Malthus Was Right

How the Super Rich and the International Corporations They Own

Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg

Or Malthus Was Right

January 03, 2014

“The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798 under the alias Joseph Johnson.,^[1] but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. While it was not the first book on population, it has been acknowledged as the most influential work of its era. Its 6th edition was independently cited as a key influence by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection.

A key portion of the book was dedicated to what is now known as Malthus' Iron Law of Population. This name itself is retrospective, based on the iron law of wages, which is the reformulation of Malthus' position by Ferdinand Lassalle, who in turn derived the name from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.^[2] This theory suggested that growing population rates would contribute to a rising supply of labour that would inevitably lower wages. In essence, Malthus feared that continued population growth would lend itself to poverty.”                             Source Wikipedia

While Malthus was certainly not the first ecological thinker, Rachael Carson created the concept in Silent Spring in the sixties.  Since her book created the critical new scientific field of ecology, it is now accepted in the scientific community that because we live on a small blue planet which is essentially a closed system, we know that the resources necessary for the survival of our species are in limited supply. The political ramifications are that laissez-faire capitalism will not work if we wish to survive. There must be limits placed on the usage of critical resources and processes used to produce industrial products.  We cannot afford to contaminate such water, air, and soil which are all necessary for food production. The most rapid and graphic example was the photo documentary of the horrid deformities of children in a village in Japan downstream from a factory that carelessly dumped the Mercury used in an industrial process into a stream that carried this highly toxic metal to the village were babies were born with grossly deformed bodies.

 Rache Carlson's book focused on the long-term effects of a commonly used pesticide DDT.  We now know that there are tens of thousands of synthetic compounds that now contaminate to some degree all of the water and soil on the entire planet. Early regulatory attempts to control the use of these compounds were totally ineffective. DDT was banned and mega agriculture just substituted somewhat less toxic chemicals. Industrial growth in the 20th century was both rapid and on restrained, and to the present day all attempts to restrain growth and protect our environment from pollution have been a failure.

 The advent of birth control in the 60s initially raised hopes that population could be controlled in a harmless and humane way for the first time in the history of our species. Population growth in both economically prosperous countries such as western Europe, and less prosperous countries like China have in effect been successful. However, equal access to these techniques has not been evenly distributed. The entire continent of Africa is the most glaring example. Population growth in Africa has actually accelerated in the 20th century due to increased crop yields made possible by the production of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. These detrimental compounds on the ecology of the areas in which they have been used has had profound negative effects, including the extension of many species of flora and fauna. Also, Climatologists, an other knew scientific field intimately related to ecology, have recently discovered that the 20th century had one of the mildest periods of the lack of rapid climate change. The 20th century was essentially a fluke of nature has such a mild weather had not been seen on the planet in some 100,000 years, and combined with the one time event of the discovery of oil and depleting it to critically low levels in a little more than a century allowed the world population to explode from 3 billion in 1900 to the current 6.5 billion. With the sudden return of the more violent and normal climactic changes in the early 2000's, combined with the depletion of oil which was the base resource for the host of chemicals that enhanced crop yields, billions of her species are doomed to starvation by 2050. Experts very widely in their prediction of precisely how many will die, but the range is roughly 1 to 3.5 billion. However, for myself no matter what the number we will witness a population catastrophe unequaled in the history of our species.

 The politics of the situation are profoundly depressing. During the last three decades sociopaths (a biological phenomena that has only been understood and proven by  neurophysiologist and psychiatrists by 2003) have exploited the political arena in the United States and now have firm control over our government and everything it does.  As  Senator Bernie Sanders was recently quoted "nothing happens in this country without the approval of the corporations.”  These mega-corporations with strong international influence are owned and controlled by the superrich, who are mostly sociopaths. The pathology of the sociopath which prevents he or she from having any empathy for any other human beings produces an insatiable lust for more and more power and money. What are the moral and ethical justifications for individual human beings who are already trillionaires, sacrificing the essential needs of the rest of the 6.5 billion humans in order to increase their already obscene wealth. I say there are none, and sociopath as why that the heart of our wasteful consumerism and ineffective efforts to control the behavior of the international corporations. It now seems perfectly clear that the 0.9% of our species that sociopaths have been the main source of man's inhumanity to man throughout the history of our species sense we organized beyond the tribal level of Hunter gatherer societies.

 It is also clear that putting effective limits on the behaviors of the powerful international corporations must somehow be accomplished. There are many viable strategies to accomplish this, but we must come to an agreement very soon, and carry out the selected strategies on a massive effort of every average human being. Love and are capacity for bonding and working as a mass towards a well-defined goal is our greatest weapon against the sociopath industrialists who are incapable of any such love intimacy and bonding.

Morris Creedon-McVean, DO