"feeding starving people..."

[arethinn]

evergrey posted a craigslist tidbit where someone had reposted a table of various reasons not to breed from the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which is Most Interesting in itself. However, I want to go off on a bit of a tangent, from a few sentences I saw on another of their pages:

Like Pentti Linkola of Saaksmaki, Finland, quoted in the Wall Street Journal (1) Another world war, he says (in Finnish), would be "a happy occasion for the planet ... If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions would die."

He didn't say how many millions he wants to play lemming with, but even 80 million would only eliminate one year's growth. It wouldn't rescue Gaia, and we'd be stuck with all those bodies. Yuck. Even Garrett Hardin, who says that feeding starving people just makes more starving people, balks at Linkola's hard-nosed philosophy: "We have many possibilities which should be explored before we take a strong-arm approach," he cautions. (emphasis mine)

First, the phrase "feeding starving people just makes more starving people" took me a bit aback. It's logically true; if starving people are fed and survive, they tend to breed, and breed a lot (due to lack of contraception in areas where people are starving), which tends to leave said offspring in the same position as their parents: starving. But my real response, I think, is this: Yes, but it is better to do that which relieves suffering for those who are here now. On the other hand, that could be argued as "benefit at the cost of the future". However, I still feel that even though relieving the present suffering can present future problems, or at least fail to resolve them, in such a case it is better to do what we can for the suffering which is evident right now, rather than not do it.

This response kind of surprises me, because I generally consider myself to be emotionally cold and almost not at all compassionate.

From the same page, but thematically unrelated, I especially liked this bit:

Q: Is this another one of those suicide cults?

Seems as if our entire industrialized civilization is one big suicide cult. The symptoms surround us.

We propel our bodies about in fragile metal boxes, at potentially fatal speeds, without much care or reason.

We ingest so much poison that meat from our bones wouldn't meet government standards for pork.

We pull strands from the web of life, jump up and down on it, and expect it to hold our ever-increasing weight. Few notice there's no safety net.

Instead, we could be embracing life: voluntary human extinction offers a healthy cure for humanity's collective death wish.

"The destruction which has overtaken a number of civilizations in the past has never been the work of any external agency, but has always been in the nature of an act of suicide." --Arnold Toynbee, "A Study of History", 1949.

Comments

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

Maybe we could treat starving people like stray animals: clean them up, feed them, and spay or neuter them at the same time.

Awful as that phrasing is, I'm not really kidding.

[twopiearr.livejournal.com]

"feeding starving people just makes more starving people"

It's a bit extreme, but it's essentially true. But I would argue that there's a third option: the ole "give a man a fish he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish he'll eat for a lifetime" approach. Current welfare initiatives tend to focus more on the former than the latter; they give a deadline for when you'll be kicked off public assistance but do very little in terms of training those who lack life skills. Which, given the decline of home ec (for boys or girls) and electives in public education, is basically everybody these days. But that's another issue.