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The Bible speak of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that will be let loose upon the world in the last days. Their names are War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. We have already looked at War. Now let us consider Famine.
Primitive humans, as we saw, rarely knew famine. But as soon as people started farming, famines became regular occurrences. In the poor countries of the world, famines continue to kill millions every year. But in the rich countries, people say, modern mechanised agriculture has vastly increased food production, and hunger has been eliminated. Farming is now done with scientific precision. We have tractors and chemical fertilisers and pesticides and irrigation, as well as efficient transport systems to distribute food. And in the unlikely event of crop failure, we have vast reserves of food to tide us over.
However, we have not defeated that terrible horseman Famine. We have only won a temporary reprieve. The world is slowly but surely building up towards what we might call a "super-famine", an agricultural disaster of unprecedented proportions where not merely millions, but billions, will perish.
What do we mean by this? Let us see. We saw earlier that primitive humans ate a very diverse diet. And diversity means security. Should one species go under, there were plenty of others to take its place.
But farmers tend to rely on a small number of staple crops, and they eat very little else. This represents a less secure food supply. Should those few staple crops go extinct, and should humans be unable to replace them with something else, terrible starvation would result.
Of course, this is not likely to happen. Or is it? When humans began farming, they and their chosen food plants in effect separated themselves from nature and formed a little independent ecosystem of their own. Agricultural plants have become dependent on humans for survival, just as we have become dependent on them. If humans were to disappear, our food plants would die out because they have lost the ability to survive in the wild. They need us humans to protect them from pests and diseases, and to collect their seeds and plant them and watch over them as they grow.
Conversely, were our food plants to become extinct, we humans would find ourselves without food. It is only intensive agriculture that has allowed humans to multiply in such numbers as they have. If agriculture stopped, nature could not possibly feed so many of us. Billions would starve, and we would have our super-famine.
As we can see, it is vitally important that humans take good care of their agricultural plants and never let them go extinct. Indeed, for several thousand years, farmers did take good care of their food plants. It is not difficult to do. The main requirement that the plants need is healthy soil to grow in. And soil is kept healthy with manure and compost, and with crop rotation, polyculture, and the practice of letting fields lie fallow periodically. Good soil is not just simple, dead clod, as people sometimes imagine. No, soil is a complex living ecosystem, full of fungi and bacteria and worms and insects and decomposing vegetable matter. To remain healthy, soil must therefore be cared for like any other living organism. It must be fed and nurtured and rested so that it can stay healthy and grow healthy plants. And when the plants are healthy, they will have a natural resistance against pests and diseases.
All the above measures that care for the soil aim essentially at imitating nature. Compost and manure are natural fertilisers. Crop rotation and polyculture echo the way plants grow in a forest. And letting a field lie fallow also approaches natural conditions. Farmers tend to overuse and exhaust their soil, which means that a field needs an occasional period of rest to recover its health.
But then came our modern industrial farming and changed everything. Big farm machines require that large fields be planted with a single crop. So out went polyculture and crop rotation. Next, industrial farmers decided that compost and manure were too dirty and troublesome and expensive. They opted instead for cheaper artificial fertilisers. And because these were considered so much superior, the practice of letting fields lie fallow was also dispensed with.
Before long, troubles appeared. Artificial fertilisers do not restore soil health. Rather, they "pep it up", somewhat like caffeine does to a sleepy human. Each season, more and more fertilisers had to be used to achieve the same result. But the health of the soil deteriorated, and the plants growing in it lost their natural resistance to pests and diseases. Industrial farmers then had to resort to chemical pesticides to control the ever more serious pest infestations that were happening. At first, these pesticides worked wonders. Pests and diseases vanished from sight altogether, and crop yields boomed.
But this did not last. After a few years, the pests developed resistance and returned in larger numbers than ever. Crop yields fell below what they had been prior to the introduction of pesticides. Why did the pest return in greater numbers? The reason has to do with simple ecology. The pesticides had not only killed the pests themselves, but also the predators that kept the pest numbers down. And so, when the pests came back, they were free of their natural enemies, and could multiply in plague proportions. Of course, the predators also returned, but not for several more years. A predator cannot re-establish itself until after its prey has done so. Also, being higher on the food pyramid and therefore fewer in number, the predators did not have the same genetic variety to help them develop resistance to the pesticides as fast as the pests did.
Meanwhile, farmers reacted to growing infestations by spraying ever more pesticide. Doses were increased up to a thousandfold. But the pests survived, and moreover, human food became tainted with pesticide residue. Naturally, the heavy spraying of pesticide caused further deterioration in soil health, and food plants found themselves growing in increasingly unnatural conditions. They were no longer surrounded with life and nature, but with artificial chemicals and sterile, life-destroying poisons.
But industrial humans attacked their agricultural soil in other ways as well. As we know, rainwater is pure, distilled water that leaves no mineral residue when it evaporates. But industrial farmers decided that rain was too unreliable. They started drilling wells and pumping up groundwater for irrigation instead. But groundwater is full of minerals that remain in the soil when the water evaporates. Soon the soil became too salty to be able to grow any plants at all. If the water came from directly underneath the farm, the watertable sank and the soil became dry and salty and hard as rock, and completely useless for agriculture. But if the water was piped in from some distant underground source, the watertable rose and the soil became salty and waterlogged. Either way, salt-damaged soil is very difficult to repair, and farmers simply abandon it and move somewhere else.
We have seen how industrial farming has poisoned and destroyed agricultural soil, leaving nothing but sterile desert where no plants can grow. Every year, billions of tonnes of good agricultural soil is lost because of bad farming practices. It has been estimated that for every tonne of food grown, six tonnes of soil is destroyed. In another fifty years, all arable land on the planet will have been turned into desert. What will happen to our food plants then? What will happen to humans? Our industrial farming practices are carrying us inexorably towards a super-famine.
But industrial farming attacks food plants not just by destroying the soil they grow in. It also attacks the plants directly. In the old days, farmers used to keep a part of their crop for seeds to plant next year. They were well acquainted with selective breeding, and used only the best plants for seeds. Over the centuries, they bred plants that had bigger fruit, better flavour, better nutrition, and better storage qualities.
But then the modern seed industry decided that the farmers' methods of plant breeding were too slow and unscientific. It was time that qualified genetic engineers took over the job. And before long they had bred a new "super-plant" that would grow faster and give bigger yields on less water, and that would, supposedly, resist all pests and diseases forever. The new super-plant was cloned by the billions. Every seed was exactly alike and there was no genetic variation. That way, farmers could be assured that every single plant would be identical and have the same excellent qualities.
Farmers eagerly abandoned their traditional varieties and purchased the new super-plant. Crop yields shot up and pest problems seemed a thing of the past. For a few years, all went well. But then disaster struck. The pests returned with a vengeance. Enormous swarms descended from the skies and destroyed the crops of an entire continent in a single fell swoop. What had gone wrong?
The genetic scientists soon figured it out. They had failed to take into account the changeability of nature. In nature, all species are constantly evolving. Every three years or so, pests learn to overcome the defenses of plants, and the plants then evolve new defenses, and so on. Typically, in traditional farming, a quarter of the crop is lost to pests every year. But the remaining three quarters is resistant to pests and provided humans both with food and with good seeds for next year's planting.
Now, when plants and pests evolve a new defense, where do they get it from? From their genetic variability. In nature, every species possesses a rich storehouse of genetic variability. Some individuals within the species are tall, others are short. Some have this chemical in their bodies, some have that chemical. In traditional farming, a pest may be able to eat some of the plants growing in a field, but the rest have a chemical that the pest cannot tolerate. He starves rather than eat those plants. The resistant plants then survive and produce the next generation of plants, and next year, when the pest returns, he finds that all the plants have that unpalatable chemical in them. The pests die of starvation, except for a few individuals who, by chance, happen to have a chemical of their own that is able to overcome the plants' chemical defense. Next year, all the pests have that chemical, and the plants are helpless, except for those few who happen to have yet another chemical able to resist the pests' chemical. And so it goes on. New defenses appear and are countered by new offenses, only to be overcome by still more defenses. And as we said, it is from their storehouse of genetic variability that both plants and pests draw their ability to evolve. Any species that lacks genetic variability is doomed to extinction because it has lost its ability to keep up with the rest of nature.
Now, when the seed industry cloned their super-plant by the billions, what did they do to genetic variability? They completely eliminated it. In their ignorance, they thought that perfect genetic uniformity would be a good thing. Indeed, even the slightest genetic variability in cloned plants was regarded almost as a moral sin.
And so, once the pests had overcome the super-plants' defenses, they were able to eat the entire crop, down to the last plant. And the plants, without genetic variability, were totally unable to evolve new defenses. Monoculture was another boon for the pests as well. Because huge fields were planted with a single crop, the pests did not have to travel far for their next meal. They literally found themselves literally in an ocean of food, and were able to multiply as never before.
The seed companies saw that removing genetic variability had been a mistake. To reverse that mistake, we must put genetic variability back into our food plants again. But where was that genetic variability? In their foolish excitement over the super-plant, farmers had simply abandoned their traditional varieties, and these, unable to survive in the wild, has died out.
After a long, hard search, scientists found a few scraggly remains growing on the edge of some farms. But most of the genetic variability was irretrievably lost. Thousands of years of plant breeding by farmers had gone down the drain. The best estimates indicate that in the USA, most agricultural plants have lost at least 90% of their genetic variability. Where there once were hundreds of varieties of beans and wheat and potatoes and cucumbers and tomatoes and so on, there are today only a few dozen. In all countries that practice industrial farming, the loss of genetic variability has been nothing less than disastrous.
And as we said, a plant that loses its genetic variability is doomed to extinction. The specter of a super-famine suddenly looms larger. Jack Harlan warned of "catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine". He wrote(30): "Who would survive if wheat, rice or maize were to be destroyed? To suggest such a possibility would have seemed absurd a few years ago. It is not absurd now...What is the potential magnitude of the disaster? One might as well ask how serious is atomic warfare? The consequences...are beyond imagination".
While the chemical industry is destroying soil by taking soil maintenance out of nature and placing it in the hands of chemists, the seed industry is destroying food plants by taking evolution out of nature and placing it in the hands of genetic scientists. It is suicidal for humans to think they can tamper with such complex processes or improve on nature in this way.
It is still not too late to save our food plants. In the poor countries where industrial farming is not widely practiced, there is considerable genetic variability left. And in the rainforests of the world, there are many wild relatives of our food plants. But industrial farming is rapidly overtaking the poor countries, and rainforests are being cut down. If we do not act soon, all remaining genetic variability will be lost, and once it is lost, we will never get it back again.
The poor countries have lately woken up to the invaluable treasure they possess. They are starting to think of charging very high prices for their genetic variability. The rich nations talk hypocritically of the common heritage of all humans, but at the same time, they anticipate the possibility of going to war against some poor nation in order to bring home a few scraggly weeds or a tuft of grass.
Meanwhile, what are the seed companies doing to save our genetic variability? Are they trying to put genetic variability back on the farm where it belongs? Hardly. If they did that, farmers would no longer need seed companies. Instead, the seed companies keep on as before, breeding new "super-plants" and cloning them by the billions. They are also clamouring for laws that will allow them to patent any new varieties they develop. Such seed patent laws will contribute further to destruction of genetic variability. After all, to be enforceable, such laws will require perfect genetic uniformity. The seed companies also want laws that will stop anyone from growing any naturally occurring varieties that may happen to resemble a patented variety. In other words, it could become illegal to plant any seed that was not purchased from a seed company. The time-honoured practice of saving a portion of each crop for next year's planting could become a criminal offense.
But the seed companies are not waiting for laws to eliminate this practice. They are sabotaging it even now by developing infertile seeds, that is, seeds that produce plants whose seeds cannot grow into new plants. Farmers will have no choice but to buy new seeds each year. The seed companies are also collaborating with the chemical companies to breed plants that can only grow if a certain chemical fertiliser or pesticide is applied. And as if that was not enough, many of these chemical fertilisers and pesticides are manufactured from oil. But oil is running out. What will happen to our oil-dependent food plants then? Clearly, the seed companies are not interested in human welfare. They may pretend that they are breeding plants with better pest resistance and storability and so on, but in fact, they are breeding profit for themselves. Or more precisely, they are breeding a terrible humanitarian disaster from which they hope to profit handsomely. Capitalists make money from human needs, and what could be more profitable than to control the food supply in a world full of starving humans? The seed companies appear to be maneuvering themselves into just such a situation. They are building up their own private seed collections, so that, after all of nature is destroyed, they will literally own all the food in the world. Or what is the same thing, they will own the earth's biosphere. Apart from human beings themselves, who according to Capitalist law cannot become property, the seed companies will effectively own the whole process of organic life.
Civilisation has let loose War and Famine on the world. Now what of the third Horseman, named Pestilence or Disease? Civilised living conditions are unnatural, and it is only to be expected that civilised humans will suffer from a variety of diseases. In ancient and Mediaeval times, average life expectancy was low and infant mortality high. This was largely due to disease. These included terrible epidemics, such as the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, which killed millions of people.
But today we have modern medicine. And modern medicine is regarded by everybody as a wonderful thing. Even those who dislike everything else about civilisation have nothing but praise for modern medicine. It is popularly believed that through advanced drugs and medical technology and surgical techniques, doctors have controlled or even totally eliminated all those terrible epidemics of the past. And it is also believed that, given time, our clever doctors will find a cure for cancer and the common cold and for headaches and measles and every other disease as well, so that humans can enjoy perfect health forever after.
And yet, primitive people already enjoyed perfect health without need for modern medicine. The real cure for the diseases of civilisation is not more drugs and surgical techniques, but a return to natural living conditions. The terrible epidemics of the past were caused not by lack of drugs and surgical techniques, but by overcrowding and poor hygiene. Then, when doctors discovered germs and viruses, they started telling people to wash their hands and boil their food and water and to dispose of sewage properly, as well as to control rats and mosquitoes and other disease carriers. And when people did this, those terrible epidemics vanished. Average lifespan went up, and infant mortality came down.
Now, in telling people to practice hygiene, doctors were in effect telling people to return to more natural living conditions. In giving people this advice, the doctors of the past put themselves out of a job in order to help the human race. They practiced their Hippocratic oath as they should, caring more about people's health than their own profit. Hygiene is a simple, elementary kind of medicine that every person can practice for himself, once the doctors have shown him how. No complex technology is needed, nor any exotic medicines or complicated procedures. The human body is naturally self-repairing and self-maintaining, and in natural conditions it will keep itself healthy without need for complex medicine.
But then came our modern industrial civilisation with an entirely new host of diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, tooth caries, peptic ulcers, appendicitis, constipation, and so on. These diseases are not found among primitive people. Even in pre-industrial civilisations they are rare. These diseases are peculiar to modern civilisation, and their causes include bad diet, pollution, stress, smoking, lack of exercise, and so on.
Now, the best cure for these diseases is to eat a proper diet, to exercise more, and to reduce stress and pollution and smoking. This is a simple, cheap, and natural medicine that ordinary people can practice for themselves without need for doctors. If the medical profession practiced their Hippocratic oath as they ought, they would train people in this simple medicine. Indeed, many doctors try to do precisely this, and in so doing, they risk putting themselves out of a job. But other doctors do the opposite. Modern Capitalism has created an entirely new kind of medicine, a complex medicine which has no simple procedures that ordinary people can practice for themselves. No, this new medicine consists in expensive drugs and advanced technology and complex surgical techniques that are completely beyond the capability of ordinary humans. Instead, people must rely on highly trained specialists who speak a technical language that no one else can understand. This complex medicine does not try to return humans to nature, where the self-healing mechanisms of the body can operate at their best. No, instead it tries to displace those self-healing mechanisms, to take over body chemistry and to "engineer" health by artificial means. Buoyed up by successes in other fields, scientists have grown overconfident of their abilities, and now they believe they can manage human health better than nature.
The general public tends to think that it is this modern complex medicine that put an end to the terrible epidemics of the past, and that raised average life span and reduced infant mortality. But as we said, it is simple medicine that did this. What benefits, then, has modern complex medicine brought us? Very little, especially in relation to the enormous resources it consumes. In spite of billions of dollars' worth of research, complex medicine has failed to find a cure for cancer or heart disease or the common cold or diabetes and so on. Of course, we know what the cure is. It is to live a healthier and more natural lifestyle. But people do not like that cure. They do not want to exercise or give up their cigarettes and fast foods. They want to keep doing the bad things that make them sick, and then they hope that modern medicine will come up with a pill that will cure cancer and heart disease and so on. Popping a pill is so much easier than exercise and diet.
But modern medicine with all its machinery and specialised language and expensive drugs cannot cure cancer and heart disease. Only simple medicine can do that. Modern medicine does, however, profit handsomely from these diseases. Capitalism, having seen a demand, pretends to be able to fill that demand, and charges desperately sick people high prices for its products and services. But usually, the best that modern medicine can do is to temporarily alleviate symptoms. And while doing that, it often causes new diseases as well. The human body is far too complex for any doctor to fully understand, no matter how highly qualified he may be. And what we do not understand, we are better off not interfering with. But modern medicine does interfere, and in so doing, it gives rise to a range of new diseases, known as "iatrogenic" or "doctor-caused" diseases. Ivan Illich says(31) that one in five patients in research hospitals get iatrogenic illnesses, and one in thirty die from it. He points out that a restaurant with a similar record would be closed by the police. Being a patient in a modern hospital is, statistically speaking, more dangerous than any occupation besides mining and highrise construction.
Apart from hospitals, the drug industry is also a major creator of iatrogenic illness. In the rich countries, people consume vast amounts of drugs. If their doctor tells them to eat less and exercise more, people do not think this is "real" treatment. Only if the doctor prescribes a pill has he paid proper attention to their complaints. And doctors tend at times to give in to their patients' demands for drugs, and to prescribe medicines against their own better judgment. People also take many drugs without their doctor's knowledge, or against his advice. And as often as not, the person taking the drugs has no idea what the drugs are for or what their effects may be.
The drug industry also fails to adequately test many drugs before releasing them on the market. Drug companies have been known on many occasions to play down or deliberately cover up the harmful effects of a drug. And these harmful effects can be far from trivial. Thalidomide, for example, was widely advertised as a sedative, and people consumed vast quantities, even giving it to their babies to calm them down. But then it was found that thalidomide caused terrible birth defects. Babies were born with just a head and a torso and with no arms or legs. Investigations found that the drug company involved had early suspicions that this might happen, but hushed it up for the sake of profit. Profits from drug sales are very high, and often far in excess of any compensation that the company may be forced to pay. Indeed, companies calculate in advance the probable cost of compensation payments before releasing a new drug, and then they raise the price of that drug to cover themselves against that cost.
Naturally, with Capitalism, the best health services go not to those who need it most, but to those who have the most money. Doctors many deny that they are interested in money, but the fact is that they are among the highest money earners in modern society, and this is a position which they strenuously defend. Most doctors prefer to practice in the big cities of rich nations, where there are more rich people, than in country areas or in poor countries where their income will be lower. In the USA, there is an overabundance of health services for rich people. The rich can get not just their illnesses treated, but also their desires. A rich person who thinks his nose is the wrong shape can get it altered by cosmetic surgery, while his pet poodle visits a dog psychologist or spends the weekend at some canine health farm to improve muscle tone.
Poor US citizens, meanwhile, often cannot afford the high cost of health care. It is said that the USA is a country where ordinary people cannot afford to get sick. Many people deliberately choose not to seek treatment, even when seriously ill, because they do not want to risk bankruptcy.
Let us now consider some of the diseases of civilisation in more detail. Heart disease has grown to be the number one cause of death in the rich countries, and the reason, as we saw, has to do with smoking, a high fat diet, stress, overeating, and lack of exercise. The richer a country is, the more the population suffers from heart disease. And yet, it is not the wealthiest people that suffer. No, it is ordinary people. They tend to eat a lot of cheap, highly processed food, and very little fresh fruit and vegetables. Governments try to persuade people to eat better, but these efforts are almost always sabotaged by public apathy and by commercial interests. In order to maximise profit, Capitalism has developed food that contains many chemical additives intended to give cheap ingredients the appearance of high quality. These poor quality foods are often loaded with fat and sugar to tempt us to overeat. They also have little or no fibre, so as to take up as little space in the stomach as possible. Profits go up and health goes down. The proportion of obese people in the rich countries increases every year. One in three meals is now eaten out, and many families do so little home cooking that it is feared that home cooking may become a lost art. Many people live almost entirely on pizzas and hamburgers and soft drinks and chocolate. The generation of children now growing up has been called the unhealthiest ever, and fast food is the main culprit.
The second biggest killer in the rich countries after heart disease is cancer. The causes include smoking, pollution, food additives, and pesticide residues in food. Over the past 50 years, pollution caused by industrial activity has increased enormously, and caused a virtual epidemic of cancer. But industry, seeing a threat to their profits, tries to blame rising cancer rates on our rising average life span. In other words, they are trying to say that cancer is a disease of old age. But that is not so, because cancer in children has been increasing as well. One US Government report describes what it calls a "clustering effect" -- that is, wherever there is a higher than normal cancer rate, there is almost always a big petrochemical plant nearby, or a ship building, paper, or chemical factory. The world is becoming more poisonous to life. David Suzuki says(32) that we live in an "ocean of man-made chemicals". These chemicals interfere with cell chemistry, causing cells to grow and reproduce abnormally, and we have cancer.
The tobacco industry has a long history of resisting and sabotaging every effort to get people to give up smoking. Indeed, tobacco companies have engaged in much spurious scientific research of their own, pretending to prove that smoking cures cancer, or that cancer causes smoking rather than the other way around. The food and pesticide industry is likewise guilty of putting profit before people's health. Each of us now eats several kilograms of chemical additives and pesticides per year, and many of these are used illegally. The asbestos industry has a notorious reputation for social irresponsibility. For 30 years, it knew that asbestos causes cancer, but it kept that knowledge secret for the sake of profits.
While industry is against any move to cure cancer by a return to a more natural lifestyle, it is all in favour of doing so by inventing a cancer pill, and so create yet another opportunity to make profits. Indeed, there is already a billion dollar a year industry, funded largely by public donations, which is busy doing cancer research. It has been said that "more people live on cancer than die from it".
Lead poisoning is another disease that is only found in civilisation. Lead serves no useful biological function whatsoever. It is, however, a potent neurotoxin. It attacks the central nervous system, reducing a person's intelligence and making him more aggressive.
In primitive communities, lead was completely absent. But ancient civilisations like Greece and Rome used lead in large quantities to make drinking cups, as well as vessels for storing wine. The Greeks and Romans had no idea of the cause of the sickness they must have suffered as a result. Today, we do know about the danger, yet we keep putting lead into petrol so that whenever we breathe in the exhaust fumes of a car, we get a dose of lead. Every city dweller now has low-level lead poisoning.
While people in the rich countries today suffer from diseases of affluence like heart disease and cancer and so on, the people in the poor countries have different kinds of health problems. They have no diseases of affluence because they have no affluence. Instead, they suffer the same kind of problems that were prevalent in Mediaeval Europe. Bad drinking water and overcrowding and lack of hygiene provide a breeding ground for various epidemics like cholera and malaria and so on. The poor also suffer from diseases of undernutrition. "Kwashiorkor" is the name of the disease that causes the stomachs of starving children to swell up with a watery phlegm. Marasmus is an acute condition where the body is severely stunted due to lack of food. On the whole, however, people who live a traditional lifestyle, growing their own food and working hard, have quite good health. But wherever modern Capitalism intrudes into their lives, health quickly deteriorates. Poor people eagerly desire the same affluence that people in the rich countries have, and they are easily tempted into buying cheap, highly processed food in the belief that this will improve their lifestyle. The tobacco industry also capitalises on the desire of the poor to imitate the rich. Faced with declining tobacco sales in rich countries, tobacco companies are now busy recruiting new addicts in the poor countries instead. Tobacco advertising is colourful and plentiful even in the poorest slums, and nicotine content is kept high to get people addicted more effectively. If a person is too poor to buy a whole pack, he can buy one cigarette at a time.
Due to lack of regulation, industrial pollution is often worse in the poor countries than in rich ones. When a rich country bans a particular chemical, the companies involved move their operations to a poor country where no regulations exist. Due to ignorance, poisonous chemicals are often used recklessly. Thousands of people get sick or die every year. Banned drugs are also dumped in poor countries. For example, anabolic steroids have been sold as a cure for malnourished children. Advertisements show pictures of big, fat, healthy babies, and worried mothers buy the drug in the belief that it will make up for a lack of food. Rich manufacturers of baby formula also exploit the concern of poor mothers for their babies. Sales representatives have appeared in hospitals and clinics in the poor countries, dressed as nurses, and given what appeared to be advice on health and nutrition, but what was in fact a sales pitch. And many poor mothers were persuaded to give up breast feeding, which is cheap and healthy, and start on bottle feeding instead. Poor families spent as much as half their total income on baby formula. And the health of babies deteriorated. A 1973 WHO study found that bottlefed Chilean babies had three times the mortality rate of breastfed Chilean babies.
PART 47
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION
We have looked at the three horsemen named War, Famine, and Pestilence. The fourth is named Death, but he could equally well have been called Environmental Destruction. God told humans to "replenish the earth" (Genesis 1:28), and He threatened to "destroy them which destroy the earth" (Revelations 11:18).
Primitive humans obeyed the will of God and left planet earth to us modern humans in more or less its original virgin state. But modern Capitalism has in a mere 200 years wrought more destruction than all previous societies put together. And because we destroy the life support system on which our continued existence depends, we also destroy ourselves. We have multiplied in numbers far above what nature can support, and we are still continuing to increase. The earth's biosphere can support perhaps 5 or 10 million human beings. But the current population of the world is 6 billion, and it is estimated that by the year 2,000 it will have grown to 10 billion. Already human beings consume more food than all other land vertebrates put together. Thomas Malthus saw 200 years ago that food production, which grows linearly, can never keep up with population, which grows exponentially. He warned that if we want to avoid war, famine, and pestilence, we must exercise moral restraint and stop breeding.
But for now, the human race is increasing at the rate of 100 million new people every year, and all of them place demands on the environment, especially since every person wants to consume more and more. We have developed an insatiable greed for wealth of a kind that nature never meant us to have. Primitive people lived in harmony with nature, and were content with the kind of natural wealth that nature provided, that is, fresh air, sunshine, clean water, and healthy food. But civilised humans are no longer content with such natural wealth. They prefer money and plastics and houses and air conditioning and electric lights and junk food and so on. Our industry is busy converting good, natural wealth into evil, unnatural wealth at the fastest possible rate. And our greed for unnatural wealth is such that we are destroying nature. And when we destroy nature, we also destroy ourselves. We have made a so called "Faustian bargain"; that is, we have sold our souls to Satan in return for earthly wealth. We have sinned against God. The word "sin" means "a missing of the mark". The whole of our industrial civilisation is a sin. The Bible uses words like "dirt" and "filth" as synonyms for sin. Now, we civilised humans often equate dirt with soil. We are horrified by soil, and we reach for disinfectants and bleaches and detergents and other chemicals to keep nature out of our houses. In all this, we are implying that nature is somehow sinful and evil. And yet, in our more thoughtful moments, we realise that soil is not dirty or evil. On the contrary, all things are good in their proper place. In nature, soil is good because plants grow in it. The word "dirt" really means any substance that is in the wrong place, just as the word "sin" means any action that "misses the mark" or is inappropriate to the situation.
Now, if dirt means any substance in the wrong place, how should we describe the plastics and pesticides and junk food and other substances that civilised humans surround themselves with? Clearly, they are all dirt and filth. They do not belong in our lives. Of course, plastics and pesticides are not in themselves evil. After all, everything that exists is in essence good. But anything that is in the wrong place becomes evil. And plastics and pesticides have no place at all in the earth's biosphere.
Not all dirt is necessarily repulsive to the eyes or to the touch. No, the dirt of civilisation is designed to be as attractive to the senses as possible. Consumer goods are bright and colourful, they taste sweet and they seduce us with their beguiling appearance. Satan, who tempts us into sin, is a master of disguise, hiding his evil behind an appearance of goodness. But underneath that appearance, our entire consumer culture with all its colourful plastics and attractively packaged goods is in reality nothing but filth and excrement. Supermarket shelves are stacked with filth, and our houses are built from it. People who are horrified by soil think nothing of breathing toxic fumes from cars or eating food laced with pesticides. Nor do they mind inundating their bodies with antiseptics and detergents and other poisons, or dressing themselves in plastic clothing. We would not live on a rubbish tip, yet we surround ourselves with the same substances, only more prettily arranged. We wallow in sin like lustful pigs, unaware of how disgusting we are in the sight of God and nature. Our entire civilisation is an orgy of sin and filth. Far from carrying us to Salvation, civilisation, by destroying the environment that sustains us, is much more likely to lead us into destruction.
Let us look more closely at the problem of environmental destruction. It is a problem that has many facets, and one of these facets is the way in which civilised people are squandering invaluable, irreplaceable resources like coal and oil and so on for absolutely trivial reasons.
Primitive people survived very well with simple means. Each person needed only a few sticks and stones and bits of bone, and the energy of his own body plus a little extra in the form of firewood. But modern humans have discovered how to build machines of iron and to power them with coal and oil. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, if we use the machines only for sensible and useful things. But the Beast of Capitalism got hold of the new technology and soon turned it to evil. Every inventor of a new machine thinks to himself, "Great! Now I can patent it and get rich." The profit motive drives inventors to create a virtual explosion of machines for every trivial and silly reason. In their greed for profit, inventors search in people's lives for any trivial little activity that no one else has yet thought to build a machine for. Indeed, inventors even invent new activities for people to do. And when they have built a machine to do what people managed perfectly well to do by hand before, they use advertising to convince everybody that now they can be liberated from beastly slavery for no more than the cost of the new machine. And people buy all the new machines and soon forget how to do all those activities by hand. In this way, our "addiction to paralysing affluence" is built up. Commercial interests still search restlessly for new opportunities to squeeze yet another gadget into our lives. We are inundated by useless and trivial things. And far from shaking our heads at the folly of it all, we boast proudly that "what was a luxury to our grandparents has become a necessity for us".
Not all machines are small. On the contrary, some are very large and resource-hungry. Private cars are one example. We also have huge aircraft and luxury ocean liners that consume vast amounts of fuel for no more important purposes than to entertain rich people who are bored. There are machines to do everything for us. Electric toothbrushes relieve us of the effort of moving our hand when brushing our teeth, while TV remote controls make it unnecessary to stand up to change the channel. Our cars save us the trouble of walking down to the corner shop. And when we get unhealthy from lack of exercise, we can buy exercise machines to get us back in shape. Once, people breathed fresh air and saw by natural sunlight. Now we build buildings that shut out fresh air and sunlight, and then we install airconditioners and electric light so that we can see and breathe.
Nature used to supply all our food locally. But today, we feel deprived unless we can choose between bananas from the tropics, apples from temperate regions, and spices and delicacies from every corner of the globe. And it is machines that transport all this food to us. In the USA, it is estimated that food travels an average of 3,200 kilometres from where it is produced to where it is consumed. Most of this transportation of food is unnecessary, and some of it is ridiculous. A tomato-growing region, for example, may send its tomatoes to a wholesaler hundreds of kilometres away, then the same tomatoes are transported back again for local consumption.
More, it is only because we have vast fleets of food transporting machines that Capitalism can keep on transferring food from poor countries to rich countries. Without machines, food grown in poor countries would have to stay there and be sold to the local poor at prices they could afford. But as it is, the rich use machines to literally take the bread out of the mouths of the poor so that it may tickle the tastebuds of the rich.
Planned obsolescence is another peculiarity of Capitalist production. Ordinary common sense teaches us that it is silly to deliberately build machines that do not last. But Capitalism depends on the wheels of production and consumption turning over faster and faster. If the cycle stops growing, the economy grinds to a halt and we have a recession. But there are limits to what human beings need. Once Capitalism has filled those needs, the cycle of production and consumption stops growing, unless Capitalism can find ways to overfill our needs, to force-feed us and make us consume ever more wastefully. Therefore, with Capitalism, it makes no sense to build machines that last long or are easy to repair. Instead, things are made to break down quickly, and to be so hard to repair that it is more economical to buy a new one. We no longer have the old cut-throat razors that could be sharpened again and again, and that lasted for many generations. Instead we have disposable razors that are used once and then thrown away. Planned obsolescence is a great moneyspinner for industry and a great waste of resources. One automotive manufacturer even proposed "throw-away" car engines that needed no service, and that would have to be thrown away after three years and be replaced with another. This proposal was too grossly wasteful for public acceptance. And yet our cars are riddled with less spectacular but just as effective forms of planned obsolescence. These cost car owners thousands every year in repairs that would be unnecessary if cars were more sensibly designed.
Gossip, that most futile of all human pursuits, has become a billion dollar industry. Hundreds of magazines cater for people's insatiable appetite for useless information, such as who is sleeping with who. A fad industry has also appeared to cater for our desire for cheap thrills and transient novelties. Yo-yos, superballs, pop sunglasses, hula hoops, and other trivial rubbish appear on the scene almost overnight and vanish almost as quickly to give way to the next fad.
But of all the ways in which modern humans waste resources, the private automobile is surely the worst. For every person to have his own petrol-driven car is an incredibly wasteful way of transporting humans from place to place. The cost of building cars, and providing them with fuel and roads and parking lots and traffic police and so on is truly enormous. And what do we get for that cost? Let us see. Our car may take us to work in, let us say, ten minutes, but then we must work several hours a day to pay for the cost of purchasing the car and repairing it, and also to pay the taxes that go to roadbuilding, and so on. This time spent working to pay for our car should really be counted as part of our traveling time. If we do, then it turns out that our car actually travels at a speed of 5 km per hour, or in other words, the speed of a bicycle. To achieve that speed, we are squandering natural resources at an incredible rate, and creating enormous pollution problems. There is also an enormous cost in terms of human life. So far, cars have killed 25 million people in road accidents -- more than the number of soldiers killed in World War II.. Private cars are dirty, expensive, dangerous, and noisy. James Marston Fitch comments upon their effect on our living environment: "The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitated space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic...Gas-filled, noisy, and hazardous, our streets have become the most inhumane landscape in the world". One economist considers the private automobile to be "one of the greatest disasters to have befallen the human race". For only a fraction of the cost, he says, we could have highly efficient, comfortable, and frequent public transport, and the world would be a much quieter, safer, and cleaner place to live in. But anything sensible, like public transport, is an enemy of Capitalism, and is treated as such. The automotive industry uses its vast economic power to force Governments to divert vast sums of money towards roadbuilding and away from public transport. One big car maker in the USA was even convicted and fined for deliberately sabotaging the public transport system of a city, and thereby obliging people to buy private cars.
Via machines, humans have created a vast, unnatural environment in which they are constantly surrounded by a jungle of machines and machine-made products. Nature is something we only see in glimpses now and then between the machines. Our lives are entirely dependent on machines. Our agriculture cannot operate without them. Modern cities only survive because machines transport food and water from the surrounding countryside into the city, and remove sewage and dump it in the sea. Without machines, most people would not be able to get to work, or cook their meals, or survive the cold winter. If, God forbid, all our machines suddenly stopped working, the consequences would be truly disastrous. Agriculture would grind to a halt, cities would drown in sewage, and billions would starve. It is therefore vitally important that we keep our machines working. To do that, we must supply them with a constant stream of iron and coal and oil. And, we are told, the earth has vast resources of these minerals, enough to keep our machines running for a long time yet.
Or does it? There is a story about a man who wanted a pet that was small and cheap to feed. He bought a little puppy, and at first all was well. But soon the tiny puppy grew into a big dog with a ravenous appetite. If the man failed to provide enough food, the dog became angry and threatened to devour him. The man could neither kill the dog, nor escape from it. In the end he went bankrupt, and the dog killed him.
Likewise, Capitalism is a Beast that is only happy as long as it is growing. If it stops growing, it punishes humans with recession and unemployment and poverty. To avoid that, we must keep feeding Capitalism the ever-increasing amounts of coal and iron and oil it demands from us. Now, the growth of Capitalism is exponential, meaning that it doubles in size at fixed time intervals. The "Gross World Product" or GWP doubles about every ten years. This means a thousandfold increase every century. Exponential growth can be deceptive, tricking us with what seems at first a small price, but once we are addicted, the price starts increasing astronomically.
The way this works can be illustrated by another story, this time about a man who offered to do a service for a king. In payment, the man asked for nothing but a few grains of wheat. "How many grains?" asked the king suspiciously. The man produced a chessboard and laid it on the ground. "On the first square", he said, "I want one grain. On the second square, two grains. On the third square, four grains, and so on. On each square I want twice the number of grains as on the previous square, until the whole board is full."
The king did some quick calculations in his head. At most, he thought, it would come to a bushel or two of wheat. The king thought of his storehouses full of wheat, and agreed to the deal. But when it was time to pay, the king found that he had been too hasty. He had let himself be deceived by what seemed at first a small price, but which soon increased beyond all expectation.
He placed one grain on the first square, two on the second, then four, then, eight, and so on. But soon the numbers began building up with disconcerting rapidity. Square twenty required half a million grains. Square 32 required two billion. And the board was so far only half full. By the time the king finally got to square 64, he had to count out no less than 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains. This is 15 trillion truckloads, or a pile of wheat the size of Mount Everest. Far from having got a bargain, the king found himself totally unable to pay the price he had so foolishly agreed to.
This is exactly how the Beast of Capitalism has tricked humans. At first, the machines demanded only very modest amounts of coal and oil and iron. And people thought of the vast reserves still in the ground, and felt that they would never run out. But as soon as humans were addicted, the price began to escalate. And the chessboard the Beast has given us does not just have 64 squares. No, it stretches out to infinity. For square 65, we will need two Mount Everests, then four, then eight, and so on. And each time the Beast gives us only ten years to come up with the price. For square 100, we will have ten years to produce 70 trillion Mount Everests. Those reserves of coal and oil and iron that seemed so vast suddenly shrink to almost nothing. Much sooner than we think, the Beast will be demanding a whole Universe full of coal and oil and iron, and when it has devoured that, it will give us ten years to produce two more Universes. And if we fail to give the Beast what it demands, we will be punished with terrible wars, famines, epidemics, and other troubles.
If humans have any wisdom, they will destroy the Beast now, while it is still relatively small. But humans show no signs of wisdom. The rich are not going to abandon an economic system that gives them so much wealth. And as for ordinary people, they seem quite content to let the Beast lure them to their destruction with an illusion of limitless wealth.
Given that humans cannot bear to give up their addiction to paralysing affluence, we must ask: how much longer can we keep feeding the Beast before disaster strikes? That disaster will strike is inevitable, since we can never produce a whole Universe full of coal and oil and iron. The only question is how much time we still have. A thousand years? Five hundred?
In 1972, a group calling themselves the Club of Rome decided to find out. They used computers to predict what would happen if present trends continued. The results were grim. In only another 70 years, all the world's coal and oil and iron would be used up. These calculations assumed that only 20% of the world's population live in luxury while the other 80% starve. But if all humans want the same luxury, the 70 years will shrink to a mere 5 years.
When the Club Of Rome published its findings(33), people were alarmed. There was much talk, but no action. After a while, the talk died down, and the predictions of the Club of Rome were forgotten, and people were lulled back into their normal stupor by Capitalist advertising which assures us that all is well and that we can safely keep on consuming as much as we want.
All this happened 25 years ago. Of the 70 years allowed us by the Club Of Rome, we now have only 45 left. 80% of the human race is still poor, but the rich 20% keep on consuming as greedily as they possibly can, using up fossil fuels a million times faster than nature made them. And if anyone asks what we will do when the fossil fuel runs out, people shrug their shoulders and say that, when the need arises, human ingenuity will surely find a way. After we run out of fossil fuels, we can use nuclear power until science solves the problem of fusion power and gives us cheap, pollution free energy in practically unlimited quantities.
However, more knowledgeable people are not so complacent. Scientists do not know whether fusion power will ever be possible. If we start using nuclear power, and it turns out that fusion power is impossible, then we must continue feeding the Beast on nuclear power, and the problems of nuclear waste hardly bear thinking about. But even if -- and it is a big if -- all difficulties can be overcome, there is still a limit to how much energy consumption planet earth can withstand. All energy we use is ultimately degraded into heat. Every time we use energy, we heat up the planet a little. If energy use escalated without restraint, in 100 years we will start to experience unacceptable climate changes.
In short, no matter how ingenious we think we are, we cannot keep feeding the Beast forever. We are on a collision course with disaster, and most people now under the age of 25 years will live to see it. What exactly will they see? That is hard to predict, but it seems likely that there will be terrible wars between the haves and have-nots. Billions will starve, and dreadful epidemics will decimate the human race. It is also likely that when the troubles are over and the dust settles, the earth will be radically different place. Most of the human race will be gone, along with most other lifeforms, as well as our whole technological civilisation. Those few humans that remain will face a severely polluted and impoverished world. If they want to start building up a new technology, they will have to do it without coal and oil, because we have used all that up. And if they want metals, they will have to mine our rubbish dumps. When they do that, they will marvel at all the things we produced. They will unearth a vast river of faddish, trivial consumer goods, and shake their heads at the poorly made rubbish with inbuilt obsolescence. And what will our grandchildren think of such enormous waste of the earth's precious resources? Will they be grateful for the great things we accomplished? Hardly. Such a shameful waste of resources would only be forgivable if it resulted in some really great benefit for succeeding generations. But what are we in fact accomplishing with our incredible squandering of the world's resources? Nothing but our own day to day survival. Nothing good for the future, only the same day to day survival that primitive people accomplished with much simpler means, namely a few sticks and stones and bits of bone, and the energy of their own body plus a little extra in the form of firewood. Our greedy consumption will leave nothing of value for future generations, nothing but waste and misery and garbage. Far from thanking us, our grandchildren will curse us and be ashamed to call themselves our descendants.
Before the 1960s, hardly anyone had heard of environmental pollution. People thought of nature as a bottomless pit that could absorb all the waste that humans could possibly throw into it. On this assumption, factories poured rivers of waste into nearby lakes or into the air with no thought for anything but to keep the cost of disposal as cheap as possible.
But then the problems started. Even early industrial England began to suffer severe air pollution due to the burning of coal. So-called "killer fogs" stalked the streets, killing literally thousands of people through respiratory illness. Today, air pollution continues to escalate faster than ever. Private cars are perhaps the worst offenders. The Parthenon, which has stood for 2,500 years, is rapidly corroding due to car exhaust fumes and may not last much longer. In Calcutta, breathing the air is equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. In Milan, traffic police must wear breathing masks. And in Mexico City, there are special booths where people can place coins into a slot and get a whiff of clean air.
There was a time when air pollution was only a problem in the big cities. Out in the country, we could still breathe air that was as pure and clean as nature originally made it. But that is not so any longer. Air pollution is getting so bad that problems are appearing even in areas that are remote from cities. One of these problems is acid rain. The burning of coal and oil releases chemicals into the air that react with water and sunlight to produce nitric and sulphuric acid. In laboratories, these dangerous chemicals are kept in sealed glass bottles and handled with great care. But now these chemicals are literally raining down on our heads. Rain almost as acidic as battery acid has been detected in the USA. Acid rain destroys copper and dissolves paint. It corrodes iron railways and buildings. It burns plants and kills large areas of forest. In the USA, 67% of all forests have been affected. And when the acid gets into the soil, it leaches out good chemicals like calcium and releases poisonous ones like lead. Then the acid runs into lakes and kills all life there. In southern Norway, for example, 80% of all lakes are now either totally sterile, or else very close to it.
Besides acid rain, air pollution also produces global warming. Private cars release vast quantities of carbon dioxide which alters the thermal properties of the atmosphere and causes it to trap more heat from the sun. As a result, the earth is getting warmer. Scientists tell us that, in the past 100 years, the earth's temperature has risen by about 1 degree Celsius, and in the next fifty years it will rise by another 7 to 10 degrees. This may not sound like much, until we realise that the difference between an ice age and a warm period is a mere six degrees. This small change in temperature causes entire forests to migrate, and the fauna of an entire continent to be wiped out and replaced by new species. Now we humans are proposing to heat up the earth by seven to ten degrees. The earth will become hotter than it has ever been since it was first created out of a fireball. And to make matters worse, this seven to ten degree change will happen in only 50 years. Geologically speaking, this is a mere moment of time. In the past, going from an ice age to a warm period took hundreds of thousands of years. If six degrees over a hundred thousand years causes environmental havoc, imagine what a seven to ten degree change over fifty years will do. There will be unprecedented meteorological chaos together with dreadful agricultural disasters. Huge areas of forest will die because they cannot migrate fast enough. Tropical diseases and agricultural pests, on the other hand, can migrate easily, and will cause much suffering in cooler regions where people and plants have no resistance against them. The polar icecaps will melt and all lowlying coastal areas will be flooded. Entire cities and even some nations will disappear under water. At least a billion humans will be evicted from their homes by the rising sea. This will amount to the greatest migration of human beings that the world has ever seen.
What would happen if global warming continued to extremes? The planet Venus gives us the answer. Its atmosphere is almost wholly composed of carbon dioxide, and the surface temperature there is 475 degrees Celsius. Nothing can live in these conditions. The hot, dense, soupy atmosphere rushes around the planet in a mad race, scouring the tortured landscape and throwing almost red-hot rocks up in the air. To astronomers, Venus has come to stand for a vision of Hell.
Air pollution is also responsible for ozone depletion. High up in the atmosphere, there is a layer of gas called the ozone layer. This gas screens out the deadly ultraviolet rays of the sun and lets only safe sunlight through. If the ozone layer was to disappear, deadly UV radiation would flood the earth and kill all life on land as well as everything in the oceans down to a depth of five metres.
For a billion years, the ozone layer remained undisturbed, faithfully doing its job of protecting the life below. Then one day, humans started making refrigerators and spray cans and plastics. These activities release gases known as Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons, or CFCs for short. CFCs are not poisonous to breathe, and no one thought there would be any harm in releasing them into the atmosphere. But then, a hole was suddenly discovered in the ozone layer. Deadly UV radiation was getting through. It was soon found that CFCs were the culprit. These gases, it turned out, destroy ozone. Fortunately, the first hole in the ozone layer occurred over the Antarctic where there are very few living things. What might have happened if the ozone hole had appeared over London or New York or Tokyo hardly bears thinking about.
The discovery of the first ozone hole sparked much alarm, and there was talk of banning CFCs. However, due to public apathy and commercial interests, nothing was done. Ten years passed, during which CFC use continued to escalate. Then a second hole was discovered, this time over the Arctic. This was too close to the rich, densely populated countries of North America and Europe. For the next ten years, the problem was studied. Meanwhile, CFC use continued unabated, and both ozone holes were getting bigger. The situation was becoming desperate. Finally, a few community-spirited business people took the trouble to develop safe alternatives to CFCs. This meant that we could save the ozone layer without having to give up our spray cans or refrigerators. Disaster had been averted without making the Beast of Capitalism angry. It is now anticipated that, as the remaining stocks of CFCs are used up and the new ozone safe chemicals are phased in, the ozone layer will repair itself in another 50 years or so. Ozone depletion is one of the very few environmental hazards where humans have managed to act effectively. And the reason is that they found a way that did not offend Capitalist interests. Had not those safe alternatives to CFCs been developed, CFC use would probably continue unabated even now.
Water pollution is also on the increase. Once, all fresh water on earth was safe to drink. Now every big city must treat its drinking water before it is safe for consumption. In the poor countries, bad drinking water kills 25,000 people a day. Once beautiful rivers are loaded with industrial poisons, much of it dumped illegally. Waterways that used to teem with life are dead and stagnant. London's River Thames was at one time so filthy that no fish could live in it. Human excrement used to be part of nature's system. Now it is a deadly poison. Large amounts of it are dumped in lakes, causing explosive growth of algae that coat the water's surface with what looks like green paint. Deprived of oxygen, most fish and crustaceans die out, leaving only primitive anaerobic bacteria that produce foul gases.
The world's salt water has fared no better. Clots of oil and pellets of plastic can now be found floating all over the world's oceans. Vast amounts of industrial poisons have been dumped in the sea, and these poisons are now returning to haunt us in the form of poisoned fish, seals, and birds. Parts of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Caribbean are so dirty that they have turned brackish: that is, nothing can survive except a few hardy, pollution-resistant species. Swimmers in the Mediterranean are advised not to swallow the water, and shellfish caught there must be thoroughly cooked to kill the germs and viruses. Oil spills are another major cause of ocean pollution. Not all spills are accidental. Big oil tankers routinely wash out their tanks with seawater. And the biggest spill in history was deliberate; in January 1991, during the Gulf War, the Iraqis discharged 1,470,000 tonnes of oil into the sea.
Enormous quantities of waste are also disposed of underground. People think that when something is buried, it is never seen again. But that is not so. Soil and even solid rock has water flowing through it, and that water dissolves poisons and floats them to the surface. Or else the poison appears in nearby lakes and rivers, or it is pumped up with groundwater. Many former landfill areas are now so poisonous that humans cannot live on the land or grow food there. Entire suburbs have been evacuated and abandoned due to soil poisoned by industrial waste.
In short, whether we dispose of waste in the air, or in water, or underground, it inevitably comes back to poison us. Planet earth is a closed system comprising many intermingling circulatory rhythms that reach everywhere. All the world's air circulates, and so does all the world's water, including the deepest groundwater as well as the water in the deepest ocean trenches. Even solid rock has its own slow, ponderous rhythms. Nothing ever stands still. Every part of the earth moves round and round and is recycled and intermingled. There is no safe place to dump poisonous waste. Any poison dumped, no matter where, will be taken up by the earth's circulatory systems and carried round and round until it is evenly spread out everywhere in the world.
And human life is inescapably a part of these circulatory rhythms. Inside our bodies, blood circulates, carrying oxygen to our organs and removing carbon dioxide. That circulatory system is in contact with the earth's atmosphere via our lungs. And the atmosphere contains many circulatory rhythms of its own. It takes our carbon dioxide and carries it to plants, which absorb it and give oxygen back. Our bodies are also continually exchanging liquids with the environment. Every year, 3 trillion litres of the world's water flow through human bodies, entering in via the mouth, and seeping into every cell before exiting the body in the form of urine and perspiration. Enormous quantities of solids also pass through our intestines and intermingle with the solids that our bodies are made from.
Now, we would never dispose of industrial waste by injecting it into our own bloodstream. But when we throw waste into nature, this is like injecting it into our own blood, because sooner or later that waste will find its way into our blood. We cannot stop that happening, because we are inextricably part of nature's circulatory rhythms, whether we like it or not. As a result of past human foolishness, every human and animal on earth now eats and drinks and breathes weak poisons. There is not a single living thing anywhere on earth that does not have DDT, lead, cadmium, mercury, pesticides, and so on, in their bodies.
Humans did not realise how impossible it is to dispose of waste safely until they tried to dispose of nuclear waste, the most toxic substance of all. People have tried burying it underground, but it leached into the ground water and came back to us as we pumped up the groundwater, or it appeared in nearby lakes and streams. People have tried injecting nuclear waste at high pressure deep into the earth, but that did not stop it getting into the groundwater. In addition, caps sometimes blew off and the poison was sprayed over a wide area. Ocean dumping did not work; the nuclear waste came back to us in the fish we buy in the markets. People have talked about sealing nuclear waste inside gigantic glass or concrete blocks and storing them in disused mines or in deep caves. But this would only create toxic timebombs for future generations to worry about. The earth's circulatory rhythms reach into every place, even inside sealed glass blocks. Sooner or later, millions of deteriorating blocks would start releasing massive amounts of poison into the world. In addition, every time there is a landslide or an earthquake, people would have to worry in case some of those glass blocks are broken. The more depositories there are around the world, especially secret, illegal ones, the more serious this worry would be.
Sending nuclear waste into space in rockets is another possibility that has been considered. But this is very expensive, and in addition there is the danger that a rocket may fall back to earth and burn up in our atmosphere, spreading its toxic load all over the land.
In short, there is no safe way to dispose of waste. The only way not to poison the world is to not produce any poisons in the first place. Once poisons exist, we are unable to prevent them from spreading throughout the environment and coming back to us in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.
But industry lobbies intensively against every Government move to restrict the production of poisonous waste, or its use or disposal. Every dangerous chemical has an industry that fights tooth and nail for its continued use. When companies are accused of environmental irresponsibility, they have a number of tricks they resort to. They spend millions on advertising campaigns in which they portray themselves as motivated only by concern for humans and for the public good. They pretend that they are poor, innocent victims of evil, wellfinanced saboteurs whose aim is to destroy the economy and put people out of work. They also trivialise the issues, quibbling over minor details while refusing to acknowledge the validity of the important concerns.
And these tricks work. Public fears are calmed, and the production of toxic waste continues to escalate. Each year, the amount of poison dumped in the air, or in the oceans, or in rivers and lakes, or buried beneath the soil, is larger than the previous year.
Before civilisation, the earth was full of life. Every corner of the world housed its own prosperous community of living organisms. The tropical forests were especially rich with life. Although they cover only 7% of the land surface, they contain 50% of all living species. Coral reefs and wetlands are also high in so called "biodiversity"; that is, they provide a home for large numbers of species. But even the driest deserts, the coldest Antarctic wastes, and the deepest and darkest ocean floors were full of plants and animals that had learned to survive there.
Then civilised humans started interfering with the natural order. And as a result, species after species began going extinct. This is called "desertification" -- areas that once were full of life are reduced to sterile desert. Today, in our modern age, desertification is proceeding faster than ever. 200 acres of fertile soil is turned into desert, not every year or every hour, but every minute. A football field of forest vanishes every second. The world's deserts are growing at a rate of six million hectares a year. Our insatiable greed is destroying the life support system by which we exist. In Brazil, the largest rainforest in the world is rapidly disappearing beneath roads, ranches, dams, railways and mines. Tropical forests produce much of the world's oxygen. What will we breathe once those forests are gone? Timber companies do not care. A forest to them is "green gold", and cannot be cut down fast enough. Some companies claim that they replant everything they cut down. But that is not so. Only a very minuscule portion is replanted, usually in conspicuous places where the public can see it. More, these replanted forests lack biodiversity and genetic variability, and are unlikely to survive in the long term.
In addition to destroying forests, humans are also filling in wetlands, and coral reefs have been dynamited to kill fish, or drilled in search of oil. Animal abuse is an especially obnoxious facet of desertification. The higher animals have intelligence and emotions just like us, and ill-treating them is not unlike ill-treating humans themselves. Primitive humans did not abuse animals. They treated them with respect and reverence. But industrial humans have invented "factory farming" where millions of animals are shut into tiny cages where they never see sunshine or breathe clean air. Unnecessary body parts like tails or beaks are cut off in the interests of efficient production. Naturally, anaesthetics are too expensive to be bothered with. In scientific laboratories, meanwhile, thousands of animals are subject to cruel experiments, often for utterly trivial reasons such as finding out if some new cosmetic is safe for humans.
All in all, the earth's living species are going extinct at a rate of up to a thousand per year. This is much faster than nature can create new ones. Every ecosystem on earth is in decline. Humans, along with the pests and parasites and disease organisms that depend on humans, are the only exception. While all other species are moving towards extinction, humans are multiplying faster than ever. This is not a good situation for anyone, including humans themselves. Any ecosystem where one species is doing too well at the expense of all others is unbalanced, and leads only to destruction for all, including the species that thinks it is being successful.
An ecological collapse like this actually happened in miniature on the island of Laysan. Once, that island was teeming with unique lifeforms not found anywhere else in the world. Then someone introduced rabbits. Without their natural predators, these rabbits bred out of control, devouring every leaf and blade of grass, until in a few short years the whole island was reduced to desert with nothing but dead tree stumps and a few starving rabbits.
A similar process is now happening on a global scale, with humans and not rabbits as the agents of destruction. Already on TV we can see pictures from the poor countries, showing a denuded landscape with nothing but dead tree stumps and starving humans. Omnicide -- the death of everything -- would have seemed absurd only 30 years ago. Now it is a real possibility. Capitalism is an unnatural system that values things in an entirely inappropriate way. Only that which is made by human labour has value. The things that nature provides for free and in great abundance have no value as seen by Capitalists. Thus, a 50 cent yo-yo is worth more than all the world's fresh air and sunshine. Everybody can see how utterly absurd it is to value things in this way, yet we continue to live by an economic system that drives us to convert irreplaceable natural resources into trivial rubbish. Indeed, to call nature a resource is a mistake to begin with. Nature is more correctly likened to a capital investment that yields interest. If we live on the interest only and leave the capital alone, we can survive forever. But if we get greedy and start consuming our capital, we will not live long. Primitive humans saw nature correctly as capital, although they did not refer to it in those terms. They called nature a mother who provided all her children with what they needed to live, but whose body we must not consume. The Beast of Capitalism, however, has no respect for mother nature. It has organised modern humans and their machines into a greedy, brainless monster that, with an insatiable appetite, is consuming the mother that gave it life, and cannot stop until everything is gone and the earth is reduced to sterile desert. We humans have brains, and we can see what is happening, but we are helpless to stop the destruction. Capitalism prevents us from using our intelligence to control our fate. Powerful private interests prevent any planned interference with market forces, and we can only watch in horror as the monster economy we have made carries us to destruction.
We have looked briefly at the history of the Universe from the beginning until the present time. Now let us consider what may happen in the future.
Human society appears to be moving towards a global war between rich and poor people. The rich will try to hang on to what they have, while the poor will insist on a fair share of the world's wealth. And while humans are fighting each other over wealth, there is also the question of the environment. Will humans be able to stop destroying the earth's environment before it is too late, or will our insatiable greed mean the end for mother nature, and thereby also the end for ourselves?
Let us look at what the outcome of all these conflicts may be. Rich people, of course, are represented by the giant corporations, by the Beast of Capitalism. And the goal of the Beast is to attain ownership of the whole earth and turn the world's police forces into its own private army whose duty it is to protect the private property rights of the rich.
If the corporations succeed in all this, what will they do next? We said earlier that the corporations operate like criminals, like perfect sociopaths. And yet, every Beast has within it the seeds of a new Church. Let us suppose that the corporations do manage to gain totalitarian control over the whole world. They are then no longer criminals. No, they are society itself, and it would make no sense for them to continue to exploit and sabotage society. After all, they would only be exploiting and sabotaging themselves. Instead, the corporations will start looking after society. They will maintain law and order and promote public morality. In other words, they will change from a Beast to a Church. Indeed, if the corporations are as smart as we assume, then they will know about God and Salvation. And since they undoubtedly want Salvation, they will promote religious ideals. They will arrange the world into a totalitarian religious state, in which all citizens who do their part will be treated well.
But exactly how well will citizens be treated? Will we be cosseted and pampered in the same way as consumers in the rich nations are now, enjoying democratic freedom and unlimited supplies of consumer goods? No, we will not. Once the corporations have traded their way to total ownership of the world, they will no longer see any advantage to themselves in keeping the cycle of production and consumption spinning faster and faster. Therefore, the corporations will put an end to industrial abundance, and democracy will go out the window as well. The corporations will form a powerful Fascist World Government that forces environmental responsibility on humans whether they want to or not. Laws will be made to protect the environment from human greed, and ordinary people will have their private automobiles and videos and other environment-destroying luxuries taken away by force. They will find themselves living simple, Spartan lives in the country, working their farms by oldfashioned manual methods and baking bread in earth ovens. Probably, laws will also be made that limit the human population to within what the earth can comfortably sustain, and what is profitable for the corporations. Any humans in excess of the permitted number will be declared illegal, that is, having no right to exist, and hunted down and killed by police.
But while the corporations force environmental responsibility onto the rest of the human race, the ruling elite will of course be exempted. There will not be any luxury too expensive for them, nor any privilege too sinful. They and their descendants will live like Feudal lords on the taxes collected from ordinary people, who will in effect be reduced to the status of serfs. Held in bondage on their land, and without education or welfare, these serfs will soon revert to Mediaeval ignorance and superstition.
Once the corporations have consolidated their power on earth, they will probably do Salvation Research and build a Salvation Machine to carry the whole Universe to Heaven. The serfs will probably be taught some of the basic ideas of Salvation Science. They will be trained to believe that the corporations and their important executives and shareholders are God's representatives on earth, who out of love for humanity are working to bring about Salvation for everyone.
This may be the kind of future that the corporations will give us, if they have their way. But is it really the best way? The fact remains that, compared to mainstream human society, the corporations are the Beast. They are criminals, they are Satan's representatives on earth. Therefore, they cannot carry us to Heaven by the shortest and best route. No, instead, they will try to do so by a longer and more dangerous way. To carry out their plans, the corporations must first attain absolute and total ownership of the whole earth. But they do not have that yet. Therefore, for the next several decades at least, they will have to continue producing and selling consumer goods, so that by clever trading they can increase their ownership of the earth. This means that the war of private property, with its poverty and war and famine and environmental destruction, will continue for the foreseeable future. The world will become more and more polluted, oxygen levels will fall due to deforestation, and wars and epidemics and agricultural disasters will grow more frequent and more devastating. Sooner or later, nature may altogether lose its power to regenerate itself. When that happens, desertification will begin to proceed spontaneously and all by itself, without any need for further active participation by humans. As coal and oil run out, corporations desperate for energy will rush into nuclear power with no regard for the massive pollution this creates. Our last agricultural plants will fail us, and humans may resort to eating fungi and algae and yeasts, grown in industrial vats and fed on industrial waste.
Perhaps foolish humanity will still be talking about how wonderful industrial progress is, and how splendid our future will be under the benevolent guidance of the invisible hand of Capitalism. There will be grandiose plans to colonise the seas, or move the entire human race in giant spaceships to some new, unspoiled planet where we can start our industrial civilisation all over again. People will also dream about giant mirrors in space that reflect sunlight and create perpetual daylight all over the earth, and they will fantasise about using black holes as infinitely capacious garbage bins. Capitalism, they will say, will surely repair all the environmental damage as soon as market forces make recycling profitable. The earth will be restored to its former glory, and the corporations will transform the world into a Technological Paradise where all humans can live happily while working towards Salvation.
Meanwhile, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, namely War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death will continue to ravage the planet as corporations continue the struggle to make the whole world their private property. But the corporations may never get a chance to carry their plans to completion. The last remnants of higher life on earth may die out before then, leaving nothing but rats and cockroaches and primitive bacteria to survive amid the ruins of our fallen civilisation. And without humans, the corporations will of course die, since they only exist as creations in the human mind. Our Universe, preoccupied with the war of private property, will have missed its chance of Salvation, and will therefore go to Hell instead. A suitable epitaph over the passing world would probably be Schiller's immortal phrase, "Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain".
We have seen what may happen in the future if the corporations have their way. But what if ordinary humans decide to get together and destroy the corporations? As we said, this is easy to do. The corporations were created by law, and can be destroyed by a simple change in the law.
Suppose that humans did destroy the giant corporations, and that democracy survived, and ordinary people were free to decide their own future instead of having it forced on them by totalitarian Governments, what will they do? Having destroyed the corporations, will they also destroy private property and put an end to the Beast of Capitalism altogether? Perhaps not. Most people, even though they may disapprove of the giant corporations, still persist in the belief that civilisation is good, and that Capitalism will save us from evil. Most people today look forward to nothing more than a future of ever more lavish consumption on earth. These people are either ignorant of environmental problems, or else they have unbounded faith that our clever and benevolent scientists will find a way to solve every difficulty, so that humans need not put any limits on their greed at all. There are even so-called "exemptionalists" who think that God will intervene with a miracle and save the human race from the consequences of their own folly.
More sensible people, however, know that we cannot keep on increasing our consumption forever. According to the Greens, the rich nations must radically simplify their lifestyle, reducing their consumption to levels that our planet can sustain. The Greens would like a future where all humans live a simple and healthy lifestyle in the country, growing their own food and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. This is the same future that the corporations would also give us, except that, if we follow the Greens instead of the corporations, ordinary humans will themselves choose that lifestyle instead of having it forced on them from above.
And, having arranged society in this way, the Greens would probably then have us doing Salvation Research and building a Salvation Machine to carry the Universe to Heaven.
The problem with the Green vision of the future, however, is that the Greens want to retain private property and trading. All humans will still be each other's competitive enemies. The war of private property will rage on, which means that the environment that supports humans will never be safe from human greed. Sooner or later, new giant corporations will arise and start destroying the world all over again.
In Salvation Science, we believe that there is a much better alternative future than those promised by either the corporations or the Greens. The first step is to get rid of Capitalism and private property altogether, because these are evil and immoral things that do no good, and return to the primitive lifestyle which is the only way of life that God meant we should have. But we must preserve science and learning, because these things are good, and we will need them to achieve Salvation. In the world of the future, then, humans will live as primitive hunter-gatherers while at the same time doing scientific research for Salvation purposes. Since this new society combines a Paleolithic lifestyle with advanced science and technology, we shall call our new society the "Technolithic Society".
The idea of stone-age people doing scientific research may sound like a strange contradiction in terms. We are accustomed to believing that advanced science can only exist in a civilised setting, and that primitive society produces nothing but ignorance and superstition. But there is no reason why we cannot do advanced scientific research while living a simple live in nature. Special areas can be set aside where scientific experiments may be carried out. Many experiments can be done in the open air, but if any particular experiment needs protection from the weather, special houses can be built for that purpose. Of course, these houses will not be for humans to live in. No, humans will go naked or seminaked in nature, hunting and gathering food by day and sleeping at night either beneath the stars, or perhaps in simple overnight shelters built from sticks and leaves and grass. Any person can do Salvation Research when he feels so inclined, and when he gets hungry or thirsty, he can go home to the forest and hunt for his dinner. Today after work, our scientists go home to their houses to rest and eat. In the Technolithic society, they will go home to nature for the same purpose. There is nothing strange or contradictory about this. It is a perfectly simple and natural arrangement.
Conducting scientific research will mean, of course, that we will need electric power and metals and machines and test tubes and other scientific apparatus. Humans must therefore mine for coal and oil and iron, and they must build smelters and dispose of waste materials. In other words, we cannot completely avoid the evils of civilisation. However, the scale of these industrial activities will be very modest indeed when compared to what Capitalism is doing today. Technolithic industry will have hardly any impact on nature at all. Moreover, Technolithic industry will be for a truly worthwhile purpose, namely Salvation. This means that future generations will not curse Technolithic society for any environmental destruction that it may cause.
Let us now consider how we can get from our present society to a Technolithic society. Such a transition will constitute a major revolution, comparable to the Neolithic and the Industrial Revolutions. Indeed, some people may think of it as an impossible transition. "Only romantic fools", said Alvin Toffler(34), "babble about returning to a "state of nature"". However, it is those who think we can continue our present society that are the real deluded fools. Considering the war and pollution and overpopulation and other disasters of our present society, going back to nature seems like the only sane and sensible choice we have.
Now, if our present technological civilisation continues until it self-destructs, and if humans enter a Dark Age of barbarism, and then, let us say, discover this text and start doing Salvation Research while still living in nature, then we will have our Technolithic society. However, to hope that the Technolithic society will come about by chance is hardly the best way. So far in human history, humans have been largely ignorant of the forces that have shaped their societies and made them what they are. And being ignorant of these forces, we have let ourselves be ruled by them. But now it is time at last that humans took intelligent control over their fate, and consciously designed a better society instead of just waiting for it to happen by chance. Conscious, informed, intelligent design by all humans acting together is the only way to ensure that justice and love and morality are truly achieved. This is how our Technolithic Revolution will happen; not by war or violence, but by all humans getting together and using their intelligence to create a better world. History teaches that violence only breeds more violence and produces societies that are more harsh and repressive than their predecessors. Our Technolithic Revolution must therefore be carried out peacefully and intelligently, by all humans cooperating together in a spirit of equality and democracy. During the Technolithic Revolution, no person anywhere must be exposed to economic hardship, or even the threat of it. No, every human being must have absolute assurance that he will be fed and clothed and housed during the transition period. And when the return to nature is made, it must be done in a planned and orderly fashion. We must not let the forests become lawless havens for criminals, nor can we let people who are bored with society's moral restraints load up their four wheel drives with drugs and alcohol and go into the forest to indulge in debauchery and say that they are "going back to nature". No, the police must keep law and order in the jungle, just as they now do in the cities.
What if some people do not want to make the transition into nature, and prefer to continue in civilised sin? We do not want to force anyone to do what they do not want to do. And yet, in almost every facet of life, there are certain things that everybody must do for the public good. We cannot allow some people to continue our present industrial civilisation while the rest go back to nature. No, civilisation is an evil that must be totally destroyed for the greater good of the world.
The first step in our "back to nature" program should be to reverse the evil of desocialisation. We already saw how civilisation has created hate and enmity between humans. To repair that damage and resocialise the human race, we must begin by letting mothers carry their babies in their arms, and we must also allow 12 and 13 year olds to marry and have sex and raise a family. Another important facet of resocialisation is to eliminate the institution of private property, since private property is a major cause of envy and conflict between human beings. As a first step, perhaps we could make laws that guarantee each person in the world, whether he works or not, a basic income that is sufficient for the essentials of life. As we have seen, the world can afford such a basic income for all humans. There is enough wealth in the world so that, if it was fairly shared out, everybody could have a decent life.
The second step in our Technolithic Revolution is depopulation. At present there are nearly 6 billion humans in the world. This is far too many. Nature can only support perhaps 5 million of us. This means that, out of every 1,000 people now alive, 999 must go. But we do not have to resort to guns or poison gas. No, all we have to do is to control breeding. If every couple has only one child, we can reduce the population from 6 billion to 5 million in about 200 years. And once we have reached that target, we must make laws to keep the population at this level.
Population control is very unpopular in our society. And yet, we must do it. There was undoubtedly a time when murderers thought that laws against murder was an unjust infringement on their natural right to kill their fellow humans. But once murder had become illegal, public morals changed, and murder was no longer considered a natural human right, but a crime. Public morality has a tendency to follow the law. In our age, we can no longer afford to let people breed as they like. Population control is becoming a survival necessity, and there is no reason why people cannot learn to see overbreeding as a crime against society, and to regard those who have more than the allowed number of children as immoral beasts.
What is more, it is mainly economic and political insecurity that today causes people to have large families. Without insecurity, and with the help of contraceptives combined with enlightened and democratic Government policies, most couples will voluntarily agree to restrict themselves to only the allowed number of children. But what should we do if some couples go ahead and produce more than the allowed number? The irresponsible couple must be punished in some way to deter them and others from repeating the offense. In extreme cases, we may have to resort to forced sterilisation. And if the illegally born child causes the number of humans on earth to exceed the legally allowed limit, what then? Should we consider infanticide? No, all we have to do is to wait a little while. With five million humans on earth, someone will die on the average every seven minutes. And when that happens, the child's existence becomes legal.
Of course, the child should be taken from its biological parents, since those guilty of overbreeding should not be allowed to profit from their crime. Instead, the child should be adopted out to an infertile couple, or one who is willing to forgo the right to produce their own child. If no such couple can be found, it may be necessary to draw lots to select a couple at random, and force them to take on the illegally produced child. However, there should be no problem finding volunteers. In primitive society, parents were as happy to raise other people's children as their own. It is only we modern civilised humans who are horrified if a child is not raised by its genetic parents. We call such a child illegitimate and a bastard. But to primitive people, genetic ties were trivial and unimportant, and the only thing that really mattered was love between human beings.
Once the human race is resocialised and depopulated, we go to the third step in our "back to nature" program, namely re-education. We must rediscover the lost art of hunting and gathering, and we must get used to sleeping outdoors and eating only wild, natural foods. There are still a few primitive people left in the world today, and they will very likely be glad to teach us what they know.
Once we are re-educated, then we are ready at last to abandon our houses and our cars and forget about factory work and bills and supermarkets, and go out into nature and live there. Farm and zoo animals will either be set free or humanely killed. Power stations will be switched off, and roads and farms and parking lots given over to weeds. Cars will rust away in peace, and cities will stand empty and silent. We will take nothing civilised with us; no wristwatches or clothes or radios, and most certainly no guns or traps or poisons to help us catch food. No, we will have only simple tools of stone and wood and bits of bone. We are also permitted to use fire to cook our food, and if we live in cold climates, we can make clothing by hand from vegetable fibre or from animal skins. After all, in primitive times, the human species evolved a dependence on fire and clothing. Having no fur, we cannot withstand cold like other mammals, and our jaws are too small to chew our food raw.
When humans live in the only way that God intended, evils will vanish and many things will fall naturally and harmoniously into place. Civilisation is constantly tempting us into evil, pandering to our lowest appetites and corrupting and degrading us. But nature gives us only what is good and morally upbuilding, that is, healthy food, clean water, and fresh air, as well as freedom and love. More, nature provides all these good things free of charge and without requiring us to work and slave in offices and factories. Civilisation does not love humans. Supermarkets sell us food only in order to make money from us. But nature gives it to us for free because it truly loves us. And because nature truly loves us, it also teaches humans how to truly love each other. The saying "he who does not work shall not eat" is essentially selfish and inhuman. In a psychology of abundance, people will become truly generous and share all good things without asking who deserves it and who does not.
Life in nature's loving abundance can probably best be likened to a children's birthday party. Most parents are familiar with children's parties where the floor becomes littered with half-eaten food dropped by children who took one bite and then saw a more delectable item somewhere else. To people conditioned to scarcity, such waste is immoral and sinful. But in nature's abundance, life is one long children's party where we can almost literally do whatever we want, and nature will recycle all the waste and provide more without humans having to worry about it in the slightest.
And yet, humans will not become wasteful in any vulgar or destructive sense. No, in conditions of abundance and freedom, infinite greed will disappear, and people will act sensibly, taking only what they need and leaving the rest for others and for the future. No primitive person sees any point in killing ten rabbits for his dinner when he can only eat one.
All diseases of civilisation will vanish, and there will be little or no need for doctors and modern medicines. All we will need is some basic skill in bandaging wounds and setting broken bones. As for the rest, God made the human body a self-healing and self-maintaining system, and in a natural and healthy environment, those self-repairing mechanisms will maintain us in perfect health without us having to make any special effort.
And after our Technolithic humans have taken a generation or two to properly settle into nature, parents and grandparents may start telling their children stories about our current technological civilisation and all its evils. These children, brought up with nothing but perfect love and goodness, will probably be unable to understand what cruelty drove us to let 40,000 children starve to death every day. Nor will they comprehend the madness that possessed us to make weapons that could destroy the earth fifty or a hundred times over. They will feel pity and horror when they learn of our complicated, miserable, lonely lives, and they will see the whole era of civilisation as a terrible Dark Age when humans became slaves to evils that nearly destroyed the whole world.
Once humans have settled into nature, it is time to start working on Salvation. The first step is to teach children about Salvation Science. But in our Technolithic society, children will not go to school like they do today. No, our industrial school system, which reduces humans to industrial robots, will be done away with, and children will be educated in the only way that is good and natural and that fully develops them as human beings.
Education will begin in the womb. In the last month or two before birth, the unborn foetus has developed functional ears and eyes, and can start absorbing information. This is when he gets his first lesson in socialisation. Day and night, he senses the presence of human life all around him. He can feel his mother moving around, and he hears the sound of her heart beating, and human voices in the world outside. And so, when the child is born, he already knows something of what to expect. And if he is placed in his mother's arms and constantly carried by her as she carried him in her womb, he will not cry or fight or suffer stress. No, he will be perfectly calm and secure and happy. During the first years of life, he observes everything his mother does and learns from it. By the time he is ready to climb down and take his first steps on the ground, he will already know how to light a fire without getting burnt, how to handle a sharp knife, and how to do all the other tasks of everyday life. Civilised babies who spend most of their early years alone in a cot away from human activity learn nothing, and we civilised people have come to believe that children are naturally incompetent in basic tasks until age five or ten. In civilisation, so called "child geniuses" are rare. Mozart was able to compose music at age four, and we regard this as exceptional. But nature did not intend any animals to have infants that are incompetent in basic tasks for many years. A foal is able to stand up and run with the herd within hours of being born. In nature, competence at a very early age is perfectly normal.
Naturally, growing children will listen to adults discussing Salvation Science. From this, they will learn about God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and the war of good and evil. They will be conversant in abstract scientific concepts at a very early age. Civilised parents tend to feel that the real world is too harsh for young, tender minds, and so they create an imaginary fantasy world for their children, a world full of smurfs and fairies and talking frogs. We do this because we want to preserve the innocence of childhood a little longer and not let our young be corrupted by the evils of civilised life any sooner than absolutely necessary.
But in nature, there are no evils to protect young minds from. Children can therefore learn adult knowledge from the start. They are surrounded only by good influences, and will learn from their parents' example how to be good, loving human beings. There is no need for adults to design special lessons for the child. No, the child learns by simply listening to and watching and imitating adults. The adults can go about their normal daily activities without bothering overly much about the education of children. We civilised people tend to assume that learning is an unpleasant task that people must be forced to do. But that is not so. Every child has a natural hunger for knowledge. Our industrial schools destroy that hunger by forcing children into an inhuman discipline which robs them of their initiative. But if children are allowed to be directed in their learning by their own curiosity, learning will be both pleasurable as well as effective. Indeed, every child will be a genius. The psychologist Abraham Maslow investigated several historical geniuses, like Beethoven and Einstein, and found that they all shared certain personality traits. They are realistically oriented and accept themselves and others and the world as they are. They identify with humankind, have democratic values, and their relationships with others are deep and genuine, not superficial. They are problem-centered and not self-centered, and they do not confuse means and ends. They are also autonomous and independent, their perception is fresh instead of stereotyped, and they resist mindless conformity to cultural norms.
In all these traits, we can recognise the primitive human type, as opposed to the civilised type who has authoritarian values instead of democratic ones, who does not care about the human race and is self-centered instead of problem-centered, who cannot accept himself or the world as they are, who confuses means and ends, and who conforms blindly to stereotyped cultural norms.
In civilisation, geniuses tend to be very rare. Galton estimated that of all the humans that ever lived, only about 400 could be considered great geniuses. However, psychologists have more recently found that every single human being is a potential genius. We are all constantly imagining things. Our brain produces a neverending stream of ideas. But the civilised or authoritarian person suppresses his imagination, dismissing the whole stream of ideas as useless rubbish. And in doing that, he renders useless at least 90% of his brainpower, and so ends up behaving like the fools and morons that civilised people often are. Geniuses, however, are those who are not afraid to use their imagination. Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist, says that "what is unusual about the creative person is that he has easy access to his inner world, and does not repress it as much as most people". Buckminster Fuller said that "all humans are geniuses, some are less damaged than others". Albert Einstein, an undoubted genius, was dismissed as a "daydreamer" at school. His teacher believed that he would never amount to anything. Little did the teacher realise that by daydreaming, the young Einstein was actually training himself to be a great genius.
Psychological studies have been done to discover the environmental factors that promote the development of genius. In one study, several famous people were selected, including J S Mill, Leibniz, Goethe, Pascal, and Voltaire. Experienced IQ testers then used abundant biographical material to determine the childhood IQ of each genius. Each one was found to have an IQ between 170 and 190 -- exceptionally high, in other words.
Further biographical material also yielded the environmental factors that these great geniuses shared in common. These environmental factors were:
1 -- The parents were themselves highly learned, and gave their child abundant love plus an early and intensive education is adult knowledge, not child knowledge.
2 -- The genius child was isolated from the corrupting influences of other children his own age.
3 -- The child learned to enjoy creative thinking and developed a rich fantasy world in which his powers of imagination could grow freely.
Needless to say, all three environmental factors are absent in our current industrial schools. Imagination and independent thinking is discouraged as teachers demand conformity to the curriculum or pre-determined teaching plan. Contact with corrupting influences from other children is maximised, and indeed regarded by civilised people as healthy and necessary. And industrial schools also process children in groups of 30 or more where love and individual attention is minimal.
But in our Technolithic society, all three factors for producing geniuses will be present. Imagination and creative thinking will be allowed to flourish freely, there will be no corruptive influences, and all adults will be highly learned themselves and give their children abundant love plus early and intensive instruction in adult knowledge.
In civilisation, because geniuses are rare, they end up as misfits and social outcasts. Some geniuses pretend to be stupid in order to be more popular, while others pass their lives in a loneliness which grows worse with age. But in nature, every genius will be accepted just as he is, and none will be made to feel rejected or different. Instead it is the civilised type, with his aggressiveness, selfishness, and narrowmindedness, that will, quite deservedly, find himself a social outcast.
The Bible tells us that to develop wisdom, we must live a life of leisure. Modern research has found that economic necessity is a major obstacle to creative thinking. Many potential Picassos or Michelangelos are languishing in dull jobs that drain all their energy and prevent them from realising their full potential. But in nature, there is no economic necessity, and everybody will have ample leisure to pursue their creative activities.
And so, our Technolithic Society will be composed of nothing but great geniuses. We could hardly wish for better prerequisites for Salvation research. And yet, we already saw that prior to civilisation, humans lived in nature for two million years, and during that whole time, they never developed Salvation Science, or any other real learning either. If we now get rid of civilisation and return to nature, is there a chance that humans will again find life so pleasant that they will lapse back into intellectual complacency and not bother to pursue any further learning?
No, we hope not. In our Technolithic society, people will have had the experience of civilisation and all its evils. They will have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and will no longer be like innocent babes. Prior to civilisation, humans thought that this Universe was permanent and would last forever. But the people of our Technolithic Society will be aware that the Universe is headed for destruction. They will be "like gods" with a job to do, namely to defeat evil before evil destroys them. We believe that this awareness will stimulate the natural genius in every person and make them do Salvation Research.
In nature, animals have no law except for the natural moral code built into their hearts by God. But in our Technolithic Society, we cannot let humans go back to natural lawlessness. No, we must have laws and Government. But small regional Governments are not enough. These only produce conflicts and leave a power vacuum that invites tyrants to fill it. For this reason, our Technolithic society will have to be governed by a single, all powerful World Government.
And yet, humans can only live together lovingly in small groups where everybody knows everybody else since birth. Therefore we must organise humans into small tribal groups or extended families, exactly as was the case in primitive times. Then each group must elect a leader, and these leaders should then get together in groups of their own, in which every member knows and loves the other members. Then each of these groups will again elect a leader, and so on. This will give us a pyramidal hierarchical structure, at the top of which is a group of leaders of the highest rank that will rule the whole world.
How can we prevent these leaders from becoming corrupt? For a start, there will be no money or private property in our Technolithic society. Every person, from the highest leader to the lowest commoner, will own the whole world and live exactly the same lifestyle. There will be no material privileges reserved for leaders. In such conditions, there can be no corruption because there is nothing to be gained by corruption.
What is more, the Government will be made up of the best humans in the world. In our present civilised society, leaders are often those who have the most wealth and are the most skillful at manipulating voters. But in the Technolithic society, every leader will be elected by people who know him intimately. In such conditions, it will be very difficult for anyone to be elected on false pretenses. Psychologists have found that, when a group of people know each other well, the person most likely to be elected leader is not the one who makes the biggest promises, or tells the best jokes, but the one who is perceived by the others to be the most competent in survival tasks and to have the best grasp on reality.
In our civilised society, Governments routinely keep secrets from the public. But in our Technolithic society, there will be no Government secrets, no information of military or security value. No, all information without exception will be freely available to every man, woman, and child. In addition, unlike civilised humans, every individual in our Technolithic society will be intellectually capable of coping with Government information. There will be no reason, therefore, to keep information secret from the public "for their own good".
In civilised nations today, democracy usually works by allowing people to vote every three or four years for candidates or parties, and once in power, these candidates or parties do more or less what they want. This is not true democracy. In ancient Greece, where democracy began, every citizen voted directly on every Government decision, and the role of Government was simply to carry out the decisions made by the people. This is the kind of democracy that we will have in our Technolithic society. The leaders will not make decisions on behalf of the people. No, every decision, no matter how trivial, will be decided by a popular vote that will include every person on earth, and the role of the leaders will be only to implement that decision.
Naturally, the right to vote carries with it the responsibility to be properly informed and to make an intelligent and properly considered vote. To vote stupidly or to ignore relevant facts should be considered an act of vandalism against society. How can we prevent stupid voting? Perhaps by requiring people to vote not with a simple yes or no, but by writing an essay that explains the reasons behind their vote. This essay can be as long or as short as people like, and it can express any viewpoint whatsoever. But if it is based on inaccurate facts, or makes no logical sense, it will be counted as invalid. There will be no age qualifications for voting. The only qualification is intellectual. A two year old is as free to vote as any adult, but he must expect that his vote will be judged by the same adult standard as everybody else's.
Any person will also be free to nominate any issue he thinks is important enough to vote on. And when enough nominations have been received on any issue, the Government will then see to it that this issue is voted on.
Let us try to guess what kind of laws and policies people are likely to vote for. Hopefully they will retain democracy, and maintain the five million upper limit on the population. Most likely they will also make laws against murder and rape and violence and other obvious crimes, as well as laws that forbid anyone to enjoy special privileges not shared by everybody else. Wives will not be in any way the property of their husbands, nor children of their parents, or ordinary people of their leaders. All humans, of whatever age or sex or race, will have exactly equal status before the law. And indeed, since Salvation Science is not anthropocentric, we hope that all non-human processes will be granted equal status as well. Stones and trees and insects will enjoy the same protection under the law as humans do, and they will have the same rights and responsibilities, according to the nature of each process and its place in the order of nature.
Perhaps the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will become law in our Technolithic Society. Of course, some amendments will be necessary. The right to privacy and nationality are irrelevant, and the right to own private property is contrary to our ideals. Then there are some rights that the Universal Declaration fails to mention, such as the right to hunt and forage for a living anywhere on earth, provided that appropriate natural hunting and gathering techniques are used, and the environment as well as the territorial wishes of the local inhabitants are respected.
Now let us see how all these laws are to be enforced. We will need a police force to investigate breaches of the law and apprehend suspects. This police force will use the best forensic science, together with the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, to determine who is guilty and of what. This arrangement is slightly different from our present system. Now, the police only gathers evidence and apprehends suspects. Then it is up to a judge or a jury to evaluate the evidence and decide who is guilty or innocent. And when we decide that, we use the so-called "adversarial" system. That is, we have one lawyer for the defense and another for the prosecution, and out of the "war" between these two lawyers, the truth is supposed to emerge. However, the adversarial system has drawbacks. Introducing competition into truth-finding tends at times to obscure the truth, and the winner is often he who has the better debating skills. In Salvation Science, we prefer the so-called "inquisitorial" system, where there is no competition, and everybody simply work together to find the most likely truth. Nor is there any reason why this must be done in a court. A special branch of the police can do it. Then the police writes up a report which explains the details of the crime, lists the evidence, and identifies those who have been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
When that is done, it is then time to sentence the guilty to some punishment, and compensate the injured. How do we do that? At present, victims of crime are usually ignored and left to repair their lives as best they can, while the guilty are sentenced by judges whom they have never met before and who do not know the person they are sentencing. But in our Technolithic society, the judge will be the leader of the tribal group that the guilty person belongs to. In this way, the judge will personally know and love the offender, and be in the best position to ensure that any punishment is appropriate to the person. Also, since the judge and the offender live in the same tribe, the judge can check on an ongoing basis that any punishment he hands out is effective.
What kind of punishments should there be? In a society without private property or work, we cannot fine anyone, or sentence them to a period of hard labour. And imprisonment is hardly feasible, nor particularly desirable. In primitive communities, punishments usually consisted in the offender being ostracised. That is, his tribe treated him coldly and refused to talk to him until he changed his ways. This kind of punishment seems appropriate for our Technolithic Society.
Some primitive tribes also punished offenders by torture and mutilation, or even death. In our Technolithic Society, we would prefer not to have these kinds of punishments at all, or if they turn out to be unavoidable, to use them only in extreme cases.
How should we determine the amount of punishment a person should receive? Well, the Bible preaches what is known as "retributive" justice. This is the principle of revenge, as expressed in the saying "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth". He who stole a cow was punished by having one of his own cows taken away from him, while a murderer was punished by death, and so on.
In modern times, however, we have moved away from retributive justice and are practicing the deterrence principle instead. A punishment need only be sufficient to discourage a repetition of the offense. If a small punishment is enough to make the offender behave himself, then it is cruel and unnecessary to inflict a large punishment.
In our Technolithic society, however, we shall opt for a third kind of justice, namely "reconciliatory" justice. The idea is to restore love between the criminal and the victim. The criminal must repent of his evil deed and ask forgiveness, whereupon the victim, at his own discretion and without being coerced, forgives the criminal. This is how questions of justice are settled between brothers and sisters under the loving supervision of their parents. Retributive and deterrent justice go only part of the way. But reconciliatory justice achieves the final goal that justice is supposed to achieve, namely to repair the love that was damaged by the crime. Experiments have been done already with reconciliatory justice, and the results seem promising. The criminal and the victim are brought together under the watchful eyes of responsible and caring people, and are given the opportunity to get to know each other. When the criminal can see directly the human suffering he caused by his crime, he usually becomes genuinely remorseful, and the victim, seeing that the criminal is not an evil demon after all, but a human being with ordinary feelings, often forgives him.
We have looked briefly at some of the functions that our World Government must carry out. Now, to be able to carry out these functions properly, the Government will need some kind of global communications system. But we cannot allow humans to travel by car or airplane, and travel by foot is too slow.
Instead, we shall let each person have his own personal computer, and each computer is linked to a worldwide electronic communications system, somewhat like the Internet of our own time. Via this system, every person can communicate at will with any other person anywhere in the world. A central computer can keep the whole system organised, and also serve as a store of information that everybody can access or add to. In elections, the central computer can analyse votes and announce the result to the world.
The idea of everyone carrying a personal computer may sound cumbersome, but it need not be. Ever since computers were first invented, they have been made progressively smaller and cheaper and more powerful. Scientists speculate that one day it may be possible to make computers the size of a pea that have the power of a thousand Cray Supercomputers. They will be so easy to manufacture, and require so little energy, that the world can have almost unlimited computing power at a very small cost to the environment. These pea-sized computers can perhaps be installed into the brain of every person at birth, where they interface directly with brain cells. Naturally, these computers will not be used for any kind of totalitarian mind control. No, each person is completely in charge of his computer, and can switch it off whenever he wants to. But if he chooses to keep it on, he will have at his disposal an extremely powerful aid to his thinking processes. The computer can perform routine calculations and organise data, and also provide instant access to a vast library of information on every topic under the sun.
Today's computers use a keyboard or a mouse which are operated manually. But the computers in our Technolithic society will be operated directly by the mind. We merely have to think a command, and the computer obeys.
Also, today's computers use a monitor or TV screen on which data is displayed. But our Technolithic computers will display data directly in the mind of the user. These "mind monitors" need not be restricted to a two dimensional screen. No, they can create an entire three dimensional world in our minds, in which we can mentally move around and look at things. Nor is there any reason why the computers must be restricted to the visual sense only. Sound and smell and taste and touch can be added. We can visit an art gallery in our minds, or partake in the discovery of the lost tomb of Tutanchamon, all with stunning virtual reality effects. This will be an important aid in the education of children. Naturally, we can instruct our computers to maintain a small screen in the corner of our eye so that, while we are away on our mind-adventure, we can keep an eye on the real world as well.
If our computer can transmit information to our senses, then of course it can receive information from our senses as well. We can transmit all our thoughts and feelings to any person in the world, and literally enter into the mind of other people -- with their permission, of course -- and know what it is like to be them. The dream of telepathy will be realised. The human race will be united in a single racial consciousness. This will help build love and friendship all over the world, and also ensure that every person on earth can personally know and trust those who run the World Government.
We can thus imagine the people of our Technolithic Society devoting something like two hours per day to a pleasant stroll in nature while searching for food, and the rest of their time they can spend however they want. They can converse with friends, or play games, or sit under a tree or on top of a mountain, enjoying the peace of nature while in their minds they are playing chess with someone ten thousand kilometres away. Or they can watch a movie, or even create one themselves by simply instructing their computer to record the products of their imagination. Or they can study scientific or philosophical problems or contemplate the mysteries of the Universe. And this is how they will spend every day of their lives. There will be no unpleasant chores that must be done, no factories or bosses or timetables to obey. Every person will enjoy the greatest possible earthly happiness while striving to attain the only happiness that is greater still, namely Heavenly happiness.
The people of our Technolithic Society will establish a Salvation Research Institute, where scientific research is done to find the way to Heaven. Any person can contribute if he so wishes. But no wages are paid. People will do Salvation Research simply because they want to do it. Some of the physical work involved may be done by hand, but there is no need for people to do boring and repetitive tasks or handle industrial poisons. Automated robots, controlled from a distance by human minds, can do these things.
And so, we might imagine our Salvation Research Institute as a kind of industrial town populated by robots. Humans may enter if they wish, but their task is mainly to supervise, to design, and to control operations from a distance, while robots do the actual work.
We said earlier that the aim of Salvation Research is to build a "Salvation Machine" that can penetrate outside space and time and make contact with God. But now we must amend that. The human task is not to actually build a Salvation Machine, but rather to create a new lifeform, superior to ourselves, that can build a Salvation Machine. And what is this new and superior lifeform? It is machine life. Machines, once made into a lifeform capable of growth and reproduction, are much better able to do Salvation Research than humans are. Machines are stronger, faster, more intelligent, more durable, and more adaptable. They can evolve by intelligent design instead of by genetic mutation. Machine parents will not have to wait for the slow, haphazard process of organic evolution to improve their offspring. No, they can design their offspring to suit any intended environment. Machine life will be able to thrive in places where humans cannot go. They can explore the earth's interior and travel to the distant ends of the galaxy.
Why are machines more suited to Salvation Research than humans? Because building a Salvation Machine involves research into basic science, which probably involves giant particle accelerators and powerful radiation and other dangerous, high-energy phenomena. And planet earth, with its small and fragile ecosystem, is no place for such things. These dangerous experiments are better done in space where there is unlimited room, absolute zero temperature, and lots of hard vacuum. Only machine life, adapted to live in space, can properly do this kind of experimentation. With literally the whole Universe as their laboratory, machine life can tap the energy of a thousand suns and experiment with black holes and super-powerful magnetic fields, and so make much better progress in Salvation Research than humans can do with the puny resources of planet earth.
Human technology is even today moving in the direction of machine life. Computer scientists are nowadays experimenting with robots and with artificial intelligence. This kind of technology fits in quite well with the earth's limited resources, since electronic circuits are small and need relatively little energy. It seems only natural, then, to continue this process. Indeed, many scientists today believe that machine life is the natural and inevitable next step of evolution. "The era of carbon-chemistry life is drawing to a close on earth", said Robert Jastrow(35), "and a new era of silicon-based life -- indestructible, immortal, infinitely expandable -- is beginning".
Ordinary people often regard the idea of machine life with horror. We imagine a horde of Frankenstein's monsters plotting to kill all humans and take over the world. But this fear is only the result of ignorance. Machine life is not evil. On the contrary, it will have to survive under the same moral laws as any other process, and therefore, machine life will have an essentially human personality, complete with the same love and hate and fear and trust as we have. Machines will live by the Golden Rule, doing unto others as they want others to do to them. Indeed, since machines will be much better adjusted to reality than humans, especially civilised humans, they will be more virtuous than we are. J. Doyne Farmer spoke(36) of "glorious, enlightened creatures that far surpass us in their intelligence and wisdom". He added that "artificial life is potentially the most beautiful creation of humanity". Machine life will be our child, and we their parents. We should love and nurture and protect them, and they will trust and revere us in return. Already there are car enthusiasts and electronics hobbyists who love and care for the machines they create. Humans can quite easily identify with machines. One psychologist, Sherry Turkle, found that whereas many adults nowadays see themselves as "intelligent animals", computer-literate children see themselves as "emotional machines". Masahiro Mori, a Japanese robotics expert, wrote in his book "The Buddha In The Robot", that "man achieves dignity by recognising in machines and robots the same Buddha nature that pervades his inner self".
And so, when one process has finished its task in the great cosmic scheme of things, it should retire gracefully from the scene and let the next process take over. If humans try to cling to centre-stage after they are obsolete, the result may well be a war between humans and machines. Such a war benefits no one except Satan. But we hope that the people of our Technolithic society will be wiser than the average civilised person today. Fear and hate of machines is just as evil as racism or xenophobia or homophobia. All such forms of ignorance make us less than animals, because animals do the will of God, whereas racists and xenophobics are followers of Satan. Instead of trying to destroy machines, humans should do everything to help them. And when we do, we ultimately also help ourselves. After all, we will maximise our own chances of Salvation.
Let us suppose that machine life is the next step in the evolution of the Universe. Will machine life create a dirty, smokefilled and noisy world like that of early industrial England? No, machine life will not be that dirty and inefficient. On the contrary, it will be as clean and pure as a dew-drop sparkling in a ray of sunlight. Every atom will be used to the best possible advantage. Machine life will be sub-microscopic. It will use single atoms to construct tiny molecular cogwheels, crankshafts, pistons, cylinders, and levers. These tiny machine elements will be assembled into tiny robots, equipped with molecular computers for brains. A robot the size of a bacterium will have the intelligence of a human being. And these tiny robots can then take any atoms they find in their surroundings and assemble them into more tiny robots. Given the great speed at which everything happens at the molecular level, machines will probably reproduce at lightning speed, converting a mountain of earth and stone into tiny robots in a matter of minutes. As soon as the first molecular robots have been released from the laboratory, the whole earth will in a few hours have been changed into a mass of molecular robots. These robots may then send out tiny spores into space, each spore containing a robot. And whenever one of these spores land on a planet or an asteroid, or even a speck of dust, that planet or speck of dust will be converted into more robots. Soon the whole Universe, or as much of it as the laws of Thermodynamics will allow, will be changed into a great mass of molecular robots.
Once that is done, the robots will then organise themselves into a moral society, a community cemented together with love and intelligent cooperation for the common good. Matter will then have attained the highest possible level of organisation. It will no longer be simple clod. No, it will consist in pure intelligence. It will be, quite literally, thinking matter, or as we shall call it, "Intelmatter".
Intelmatter will have astonishing powers. Let us suppose that we are Captain Kirk and Mr Spock in Star Trek, and that we have just beamed down on a planet made of such Intelmatter. As soon as we land, Intelmatter will send tiny robots into our bodies to map and explore every atom inside us. The information will then be transmitted to the robots waiting outside. All this will be done in a few seconds, and we will not even be aware of it. Before we knew what was happening, the Intelmatter planet will be literally reading our minds, knowing every thought and feeling inside us.
Now, human acrobats in circuses are able to climb on top of each other's shoulders and form pyramids and other structures. Our tiny robots can do the same, but on a much grander scale. Let us say that Captain Kirk happened to think of, let us say, Michelangelo's sculpture, "David". The tiny robots would know what he was thinking, and instantly form themselves into a replica of that sculpture. Captain Kirk would see the Intelmatter literally flow and change shape before his eyes like magic, responding to every thought in his mind and assuming any shape he thought of. Intelmatter could arrange itself into food that he could eat, or water he could swim in, or a living replica of his family and friends back home. If it so choose, Intelmatter could make our every dream and fantasy come true before our eyes. Or alternatively, it could terrify us with our own worst nightmares. Then again, Intelmatter might choose to appear before us like a wise old man and share its wisdom with us.
However, most probably Intelmatter would not bother to do any of the above things. We humans would be indistinguishable from simple clod in its eyes. The instant we landed, our bodies would be taken apart into separate atoms and converted into Intelmatter, along with our spaceship and our clothes and everything else. It would be over in mere seconds, and we would be powerless to stop it. The hardest metals cannot resist Intelmatter, nor any weapons we could possibly think of. The molecular robots would be too tiny, too numerous, too fast, too clever, and too well organised.
Intelmatter seems the next locigal step in the process of evolution. Scientists tell us that, in the past, the Universe has gone through many different stages of evolution. From Primordial Chaos, it passed on to the Quark era, then a Hadron and a Lepton era, followed by a Radiation era, and finally a Matter era, which is the era we are now in. This Matter era will be followed by an Intelmatter era, in which the saying "mind over matter" will literally be true, since all matter will be mind.
But at the same time as the Universe evolves Intelmatter, Satan will also be busy. The world will arrive at an important juncture where Evolution and Antievolution, Christ and Antichrist, meet each other in a final showdown to wage war for possession of the Universe. Intelmatter, once created, will have only a limited time to find the way towards Salvation before the two evil processes, entropy and gravitational collapse, destroy the whole Universe and end all our chances of ever attaining Salvation.
Intelmatter must therefore waste no time in building a Salvation Machine that can reach outside time and space and make contact with God. But material processes cannot survive outside of space and time. The Bible says that we brought nothing into this Universe, and we cannot take anything out. We must therefore send some kind of non-material messenger. In the Bible, this non-material messenger is Jesus Christ. In Salvation Science, it is Evolution, or a non-material form of it. Material processes will have to wait outside the door of God's realm, while a non-material chain of Cause and Effect proceeds inside and offers to God our prayer for Salvation.
We might imagine, then, that Intelmatter will construct some kind of machine that can "push" against the barrier of space and time, rather like a person inside a sack can push against the wall of that sack. These pushes are then transmitted to whatever reality lies outside our Universe. The sequence of pushes can be designed in such a way that whatever non-material substances are there will assemble themselves into a non-material, or spiritual, replica of the Salvation Machine. Then this spiritual Salvation Machine will approach God, carrying with it the gift of intelligence plus our prayer for Salvation. And when God has received the gift of intelligence, He will hopefully hear our prayer and respond to it. Then the material processes waiting in this Universe will experience what theologians refer to as a "Rapture" -- they will suddenly find themselves carried to Heaven by the miraculous power of God (I Thessalonians 4:17).
The Bible tells us that the Rapture comes unexpectedly, "as a thief in the night". Since God exists in a timeless realm, there may not necessarily be any temporal relationship between when the Salvation Machine is sent outside space and time, and when God comes back with Salvation. Salvation may come immediately after the Salvation Machine reaches God, or perhaps a million years later, or perhaps not until after our Universe has been destroyed. It is impossible to say.
Some impatient people may ask if there is a shortcut to Heaven. Must we really bother with the Technolithic Society and Intelmatter and all those other stages of Evolution? Could we not get all the world's scientists together now, and while the world is being destroyed by nuclear war and environmental chaos, get those scientists to work frantically on building a Salvation Machine? By this, we could bypass Evolution and go directly from organic life to God.
Perhaps so. And yet, there is nothing to be gained by undue haste. It is better to make our attempt at Salvation with as much careful intelligent planning as we can. If we try some desperate shortcut, we diminish our chances of getting to Heaven at all. If we fail, we may not get another chance before evil destroys us. For now, we still have plenty of time to make our Salvation attempt the best possible. This means that we should go through all those stages of Evolution that we mentioned -- the Technolithic Society, Machine Life, and the Intelmatter Universe.
Of course, scientists tell us that we humans may not be the only intelligent life-form in the Universe. There are something like ten thousand billion billion other planets besides the earth, and chances are that billions of these planets are suitable for life. Of course, not all of them may actually develop life, and even if they do, they may not develop intelligent life capable of science and technology. And even if an intelligent life-form does evolve and develop science, it may still commit suicide by nuclear war or environmental destruction before creating machine life. Here on earth, we humans are coming dangerously close to both of these kinds of suicide.
Still, taking all these factors into account, it is likely that millions of intelligent life-forms throughout the Universe will make attempts at Salvation. Therefore, even if we humans fail, someone else may succeed, and we will go to Heaven after all. Indeed, a Salvation Machine may already have been constructed elsewhere in the Universe and sent off on its mission to God. Salvation may be on its way to us even now. Rapture could strike at any moment. Or again, a spore of Intelmatter, produced millions of lightyears away by another life-form, may at any moment drift down on the earth and start converting our planet into Intelmatter. All these possibilities could happen.
On the other hand, it is also possible that we humans are the only intelligent life-form in the Universe, and if we destroy ourselves, there may not be anyone else to make a Salvation attempt. Scientists have tried to make contact with other intelligent life-forms in space. Radio messages have been sent out, and the skies are continually being monitored for incoming signals. So far, no evidence of intelligent life in space has been found. Of course, there are many people who claim to have seen UFOs, but none of these reported sightings has been reliably verified. As far as science is aware, the Universe appears completely empty and deserted. Are we humans really the only intelligent life-form in existence? Or could it be, as some science fiction writers suggest, that there are indeed aliens in space, and that these aliens are watching us, but refusing to make contact until we learn to be less aggressive and war-like, and develop some wisdom and maturity? Or could it be that the aliens are not bothering to develop space travel or respond to our radio signals, because they prefer to stay at home and use the limited resources of their planets for Salvation Research instead?
Anything is possible. And yet, it would be foolish of us humans to wait with bated breath for someone else to bring about Salvation for us. Instead, we should assume that we are the only intelligent lifeform in the Universe, and on that assumption, we should get on with the work of doing Salvation Research without wasting any more time on war and conflict and other unimportant things.
And what happens after Salvation has been achieved, and we find ourselves in Heaven? Will we sit back and enjoy our immortal happiness in all eternity, or will we do something else that we cannot now imagine? Will the concept of a purpose in life be obsolete? Or will there be new and still higher purposes to strive for? Perhaps we will be like Gods, creating new Universes of our own. Maybe we will find ourselves in some kind of Super-Universe, composed of many other Salvation Universes; a great community of intelligent Gods? With imaginations limited by the parameters of our current earthly existence, it is impossible to say.
Every person has heard of the so-called Seven Wonders of the world -- the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and other architectural wonders of the ancient world. But in Salvation Science, we shall propose a new order of Wonders, ten in all, which mark the important stages in the war of good and evil.
The first Wonder is God, Who created the Universe and all things in it.
The second Wonder is the Universe that God made.
The third Wonder is Organic Life, the most highly evolved of all processes currently in existence.
The fourth Wonder in Intelligence, the most powerful survival tool yet developed by Organic Life.
And the fifth Wonder is Technology, the highest product of Intelligence.
The above five Wonders describe the evolution of the Universe from the beginning until now. God made the Universe, which made Organic Life, which made Intelligence, which made Technology.
Now, in the computer, or "thinking machine", Technology has become like its creator, Intelligence. Technology has become Intelligent Technology. This is our sixth Wonder.
Intelligent Technology will then strive towards equality with its creator, Organic Life, and become Intelligent Technological Life, or as we called it, Intelmatter. This is Wonder number seven.
Once Intelligent Technological Life exists, it will climb up to the next level and attain equality with its creator, the Universe. This will give us an Intelligent Technological Living Universe, which is our Wonder number eight.
The ninth Wonder is when the Intelligent Technological Living Universe strives for equality with its creator, God, and gives us an Intelligent Technological Living Universal God.
And this God will then create the Salvation Universe, which is the tenth and the greatest Wonder of all.
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