Something I realised last week about violence and war

[bbchris]

In war countries like Middle East, people contribute (make a difference) by dying.



Even though they want peace, they can't afford it.



People have a choice of peace - starting life from scratch and working at menial jobs (if they are lucky) or they can get massive significance from dying for their faith/belief - instant heroes. (They've done something for their people)



So hence it's become an addiction.



Humans all have six basic needs - certainty, uncertainty, love/connection, significance, growth and contribution. Being unemployed or working at dull jobs doesn't satisfy any of those criteria. Notice how many of the needs are fulfilled by being a suicide bomber....



I'm thinking through how we can improve people's lives and fulfil their needs. I'll be back.

|Blah Blah|Thinking Out Loud|Jane Eliz||Talk Soup |

[DreamTone7]

When I was studying to become a high-school teacher, we were required to take many courses in the psychology of learning. In one of the courses we discussed a hierarchy of needs that need to be met, and in a specific order...I can't remember what it was called though (a little help here Seismo?)



Anyway, there are many more needs in addition to those listed by chris...I think it might help a discussion to dig them up and list them. It may shed a little more light on the truth.



Please note I am not disagreeing with what has been said...I just think that there is a little more to it.

[Seismic Anamoly]

Here ya go, DT...



MASLOW HON...

[Sterling30sg]

First you have to convince every group og people in the world that their own survival is directly linked to the guarentee of everyone one else's survival, then you have to convinve them that overpopulation, be it either by deliberate design, stupidity, (thanks to the Vatican & Co..) or poverty-illiteracy will always bind them in misery and strife. That means changing human nature and just how do you accomplish that???



This writer has some good thought on the subject.



www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/anarchy.htm



For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.



----------



It is time to understand The Environment for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh--developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts--will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in the shape of a doughnut--lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.





www.theatlantic.com/politics/environ/environ.htm

Edited by: Sterling30sg at: 4/30/04 12:24 pm

[questionnaire]

No theory based on essentialist or behaviourist conceptions of human needs can ever stand up. Maslow's hierarchy of needs would apply to a human being in a direct confrontation with nature, but in complex industrial societies and old religious cultures it is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation for human behaviour. Culture has the ability to transform the psychic energy behind the human being's awareness of basic needs (in other words anxiety) into fears, desires, yearnings and fetishes. Both religious and capitalist cultures have learnt to perform this function par excellence, which is why they can generate such extremes of love and hate amongst their respective believers. Dangerous extremes, of course.

[questionnaire]

That apocalyptic theory you just quoted is a classic example of what I'm talking about. It creates a cultural climate of fear and the perfect justification for extreme behaviour such as war. Neat trick, huh?



Global warming and population could be controlled quite easily through democratic politics, science and law. We must ask ourselves a very deep question here. Why do market capitalism and the higher echelons of its Judaeo-Christian supporters seem to actually want chaos and destruction at the moment? I think the answer is to be found in the logic of the capitalist economic cycle.

[Seismic Anamoly]

I always thought his theory Sucked, too.

[Sterling30sg]

That apocalyptic theory you just quoted is a classic example of what I'm talking about. It creates a cultural climate of fear and the perfect justification for extreme behaviour such as war. Neat trick, huh?



A dose of reality is good for everyone me thinks. Perhaps you should let St. Thomas [Malthus] explain it to you better..



Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.



By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.



---



Quote:



We must ask ourselves a very deep question here. Why do market capitalism and the higher echelons of its Judaeo-Christian supporters seem to actually want chaos and destruction at the moment? I think the answer is to be found in the logic of the capitalist economic cycle.



I thinks this chaos and destruction you describe needs no help from anyone, there's at least 200 wars in progress at the moment if memory serves me correctly, I hardly believe this is the fault of any one entity.. And the answer has nothing to do with any capitolist cycle, the geometrical population growth cycle will probably explain just about everyone of them.



That's bad for the average person who is trampeled under and will never have a chance for a decent life but unfortunately useful for a religion, whether it worships God or man, if they are looking to aquire large tracts of land. No one is easier to convert than the destitute..



Of the manners and habits that prevail among nations of shepherds, the next state of mankind, we are even more ignorant than of the savage state. But that these nations could not escape the general lot of misery arising from the want of subsistence, Europe, and all the fairest countries in the world, bear ample testimony. Want was the goad that drove the Scythian shepherds from their native haunts, like so many famished wolves in search of prey. Set in motion by this all powerful cause, clouds of Barbarians seemed to collect from all points of the northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy and sunk the whole world in universal night. These tremendous effects, so long and so deeply felt throughout the fairest portions of the earth, may be traced to the simple cause of the superior power of population to the means of subsistence.

Edited by: Sterling30sg at: 5/1/04 3:27 pm

[questionnaire]

Thomas Malthus was a 19th century British clergyman and part-time statistician, not a saint!!!! Along with Herbert Spencer, he was responsible for the wacky and dangerous doctrine of Social Darwinism, which was behind the vile British eugenics movement.



Malthus and Spencer were a pair of low-brow eccentrics. They didn't even understand their main influence, Charles Darwin, misquoting his 'Origin of Species'. Darwin said the 'survival of the best fitted', Malthus changed it to 'survival of the fittest'. Evidence suggests that countries with balanced economies and high educational standards, such as many in Europe, achieve almost zero population growth as a matter of course. So I agree with you that the problem of destitution in the 3rd world is the main one, but to address that we have to look at the terms of trade with the industrialized West.



You did not really put an argument against capitalism's underlying need for endless cycles of destruction and renewal. The system was born around economic growth and infrastructural development, and cannot breath in any other atmosphere, so when it runs out of air it must start to manufacture its own, and the destruction and re-building of infrastructure and the opening of new markets are its only way forward.

[Sterling30sg]

Certainly not me, but that's your second error..



Charles Darwin, misquoting his 'Origin of Species'. Darwin said the 'survival of the best fitted', Malthus changed it to 'survival of the fittest'.



I believe Mauthus died long before Dawin's work was even begun, so your info is wrong.



I'll write more later, I'm to tired now..



Trade with the west may be a problem, probably the fact that they're etrading at all. I'd rather focus on developing third world countries so they can be self-sufficient, not to become labor camps for multi-nationals as too many are today.

[questionnaire]

... I meant Spencer, not Malthus. However, Malthus' theories of population, especially his postulation that individuals failing to prosper in the capitalist economy should not be given 'artificial help', were used by the Social Darwinist movement as an empirical and theoretical basis for their arguments, so my main point is still valid.



I did not accuse you of supporting unbridled capitalism. I was merely pointing out that vital economic and political factors were absent from your rather elliptical argument.

[Sterling30sg]

I was merely pointing out that vital economic and political factors were absent from your rather elliptical argument.



I was merely pointing out why vital economic and political factors were absent in areas of the worst human suffering, a factor present in every conflict that you dismiss and sadly blame capitolism for it seems all these troubles but it seems to me global socialism brought forward the suffering so many can never escape.



Well, you and I can't solve the problem and Malthus's solution of encouraging immorality, vice and the spread of disease among the young certainly is reprehensible and short-sited. Forcing those who's only real guilt is ignorance to live in the worst squalor isn't a deterrent either. It may be too late now, but me thinks that someone properly educated is capable of making responsible choices in life, or most are anyway. And sad the best educated are the most blind to the fact geometric population growth will dictate their own future.

I guess in the end nature will force her hand again..., it won't be the first time.

[questionnaire]

'...but it seems to me global socialism brought forward the suffering so many can never escape.'



I don't understand your point, Gregg. Socialism has never been 'global', but rather isolated in specific states. European socialism has had a beneficial effect, creating the necessary balance between the excesses of capitalism and the social needs of the population. Europe is not drowning in ignorance, poverty or over-population. In fact, indigenous populations in some European states are declining, leaving room for immigration.



Also, if you study the details of 3rd world food shortages you will invariably find monoculture and cash-cropping at the bottom of it. In other words, countries are forced into growing export crops for unfair trading relations with corporations in order to earn dollars for industrial development, from which corporations profit further in the future. The Advanca Brasil movement is a classic example, with its countryside emptied as agribusiness takes over, forcing traditional farmers and agricultural workers into shanty towns on the periphery of the big cities. This makes areas of Brazil look over-populated - in fact what has really happened is that the countryside has been emptied. Over-population is a big scary myth - the fact is that the logic of global capital is forcing populations (like it did in the huge urbanisation process in England in the 18th and 19th centuries) to move in ways that make it appear the world is over-populated. In fact, 'socialist' Europe is over-producing food for its massive 330 milion population and has eliminated absolute poverty.



I think you have been reading junk books and articles on the web. Try Ellwood's book 'The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalisation' or the journal 'New Internationalist' for some more reliable material.

[Sterling30sg]

Socialism has it's hand just about everyhere on the planet, it may work in Europe but it's caused nothing but harm in this country.



Point being made about vital economic and political factors being absent form the affected areas mentioned in that article, if you know your recent history you'll find the ]vital economic and political factors you mention were in fact very present in many cases, just a generation ago.



Population control is a hot topic that no one wants to address but mass starvation, war and disease is something often joked about, until it's on our front doorstep. Ignorance, poverty & political agendas are all factors in these senseless tragedies but maybe there really is no logical way to prevent them.

[questionnaire]

Which country? This is an international board. If you're talking about North America, the idea that you've ever had 'socialism' there is ludicrous. What benefits and problems you have are the results of unregulated capitalism.