Carrying capacity and violence
I am writing to an empty stage but even as I do so, I am in such a writing fervor that I need to write something down, even if just to assist my own memory (which God knows isn’t worth half the damn it used to be). So anyway, in the race between me and the calcification of my neurons, let me get a head start and proceed with what I want to say….echo…echo…echo. I had the idea today that violence is not merely unavoidable but necessary to the human condition. Our carrying capacity (i.e. the amount of humans the planet can hold at one time with no population growth or decline) is knee deep in the blood of violent conflicts and placental discharge. I probably could have used better imagery but my point is the same “we need people to die for people to be born” and the reverse holds an obvious truth as well. Think of a model experiment in which we lock two pregnant women in a room with only enough food to support one if them. Sure, they both might eat a half portion but surely their emaciated bodies will not be able to support the growth of an entirely new organism within their bellies. Now place a gun in the room and see what happens. Death of at least one and her child. I say that we can apply this model to societies at large locked in the limited globe of resources. This is true only because humans are continuously surfing their carrying capacity. But too often, the population overshoots its capacity and at that point, something drastic has to happen. There are no words that can quell a hungry stomach. No treatise that will stop one who has sick or dying children. For those occaisions, we call our good friend Bloodshed to do the job. How can we avoid the violence? I believe it comes down to a simple understanding of how carrying capacities and population growths interact. If your population is dying at the same rate that it is growing, congratulations, you’re at carrying capacity! And natural deaths can do the trick here. We die just as fast as we are born. The problem occurs when someone artificially increases the birthrate. Then the deathrate gets overwhelmed but nature implanted an ingenious device deep in the reptilian brain of ours that helps resolve the issue: Violence and agression. To be fair though, even insect colonies exhibit this behavior. So there seem to be two solutions, you can either 1. Slow down the birthrate or 2. Increase the carrying capacity. It may be a very contentious point but I will call a “technology” anything that achieves either of these two goals by artificial means. The first method is what generally is cloaked in violence. If we kill our enemies then we can have more pizza for ourselves. Technologies on this side of the spectrum are generally considered weapons, although sometimes the methods can be so subtle as to diffuse the weapon among thousands of people. This is the kind of systematic group weapon employed by the Nazi army during the genocide of the Jews. Religions historically have been used as weapon technologies as well. The other side of the spectrum contains all the technologies that increase carrying capacity. Things like increased farm production to renewable resources fall under this category. These are peaceful gains because they assure that population growth rates remain unchecked. It is nonviolent up until the point that growth rates catch up. So the question becomes: will we ever reach a point that carrying capacity will grow faster than population birthrates so that violence can be avoided? I believe so but I don't like speculating about the future.