By

John Wright

August 11, 2012

I believe it is fair to say that virtually all of us have experienced nightmares while sleeping. As to the possible causes of nightmares I can’t say much, and neither can anyone else who is honest, for whatever our subconscious cooks up for any dream, good or bad, it is often difficult to associate our dreams with our recent daily living experiences. Perhaps some people are so traumatized by a real life event earlier in life that they never get over it and live out the horror ad nauseam through nightmares.

The most common response to nightmares is awakening, perhaps in a sweat, filled with fear or loathing, just at the point where some unspeakable horror overcomes our efforts to escape and grabs us, about to destroy us. Or perhaps the horror is something like being trapped underwater while scuba diving and running out of air, or falling uncontrolled from a great height. The point in common with our variety of nightmares, apart from the simple reality that we have them, is that we awaken, just before our destruction, only to realize once awake that our survival instinct "teleported" us from the nightmare world of our dream back to the real world. Whew!

Now envision yourself in real life as part of a team of mountain climbers scaling vast, steep sheets of ice, to ascend thousands of feet above distant valleys below, your goal being, as usual, to reach the summit. If you succeed you once again establish your dominance over the worst that nature provides as a challenge. If your team fails by having to descend without reaching the summit then you are emasculated. The third possibility is that one or more of your team, including you, die during the event by losing the stability of a critical handhold or foothold, and you, and perhaps others, slide ever faster down the ice sheet to a certain death. In those long moments from the failure of the handhold or the foothold until you lose consciousness you are horror stricken with the realization that this nightmare has no escape … and that you did it to yourself.

The word, nightmare, is used at times to describe a bad real life event or even an environment with ongoing multiple bad events, e.g. security is so bad for the folks who live there that life is a continuous nightmare. It is easy to understand why the word nightmare is used to describe non-dream situations as most of us have a common experience of occasional nightmares while sleeping. We immediately relate to the use of the word, nightmare. It conveys exactly the right sense of horror to be fully understood. The aspect that is not considered, or at least not developed as part of any typical story, is the possibility of an inescapable nightmare. In the present context that means a real life situation with dire pending disaster, with no way to escape, logically similar to the mountain climbing example described in the above paragraph.

Let’s now enlarge the scope of the nightmare scenario to include all the people of a given country, like the USA. The goal, the American Dream, is to live a long and comfortable life of enjoyment and fulfillment, based on gain from living out our strong work ethic, and that is the objective that underwrites all that we do, provided we are sane and responsible. Any other view of life, regardless of its source, is insane or destructive to those who are responsible citizens. Like the climbers we have obstacles and risks that impede our succeeding and that we must overcome to be happy. If we succeed we gain the prize we sought. If we fail we do not necessarily die immediately. Some of us are forced to live a smaller life, based on both our limited abilities and limited opportunities. Sometimes we die a little bit every day inside for many years in frustration, having fallen from the zenith of our life, until our ultimate physical death.

In the course of our lives we coexist with other people who, whatever their abilities and choices, are attempting to achieve the same fundamental goal as we, except for the ones who are not sane or responsible people, and they are many, make no mistake. But unlike the straightforward example of the mountain climbers, where the tasks and the goal are easy to understand, our lives are complicated immeasurably by differences of ability, opinion and fundamental beliefs across the population in which we coexist. These differences confound our efforts to achieve the ideal life. One man’s meat is often another man’s poison, yet coexist we must, under the law, to avoid becoming savages and openly destructive to each other.

The idea is that goals and means that one person or one group might use/achieve are directly in conflict with the goals and means of another person or group, and none of that necessarily by design. The mere fact that we have to share the planet guarantees collisions with the actions and goals of others, for there are many of us on what turns out to be a very small planet. Think of it as a zero sum game. And now we start to build the sequence of events and hard physical realities that lead to the major ongoing special (by species) nightmare with no apparent escape. We will not be teleported. We will not awaken to realize, to our relief, that what horrified us was merely a dream.

I am talking, of course, of the profound reality that of all the people alive today only about twenty percent of the total has any substantive contribution to make to improve or even maintain life on our planet, which is juxtaposed to the opposite reality that the other eighty percent overpopulate. This is a nightmare with no apparent escape, and some of us see well before the major disasters that indeed disaster is what we all face as a result of failing to plan our populations in size and also composition. What throws most people off in their failure to realize the seriousness of our situation is that the negative events happen in slow motion, in this case over many decades, much like a slow motion nightmare. Temporary respite from economic disaster runs in cycles in which a few folks regain some of what they lost, so for those folks problems with the economy appear to be on the mend. Not so for others. And the small and temporary up and down cycles are on a trend line with a negative slope. It takes perspective to range the issues and not get caught up in the TV solutions approach to life where everything gets resolved in the course of a one hour program.

What is the basis or basic cause for the type of societal evolution, globally, that underwrites this disastrous path? It is the curse of altruism, in which the needs of the many and ever more people who are not sufficiently productive to support their own needs is used to justify the stealing (taxes, et. al.) from those who are productive and self-supporting. The backhanded anti-morality of altruism is cloaked in our most natural feelings of kindness, of wanting to live by the golden rule. The moral issue that altruists deny is that all the golden rule intent from the individual goes down the tubes when the decisions of who receives the help and how much they receive is determined by government and accomplished without consent of those paying. This bastardizes the whole concept of giving to help the poor and turns it into outright theft to support those unwilling to work and those who will by excessive reproduction create an ever larger problem for society, that is, for the taxpayers. No political party will halt any part of that theft, in fact the present leaders in government are simply making it worse.

Thus the primary problem using the altruistic approach is that the need always expands to exceed the ability of the ever fewer productive people, on a percentage basis, to take care of those less capable or unwilling, due either to limited abilities of the needy leading to poor judgments relative to reproduction and indeed most areas of life, or in other instances poor physical environments for growing food, or both. If I consider the huge efforts undertaken by the capable from different countries to help solve hunger problems for burgeoning populations, like the Green Revolution, or even the outright ongoing attempts to feed poor populations directly, food stamps being only one example, it becomes clear that altruism was, is and always will be doomed to failure, which means societies that operate under socialism/communism ultimately fail or remain very backward compared to capitalist societies where success is a result of applied intelligence and motivation to create products that the citizenry want to buy and also need.

Why does this happen? The reason is the needs of the many, satisfied primarily by laying guilt trips on the productive and stealing the fruits of those who are responsible and productive, eventually overwhelms even the best of kind intent on the part of the producers. It is interesting that the offshoring that I so strongly dislike becomes understandable when altruism has ruined the business environment within the USA. First, the economy cannot be maintained with a heavy socialist load in the absence of the citizenry having good payings jobs so as to be able to pay taxes. Thus, the economy collapses, in the USA and in many other countries where the altruists have positions of governmental power. Then, all it takes to realize the disaster of countless millions starving is the added problem of temporary loss of ability to grow food. That is happening big time all over the world, right now, even without issues like droughts, due to overpopulating beyond the capacity of the land to provide enough food.

Why is this a problem? The answer is obvious. When no control of excessive reproduction is done the food provided simply expands the problem of hunger. There is no resolution or path to success with the altruistic approach to life, for to permit ever larger populations to overwhelm the best efforts of the capable to provide technology for food production and even outright donations, then the entire approach taken to solve world hunger is a disastrous mistake. Now here is the crowning touch of altruistic stupidity ... When we see clearly the destruction of our physical environment, like pollution and global warming, and the depletion of great resources that have been available from the beginning of recorded history for people to use responsibly, like water or oil, we simply must ask, what is the purpose of despoiling the planet on which we all depend for life? The sad answer is the handout basis of altruism, where need is permitted or justified to consume without creating equal value that returns useful product to others, without despoiling our planet. It goes on until natural disaster, and ill-considered knee jerk responses to disaster, destroys life for everyone. The proper solution was, is and will be population control, globally, through sterilization, such that we continue to feed the hungry today and gradually lessen the disastrous demands of too many unproductive people.

What at one time might have seemed a proclamation that violated the basic human right to reproduce is now seen in a different light. It works like this … No human has the right to do anything that despoils the lives of other humans, which is exactly the result from mindless overpopulating. Put bluntly, I am saying that there is no such thing as a fundamental right to reproduce. The consequences of failing to manage this idiotic situation are upon us. What is presented today as economy problems globally, and what is slowly being recognized as environmental disaster, has its entire root in the issue of mindless overpopulation. And I mean unthinking reproduction on the part of those that cannot and/or will not contribute to the improvement of life on this planet. Note that this destruction of large populations is not new to the history of man. The Mayans perished because successive years of drought removed from them the capability of growing the food necessary to feed their huge and ever growing population.

In short, the solution to world hunger and environmental stress is to have far fewer people alive on this planet, and of a composition capable and willing to advance humanity for our present century and future centuries. Instead, we are strangling in our political and religious stupidity. This means that when the economic ax falls and the environmental ax falls, as they are starting to do noticeably right now, that the degree of human suffering all over our planet as this dual disaster unfolds will dwarf anything that occurred in the past by orders of magnitude.

It should be clear by now that there is no such thing as a political solution, for political decisions poorly made for the last 100 years are the reason we are in terrible trouble now. That will not change. What will change is the most cruel solution path of all … global starvation in the midst of military conflict aimed at total destruction of anything and everything deemed to be a source of trouble.

This nightmare, and indeed it is a nightmare, is inescapable, for no power system, no government, can reverse course now except by destroying and in turn being destroyed, in whole or in part. There isn’t any group of any kind anywhere that can or will change that coming reality. It is simply a question of how much time we have before the nightmare becomes unavoidably obvious as we try to live without feelings of horror about what is happening, real time, to the people around us, or perhaps soon to us.

We dreamed too long. There is no wake-up call available to us now. We will simply pay all the nightmare consequences for our silly beliefs that were not founded on clear, clean logic. Humanity badly needs this lesson and I have no doubts "school" has already begun, unfortunately for all of us. No one will escape the consequences.

Humanity, decimated, will however go on, sadder but wiser.

The question remains, for how long will the hard knowledge of our historical stupidity have positive effect on our planning, structuring and operating the human society of the future? If we don’t change the level of human intelligence to avoid repeating our past mistakes we will simply do it all, all over again, in utter, pitiful ignorance.

That, my friend, is the worst nightmare of all. In the grand sense, it never ends. Welcome to hell.