It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the hypocrisy of the privileged when discussing global overpopulation while overlooking issues related to food distribution and resource allocation.
In this quote, Jeremy Rifkin points out the hypocrisy of those in developed nations who focus on the problem of overpopulation in poorer regions, while they themselves ignore significant issues within their own systems. He highlights how the overpopulation of livestock and the inequitable distribution of resources contribute to ongoing poverty and hunger in the world, suggesting that the real discussion should center on how wealth and food resources are mismanaged rather than blaming the population growth in less affluent countries.
In practice
In a panel discussion about global food security, this quote can be referenced to highlight the need for responsible resource management.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.
***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans.
Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
Well, you split your soul, you see, and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged. But of course, existence in such a form . . .
When all the Self was conquered and dead, when all passions and desires were silent, then the last must awaken, the innermost of Being that is no longer Self - the great secret!
In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.
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