Dark side of the moon II

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Ok, otro trozo de conocimiento por parte de las élites, en este caso desde Aldous Huxley…

In a lecture titled The Population Explosion, delivered at Santa Barbara, California. in 1959, Aldous Huxley said, "Today I want to pass on to what is happening to the human species and to think a little about what our philosophy and our ethical outlook on the subject should be. This lecture is essentially about human numbers and their relation to human well-being and human values in general.
"Needless to say, any accurate estimation of human numbers is very recent, but we can extrapolate into the past and come to what seem to be fairly good conclusions. Although there are some fairly wide margins of difference among the experts, the numbers they come to are roughly in agreement. They agree that in pre-agricultural days, for example in the lower Palaeolithic times, when man was a food-gathering creature, there were probably not more than twenty million humans on this whole planet. In later Palaeolithic times, after organized hunting had been invented, the number probably doubled. We can make a rough estimate of what an organized hunting people could do because we know how many Indians were present in North America when the white man arrived - not more than one million in the entire North American continent east of the Rockies - and this gives one an indication of the extremely low density of population possible in a hunting economy.
"The Great Revolution came about 6000 B.C. with the invention of agriculture, and the creation of cities in the next millennia. By about 1000 B.C., after five thousand years of agriculture, there were probably about one hundred million people in the world.
"By the beginning of the Christian era, this figure had a little more than doubled: it was somewhere between two hundred million and two hundred and fifty million - less than half the present population of China. The population increased very gradually in the following years; sometimes there were long periods of standstill and sometimes there were even periods of decrease, as in the years immediately following 1348, when the Black Death killed off 30 percent of the population of Europe and nobody knows how much of the population of Asia.
"By the time the Pilgrim fathers arrived in this country, it is estimated that the population of the world was about twice what it had been on the first Christmas Day - that is to say, it had doubled in sixteen hundred years, an extremely slow rate of increase. But from that time on, from the middle of the seventeenth century, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first importation of food from the newly developed lands of the New World, population began rising far more rapidly than it had ever risen before.
"By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, the figure for the human population of the world was probably around seven hundred million; it must have passed the billion mark fairly early in the nineteenth century and stood at about fourteen hundred million around the time when I was born in the 1890s. The striking fact is that since that time the population of the planet has doubled again. It has gone from fourteen hundred million, which is already twice what it was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to twenty-eight hundred million. And the rate of increase now is such that it will probably double again in rather less than fifty years.
"Thus the rates of increase have been increasing along with the absolute increase in numbers."
[Please remember, this was written in 1959. The world's current population is rapidly approaching the 7 Billion figure - those are not "official" numbers, however.]……… [and 8 billion now in the year 2000 - update]
Still quoting Huxley:
"Let us now ask ourselves what the practical alternatives are as we confront this problem of population growth. One alternative is to do nothing in particular about it and just let things go on as they are, but the consequences of that course are quite clear: the problem will be solved by nature in the way that nature always solves problems of over-population - (a) to starvation and (b) severe epidemic diseases.
"In the human population, we can envisage that the natural check on the unlimited growth of population will be precisely this: there will be pestilence, famine, and, since we are human beings and not animals, there will be organized warfare, which will bring the numbers down to what the Earth can carry. What nature teaches us is that it is extraordinarily dangerous to upset any of its fundamental balances, and we are in the process of upsetting a fundamental balance in the most alarming and drastic manner. The question is: Are we going to restore the balance in the natural way, which is a brutal and entirely anti-human way, or are we going to restore it in some intelligent, rational, and humane way? If we leave matters as they are, nature will certainly solve the problem in her way and not in ours.
"Another alternative is to increase industrial and agricultural production so that they can catch up with the increase in population. This solution, however, would be extremely like what happens to Alice in Through The Looking Glass. You remember that Alice and the Red Queen are running a tremendous race. To Alice's astonishment, when they have run until they are completely out of breath they are in exactly the same place, and Alice says, 'Well, in our country...you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.'
'A slow sort of country!' says the Queen. 'Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
"This is a cosmic parable of the extremely tragic situation in which we now find ourselves. We have to work, to put forth an enormous effort, just to stand where we are; and where we are is in a most undesirable position because, as the most recent figures issued by the United Nations indicate, something like two-thirds of the human race now lives on a diet of two thousand calories or less per day, which - the ideal being in the neighborhood of three thousand - is definitely a diet of undernourishment."
Further into the speech, quoting Huxley again:
"The third alternative is to try to increase production as much as possible and at the same time to try to re-establish the balance between the birth rate and the death rate by means less gruesome than those which are used in nature - by intelligent and humane methods. In this connection it is interesting to note that the idea of limiting the growth of populations is by no means new. In a great many primitive societies, and even in many of the highly civilized societies of antiquity, where local over-population was a menace, although less fearful than the natural means, the most common was infanticide - killing or exposing by leaving out on the mountain unwanted children, or children of the wrong sex, or children who happened to be born with some slight deficiency or other. Abortion was also very common. And there were many societies in which strict religious injunctions imposed long periods of sexual continence between the birth of each child. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries various methods of birth control less fearful in nature have been devised, and it is in fact theoretically conceivable that such methods might be applied throughout the whole world.
"What is theoretically possible, however, is often practically almost impossible. There are colossal difficulties in the way of implementing any large-scale policy of limitation of population; whereas death control is extremely easy under modern circumstances, birth control is extremely difficult. The reason is very simple: death control - the control, for example, of infectious diseases - can be accomplished by a handful of experts and quite a small labour force of unskilled persons and requires a very small capital expenditure."
Again, Huxley,
"The problem of control of the birth rate is infinitely complex. It is not merely a problem of medicine, in chemistry, in biochemistry, in physiology; it is also a problem in sociology, in psychology, in theology, and in education. It has to be attacked on about ten different fronts simultaneously if there is to be any hope of solving it."
And, continuing later in Huxley's speech,
"Merely from a technical and temporal point of view, we are obviously in a very tight spot. But we have also to consider the political point of view. There would undoubtedly have to be either world-wide agreement or regional agreements on a general population policy in order to have any satisfactory control of the situation at all. But there is absolutely no prospect at the present time of our getting any such political agreement."
Huxley continues,
"Now we have to ask ourselves what our attitude should be towards these problems. We come to the other end of the bridge. We pass from the world of facts to the world of values. What we think about all this depends entirely on what we regard as the end and purpose of human life. If we believe the end and purpose of human life is to foster power politics and nationalism, then we shall probably need a great deal of cannon fodder, although even this proposition becomes rather dubious in the light of nuclear warfare. But if, as I think most of us would agree, the end of human life is to realize individual potentialities to their limits and in the best way possible, and to create a society which makes possible such a realization and philosophical way about the population problem. We see that in very many cases the effort to raise human quality is being thwarted by the mere increase of human quantity, that quality is very often incompatible with quantity. We have seen that mere quantity makes the educational potentialities of the world unrealizable. We have seen that the pressure of enormous numbers upon resources makes it almost impossible to improve the material standards of life, which after all have to raise to a minimum if any of the higher possibilities are to be realized: although it is quite true that man cannot live by bread alone, still less can he live without bread, and if we simply cannot provide adequate bread, we cannot provide anything else. Only when he has bread, only when his belly is full, is there some hope of something else emerging from the human situation.
"Then there is the political problem. It is quite clear that as population presses more and more heavily upon resources, the economic situation tends to become more and more precarious. As there is a tendency in precarious situations for centralized government to assume more and more control, there is therefore now a tendency towards totalitarian forms of government, which certainly we in the West find very undesirable. But when you ask whether democracy is possible in a population where two-thirds of the people are living on two thousand calories a day, and one-third is living on over three thousand, the answer is no, because the people living on less than two thousand calories will simply not have enough energy to participate in the political life of the country, and so they will be governed by the well-fed and energetic. Again, quantity militates against quality."
And later, "Finally, the unlimited increase in human numbers practically guarantees that our planetary resources will be destroyed and that within a hundred or two hundred years an immensely hypertrophied human species will have become a kind of cancer on this planet and will ruin the quasi-organism on which it lives. It is a most depressing forecast and possibility.
"I think one can say from this last point that the problem of quality and quantity is really a religious problem. For, after all, what is religion but a preoccupation with the destiny of the individual and with the destiny of society and the race at large? This is summed up very clearly in the Gospel when we are told that the Kingdom of God is within us but at the same time it is our business to contribute to the founding of the Kingdom of God upon Earth. We cannot neglect either of these two aspects of human destiny. For if we neglect the general, quantitative, population aspect of destiny, we condemn ourselves, or certainly our children and grandchildren, as individuals. We condemn them to the kind of life which we should find intolerable and which presumably they will find intolerable too.
"There are no certain theological objections to population limitation. Most religious organizations in the world today, both within and outside the Christian pale, accept it. But the Roman Catholic church does not accept any method of population control except that which was promulgated and made permissible in 1932 - the so-called rhythm method. Unfortunately, where the rhythm method has been tried on a considerable scale in an undeveloped country such as India, it has not been found to be very effective. The fact that the Church recognizes this problem was brought home very clearly in 1954 at the time of the first united Nations Population Congress, which took place in Rome, when the late Pope, in an allocution to the delegates, made it quite clear that the problem of population was a very grave one which he recommended to the consideration of the faithful."
And later, "We can conclude, then, by saying that over-population is quite clearly one of the gravest problems which confront us, and the choice before us is either to let the problem be solved by nature in the most horrifying possible way or else to find some intelligent and humane method of solving it, simultaneously increasing production and balancing the birth rate and the death rate, and in some way or other forming an agreed international policy on the subject. To my mind, the most important prerequisites to such a solution are first of all an awareness of the problem, and then a realization that it is a profoundly religious problem, a problem of human destiny. Our hope, as always, is to be realistically idealistic."
[end of article]

Por supuesto todo el artículo es esencial, pero tomen nota de las calorías ideales…3000…si…leíste bien…3000….2000 o menos es considerado desnutrición.

Te preguntarás entonces, porqué todo el mundo que hace dieta hoy en día con un mínimo de 1200 a 1500 y un máximo de 2000 están todos gordos???…serán las calorías??? o será el tipo de calorías????

Recuerda, esta es la súper élite hablando…deberíamos escuchar.

food for thoughts….

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