The Brutish Right Will Save The Planet

..unfortunately (fortunately?) they will not save many people. And for that we should be grateful.

Horrified already? If so, get ready for a wild ride, as the premise of this little exercise is to show why the heartless, greedy, vicious, Right Wing politicians of the world and their followers will ultimately save the planet.

Hang on to your hats, dear readers!

Let’s start with a little anecdote from back in the 1980’s.

A Danish tax lawyer named Mogens Glistrup appeared on TV here in the early 1980’s, bragging that he paid zero income taxes – because he knew how to legally play the system. A furor erupted, most condemning him, but a sizeable part of the population, business people and the more know-nothing disgruntled part of the working class, let themselves be suckered into supporting his newly-founded Progress Party... and his party grew from nothing to take a fourth of the seats in Parliament almost overnight.

At one point he famously said, to cut taxes he would do away with the Danish military and just have a recording the Russians could call which would announce “We surrender.” Of course everyone here knew that Denmark would last 5 minutes if the Russians ever wanted to invade and that the military was an expensive cosmetic device useful only to protect Danish pride – but most people hated to be reminded of it.

Later Mr. Glistrup said something which made my blood run cold. He said, at a time when Danes were generously collecting funds to aid millions of starving people in Biafra, “This is stupid. If we save 2 million from starving today when we can, there will be 10 million starving in ten years and we won’t be able to save them. So isn’t it better to do nothing now?”

It is this cold heartless logic of the Right that may save the planet and at least some of its people.

But save it from what? And how?

The cold, heartless, selfish Right will save the planet from science and progress, from cooperation, from all the things that will make 20 billion people starve and try to cut each other’s throat in a frenzied effort to survive in 20 or 30 years’ time.

For what does science and progress accomplish? They save more and more babies from dying, dying from malaria, smallpox, polio, measles, cholera. And science will save many more from dying in the future from diabetes, breast and prostate cancer, high blood pressure. Science will find ways to fight more and more diseases, grow more and more food, provide more and more energy.. until we reach the critical numbers that can’t be sustained for all of science’s noble efforts. Right now science and progress are providing millions of now-middleclass Indians with cars, and the Chinese are soon going to be chugging along in the Hummers they’ll be constructing. The only way human growth and consumption will halt is if something halts it. Famine. Draught. Plague. War.

Now, some will argue that as education and prosperity become more widespread and the norm, birthrates will plummet. Perhaps the world’s population will level off at 10 billion. Well, perhaps so, but in order to keep the 10 billion alive and comfortable, science and smart politicians will have to keep the system super effective and provide a constant supply of food, water and energy. Temporary breakdowns would be catastrophic. And key resources like oil, nitrates and other vital minerals and chemicals will still disappear at some point.

The only thing that can save the planet from global warming, a destruction of most animal and fish species, a horrendous depletion of forests and natural resources, and devastating pollution, is a drastic fall in the numbers of people on the planet – from 8 or 10 billion to perhaps 500 million.

And who is better prepared to aid in this population drop than the Right? Of course they won’t help intentionally or out of any altruism. And as most Right Wingers claim to be against birth control, their efforts in this area won’t be conscious. But it will be effective, none the less.

For the following reasons:

Right Wingers hate science.. except for military science. They’re against stem cell research and the theory of evolution, as many of their most vocal members are religious nuts. This goes for Right Wingers in Palm Springs as well as Pakistan. Right Wingers won’t believe in Global Warming as they continue to believe there’s more money to be made from oil or nuclear power, so screw the environment. They actively promote the myth that global warming is a myth. They relish in meat eating, the bigger and the bloodier the steak the better, and they ridicule vegetarians for being pale wimps. The notion that billions of methane-producing pigs and cattle might be greatly harming the planet is of no concern to them, for they will only light up the barbecue and howl with carnivorous delight. And because of their contempt for the environment they will bring chaos and destruction closer – and populations will drop much sooner.

Right Wingers also promote division and xenophobia, the idea that the guy across the border is dangerous, different, inferior, a rival, smash him before he smashes you. His skin color, his religion, even the things he eats, are different and therefore disgusting. “Everybody but us is the enemy.” This eternal hostility and hatred of the foreign, will greatly aid in the creation of wars and conflicts and in the following population drops.

Logic would tell us that, as far as over-population goes, the more people engaging in homosexual behavior the better, as long as they use condoms and have access to AIDS medicine.. (..for pregnancies rarely occur due to homosexual behavior.. or am I wrong about this?) The Right, in their hatred for all things gay or even logically sexual, whether these Right Wingers reside in the Vatican or Pakistan, will always actively fight abortion, birth control, condoms, anything that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies, disease or general misery.

And the more disease-ridden and poverty-stricken children that are born the faster the Apocalypse will arrive.

The Right Wing has always been not only a death cult but a suicide cult, longing for purging fire and self-immolation – which partially explains why they so favor oil and everything combustible and have such contempt for windmills. The Hitlers, Mussolinis, Limbaughs of history relish risky behavior and seducing others to become puppets and bit-players in their own private Ragnaroks. The Alpha-beasts will always have mindless followers, admirers and inheritors.

And perhaps like the Hindu gods of destruction, the planet will need them when it begins to succumb to the successes of science and the eventual resultant unsustainable growth?

As Mr. Glistrup might have said, “Is it better for 20 billion to die instead of 10 billion before we slide back into 1,000 years of darkness and misery?”

Competitors & Co-operators

I think I've figured it out… somewhat.

I previously said people are divided into basically four groups:

The Organizers

– planners, builders, investors, generals

The Organized – soldiers, drones, workers, taxpayers

The Disorganizers – anarchists, rebels, the envious, the malicious

The Disorganized – the lazy, the dimwitted, the dispirited, the oblivious

..and I said at the time none of us resides solely and only in one group. At different moments of our lives we reside in two or more groups at the same time.

Now I have decided that we also fall into two different groups who might well replace the idea of Conservative and Liberal, or Republican and Democrat.

The Competitors & The Co-operators

Competitors believe that competition and self-interest are the best motivators for progress and prosperity.

Co-operators believe that you can get just as far if not farther by co-operation.

Competitors love sports, soldiers, wars, flags, uniforms, bold moves, no regrets, go-team-go and screw the opposition. The Competitors are only interested in providing spoils, victory, prosperity, happiness for their own teams and tribes. Often times they enjoy and mock the backwardness and misery of others.

Co-operators love meetings and voting and voting whether to have a vote. It’s said the camel looks as if it was designed by a committee of co-operators – while the Hummer looks as if it was designed by a competitor from the Herman Goring School of Aesthetics.

Competitors feel that life is about Us against Them… or more correctly Me against Everyone Else.

Co-operators, too, may fear that life is about Me against Everyone Else.. but believe the best and perhaps the only way to survive merciless competition is by careful and thoughtful co-operating with those many others who also hate the cold and corrosive effects of self interest gone wild. Co-operators nourish and cherish. Competitors bulldoze, plunder and ravage, build steel mills and power plants.

Obviously we need both kinds of people, both attitudes, at different times and for different circumstances. But for either side to triumph totally would have great drawbacks.

The Co-operators may often be slow, ineffectual, timid.. but a world inhabited or operated solely by them would be a much more pleasant place in which to reside than the dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest triumphing bull male battleground that a pure Competitors’ society would be.

Some might say the Competitors’ world is by nature a male one, while the Co-operators’ is a female one.

Fine by me.

Let women rule the world for a while. It might take the ladies quite a bit longer to drill for oil on National Park grounds or build Nuclear reactors if it indeed proves necessary – but at least we’ll be spared the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Venezuela’s Chavez, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh – and all the other manipulating Mussolini-clone Competitors who are having so much fun exercising their egos.

As the Africans say, “When elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled.”

Lastly, Competitors are exclusive – Co-operators are inclusive.

Competitors love secret societies, country clubs, gated communities, anything that assembles an elite. They eat in exclusive restaurants. They buy exclusive luxury goods. They hate anything from the outside, anything foreign or different – unless it is expensive. They want monoculture and lock step thought. The jack boot is the sound they dance to. The military band.

(A glowing example of their monomania and exclusive Us against Them is the high incidence of birth defects among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Polygamous Mormons, and isolated pockets of Moslems residing in plural societies. They fear and reject foreign ideas and foreign sperm! Inbreeding results.)

Co-operators, on the other hand, are inclusive, inviting. They welcome the foreign, the spicy, the exotic, the different, new ideas, new philosophies, new impulses, new religions, other skin colors. The opinions of those who have no money or power but having warm feelings and ideas. The music of the Co-operators is the music of the third world, jazz, reggae, blues.

Co-operators want everyone to be happy, as the more the merrier.

Competitors want their side to win and thrive and the other side to lose.. and they still love to make sissies cry.

(..yes… I was always picked last in dodgeball games..)