I do not claim to be a qualified scientist, economist, politician, religious guru, professor ... more student in the study of civilised life and its values; further I am a long-term philosopher to even further endorse any credibility for my views; however, nevertheless undaunted I plan to appeal to you and present you with some reasoning which will force you into reviewing your values and the values that you think society and therefore any government should consider.
Firstly to consider the concept of "killing off the planet". It was before increasingly obvious that man's activities in the pursuit of industry, commerce, social values, has put him in conflict with "the natural order" with pollution, toxic gases and materials, sewerage, gases that do and may contribute to global warming and it is possible to perceive that a trend unchecked toward wanton damage on the earth has unpredictable disastrous consequences upon the interdependent life existing and creating properties upon the earth. However that is not to say that the planet is being killed off: it is to say that life is being distorted, unnaturally and the very worst that could happen to the earth is that it could become a lifeless planet in which case it would only be in common with the remainder of the planets in our galaxy.
However, the above is an extreme hypothetical suggestion but it does beg the question as to whether other planets have at some time in the past, or will have at some time in the future, the power to support organic life or have maybe lost life for some in&edible reason.
We can be sure, however, that life on the planet earth is both a chain and an inter-relationship of dependence; ie, to support human life we need, say for the sake of argument, a supply of milk. To 20th century man a supply of milk is a matter of opening the front door in the morning: it comes in bottles; or going down to the supermarket for a carton: the normal view. When the real view of milk's need and where it comes from requires a deeper search to find that it comes from cows, cows are animals fed on grass; grass grows because of moisture and photosynthesis; at the heart of the growth is a supply of water; a major constituent of water is oxygen - no oxygen, no milk - no cow, no milk - no grass, no milk. Consequently if anything happens to disrupt the balance between the elements this has a knock-on effect on the eventual consumer.
I referred earlier on to a notional view which is man's created view of things, usually in shortthink as opposed to shorthand. By this I mean that man creates his own set of values to suit what he wants to think, as with the above man does not need (or so he thinks) to think about cows, biology and chemical elements when thinking about the origin of a bottle of milk - from the milkman will do.
It is to this end that I will pursue notional value in this book because what I will try to do is cut away our notional values or our interpretation of- notional worth that we have created and fostered in our cozy 20th century way of life, and suggest that we have to resurrect realities.
Further, it is to suggest that such is not a matter for debate, more a serious attempt to adjust our attitude to life in order that we do not drive the wrong way down a one-way street with the blinkers on.
This book looks at the conflict between man and nature that has arisen which affects our attitude to politics, religion, business - hopefully in a new and interesting light. The object is two-fold on the part of the writer: it is to write those things that are bubbling around in mind and also to give light to views that I have never heard expressed or been taught, but feel there is a need for such expression.
THE CONFLICT
It is quite clear that it is man who is endangering life on the planet over farming, over killing, polluting etc. and he is faced with the dilemma that the very science that created wonders to enhance life is now telling man that there is a Catch 22 around the corner and unless action is taken there will be serious consequences.
The truth is that man has built the 20th century on notional worth, this that he has created and he is being faced with the consequent effects upon reality. Of course the reality is -that man has not created anything, only used things, and man's effect upon reality is to distort it.
Therefore the conflict arises between notional values and reality and in order to study it, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of notional and reality conflict and look at the elements of it.
I refer to alchemy and the work of early experimenters in elemental make-up and the attempts to turn base metals-into gold. There are two elements here: one, that gold is a precious metal that is real; however the notion of value is man-made and can only be expressed by how much he "owns"; two, it was impossible to "make" gold; consequently the elements were wasted and energy was wasted so the effect upon reality was one of destruction for no benefit.
What we are faced with in the 20th century is that we have adopted notional values as a way of life and managing and policing life revolves around how best we do that, and that reality is often seen as just an obstacle to be overcome.
This conflict of notional values developed from alchemy as from the beginnings of elemental change develops the basis of where we are today, whereby most gases, chemical elements, metals, have been classified, subjected to experimentation and used to create notional things of notional value.
The reality of course is that we just use up gases, chemical elements and metals as if they were infinite; every time we use them we create notional worth expressed in terms of money, money itself being notional.
The reality is that there is nothing on the earth that is infinite; when we use oil, for instance, we consume a deposit laid over millions of years - we destroy it, we build a notional value life on the notional money we create supported by the energy created from the oil that we destroy.
As life has developed in the last hundred years or so, we have increasingly directed our intelligence and efforts at scouring the globe to find more and more for consumption. The world's elements which are its make-up and fundamentally exist to create the world as it is and should be, have been seen as resources.
This implies that the world has shifted from many centuries of complete elemental complexity to become like a vast ocean to be trawled. No stone is left unturned in our search for more, more, more.
If we persist in changing the relationship of the world's elements it is no wonder that at some stage the earth will cry "no more", as everything that exists is finite yet the world's potential as a planet is infinite; unless man can learn how to temper his attitude to his only home in the universe, then problems are just a matter of time!
KILLING OFF THE PLANET
Put down in the ensuing chapters are views mainly about the difference between notion and reality and that the two concepts create a dilemma for man. At the very heart of the idea of killing off the planet invokes some sort of notion that we are actively engaged in planetary destruction - this is not so. What we are engaged in is an incessant obsession of improving notional values in life, either things or wealth, and the planet is being disregarded rather than actively, wantonly damaged. This is largely because of the value of wealth. Because it is man-made and notional, wealth is apparently limitless and so it would seem are the things of combined real and notional value, that the earth and what is in/on it has become merely fuel.
Of course there are increasing problems caused by the level of human, population which ever grows, and if more and more humans are born to have an outlook on life which is hinged upon notional value, so the pressure upon the planet will become greater and indeed the concept of planet killing will become more relevant.
If, in fact, what happens to the earth is that there is a shift in life and life-supporting infrastructure, the consequences will be more for life than the planet.
We have to remember that for centuries the earth has supported life and part of that life mix has been man; the only thing that has changed in the 20th century is that man has changed his relationship with his home. On the one hand he has to show for it what he regards as a superior lifestyle which is increasingly becoming threatened; on the other, he gives voice about the potential problems.
Of course the essence of the problem for man is that all that he uses on the earth becomes depreciated after use (with the exception of precious metals) so consequently as the pressure becomes greater for more notional value goods and services, the earth is wasting away and cannot be replaced.
It is of course back to money, the notional value, so much of life revolves around - the acquisition of wealth either by money or precious metal, neither of which have any reality value. Consequently if my life ambition is to be a millionaire and I achieve it, what have I really got? A capability. So much of life has become to revolve around acquiring the above capability in the form of companies or private individuals aiming for success.
As a result, individuals are forced to create even more notional values in respect of things and services and are unable to break what has become a treadmill of human endeavour aimed at money and something called the quality of life. This latter statement refers to the quality of human life when what is obviously needed is a concept of importance called the quality of the planet within which humans carve out a role for themselves aimed at planetary security which in turn boils down to the security of life.
What becomes obvious is that man can not just expect to set aside a percentage of his gains- in the pursuit of wealth toward a notional effort wards staving off the ever-encroaching effects on reality and its potential effect on life: i.e., there has to be a reversal with reality treated with virtual reverence and any creation of wealth done within such a concept.
WEALTH, INTELLIGENCE AND LUCK
I use the above three elements as being major factors that influence success in 20th-century life, all of which bring man to bear down upon the realities on the planet in striving to improve the quality of life.
Wealth, because it is a notional and unreal, tangible reality, brings with it the inability to contain the drive for it despite whatever may or may not be in mind to utilise it.
I suspect that if all the monetary wealth in the western world were at once tried to be converted into reality elements of the earth, huge chunks of the earth would be sold creating colossal private ownership and the balance between notion and reality would become so upset as to have lasting effects for generations to come.
The strive for individual wealth in monetary terms has led increasingly to consortiums of people using the reality of the earth to generate things and services of notional value.
There is supply, demand and price but these factors are all notional; supply becomes elements or reality engineered, to facilitate use. Demand is created either by suggestion or desire for use of the product. Price is the vehicle of wealth transaction, the aim of which is to create wealth. This process started from humble beginnings and became the national life-support system, but it has become a sophisticated machine and the original fundamental economic base has become an earth-swallowing machine which is beyond control. The reason for this is that the drive for wealth in either monetary or precious metal terms has become all-consuming. The real problem is that the "consortiums of people", namely companies, instead of being seen as creators, reality users with a responsibility- towards the source of raw materials, have become totally wealth-orientated, consequently the realities of the earth are simply and unquestionably "used" as an element in the creation of wealth, taken for granted as purchasable and their importance as maintaining a balance of life supporting existence in the world is ignored. What, in effect, has happened is that life in the western world has become a dangerous game with ever-encouraged ideas of things and services that improve the "quality of life", not because we want them or need them necessarily but because large companies and corporations pursue wealth in competition and in the course of achieving/not achieving wealth they become obliged to improve wealth constantly, therefore they are under pressure to use the earth's realities and conjure up new things and services of notional value because wealth and its endemic pressure is unyielding. We have created a notional value that has turned us into slaves. We are over-pressed to feed it but we have become incapable of managing it because the ownership of wealth is so diverse that it has become impossible to direct wealth solely as a commodity with a means to an end. Instead, wealth has become a substitute for God with lives hell-bent on producing an earth-bound Messiah to worship. The having of wealth is seen as an aim. it is my view that we should review our relationship with the planet and realise -that if we are to have a healthy future as a race, we need to review our lifestyles dramatically and treat the realities on the planet with reverence and awe and use wealth solely as a tool to affect our relationship with the realities on the planet.
I recently saw a successful GB company worth millions of pounds declare profits of several hundred millions of pounds. There are some points to consider here. Firstly, the company had to create a massive turnover to generate such a profit; consequently one can picture massive use of the earth's resources.
Secondly, having made such a profit, what are the obligations upon that company: (1) reward shareholders; (2) pay taxes; (3) nothing else! except having done so well this year they become automatically pressed to improve the figure next year, i.e. it is impossible to contain a profit-making drive or control it; consequently all the other effects of the company on the environment in general become merely tools or ingredients for profit. Wealth is managing and directing us. We are not controlling wealth. And it is this drive that will be man's undoing.
In consequence the ownership of wealth is so diverse and unbalanced as to make it unaccountable for what it does. As above, whereby I have stated that the main purpose and activity of wealth is to keep generating itself, as a consequence any-relationship between wealth, the environment and reality can only happen if there is a wholesale review of life's priorities, i.e. whether we become motivated by a drive for conservation as a high priority which forces us to review the role of wealth in our society, i.e. we use less raw materials, charge more for them, redirect more profit towards maintaining the earth's life support systems. This probably means a cut-back in mass production, an upgrading in the quality of finished work, ownership of fewer but better goods and services, appreciation to be encouraged.
The following two elements of this chapter, intelligence and luck, are included because I see them as overriding factors that are brought to bear on life in the 20th century and they are worth a review. They, together with the drive for wealth more than anything, influence the relative success of western man and it is because they do that we have to watch out for them and understand the effect that they have.
With regard to intelligence: we are aware of the measure of IQ that is, we are given to understand that humans have a variable intelligence capacity. This work is not to go into any suggestions for reasons why this may be the case, but merely to recognise a difference in humans with regard to individual brain power. Teaching children from an early age has become a recognised practice over many years, the object being to equip humans with the power to, cope in the world on their own when they are older. But education has become more than just grooming for adulthood and it is now seen that the harnessing and development of intelligence is a prized benefit and as a consequence people are often judged as people by the level of their academic prowess. What has developed in education is a forcing group aimed at preparing young people to become adept in the national wealth creating machinery: the idea being to ground them for a good job.
We all know from our days at school that there were pupils in the class with varying degrees of intelligence and aptitude, but what invariably happens is that the kids who do well get singled out for merit and by degree the kids who do less well get punished or ignored, thereby creating a division. And I believe that it is this division that has a lot to answer for as clearly the kids with high IQs who do well get all the praise and are maybe luckier with eventual employment, i.e. they are treated as superior. The kids who find it tough are either derided or left to struggle and there is at this early stage in human life an assessment of a person's quality as a human being based upon intelligence. Consequently the kids who cope less well have to struggle more and they have a far greater chance of problems later in life.
Now I must admit I know successful people in adult life who were not cut out for school work. But what I am saying is that if youngsters are assessed as to their quality as a human being on the strength of their academic capabilities then the chances are that they start life disadvantaged through no fault of their own because society in general imposes a certain standard of requirement for them. A matter of bad luck? There are no laws set down anywhere in statute or in the bible that refer to the quality of a human being based upon intelligence; it can therefore be said that every human being has a right to a dignified life and it must therefore be that it is the onus of society to create a situation whereby all human beings are catered for and that there is not an elitist system which upgrades the clever and downgrades the not-so-clever, because we are back again to wealth and notional values. If the ability to produce wealth, the ability to be clever, have become the essential predispositions in life, rather than the ability to create a caring society, that uses wealth to secure its future.
It is my view that a great many social problems ensue from children's school years when they become exposed to competition and later life problems stem from such a beginning.
It can be said that being born academically weaker is a matter of bad luck. It is a fact that luck plays a great deal in our lives. It could be said that the global warming prospect is just bad luck. However is it really good enough to allow luck to be so majorly responsible for success or failure in life? If I choose to buy a car of a particular make I can only buy from the ones I see advertised, at the time I am looking. It will be a matter of luck as to whether I pick the right time, right car, right place to look. So it is with life. So much is unpredictable. Society today consists of winners and losers: those who have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to pick the right/wrong careers, etc, etc. What it really means is that life can be precarious and in order to avoid pitfalls we would be wise to take out insurance policies of a sort. We have gone hell-for-leather for wealth and inevitably there are those who will benefit from wealth and those who will not. If you are unlucky enough to be among the not-so-bright, and you have had a share of bad luck, chances are that life seems pretty grim.
It seems quite clear that human beings are subject to luck; luck can be a problem. As a consequence we must recognise the severity and the timeliness of luck and engineer our welfare state to be capable of-helping those who fall victim to bad luck. Because if intelligence is a matter of luck, employment is a matter of luck. Unless man sees his responsibilities in life only to himself and his immediate family, it is necessary to engineer human effort in the direction of a secure society with wealth balanced to achieve it whilst putting less strain on planetary realities, less emphasis on pure wealth creating in favour of a co-operative social framework.
One of our aims as a society must be to guard against the effects of bad luck on individuals and when things look as if they are going to cause problems, whether it be socially or environmentally, we must have a societal management structure capable of effective measure that have inbuilt resources to tackle problems.
NOTION AND REALITY
I have written so far about notions and reality and used them in context. However I feel a need to enlarge upon the two contexts by way of explanation.
I referred to notion earlier on as being the values and worth that are created either by man's mind or his senses. To give some examples, take wealth. Relative wealth is a notion of value and was developed by man to give both a product and a fuel that stimulates activity. Notions about entertainment, the quality of life, taste, etc etc are all values that man expresses but are not physical realities. In general, in the last 100 years, man's wealth and relative affluence have largely been about appealing to notional values on the earth as opposed to the physical realities that exist on the earth and furthermore, what is evident is that there has been an ongoing policy of using the earth's resources to create notional values and experiences that improve the quality of life and at the same time improve notional wealth.
What has happened is that after centuries of man's habitation on the planet consisting by and large of dependence upon life forms to generate notional wealth, man shifted his attention to minerals, gases, all of which elements contributed to lifebound revolution.
The result is that man is now relatively wealthier and affluent, his ownership of actuality on the planet has increased but we cannot forget that wealth is only a relative notion and to say for sake of argument that there is twice as much wealth today as there was 100 years ago, is not to say that there is twice as much on the planet. What has happened is that there has been a significant change in the interdependence of notional value and physical reality value,
Man has significantly put notional value ahead of maintaining the existence and the value of physical reality.
Most notional values are immediate sensations, things that affect sight, sense, smell. Thoughts do not linger; consequently there becomes an ever-present need to create notional values and the ability to fulfil them.
What has happened is that man has put his own notional values ahead of the values of unchanging reality. As a result man has turned the earth into an engine that creates notional values but in so doing has a waste by-product and effect on reality thereby forcing a reassessment of centuries of compressing relative values supporting life on the planet to planetary reality being used to support notional value creation that significantly changes the interdependence of notions upon reality, and reality upon notion.
This is a very dangerous state of affairs because notions are within limit, fact or fantasy. Fulfilling them will put ever more pressure on the earth as the notional need for the notional increase in wealth keeps winding up, the existence of fossil fuels keeps reducing which will eventually lead to a situation whereby successful intelligent man is on the planet in huge numbers (because life is so nice), ever depleting the existence of reality to either maintain or improve the "quality of life" and thereby in the long term endangering his existence. As reality and notions are on opposite sides rather than similar, there is no relationship creating consequence and value, only anti-relationships, creating fragmentation and non-sustainable value. It is necessary to review notion and reality in order to improve the prospect of longer term security. The future needs nurturing.
RESOURCES AND ENERGY
The word "resources" implies things that can be utilised by man. So it has been for centuries that man has searched for and developed physical realities to use in the furtherance of the quality of life. What has developed today is an awareness of those elements that exist on the planet which can be used and a general ignorance of the remainder. Such an attitude is responsible for changing the physical make-up of the surface of the earth.
In addition to reality resources on the earth there are notional resources, namely human thought and wealth. Wealth is both a product and resource which makes it confusing to understand, because when we produce wealth as a product the only thing that it is good for is to reuse it as a resource.
The result of the above is to conclude that the earth has become an energetic phenomenon. On the one hand wealth exists as a notional value and a fuel, the earth's materials become fuel. The combination of wealth, earth's resources, thought and a sprinkling of luck are used to produce wealth. Consequently the pressure for wealth, notional value, forces us to ignore responsibilities toward the reality of the planet because we only recognise the value of those physical realities that are used to make wealth and when we have wealth, all we can do with it is have more wealth. On the way the notions of what humans need and want become elaborated upon putting ever more pressure on reality to give up of itself. It is without reason.
In short, humans have created a lifestyle problem, namely how long can they persist in utilising resources before there is a breakdown in supply?
The key to the issues involved is energy. What man has done in the last 100 years is to create a lifestyle that centres around the use of energy. Reality has simply become fuel. Wealth is fuel. What is produced is fuel. What is consumed has a short life value. As a result the planet is under pressure.
THE FUTURE - KILLING OFF THE PLANET?
In order to try to predict the future it is considered necessary to look at the past.
The earth has been in existence for millions of years and if we are to take the word of archaeologists and geologists, subject to much change in life and climate. We also are offered by Darwin an explanation for the evolution of life on the planet.
What sticks out is the fact that from his predecessors, man has evolved superior intelligence from past life. We also know that there have been ecological and climatic changes which have affected the existence and success of animal life. Consequently it is reasonable to suggest that in the future the evolutionary trend will continue and that the earth may be subject to ecological and climatic change.
Therefore what is likely is that future homosapien will be more intelligent than man of today and as a result will hold notional values more highly than physical values. This being the case, man and his counterpart will continue to put pressure on the planet.
However, if during the course of evolution man cannot learn to control his relationship with reality, depletion and depreciation of reality will mean that man will become frustrated because he failed to value the importance of the interdependence of notion and reality. And this could herald his downfall.
In effect, what will happen to man is the opposite of what happened to the dinosaur. The dinosaur had small brain and intelligence but massive body and its relationship with the earth was purely animal and physical. It failed to survive. In the case of the human, he has enormous intelligence and thought capacity and does not care too much about things that can't satisfy his brain. Consequently he puts increasing pressure on resources, which if they run out, when they run out, will destroy a lot of the value of life for man and may herald his decline.
All this suggests that despite man's limitations he will not "kill off the planet". It is more likely that he will kill off himself if he cannot learn how to compromise between the values of physical reality and notional worth.
This all leads to some statements about environmental issues. Environmental issues are not in themselves the disease that man has to wrestle with. Yes, work on the environment is useful. However, what is dear from this work is that problems with the environment are only symptoms of a much worse disease which is caused by the value of wealth exceeding its original purpose and its demands being a pressure on man to exploit reality.
Damage to the earth is a by-product of commercial and industrial success and can only stop with a major rethink about what we should be doing on the planet, and why.
