 Hello, and welcome to Global Connections. I'm Dr. Gregory Gatis, Associate Professor of Political Science at Hawaii Pacific University, and my co-host here is Dr. Phil King, a professor of political emeritus of political psychology at Hawaii Pacific University here. Dr. King and I have been colleagues for 40 years. He has a distinguished past. He is a graduate of Grinnell College and a master's in psychology from University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from political science and political science at the University of Hawaii. I was at Bowen Green for my bachelor's and master's degree and my PhD in political science at the same time. Dr. King, our presentation here today has to do with the imminent collapse of civilization. I know it sounds really overwhelming, but in fact, we've been working on this for 40 years. When we were graduate students back at the University of Hawaii, we debated many times about all the problems that were about us, the disappearing ozone layer and overpopulation and on and on, and nobody in the faculty was doing that. They're doing mindless games like game theory with card tricks and stuff like that to get published, and we instituted a non-trivial memo series. We sent two of them out. You sent one that I went out, then Henry Kerry held shy to us, and then we realized, hey, wait a minute, these guys have to give us our PhD. We better not irritate them anymore. So we still are concerned about these great momentous problems that the world has, that we were trying to figure out how to solve. And among them that have transpired since then, I'm just going to give you a quick list of possible threats that could have been about this end of civilization. Of course, one is overpopulation and mass starvation if there was a severe drought and there wasn't adequate food. Electromagnetic pulse from either the sun, which comes every 150 years, and we're due to have one in 2020, according to, one in eight chance, according to the scientists, which would be very bad for frying our electric grid. Financial collapse is really scary, the way that Japan and Europe and the United States is printing money and trying to keep it afloat, and we have a sense that the whole thing could really collapse. It could be a house of cards. We seem prosperous, all of us, but we could go under. Trade wars could happen. We could wind up like the Hootsmolley Tariff in 1920s, in which they led to the Great Depression. Climate change, of course, can bring up a lot of these things, and we also have long-term fossil fuel problem to sustain this highly sophisticated, highly advanced technological system that came with us for the industrial revolution. Now, you and I have been talking about this in various ways, and we were, our interest was first lit, I guess, by Gregory Bateson, who is outside of political science. We started looking for people outside political science for guidance in life, and he was a genius who had done many things, anthropology, psychology. The last thing he did was cybernetics. After World War II, he and Margaret Mead and those had a conference, and he came up with information theory and the idea that everything is related, and you can't just do one thing. If you do something to solve a problem, you might solve that, but have a lot of other problems that follow from that. So he was very pessimistic about humans' ability to solve our problems. So I once said to him in desperation, well, what can we do? What can we do? And he said, well, you can't do anything. In fact, he said, we once had a conference in which the people were divided. Since it's all going to collapse, should we do it? Should we precipitate it now? Should we sabotage society now and collapse sooner so the damage isn't so great, so we have four million people instead of eight million people? Or should we let it bleed? And half the people were for sabotaging it, and half the property for letting it bleed. So whoa, this is heavy stuff. So we spend a lot of our time arguing about these things, and we need to have some clarity on it. We need to share this with other people. And I'd like to turn to you to see how you see the problem. What do you think the central problem is? And in later shows, we can actually try to solve these problems. But today, we should just alert people to the problems. But what do you see as the major problem? Well, first of all, Dr. Guido, it's a pleasure to be here with you and to resume our conversation that we started 46 years ago. It seems like 46 days. You sound so old if it's 46. That's right. I recall that when we first grasped the oldest problem and tried to make some sense out of it. Since that time, the population of the planet has more than doubled. The population of the United States is up 60%, and the population of Hawaii has nearly doubled. So whatever problems exist to then have been exacerbated and exist even greater now. I personally think the main driving factor, which has been called the master variable in all this, is in fact, burgeoning and uncontrolled population growth. Because with population growth, you get a greater demand for the use of resources, more pollution, more complexity in society. And it's really out of control. Think of rabbits on an island. An island can maybe sustain a certain number of rabbits. If you double the number of rabbits on an island and then double them again, eventually the finite mass of that island cannot contain the increasing infinite number of rabbits. It's that simple on one level. However, it's a completely very complex problem because as you mentioned in your introduction, everything is connected to everything else. And if we extract more resources, then we deplete non-renewable resources. I recall there's that right now in Florida, they're deepening the channel around Miami so that bigger tankers can carry more oil in and out of Florida, and that destroys the reef in Florida, which destroys the sea life, which destroys the oceans. So it's hard to avoid doing damage. Now back in 1969, these were considered problems, very serious problems, but problems are not able to solution. If only, for example, people would have on the average two kids per family, which would lead over time to a stable world population. But since the world population has doubled since then, two children per family will no longer do the trick. Now we need really one child per family over about three generations. That would be hypothetically a very benign way to get the world down to a sustainable level of people. Many of our analysts I've read talk about two billion being the level of people that the planet could sustain at a lifestyle comparable to European lifestyles. European lifestyles are very good, perhaps a tad lower than the United States lifestyle because we have all these needs for transportation. We have a bigger country, but that would certainly be a very agreeable lifestyle for all the people on the planet. Unfortunately, we don't have two billion people on the planet. We have seven and a half approaching eight and heading toward 10. So that's, in essence, is the problem. And we could be talking about this for hours and hours, but we'll try to respond to your questions and talk more about a basic overview of the situation. Yeah. Now that you mentioned that, I just saw on the paper yesterday, this is out of the star advertiser of all things here, and then little headline is 400,000 kids in Nigeria at risk of starvation, UN warns. Well, you know what that means. It means that the UN is going to come to us and be compassionate to give food. And of course we will, as we always have. Sure, here we'll feed those kids. Those kids will survive. But remember, we taught, of course, social 100 in which the economic, it was different social sciences for economics. We chose this one famine in Africa. And it was interesting. They had a famine like in 1970 and all these millions of people were going to starve, except we rushed in food, save them. And then seven years later, 77, they had another famine. But now we have twice as many people, but we have to rush in food and save them. And it just is noticing, yes, last week that there was, oh, Ethiopians, they're starving again. And I realized what we have is what Bateson talked about, schismogenesis or a runaway system, so that if there's a problem, people are there, they're overpopulated, but we rush in and give them food, they survive. We give them medicine, they survive. So now they have twice as many of them, but they have eight kids. And then suddenly they exceed the carrying capacity of their soil. And they can't produce the food for that. We have to rush in again. So each time we rush in to save something in Bateson's terms, we just increase it. And it's like a runaway system. It's like your car is going faster and there's no, nothing, there's no governor to keep it in place. And one governor that you suggested was a limited population, two per family or perhaps one per family. So I'm agree with you that long term. When is this going to hit? What's your projection? How long do we have to solve this if you're going to solve it? Well, what was a problem in 1969 when we first started studying this has now turned into, in Greer's terms, a predicament. A problem is amenable to solution. A predicament is something you just have to adjust to and live with. I think it's highly unlikely that the world as a whole will adopt an average of one child families. But that would be a benign way to reduce population to sustainable levels. There was a computer, a very famous computer simulation done at MIT in 1970. And it led to a book called The Limits to Growth by Dennis and Danella Meadows and a number of other researchers. And one thing they did is they took some major variables such as population growth, resource use, depletion of resources, malnutrition, global pollution and so forth. And they put all sorts of assumptions about how these factors interrelated interact with each other. Then they would run their model out and to see what would happen. And they varied the assumptions in the model. Oh, we have so much agricultural productivity. Oh, we can double that or cut it in half. We have so much pollution or less. And whatever model, whatever changes they made to the model, what happened was a die off, a die off of world population by 100 years from when they did the model, which was 1970. So by 2070, well within the lifetime of many, many people currently alive, this would be happened. This would be a bad way to reduce population because there would just be a die off. Too many rabbits on the island, the rabbits starve and they die off. So the alternative to that bad solution would be a deliberate benign decision by human beings to limit family size. That hasn't happened yet. The world's leaders have been utterly derelict in the fact that they've ignored this problem entirely. And who knows what's going to happen? It doesn't look good. That's for sure. Well, how about this? Some people say that with industrialization and wealth, people naturally choose smaller families so that my grandparents might have had six or seven children. My parents had four children. I don't happen to have any children. Our generation, we have no children or one children or two children at least among our colleagues at the university. So it becomes so expensive to have children that people have less. Now this has happened in the United States. It's happened in Japan. It's happened in Europe. Is this a solution to over time that as people get wealthy, the problem will go away on its own? In principle, yes. But all I can say is too little too late. This is known as a demographic shift. If people become more wealthy and become industrialized, they do tend to have smaller families. But too little too late. This might have been a good coping mechanism 50 years ago, 80 years ago. But unfortunately, there's still a number of countries and societies that produce loss of kids. As you noted, the United States, if left to only natural increase, would be the population be even or maybe declining slightly. But because we want cheap labor, we have a lot of immigration, which means that the United States population has gone up. It's gone up 60 percent just in the time since we've been thinking about this problem in the late 1960s. Yeah, that's shocking to think that. There's one billion in 1800 and then two billion in 1860 or something like that. And then after 60 years, and then three billion after 30 years, and now it's just going up an exponential curve. And as you say, it has to be brought down rationally through choice or through collapse of some sort of starve off, which could come about, what would precipitate this, what do you think would precipitate this starve off? When would be suddenly, uh-oh, we don't have enough food anymore. Like if we don't have enough food here, if we don't have this great bread basket, because actually North America, the United States and Canada feeds the world, we're the ones with the two big, oh, I think Australia also has surplus grain to go around the world. But if something were to happen to our water, let's say, the irrigation under the aquifer there, for example, Nebraska and all that, I think that only runs 20 years. Right now it's sprinkling nice and giving us all this green crops and everything. But if that ran out in 20 years and we don't have it anymore, what are we going to do? What's the solution to this? Well, first of all, it's hard to know when various elements of collapse will occur. We, it's almost dead certain that they will occur, but whether something happens in five years or 10 or 15 or 20 or 50 is a bit indeterminate. I like to think of the old metaphor of a camel and the straw that breaks the camel's back. If you start loading pieces of straw one at a time on a camel, eventually that camel's going to collapse. Will its back break, as in the old metaphor, or will its knees give out, will its heart give out, will its lungs give out? We don't know, but we know that you can't pile an infinite number of pieces of straw on the back of a finite camel that will give way. Already we're seeing things like the rise of sea level, which is predicted to be 6.6 feet. The oceans will rise by the year 2100 by the end of this century. Can you imagine what that will do to Miami, New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco and places in New York like Rotterdam, which is already under sea level? So that's one thing that could happen. Everything is so interdependent. Things are universalized and not regionalized. If the grid goes down, it can go down for an entire state or half the country. What would be a rational solution or preventive step taken to prevent some of these catastrophes is to have things much more local and regional, have town-based electrical grids rather than state or national-based electrical grids, have agricultural production close to where people eat the food, etc.? Yes. These are all great thoughts here. I'm hoping that we can all digest these and have a basin called a drop in the population in such a way that survivors are in an untraumatized state, but it's hard to believe they could do that if people are starving and if there's actually going to be people mobbed going around with guns, going after each other's food and things like that. It could be rather ugly. So rational is the choice. That's what we should be doing. So let's hope that we're capable of thinking that way. The other topics that we're going to have to think about here that might precipitate this, because a lot of things can precipitate this. It could be, as I said, that electromagnetic pulse from the sky and so forth. That would, if it came, would fry the electric grid. They say that the North American electric grid is the greatest invention of man. It's the most spectacular thing more than the pyramids or the as-wan dam or anything else. And of course it's wonderful, but the problem is the more wonderful something is, the more efficient it is, the more grandiose it is, the more vulnerable it is to collapse, because any interruption with that, everything falls apart. I'm thinking of back in Marblehead, Ohio, where I was from, everybody had their own well. It was sort of a semi-rural area, and everyone's home is about a hundred yards apart or half a mile apart or whatever. Everybody drilled their own well. Everybody had their own water. So if somebody's well went bad, it's okay. His well went bad, but everyone else still has water. Then Marblehead put in city water. He went and he linked up and everybody says, yeah, let's link up. So they linked up to the water, and that's fine. But what happens if something goes wrong with that water? It got poisoned or it broke and it wasn't able to do it anymore, send it out to you, the electric motor or whatever. Suddenly everybody's without water. It's more efficient, that's good, but it's more vulnerable. And all of our computer systems are the same way. I mean, look at hacking into the, our Yahoo! just had a billion people hacking in, whether they went in and disrupted things since I don't know what they're going to do to the people's accounts or whatever. But it could be ridiculous. It could be awful. So it would be rather dangerous. The more sophisticated it would become. Because think of the brain. You see these images of the brain on TV and you'll see the synapses firing off and all the bits of information going around. And there are billions of those. And that's what society is. And if you go in and cut the brain at some point and so forth and stop it and that's perhaps lethal to that person, well if you do that to society, cut the electronic grid, then nothing moves. There's no transportation. And so Ted Koppel, whom I know you know and respect, a nightline moderator for many years, wrote a book called Lights Out. And in this book he said, if the electronic grid goes, now there's a couple ways it could go. One would be from an electronic magnetic pulse from the sun, which happens every 150 years. And we're due for one in the next eight years. That would be disastrous. In fact it's so disastrous we probably should hold off on this and save this, take a pause and come back to it. But at any rate, the bad fact about to leave people with is 90% of the people would die within a year. This is from Ted Koppel saying we can't get the food to the people in the cities and people are going to starve. So we are extremely vulnerable to one little thing, the electronic grid going down. It can go down two ways. One from the sun, from the solar storms, or it could be a nuclear weapon overhead from North Korea, let's say, or some crazy country, Iran, which explodes it and then fries the grid. Then we're in big trouble. I know in my own condo for example, whenever there's a big rainstorm and electricity goes out, people can't get the elevators to the top floors. So we have a generator, we start up and that generator will use one elevator and that solves the problem. So people can get up or down. But imagine if it went out completely and your generator runs out of gasoline, there's no way to get you gasoline. Imagine people living on the 40th store or the 140th store for talking about New York. No one's going to live there. No one's going to carry the water up. You can't even flush a toilet. The cities will depopulate. They're going to run out in the countryside looking for food. Farmers will say no, no, no. It could be chaotic. So these kind of things can also sponsor this, these electrical magnetic pulses either from a nuclear blast overhead by some rogue enemy of ours and only two rogue enemies and now that would think of doing that would be North Korea and Iran. I think the Chinese and Russians are too smart. They never pulled the trigger in like 40 years because they don't want to be destroyed. But some apocalyptic crazy man could do that sort of thing. So we really have to worry about that. I think that's one of the serious things. The other population things that you're talking about, it could be just a slow death. It could be a slow starvation regionally in some areas and so forth. But if America went out, I mean just think, we feed the world and Canada does, suddenly there's no food for anybody, no surplus food for anybody. So I'm a little worried about that. Just not just the problem is stopping the North Koreans and Iranians, the predicament is that trying to stop the sun, you can't stop the sun's solar storm. If they're going to have a storm every 150 years, it's coming. Now the last time it came was this 1848 and at that time the only electrical thing we had in the world was the telegraph and those wires got fried and we could use it. So we just replace it with new wires and got set up again in a week or a month. But if the electronic grid goes, it's, and if they burn the transformers, that's disastrous. So I would really be worried about that. And we ought to do something to harden our transformers or something. We're not doing anything. By the way, the only place that makes transformers is Germany and South Korea. So there's a limited supply of these transformers. We're not thinking ahead. We're not thinking about how to harden them or protect them in case of this electronic pulse. So that would be my concern. Everything that you say is true. It would be nice to be rational about population, but until that time comes, we're going to be subject to these other things. Who else besides Bateson was a guru to you that led you to understand this? Well, there was a man named Garrett Hardin who wrote a seminal long article called The Tragedy of the Commons. I think that came out around 1970 as well. And he pointed out that the morality of any action, such as choosing your family size, for example, is a matter of the state of the system in which the action takes place. So if we're talking about 1800 in frontier America, to have six or eight children made eminent sense, and it was a moral decision because you had an open land with many resources, and there weren't these shortages. Also, a lot of kids died very young or in childbirth as infants. But to have six or eight kids now is really indulgence. It's an indulgence for your own ego. When you consider the burden those kids will have on the planet and the very difficult life they're likely to have young children today. Anyone under the age of 30 today, let's say, is likely to have a very hard go of it. Yes, this is sort of depressing, but we'll have to follow up on this here. I will take a break here in a minute, but I want you to think about other things like the trade war and its possible economic collapse, the financial system, how shaky do you think that is, what else should be, what other items do we need to think about? We're not going to solve these in this short period that we have here, but we can at least set up the standard for what we need to look at. And then in subsequent shows, we can propose solutions to those things that are amenable to solutions. If there are predicaments, like worrying about an ice age, for example, that is another end of civilization, the ice age, which comes every 20,000 years or so. Last one came 10,000 years ago. There's nothing you can do about that. If the ice age is coming down to the sheet of ice a mile high, it got as far as North Carolina last time, we're cooked for a while. We just have to go south and avoid it. So the point is, things that can be avoided, though, we ought to be thinking in terms of solving problems, even if we can't solve predicaments like an ice age. That's quite a ways away. I mean, of course, there's, the sun's going to actually burn itself in a few hundred million years, too. There's other things that, and there's also asteroids coming out of the sky hitting the earth like they wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Those, nothing can be done. So we'll just have to accept that. But things that can be done, like your intelligence suggestion about limiting population, is sensible. Let's pause here for a moment here. And, well, we're going to not pause. Instead, we're going to pause for, to think about the next session. Anything else that you want to add the next time we have the show? Well, let me just mention that there are some movements, though, on the fringes of society still for people to actually get off the grid, for people to get back to the way people lived in 1880 or 1920, growing their own food, generating their own electricity, having wind mills. This is a small but growing movement. Thank you, Dr. King. That was a splendid presentation. We're terribly grateful. Looking forward to more discussion on these topics in the future. Very good.