At the beginning of The Population Bomb, Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich described a well-known experiment.
Take a box, one meter by one meter and 30 centimeters high. Place two rats, one a male, the other, a female, in it. Place plenty of food and water and some sawdust on which to lie and the rats will be happy. Soon, there will be several new baby rats in the enclosure.
Then divide the enclosure in half. Make sure that there’s food and water on each side. The rats will continue to frolic, play, and procreate. More rats will be born.
Divide the enclosure into quarters. Do NOT increase the amount of food and water. Now, watch what happens.
The male rats will become homosexual. The female rats will become cannibals.
And that, my friends, is what some would say has been happening in the West for about the last 30–40 years. They claim that “the onslaught” of homosexuality and lesbianism; the abandonment of proper nurturing of our kids; a sense of familial decay, are all signs of the overconsumption of and increasing demand on our resources.
When our reptilian brains no longer dominate; when at least the limbic brains have equal power; and when we start using the forethought capacities of our neocortexes, we will have a chance to make reasonable choices that benefit us as a species, and not as apex predators.
The key ingredient to Mankind’s growth has been the eternal conflict between our reptilian brains — -favoring power, aggression, territoriality, ritual, exploitation, and dominance of those considered to be weak — -and our limbic systems, which increase our abilities to empathize, cooperate, focus on the common good, adopt civil means of addressing differences, and perform socially-beneficial work at the expense of personal aggrandizement. In figurative terms, these are “the Devil and the Angel” of our nature.
For too long, the “Devil” has dominated. Now, however, with the advent of the Sixth Mass Extinction — -with Mankind thrown into the mix as a likely victim — -we have no choice but to considerably revise how we live, work together, and interact in general. We must put aside our petty differences and recognize those qualities which enhance our chances of not only surviving, but thriving, so that we will, for the first time, truly be human.
If we don’t do so, well, then: bye-bye, Humanity.
