Post
by Brian Peacock » Wed Nov 02, 2022 10:12 am
The logic of Malthus was flawed in his day, and debunked a generation later. Yet it still resonates in the conservative mind: the 'problem' is too many people, particularly poor people, and especially poor brown and black people.
Evidence shows that things like greater income equality, improved access to health services, adequate social safety nets (including social housing), access to quality education (particularly for girls), giving women control over their reproductive health, etc, all contribute to reducing the birth rate - as well as producing a more tolerant, inclusive, less violent and happier society. However, an economic paradigm rooted in perpetual growth requires greater and increasing levels of consumption. Therefore those who measure personal and social success, value, and security by growth in their asset wealth have a vested interest in maintaining a less equal, less healthy, less well educated, less inclusive, less tolerant, and thus more demoralising (in both senses) system.
To deny this reality in favour of learned cynical fatalism, one that assumes our current human-made economic and social systems are the natural norm: not just the way things are, but they way they always have been and always will be, is an acquiesce to the imperatives of Power.
:marx:
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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