04-14-2022, 03:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-14-2022, 03:54 AM by Fresh Prince.)
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This is an excerpt from Konrad Lorenz's 1973 essay Civilized man's eight deadly sins on the dangers of overpopulation and city life. Konrad Lorenz was an Austrian ornithologist, former nazi and an early leading proponent of ecology before it was coopted by the left.
A small addendum: I can't help thinking that many of the character attributions for Chinese in this forum are based entirely on the moral implications of overpopulation as described by Lorenz. We also find similar descriptions in Spengler's Fellaheen as a mixed, urban basic population of late civilisation. Hence why any attempt at a eugenic reconstruction of humanity must include epigenetic considerations.
This is an excerpt from Konrad Lorenz's 1973 essay Civilized man's eight deadly sins on the dangers of overpopulation and city life. Konrad Lorenz was an Austrian ornithologist, former nazi and an early leading proponent of ecology before it was coopted by the left.
Quote:In the single organism, we almost never come across a positive feedback cycle. Only life as a whole can indulge with apparent impunity in this immoderation. Organic life has built itself, like a rare kind of dam, into the stream of dissipating world energy; it devours negative entropy, gathers energy voraciously, and grows with it. Moreover, the process of growth enables it to acquire more and more energy, and all the more quickly, the more it has already gathered in. If this process has not yet led to overproliferation and to catastrophe, it is because the merciless powers of the inorganic, the laws of probability, keep the multiplication of living beings within bounds, and also because regulating cycles have been formed between the different species of living organisms. In the next chapter, which deals with the destruction of our earthly environment, we shall explain briefly how these cycles work. We must discuss the measureless multiplication of human beings first, since it is the cause of most of the phenomena that are the subjects of our later consideration.
All those gifts that have sprung from man s deep insight into the nature of his surroundings the progress of his technology, his chemical and medical sciences, everything that seems most likely to relieve human suffering work in a horrible and paradoxical way toward the destruction of mankind. And humanity threatens to do what living systems almost never do, namely to suffocate in itself. Worst of all, in this apocalypse, the highest and noblest properties and faculties of man, the ones rightly valued as specifically human, are apparently the first to perish. We who live in densely populated civilized countries, especially in large cities, no longer realize how much we are in want of warmhearted human affection. You have to go to a really sparsely populated country, where neighbors are separated by several miles of bad roads, and enter a house uninvited, to realize how hospitable and friendly people are when their capacity for social contact is not continually overstrained. This was brought home to me by an unforgettable experience. We had an American couple staying with us in Austria whose house is situated in an isolated spot in the woods of Wisconsin. Just as we were sitting down to dinner, the doorbell rang and I cried out angrily, Who on earth is that now? I could not have shocked my visitors more if I had let fly a volley of obscene oaths. To them it was inconceivable that anyone could react to the ringing of the bell with anything but pleasure.
Crowded together in our huge modern cities, in the phantasmagoria of human faces, superimposed on each other and blurred, we no longer see the face of our neighbor. Our neighborly love becomes so diluted by a surfeit of neighbors that, in the end, not a trace of it is left. Anyone who still wants to feel affection for his fellow humans must concentrate it on a small number of friends, for we are not so constituted that we can love all mankind, however right and ethical the exhortation to do so may be. So we must select, that is, we must keep certain people, who would be fully worthy of our friendship, at a distance. Not to get emotionally involved is one of the chief worries of large-city people. This state of affairs, not quite avoidable for any of us, already bears the stamp of inhumanity; it is redolent of the old American plantation owners who treated their house niggers as human beings but their plantation slaves at best as valuable domestic animals. When this intentional screening-off from human contacts goes further, it leads not only to emotional entropy, of which I will speak later, but to the horrible manifestations of apathy reported daily in the press. The greater the overcrowding, the more urgent becomes the need for the individual not to get involved ; thus, today, in the largest cities, robbery, murder, and rape take place in broad daylight, and in crowded streets, without the intervention of any passer-by. The overcrowding of many people into a small space leads, not only indirectly through exhaustion of interhuman relationships, but also directly, to aggressive behavior.
Animal experiments have shown that intraspecific ageression can be escalated by overcrowding. Nobody, who has not been a prisoner of war or personally experienced a similar compulsory aggregation of human beings can imagine what pitch the smallest irritation can reach under such circumstances. When, in daily and hourly contact with fellow humans who are not our friends, we continually try to be polite and friendly, our state of mind becomes unbearable. The general unfriendliness, evident in all large cities, is clearly proportional to the density of human masses in certain places. For example, in large railway stations and at the bus terminal in New York City, it reaches a frightening intensity. Indirectly, overcrowding contributes toward all the symptoms of decay that we will be discussing in the following chapters. The idea that by suitable conditioning a new kind of human being, immune to the effects of dense overcrowding, could be produced, is, to my mind, a dangerous madness.
A small addendum: I can't help thinking that many of the character attributions for Chinese in this forum are based entirely on the moral implications of overpopulation as described by Lorenz. We also find similar descriptions in Spengler's Fellaheen as a mixed, urban basic population of late civilisation. Hence why any attempt at a eugenic reconstruction of humanity must include epigenetic considerations.