now (Bland 2019).

23) Excerpt from How Nixon and the Catholic Church conspired to stop actions to prevent overpopulation

In 1971, it recognized that reliance on private, voluntary decisions: “will not be sufficient to provide the necessary limitation of population growth unless there is a radical and rapid change in the attitudes and desires. The Church must commit itself to effecting this change. The assumption that couples have the freedom to have as many children as they can support should be challenged. We can no longer justify bringing into existence as many children as we desire. Our corporate responsibility to each other prohibits this. Given the population crisis we must recognize and teach, beginning with ourselves, that man has an obligation to limit the size of his family.”

And in 1972, the Presbyterians called on governments “to take such actions as will stabilize population size…. We who are motivated by the urgency of over-population rather than the prospect of decimation would preserve the species by responding in faith: Do not multiply—the earth is filled!”[3]

This kind of increasing out cry for action made it safe—almost compelling—for American political leadership to identify with the concept of population growth control and to call for new programs to deal with the problem.

It was in this climate of rising concern that President Nixon sent to Congress his “Special Message on Problems of Population Growth.” Special messages to the Congress are exceedingly rare and this was the first such message on population. This action punctuated the beginning of the peak of American political will to deal with the mounting population crisis. The message, for the first time, committed the United States to confronting the population problem. Also rare, this special message was approved by the Congress. Its passage was bipartisan, indicating broad political support for American political action to combat this problem. The message was a water shed development, yet few recall it.

The most important element of the Special Message was its creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. During the signing of the bill establishing the Commission, President Nixon commented on the broad political and public support: “I believe this is an historic occasion. It has been made historic not simply by the act of the President in signing this measure, but by the fact that it has had bipartisan support and also such broad support in the Nation.”

The 24 member Commission was chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd. It ordered more than 100 research projects which collected and analyzed data that would make possible the formulation of a comprehensive U.S. population policy. After 2 years of intense effort, the Commission completed a 186-page report titled, Population and the American Future which offered more than 70 recommendations. The recommendations were a bold but sane response to the challenges we faced in 1973. For example, they called for: passage of a Population Education Act to help school systems establish well-planned population education programs; sex education to be widely available for all, including minors, at government expense if necessary; vastly expanded research in many areas related to population-growth control; and the elimination of all employment of illegal aliens.

The recommendations represented the conclusions of some of the nation’s most capable people. The scientists who completed the Commission’s 100 research projects were among the best in their fields. These recommendations are included in this book because it is important for the reader to know what the U.S. response to the population problem could have been and should have been. On May 5, 1972, at a ceremony held for the purpose of formally submitting the Commission’s findings and conclusions, President Nixon publicly renounced the report.[4] This was 6 months before the President faced re-election and he was feeling intense political heat from one particularly powerful, foreign-controlled special interest group—the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing happened toward implementation of any of the more than three score recommendations that collectively would have created a comprehensive U.S. population policy. Not one recommendation was ever adopted. To this day, the U.S. has no population policy, one of the few major countries with this distinction.

Had these 70 carefully reasoned recommendations been adopted as U.S. population policy in 1973—or if even a dozen or so of the most important ones had been adopted—America would be very different today. We would be more secure, subjected to less crime, better educated now with even greater educational opportunities ahead, living with less stress in a healthier environment, with more secure employment and greater employment opportunities, with better medical care, all in a physically less crowded America.

We would have set an example for the world, and we have good reason to believe that much of the world would have followed. Ironically, the American people were better prepared to accept these recommendations in 1973 than in 1994, even though world population during this brief period has mushroomed a horrendous 43 percent. For the past 20 years, all of us have been subjected to an intense disinformation program staged by the opposition to raise doubts in each of us regarding the seriousness of the population problem.

24) Even Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize for the Green Revolution is alarmed by overpopulation

The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved. Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary. “If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species,” he declared. he warned the Nobel audience that the struggle against hunger had not been won. “We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts,” he said (Gillis 2009).

Quotes

Aldo Leopold: “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us”.

Leon Kolankiewicz “Our species is unique, because here and now only we have the ability to destroy, or to save, biodiversity. Only we have the ability to care one way or the other. The destiny of all wild living things is in our hands. Will we crush them or let them be wild and free? Limiting human population will not guarantee success, but not doing so means certain failure”.

Isaac Asimov: “Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears”.

References

APPG 2007. Return of the Population Growth Factor: Its Impact on the Millennium Development Goals. All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health.

Asimov, I. 1974. The future of humanity. Newark college of engineering. asimovonline.com.
http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html

Beck and Kolankiewicz. 2000. “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization”

Bland, A. 2019. So why isn’t anyone talking about population? East Bay Express.

Cafaro, P, (ed) et al. 2013. “Life on the Brink. Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation”.

Erisman JW, Sutton MA, Galloway J, et al (2008) How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nat Geosci

Erb, Karl-Heinz, et al. 2009. Eating the Planet: Feeding and fuelling the world sustainably, fairly and humanely–a scoping study. Social Ecology Working Paper no. 116. Institute of Social Ecology and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Erlich, P. 1970. Population Resources Environment: Issues to Human Ecology.

Fisher D (2001) The Nitrogen Bomb. By learning to draw fertilizer from a clear blue sky, chemists have fed the multitudes. Discover magazine

Gillis J (2009) Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html

Hays, S. 1987. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985.

IUGS (International Union of Geological Sciences) 2013. Geoindicators. Soil and Sediment Erosion.

Levinson “The Box”

Meijer, R. I. Apr 16 2014: Overpopulation Is Not A Problem For Us. Theautomaticearth.com

Scheidel, W. 2003. “Ancient World, Demography of”. Encyclopedia of Population.

Homer-Dixon, T. 2001. Environment, Scarcity, and Violence.

Rockström J (2009) Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology & Society 14(2):32.

Smil V (2004) Enriching the earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food production. MIT Press

Stewart WM, Dibb DW, Johnston AE et al (2005) The contribution of commercial fertilizer nutrients to food production. Agron J 97:1–6

UNFAO 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization.

Weiss, K.R. October 27, 2004. The Man Behind the Land. Los Angeles Times.

APPENDIX 1
[Here are excerpts of a more nuanced look at overpopulation denial ]

Diana Coole (2013) Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question, Environmental Politics, 22:2, 195-215.

During the 1960s and early 1970s population growth was regarded as an urgent environmental issue. Since then the topic has fallen into abeyance. Despite continuing demographic expansion and anxieties about a range of socio-ecological problems – from the stresses of high-density urban living to climate change, water, energy and food insecurity and loss of biodiversity – there is currently scant consideration of the benefits of population stabilization or decline.

Indeed, the problematization of population numbers is widely disavowed or regarded with profound suspicion. Why have we become so reluctant to ask whether we are too many or to countenance policies that might discourage further growth? I identify five discourses – population-shaming, population-skepticism, population-declinism, population-decomposing and population-fatalism – that foreclose public debate and subject them to critical analysis.

In 1950 world population had recently exceeded 2.5 billion. By 1990 it had doubled and by 2020 it will have tripled. October 2011 marked one among numerous demographic milestones on this expansive journey as the 7 billion threshold was crossed. This is in line with conclusions to the United Nations’ 2010 revision that ‘world population is expected to keep rising during the 21st century’, albeit more slowly during the latter part. It projects some 9.3 billion of us by 2050 and over 10 billion by the century’s end (United Nations 2010). Such an ongoing increase surely conveys an alarming story to anyone concerned about environmental sustainability and social wellbeing. Or does it? I ask why concerns about population growth and over-population have virtually disappeared from the political agenda of developed countries, especially, since the mid-1970s. Have they simply forgotten about, even resolved, the issue? Or is it rather, as my analysis suggests, that problematising it has been foreclosed? For despite periodic eruptions of concern among democratic publics, members of the policy community have been noticeably reluctant to address these anxieties. Even among critical theorists and Greens, scant attention has been paid to the topic over recent decades.

These are analytic distinctions. In practice the discourses overlap or work in conjunction, the most obvious factor they share being antipathy to the Malthusian equation between population growth and resource shortages. But these are not merely analytic categories; they are also profoundly political. Each has a distinctive genealogy in terms of its ideological and professional investments, the political interests it serves and the narratives in which it is embedded. The more that key demographic variables become amenable to policymaking, the greater the impact of the discourses that frame them. It is not my contention that arguments for disavowing the population question are simply specious; but I do think they warrant critical investigation. Do they offer good enough reasons for excluding population talk from public debate or for dismissing certain types of policy intervention?

My analysis shows how a taboo on considering the merits of population stabilization is complemented in developed countries by a policy framework that favors higher birth rates and net inward migration as a condition of sustained economic growth.

Population talk in more developed countries operates at three levels: concerning their own demographics; concerning trends in developing countries; and regarding global numbers more generally. Regarding their own population size, first, it is helpful to summarize a few salient elements of Malthus’ argument in An Essay on the Principle of Population (2004 [1798]). Malthus claimed that while the means of subsistence develop in a linear manner, population grows exponentially. These different tempos reach a critical threshold as productive land is exhausted; a situation of disequilibrium he associated with more developed countries like Britain. Either population growth must thenceforth be reduced through rational means, notably by sexual abstinence, or, if these ‘preventive checks’ fail, more painful ‘positive checks’ will ensue as the unsustainable excess falls victim to famine, disease or war, thereby restoring balance (Malthus 2004).

It is hardly surprising that such views should have provoked antagonism. Anti-natalist ideas about curtailing the proliferation of the human species challenged deep-seated traditional beliefs. In raising the specter of excessive numbers, the population question crossed vitalist and religious taboos regarding the sanctity of life and privileging of human life. It challenged Enlightenment ideas about humans’ mastery economists’ views on the engine of prosperity, humanity’s most fundamental ideas about the sacred, life and death, as well as on some of its most enduring identities and rituals regarding the family, marriage and sexuality.

Demographic change entails three principal variables: fertility, mortality and migration. All provoke profound ethical questions, especially once the state involves itself biopolitically in their modification. During the 1960s, Malthusianism nevertheless acquired fresh resonance in advanced industrial countries where there was renewed anxiety about a population explosion (Ehrlich 1972, Meadows et al. 1972, Goldsmith and Allen 1972). Despite the post-war baby boom the rate of increase here was relatively modest, but the multiplication of increasing affluence by larger numbers suggested imminent catastrophe.

The Malthusian alternative between choosing limits or facing disaster was widely spoken about. New reproductive technologies and feminist challenges to conventional gender roles seemed to make population stabilization more viable, yet the task of restoring equilibrium between population and environment seemed no less difficult given predilections for sustained economic growth. Reducing population nevertheless became integral to an environmental sensibility that mobilized new social movements and found common cause with new left critiques of consumer capitalism (Marcuse 1964, 1972). Limits-to-growth arguments accordingly provided the framework for a radical discourse in which economic and population growth were recognized as mutually reinforcing and equally exponential, thus exceeding the capacities of a finite planet. Restoring balance suggested a fundamental social transformation in which fewer people might use technology creatively to improve the quality of lives sustained by less toil, wasteful consumption or excessive reproduction but enriched by a more harmonious relationship with nature. By 1969 even President Richard Nixon was warning Congress that the domestic pressure of 200 million Americans was threatening democracy and education, privacy and living space, natural resources and the quality of the environment (Nixon 2006, pp. 775, 777). Official reports to both the American (1972) and British (1973) governments advised stabilizing population numbers in the national interest. Yet this antigrowth orientation would shortly fall into abeyance, with the very language of limits or constraint being rejected.

On a second level, developed countries express concern about population growth in developing countries, where most increase now occurs. I want to emphasize here the way this concern rebounded to reframe their own views on the population question. On the one hand, radical arguments for controlling fertility in economically advanced nations were complemented by support for population control policies in the global South, where they provoked accusations of racism. My account of population-shaming shows how third-world suspicion about first-world motives rebounded to render the topic uncongenial to democratic publics.

On the other hand, while many governments in developing countries still struggle to contain their burgeoning populations (United Nations 2011), new anti-Malthusian discourses in developed countries are helping to reframe their views, thanks to the circulation of transnational discourses through bodies like the United Nations or World Bank and via non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academic currencies. So even here, the epic story of runaway population growth that formerly galvanized efforts at fertility reduction has become muted: despite regional demographic differences, discursive frameworks are increasingly global and hegemonic.

Population-fatalist. These generally recognize that the multiplication of relatively small but expanding ecological footprints in poor countries plus the larger ones imprinted by richer individuals are collectively responsible for exacerbating phenomena like climate change (Wire 2009, O’Neill et al. 2010). As the Living Planet Report 2008 concludes, ‘with the world already in ecological overshoot, continued growth in population and per person footprint is clearly not a sustainable path’ (WWF 2008, p. 29).

While such claims suggest that world population numbers are hesitantly being re-problematized, demographic solutions are routinely rejected as too controversial or inefficacious to contemplate.

Discourses of dismissal and disavowal. Population-shaming. Among my five silencing discourses, population-shaming is most indicative of the poisonous legacy of North/South relations. Like population-skeptics, its protagonists reject claims that there is an objective demographic growth problem. Rather than charging neo-Malthusians with misplaced anxiety, however, they suggest that ostensible concerns about over-population are a subterfuge for pursuing heinous ulterior motives (Furedi 1997). The humus of population-shaming is a pervasive suspicion that limiting population actually means limiting certain categories of people who are deemed redundant or undesirable. Those who persist in advancing such arguments risk public humiliation for playing a numbers game that is interpreted as a blame game: one in which the world’s problems are refracted through population growth and blamed on the incontinent fecundity of the less privileged, whether they be the poor, women or inhabitants of the global South.

Sometimes advocates of population stabilization are presented as misanthropic people-haters, as when Murray Bookchin (1991, p. 123) asserts that deep ecology ‘blames ‘‘Humanity’’ as such for the ecological crisis – especially ordinary “consumers” and “breeders of children”. Sometimes they are charged with misogyny, inasmuch as women’s fertility is blamed for under-development or family planning programs are credited with promulgating unsafe contraceptive procedures (Hartmann 1987, Rao 2004). But the most serious charge concerns racism, linked here to colonialism, eugenics and genocide. As an article in the New Statesman (2004) states: ‘We dare not discuss population growth lest we be called racist’. But why is this association so pervasive?

First, despicable motives are attributed to population agencies, which are condemned for disguising their real aims through humanitarian rhetoric. This allegedly hides their true agenda (racism) and practices (coercive), which are claimed ‘in fact’ to represent the dictates of international institutions and national governments. International agencies are charged not only with sponsoring compulsory sterilisation but also with ‘withholding from some populations aid for food or sanitation infrastructure’ with the specific aim of culling the world’s poor. Multinationals’ ‘thirst for profit’ is presented as complementary to a broader racist project in which ‘poverty and disease become indirect tools of population control’. In short, both sorts of Malthusian check are identified here: the preventive type being imposed coercively and the positive kind cynically being left to run its course. In the context of developing countries they acquire distinctly racist significance. Such charges are not unfounded, with India especially commending itself as the referent for Hardt and Negri’s invective. Mass famines there had sometimes been presented by colonial administrators as salutary checks on overpopulation. Neo-Malthusian views would subsequently persuade the new republic to initiate the world’s first family planning program (1952) but it soon found itself dependent on foreign aid and mired in geopolitical interests. While at home Americans were fretting about the domestic effects of a population explosion on the environment, abroad their Cold War anxiety linked population growth to social instability and hence vulnerability to communism. Following disastrous harvests in the mid-1960s, food aid to India was used by the Johnson administration as leverage to insist on a robust family planning program whose respect for human rights was noticeably deficient (Caldwell 1998, Rao 2004, Connelly 2006). These equations formed the basis for considerable hostility to the population establishment and its Western supporters, with opposition being eloquently rehearsed by third world delegates to Bucharest in 1974 (Finkle and Crane 1975, Hodgson 1998). They interpreted population policies advocated by the US government as neocolonial and racially-motivated while accusing the West of blaming population growth for poverty rather than recognising the international capitalist system as the principal cause of under-development.

Because they are unspecific about these circumstances they imply that all family planning programmes with wider demographic goals are coercive and racially-motivated. Despite Multitude’s focus on the poor, its authors ignore the bleak effects of rapid population growth on the everyday lives of those who inhabit slums or the misery of unwanted pregnancies for those whose need for contraception remains unmet (Davis 2006, Stephenson et al. 2010). Nor can they consider the global consequences of increasingly affluent populations, since ecological concerns have been ruled out as mere hypocrisy.

A second association between population policy and racism is made via allusions to eugenics. Hardt and Negri condemn those who are ‘concerned primarily with which social groups reproduce and which do not’. For much of the twentieth century the project of improving the species’ genetic stock had influential adherents but by the 1920s, negative eugenics entailed sterilising the degenerate: the insane, the criminal, certain races. This policy gained its most notorious expression under Nazism as population policy became genocidal. The link in Multitude is undoubtedly reinforced by its authors’ indebtedness to Foucault, who explains that treating population as a matrix of different races permits the state to kill others as a condition of making life healthier (Foucault 2003, p. 245). In an age of colonial ambitions race accordingly justified genocide, while for eugenics programmes killing the enemy was a way to purify one’s own race. Historically, such references remain very powerful. Yet again, the link to population policy is specific and contingent. It is surely not a good enough reason to avoid population talk in the current century although it does provide a good explanation for our proclivity to do so. In a third linkage, Hardt and Negri refer to ‘racial panic’: a phenomenon elsewhere referred to as ‘race suicide’. In light of the decline of white European populations, they argue, perceptions of a demographic crisis primarily concern racial composition: the increasingly ‘darker color’ of European and world populations. ‘It is difficult’, they argue, ‘to separate most contemporary projects of population control from a kind of racial panic’. The term race suicide emerged early in the twentieth century when President Theodore Roosevelt condemned families who chose to produce merely two progeny: a nation that wilfully reduced its population in this way would deservedly commit race suicide, he maintained, adding that the differential fertility rates among Anglo-Saxons and immigrants might deliver an especially regrettable form of race suicide (Roosevelt 1903). It is indeed the case that population policies have sometimes been motivated by nationalist or ethnic desires to increase a people’s powers by multiplying more strenuously than its competitors. But this is not limited to white European populations; it is more typically associated with selective pro-natalism and population concerns are not reducible to eugenic ambitions, especially when it is the affluent who are most unsustainable. Hardt and Negri are helpful for illustrating how vulnerable demographic policies, especially those designed to achieve differential birth rates, are to racism and xenophobia and how susceptible to entanglement in broader geopolitical struggles. The warning remains salient inasmuch as such connections have acquired renewed resonance in light of unprecedented migration flows since the mid-1990s. In developed countries, immigration has replaced fertility as the principal demographic variable provoking public anxiety about population growth (United Nations 2000, Coleman 2010), with concerns about overcrowding and the environment again being interpreted as cloaks for racism. The connection certainly reinforces the sense in which population numbers are an inherently controversial issue. But does it not also show why anxieties provoked by demographic change must be subjected to public deliberation rather than being summarily rejected as too shameful to acknowledge?

Population-skepticism Although demography is for the most part an arid quantitative discipline, it also has its own narratives and these provide conduits investment. This section begins with a brief discussion transition theory (DTT), which is currently the dominant narrative and is responsible for population-skepticism among experts. By skepticism, here, I mean doubt that there is any longer a population problem since fertility is declining almost everywhere. In the latter part of the section I consider a more political variant of population-skepticism that suggests population growth is not detrimental anyway. In this case I show how the population-skepticism promulgated by demographic revisionists neoliberal and social conservative values. skepticism are hostile to an alternative Malthusian narrative. In the first case this is judged anachronistic; in the second it is rejected as predicated on fundamental misunderstandings of modernity’s capacities for sustained growth.

DTT comprises one of the great narratives of modernisation (Kirk 1996, p. 384). As Lee and Reher (2011, p. 1) write of transition, this ‘historical process ranks as one of the most important changes affecting human society in the past half millennium, on a par with the spread of democratic government, the industrial revolution, the increase in urbanization, and the progressive increases in educational levels of human populations’. DTT identifies four demographic stages that are integral to modernisation. Relatively stable populations with high fertility and mortality (DT 1) are disrupted by biopolitical regimes that reduce mortality rates. This causes rapid population growth because there is typically a lag before fertility drops correspondingly (DT 2). Thereafter, low mortality is matched by low fertility: the transition proper. Growth nevertheless continues thanks to the momentum of large, youthful populations (DT 3). Only in a final stage is transition completed as the population ages and growth stops, thereby restoring equilibrium albeit at a higher level (DT 4). This account stifles the population question by contextualising it. If population growth is caused by the second stage it is observed most anxiously in the third, yet by then fertility is already falling. While developed countries are currently in the final stage of transition, exponents of DTT maintain that most of their developing counterparts are advancing through the third stage and all are expected to follow suit. There is indeed considerable empirical evidence supporting fertility transition and the theory is useful for classifying the demographic situation in particular locations. It is nonetheless worth making some critical observations about the theory’s predictive powers and its relevance for the future, given that transition is routinely cited to justify demographic complacency.

It claims universal applicability but European experience provides its template and ideal. A problem arises insofar as diverse transitional patterns are classified as manifestations of a deterministic mechanism guaranteeing that transition will everywhere be completed. This greatly enhances the sceptical potency of the theory but like other modern end-of-history arguments, it relies on dubious teleological assumptions to inflate its predictive claims. For example, DTT presupposes that secular, Western attitudes to contraception and family size will prevail, yet it is by no means certain that this can be relied upon in a multicultural world in which religious, patriarchal cultures are gaining relative demographic advantage (Norris and Inglehart 2004, Kaufmann 2010). It assumes there is no Malthusian trap whereby high fertility forecloses opportunities for development, for example by suppressing capital accumulation. While current projections are broadly congruent with DTT expectations, this is unsurprising inasmuch as projections must extrapolate from current trends, a practice that relies on assumptions themselves furnished by DTT optimism. Projections ‘must not be confused with current reality’ precisely because their ‘assumptions reflect the spirit of the era in which they are framed. To them are transmitted its hopes and fears’ (Le Bras 2008, p.153, van de Kaa 1996, ONS 2008, pp. 23, 24). Their uncertainty is indicated by the production of several variants. So while the UN’s oft-cited medium variant for 2100 is 10.1 billion, this increases to 27 billion were 2005–10 fertility rates to remain constant (United Nations 2010, p. 1). In short, there are no guarantees that fertility will decline universally or irreversibly. Ironically, since worldwide completion of transition relies on contingent factors such as the willingness of international donors to fund family planning programs, population skepticism helps to disincentivise the very policies fertility decline depends on and to challenge projections’ accuracy.

Let us assume, however, that population does stabilise around 10 billion or perhaps declines thereafter. Would this be a good enough reason for dismissing population growth anxieties, as sceptics do? Might environmentalists not still wonder whether such levels are sustainable or desirable, especially when coupled with aspirations for global economic development and equity and in light of current ecological challenges? Should those who currently urge pronatalist policies in order to increase the post-transitional birth rate as a driver of economic growth not be challenged to justify their arguments in relation to the longer-term wellbeing of future generations and the planet? There is an important distinction here between skepticism levelled at the prospect of continuing demographic growth and normative doubts regarding the social benefits of living at thickening densities. Yet it is partly to suppress such reflections on the merits of returning to smaller populations, I now suggest, that population-skepticism has been embraced by neoliberals as an antidote to limits-to-growth arguments. An excellent place to start disentangling this political dimension of population-skepticism is the ‘Policy Statement of the United States of America at the United Nations International Conference on Population’ (The Whitehouse 1984). My analysis is designed to show the high ideological stakes the population game had assumed by the 1980s as neoliberal interests invested in population-skepticism. Despite developing countries’ antagonism to Americanled initiatives on population control in Bucharest, many had introduced donordependent, national family planning programmes by the 1980s because they regarded population growth as detrimental to development. It was in this context that the intervention of the Reagan administration, in an official document preparatory for the Mexico City conference (1984), represented a dramatic shift in perspective. The Statement insists that centralised targets for reducing population have no place in ‘the right of couples to determine the size of their own families’ (The Whitehouse 1984, p. 578). Such arguments have affinity with populationshaming but with two important differences. From the neoliberal perspective it was East/West rather than North/South political relations that were at issue, while the link between population policy and coercion was made from the point of view of the political right rather than left. A dichotomy was now constructed between coercion and voluntarism, the implication being that reproductive rights are antithetical to state intervention because this is ipso facto coercive. Population-skepticism is advanced here by displacing the problem of population growth onto a problematisation of the (socialist) authoritarian state.

While exponents of DTT are sceptical that population increase remains a problem since growth rates are slowing, the Whitehouse (1984, p. 576) advanced the bolder claim that growth is itself a ‘neutral phenomenon’. ‘The relationship between population growth and economic development is not necessarily a negative one’.

Julian Simon (1977), one of demographic revisionism’s principal proponents, maintains that population growth is in the longer run beneficial for economic growth and the environment because more people are a spur to and resource for hard work, ingenuity and technological innovation. This approach continues to furnish the standard riposte to limitsto-growth arguments: bigger populations are held to be sustainable because the inventiveness of more people will endow ecosystems with the resilience needed to accommodate them

Where population growth remains a problem, free markets were presented by the Reagan administration as a panacea. Thus ‘economic statism’ not only hinders development by stifling individual initiative; it also disrupts ‘the natural mechanism’ for slowing population growth. This natural ‘controlling factor’ is glossed as ‘the adjustment, by individual families, of reproductive behaviour to economic opportunity and aspiration. Historically, as opportunities and the standard of living rise’, it is argued, ‘the birth rate falls’. This is allegedly because ‘economic freedom’ engenders ‘economically rational behavior’ that includes responsible fertility choices

The ideological intentions of the Statement were made clear by a lightly-coded attack on the American new left. The Whitehouse policy response to population is advertised as ‘measured, modulated’, as opposed to ‘an overreaction by some’. Overreaction (in response to imminent environmental crisis) was identified in 1984 as an unfortunate consequence of rapid population growth having coincided with two regrettable factors that ‘hindered families and nations’. The first was foreign socialism; the second involved the counter-culture’s alleged ‘anti-intellectualism’, attributed here to anxieties caused by the West’s rapid modernisation. Cultural pessimism, rather than material concerns about sustainability, was thus identified as the source of domestic population anxiety. This interpretation left the way clear for a ‘rapid and responsible development of natural resources’, that is, the sustained economic growth through technologically-enhanced development that revisionists and neoliberals associated with population growth. For the radical right, in sum, the problem of population growth simply evaporated since in the West it had been merely a delusion of left-wing infantilism, while in poorer countries the solution lay in liberalised markets whose congenial effects on fertility choices would be complemented by the efficiency of privatised health services.

Before leaving this category of population-skepticism it is important to notice how social conservatism was also incorporated. Once population growth had been discounted as a relevant issue it became easier for social conservatives to instigate changes that would not only undermine support for population policies but also direct funding away from family planning programs. The defining issue here was abortion. While abortion had been viewed as an integral part of family planning by much of the population establishment, the Reagan administration’s emphasis on human lives included the unborn whose rights coincided with its pro-life policy. Population policies must, the Whitehouse insisted, be ‘consistent with respect for human dignity and family values’, including religious values. Abortion was now scuttled into the category of disrespectful (‘repugnant’) coercion. ‘Attempts to use abortion, involuntary sterilization, or other coercive measures in family planning’, it stated, ‘must be shunned’ (The Whitehouse 1984, p. 578). This judgement was not merely rhetorical: it had immediate practical implications for family planning organizations, NGOs, the UNFPA itself, which now lost US funding even if they only in principle supported abortion.

By placing social and religious conservatism at the heart of American population policy, the Republicans gave succor to traditional antipathies to modern contraception and women’s reproductive autonomy while introducing an additional level of value-conflict into a field where secular attitudes had formerly dominated. This opened a new dimension in the population-silencing frame. Asking why population growth now attracts so little attention in the United States, Martha Campbell cites ‘anti-abortion activists, religious leaders and conservative think tanks’ as a major cause (Campbell 2007, p. 240). As religious voices have become more strident in a context of multiculturalist respect for diversity and neo-conservative support, espousing population concerns that imply anti-natalism has correspondingly become more risky.

Skepticism also has a more political dimension inasmuch as it is reinforced by revisionist claims that population growth is advantageous: a view that is congruent with neoliberal desires for sustained economic growth and anathema to limits-to-growth arguments.

Population-declinism is a corollary of population-skepticism in that it is an expression of the final stage of demographic transition. It warrants its own discursive category, however, because it differs from skepticism in two significant ways: regarding mood and policy implications. Its affective tenor is quite different from the dynamic, pro-growth bullishness of political skepticism. A symptom of completing transition is that the population ages. This phenomenon engenders a sense of melancholia and loss connected to fears of relative decline; it is despondent about completing transition. Population declinism is currently powerful in precluding enthusiasm for population stabilization because rather than welcoming ageing as a sign that modernity’s enormous demographic expansion is ending, it promulgates images of enervation and decay in which the faltering powers and risk-averse outlooks ascribed to older people are attributed to whole regions (like ‘old Europe’). For declinists, low-fertility societies are destined to fail relative to more youthful, energetic competitors, with feebleness in the global economy accompanying weakness in the military theatre (Jackson and Howe 2008). The remedy is to encourage renewed growth. Such anxieties induce skepticism. While the latter rejects state interference in influencing population numbers, regarding it as unnecessary, inefficacious and coercive, population declinists do advocate interventionist policies. Unlike earlier limits-to-growth exponents, however, they promote pro-, rather than anti-, natalism, alongside immigration, in order to rejuvenate developed world populations (Commission of the European Communities 2005, Dixon and Margolis 2006). In 2009 almost half the governments in these countries regarded their population growth as too low

The power of declinism is such that this is rarely complemented by consideration of whether upward trends enhance quality of life or the environmental systems on which it depends

The principal danger of declinism is that it operates within a short timeframe that focuses on temporary fiscal and productivity challenges, yet its demographic remedies are likely to aggravate unsustainability later on.

Population-decomposing. A fourth category of silencing discourse

Talking about population as a totality that can be planned and managed has come to be regarded as not only political dangerous but also methodologically crude. This is a more elusive discursive effect than the first three categories but it has been effective in disenfranchising the population question in three ways: normative, methodological and ontological. Normatively, population-decomposing has been effective in rejecting ‘the numbers game’. This is congruent with population-shaming and political skepticism but this argument is rather different in its aversion to referencing population size as such. The numbers game is played by those who worry that the mass of human flesh is unsustainable or that thickening population densities degrade wellbeing.

Iconic texts like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb were explicit about population being a numbers game. In light of an imminent environmental crisis, Ehrlich (1972, preface) defined population control as ‘the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs not just of individual families, but of society as a whole’. In other words, reproduction was understood as an other-regarding act. Ehrlich (1972, p. 3f.) had concluded that ‘no matter how you slice it, population is a numbers game’. He was probably referring here to the need for statistical familiarity with the properties of exponential growth, but to critics his work suggested an equation between the numbers game and state-imposed coercion. As a consequence the focus on population size and growth rates, especially when linked to targets and sanctions, fell into disrepute. This antipathy is encapsulated in UNFPA’s observation that since the mid-1990s, there has been ‘a shift in population policy and programs away from a focus on human numbers’ to a focus on ‘human lives’. Policies based on perceptions of a ‘race between numbers and resources’ are eschewed as synonymous with a ‘numbers game’ presented as antithetical to human rights (UNFPA, n.d., p. 4, UNFPA 2008, p. 1). In sum, even to focus on overall demographic quantities becomes anathema to personal choice and liberty. Reproduction is recast as a self-regarding act. One outcome has been to devolve population issues into matters of reproductive health and individual welfare entitlements.

The change of emphasis they entail has helped to exclude discussions about overall numbers while supporting the view that population is best approached at an individual or familial level.

Its disavowal of the numbers game, provoking critics like Ehrlich (2008, p. 107) to lament the way environmental repercussions of population growth now succumbed to ‘a narrow focus on issues of reproductive rights and maternal and child health’. The focus is in no way reprehensible but it has had the effect of displacing population growth as a global environmental issue. Campbell (2007, pp. 237, 243) cites Cairo as ‘the turning point in removing the population subject from policy discourse’, noting that talking about population became politically incorrect thereafter because it was perceived as disadvantageous to women.

This decomposing trend has been reinforced by the way aggregated population numbers have come to be regarded as methodologically and statistically crude, thus further undermining the possibility of advancing (neo-) Malthusian arguments. Figures at a more fine-grained level make less obvious headline news or dramatic narratives. Complementing new emphasis on demographic complexity is a widespread view that population dynamics such as age composition or urbanization are more relevant for policymaking than broader trajectories of population size. This, too, dissolves narrative impact by translating demographic trends into numerous policy challenges. These disaggregating effects thus serve to de-politicize and de-problematize the issue because as data has been refined, the demographic phenomena that mobilized players of the numbers game are occluded.

Demography as a discipline has itself, moreover, become more closely modelled on economics and concerned with economic data, thus sharing with economics its own movement away from macro-level approaches towards micro-level, statistical studies where individuals feature as rational agents making choices on the basis of cost–benefit analysis. Le Bras maintains that every branch of demographic analysis has been renewed in this direction over the past two decades. ‘In fertility studies, the dominant position is now occupied by microeconomic models of the family’ based on work by Gary Becker and George Schulz (Le Bras 2008, p. xi). Ehrlich also argues that as a discipline, demography ‘has largely diverged from environmental concerns and the broad analyses of social structures’ it formerly undertook. It now ‘focuses on measuring and modelling the dynamics of various populations’: a process judged valuable but peripheral to ‘the really big demographic issue’ of the environmental cost of population growth and its rectification (Ehrlich 2008, p. 103). It might also be noted that macro-level analysis was formerly associated with structural, Marxist approaches that have themselves fallen from grace as planning regimes have succumbed to more laissez-faire frameworks emphasizing individual decision-making. In sum, the normative and methodological dimensions of population-decomposing together help to demolish the framework in which population numbers matter and in which society has an interest in and responsibility for sustainable levels. This makes it difficult to identify, problematize or debate population growth as a social issue amenable to democratic debate or collective action.

As advanced countries have developed service or digital economies, and as the more obviously material costs of industrialization have become less emphasized, so attention to the material needs and costs of more bodies, qua needy biological entities engaged in physical labor, has also waned. Diane Coyle (1997) writes evocatively of a ‘weightless world’ and urges governments to embrace an age of de-materialization. This complements a tendency to understand social systems in virtual terms, with production and consumption re-figured as virtual flows of data, symbols and images that can be regarded as having little actual impact on the environment. Yet a corresponding emphasis on the human capital that drives the knowledge economy detracts from the space that embodied humans require and ignores the consumer durables – like cars, refrigerators, plastics, swimming pools – they desire. It permits an illicit substitution of the idea of sustained, indefinite growth for earlier recognition of the material limits of a finite planet.

From a virtual viewpoint there is in this lightness of being no obvious limit to the numbers the earth can sustain or to their capacity to invent new technologies that will render resources infinitely elastic and felicitously ethereal. This surely rests on a dangerous illusion. Population-fatalism In a final discursive category, the term population-fatalism captures some contemporary British inquiries into challenges posed by population growth. Because these are testimony to renewed concern about expanding numbers, they are suggestive of a return of the population question. They are nonetheless distinctive precisely because their overall tone is not fatalistic: they are mainly confident that the challenges of 9 billion (70 million in the United Kingdom) can be met. But they are fatalist in treating population growth as a given; as an aggravating or critical factor they are powerless to change and reluctant to address. Instead, they identify challenges and calculate abatement costs. This distinguishes their arguments from: population-skepticism, which does not see population growth as a problem; population-declinism, which encourages population growth to foreclose shrinkage; population-decomposing, which disavows the very framework of numbers. But it shares their antipathy to antinatalist policy and is probably apprehensive about population-shaming.

The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change is a good example of population-fatalism. Although population growth is included as a significant contributor to global warming there is no suggestion that a demographic element might be incorporated into climate change policy (Stern 2006, p. 12). This formula of neglectful concern has been the hallmark of other recent studies, which prefer technological solutions to controversial political interventions.

Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability cites population growth as an urgent challenge in light of the need ‘to ensure that a global population rising to nine billion or more can be fed sustainably and equitably’ (Foresight 2011, introduction, p. 9). But in neither case is there any suggestion that further population growth might be tackled. The Economist’s (2011) ‘The 9 billion people question’ and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ ‘Population: One Planet, Too Many People?’ (2011) follow a similar logic, with (bio)technological solutions being proffered for a demographic fait accompli.

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s The Environmental Impacts of Demographic Change in the UK (2011) goes further by explicitly excluding population growth as an appropriate policy domain (Coole 2012b). Despite acknowledging that ‘total population is likely to continue to grow, at a historically relatively high rate’ in the United Kingdom and that some regions suffer ‘obvious pressure on infrastructure, services and environment’ (RCEP 2011, 2.22, 6.2), the report constructs an either/or choice between seeking to influence demographic change or trying to mitigate its environmental impact. It unequivocally opts for the latter, declaring the former not ‘a good basis for policy’ because unspecified ‘objections on social and ethical grounds would outweigh the environmental gains’

Conclusion

I have asked why, as the twenty-first century proceeds inexorably towards a world population of 9 billion plus, there is so little discussion of the socio-ecologically deleterious effects of continuing population growth. I identified five discourses that together explain why there is currently no politically acceptable framework within which population numbers can be problematized or remedial action commended. While they are mutually-supporting in their silencing effects, two of these discourses seem especially powerful: population shaming, because it renders the population question so morally treacherous, and population-skepticism, because of its complacency and its congeniality for hegemonic pro-growth ideologies. I have not attempted to refute such arguments but I have suggested that they are not good enough reasons for suppressing discussion about population numbers and the merits of fewer people, especially as renewed public concerns emerge over resource insecurity, biodiversity, climate change and high-density urban living.

Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?

The post Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration? appeared first on BOCS FOUNDATION.

The direction of human evolution is to cheat brutal earth evolution with contraception and euthanasia!

1.

Have you ever been fooled by this materialistically misinterpreted Gandhi quote a million times? “The world is enough for everyone’s needs, but not for their greed.”

It is completely false to understand this in material terms alone. Greed in Gandhi means also the multiplication of subjects! In addition to the powers, religions, ideologies that force procreation, parents are also greedy when they procreate irresponsibly (clumsily in sexual greed) or selfishly (their child’s labour, elderly caretaker)!

Gandhi was not an ignorant warmonger, and although there were no precise ecological data at the time, he never thought the world’s resources were sufficient for an exploding human population if it did not consume greedily (i.e. sink into world oppression).
India’s population has exploded more than fourfold since then, so that its per capita subsistence is only one-ninth that of Hungary. In other words, the poverty trap is closed for them, and their current poverty is no longer sustainable! Although the average Indian has an ecological footprint of only about a quarter of the Hungarian average, India’s population is more than three times overburdened and is rapidly depleting its land.

The lesson: those who do not work primarily for the human right to contraception, but who preach about reducing consumption by quoting Gandhi’s materialistic phrase, not only do not understand ecology, but have no heart (or idea of poverty), since access to contraception is the key to lifting people out of poverty.

See also: Antinatalism – Gandhi’s Gait

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2.

The “nature”
– is a resource to be exploited by the exploiters,
– boring, inconvenient and prickly to the non-nature walkers,
– a nostalgic beauty to those who miss it,
– for the conservationists, the basis of human life, but also a value in itself,
– for science, a brutal state of being, evolution: forced unlimited reproduction, scarcity, struggle, suffering,
– for the mystic, a low rung in the universe.

A beautiful ring of galaxies on every finger, even on every toe. And on every finger of all 8 billion people, since we already detect more than 200 billion galaxies.
The average galaxy contains more than a hundred billion stars. That’s more than 2 trillion stars for every person living on Earth today in the universe as we know it. And we’ve already detected more than 200 exoplanets nearby in the last two decades, where life could be possible.
What advanced life systems could there be in this vast cosmos?

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3.
The earthly order of being, evolution, is rather low, brutal:
– all beings must reproduce in a forced and unlimited way,

– so it must constantly encounter resource constraints (scarcity) and competition (struggle, suffering),

– it must strive to differ, to modify, to mutate, to somehow overtake its competitors, but most of these modifications lead to destruction, descharge,

– for many creatures to survive, to reproduce, they have to cause suffering, to kill, to defraud, (and the sadism of evolution programs eternal struggle even into mating relationships, since the strategy of successful gene propagation is both male and female cheating + jealousy, i.e. deceiving and restricting each other at the same time)

– and then evolution selects for the “fall of the worm” brutality, moreover selects for indifference to suffering, ruthlessness (those who cannot expel the horrors of life on earth from their psyche become depressed, not winners),

– and what few survive successfully flourish on the skeletal heaps of failure, suffering, death, destruction.

– but we who have survived for the time being do not grasp the brutality of evolution, because the vast majority of the extinct no longer have any news or lessons to learn, because history is written by the victors, the wailing of the suffering is not heard in the cheers of the victors.

“Evolution is an amoral, heartless process that proceeds pragmatically, without concern for ethical preferences, codes of honour or value systems. Of course, it does not distinguish between prosocial cooperation and antisocial manipulation, because only what works for survival and reproduction matters.” (Lixing Sun)

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4.
Do procreationist religions worship evolution (“natural law”) as their god? (While even denying evolution, lest their idolatry be exposed.)
Evolution doesn’t care how much is lost in horrible suffering, only the most productive ones who make it to further reproduction matter.
Humanity forces reproduction at the expense of quality and suffering, humanity does the opposite.

Even though gene evolution was preceded by meme evolution (since changes in behaviour under the influence of memes are much faster than mutations in genes), it is also contaminated by forced reproduction. The family or ethnic group that was better able to push its daughters and wives into the birth machine (through memes, religion, socialisation, violence) gained the advantage.
Carelessness and interest dance around procreation, but the music is played by evil, which brutally enforces (public thinking, social pressure, law, education, socialisation…) the gene-evolution reproduction in the meme-world as well.

In brutal evolution, life is generally not pretty. That it is beautiful is what the reproductionists would have the masses believe. Otherwise people would not want to pass on a life that is not nice. And for the few, having many servants is what makes life somewhat beautiful. So many must live a not-nice life for the few to live a nice life.

And the production of slaves produces sacrifices: not only are the vast majority of the children born slave labourers for the rest of their lives, but the earth’s ability to support itself collapses underneath.

In recent decades, masses of people have been able to rise out of poverty, seemingly to the benefit of all. Who suffers the price? Children, the poor, wildlife and future generations. They are the most vulnerable, their voices are not heard, they cannot defend their interests.

For it is not only the human slave army of the population explosion that serves the somewhat beautiful lives of the few, but also an army of machine slaves. They are eating up the future as fuel. They destroy the climate, the soils, the forests, the waters, the wildlife, they pollute and poison the biosphere.

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5.
Only goodness that helps those without contraception! Without this chariity is ignorance or hypocrisy.
It doesn’t really matter if you responsibly procreate a little, because you can help prevent ten or a hundred times more by helping those with unmet need of contraceptives.

The human race has evolved in evolution, but it is outgrowing it, it is already in dissonance with it, it considers the need to reproduce, scarcity, struggle, suffering, brutal. Even primitive peoples have apologised to the soul of the hunted beast and explained to it that, unfortunately, they have to kill to feed.
Why are we in the world? To recognize the lowliness of the earthly order and to ascend to a higher level.

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6.
Contraception is the most crucial element of becoming human, a way to override instinctive reproduction, the driving force behind the brutality of evolution. The more evolved man can achieve pleasure without reproduction. It is the separation of fertility from sex that has set man apart from the animal world. Animals do not have sex, they only procreate (with a few advanced exceptions).

What is it that makes responsible procreation (and nonprocreation, childfree) so widespread in our time? What is the unlucky-luck that has pushed the human species beyond evolution? Already five major (and many minor) extinctions in the history of life on Earth have been caused by catastrophes: asteroid impacts, series of supervolcano eruptions. The current sixth great extinction is the first caused by evolution itself.
So far, the incessant population explosions have been self-correcting, e.g. locusts multiply, devour everything, then die out en masse. Now, however, the overpopulation of the human species has triggered a super-volcanic eruption-like catastrophe: it has punctured the Earth in millions of places and blasted the extracted fossil energy, underworldly envy, back into the biosphere, into the surface.

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7.
Thus humanity is well on its way to the higher level envisioned by Gandhi, to extinction from the brutal Earth, i.e. to “ascend” to a more advanced cosmic existence. The question is how much of this ascension will be humane and how much of it will be horrible.

A higher moral, humane ascension might work something like this:
– Responsible procreation (see below), so few offspring, for whom it is not an overload, but much joy, little suffering.

– Many manage to enjoy life, but are responsible, so they don’t want to procreate because they know their offspring will probably not be so lucky, but may sink into the vast majority of sufferers. Fortunately, the childfree choice also makes life more enjoyable.

– For the vast majority, life is largely suffering, so they would not procrea tewithout the social pressure, brainwashing and heartwashing that reproduction forces. Hundreds of millions can resist even this pressure, but they are brutally pushed into a birth machine queue, deprived of the human right, knowledge and means of contraception. Morality begins by mitigating the deprivation of contraception

– It is part of human dignity to be able to choose to end one’s life on earth. Jesus also taught that one must be ready to give up life on earth (bios) in order to gain a higher life (dzoé). Even today, a significant number of people commit “suicide”, but the slave-producing society does not let them escape from slavery so easily, ninety-nine percent of them are pulled back (“rescued”, so that they can then mostly fight to die again). The adoption of euthanasia (good death) can help the poor to have the opportunity to do what is still mostly the privilege of the rich: to have the legal and health care to make their own choices and to move on under appropriate conditions.

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8.
Unfortunately, it is possible that the majority of humanity will not die out of the Earth in such a “die-off”, but
– suffering individually, eagerly waiting for death to “lift our brother who opens the gates” (St. Francis of Assisi: Hymn to the Sun), and in the meantime suffering accidents, sometimes even accidental death, so that they cannot break the eternal cycle of procreation, suffering and death,
– and, as a human species, according to the rules of brutal evolution: the misery of civilizational collapse, climate catastrophe, nuclear war, etc., caused by overpopulation.
But goodness is effective even in such cases: the amount of suffering in the greatest catastrophe can be alleviated by supporting contraception.

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9.
No one has the right to procreate! Unless …

Only women can decide if, when and by whom they want to get pregnant. But they can only say NO on their own, not YES!

No one has the right to procreate without fulfilling the rights of a potential future child:

● the right to conceive by responsible choice, not by accident

● the decision of a well-prepared couple

● who are mature in their personalities

● who are raising children in a stable parental relationship

● the right to a loving home and community

● to a small age group, where there are as few as possible psychologically damaged, destitute children unwanted by their parents, where people are rare treasures, not overproduced, expendable slaves, and do not have to fight in droves for increasingly scarce water, land, shelter, shade… (so only those who help those without contraception procreate responsibly!)

● a healthy nature, an Earth that can live for at least a century

● where you will receive the spiritual and material resources necessary for a happy life.

So only those who help those who do not use contraception are responsible!

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10.
Contraception is a fundamental human right (UN, 1968)!
A child is not a tool, but a person. It should not be conceived for any nationalistic, religious, economic, political, family, military, family, relationship, psychological, individual, etc. interest, but only for the sake of the future child. E.g. those who panic about depopulation do not consider future children as persons, only as a means to their quantitative ends.

No one has the right to procreate! Meditation before the most serious decision:

Do you really want to have a child with us and conceive now?

(This is the title of our collection of texts on responsible procreation.)

“There is nothing so deceptive as human life, nothing so deceitful. Surely no one would accept it if it were not given without his knowledge. Therefore, too, if the greatest fortune be not born, hold it nearest to that, after a short life to be speedily restored to the former state.” (Seneca: Consolations)

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11.

“The man and the woman were both naked, yet they felt no shame. But the phallus was more  crafty  than any animal the God created.

The phallus said to the woman, “Did God really say that you, being already distinguished among the animals, can now no longer enjoy each other’s bodies?”

The woman replied, “We may still enjoy each other’s bodies, caressing, kissing, licking, sucking and fucking what we have. God only said about the sperm: ‘From now on, don’t let it into the vagina, or you will die.’”

Then the phallus said to the woman, “You will not certainly die any more violently than you did before, like animals. God knows well that your eyes have been opened, you have become like gods  knowing good and evil. So if the sperm enters your vagina, you humans will create, rule, decide on life and death. God wants you to procreate and multiply and rule over every living creature on earth.”

She knew that the phallus was pleasurable, pleasing to the eye, and she loved to feel it in her vagina when he orgasmed. So she was still not careful, and she told the man that there was no need to be careful. So the sperm got into her vagina and she was now pregnant as a human.

But with their eyes already open, they were shaken by the heavy responsibility of becoming parents. They realised they were naked and that they had become like gods, knowing good and evil. They can multiply, create humans on Earth, and decide which beings they want to displace from existence. What they had experienced with animal unconsciousness, the relentless cycle of procreation, suffering, death, now horrified them. They sensed the low brutality of earthly evolution, driven by forced reproduction.

They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then they heard the sound of the God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the God among the trees of the garden. But God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

But he said: “Who told you that you were naked? Though you have risen above the animal level, have you ejaculated into her vagina, which I forbade?” The man replied, “The woman you put here with me, still did not want to take care, so didn’t I.” God asked the woman, “What is this you have done?” She replied, “The phallus deceived me, that’s why I did it.”

So the God said to the phallus, “Because you have deceived human, you have lied that evolution is God, you have encouraged procreation and domination, you will be cursed, the plague of overpopulation on the world. I will put opposition between you and woman, she will shrink from even pleasure, terrified of pregnancy. She will not trust you and you will have to trick, brainwash and force to get her pregnant.”

And to the woman God said: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you, especially if he has already made you pregnant.”

To the man God said, “Because you have continued in animal negligence with the woman and ejaculated into her vagina, although I have forbidden it, cursed is the ground because of your overpopulation. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. You cannot reach the Garden of Eden until you have tamed your phallus, which evolution’s reproductive compulsion has mastered, into a human penis, a player of pleasure.”

Then the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. But he will not easily give up the destructive power of procreation. Let us see how long it takes him to recognize the brutal inferiority of earthly evolution driven by the compulsion to reproduce. Then he will again abstain from irresponsible procreation, break the inexorable cycle of procreation-suffer-death, die out from the Earth, die up to the Garden of Eden.”

(Based on Genesis 2-3 chapters, by Gyula I. Simonyi)

Simonyi, Gyula I.

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