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Most people lack the basic education in arithmetic, geography and logistics to judge whether they are overpopulated, to compare population densities between regions, to factor in import and export, and, most importantly, to understand how waste-disposal requires natural 'services' or to understand that they are themselves, microbiologically, a part of nature, but that each one of us now is extended into a kind of per capita earth moving and processing factory for creating dead stuff. This article evolved from a response to a quora question and appears in its original form here: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cause-of-illiteracy-on-overpopulation/answer/Astrid-Nova]

The importance of different land-tenure systems which do or do not promote growth lobbies

My research tells me that illiteracy on overpopulation is mainly due to the fact that the financial beneficiaries of overpopulation also control the mainstream/corporate press, which constantly tells people that population growth causes economic growth and that the problem is not ‘overpopulation’ but ‘lack of infrastructure’. This cause of illiteracy is most prevalent in the Anglosphere where the system does not penalise land-speculation and does not see population growth as a cost to the state, but as a way of profiting in the private sector - notably in the property development and upstream and downstream industries, including land-sales, mining for materials, construction materials sales, development and construction finance, real-estate, housing construction and sales, furnishing etc.

Non-Anglosphere systems (typically Roman Law ones with Napoleonic Civil Codes in continental Europe) tend to penalise this kind of ‘growth’ (really wealth transfer) because it represents a cost to the state, because there the state subsidises finance for and carries out most land development and construction, keeping prices relatively low in a smaller private sector. Therefore, in those Roman Law systems, you don’t have much of a ‘growth lobby’ because there is a lack of focused beneficiaries. In the 2008 financial crash, for instance, France suddenly got a big debt because its banks invested in the US subprime system, which did not exist in France itself due to the nature of France’s property development and housing system.

In the Anglosphere settler states with strong property development growth lobbies and mass immigration, the government members, public servants and the opposition members and political parties, tend themselves to have accumulated huge land-banks and property finance interests. Usually these are concealed in shell companies that donate to an intermediary company that donates to the political party. These beneficiaries of the growth lobby make laws to promote their investment interests. Corporations also invest in the property development and population growth lobby. The corporate press has property dot coms, so they promote these private interests and constantly tell the public that population growth is a great thing for the economy. Public broadcasting also promotes this. Although observant people can tell that the cost of living is going up all the time and that mortgages are out of reach for many wage earners and nature is being paved over, it is hard for those of us who pay for this population growth, rather than profiting from it, to organise. That is because the propaganda is so effective that people simply look away from the obvious, having been told that that is not the problem.

Education and information fail to provide necessary skills for charity or politicians to judge what is happening

Most people have come to accept the idea that population grows out of control everywhere because this has been taught to them at school, in the media, by churches, and by demographers, who are not really population theory experts, but just accept the numbers and calculate on trends. The growth lobby beneficiaries are so wealthy and organised that they are able to place people on charity and welfare boards and on public broadcasting boards and behave as if they are doing a charitable act by offering advice to invest in property and not to criticise high immigration.

My references are Sheila Newman: The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, Swinburne University, Australia or academia.edu. Also Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations Countershock Press, and, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-Tenure and the Rise of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press.

Doubling times

Another reason that people cannot make sense of what is happening is that they cannot understand population sizes or population doublings arithmetically. See Albert Bartlett videos or find online a doubling rate calculator. This is a deficiency of the education and information system.

Population density and environment

People also tend to fall for questionable comparisons between population densities in places with radically different environments, such as comparing the low population density per sq km of Australia with the high density per sq km of Holland. This kind of comparison ignores differences in land fertility, climate and terrain, such as the fact that Australia is quite densely settled in the fertile parts but that 35% is hot, sandy, salty desert and another 30% is arid range land.

Food production logistics

People also are not taught to look at the logistics of food production: They would otherwise factor in the role of importation of food and materials from colonies or poor countries, which can make a big population viable in a small tertiary economy with little land. This problem is well-modeled in the Ecological Footprint diagram which you could find by search-engining the term.

Dangerous ignorance: Waste processing logistics and addiction

The logistics of waste remain inaccessible to governments, business and citizens, to our peril: A large proportion of the world has to be left for food and materials production; you cannot cover this with cities. There are two very important arguments for preserving a very large part of the world for biodiverse nature, both quality and quantity.

The first reason is that nature is our heritage and wonderful and valuable in its own right.

The second reason is thermodynamic. Life is the only thing that reorganises diffuse energy into systems. It does this when it consumes food and then reorganises it to fuel and replace living cells and to create new organisms, via reproduction. Although waste is created in this process, according to the laws of thermodynamics, it is biological waste.

Unlike other life-forms, human life, unfortunately, creates more dead and disorganised (non-living) stuff per person than its own total biomass. So, we need a large, functioning natural world to process our disorganised material and toxic waste.

This excellent slide-show analyses medical waste, but the components of medical waste are the same as for most waste.

We should not forget that we are a part of nature; we are composed of systematised cells and viruses that function as our cells and organs. No wonder that when we think about losing nature, we feel terrible. Except where we have become obsessed with the idea of power and wealth, which are forms of addiction. And all creatures can become addicted to substances and rewards that feed the sensation that they are increasing their power or territory to a magical degree that will make them capable of overcoming reality. Currently our global economic systems reward this kind of delusion.

This article or essay is a response to some typical growthist responses to the question posed by Mikhael Bornstein on a Quora forum here: "How long before our species realizes that overpopulation is the root cause to almost all of our global problems?. I describe how growthists narrow the range of their argument, what they leave out, and I analyse how they mistaken the hypothetical for the actual, acting as if the solutions they propose for obvious overpopulation problems, were already happening, when most probably never will.

The arguments I explore came from a US computer science professor, who wrote that he did not worry about population growth because he believed that the world is not overpopulated. His reasons for this were that human population is predicted to 'top out around 10 to 11 billion later this century', that there is plenty of food, energy and natural resources for 9-11 billion people, because these natural resources do not leave the earth and with advanced technology and inexpensive energy, we will be able to recycle them - except for fossil fuels, which he believes won't be needed beyond this century. He thinks that some 'under-developed' countries have an over-population problem because many of their governments are corrupt or anarchistic, impacting on food distribution and education. And, if women are not educated, they do not know about birth control or affordable birth control is not available. He thinks, however, that, in a few decades, most underdeveloped countries will be developed. [This is a belief that people have held since the 1950s or before,that it will all be fixed in a decade or two.] The professor thinks that the developing countries risk population decline and need immigration to maintain them. Those that are not growing, like Japan, need more adult diapers than baby diapers, he adds. He expresses concern that a bigger problem will be maintaining the world population in developed countries, without it decreasing too rapidly.

My responses

With all due respect, I find that Prof Farrages’s answer survives on the narrow range of values it canvasses. It is the values it leaves out that bring it down, along with the theoretical perspective that ignores how things are actually organised.

Other species and the natural world

A major value it fails to take into account is the natural world and other species. This part of the world is suffering terribly because of human expansion and it cannot cope. Our species had close relationships with other species and the natural world for almost all of its existence. Now we are being deprived of that due to human population growth and expansion, along with the constant growth in consumerism that our modern economies rely on. This is my number one complaint about population growth.

Inhuman mechanised farm production

There is also the terrible inhumanity of feedlots and battery farming, which are 'justified' economically because of the scale required to feed vast human populations. The effluent from this intensified farming wrecks rivers and the animals are often kept permanently on antibiotics because intensive farming raises infection risks.

High rise myopia and other health problems

Humans living in high-rises in dense cities are similar to battery hens in a number of ways. Their lack of outside activity causes myopia in children. High density means exposure to more infections, especially gastric, cold and flu. When these are treated with antibiotics they give rise to secondary problems, including antibiotic resistance and clostridium difficil, which can kill people, is becoming common, but often overlooked, especially in the elderly.

Food distribution and the profit motive

In theory there might be plenty of food, energy and natural resources for 9-11 billion people, but theory is not actuality. Food is not distributed according to need, but to income in our modern systems. Man does not live by bread alone, either.

Materials and energy resources, war and occupation

There are many resources that are scarce, for instance rare earth elements. Cobalt is a major driver of criminal international exploitation and environmental destruction in the Congo. New ways of producing cobalt won't stop that because people can still make money by using slave labour and violence to get the cobalt cheaply. Except in a command economy, new technologies are only taken up when the old are exhausted if the old can be exploited cheaply.

Petroleum is not as plentiful as it was; much of what is now classed as petroleum is actually lease condensate, coal-oil, vegetable oil, and the last two have major consequences, one with pollution and the other by wrecking wildlife habitat and landscapes. We are destroying orangutan habitat for palm oil, just to name one horrendous consequence. If petroleum were plentiful in relation to our population growth and consumption, then we would not have petroleum wars in the Middle East, but we do, with US-NATO the main cause, because it does not want Russia, China or Middle Eastern Countries to have any control over fossil fuels, even those on their doorsteps. The US does the same thing to South American oil-producing states and US-NATO sponsors wars and warlords in places like Somalia because US-NATO presence there means they are close by the petroleum producing states.

Coal is being exploited at a rate and scale never seen before - because it is there, because it is cheaper. Cheap is what drives most economic activity, using slavery, stealing land, and creating wars. (By the way, my quals on this is that I am Sheila Newman Ed. The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 1st and 2nd edition (co-edited), which were collections of different scientists writing about future prospects for energy.)

Non-fossil fuel energy resources

Yes, there are non-fossil fuel technologies, but they are not 'cheap'. Also they carry a lot of embodied energy in the materials that must be mined to create them. The reality is that they (a) require organisation that the desire for cheapness in the Anglosphere makes impossible (b) they can produce for smaller, lower consumption populations, but the savage capitalism that characterises the Anglosphere demands more and more people to consume more and more stuff - and that needs fossil fuel - so that brings us back to the lowest common denominator again.

Population and democracy

Population growth costs in all kinds of ways. A bigger population means a smaller you. The discouragement of nationalism in favour of open borders by globalists means that nations cannot organise properly to take charge of their population numbers so that they live the lives they want, with the values they want, rather than suffering the consequences of theoretical arguments for more population growth.

The writer characterises third world overpopulation as partly caused by corrupt governments, but the governments in the first world are increasingly corrupt as well, hell-bent on inflating the cost of resources by driving up population growth. Democracy is disappearing in the Anglosphere, as I have implied already.

The Aging population

The writer repeats an old furphy of the 'aging population'. The aging population argument completely ignores the fact that the world's population, including that of almost all 'developed' countries, is bigger than it has ever been, by an order of magnitude. These huge numbers reflect the availability of cheap fossil fuels, which is now in question.

Once again there is a theoretical perspective that pretends that it is reasonable, cost-free, democratic and desirable to engineer population growth to not only maintain this unprecedented population behemoth, but to try and increase it! At some stage the number of children has to go down in proportion to the number of aged: other wise we grow forever and life will become more and more unaffordable.

Population pressure on land and housing prices pushes up the cost of living so high that it becomes too expensive for anyone who does not have high wages - which includes elderly people. This problem resolves itself if you stop importing economic immigrants and allow populations to adjust themselves downwards naturally. Then the prices of all vital resources, including housing and land, come down, and the cost of living with it. This is what has happened in Japan. People are actually returning to Japan because it is becoming such a nice place to live and the cost of living is going down.

One more thing: comparing children from 0-15yrs old with say, people over 65 is an unreal comparison, because it generalises between two cohorts of unequal size. Furthermore, as many young people would know, especially in 'developed' countries, young people may spend much longer as 'dependents' either on their parents or on the state, because they cannot get enough work and because education is increasingly expensive.

Educating girls and immigration

In my country girls are relatively well educated, but our population keeps growing due to mass economic immigration, invited by government and growth lobby.

This is also happening in the 'third world', for instance, Africa. African tribal borders and an associated orderly Africa have been destroyed and there are constantly immigrating and emigrating populations, many of them going in and out of cities, adding both to marriage and fertility opportunities (previously limited by need to find partners within your tribe) in much the same way as is happening in the countries of the first world that are receiving mass immigration.

Immigration is a fundamental driver of population growth. Natural populations in most species, including our own, are small and endogamous. That is, tribe members marry other tribe members. This endogamy is a fertility opportunity limiter. Mass immigration is a fertility accelerator because it stimulates exogamy - which means marrying outside your tribe, which means increasing the proportion of people in a society who reproduce, which was usually limited before our era of globalisation. (See Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations).

The problem with the theoretical perspective

This theoretical perspective is common to the growth lobby, which tries to minimise problems by talking about how they might be fixed one day as if that were actually happening. Where I live, population growth in Australia is causing massive problems and 74 % of Australians want government to stop artificially engineering population growth (60+ % fueled by mass economic immigration and 80% of New South Wales' last year). See Betts & Birrell: Australian voters’ views on immigration policy: Full Report. One of the main reasons people want population growth to stop is due to exponentially rising traffic congestion, housing prices, homelessness, and changes to laws to remove peoples' right to object to draconian unbelievably expensive infrastructure 'solutions' that don't even solve the problems, but make engineering firms rich and cause engineering technofix ideology to dominate. The growth lobbyists (property developers and financiers - plus upstream and downstream industries) now dominate the mass media and the government and constantly pretend that all this can go on if we 'provide infrastructure'. Part of what is wrong with that is that property development is carried out on bushland and green spaces because they can be bought more cheaply and then rezoned. It also competes with things communities created for themselves. For instance there has been a rash of closing down 50m community swimming pools because population growth has forced up the ‘value’ of the land and developers think that they can make more money by building for more intensive occupaton, using what was public land.

The reality is land-speculation, although the theory is 'smart growth'. And we don't want more infrastructure or more population, because infrastructure is closing in on us even though inadequate to cope with the growth. There are actually systems that deal with planning better, such as France's, but those systems also discourage population growth, which is rightly seen as a cost to the state, which develops the land and subsidises the housing. (On France see Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France:

This is a very interesting question. Although not familiar with the exact trajectory of India’s demographics over the period, I know of several things that started its population growing beyond what it would have been pre-British colonisation. You can see my books on the subject here: About Sheila Newman, social researcher I would also really like to have some more details and discussion on Indian demographic history, so anyone with ideas, please contact me. [This article is based on a question and my answer posted on Quora at https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-reasons-for-the-rapid-growth-of-population-after-Indian-independence]

Here is my explanation:

HENRY JAMES SUMNER AND LAND-TENURE AND INHERITANCE LAWS

For starters, the British rewrote Indian land tenure and inheritance laws to ressemble their own, which promote high population growth. I do not know whether these rewrites left any part of India alone.

Henry James Sumner Maine was the British lawyer who rewrote the laws. As I recall, he believed, correctly, that male primogeniture, increases the chances of capitalism.

HOW DOES PRIMOGENITURE INCREASE POPULATION GROWTH?

The way it does this is to favour the aggregation of land in private hands: only one person inherits the land, and the rest become landless labour, for factories, agriculture, army, religious orders. Land aggregation was also favoured by the fact that women could not inherit land, but their husbands could, so Lord X might marry Miss Y, who had no brothers, then he would get her family fortune. In the 17th century land began to be commodified and land-titles, instead of entailing responsibilities and rights to various members of the local community, were redrafted under a single title holder. Now that title holder could buy and sell land that had previously been kept together by the entailments and rights of others. The excuse, under pareto-sufficiency economics was that, as long as the winner of a dispute put more money into the economy through selling land, then it didn’t matter who lost out in the meantime, even if they died of cold because they had lost their entitlement to cut wood on the property, for instance. That’s how British law works and how it works in all the countries that Britain carried that law to. (In continental Europe, under the Roman law system with Napoleonic civil codes, population growth is largely democratically controlled and the societies remain relatively endogamous and sedentary - especially compared to Britain.)

Male primogeniture also increases the rate of population growth, unless it happens within a sedentery endogamous society where people live on the land and most do not marry. When people cannot for some reason survive on the land, they are forced to wander in search of a living. This breaks up endogamous clans and tribes and causes new marriage opportunities by exposing the wanderers to a larger pool of people, when they might previously have remained in ‘house’ families, where only one couple bred and the rest were aunties and uncles helping, in exchange for home and food.

Before British rule, it is probable that India was composed of many endogamous tribes (or peoples), subdivided into smaller kinship groups of skins or moities. (Note that I use the term ‘tribe’ to indicate a people made up of related clans, not to indicate a non-agricultural society or something.) (Let us leave aside the castes for a moment.) The populations of these tribes and the skins or moities within them would have been much smaller. The tribes would be in part defined by their territory, which would generally remain fixed as the tribes were ‘sedentary’ - meaning did not move around much.

Tribes have rules about marriage that keep their numbers within the limits of their territory and its ability to support people, based on a tension between endogamy (marrying within your clan, skin, tribe) and exogamy (marrying outsiders). (Animals and plants also do this.) [I have a theory as to how they do it and I wrote about it in Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations and the next book in the series, called Sheila Newman: Demography Territory Law: Land-tenure and the origins of capitalism in Britain, in case you are interested.] I have also published diagrams of how these rules work, if you are interested, at this URL: Overpopulation: Endogamy,Exogamy and fertility opportunity theory

The tension between endogamy and exogamy limits the number of people who actually marry and therefore the fertility rate. Exogamy enlarges your marriage pool and therefore raises growth rate potential.

GENDER SEPARATION AND MALE AND FEMALE LAND

Tribes also have rules and traditions that keep the genders more or less separate and this also reduces marriage opportunity. For instance, men and women of Australian Aborigines often lived in separate quarters, engaged in different activities in different sections of the tribal land. In the Pacific Islands and Africa, and probably everywhere once, men and women had separate land, and even villages. A couple might live together for a while after marriage, but generally the woman went back to her female kin and raised the children, with the boys going to live with the men when they were around six years old.

TRANSPORT TECHNOLOGIES

Different transport technologies mean that you can go further in search of a mate than you could just on foot. So elephants, horses, boats, cars, trains, aeroplanes all contribute to increasing fertility opportunities. The most exogamous systems are cities and the global economy.

BRITISH SYSTEM IMPACT

The British system dispossessed and dispersed endogamous and sedentary tribes, completely breaking their endogamous systems and distancing them from local biofeedback that helped set the algorithms for endogamy/exogamy. The British then imposed inheritance laws that further interrupted the usual way that people inherited the territory they were born on. They probably also changed the land-title system and accelerated land-commodification, developing a financial system that had little relationship to the biophysical qualities of the actual land.

CASTES

Castes seem to be a relic of past invasions and takeovers and the British imperialists were another cast, but fueled by coal and iron.

Pre-British castes existed and intermarried within their own. A ruling caste is probably always smaller in number than the caste they rule over. That is because the ruling caste acts like a dynasty to consolidate their land-holding and power, by intermarrying with close relatives. This means that they have very limited marriage opportunities, but a lot of land and power per person, living in a kind of House system (called cooperative breeding in non-human species) in palaces etc. The people they rule over - the lower caste - is characteristically squeezed into smaller land areas, with less power. It may have once consisted of a large tribe with various skin groups and gender pathways. As the dominated caste is squeezed in together, these pathways and skin divisions get mixed up and broken. Usually there are battles and the deaths of the overtaken tribe cause marriage vacancies. Too many changes to write about here. If the lower caste remains endogamous and sedentary, then its population will be limited. If, however, as under the British system, if finishes up without land and having to work for low wages in cities, it will (a) have increased marriage and fertility opportunities and (b) if there are no laws enforced against child labour, may have a lot of children because their small wages will enhance the household income.

HOW DID ENGLAND GET THIS WAY?

I’ll just add that the British land-tenure and inheritance system of primogeniture, which only changed in the 1920s, was imposed on the British by William the Conqueror, who came from areas of France settled by Vikings in the 19th and 10th century. Under Viking inspired law, Britain was a colonial frontier that had to be defended by knights. The knights received parcels of land from the king in exchange for defending it. Women were not considered to be fighters, so the land and the buildings on it, could only be owned and passed on by men.

After the primogeniture rule changed in the 1920s, the system still tended to dispossess and cause landless labour because there were no rules requiring parents to pass on their estate to their children. (This was the subject of my book, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014.) Under Roman law, however, the law compels parents to pass on their estate to children equally to both sexes. This is how land remains relatively proportionately within families and you have male and female inheritance lines. (The French system is the subject of the book I am currently writing which will be called, Demography Territory Law 3: Land-tenure and the Origins of Democracy in France.

[This is a translation from the French version, "Quelle est la théorie du complot la plus crédible que vous connaissez?"] The mass media is the mouthpiece of the corporate world. It pretends to reflect the opinions of we masses but, in reality, it tries to create a perception that the exploitative economic system benefits us. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is about this conspiracy. Chomsky shows how people are convinced that the corporate media reflects the opinions and thoughts of ordinary people, even if it isn't true. Ordinary people continue to read the corporate media, believing that it will represent them. They finish up adapting to what is presented to them as the opinion of their equals, even though this is rarely true.

The idea of 'fake news' is a feature of this propaganda machine, which now characterises all criticism of its prejudices as 'fake news'. This distortion of reality is more exaggerated and obvious in video games and social media, which exploit a younger, naive, social cohort, who lack classical education.

Stigmatising the nation state

I think that one of the principal results of this media has been the stigmatisation of nationalism. When you think of it, what other concept can unite a country? Initially, small localities resisted the notion of 'nations' because they feared that nations would overwhelm their self-determination, their identities, their societiies and their local economies. In many cases, they were right, although the French system of communes within the roman (Napoleonic) system, resisted this better than the Anglosphere systems.

In general, however, national systems conquered small regional entities and people came to identify with the nation and to expect national governments to serve their people. It is important to note that the members of nations frequently won the right to vote. In effect, to vote - to be enfranchised - characterises the modern nation.

Global 'citizens' have no votes and no civic rights

Today globalism seeks to stigmatise the nation and fails to offer the global 'citizen' the right to vote on questions that concern him or her. In effect, there are no 'global' citizens. There are only global populations. National governments, once required to serve their citizens, now take orders from global forces. What globalism promises is that the global market will be the final arbiter of everything. Some elites can profit from the global market, but most of us are its playthings.

It is true that warlike elites have often abused nationalism, during the last two world wars, for example. But nationalism is also a product of the French Revolution, which gave birth to durable values of civil rights and the maintenance of the family land, rather than having it in the hands of elites. As long as the nation remains the only political level where people may vote to influence their fates, I am in favour of its preservation.

Perhaps I should qualify my implication of Chomsky's theory as a conspiracy theory, since Chomsky himself described what the mass media does as a hegemonic system, which means a sort of pragmatic adaptation by its beneficiaries, rather than having begun with a careful plan. The massive and rapid campaign to call media views outside the mass media's views 'fake news', in particular those alternative opinions against the wars and sanctions of the US-NATO, seems to me to be a true conspiracy against anyone who tries to cast doubt on US-NATO politics.

I would like to add that Quora could become a way of helping other points of view, for it provides a huge platform. This does seem rather too much to hope, but I would like to hope.

This article sprang from my response to a French language Quora question here: What is the most credible conspiracy theory you know?" (Quelle est la théorie du complot la plus crédible que vous connaissez ?).

Les médias de masse sont le porte-parole du monde des grandes entreprises. Ils prétendent refléter l'opinion de masse mais, en réalité, ils essaient de créer une perception que ce système économique exploiteur est à notre avantage. Le livre de Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, traitait de ce complot. En francais ce livre s'intitule, La fabrication du consentement : De la propagande médiatique en démocratie. Il y en a qui disent que depuis Chomsky a ete coopté dans la disinformation, neanmoins ce livre montre comment les gens ordinaires sont convaincus que les médias reflètent ce que les gens ordinaires pensent, même si ce n'est pas vrai. Les gens continuent à lire les mass media, croyant que cela les représentera et ils s'adaptent à ce qu'il leur present comme l'opinion de leurs egaux, bien que ce soit rarement la vérité.

L'idée de «fausses nouvelles» est une caractéristique de cette machine de propagande, qui désigne désormais toutes les critiques de ses préjugés comme de «fausses nouvelles». La distorsion de la réalité est plus exagérée et évidente dans les jeux vidéo et les médias sociaux, qui exploitent une classe plus jeune, naïve et sociale, sans éducation classique.

Stigmatisation de l'État-nation

Je crois que l'un des principaux résultats de ces médias a été la stigmatisation du nationalisme. Quand vous y pensez, quel autre concept unificateur peut unir un pays? Au départ, les petites localités ont résisté à la notion de «nations» parce qu'elles craignaient que les nations ne subsument leur autodétermination, leur identités, leur societés et leur economies locales. Dans de nombreux cas, ils avaient raison, bien que le système de communes français dans le systeme romane (napoleonique) ait résisté à cela mieux que les systèmes de l'anglosphere.

En général, cependant, les systemes de nations ont conquis les petites entités régionales et les gens sont venus s'identifier à eux et s'attendre à ce que les gouvernements nationaux servent le peuple. Il est important de noter que les membres des nations ont souvent acquis la possibilité de voter. En effet, voter - la franchise - caracterise la nation moderne.

Les «citoyens» mondiaux n'ont aucun vote et aucun droit civique

Aujourd'hui, la mondialisation cherche à stigmatiser la nation et n'offre pas au «citoyen» mondial la possibilité de voter sur les questions qui le concernent. En fait, il n'y a pas de «citoyens» mondiaux; il n'y a que des populations mondiales. Les gouvernements nationaux, autrefois tenus a servir les citoyens, sont maintenant redevables aux forces mondiales. Ce que le mondialisme promet, c'est que le marché mondial sera l'arbitre final de tout. Certaines élites peuvent profiter du marché mondial, mais la plupart d'entre nous sont ses jouets.

Il est vrai que les élites guerrières ont souvent abusé du nationalisme, par exemple lors des deux dernières guerres mondiales, mais le nationalisme est aussi un produit de la Révolution française qui a donné naissance à des concepts durables de droits civils et de maintien de la propriété familiale, plutôt que dans les mains des élites. Tant que la nation reste le seul niveau politique où les gens peuvent voter sur leur bien-être, je suis en faveur de sa préservation.

Je devrais peut-être qualifier ma description de la théorie de Chomsky comme une théorie du complot, puisque Chomsky lui-même a décrit ce que font les médias de masse comme un système hégémonique, c'est-à-dire une sorte d'adaptation pragmatique par ses bénéficiaires, plutôt que de commencer par un plan réfléchi. La campagne massive et rapide pour qualifier les vues de presse en dehors des médias de masse de «fausses nouvelles», en particulier contre les guerres et les sanctions US-OTAN, me semble être une véritable conspiration contre quiconque met en doute ces politiques US-OTAN.

Je voudrais ajouter que Quora pourrait devenir un moyen d'aider d'autres points de vue, car il fournit une énorme plateforme. Cela semble presque trop espérer, mais je voudrais espérer.

Cet article est né de ma réponse à une question Quora francophone ici: Quelle est la théorie du complot la plus crédible que vous connaissez ?