Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake
Today’s program features the second tape in a series of trialogue tapes that were recorded in September 1991 at a private recording session with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna. It begins with a wrap-up of their previous conversation, titled “Grass Roots Science”. And then they begin with a new topic, introduced by Terence McKenna and his plan for “Saving the World”.
[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]
“If mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago.”
“As I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over-population. All other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the Earth.”
“First of all, let’s just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on.”
“A child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told.”
“Notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, ‘How would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.’ ”
“I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future.”
… and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terence’s plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:33 ►
As I said last week, I’m not going to do any kind of year-end program or anything like that right now.
00:00:39 ►
In fact, this will be my last podcast until about the second week in January.
00:00:49 ►
Like some of my fellow podcasters, I’m going to take a little time off and just kick back and visit with friends and family for the next couple of weeks.
00:00:55 ►
And I know that a lot of you still have to go to work for most days during these holidays. But for us retired people and students, well, we appreciate all you do to keep the world turning for us.
00:01:03 ►
And we hope that you get to take some time off and relax as well.
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And particularly you moms out there,
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give yourselves a break and take a few hours off
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and just do nothing if you can.
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I know it’s hard this time of year,
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but there’s always that one more present or one more card
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or one more box of cookies to take to a friend.
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And nothing like a relaxing holiday season, huh?
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But I jest, of course.
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It is fun to reconnect with family and friends.
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And even with the ones that think you’re the weird one when the truth is actually the other way around.
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But speaking of friends who are on your same wavelength,
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I want to thank a friend of the salon,
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Francis D.,
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who made a very generous donation
00:01:52 ►
to help with the expenses
00:01:54 ►
of producing these podcasts.
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So thank you, Francis.
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We all really appreciate your help,
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and I hope that you and yours
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all have a wonderful holiday season.
00:02:06 ►
Now getting on to today’s program, as promised, we’ll pick up right where the last podcast ended
00:02:13 ►
with Rupert and Ralph discussing the challenges facing big science versus today’s grassroots
00:02:19 ►
science. And once again, I’ve left this recording intact, complete with a few long pauses when
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they were obviously trying to figure out what to say next. And as I mentioned last week,
00:02:34 ►
these trialogue recordings were made in September 1991, and apparently were recorded for their own
00:02:41 ►
use, perhaps in planning another public trialogue or to gather information for one of their books.
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In any event, these quiet little recording sessions
00:02:52 ►
are starting to grow on me, and I hope you feel the same way.
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So the next 14 minutes or so
00:03:00 ►
will be the conclusion of their first session, where they were discussing
00:03:04 ►
the relative merits
00:03:05 ►
of big science versus grassroots science.
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Then there’s a brief pause in the tape
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and right away they begin the second session.
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And that begins with them discussing future books and trilogues,
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some of which materialized later and some of which did not.
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And once again, they began their recording session by first chanting Aum,
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which I find quite charming myself.
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So let’s join them now.
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So one of the faults of big science associated associated with the reductionist perspective i suppose is this
00:03:49 ►
gradual progressive never-ending elimination trimming pruning off different things that
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are labeled as pseudosciences amateur fringe science and Or subjective. Subjective. All the paranormal, all the nutritional,
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all kind of alternative medical,
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all these things that are rejected
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comprise a daily growing group.
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While the number of natural phenomena
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studied by big science, official science,
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and establishment science is always shrinking.
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So one of the important gains of
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the new model for alternative science would be to open up cracks in the structure for
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the reintegration of all these different threads, which represents a kind of a holistic approach
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to the whole field of knowledge,
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especially when you include archaeology, history, the social fanaticism, and so on.
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What we’re talking about is bigger than science, really. It’s the reintegration of the entire intellectual sphere.
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Of research in general?
00:04:59 ►
Yes.
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Yes, because there’s a great deal of amateur historical research goes on
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through local histories, societies and so on, which is on the whole unintegrated with professional endeavours.
00:05:14 ►
So that’s one thing. I think one further thing that is worth considering is the formulation of questions.
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worth considering is the formulation of questions now i’m trying to do it in my book called eight experiments to say to change the world um where i formulated eight specific research areas with
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eight specific experiments that could be done on very low budgets any one of which would have a
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paradigm shattering effect taken together would reduce our present model of the world to rubble and require the adoption of a much larger and holistic view of reality.
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These would be…
00:05:52 ►
They’re all things that can be done for budgets of $100 or less.
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Now, I’ve spent some years trying to think out this kind of experiment,
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and the ones I’ve finally come up with for this book
00:06:02 ►
are selected from about 20 or 30 that I’ve considered.
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But this is my own unaided efforts, and it’s a virgin field,
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and I can’t believe that I’m the only person capable of thinking of these things.
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There must be many people, given the incentive,
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who could think up really good questions.
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One thing that happened with morphic resonance research
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was a competition run by the New Scientist magazine
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for experimental designs for morphic resonance,
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with prizes totaling only £250,
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which led to a considerable wave of creativity in experimental design.
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In terms of large-scale questions,
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the kind of endeavour I’ve been engaged in,
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in thinking out simple experiments, is something which groups of people,
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such as ourselves or such as exist in many parts of the world,
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could get together and think of questions, and not only think of the questions
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but think of ways in which they could be plausibly implemented on low budgets by groups of amateurs actually work out questions and possible strategies that could be implemented
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these would then be competitions one way a kind of forum for questions in which these questions
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were published and you know the most interesting ones would be taken up by others and stimulate
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a public debate is another. But this is an important component of it and this is something
00:07:31 ►
that costs nothing. It just involves people sitting around thinking and talking. And this
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I think is a very important component of it because there are lots of people in place who can do the experiments but most people outside
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the scientific endeavor have not um felt empowered to ask the kinds of questions which you can ask
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and because my own background is in experimental science i don’t have that particular inhibition
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um but um most people once they get into the idea at least a lot of people when they get into the
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whole mode of thinking up questions for themselves not feeling they can’t ask them because they’re
00:08:14 ►
not professional scientists are quite capable of appreciating understanding and asking these sorts
00:08:21 ►
of questions so the realm of question formulation and experimental design in this context
00:08:27 ►
is a vast one, which is a wide open field
00:08:32 ►
and which could lead to interesting debates, publications, letters.
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It could be done through existing popular science journals
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if new scientists or even nature had a page in each issue.
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It is devoted to the discussion of
00:08:46 ►
Less than a thousand dollar research projects or things appropriate small science
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A question journal should have a question corner
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That’s right
00:08:54 ►
And then readers letters where people would write in and and say well that design wouldn’t work very well
00:09:00 ►
It’d be better to do it this way a whole debate could be started within
00:09:01 ►
well, it’d be better to do it this way.
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A whole debate could be started within international science journals themselves
00:09:07 ►
and things like Scientific American New Scientist,
00:09:10 ►
which would have a great reader attraction potential
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and would cost virtually nothing
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and could exist within its system.
00:09:18 ►
We need a magazine called Core Scientific American.
00:09:25 ►
Well, some journals already have a question corner, I suppose,
00:09:30 ►
like the Journal of Seriology.
00:09:31 ►
I think they’re interested in posing questions.
00:09:34 ►
That’s right, and they also have people’s predictions for the year,
00:09:37 ►
where people can offer their predictions about what’s going to happen.
00:09:40 ►
Yes, the year’s discoveries.
00:09:42 ►
Yes.
00:09:44 ►
Well, something of this kind probably wouldn’t survive actually as a separate journal,
00:09:48 ►
but once this idea got more widespread, within existing period,
00:09:53 ►
even newspapers could run them on their science pages,
00:09:57 ►
and there could be sort of sections of this in schools and universities,
00:10:02 ►
student societies and so on.
00:10:04 ►
It could be, if there was some forum in which the questions could be aired,
00:10:08 ►
if some means by which they could be not merely sterile exercises and imagination,
00:10:13 ►
but rather have prizes or competitions that stimulate this
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and give a personal reward to those who think them up,
00:10:21 ►
and also some means by which the research can be implemented
00:10:24 ►
and fed into the amateur networks.
00:10:28 ►
Then we’d have a completely different model.
00:10:32 ►
Like in psychedelic research, you see, one could formulate particular questions
00:10:36 ►
which one could ask of people who take mushrooms or cannabis or whatever,
00:10:41 ►
DMT and various psychedelics,
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or whatever, DMT and various psychedelics,
00:10:49 ►
questions which would be, which seem interesting or important to those experienced in the field,
00:10:51 ►
which could be asked of many people.
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People could write in to some address or through some newsletter,
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networks or something.
00:10:59 ►
This information could be collected.
00:11:02 ►
But formulating questions is an extremely important part of
00:11:05 ►
this whole vision and endeavour. And fortunately, that’s the cheapest part of the whole thing.
00:11:11 ►
As you know, mathematics, well, it’s not a science, but it has this alternative structure
00:11:16 ►
already. It’s always been very strongly influenced by questions and prize competitions. And the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
00:11:27 ►
has a regular question corner,
00:11:29 ►
and students and all kinds of amateurs send in their entries
00:11:35 ►
with attempted answers of these problems.
00:11:39 ►
Some of them are quite difficult.
00:11:41 ►
So there’s an existing model out there.
00:11:44 ►
Yes, which
00:11:45 ►
has a very strong stimulating effect
00:11:47 ►
on the whole development of the subject.
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And some of the best people
00:11:51 ►
are in charge of the questioned corner.
00:11:54 ►
Yes, well, the Scientific
00:11:55 ►
American, the amateur scientist
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section of that has
00:11:59 ►
run for years
00:12:02 ►
and
00:12:02 ►
some quite intricate experiments are carried out for very little money
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so we’ve already got models of our running yes
00:12:29 ►
So, how could all this be implemented? Well, we have a… we’ve sort of derived a workable alternative system.
00:12:38 ►
We’re assuming that other paradigms in society would shift simultaneously, then this would
00:12:44 ►
not really happen.
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I think the key for, just for example, on the integration of the different paradigm shifts,
00:12:51 ►
the key for the transformation into this new model would be changes in the universities and high schools.
00:13:00 ►
We mentioned several times high school students responding to these surprise problems,
00:13:08 ►
We mentioned several times high school students responding to these surprise problems, and not so many times university students.
00:13:22 ►
Universities have been one of the main institutions supporting this restrictive peer review, super professional, and archaic model of science. If universities were reformed
00:13:25 ►
so that they had
00:13:27 ►
departments of integration,
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as it were,
00:13:32 ►
interdisciplinary programs
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and a holistic approach,
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then they could play a tremendous role,
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you see, in preparing people,
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educating people to be amateur scientists,
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for example.
00:13:47 ►
And interesting, then, in many of these problems, I mean, the, the questions being
00:13:54 ►
proposed by the, uh, question setters should become part of the curriculum in universities,
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for example. As Morphic Reson resonance research has penetrated universities a little bit.
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At the University, for example, there’s a model that should be spread worldwide.
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Universities should be revitalized along with the revitalization of science and
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the careers like in physical education, so-called, some schools have team sports. You see, these
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are of no use whatsoever to the amateur athlete. Very few universities, like my university,
00:14:34 ►
the University of California at Santa Cruz, had no team sports and only individual sports
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because they wanted to prepare people for a new society. It was formed in the 1960s when in the hip subculture everybody gave up team sports and wanted only
00:14:51 ►
individual sports, something that you could continue throughout your entire lifetime.
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So that’s a kind of change which is wanted in universities and all their other structures, so that the full holistic range of intellectual
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endeavor, including what we call research, is nothing more than participation.
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A person who is going to participate in life, in evolution, in building the future of the
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planet and the species, among other things it’s necessary to do research.
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One should be an amateur athlete, an amateur scientist,
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an amateur historian, and so on.
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Everyone should throughout their lifetime.
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If universities are preparing people with a model of education,
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of self-education, which could be continued indefinitely,
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then of course they would be teaching this. They would be teaching
00:15:46 ►
grassroots science. Where are the questions?
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Where to publish the answers? How to use
00:15:50 ►
the computer to do it?
00:15:53 ►
In a
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sense, the move in science teaching
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and other forms of teaching towards
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students doing projects, which has been
00:15:59 ►
something that’s been going on for several years
00:16:02 ►
now, is working in this
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direction. Because now students are taught to do projects,
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and a lot of the teaching is supposed to happen through projects.
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The only trouble is the projects they do
00:16:11 ►
are ones of the most utter banality and derivative kind, for the most part,
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because it’s not assumed that a student can really do
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a serious and interesting project of any wider interest.
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These are like juvenile training exercises
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for research rather than the real thing. And there’s no doubt people need training in research
00:16:31 ►
methods, but there’s very few student projects that I’ve ever come across are conceived on
00:16:36 ►
as being real research. Now, the morphic resonance ones are real research, and there may be other
00:16:41 ►
areas where they do real research and student projects but the direction of training students to do projects is already in
00:16:49 ►
place this is mainstream it’s just that taking seriously what’s already
00:16:53 ►
mainstream hasn’t happened yet students are demanding more interesting problems
00:16:57 ►
we set them and because they’re not set them they abandon science and go to
00:17:01 ►
something else which is more interesting. And then they have real problems that students can’t address,
00:17:06 ►
like computer science.
00:17:09 ►
So the creation of a new model for science,
00:17:14 ►
for grassroots science,
00:17:15 ►
would actually give universities the opportunity
00:17:18 ►
to revitalize their science curriculum,
00:17:23 ►
thereby attracting once more the better students
00:17:26 ►
who are talented particularly
00:17:27 ►
for that, giving them something to
00:17:30 ►
aim at in their
00:17:32 ►
lifetime of research without
00:17:34 ►
large grants and
00:17:36 ►
working in big laboratories for the military
00:17:38 ►
industrial complex
00:17:39 ►
so I think it’s
00:17:41 ►
this whole discussion
00:17:43 ►
which is very good news for universities.
00:17:52 ►
Okay.
00:17:53 ►
I think we’ve solved the problems of science.
00:17:58 ►
Yes.
00:18:00 ►
One was knockoff.
00:18:01 ►
It’s a quarter now.
00:18:02 ►
Yes.
00:18:03 ►
On the money.
00:18:04 ►
On the money.
00:18:05 ►
Good.
00:18:06 ►
And as I said, it was good we didn’t quit a couple of times when we thought of it, because then…
00:18:12 ►
Well, it never entered my mind.
00:18:20 ►
You know, if the future of intelligence is inadequate in the light of subsequent reading,
00:18:25 ►
we can do that one again and it’ll be much better set in time.
00:18:30 ►
So I don’t see unless there’s some other pressing reason.
00:18:35 ►
I rather enjoy the trilogues and I think the concentrated form is better than once a month.
00:18:40 ►
I think you get into gear and into the mood, and it flows better.
00:18:49 ►
You know, it’s like, instead of writing one chapter of a book on the first few days of each month,
00:18:52 ►
I mean, actually, I find it easier to get right in and keep working day after day.
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It may be a different style.
00:18:58 ►
Yes. You know, I like the way of doing it.
00:19:00 ►
I think if we had subjects in advance and gave them some preparation, it would be better.
00:19:05 ►
For example, if we come here to give a workshop,
00:19:07 ►
then we cram a certain amount of homework a day or two in advance.
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And originally, our fantasy for subsequent volumes was to go to,
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rent a house in Glastonbury and do a number of trial laws on one subject.
00:19:23 ►
But I think today went well.
00:19:27 ►
Yeah, I don’t think there’s any problem so far. Why don’t we just carry on?
00:19:30 ►
Yes, let’s carry on.
00:19:32 ►
I mean, that we were allowing the fact that we get together so rarely to dictate that we then try to jam too much into these things, and
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that we might be better served in the end if we, in an ideal situation, did them more
00:19:59 ►
infrequently with more preparation.
00:20:01 ►
Well, I think we could take that approach for Volume 3,
00:20:05 ►
but Volume 2 is…
00:20:08 ►
I mean, the fact is that it’s really difficult to get together,
00:20:11 ►
and here we are. We are together.
00:20:13 ►
Yes, well, we…
00:20:14 ►
And if we don’t like what we’ve done, we can throw it away.
00:20:16 ►
Yes, we’ll regard it as the roulette approach.
00:20:19 ►
We’ll do six or seven, maybe three or four of them we’ll like,
00:20:22 ►
and we don’t know which one.
00:20:23 ►
And if we can get together at other times
00:20:26 ►
all well and good
00:20:27 ►
but I mean it’s hardly possible
00:20:28 ►
this is the only time we come to the US
00:20:30 ►
well for Prague let’s say we’ll do one trialogue in Prague
00:20:33 ►
we’ll decide the subject two three months in advance
00:20:36 ►
and do anybody who wants to do homework
00:20:38 ►
can do so
00:20:38 ►
ok I must say volume three
00:20:42 ►
is a phrase I hoped
00:20:44 ►
never to hear.
00:20:46 ►
Well, Blastonbury would be fun.
00:20:49 ►
Yes.
00:20:50 ►
Without doing this, I assure you…
00:20:53 ►
Time is getting worn down.
00:20:56 ►
It’s getting worn down.
00:20:57 ►
Yes, well, we’ll have to bring back this.
00:20:59 ►
That may have to come, Terence.
00:21:03 ►
Talking about it won’t suffice.
00:21:05 ►
Talking about it definitely won’t suffice.
00:21:08 ►
Okay, well, let’s roll here.
00:21:09 ►
Did you all screw up funny because of…
00:21:12 ►
What?
00:21:14 ►
Oh, it’s maybe warmer.
00:21:17 ►
Do you want it warmer?
00:21:18 ►
Well, it’s too hot in here.
00:21:20 ►
Oh, well, then let it bleed heat.
00:21:22 ►
I don’t mind.
00:21:23 ►
Well, we can always open the door.
00:21:24 ►
Okay.
00:21:26 ►
We’ve got better light.
00:21:27 ►
I think this would go on over back here.
00:21:31 ►
Maybe.
00:21:32 ►
Well, that shines straight in my eyes.
00:21:34 ►
Yeah, okay.
00:21:35 ►
Right.
00:21:35 ►
Because we’re sitting…
00:21:36 ►
We maybe don’t need the central light.
00:21:37 ►
It can also be dialed down.
00:21:40 ►
We…
00:21:40 ►
Well, try putting it off.
00:21:42 ►
Here I’ll…
00:21:44 ►
I think that’s quite adequate there off. That’s right. That’s quite adequate
00:21:48 ►
All right, all right, so we need to chant
00:21:57 ►
Saving the world, but we’re going to chant, right? Mm-hmm. We’ll use the world chant.
00:22:05 ►
Yeah.
00:22:06 ►
We’ll sing it.
00:22:13 ►
So what will it be?
00:22:16 ►
Hmm.
00:22:20 ►
Is that a hum or a free?
00:22:21 ►
I think it’s an omaha.
00:22:23 ►
Omaha?
00:22:24 ►
It’s good.
00:22:26 ►
Or an om Omaha, perhaps.
00:22:29 ►
The mantra of North America. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Aum.
00:23:25 ►
Aum. Do you have the sound you want, Paul?
00:23:55 ►
Yes.
00:23:55 ►
Very good.
00:23:59 ►
This particular trilogue is titled Saving the World, and I thought it would be interesting
00:24:08 ►
to discuss this theme, first of all because I think that there’s a great deal of pessimism
00:24:16 ►
about the subject, saving the world, that people feel that if they can imagine a set of policies or actions that might be taken
00:24:30 ►
to save the world, that then somehow these policies are unlikely to be realized because inertia of human bad habits will somehow interfere with the best intentions and
00:24:50 ►
that hortatory ravings of the Sermon on the Mount variety have clearly failed. If
00:25:00 ►
mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago
00:25:08 ►
so what’s needed then is a notion or a set of notions
00:25:16 ►
which will somehow not run counter to the general flow of human needs, weaknesses and expectations, and yet create a radical change in the nature of our world.
00:25:37 ►
And as I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one that I come back to again and again
00:25:49 ►
as being central to any social program
00:25:54 ►
which would create a sane and caring future for our children
00:25:59 ►
and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment
00:26:04 ►
is the problem of overpopulation.
00:26:09 ►
All other social problems can be seen as being driven
00:26:15 ►
by the excess of human population on the earth,
00:26:20 ►
which has in our own lifetimes reached a criticality
00:26:24 ►
anticipated by Malthus and other pessimistic thinkers in the past.
00:26:30 ►
And yet, even as we speak, there is no serious assault on this problem. and its handmaiden resource depletion are running rampant over the surface of the planet.
00:26:52 ►
Is there anything that could be done to mitigate this situation and buy us a little time and I think the general feeling about this is no there is not
00:27:08 ►
that because people enjoy sex because people enjoy family life because people
00:27:16 ►
are not educated concerning birth control and so forth, that somehow this is a problem we just avert our gaze from
00:27:27 ►
in the hope that perhaps war, epidemic, disease, or some other natural catastrophe
00:27:35 ►
will intervene and do the work that we as human planners have been unable to do. And I think this is a profoundly misguided and pessimistic position to take.
00:27:53 ►
I was once challenged in a workshop I gave.
00:27:57 ►
Someone said to me,
00:27:58 ►
well, you’re always talking to these entities in the higher dimensions.
00:28:05 ►
Why have you never asked how to save the world?
00:28:10 ►
And at first I took it as a kind of facetious challenge
00:28:15 ►
on the part of someone who didn’t really understand
00:28:19 ►
the protocols necessary for dealing with these entities
00:28:23 ►
on the higher planes.
00:28:25 ►
But then I thought more about it and I thought,
00:28:28 ►
if this is a legitimate source of information,
00:28:32 ►
then this would certainly be a legitimate question to pose to these entities
00:28:37 ►
that profess such affection for humanity.
00:28:42 ►
And so the next time I entered into dialogue with the botanical logos, I posed this question, how can we save the world? And with a lag time of under a third of a second, the reply was given, Each woman should bear only one natural child, the Logos told me.
00:29:12 ►
I have to confess, this was an idea that I had not given a great deal of thought to.
00:29:17 ►
I don’t think very many people have.
00:29:20 ►
And so I would just like to sketch for you the consequences of this
00:29:25 ►
and some interesting facts that I’ve come upon in the process of looking into it
00:29:32 ►
first of all let’s just take it at face value
00:29:35 ►
each woman should bear only one natural child
00:29:39 ►
and what would be the demographic consequences of this.
00:29:48 ►
Startlingly, within 50 years,
00:29:51 ►
the population of the earth would be cut in half without war, epidemic, forced migration,
00:29:57 ►
government programs of sterilization,
00:29:59 ►
so forth and so on.
00:30:02 ►
If a policy like this were adopted by even a major percentage of the world’s women, the impact would be immediate. In the succeeding 50 years, a serious social debate would ensue on a subject inconceivable to us.
00:30:31 ►
Are there now enough people in the world?
00:30:48 ►
this idea and I began to look into the demographics of population and I made a very interesting finding which I have not heard widely repeated in the media
00:30:55 ►
even among the people who are concerned about the population problem and that’s the following a child born to a woman in malibu or the upper east side of
00:31:13 ►
manhattan or berkeley or hampstead heath in other words a child born to a woman in a high-tech industrial society, in the upper class of that society,
00:31:27 ►
will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact
00:31:36 ►
on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet
00:31:40 ►
than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often
00:31:49 ►
told. When we think about the population problem, we tend to think that it’s little brown people
00:31:57 ►
on the other side of the world who just perversely refuse to stop having children. But in fact, this is not what is going on.
00:32:09 ►
Converting a woman in Malibu
00:32:12 ►
to the notion that she should limit her reproductive life
00:32:17 ►
to one child is the equivalent
00:32:20 ►
to converting 900 to a thousand women to the same proposition in Bangladesh or Central Africa.
00:32:31 ►
If we were to go to the third world
00:32:33 ►
and meet a woman who told us
00:32:36 ►
that her ambition was to have 800 to a thousand children before she died,
00:32:44 ►
we would imagine ourselves to be standing in
00:32:46 ►
the presence of a social criminal, a person so callous to the needs of the earth and the
00:32:54 ►
present state of humanity as to be almost beyond conceiving.
00:32:59 ►
Yet, in fact, this is the position held by any woman in a high-tech industrial society who chooses to have more than one child.
00:33:12 ►
There are a number of interesting factors about this.
00:33:17 ►
First of all, if we were seriously to propose this idea, one woman, one child, traditionally among demographers,
00:33:29 ►
population policies have been most difficult to sell in traditional societies, traditional
00:33:37 ►
agrarian societies, because in those societies, having large numbers of children is linked to centuries of religious and social tradition.
00:33:49 ►
And so then great frustration spreads back among the advocates of population control,
00:33:57 ►
because these traditional women are unwilling to make this commitment.
00:34:02 ►
are unwilling to make this commitment.
00:34:06 ►
In contrast to this,
00:34:12 ►
think about the woman in Malibu or Hampstead or the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
00:34:14 ►
She is college educated.
00:34:18 ►
She has access to excellent medical information.
00:34:24 ►
She should be an easy sell to this idea.
00:34:29 ►
She’s not burdened by centuries of religious tradition.
00:34:34 ►
She is a modern, secular, progressive, liberal person.
00:34:40 ►
Every woman of that type converted to this policy is the equivalent of converting 800 to 1,000 women of the other type to this policy.
00:34:53 ►
I mentioned at the beginning of this talk that it’s important
00:34:57 ►
that the concerns and wishes of the individual be commiserate
00:35:03 ►
with this large-scale social goal,
00:35:07 ►
notice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman,
00:35:13 ►
how would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money,
00:35:22 ►
and be hailed as a political hero?
00:35:24 ►
a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero.
00:35:33 ►
All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.
00:35:38 ►
Now, to the obvious objection that people want large families and want more than one child,
00:35:41 ►
you say the cities of this planet swarm with children without families.
00:35:48 ►
We’re not saying you can’t have a house full of children. We’re simply asking
00:35:54 ►
that you address your unconscious genetic chauvinism and limit the
00:36:01 ►
expression of your own genetic heritage to one child.
00:36:05 ►
You may fill your house with unwanted children from other parts of the world.
00:36:10 ►
In fact, we encourage you to do so.
00:36:13 ►
So this is a plan where the goals of the individual,
00:36:19 ►
and I think most women of this class I’m talking about,
00:36:28 ►
think most women of this class I’m talking about would do desire more leisure time and are not immune to the attraction of saving money and would certainly like to think of themselves as behaving
00:36:36 ►
politically correctly. Now another interesting thing about this proposal is it’s the first plan I’ve ever heard for
00:36:46 ►
having an impact on the destiny of our species that does not depend on men.
00:36:55 ►
Women claim that men run and ruin the world.
00:37:00 ►
Very well.
00:37:01 ►
Let women limit their reproductive activity to one natural child and save the
00:37:07 ►
world and increase their leisure time and wealth at the very same moment. Now, several
00:37:16 ►
objections have been put forward to this idea. The first is I’ve been told that I do not understand the nature of political power and that political power resides in numbers and that what I’m asking people to do is to diminish their political power resided in numbers, China would be the most
00:37:48 ►
powerful nation on earth followed close behind by India. In fact, they hardly place in the
00:37:57 ►
first five. That’s an archaic notion of what constitutes political power. Political power is constituted by money,
00:38:08 ►
the control of abstract resources.
00:38:11 ►
This is a plan by which more money would accrue
00:38:14 ►
to people who were making this step.
00:38:19 ►
So I’ve asked myself,
00:38:21 ►
why, if our planet is truly threatened
00:38:24 ►
with extinction and social chaos by overpopulation,
00:38:28 ►
we’ve heard nothing of a plan of this sort.
00:38:34 ►
And I think that, after some thought on the matter, that the reason for this is because capitalism is the system under whose aegis we are operating,
00:38:48 ►
and nobody knows how to make a buck in a situation of collapsing demographics.
00:38:56 ►
In other words, capitalism unconsciously rests on the premise of an ever-expanding population of workers and consumers
00:39:07 ►
of the goods which capitalism is set up to produce.
00:39:11 ►
I don’t think that the preservation of capitalism
00:39:14 ►
is a sufficient reason to ruin the world
00:39:17 ►
and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future.
00:39:24 ►
So I would submit to you that this extraordinarily simple idea
00:39:31 ►
appealing to all the venal drives of the individual
00:39:36 ►
could in fact be harnessed into a set of social policies
00:39:42 ►
which would very, very quickly have a major impact on the planet.
00:39:49 ►
In fact, I’m interested in seeing computer simulations run.
00:39:54 ►
How many of these high-tech women would have to convert to this notion
00:39:59 ►
before there would be an enormous freeing up of resources, a very small percentage.
00:40:06 ►
I mean, I would suspect that if 10 or 15 percent of the women in the wealthy classes of high-tech societies were to do this,
00:40:16 ►
the impact on resource availability would be measurable almost immediately.
00:40:24 ►
would be measurable almost immediately.
00:40:27 ►
It isn’t the poor woman in Bangladesh
00:40:32 ►
who should be preached at to limit her reproductive activity.
00:40:35 ►
After all, her children rest on the earth as lightly as moths or mayflies.
00:40:39 ►
It is the children in the high-tech societies
00:40:43 ►
that consume more plastic, glass, steel, petrol byproducts and so forth
00:40:49 ►
than whole villages of people in the third world.
00:40:56 ►
So I put this idea out not only that it be debated on its own merits, but because I think it shows that in trying to solve problems
00:41:07 ►
that we’ve come to think of as intractable,
00:41:10 ►
we actually have fallen victim to a kind of failure of imagination,
00:41:16 ►
and that some of the problems which we tend to think of as insoluble
00:41:20 ►
are in fact quite soluble
00:41:23 ►
if we will only make the imaginative leap necessary to think about them in these kinds of terms.
00:41:30 ►
It was stunning to me to realize that without migration, war, disease, coercion,
00:41:39 ►
you could cut the Earth’s population in half in 50 years
00:41:43 ►
and make a whole bunch of people
00:41:45 ►
leisured and wealthy in the process seems to me astonishing that these kinds
00:41:51 ►
of things have been overlooked
00:42:01 ►
well well
00:42:02 ►
well
00:42:03 ►
well a provocative
00:42:07 ►
point of view
00:42:09 ►
to which firstly
00:42:11 ►
several objections
00:42:13 ►
immediately spring to mind
00:42:15 ►
and secondly
00:42:17 ►
to which
00:42:20 ►
I have a counter proposal or an additional
00:42:22 ►
one
00:42:22 ►
the Sheldrake plan for saving the world.
00:42:28 ►
But before that, first I should think that the incidence of single-child families
00:42:32 ►
probably is 10% to 15% of the class of women that you talk about already.
00:42:37 ►
It’s a very common phenomenon.
00:42:43 ►
It’s the number of children inversely related to income
00:42:48 ►
it’s a general rule
00:42:49 ►
and quite a lot of women already only have one child
00:42:53 ►
secondly, the adoption plan doesn’t seem to me to work
00:42:58 ►
it would only work if the woman in Malibu
00:43:01 ►
adopted dozens of brown skinned little children and then kept them living at a Bangladeshi level in her Malibu adopted dozens of brown skin skinned little children and then kept them living
00:43:06 ►
at a Bangladeshi level in her Malibu house um the studies of adopted children adopted children in
00:43:14 ►
general are usually raised in a similar manner to people’s own children and would immediately
00:43:19 ►
very important immediately be promoted to the thousand-fold consumers.
00:43:29 ►
I know families who adopted children from Sri Lanka and from Hong Kong and Vietnam and so on,
00:43:32 ►
and they’re instantly promoted to the maximum consumption class
00:43:36 ►
by the very act of adoption.
00:43:38 ►
So that point is, I think, quite invalid, of course.
00:43:41 ►
The adoption thing won’t work.
00:43:44 ►
So I think the principal objection to the scheme is… invalid of yours. The adoption thing won’t work. So,
00:43:45 ►
I think the principal objection
00:43:48 ►
to the scheme is, oh, the third
00:43:49 ►
point, this is the very policy
00:43:52 ►
the government of China is trying to enforce
00:43:54 ►
for two or three decades now.
00:43:56 ►
Each family should have only one child.
00:43:58 ►
So, the scheme has actually
00:43:59 ►
been tried. And one has to say,
00:44:01 ►
in the case of China, it’s had
00:44:03 ►
some success. The birth
00:44:05 ►
rate is slower there than in India. But it hasn’t been completely successful because
00:44:10 ►
of the difficulty of enforcing it. Now, take your point that it’s easier to sell to women
00:44:15 ►
in Berkeley than it is to women in Shanghai. But I think the biggest problem to overcome
00:44:24 ►
is the prejudice against only children.
00:44:27 ►
Since all of us have had two children each,
00:44:30 ►
if we ask ourselves why we had two children rather than one,
00:44:34 ►
we certainly didn’t have them because we thought we’d get more prosperous by having two children.
00:44:38 ►
It must have been obvious before we did it that we’d be poorer.
00:44:42 ►
It must have been obvious that there’d be a smaller amount of available resources to be spent on them. But there’s a very strongly established feeling that
00:44:50 ►
somehow there’s something wrong with being an only child and that seems to be the most powerful
00:44:55 ►
psychological obstacle that has to be overcome for this plan to be put into operation. Maybe I’ll
00:45:00 ►
leave it there and now I’ll come later to my own patent scheme for dealing with the demographic situation.
00:45:08 ►
Yes. Well, as I understand it, Terence, you challenged the botanical logos to provide a solution and it came up with this plan and then you derived these demographic consequences
00:45:28 ►
which are startling to you and interesting. And if we were to achieve the gain that this
00:45:37 ►
plan proposes, we would then need a third step, which I guess hasn’t been done yet, and that is to solve the problem how this plan is to be implemented.
00:45:49 ►
So, although I agree with Rupert that not wanting to insult the entity,
00:45:57 ►
in fact, as the plan is not very original,
00:46:01 ►
still I’m going to suggest that you go back to the entity to ask how this would be implemented,
00:46:06 ►
because in your demographics there is this very big if.
00:46:11 ►
If every woman and so on.
00:46:13 ►
Now, for every family to have one child, let’s say, every woman to have one child is not
00:46:19 ►
demographically different from many families on the average having one child.
00:46:29 ►
That’s a different implementation of the same policy.
00:46:33 ►
And many countries, developed countries,
00:46:37 ►
now do have approximately zero population growth,
00:46:39 ►
which means their average is about two. Right.
00:46:40 ►
So this one is less than two, and that’s significantly less,
00:46:44 ►
and that’s interesting.
00:46:44 ►
So this one is less than two, and that’s significantly less, and that’s interesting.
00:46:54 ►
But as far as people adopting this plan, putting this plan in force, persuading people, educating,
00:46:56 ►
here’s the big if.
00:46:57 ►
How do you, what is step three?
00:47:00 ►
How do you implement this plan?
00:47:04 ►
And this is, as a matter of fact, the real problem in saving the world,
00:47:08 ►
and it’s the one that we’ve been talking about in several meetings in the past.
00:47:10 ►
Do you use education?
00:47:17 ►
This is a common theory that the reason that developed countries have achieved zero population growth is because of education.
00:47:19 ►
Or do you change the mythology? I mean, all of the possibilities that we’ve discussed for making a paradigm shift, a social transformation in general, all of them would be applicable to this problem.
00:47:30 ►
But which? How? What? Through education, youth, rewards?
00:47:46 ►
which would result in people feeling as their personal goal to get the population growth of their neighborhood down to half, minus 50%.
00:47:53 ►
You have to point out this thing that personal wealth and leisure time will increase
00:48:00 ►
if this policy is followed.
00:48:02 ►
In other words, people will follow their own best interests.
00:48:07 ►
So you can’t appeal to some higher set of goals.
00:48:13 ►
You just have to say,
00:48:14 ►
wouldn’t you like to work less and have more money?
00:48:17 ►
Well, I think there might be a solution to this problem,
00:48:20 ►
but I doubt that’s it.
00:48:21 ►
I think that Rupert is right.
00:48:23 ►
There’s a preference based on actual experience for two,
00:48:27 ►
not for two, for zero or two.
00:48:29 ►
What we would need here is to have more zeros
00:48:33 ►
and still some twos.
00:48:36 ►
And what is really missing, I think,
00:48:38 ►
is for a large number of women to accept
00:48:41 ►
that they don’t want to have any children at all.
00:48:43 ►
That is the real problem.
00:48:44 ►
And, of course, there already are many women who don’t plan to have any children at all. That is the real problem. Of course, there already are many women
00:48:46 ►
who don’t plan to have any children at all.
00:48:48 ►
But to increase the proportion of women
00:48:50 ►
who are choosing that as their first preference,
00:48:54 ►
the number of children they want to produce
00:48:55 ►
the entire lifetime is zero.
00:48:57 ►
I think that’s the difficulty.
00:48:59 ►
Yes, well, I think that celibacy
00:49:02 ►
is a misplaced impulse in this direction.
00:49:06 ►
Celibacy does, it’s arguable that it does anybody any good,
00:49:13 ►
but if it were redefined to be thought quite a nice thing for people to make the sacrifice of having no children,
00:49:28 ►
to make the sacrifice of having no children, and such people were honored in society in the way that we now honor celibate priests, we recognize them as a special class. If people knew that by
00:49:35 ►
having no children they would receive a certain measure of deference in society, then large
00:49:43 ►
numbers of people might opt for that.
00:49:46 ►
Yes, well, that’s reasonable.
00:49:47 ►
I absolutely reject the connection
00:49:49 ►
between sexual activity and reproduction.
00:49:53 ►
I know, I’ve heard that there is
00:49:54 ►
some kind of connection.
00:49:56 ►
But I think that
00:49:57 ►
the women,
00:50:01 ►
politically correct women in Berkeley
00:50:04 ►
and Santa Monica and so on that we’re talking about,
00:50:08 ►
they are mostly having children because they want to.
00:50:12 ►
They’ve elected to.
00:50:12 ►
I mean, there are lesbian women who have children because they want to.
00:50:16 ►
There are celibate people who have children because they wanted to have a child.
00:50:21 ►
They changed that pattern only because they wanted to have a child. They changed that pattern only because they wanted to have a child. Wanting to have a child is the cause of reproduction, not a mysterious and unsuspected byproduct
00:50:34 ►
of being sexually active. So I think we need, in order to resolve this final problem in the entity’s suggestion, we need to find some educational or mythogenetic
00:50:48 ►
strategy whereby people would really yearn to have zero children, with or without sexual
00:50:58 ►
activity. They have all kinds of… Well, I think this could be done in all kinds
00:51:02 ►
of ways, through education, through tax incentives, through direct payment.
00:51:08 ►
Also, I don’t accept your…
00:51:10 ►
Direct payment.
00:51:11 ►
I don’t accept the premise that,
00:51:14 ►
faced with one’s desire to have two children,
00:51:19 ►
or if that were linked to wrecking the planet,
00:51:24 ►
I think people would just have one child anyway.
00:51:27 ►
Yes, well, that’s a possible breakthrough.
00:51:29 ►
And, in fact, we don’t know the consequences of having one child if it were generally accepted.
00:51:36 ►
I think a lot of the one-child talk that goes around has to do with the fact of the myth of the special character of the single child.
00:51:49 ►
And daycares, all kinds of social institutions could be retooled
00:51:54 ►
to make sure that these children spend a lot of time with other children.
00:51:58 ►
So I don’t see that as a tremendous barrier.
00:52:02 ►
I agree with you.
00:52:03 ►
I think we should encourage people,
00:52:05 ►
one, to have no children.
00:52:07 ►
Those people should be given special honors.
00:52:10 ►
Otherwise, to have one.
00:52:11 ►
Otherwise, to have one.
00:52:13 ►
And never to have two.
00:52:14 ►
And never to have two.
00:52:16 ►
And people should accept that nuclear families
00:52:18 ►
don’t really exist in this society,
00:52:20 ►
and so they’re going to be single parents,
00:52:22 ►
and that makes it more attractive to have just one.
00:52:25 ►
That’s right. If you have two single parents, and that makes it more attractive to have just one. That’s right.
00:52:25 ►
If you have two single parents, each with one, combined in a house,
00:52:29 ►
then in fact they’d have a sort of nuclear family with two children,
00:52:32 ►
except both the parents would be female.
00:52:35 ►
And the other thing is to start in these high-tech societies.
00:52:40 ►
Don’t start in India and Sri Lanka.
00:52:42 ►
That makes no sense whatsoever.
00:52:44 ►
Start in the areas where you’re likely to make many converts.
00:52:48 ►
Then these third world societies, which are tending to take their value systems by emulation of the high-tech societies,
00:53:05 ►
would see the positive feedback of these policies and would quite naturally adopt them themselves in due time.
00:53:11 ►
Well, I think we do have a plan here.
00:53:14 ►
It’s sort of rounded out.
00:53:15 ►
Let’s hear Rupert’s other plan.
00:53:18 ►
No, let me just raise one further objection which has to be overcome.
00:53:22 ►
First, giving single children and single child families a better name
00:53:26 ►
seems to me the most important
00:53:27 ►
and you think the easiest
00:53:29 ►
aspect of this plan
00:53:31 ►
that seems very important
00:53:33 ►
studies are, I never saw
00:53:35 ►
the case against two children
00:53:38 ►
until we’d already got to
00:53:39 ►
when I read an article in a newspaper
00:53:42 ►
in Britain, The Guardian
00:53:43 ►
which was a fervent denunciation of the two-child norm.
00:53:48 ►
I’d never ever seen this before.
00:53:50 ►
I’d seen plenty of things about what’s wrong with only children.
00:53:53 ►
But this said that having two children is grossly abnormal.
00:53:56 ►
In the past, people had large families.
00:53:59 ►
We’ve had multiple children, multiple relationships.
00:54:02 ►
With two, you set up automatically a dyadic relationship
00:54:06 ►
of jealousy, possessiveness and fighting
00:54:08 ►
which creates a one-on-one
00:54:10 ►
competition situation
00:54:12 ►
which is atypical of the whole of
00:54:14 ►
human race in the past and that
00:54:16 ►
two children, in fact, may be a great deal
00:54:18 ►
worse than one. Now that was
00:54:20 ►
a strong argument. It’s the only time I’ve ever
00:54:22 ►
seen an argument put in favour of a
00:54:24 ►
single child as opposed to two. And it was a strong argument. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen an argument put in favour of a single child as opposed to two.
00:54:26 ►
And it was a well-put case, and it had quite an impact on me.
00:54:29 ►
It might even have influenced my own thinking on the subject had I read it before we’d had two.
00:54:37 ►
So this re-evaluation of the role of two versus one children
00:54:44 ►
is something that a great deal more attention could be paid to.
00:54:48 ►
Studies could be made on the subject.
00:54:50 ►
It may well turn out that this argument can be validated in all sorts of terms
00:54:55 ►
and that the two-child norm can be discredited as a kind of myth or ideal in favor of the one-child norm.
00:55:03 ►
Now, that would be a highly constructive act
00:55:05 ►
together with social policies that would deal better with the problem of only children and
00:55:10 ►
all the rest of it. Some ways of living or where children spend their time with other
00:55:17 ►
children. Anyone with a single child spends most of their time ferrying the child around
00:55:21 ►
to other houses so they can play with other children this could be made easier but there’s a serious political objection to the whole thing which is that in a
00:55:30 ►
demographic society in a democratic society of one person one vote um the the single most important
00:55:37 ►
thing that influences people’s thinking about this question is being outvoted by the others
00:55:43 ►
in in ireland in northern Northern Ireland, the great fear is the
00:55:46 ►
Catholics have more children than the Protestants, and they’ll take over. In the Soviet Union,
00:55:51 ►
the fear many Russians have is that the Muslim republics have enormous birth rates compared
00:55:56 ►
with European Russia, and that in a democratic Soviet Union, they’ll take over. The fear
00:56:03 ►
in the United States, surely, must be that for the woman in Malibu or Santa Monica,
00:56:07 ►
that within five years, maybe ten years,
00:56:10 ►
Hispanics will take over control of Los Angeles
00:56:14 ►
within 25 years or 10 years, 15 years of California,
00:56:18 ►
and within 50 years of the entire United States.
00:56:21 ►
And then they’ll change the rules
00:56:23 ►
because they believe in larger families
00:56:25 ►
and they won’t want to go along with this kind of norm.
00:56:27 ►
That’s the kind of objection which I think will strike people very deeply
00:56:32 ►
and raise tremendous fears.
00:56:33 ►
I think there’s an answer to that particular objection,
00:56:37 ►
which is by takeover,
00:56:40 ►
what you mean is claim an unfair amount of the wealth of the society or the resources
00:56:49 ►
or the political power. But notice that in a society where this kind of policy was slowly
00:56:57 ►
taking hold, all segments of society would grow more wealthy and there would be a diminishing anxiety about resource availability
00:57:09 ►
because there would be an ever-expanding available pool of resources. In other words,
00:57:17 ►
if we’re going to cut the earth’s population in half, then there’s going to be twice as much land and wealth to go around.
00:57:28 ►
And so people would see themselves progressively enriched, generally and specifically. I mean,
00:57:38 ►
in the world where the population is dropping by 50% every 50 years, every time you got your mail,
00:57:46 ►
you would learn that a distant cousin’s line had died out
00:57:50 ►
and that his estates and bank accounts had been ceded to you.
00:57:54 ►
So you think a chain letter principle is the one that…
00:57:57 ►
That’s the big if again,
00:58:01 ►
because, Terence, you already accepted the fact
00:58:03 ►
that in Bangladesh the population growth is not going to decrease, only in Santa Monica and Berkeley.
00:58:09 ►
No, at first in those places. I’m saying don’t preach it in Bangladesh at first.
00:58:16 ►
Demonstrate it in the high-tech societies and everyone else will follow along.
00:58:26 ►
everyone else will follow along. And as a society becomes more wealthy, that means more educated, the case will make more and more sense. It’s something that high… it’s interesting
00:58:35 ►
that the burden of working this all out would fall on the women in the high-tech societies who have claimed that they have never taken their due role in human destiny,
00:58:51 ►
and here would be a chance for them to step forward and lead us all into a better world by their demonstration.
00:59:01 ►
Well, I think in the case of our own experience in our own families and co-parenting arrangements,
00:59:07 ►
we had participated with our wives in a discussion about how many children to have and so on.
00:59:18 ►
That probably would be the case in these high-tech developed countries and families and so on. It would be sort of a partnership in men and women
00:59:27 ►
that would have to come to this new understanding.
00:59:30 ►
But women would take clearly a flagship role in all this.
00:59:36 ►
Yes. Well, suppose that Rupert’s idea that a reason for large families
00:59:45 ►
and anxiety about the voting situation in democratic countries
00:59:49 ►
and, well, we could change the vote
00:59:51 ►
so that siblings of the same mother would share one vote.
01:00:02 ►
That would take care of that.
01:00:04 ►
I think there are cleaner ways to take care of that.
01:00:07 ►
I mean, I see this objection, but I think it could be met
01:00:10 ►
that social planners, you could put in place incentives.
01:00:15 ►
I think it could be met.
01:00:16 ►
People are anxious.
01:00:18 ►
They don’t want to lose power or wealth or land.
01:00:21 ►
And the very notion of falling demographic
01:00:26 ►
reverses this pressure.
01:00:28 ►
And everyone, even those for whom the policy is working least well,
01:00:36 ►
are still living in a better situation
01:00:38 ►
than if the policy were not in place.
01:00:42 ►
If the policy is not adopted, or something like it, we all lose. If the policy is an okay number,
01:01:07 ►
then we don’t have to seek a decrease,
01:01:10 ►
then zero population growth on a planetary scale would be our goal.
01:01:12 ►
Let’s just…
01:01:13 ►
That’s awesome.
01:01:13 ►
It’s just a more general…
01:01:15 ►
It isn’t true.
01:01:15 ►
No, it isn’t true,
01:01:16 ►
but for the sake of discussion,
01:01:17 ►
let’s consider that.
01:01:19 ►
Then we already have achieved our goal
01:01:21 ►
and developed nations, many of them,
01:01:24 ►
and not in the rest of the world.
01:01:26 ►
So according to your idea, if this would apply to the one-child plan,
01:01:33 ►
that the success of this plan would then diffuse over the underdeveloped countries,
01:01:40 ►
that we should see that already happening, and yet we don’t.
01:01:43 ►
No, I think we do.
01:01:45 ►
countries that we should see that already happening and yet we don’t know I think we do as
01:01:48 ►
in as standards of living rise
01:01:53 ►
Population rates slow this has been observed all over the world I know but this dead living is not rising because the population is growing and outstripping the resources and people have this enormous famine
01:02:01 ►
In Africa and their response to this famine is to have more and more children.
01:02:05 ►
But for instance, in Thailand, South Korea,
01:02:09 ►
the emerging industrial countries of Southeast Asia,
01:02:15 ►
the population is slowing,
01:02:18 ►
and it’s generally decredited to the rising standard of living
01:02:24 ►
and expansion of the industrial base.
01:02:29 ►
Yes. I mean, there’s one further point, perhaps not such a serious one,
01:02:34 ►
which is the thing that terrifies people as well is not just being outvoted
01:02:40 ►
by the increase of one section of the population relative to the other,
01:02:44 ►
like Hispanics, but also the increase of one section of the population relative to the other,
01:02:48 ►
you know, like Hispanics, but also the question of immigration.
01:02:52 ►
And in Vancouver, for example, within five years,
01:02:55 ►
there’ll probably be a majority of Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese,
01:02:58 ►
are flooding in every day, great plane loads of them,
01:03:02 ►
just buying up a lot of property in Vancouver.
01:03:07 ►
Mexicans are flooding into the southern parts of the United States.
01:03:08 ►
This idea of people flooding in.
01:03:11 ►
The Germans are now getting worried that East Germans,
01:03:13 ►
they thought by unifying the country they could decrease immigration from East Germany.
01:03:16 ►
In fact, it’s increased.
01:03:18 ►
And now everyone in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary,
01:03:20 ►
with any ambition and who’s prepared to move,
01:03:23 ►
looks to Western Europe as the place to go.
01:03:26 ►
Any moment, people in West Germany are really afraid.
01:03:29 ►
If there really is a kind of European economic free zone
01:03:33 ►
that includes all of Europe, a free movement of peoples,
01:03:36 ►
just what they’ve been claiming they want for 30, 40 years,
01:03:40 ►
they’ve been claiming this is what they want,
01:03:42 ►
if that’s what they get, 100 million Russians
01:03:44 ►
will probably want to move to West
01:03:46 ►
Germany
01:03:46 ►
the problem of immigration
01:03:49 ►
becomes, is a very
01:03:52 ►
serious problem for a lot of people and this is
01:03:54 ►
another reason as well as being outvoted
01:03:56 ►
by demographic increase within
01:03:57 ►
the same country, the problem of immigration
01:04:00 ►
from others, you know the
01:04:02 ►
yellow peril, these kinds of things have been
01:04:04 ►
but these immigrations are fuelled by population.
01:04:08 ►
Uncontrolled growth of population. Well, they’re not because Eastern Europe has had
01:04:12 ►
one of the lowest population growth rates in the world in the last 30 or 40 years.
01:04:16 ►
So tough of the conditions being…
01:04:19 ►
The population of Romania and other countries in Eastern Europe has actually been falling
01:04:23 ►
much to the consternation of their governments
01:04:26 ►
They’ve had the lowest population growth rates anywhere
01:04:28 ►
They’ve had negative growth rates the people aren’t moving because there are so many they want they’re moving to the but you see that’s just a problem
01:04:35 ►
We will always have problems what we’re trying to do here is figure out how to save the world
01:04:42 ►
chicken and egg problem because the logical consequence of your theory
01:04:48 ►
is that we have to solve all the other problems of the world
01:04:53 ►
in order to solve the population problem.
01:04:56 ►
So the preposition at the beginning of your introduction,
01:05:01 ►
which I concur,
01:05:04 ►
that the population problem is the basic problem.
01:05:08 ►
Somehow that’s not really so logistically,
01:05:12 ►
that all nations have to be developed nations,
01:05:16 ►
people have to have education, they have to accept this new idea,
01:05:22 ►
they have to be impressed by the success of this plan as it’s applied
01:05:25 ►
in other nations. That implies
01:05:28 ►
the solution of all these problems.
01:05:29 ►
The demographic
01:05:31 ►
shifts of a constant population
01:05:34 ►
in new locations would end
01:05:35 ►
because of the inequalities of resources
01:05:37 ►
and that this
01:05:40 ►
would have been solved.
01:05:41 ►
Well, people will always
01:05:43 ►
migrate to where there are more jobs or better lives,
01:05:48 ►
but if they are truly not migrating
01:05:51 ►
because of overpopulation in their homeland,
01:05:55 ►
then they are emptying out their homeland,
01:05:59 ►
and that means in the future
01:06:01 ►
there will be empty land
01:06:03 ►
to be reintegrated into the global economy.
01:06:07 ►
The price Germany pays now by having millions of Poles move into Germany
01:06:14 ►
means that in the next century Poland will be a wonderful frontier for economic growth
01:06:22 ►
and a theater where people can build very stable, happy lives?
01:06:31 ►
Yes. Well, I’m not completely convinced, I have to say.
01:06:40 ►
Because I feel that these basic fears about immigration pressure, outvoted, other people taking over, are very, very deep-seated.
01:06:51 ►
And it would be extremely hard to remove those completely.
01:06:55 ►
I think you would just pass a law, as we have in the United States, that being here doesn’t give you the right to vote.
01:07:02 ►
And most countries have laws like that.
01:07:04 ►
I don’t know. Are there countries where if you’re just there, you can vote?
01:07:08 ►
Most countries make a very clear distinction
01:07:10 ►
between their citizens and recent immigrants.
01:07:15 ►
And you have to establish yourself,
01:07:18 ►
and citizenship is not automatic.
01:07:22 ►
No, well, nevertheless,
01:07:26 ►
the fact is that in Germany they have a problem with Turkish immigrants.
01:07:29 ►
But it’s not of being outvoted by them.
01:07:32 ►
No, that’s not the problem,
01:07:34 ►
except in certain localised areas.
01:07:36 ►
But there is this fear of relative demographic increase.
01:07:41 ►
Well, maybe these are problems that are going on anyway.
01:07:44 ►
But I think that these would surface
01:07:46 ►
as soon as this policy of yours
01:07:48 ►
began to bite. I think that there’d be
01:07:50 ►
sort of nationalist movements, sort of white
01:07:52 ►
Caucasian movements
01:07:53 ►
springing up, you know, save the Caucasian
01:07:56 ►
race and that kind of thing and I think
01:07:58 ►
one needs to have some kind of
01:08:00 ►
plan in place in advance
01:08:02 ►
to counteract this very obvious
01:08:04 ►
reaction that would come up immediately?
01:08:06 ►
Well, I think you’re right. Although these sorts of movements exist already,
01:08:10 ►
what you would hope is that this was a solution and that therefore the consequences flowing from it
01:08:18 ►
would, in a fairly short amount of time, outweigh the negative aspects of it and that people would see that their
01:08:29 ►
standard of living was rising there were more resources to spread around there was less a sense
01:08:35 ►
of encroachment and so forth and so on i think if people could achieve zero population growth on a
01:08:41 ►
planetary scale as we could regard this as a halfway
01:08:45 ►
step from there they can progress if you give them the period of several
01:08:49 ►
centuries to get to the idea that what is really needed is a rapid reduction in
01:08:54 ►
the human population to 25% of its current strength. Well, but see the longer you wait
01:08:59 ►
the more resources you’re using up. I mean are there a couple of centuries
01:09:04 ►
worth of petroleum around? Are there a couple of centuries’ worth of petroleum around?
01:09:06 ►
Are there a couple of centuries’ worth of hydroelectric power?
01:09:10 ►
Well, I think if zero population growth on a planetary scale
01:09:13 ►
were achieved in the very near future,
01:09:15 ►
if we could achieve that, we could achieve anything.
01:09:18 ►
Well, you would only achieve planetary ZPG
01:09:21 ►
if in large areas of the world you had less than zpg because you they would be you
01:09:27 ►
would be taking up the slack in those laggard areas but whatever it is it’s easier to achieve
01:09:34 ►
than what you’re proposing because if people in southern california let us say are seeing that
01:09:42 ►
their sector of the population is going to decrease to half within 50 years,
01:09:46 ►
in the same span of time that these other folks are going to be multiplied by four,
01:09:51 ►
then it’s obviously not going to go.
01:09:53 ►
No one is going to accept that.
01:09:55 ►
Why not? The people in Southern California will be twice as rich.
01:09:59 ►
The people in the other area will be four times more impoverished.
01:10:03 ►
We’re talking about, let us say, another sector of the population in Southern California,
01:10:07 ►
which is multiplying at a rapid rate with, let’s say, 12% population growth per year,
01:10:14 ►
so doubling the population in five years.
01:10:17 ►
Through immigration and increasing.
01:10:19 ►
Yeah, well, that’s the birth rate in Mexico, right now, increasing 12% per year. It can’t be 12%.
01:10:26 ►
No? No, it’s more than about
01:10:28 ►
3.5%. Oh, excuse me.
01:10:30 ►
Maybe 2%.
01:10:31 ►
Well,
01:10:34 ►
I’m not saying, you’re not going
01:10:36 ►
to save the planet with a snap
01:10:38 ►
of the finger,
01:10:40 ►
but since the other
01:10:42 ►
things on the table to solve
01:10:44 ►
this problem are thermonuclear wars, synthetic viruses, pogroms, genocide, triage, and computer-directed mass starvation, this sounds to me like a pretty good idea.
01:11:01 ►
Well, you haven’t heard my plan yet.
01:11:02 ►
I don’t have that. This plan was conceived when I first went to India and was published in Nature in 1974 and the reason I have a slight, a wary attitude to plans for solving the world’s population is that having had one myself and promoting it vigorously in international circles,
01:11:30 ►
including various sort of international aid agencies, that I was working as part of one.
01:11:37 ►
I had the ear of people of influence and so on. I was in a good position to do it. The fact that nothing’s come of it over the following 17 years has slightly discouraged me
01:11:46 ►
anyway the scheme as it goes
01:11:48 ►
is quite simple
01:11:50 ►
it’s based on the perception
01:11:52 ►
that in third world countries
01:11:54 ►
and in advanced ones
01:11:56 ►
but largely in countries like India
01:11:58 ►
where population growth is greatest
01:12:01 ►
people have lots of children
01:12:03 ►
not because they want to have lots of children choir children not because they want to have lots of children, choir children, but because they want to have lots of sons.
01:12:11 ►
Yes.
01:12:12 ►
That point is, I think, quite clear. You can talk to any Indian, any Chinese, what they
01:12:17 ►
want is sons. They don’t want daughters.
01:12:19 ►
Yes, the Chinese throw the daughters in the river.
01:12:22 ►
Yes, and so the Indians practice female infanticide in Rajput and other castes.
01:12:27 ►
And what they go and pray, they spend good money on doing ceremonies in temples,
01:12:32 ►
pujas, to try and have more sons than daughters.
01:12:36 ►
Incidentally, this provides a test of the power of prayer of a statistical kind.
01:12:41 ►
I checked out the male-to-female excess in the birth rate in India as opposed to other countries. It’s 106 to 100 males to females in live births
01:12:50 ►
in India. So it is in Western countries where there’s no such strong prejudice. So one could
01:12:55 ►
in favor of sons. So clearly, on a large scale, the magical and religious means used to try
01:13:03 ►
and promote the appearance of sons are not effective, statistically speaking.
01:13:07 ►
They may shift the balance in individual cases.
01:13:11 ►
But anyway, the fact is they want sons.
01:13:15 ►
Now, rather than trying to go against the tide, trying to persuade people to have less sons or less children,
01:13:21 ►
you give them what they want.
01:13:27 ►
sons or less children. You give them what they want. Now it was discovered in the early 70s that male sperm swim more strongly than female sperm and in vitro, in test tubes,
01:13:34 ►
if you put them in a viscous solution, any viscous substance will do, and they have to
01:13:41 ►
swim through it. There’s a progressive enrichment of male sperm getting through the other side.
01:13:48 ►
There are other ways of separating them that have been investigated
01:13:51 ►
by the artificial insemination industry,
01:13:53 ►
because with cows, you basically want to have females rather than males.
01:13:58 ►
So there’s some research gone into this.
01:14:00 ►
Anyway, with human sperm, like many other species,
01:14:04 ►
male sperm swim stronger than female my proposal
01:14:07 ►
was a simple technical advance whereby a capsule of a viscous substance like carboxymethyl cellulose
01:14:13 ►
very cheap buffered at an appropriate ph would be inserted before intercourse into the vagina
01:14:20 ►
the sperm would have to swim through it in order to fertilize the egg and this would give a preferential enrichment of male sperm
01:14:27 ►
now the thing may be only partially effective
01:14:30 ►
it may only increase the chances to 60-40 instead of 53-50
01:14:37 ►
which is the present ratio
01:14:39 ►
however even a slight increase as long as it was perceived as increasing the chances,
01:14:45 ►
would lead to rapid adoption of this thing.
01:14:47 ►
Even if it was banned by governments, the black market would spring up immediately.
01:14:53 ►
The product would be extremely cheap to make,
01:14:56 ►
assuming that this technical problem could be overcome.
01:14:58 ►
You know, you could make the product technically.
01:15:01 ►
The result of this, let us assume that it could work with an efficiency
01:15:05 ►
say promoting the chance of
01:15:06 ►
75 to 25 in favour
01:15:09 ►
of sons, a reasonable assumption
01:15:11 ►
it would be
01:15:13 ►
widely adopted, the proportion
01:15:15 ►
of boys would increase
01:15:16 ►
the number of children required to
01:15:18 ►
achieve the right level, the desired
01:15:21 ►
number of sons would go down
01:15:22 ►
so there would be a more adoption of birth control immediately.
01:15:27 ►
But, of course, the main consequences would come within one generation time,
01:15:31 ►
which is about 15 years in India,
01:15:33 ►
since the average age of marriage for girls is about 14 in most parts of India.
01:15:39 ►
Then, of course, the consequence would be there would be a shortage of girls.
01:15:44 ►
Not all these young men could get married to girls.
01:15:48 ►
Or even if you had a system of polyandry developing,
01:15:52 ►
the rate-limiting fact for population growth is the number of women.
01:15:58 ►
So women couldn’t increase childbearing beyond one child a year maximum,
01:16:03 ►
however many men they were married to or had sex with or whatever.
01:16:07 ►
So there’d now be an immediate bottleneck on population growth.
01:16:11 ►
Population growth would begin to plummet.
01:16:14 ►
There’d, of course, be social consequences associated with this.
01:16:18 ►
Most Westerners who had this plan said,
01:16:21 ►
well, of course, they’d all get militaristic, you’d have appalling wars.
01:16:29 ►
That’s not the reaction I heard from anyone in india the indians don’t have such a militaristic tradition i mean they they what would probably happen there is that you get a rising age of at
01:16:34 ►
which men could get married and instead of a dowry system which is what causes people to not want
01:16:41 ►
daughters there’d be the rapid development of a bride price system
01:16:45 ►
as people would have to bid higher prices to get the available girls,
01:16:50 ►
which would solve another problem, namely the low social status of women
01:16:54 ►
and the desire not to have daughters.
01:16:56 ►
And within 30 years, the whole system would re-equilibrate
01:16:59 ►
because the desire to have sons rather than daughters
01:17:02 ►
would cease to have the same motivation.
01:17:05 ►
The entire social pattern would adjust.
01:17:08 ►
There would be social problems in between,
01:17:10 ►
but nothing like the social problems caused by the doubling of the population
01:17:14 ►
in the next 25 years.
01:17:16 ►
This plan, which would go with the grain of what people want
01:17:21 ►
rather than against it,
01:17:22 ►
technically conceivable and probably achievable,
01:17:26 ►
if enough research were devoted to it.
01:17:28 ►
None has been so far.
01:17:31 ►
Here’s, I submit, another way of tackling this problem.
01:17:35 ►
Although it doesn’t address at all the impact on resources
01:17:40 ►
of children born in high-tech societies.
01:17:44 ►
It’s again a little brown people are the problem theory.
01:17:49 ►
Well, little brown people are the problem in large parts of Africa and Bangladesh and so on.
01:17:55 ►
Well, the most…
01:17:57 ►
Yes.
01:17:58 ►
But on a global scale, it’s the overconsumption that goes on in the high tech society
01:18:05 ►
I read in the last week
01:18:07 ►
and I’ve forgotten where
01:18:08 ►
the inhabitants of Orange County
01:18:11 ►
California consume as much in terms of
01:18:14 ►
petroleum products
01:18:15 ►
raw materials and energy as the entire
01:18:17 ►
population of the Indian subcontinent
01:18:19 ►
this gives you a
01:18:21 ►
notion of the disparities
01:18:23 ►
that we’re talking about.
01:18:26 ►
Yes.
01:18:28 ►
It’s a separate issue, I think, the resource depletion,
01:18:32 ►
the factor of 800 to 1,000, that’s questionable.
01:18:37 ►
I think Rupert’s plan, which does sound like it would create a global decrease
01:18:44 ►
in the rate of population growth.
01:18:46 ►
This definitely would help save the world.
01:18:50 ►
And furthermore, I think that we could go into business
01:18:53 ►
and make a fantastic profit by selling the product
01:18:55 ►
at reasonable rates in India and China.
01:18:59 ►
So let’s do it.
01:19:01 ►
Well, I’m not sure it would save the world.
01:19:04 ►
The problem is resource depletion.
01:19:08 ►
However it happens…
01:19:10 ►
Well, we could just have rationing in Southern California,
01:19:13 ►
then that would cover it.
01:19:15 ►
By a factor of…
01:19:17 ►
We’re going to cut people back by a factor of 800 to 1,000?
01:19:22 ►
Well, that sounds difficult,
01:19:24 ►
but I think it’s actually easier
01:19:25 ►
than affecting the population growth.
01:19:29 ►
No, I…
01:19:30 ►
Well, that idea of cutting back consumption
01:19:38 ►
in Orange County, California,
01:19:40 ►
by a factor of 1,000
01:19:42 ►
seemed to even leave Terrence speechless, at least for the moment, until we get to the next tape.
01:19:50 ►
And I hope you picked up on what Rupert was saying about three or four minutes into this trialogue,
01:19:56 ►
the part where he was encouraging groups of people to get together and search out questions whose answers could actually be paradigm shattering.
01:20:06 ►
You know, I know enough about a lot of our fellow salonners to know that right here in our own little clan,
01:20:12 ►
there are a significant number of people who are every bit as intelligent and as creative as are these great trialogers.
01:20:20 ►
So even if it’s just you and one other person, why don’t you start asking the
01:20:26 ►
big questions the next time you’re together? You know, rather than let the mainstream media
01:20:30 ►
dictate what you talk about, I bet you’d be surprised at how many people you know are
01:20:36 ►
thinking much like you are, but who are just afraid to be the one to break the ice, so
01:20:41 ►
to speak. You know, maybe it’s time to stand up and be counted
01:20:46 ►
when it comes to the evolution of human consciousness,
01:20:49 ►
because if our minds and our emotions
01:20:52 ►
don’t soon catch up to our technical know-how,
01:20:56 ►
well, I think we’re possibly going to be
01:20:58 ►
the cause of our own extinction as a species,
01:21:00 ►
which, of course, happens to unintelligent species, I might add.
01:21:07 ►
And hey, what do you think about Terence’s proposal that every woman
01:21:11 ►
and every man, I should note that he added in later years,
01:21:15 ►
that each person should only have one biological child?
01:21:21 ►
You know, at first I didn’t buy into the idea, but
01:21:23 ►
when he said that in just 50 years, that decision alone would reduce the Earth’s human as a third world woman would have if she had 800 children.
01:21:50 ►
Wow, I’m not sure those numbers are valid.
01:21:54 ►
It would be interesting to see where they come from.
01:21:56 ►
But when you put it that way, assuming the numbers were valid,
01:22:01 ►
well, then the decision to have children really becomes a lot more difficult.
01:22:07 ►
And I have to admit that I’m glad that I’m now past the age where decisions like that aren’t going to come my way again.
01:22:14 ►
You know, I’m afraid that the way ahead isn’t going to provide many easy choices.
01:22:21 ►
And I don’t really think that there’s any person or any group with all the right answers.
01:22:27 ►
So the best you can do, at least the way I see it,
01:22:31 ►
is to just make the best decisions you can about things like having children
01:22:36 ►
and giving up red meat and buying mainly locally grown organic food.
01:22:41 ►
You know, these decisions were once pretty simple,
01:22:44 ►
but now they’re no longer just casual decisions,
01:22:48 ►
but are decisions that could have an impact not just on you,
01:22:51 ►
but on your descendants and on the planet itself.
01:22:56 ►
In my humble opinion, we’re very near a tipping point,
01:23:00 ►
one that I have a hunch is going to tip us into a much better basin of consciousness,
01:23:05 ►
but it’s still a tipping point, and there’s no better time than now to live as impeccably as you can.
01:23:13 ►
It’s time to stand up and be counted, my friends, because the stars are entering a new alignment,
01:23:20 ►
and one that we aren’t going to be able to ignore, I don’t think.
01:23:24 ►
But for the impeccable, well, this may be the beginning of the best of times.
01:23:30 ►
And that’s what it’s going to be when these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon return in a couple weeks,
01:23:36 ►
if all goes even halfway according to plan.
01:23:39 ►
We’re going to have some really interesting new talks and interviews, as well as the continuation of the trial logs,
01:23:46 ►
and as well as some contributions from our fellow salonners.
01:23:50 ►
In all, I’m counting on having a wonderful time next year,
01:23:54 ►
and I wish the same for you.
01:23:57 ►
Now, before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts
01:24:00 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the
01:24:03 ►
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike
01:24:06 ►
3.0 License.
01:24:07 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just
01:24:09 ►
click on the Creative Commons link at the
01:24:11 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:24:14 ►
which you can find at
01:24:15 ►
psychedelicsalon.org.
01:24:17 ►
And if you have any questions, comments,
01:24:20 ►
complaints, or suggestions about these
01:24:22 ►
podcasts, just add
01:24:24 ►
them as comments to the program notes on the psychedelicsalon.org blog
01:24:28 ►
so that our entire community can get involved in these discussions.
01:24:33 ►
Or you can also post your thoughts on the Psychedelic Salon forum,
01:24:37 ►
which you will find at thegrowreport.com,
01:24:39 ►
where I also spend some of my online surfing time each week.
01:24:44 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:24:49 ►
Be well, my friends.