Overpopulation and Greed: Is There Any Future for Mankind?
Questioner: While COVID-19 has severely affected many world economies, many things have come into the limelight in the wake of the pandemic. People have realized that life is precious and that nature has limited resources.. How do you see the future of the economy? Will we move towards a resource-based economy? How would future technologies impact us or life as such?
Acharya Prashant: In the short term, probably, consumption will keep rising. The bigger picture is that the Earth just cannot sustain the kind of consumption we are exhibiting.
So, how do I look at the future? Well, mankind will be forced to reduce its population. You cannot continue to be eight billion, ten billion, twelve billion, and then say, “Well, in the natural course of things, we are anyway going to stabilize at twelve billion.” Even eight billion is just too much, it is too much by many times. Twelve billion is unthinkable, and you are talking of twelve billion when all these twelve billion aspire to have a per capita consumption similar to that of the United States.
So, what are we looking at? We are looking at a scenario where nations have the population of an India and the per capita consumption of an U.S. Multiply these two, and what do you get? Utter tragedy. Neither are we ceasing to have kids, nor are we realizing that the good life does not consist of multiplied consumption. That is how the world is living; that is how even the development of countries is being indexed: how much people consume. We take those figures, put them in descending order, and then say this country is the most advanced because it produces this much stuff. That stuff could be nuclear fissile material, or that stuff could be coal, iron, electricity, or electronics. But nevertheless, you know only one way to measure development, which is production and consumption. And when it comes to production, you are not merely producing goods; you are producing babies, too, at an alarming rate. ‘Alarming’ is a gross understatement, a very lightweight word.
So, what is COVID? In the popular conversation about COVID, we talk of how governments have failed, we talk of vaccines, we talk of WHO, we talk of China, we talk of the particular Wuhan Lab, but no one talks of the fundamental underlying reason: why did man have to come in contact with that virus at all? We came in contact with that virus because we have expanded our population so much that we have had to enter the jungles. We need land for every new baby that is born, and how do you get that land? You get that land by clearing away jungles.
And our greed knows no sense. So, we fight with each other, and nations try to have an upper hand over their neighbor. So, what do you want to do? You want to have gain-of-function research, which for name sake is for medical purposes, but a lot of it is actually for military purposes. Even if for just the sake of defense, still the purpose is military. You need to fight with the other because you want resources, and tomorrow when even water will be in shortage, why will you not fight with the other? And when you fight with the other, then you don’t hold back your punches, or do you? Then you will fight with the other using everything that you have. As they say, “All is fair in love and war.”
So, that’s the thing. Unless there is this basic recognition, which you can call as a spiritual awakening, that the good life doesn’t consist of conspicuous consumption, we are hurtling towards a great disaster. It is already upon us. You would have read that the temperature at the place where I am sitting, the day before yesterday, was seven degrees above normal. Now, is that normal statistical fluctuation? Obviously it is not. It is climate crisis, and we are going to see much more of this every passing month.
I am afraid the future is not at all bright the way we are going.
