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Memories of the 28th Century

Creating a New World Order

Rating: 2 votes, 5.00 average.
It probably was a mistake to read it at all, but I just finished reading “The World Set Free” by H. G. Wells. It is about the nuclear war in the mid 1950’s and the aftermath of the war. The book was written a hundred years ago, before anyone actually knew what a runaway nuclear reaction would be like. He got that wrong, thinking that the chain reaction would continue for years, rather than creating a real explosion of large size. The novel was about the results, rather than the action. He pointed out a few things that we usually forget but that are still important.

Humans are designed to be hunters and gathers. Our social systems and institutions are designed for people who survive by hunting and gathering. While some economic activities are like hunting, there are differences. But the economic system is predicated on human life as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago, and things have changed a little. Social institutions are for a species that numbers in the millions, not the billions. Humans aren’t meant to see other humans in great numbers. The millions of years of evolution led to a species that lived in groups of fewer than three hundred, people who wandered much of the time, animals who perpetuated the works, words, and superstitions of their forebears, people who didn’t change much from millennium to millennium. Until recently things didn’t change much over the millennia, but in the last few thousand years the surroundings in which people found themselves started becoming more and more different over time, and the social situations also changed. As population increased there became more opportunities for exogamy. Until recently the overwhelming majority of people married first or second cousins, and there were people who didn’t look the same, and some of those strange people were in the habit of doing things that were different from what our tribe was accustomed. Most social institutions, including governmental institutions are based on the assumption that most people will be similar. It is fairly easy for humans to get along with other humans who seem like them, but humans who are different are more likely to be enemies.

As society became different in its constitution, the prior institutions were retained, even though the functions for which they had developed had changed or even disappeared.

The questions are: Do we need a new order? If we do, then what should it be? People have suggested various alterations to social institutions, but those are mostly still based on the same assumptions. I don’t think that the human spirit has changed for many thousands of years, and I base that on literature that was written in the past and recently. But that spirit is not appropriate to the situations in which most people live now.

I can see two possibilities. Either humans will change their social institutions, or the human population will decrease dramatically. Both of those possibilities have been explored in literature, but I don’t think that anyone has figured out what will actually happen, and I think that the highest probability is for something other than what has been predicted to be the actual result.

I happen to like humans pretty much as they are (at least I am accustomed to them as they are, whether I like them is an individual matter). That doesn’t mean that I am not a misanthrope, but as an observer I think that the human species is interesting, and it is adaptable. Unfortunately, there are a great many humans who are not well suited for humanity as it is now, and that may include me. I think that the greatest hope for humanity is for its numbers to greatly decrease. In the last one hundred years many people have lived and reproduced who could not have survived without intervention, and humanity has not developed the intellectual strength that is required for a change in the society. Business is still carried on in ways that are largely unchanged. Running a society with the degree of specialization that is required now is different from what was needed just fifty years ago, and the nature of the population has not changed to fill those needs. As technology changes there is more and more need for people with greater intellectual capacity, but humans are still born with an average IQ of 100, which means that half of the population is not even that intelligent. That level of intelligence was fine when most people farmed, fished, mined, or worked in manufacturing plants, but it often takes more than training for someone to move from physical labor into intellectual labor.

The idea of a population crash has been brought up, and it would be likely, if humans weren’t as aware of their surroundings as they are. It is not unusual for excess population to cause a crash in deer population, squirrel population, and so on, and such a crash in human population is possible, and it would eliminate a great many problems.

Things often work out in ways that were not foreseen. As with the works of H.G. Wells, predictions become outdated quickly. Looking at history we can see that there usually is one part from one side of the argument, another part from the other side, and yet another part that is completely different. With that I will make my suggestion.

Regardless of what we might like, there will be a new order of things, but that isn’t on the immediate horizon, and the nature of the changes can’t be determined, but the population of humans will decrease significantly during the next few decades. Lastly, something else will happen, but I don’t know what that will be; although the list is topped with an unexpected scientific breakthrough and contact with intelligent life from another star system.

There are several possibilities of what will cause the decrease in population, but the old standbys top that list: disease and catastrophe. For a catastrophe to be big enough to be effective it would have to be an asteroid strike or something similar. As far as diseases go, Plague, especially if a new strain evolves, is at the top of the list, but there are many other diseases that could also change only slightly and become world killers.

There are plenty of people who think that society should be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.

Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or Summer), or something else along those lines.

So reader, what do you think? Must it begin here and now, or can we put things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as we have for these past millions of years?

Updated 03-27-2013 at 07:41 PM by PeterL

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Comments

  1. cafolini's Avatar
    There are only two possibilities. 1. The globalization of democracy. 2. Baptism by fire and their arses going up in flames. And the people are repressed, not stupid, but merely stupefied for sometime. Eventually, inevitably, they will come to terms with their arses desires. LOL.
    It's like Salman Rushdie said about the Berlin wall. It will happen very fast.
    "She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes..."
    Updated 03-27-2013 at 01:59 PM by cafolini
  2. PeterL's Avatar
    Perhaps it will be fast and hot. During the Really Great Plague we will burn bodies as we find them, and the fat arses will burn better than the bones. An asterioid strike would also cause a real holocaust. I must disagree about people; humans are evolved for life as hunters and gatherers, and those jobs take persistence and some memory of what is edible, but they do not require creative intelligence. Most hunters and gatherers who are no intelligent do not live nearly as long as the smart ones, and prehistoric humans lived into theri sixties, if they got past twenty.
  3. cafolini's Avatar
    PeterL, are you a hunter-gatherer? Did you get past 20? LOL
  4. PeterL's Avatar
    Yes on both counts, and I am scheduled to depart on October 12, 3208.
    How about you?
  5. hannah_arendt's Avatar
    Unfortunately we have a social world , very distant from a hunter one. Because people don`t have to fight, the ability of competition is dying out.
  6. PeterL's Avatar
    Yes, and the mismatch between evolutionary development and the current situation are problems. I think that getting rid of the excess is the easiest way.