The Catching up of a realistic Enlightenment would be the last Chance
The repression of one’s own perversion towards enslaved lifeforms and the resulting ignorance about the reality of nature form the core cause for all current escalations emanating from mankind. Thus, these escalations were not inevitabilities. In the following explanations, it will be shown, for example, that the rapid population growth from the 1950s onwards, from 2.4 billion to now almost eight billion people, was largely based on unsustainable decisions to push intensive crop agriculture globally, which would not have arisen after a true enlightenment about the reality of living nature. And the causes for the destructive consumption frenzy of the present, with rapid enlargement of the “ecological footprint” of the global average man, can be traced back to psychological origins, which would also not have arisen after a genuine enlightenment. Consequently, the last chances for the reversal of the destructive overall process, which may still exist now, can only lie in a very specific way: namely, in a radical and fast enlightenment process that illuminates the context of real nature, as well as of our perversion and of the collective psychological impacts.
Analyzing negative examples from the past teaches that the only chance we have lies in true enlightenment
If it has been recognized and acknowledged that mankind, with all its destructive and rapidly escalating effects, is almost on the verge of annihilating itself and large parts of the earthly ecosystem, then the question is whether this fatal process can now still be halted or even reversed. As far as the recognition of the destructive situation is concerned, this is now assumed here without further reflection. What remains is only the question of possibly still-existing last chances. Thereby, it shall be shown as concretely as possible how and why enlightenment about the reality of nature can be the only possible key to survival.
The best and most solid way to access this proof consists in the isolated analysis of single parts of the destructive total effects of mankind in the past and the fictitious “playing through” of the effects of a real enlightenment. Thereby, it will become recognizable how incomplete knowledge and artificial illusions about the connections of natural reality automatically led to wrong decisions, which then resulted in drastic escalations and destructions on a global level.
The first example, which follows, concerns the main cause of that phase of the so-called “population explosion,” in which mankind multiplied from the middle of the twentieth century up to the present.
Consequences of missing enlightenment, example 1: The global “population explosion”
The far-reaching, causal consequences of the incomplete or missing knowledge about the larger connections of the living nature can be seen by looking back at the events and consequences around the so-called “Green Revolution.” This was a massive effort, starting in the late 1950s in the USA, to convert large parts of crop cultivation to intensive agriculture on a global scale. This has been an essential basis for the growth of the human population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to almost eight billion today. But this basis was not really sustainable.
One of the building blocks of the “Green Revolution” has been the systematic breeding of so-called “high-performance varieties” of numerous crops. This was accompanied by the development of highly efficient pesticides, the introduction of new fertilization methods and new technologies for farming and harvesting. From the very beginning, the initiative was aimed at transfer to the so-called developing countries, and the probably initially honest motive was to improve the food supply in these regions. Therefore, it rapidly influenced large sections of global agriculture.
During this conversion process, small farmers in many countries of South Asia, Central Africa and Central America, for example, had little choice, because the new methods were much more productive than the old methods they had practiced for centuries. Since they also sold part of their harvest on markets, they would not have been able to compete on price against the much more productive methods. For this reason, many of the previously diverse old varieties of cereals and other crops quickly disappeared from the 1960s onward. Small farmers now bought both the seeds of the “high-performance” varieties offered by large companies and the pesticides and fertilizers pushed mostly by international corporations, even into remote village structures.
The increase in food production was the main basis of the “population explosion”
The further consequences of this process were that the amount of food produced globally increased greatly in the second half of the twentieth century. This increase was one of the primary reasons of the rapidly accelerated population growth in Africa, South Asia, and South and Central America during the next decades after the 1950s. Other factors, often claimed to be of higher importance, such as improved hygiene and supply of medicines and consequently reduced infant mortality, also contributed to this development. But without the sharp increase in the amount of food produced in intensified agriculture the population growth would have been simply impossible. There are even indications, that with an improvement in medical care, birth rates and population numbers will actually decrease after some time because of higher security. And on the other hand it is well documented for other animal species and other forms of life that a strong increase in food availability leads practically automatically to a strong increase in reproduction and population numbers.
Why this population growth, largely based on the conversion to intensive agriculture and the disappearance of earlier agricultural methods and crop varieties, should be a major problem at all can be demonstrated by many parameters. For example, the speed of the population growth has resulted in significant ecological dislocation in many regions because more people are using more land and more water. In addition, there has been a rapid disintegration of the social fabric in small-scale farming cultures, which had previously been quite stable, often over many centuries.
As a further consequence, the urge of the numerically increased younger generations to move to the urban centers intensified, which, in turn, without a suitable infrastructure being able to form so quickly, largely turned them into slums. This entire process has continued to the present day, with the result that, on the one hand, huge cities with populations often in the double-digit millions have emerged, while, on the other hand, livelihoods in rural regions have not improved in the way that the initiators of the “Green Revolution” had once predicted.
This is also due to the fact that the process of global intensification of agriculture, once set in motion, has not slowed down. In the present, small farmers no longer face competition only from the neighboring village; the products offered in the markets come from completely different regions or even distant countries and continents.
Furthermore, the “high-performance” varieties have also brought many disadvantages compared to the numerous old regional varieties, such as increased demand for water, fertilizers and pesticides. This has resulted in dwindling groundwater levels and widespread contamination and degradation of soils. All of the consequences mentioned above have massively escalated within the last 50 years [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
The bottom line for the overall effect of the “Green Revolution,” since its beginnings about 60 years ago is a negative result: Hasty multiplication of population numbers, formation of huge urban slums with the lowest standard of living, destruction of the originally relatively stable, small-scale farming systems and cultures, a massive melting away of the genetic diversity of “crops” and, last but not least, drastic ecological damage to soil, forest, groundwater and surface water. Today, even leading figures in the United Nations clearly state that the global intensification of agriculture within the “Green Revolution” was a huge mistake.
Incidentally, one of its most recent consequences is a strongly increasing immigration pressure from the quasi-overflowing conurbations and ecologically damaged rural regions of the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere.
With previous enlightenment, there would have been no “Green Revolution”
So, why would an earlier enlightenment about the realities of nature have prevented these events around the “Green Revolution” and “population explosion?” The answer is simple: a society, whose participants – from the natural sciences up to the general public – have really understood the fundamental laws of nature, would never make such detrimental decisions as those who drove the “Green Revolution.” starting in the USA.
Anyone who has understood the natural regularities of “free evolution” knows that agriculture carries a large, fundamental problem in itself, because it deviates from these fundamental ecological regularities. On the basis of this knowledge, it would have been obvious that a global intensification of agriculture could be nothing more than shoving the global population into the already existing evolutionary dead end. Everyone would have understood that the short-term success, in the form of a massive increase in the amount of food, would be offset by a drastic decline in sustainability and many other harmful side effects.
Anyone decisively involved in such an enlightened collective would have had the foresight to easily understand that the global concentration on a few high-performance varieties would displace the many old varieties and, thus, largely burn down the genetic diversity of the “useful plants” in Africa and South Asia, for example, practically within a few decades. Likewise, even a layman would have understood that the supposed “high-performance varieties” could, in reality, only be severely weakened living organisms whose “high performance” only affected a few specific traits and that they would need more and more support, because they would become even more dependent in the future.
So, it would have been easy to foresee that more and more people would be dependent on genetically increasingly impoverished and weakening organisms and that, as a result, more and more water would be needed, that degradation and contamination of soils with fertilizers and pesticides would greatly accelerate and that, finally, steady collapses would soon have to occur.
With a former real enlightenment, the history of the twentieth century would have looked very different
If one now sets up a fictitious scenario in which, from the 1920s onwards, when we saw such scientific advances as the theory of relativity and the discovery of electromagnetism, there would also have been an enlightenment about the larger interrelationships of living nature, then the following course can be assumed: Never would anyone have even thought of driving something like the globalization of intensive plant agriculture. Such a concept as the “Green Revolution,” of even stronger orientation against the now recognizable regularities of nature, would have been dismissed as completely absurd and crazy.
Instead, those involved in the natural sciences in the US, Europe, and elsewhere would have used their now free intelligence out of pure logic to find solutions for moving plant food production in the direction of mutualistic and more sustainable conditions. Thus, in Africa, for example, the older and more stable social structures would still exist to a large extent today, and what in retrospect is called the “population explosion” would have developed only in a substantially reduced form. This alone would have made the situation of the present very different from that in which mankind finds itself today. And the only key would have lain in the real enlightenment.
Consequences of missing enlightenment, example 2: The “Ecological Footprint”
Another example of the fatal developments caused by the lack of enlightenment of mankind is the rapid increase of the so-called “ecological footprint.” This functioned like a multiplying factor, which increased the destructions outlined in the first example by the population explosion.
The term “ecological footprint” has become established for the totality of all direct or indirect ecological consequences of the actions and consumption of humans as individuals. Thus, if one wants to determine the average ecological footprint of a person living in the United Kingdom or in the USA, one analyzes all the ecological consequences that this person causes, for example, through his or her purchases. If this average person in the UK consumes five kilograms of coffee in a year, then it is possible to trace back the ecological consequences that result from agricultural production in Central America, such as groundwater consumption for irrigation or soil degradation. The average person could also buy a new smartphone once a year. Then the ecological consequences, due to raw material extraction in Africa, transport routes and similar factors, would have to be added to his “ecological footprint.”
Based on the increasing offerings of developing industries, it can be assumed that the ecological footprint was bound to increase automatically from the Industrial Revolution onwards, around 200 years ago. When, for example, passenger cars came onto the broad market about 120 years ago, there was an increasing demand for this new product and, thus, associated consequences, due to raw material extraction, road construction and exhaust emissions. But it can be reconstructed easily and in many facets that the then faster and faster accelerating increase of the size of the imprint would have been at least strongly slowed down by a real enlightenment at any time. One of these facets concerns everything that has been developed around the livestock industry.
Influence of enlightenment on the ecological footprint through effects on livestock industry
It is currently estimated that the consumption of farmed animal products, which has been growing rapidly for several decades, is the single largest factor in the formation of the average global human’s ecological footprint in the present. More than one-third of agricultural land under intensive crop cultivation is used for the production of food for livestock. Meanwhile, ever larger areas of shrinking virgin forests in South America, for example, are being converted into new agricultural land for this purpose.
The reason for this sharp increase is not that people would starve if they consumed less meat, milk and eggs. Rather, a cultural attitude has developed globally after starting in the wealthy industrialized nations, which includes a drastically increased consumption of such products compared to earlier times.
This attitude sprouted in the USA and Europe in particular and spread rapidly to practically all parts of the world. In China, for example, until the second half of the twentieth century, the typical midday meal consisted of dishes with rice, some vegetables, sauce and a small piece of fish. Today’s meals of the younger generations are more similar to those in the US and Central Europe, such as large burgers made of meat, lavish portions of deep-fried poultry, milkshakes and chocolate bars. As a result, per capita consumption of animal products has multiplied in less than fifty years – and so has the environmental footprint.
Due to the enormous demand, livestock farming today has shifted, for the most part, to forms of industrialized and, thus, correspondingly productive factory farming, which causes a strong pull towards the global procurement of feed. A concrete example is the rapidly increasing destruction of the rainforests in the South American Amazon, which is mainly attributed to the creation of new cultivation areas to meet the likewise rapidly increasing demand for soy as feed for industrial mass livestock farming in China.
The consumption of animal foods would have developed completely differently after a real enlightenment process
If one now applies the fictitious scenario set up in example 1, i.e., assumes a complete enlightenment process in the 1920s, then it can be concluded that something like today’s industrial mass animal husbandry and the enormous increase in demand for products from there could not have arisen.
By learning from the first years of school and, therefore, fully comprehending that freedom has always been the central regularity in animate nature and that other animals have a fundamentally equal consciousness as we humans, the entire view of animal husbandry would have changed greatly even in children. And since now also it would have been understood that twisted and mutilated worldviews have been used for the repression of the subconsciously perceived perversion of the enslavement of other animals over centuries and even millennia, a strong urge would have developed to eliminate the harmful core cause as fast as possible. From a sense of responsibility of adults for children, this urge would have strongly affected the behavior around methods of farming animals. And almost certainly, efforts would have quickly emerged to overcome them completely.
People would not have needed a nourishing philosophy like, for instance, veganism, nor external pressure in order to change their consumer behavior radically. Anyone who has understood what high-grade unnaturalness the breeding and holding of “farm animals” represents and which harmful psychological consequences the humans themselves develop because of it would literally change in an instant.
The enlightenment would have made the emergence of industrial mass animal husbandry impossible
It is not possible to say exactly how the whole thing would have developed. But it is quite conceivable that the demand for animal food in Europe, for example, would have been reduced to such a small fraction that, ultimately, even the wild stocks and fishing would have sufficed to cover it. Since various technologies would also have eliminated the need for animals as a means of agriculture and transportation, it is reasonable to assume that the breeding and keeping of “farm animals” would have largely disappeared in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century. This, in turn, would have been accompanied by strong spillover effects to other parts of the world.
One thing that can be said with certainty is that the USA and Europe wouldn’t have been able to drag civilization into such an escalation spiral of the most extreme perversion, as it did by accelerating industrialized factory farming from the second half of the twentieth century.
So, since today, more than one third of the areas used for intensive plant cultivation serves the cultivation of fodder, the strong relative reduction of the ecological footprint by the real enlightenment can be clearly seen. In a mathematical calculation, this direct effect alone would certainly correspond to a reduction in the double-digit percentage range. But even far beyond that, the elimination of the main problem in the existing cognitive dissonance would have initiated a psychological recovery. This, in turn, would have been accompanied by manifold further changes in behavior to reduce one’s own harmful effects on the ecological fabric and, thus, reduce the “ecological footprint.”
Consequences of missing enlightenment, example 3: the burning down of intelligence
A consequence of missing the enlightenment, which has already been touched upon in examples 1 and 2, is the destruction of otherwise usable intelligence potentials through the constant mental effort to suppress reality and one’s own unnaturalness. To clothe the basic mechanism in a metaphor, one can imagine this as the attempt to hold an air-filled plastic ball under water in a swimming pool.
As the ball pushes with high pressure towards the surface of the water, large proportions of body power must be expended to keep it down. If one now finds no end and the ultimately pointless endeavor drifts on and on, then, at some point, the body forces will be used up to such an extent that one will finally no longer be able to hold oneself on the surface of the water and will drown.
In this metaphor, the surface of the water represents the surface of man’s collective and individual consciousness. The physical strength corresponds to the mental and cognitive potentials, including those of abstraction, as significant intelligence characteristics, which are relatively strong in the human species. And the ball is the reality of nature, with its regularities and orders, as well as our actions that are perversely directed against it.
The principle of pushing down the ball is already treated under the chapter “Repression.” So, one used the mental potentials, and particularly the capacities for abstraction, to build up artificial images of the world and to submit oneself to them. In this way, man was successful in reducing the cognitive tensions caused by the subconscious perception of one’s own perversion. At the same time, however, the mental potentials, including those capacities for abstraction, were practically used to deceive oneself – and were, thus, wasted.
By the concrete example of the philosophies of the supposed “modern enlightenment,” it can be seen that some of the smartest minds did almost nothing other than think up anything with which the perversion of the enslavement of the other living beings could be artificially legitimized. This was clearly a far-reaching burning of big parts of humanity’s intelligence potentials.
Instead of using these mental potentials for the deeper understanding of the connections of the perceptible reality in order to strengthen our durability and survivability, one used them for the suppression of the same. And many things in the present indicate a great probability that, in the end, mankind will actually have used its intelligence potentials to suppress reality until it sinks, just as it happens in the above metaphor with the individual in the swimming pool.
Consequences of missing enlightenment, example 4: loss of meaning and fascination
A central blow caused by the lack of enlightenment in several respects is the loss of the extremely important and sense-giving perception of the beauty and fascination of nature and, thus, of reality. This perception cannot be replaced by anything. And if it dwindles, then an affected person or even a collective, quite automatically, will try to fill the vacuum thus created – which in the end cannot really be achieved. These efforts to fill up the spiritual vacuum are, to a large extent, the cause of the destructive consumption frenzy of today’s civilization.
In order to understand the enormous extent of the damage, one can go through the concrete consequences that arise in a person of today as a result of such manipulations in the mass media, as shown in the chapter “Repression”. In the affected person, so to speak, that plug has pressed even more firmly into his head, which has already blocked mental access to the reality by the earlier repression tools of religion and philosophy. He “knows” now, by the media consumed, that nature and, thus, reality is “cruel” and “brutal” and that it is a desperate cycle of “eating and being eaten.”
And he will conclude that the planet was, from time immemorial, a place of cruelty, misery and dying, until finally the noble civilized man appeared. That it must have been exactly the other way round in reality – that the earth was a space of the free and pleasurable development in which misery and dying were only small side phenomena – is not recognizable for him anymore.
The corresponding damage, therefore, lies in the constriction of the worldview to a small and twisted remainder of the potentially possible and, finally, in the loss of the chances to find a real meaning of life and the world. A mind not damaged in this way, on the other hand, can develop in the space of reality and perceive what the term “fascination” is best suited to name. It is an intensive and pleasant “amazement” because, on the one hand, an intense beauty of nature and, thus, of reality is perceived, while, on the other hand, one also recognizes the practically unfathomable depth of the same from one’s own position.
With the increase of the perception of the fascination of nature and, thus, of reality, the spiritual wealth and corresponding quality of life rise – and with the reduction, it falls. A person could still possess as much money, food and luxury, but if his perception of the fascination of nature is at a very low level, then this affects the quality of his overall perception. And it is impossible to find a substitute in, say, digital simulations.
The fatal loss of meaning and fascination cannot be measured directly, but it can be proven indirectly
There are two problems in proving this extremely important part of the overall context surrounding the loss of meaning and fascination. The first is that it is virtually impossible to measure. It is not possible to use such clear parameters here as it is quite easy to do in examples 1 and 2, i.e., in the form of empirical statistics on the increase in population numbers, the genetic erosion of “crops” by intensive agriculture, or the global consumption of food from factory farming.
However, it is possible to reflect on the issue on the basis of written expressions of earlier people compared to those of the present day. A systematically proceeding observer will recognize a clear contrast quite easily. Even up to the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, written expressions of young people often contain representations of the perception of the literally called “beauty of nature,” which is nothing more than the perception of its fascination. Today, in 2021, such things can almost not be found anymore.
In order to understand the contrast, we can read, as an example, the following passage from a letter, which the then twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl had sent to a friend on 10.10.1942 [7] just a few months before she was murdered by the Nazi regime. Afterwards, one can reflect on the basis of the statements of today’s peers on the Internet, whether such formulations do still exist at all:
“Now I rejoice again on the last rays of the sun, I marvel at the unheard-of beauty of all that is not man-made. The red dahlias at the white garden gate, the tall serious firs and the trembling golden birches with their now shining trunks in front of all the green and rust-colored foliage, the golden sun that increases the luminous color power of every single thing (…). Everything is so beautiful to marvel at that I do not yet know what kind of feeling my speechless heart should develop for it, because it is not yet mature enough for a pure joy in it, it marvels and is content with delighted amazement. – Is it not also mysterious enough, and if one does not know the reason for it, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful?” [7]
Anyone who carries out a systematical reflection on the basis of current expressions will find that such expressions of young people today actually no longer exist, or exist only in small residual fragments. The “beauty of nature” has virtually disappeared from their minds. If one still finds such formulations on the Internet, then they almost always come from older people.
This loss of fascination is certainly one of the deepest and most fatal damages caused by missing the enlightenment. It obviously interacts in complex ways with the symptoms caused by mass media, shown in the chapter “Repression.” So, if in the mass media it is made clear as a matter of course that only man is noble and good while all nature is “cruel” and “brutal,” then these statements alone are, in themselves, like a plug blocking the opening towards the mental perception of beauty and fascination of nature and therefore of reality.
And since such medial symptoms, as analytically reflected in the chapter “Repression,” can currently be traced back mainly to the repression of the escalated perversions around intensive factory farming, this escalation has, thus, robbed man in the causal consequence of fascination and of the most important thing he could otherwise discover with his mind.
The loss of fascination has ultimately caused the dams of the consumption frenzy to burst
The loss of the perception of the beauty and fascination of nature is, beyond the serious damage to the individual, a profound reason that people as a whole no longer appreciate nature. What one does not appreciate, one is not prepared to preserve by one’s own restraint. In addition, there is a strong desire to somehow fill the immense spiritual vacuum that has inevitably been created by the loss of fascination. This is a main drive of the current destructive consumer frenzy. With the denigration of nature, the dams of this consumption frenzy are, thus, broken as a causal consequence. And it will be difficult to turn back the consequences which have come out of it.
Many of today’s young people are prevented, by the devastating mechanisms of the far advanced collective psychosis, so strongly from the development of their perception and spirit that they probably do not understand the connections reflected here even rudimentarily. However, this is not to mean at all that they are “dumbed down” in the sense of the word. If the collective psychosis could be broken up by a radical collective enlightenment, this and other damages would probably recede rapidly. So, it cannot be completely ruled out that there could still be such chances now – however, they are about to melt away quickly in these days.
CONCLUSION
On the basis of the sketched, manifold examples, it can be clearly recognized that practically all of today’s escalations of the destructive effects of mankind would not have occurred if in the temporal run-up a genuine enlightenment about the reality of nature had taken place. From it can be derived, in the reverse conclusion, that, in the present, the key to the perhaps still possible chances for prevention of a final catastrophe caused by man can lie only in such an enlightenment. This would have to become by far the most important project of mankind. If there had been a real enlightenment 100 years ago, then mathematics would not be at the top of the curricula in the schools today, but the connections of living nature. People’s behavior would be very different today. There would be the inner readiness to align one’s own existence in such a way that it caused as little destruction as possible. Only such an inner readiness of the enlightened individuals, not external pressure and coercion, could lead to a rapid reversal of the fatal path of mankind.
Sources:
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b02900
[2] https://www.scinexx.de/news/geowissen/versalzung-schluckt-2-000-hektar-land-pro-tag/
[3]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/concentrations-of-pharmaceuticals-in-freshwater-increasingly-globally
[4] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/wasserknappheit-warum-die-wassernot-im-nahen-osten-zu-konflikten-fuehrt/23097300.html
[5] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/unterirdische-wasserknappheit-von-grund-auf-ausgetrocknet/24474644.html
[6] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4202_de.html
[7] Sophie Scholl, Letter to her friend Lisa Remppis (10.10.1942), translated from German to English by ZEIS publishing.