The theories of Paulo Freire on oppression are only theoretical. I speak about this being yet on page 50 of the book but while what he speaks is true, it is only useful to a theoretical purpose. Any application of the deliverance from oppression is actually conflict resolution. Conflict resolution is important and is important to the topic of oppression but there is no person without the dehumanizing effects of hierarchy and oppression that has ever lived.
Paulo Freire’s views of oppression and enlightenment are massively useful for political and social oppressive purposes. There is no ultimate escape from conflict, hence the dehumanizing tendencies Freire discusses are human practices gone to an extreme. Economic capital is an extreme developed from human capital. Socially controlled and passed through generation hierarchy is distorted by the growing disparages in economic capital, social capital, and human capital.
Oppression needs to be addressed because oppression is rampant, and we can do this through enlightenment and conflict resolution. A society without exacerbated hierarchy would be one where people are equally enlightened and is a worthy quest. Therefore we need to first address oppression through assertion and then facilitate continuous proper assertion. This does not imply a government policy or mandate a specific curriculum but a youthful encouragement of identity without the excessive disparages in hierarchy.
Being frank this means oppression is conflict not asserted over a period of time. Oppression is to conflict, what acceleration is to speed; violence is to jerk.
This is why Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an important book.
If every action, you were responsible in the eyes of everyone you know, what then would be different of the way you act? Only your thoughts to yourself, what things would you not do? What’s the point of being existential when you don’t have to account for your actions permanently?
Theory: “If entry and exit are too easy, commitment, trustworthiness, and reciprocity will not develop.” -Robert Putnam. This is taken out of context from p. 177 of Bowling Alone, nevertheless this statement is a very powerful contribution. We are experiencing growing social lubricant. Entering and exiting relationships with those around us is easier and more threatening to the possibility of authentic relationships, that support commitment, trustworthiness, and a community sense of reciprocity. Like mechanical lubricant, there is a need to diminish the negative effects of friction and there is a threat of decreasing needed friction.
Social Friction is a term used to describe the balance needed in social relationships that limits the ability of entry and exit in community. When a social group is too well lubricated there is a tendency to fall apart. When a social group is not lubricated enough it is unlikely there is a community formed in the first place.
Actively changing stuff is all good for the attempt. The reality is things are always changing regardless of your attempts. Hoping to make things change because you feel they aren’t just means you aren’t really paying attention to the ever present change. Thinking things aren’t changing and that we need to change things, means you’re stuck in an old way of thinking. This doesn’t mean things are changing for the better. It is important to address the needed direction of the change taking place.
It’s all well to be depressed about something that is very important. Depression is no solution. The existential psychologist Viktor Frankl detailed his account of the holocaust and explained those who had hope and meaning were ones that found the most effective ways of surviving the psychological battles of the holocaust. When you want change, you’ve found meaning, but a hopeless desire for change, without setting goals, small or large. Logotherapy was developed as a purpose driven psychological method to encourage mental stability. Logo is Latin for meaning.
Accounting for an ever present change does not mean things are getting better as we assume with technology but also things are not staying still, if anything things are getting worse. This is no reason for pessimism or constant anger. There is no reason also to be an extreme liberal either. Things do need to change, drastically and a lot of those imbedded in the spectacle will be very upset with this change.
Hope won’t cause the change, but meaningful differencing through actions will. Do not hope for change and do not focus on minimizing your specific impact. Set goals, make plans. Viktor Frankl challenges us that instead of trying to understand why things are happening to us, figure out what needs to be done to deserve the life you want. We must embrace surviving through ecological and diversity collapse, then figure out what needs to be done to deserve to live in a world we want to live in.
In 2000 Robert Putnam wrote a book entitled Bowling Alone. He detailed the collapse in social capital over the last third of the twenty-first century. Social capital is human networking. There are three different types of capital, understanding the difference helps us understand social capital. Economic capital is the most familiar use of the term capital. This capital is about monetary wealth, represented by the amount of money a person, group, country has. Second is human capital which is an individual’s specific contribution. Human capital is related to education level, trade knowledge. An example of human capital is a voice teacher’s human capital is relative to the knowledge of voice. Social capital is the worth of an individual or community based on how well they are connected with each other and those outside their community.
Putnam relates the disillusion of social capital to various topics. Paraphrasing his lengthy discussion I will say the problems are homogenization and technology. He has a chapter on the influences of what he refers to as technology but I am taking a liberty is labeling what he is referring to as homogenization. He is very descriptive and informative with his statistical analysis of information of social capital over the last century. I intend to show the relationship to Robert Putnam’s work to a larger issue of human population.
Before I make my claims I want to assert I am not technophobic. I consider technology as an unintended result of our population. Technology is useful and has added to our ability to move, organize, and collect knowledge about the Universe. While technology is a compliment to our way of life, technology is an easy scapegoat for any problems with population because technology makes population growth possible. Technology is not the problem but without an understanding of the effects of technological advances it has created problems and exacerbated problems related to over population.
Populations rise is best articulated in Overshoot by William Catton Jr. He discusses on a biological level population norms and the relationship to the environment. He discusses technologies usefulness in population increases. He explains the inverse relationship between population quantity and quality, using the word Homo Colossus for our current level of resource consumption. Cargoism is a term he uses to describe the heroic endless uses we attribute to technology.
These two authors seem to talk about two different topics while in they have an interesting and useful relationship. The decline of social capital follows the same relationship Catton discusses about the inverse relationship between quantity and quality of human life. As the quantity of human life goes up or the resource consumption of the individuals increases, the quality of human life decreases. Therefore social capital is a quantitative measure of a society’s health and happiness. Social capital is on a decline as population and resource consumption is on the rise.
Neither author provides a viable solution but simply articulates the problem as they understand it from their perspective fields of study. Putnam is not engaged with the discussion to lower population and Catton’s newest book is about an impending bottleneck for the human species. Catton makes no reference to the relationship between social capital and population. The problem becomes clearer with both authors contributions. We are doing something unhealthy as a population. As a species, Catton explains we are doing something very natural and we have been doing this for a very long time. There are countless examples of other species that outgrow their environmental limits and the next stage is considered a collapse, which takes many forms. A decline in social capital is one of these many forms. As our relationship to resources is affected by our population size so then is our relationship to each other.
The last section in Putnam’s book discusses the parallel of social capital collapse around the turn of the twentieth century. He uses this time period to discuss what worked for them in 1880-1910 should work for us. Putnam does not address the issue that what they saw as a problem in 1880 is the same problem we are facing now, because the rise in social capital in the middle of the twentieth century. This issue was patched up, not fixed, and is now becoming a bigger problem. The patchwork was a lot of what Putnam discusses as an increase in social capital due to innovative ideas of the Progressive Era, but the patchwork was supplemented because we again around the time of the increase social capital in the middle of the twentieth century, increased our resource acquisition with the use of technology, as Catton explains during this same time period.
Although these problems deserve their unique recognition and are not the same problems altogether, these problems have a corresponding relationship. Humans are facing the consequence of depleting the usefulness of our environment. The only solution would be to do what no other species we have an example of has consciously done: understand our relationship as a population to ourselves and our environment, decide what is healthiest and contributes to the capital of everyone involved including future generations. Catton and Putnam are both asking us to do something entirely unique on this planet, consciously weight the consequences of having more children.
There are documentaries about global issues. I dare not say about every global issue because there has yet to be a documentary about over population. I just watched a great documentary about the industrialization of water. Honestly one of the most basic things is being commodified and sold to people at a higher price than it was originally (free). The amount of control this puts into corporations hands is catastrophic and the movie makes and excellent point of bringing this to the public’s attention.
It doesn’t take much work to find out what companies are in control of what and what this collection of power is capable of doing. Monsanto, Nestle, Coke, and many other corporations will likely be curse words in the comming century for the crimes they have committed in the name of collecting resources. The accumulation of power is no secret to being a source of a problem for the masses. Whatever the solution is to the proper distribution of this power, it won’t be solved if we keep civilization going. I agree fully that these corporations need to be stopped and power given back to the people of the world, not in the form of monetary wealth but in the original form of the resources but at what point will we take into account what the human population is doing?
We live not only in a time of corporate take over of resources but in a time a human exponential growth. We can blame corporations for destroying our environment for now, but we cannot overlook the populations impact just on the environment. At what point will we take into account that population itself is a problem. Once all people have equal access to water and we still have pollution then will we realize that humans not simply corporations impact their environment in negative ways, not because humans are harmful but because there are too many of us that use resources. Right now distribution is being corrupted by corporations and the means of distribution are more pollutant than local community based distribution, which will hopefully be what happens when we take back the world from corporations.
At this point, when the evil of corporations is neutralized. We will all have to come to the realization of the relation of population size and the inverse relationship of quality and quantity of life with in the human population. However Malthusian this sounds there is a direct relationship between the quantity of a population and the quality of individuals within that population. We know this when we talk about jobs being taken from us, given to others, closing our borders, outsourcing. Importation and exportation are going to be very important things when we defeat the evil of the world, because with or without Monsanto we have to deal with the needs of other populations versus the needs of our population, and hopefully we will realize this on a global scale before it is too late.
William Catton Jr. describes this next century as the Bottle neck century. He smiles when he gives interviews but he understands the devastation that will be occurring because in our current times, no one is stopping the population growth. Robert Putnam writes about the dissolution of community and the statistical relationship to the American trend of lower connections and high mistrust of others as a result.There may or may not be a relationship to the growing population but even when Putnam’s statistics are only a century old because that’s all that is available to him, he has no interest in relating the statistics of over population with the decline in community. These statistical relationships are the most important of our time. What happens to community and the distribution of power, with the increase of a population?
The movie I just watched, “Flow: For the Love of Water” describes community activity as a cure for the power accumulated by corporations. Community activity and petitions, grass roots activism will drawl the worlds attention to the important issues. However much power The Spectacle may have if we attempt to point it in the right direction may be too late but at what point will any of the serious discussion turn to over population? When we equally distribute the resources, erase the debt, destroy the corporations, then we will still have to face issues that have not been brought into the homes, into the wombs of every household. This is not an issue of being happy and having each and every persons needs met, because when these needs are met, we will still be faced with the inhumane decision of having less children. If we can start today, to better this understanding of what is really at risk then we might better understand why there are corporations that can accumulate wealth and distribute resources unequally. With an understanding of population and its affect we can better respond to human rights, equality, distribution of resources and we can do all of this in the most humane ways possible before there are more and more fights over water.
I hold no one person responsible. We need another generation, so there should never be an end to having children, but our understanding of every problem for the next several decades must take into account our global presence. No single problem is without a connection to our numbers. I envision a great task of accepting the responsibility and relationship of ourselves and of our environment to the problems we face within human interaction and with the dying world around us. If we can bring together our desire for equality and our responsibility to understand our population size affect, then we can hope that the deaths occurring in human life and within the other-than-human community of life are not without our concern.
Spoken word less heard with ears on inside thighs
Soft lips moving hips a language being spoken
Deaf ears the world writes and speaks with hand.
Between thighs much more spoken.
Soft cozy creation of life being mined and left forgotten
in the language of discussion.
Feminists erecting picket signs.
Deaf culture creating a voice.
Emerson speeches world wide
to a graduating classes of economic dragons.
“Instructions on How to End the World”
hidden beyond the dragons, deaf and female
in a language between our very legs,
which will soon be taken from under us.
Current strength growing wider by demolished dams
seeking lowest points.
Instructions like a manual aside
the tongue of legs reads easy as they swell.
Enough swelling always brings release.
Dilated history lesson being born
in language of legs.
You found the instructions.
Between them there sat a Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that normally meets the player with a spatial confusion. He has been teacher her to solve it using a coded formulation that redefines the six sides of any room you are in for the rest of your life.
“When you try to solve it make sure the yellow side faces West and the blue side faces up. That way you will always have a better understanding of where you are.” He told her when he first taught her to rotate a corner. “I have to face the door to the room I am in when I solve sudoku puzzles, so I remember where the exit is at all times.” It was a way for him to add dimension and ritual to the simple games in his life.
She taught him about what he called the bigger picture. She would often rant about over-population, the condition of the world as she saw things. It was a bigger puzzle that didn’t require spatial directions. Didn’t require rituals but to her it was a ritual, every time she tried to solve a puzzle it was what came to her mind. Over-population. Too often she would consider a problem and then try to find out how this was just a different way of considering over-population.
“There are too many humans. Seven billion, and the only thing they talk about in magazines are moisturizers, deoderizers, make-up and depression. Depression is just a symptom of over-population and they can’t even realize it. They always want to come up with quick solutions and talk about chemical problems inside the human mind, but it’s the fact there are too many people around. You can meet a new person every day, for the rest of your life. How are we suppose to know anyone, for real, make a real connection? No wonder we want to make sure we smell good and look good, because you might meet someone new tomorrow, and you have to make sure they like you.” She was holding the Rubik’s Cube in her hands while he was driving. She kept turning the cube in her hands, every turn the car made, she made sure yellow faced West. The whole ride she kept not knowing what she was doing, just knowing which was was up.
“Rotate the orange side clockwise.” He said as he turned the wheel counter clockwise. Her stream of consciousness didn’t subside, she just took a moment to breath.
“Birth control.” She was determined to at least get a whole side of the cube the same color before they got there. “It isn’t a sustainable mass produce able thing with out current population. We would have to make enough condoms to supply to the next generation for twenty years to actually get our numbers down. Even with the percentage of condom breaks that would naturally happen, that would be a substantial number of births that would be about exactly where we would want to be number wise. It would just never happen like that though. We couldn’t convince a whole generation not to have children.”
“Is economics an answer to the problem?” He wanted to participate more than just helping her turn sides. “Spin the red side counter clockwise.” He was driving and trying to see the sides of the cube while it kept changing directions, while she kept trying to read the magic of the spatial directions of the cube, while she ranted about the globe.
It had been a sunny day. The yellow of the sky was in the West. The sky was turning darker shades of blue at every turn. “Economics could be some inspiration to slow things down, but its all a mess right now to attempt to make any real predictions. Humans are like any other animal. Economics is a distraction. Why do we have millions of people condensed into cities? Because resource distribution lets us.” They were going to the grocery store. It wasn’t long of a drive but this conversation was one they ran into and out of.
Walking down the isles they read labels promising health, authentic products. Without a list they filled up a cart.
“No one knows what they are doing, that’s the problem. Anthropocentric fate is what it is called. Humans are like any other animal. We unfortunately and fortunately live in a time when we will have to live with making a conscious effort to lower our population or deal with repercussions of overshoot. We will have to deal with over shoot either way. This isn’t some big conspiracy though. It’s what every animal has done before us.” She did her best not to show any real interest, not to have any reaction as she placed a pregnancy test in the shopping cart.
It was a silent night. His eyes followed the pregnancy test as it was scanned at the register. The clerk smiled at him as if she knew something special. He told her which side to rotate. She made sure blue was up, but she lost track of which way was West. They never said a word other than for the sake of puzzles.
The answers are never simple. Anarchy, feed the starving children, raise third world standards up to first world comforts, lower the human population, religion, dissolve the civilization structures, destroy dams, free animals, stop eating meat, increase education standards, communism, democracy, capitalism. These are all easy solutions for our problem. Any problem can be boiled down to a symptom human of overpopulation, that doesn’t mean the problem is simple. Authentic attempt is in every direction. There are people who make heartfelt, selfless attempts to solve the problem they they consider to be most pressing. People legitimately think their religion is provides an answer.
The point is that there are people interested in changing the problems they have an understanding of. Personally I am engaged in the discussion of what the problems are and what their solutions are. I think every problem is a symptom of human over population, whatever the problem is.
The weather is exactly how it was predicted. Jake was walking to Balbo Park and he noticed three small clouds in the sky, just big enough to take turns providing shade. The wind wasn’t blowing. It wasn’t too hot but just warm enough so the sweater Jake always wore regardless of the temperature, started making him uncomfortable. He was on his was to a spot of tourism so he could voice his opinion, inspire anyone who walked by to take an interest in the environment. He regularly brought a collect of books with him and a folded up sign he would from time to time hold over his head, saying ‘The End of Destruction must be Now’. Outside the museum of man, he considered himself a person interested in the real history of humans and involved with the discussion of the future of humans.
Two days ago competition for attention started showing up at the same place and at the same times that he did. It was a young child who brought a chair and a sign with an easel. The sign was in a different language. There was a cemented path that lead to the stairs of the museum of man. Jake always put himself on the side closer to the iconic fountain of the park. The little girl sat herself on the opposite side of the path. Her hair was black in two long braids that parted her hair down the middle. She would sit herself in the chair, her feet did not touch the ground. All day long she never said a word. Jake grabbed people attention but they would immediately notice her, sitting quietly. She was no more than a four of Jake’s twenty-five years of age.
No one walking by ever read her sign, or pretended to understand it. Jake did not recognize the script. After two days Jake ventured to ask what the sign said. She had since then given no attention to Jake. She looked at him as he asked his question and then smiled. He put down his sign and walked across the path.
“What does your sign say?” He asked. She smiled and pointed to the sign. She stood from her chair and walked up to him and put out her hand. He shook her hand and she introduced herself in a language Jake had never heard.
Tourists started stopping more and more often, trying to engage her in conversation. She just kept smiling. Sometimes speaking in words no one understood. A week went by before a well dressed older man showed up and did his best to engage her in conversation. She spoke in length but the man understood nothing. Jake stopped people, engaged them in very brief conversation before the little girl became too much of a distraction for his attempts. He thought of moving, but was drawn into the events, and now the strange man showing up attempting everything he could to understand her.
The well dressed man, showed up the next day with four new people, all who looked professional. They formed a circle around the girl. They started recording her words. Writing them down and sending one person outside the circle to make phone calls, repeating words into the phone, then rejoining the circle and repeating the search. No one appeared to know the first thing about her language. Jake was asked when she first showed up at the park. “More than a week ago,” he tried to hold the linguists attention for a desire to remain involved, but the linguist left, went back to the circle.
They started writing a significant amount of her words down. Trying to understand what she meant. Jake watched the linguists puzzle themselves, “There is no reference point to start from anything she is saying.” They would take breaks fifteen feet away and discuss the phenomenon. “Do we know one word of her language? Can we figure out what one word means?”
What they couldn’t understand was that she was there, speaking about the same things Jake was. She was explaining the future and the real history of humans. She didn’t bring books. She brought questions. No one could understand it but a direct translation of her sign was “Meaningful Questions”. She had the intention of sitting in her chosen spot and thinking about the most important question possible.
It was months of hysteria at Balboa Park. Linguists from all over the word ventured to come try to understand. Jake was often unable to get close enough to his grass roots protest spot, but kept coming. He was convinced the news coverage the little girl was receiving would also be good for him. He was now in the picture even if marginal. The girl would at times pose for pictures, run and stand next to Jake. In all media he was left out of explanation, not even explained under the photo caption, but he was in newspapers. Months passed, attention faded, and they were left with a minimal amount of linguists.
Jake realized that to this day, months later, the girl had not attempted to speak any English. He asked why. She understood he asked a question and responded as if she were answering. He understood and there was silence. Neither of them understood the question or the answer.
Pick any philanthropic avenue and in the spirit of post modernism I can detail what is wrong with this specific area of ‘help’. The big problem is that no matter what philanthropy you choose it is a symptom of a larger problem and that by alleviating the symptom and not addressing the problem, nothing philanthropic is really making a difference, just alleviating a symptom and exacerbates a problem.
It bothered me when people wanted to donate money to the victims of hurricane Katrina or send money to Haiti and now people want to send money and supplies to Japan, not because this wasn’t a good cause, but because no one was really addressing the problem. If you want to look at it as fighting nature then donating money is the best we can do. We won’t win fighting nature but that’s all money does, is hope that with enough money nature can’t hurt us. I understand the desire to ease suffering and I want to end suffering more than anyone and for me that requires ending the ignorance as well. There will be natural disasters with higher death tolls in the near future and it is really just simple math that will prove this. There is a growing human population and a growing population density in all cities around the world, natural disasters are natural, henceforth there will be higher death tolls in the future. We can build the highest walls we want in attempts to keep out the chaos, spend more money rearranging the globe, but nothing will keep the death toll down, unless we keep the population down.
The big problem is population density is too high. In order to keep these catastrophes from killing ten thousand people, we need to recognize the problem, not the symptoms. I have a dim view which isn’t any excuse to not pay attention. It is really those that do not pay attention to the growing population that need excuses and will constantly be faced with the same situation, both politically and environmentally. We all want to help, and I commend anyone who does something they authentically consider to be help, but help requires full attention to the big picture, which might require we donate money philanthropically today to division of resources during natural disasters, but with continued ignorance there will only be more pain, more death in the future.
Donate a moment of your time to consider the symptom of a much larger problem. This is relevant to all problems: a broken economy, jobs, starving people, war, oil, postmodernism, mentally insane, depression, they are all symptoms and it is time that we end philanthropic funding which would not help with the real problem.