Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. As I said last week I'm not going to do any kind of year-end program or anything like that right now. In fact this will be my last podcast until about the second week in January. You know like some of my fellow podcasters I'm going to take a little time off and just kick back and visit with friends and family for the next couple of weeks. And I know that a lot of you still have to go to work for most days during these holidays but for us retired people and students well we appreciate all you do to keep the world turning for us and we hope that you get to take some time off and relax as well. And particularly you moms out there you know give yourselves a break and take a few hours off and just do nothing if you can. I know it's hard this time of year but you know there's always that one more present or one more card or one more box of cookies to take to a friend and nothing like a relaxing holiday season huh? But I jest of course it is fun to reconnect with family and friends and even with the ones that think you're the weird one when the truth is actually the other way around. But speaking of friends who are on your same wavelength I want to thank a friend of the salon Francis D who made a very generous donation to help with the expenses of producing these podcasts. So thank you Francis we all really appreciate your help and I hope that you and yours all have a wonderful holiday season. Now getting on to today's program as promised we'll pick up right where the last podcast ended with Rupert and Ralph discussing the challenges facing big science versus today's grassroots science. And once again I've left this recording intact complete with a few long pauses when they were obviously trying to figure out what to say next. And as I mentioned last week these trilogue recordings were made in September 1991 and apparently were recorded for their own use perhaps in planning another public trilogue or to gather information for one of their books. In any event these quite little recording sessions are starting to grow on me and I hope you feel the same way. So the next 14 minutes or so will be the conclusion of their first session where they were discussing the relative merits of big science versus grassroots science. Then there's a brief pause in the tape and right away they begin the second session and that begins with them discussing future books and trilogues some of which materialize later and some of which did not. And once again they began their recording session by first chanting Aum which I find quite charming myself. So let's join them now. So one of the faults of big science is associated with the reductionist perspective I suppose is this gradual progressive never-ending elimination trimming pruning off of different things that are labeled as pseudo-sciences amateur fringe science and... or subjective. Subjective all the paranormal all the nutritional all kind of alternative medical all these things that are rejected comprise a daily growing group. While the number of natural phenomena studied by big science official science and establishment science is always shrinking. So the one of the important gains of a new model for alternative science would be to open up cracks in the structure for the reintegration of all these different threads which represents a kind of a holistic approach to the whole field of knowledge. Especially when you include archaeology, history, the social fanaticism and so on. What we're talking about is bigger than science really it's the reintegration of the entire intellectual sphere. Of research in general. Yes. Yes because there's a great deal of amateur historical research goes on through local histories and so on. Which is on the whole unintegrated with professional endeavors. So that's one thing I think one one fight one further thing that is worth considering is the formulation of questions. Now I'm trying to do it in my book called eight experiments to say to change the world. Where I formulated eight specific research areas with eight specific experiments that could be done on very low budgets. Any one of which would have a paradigm shattering effect taken together. That would reduce our present model of the world to rubble and require the adoption of a much larger and holistic view of reality. These would be and they're all things that can be done for budgets of a hundred dollars or less. Now I spent some years trying to think out this kind of experiment and the ones I've finally come up with for this book. Selected from about 20 or 30 that I've considered. But this is my own unaided efforts and it's a virgin field and I can't believe that I'm the only person capable of thinking of these things. There must be many people given the incentive who could think up really good questions. One thing that happened with morphic resonance research was a competition run by the New Scientist magazine for experimental designs for morphic resonance. With prizes totaling only 250 pounds. Which led to a considerable wave of creativity in experimental design. In terms of large-scale questions the kind of endeavor I've been engaged in and thinking up simple experiments is something which groups of people such as ourselves or such as exist in many parts of the world could get together and think of questions. And not only think of the questions but think of ways in which they could be plausibly implemented on low budgets by groups of amateurs. Actually work out questions and possible strategies that could be implemented. These would then be competitions one way a kind of forum for questions in which these questions were published and you know the most interesting ones would be taken up by others and stimulate a public debate is another. But this is an important component of it and this is something that costs nothing it just involves people sitting around thinking and talking. And this I think is a very important component of it because there are lots of people in place who can do the experiments but most people outside the scientific endeavor have not felt empowered to ask the kinds of questions which you can ask. And because my own background is in experimental science I don't have that particular inhibition. But most people once they get into the idea at least a lot of people when they get into the whole mode of thinking up questions themselves not feeling they can't ask them because they're not professional scientists are quite capable of appreciating understanding asking these sorts of questions. So the realm of question formulation and experimental design in this context is a vast one which is a wide open field and which could lead to interesting debates publications letters it could be done through existing popular science journals if new scientists or even nature had a page in each issue devoted to the discussion of less than a thousand dollar research projects or things of appropriate small size. A question corner. A journal should have a question corner. That's right and then readers letters where people would write in and say well that design wouldn't work very well it'd be better to do it this way. A whole debate could be started within international science journals themselves and things like Scientific American New Scientist which would have a great reader attraction potential and and would cost virtually nothing in criticisms. We need a magazine called Core Scientific American. Well some journals already have a question corner I suppose like the Journal of Seriology I think they're interested in posing questions. That's right and they also have people's predictions for the year where people can offer their predictions about what's going to happen. Well something of this kind probably wouldn't survive actually as a separate journal but as an once this idea got more widespread and within existing period even newspapers could run on their science pages and and and there could be sort of sections of this in schools and universities student societies and so on. There could be if there was some forum in which the questions could be aired if some means by which they could be not merely sterile exercises and imagination but rather have prizes or competitions that stimulate this and give a personal reward to those who think them up and also some means by which the research can be implemented implemented and fed into the amateur networks and then we'd have a completely different model like in psychedelic research you see one could formulate particular questions which one could ask of people who take mushrooms or cannabis or whatever DMT and various psychedelics questions which would be which seem interesting or important to those experienced in the field which could be asked of many people people could write in to some central address or through some newsletter networks or something this information could be collected but to formulate in questions is an extremely important part of this whole vision and endeavor and fortunately that's the cheapest part of the whole thing as you know mathematics well it's not a science but it has this alternative structure already it's always been very strongly influenced by questions and prize competitions and the American Mathematical Society has a regular question corner and students and all kind of amateurs send in their entries attempted answers of these problems some of them are quite difficult so there's an existing model yes which it has a very strong stimulating effect on the whole development of the subject and some of the best people are in charge of the question corner well scientific American the amateur scientists section of exposure run for years and yes some quite intricate experiment carried out for very little money so we've already got models of our running yes you so how could all this be implemented well we have a sort of derived a workable alternative system you're assuming that other paradigms in society would shift simultaneously then this would not really happen I think the key for it is for example on the integration of the different paradigm shifts the the key for the transformation into this new model would be changes in the universities and high schools we mentioned several times high school students responding to these prize problems and not so many times university students universities have been one of the main institutions supporting this restrictive peer-review super professional and archaic world of science if universities were reformed so that they had departments of integration as it were interdisciplinary programs and a holistic approach then they could play a tremendous role you see in preparing people educating people to be amateur scientists interesting in many of these problems and the questions being proposed in the questions centers should become part of the curriculum in universities for example as more big resonance research has penetrated universities a little bit at the university for example there's a model that should be spread worldwide universities should be revitalized along with the revitalization of science and Korea's like in physical education so-called some schools have team sports these are of no use whatsoever to the amateur athlete very few universities like my university the University of California Santa Cruz had no team sports and only individual sports because they wanted to prepare people for a new society it was formed in the 1960s when in the hip subculture everybody gave up team sports and one of the only individual sports something that you could continue throughout your entire lifetime so that's a kind of change which is wanted in universities and all their other structures so that the full holistic range of intellectual endeavor including well what we call research is nothing more than participation the person who's going to participate in life in evolution in the future of the planet and the species than among other things it's necessary to do research one should be an amateur athlete and amateur scientist and amateur historian and so on everyone should throughout their lifetime if universities are preparing people with a model of education of self-education which could be continued indefinitely then of course they would be teaching this they would be teaching grassroots science where you have the questions where to publish the answers how to use the computer to how to do it in a sense the move in science teaching and other forms of teaching towards students doing projects which has been something's been going on for several years now is working in this direction because now students are taught to do projects and a lot of the teaching is supposed to happen through projects the only trouble is the projects they do are ones of the most utter banality and derivative kind for the most part because it's not assumed that a student can really do a serious and interesting project of any wider interest these are like juvenile training exercises for research rather than the real thing and there's no doubt people need training in research methods but there's very few student projects that I've ever come across are conceived on as being real research now the more fit resonance ones are real research and there may be other areas where they do real research and student projects but the direction of training students to do projects is already in place this is mainstream it's just the taking seriously what's already mainstream hasn't happened yet students are demanding more interesting problems and set them and because they're not set them they abandon science and go to something else which is more interesting and you have real problems that students can address like the computer science so the the creation of a new model for science for grassroots science would actually give universities the opportunity to revitalize their science curriculum thereby yes acting once more the better students were talented particularly for that giving them something to aim at in their lifetime of research without large grants and working in big laboratories for the military industrial complex so I think it's this whole discussion but it's very good news for universities okay I think we've solved the problems of science not the court of that yeah it was good we didn't quit a couple of times when we thought of it because then it never entered my mind you know if the future of intelligence is inadequate in the light of subsequent reading we can do that one again and to be much better same time so I I don't seem less to some other pressing reason I rather enjoy the trial logs and I think the concentrated form is better than once a month I can get into gear and into the mood it flows better you know it's like instead of writing one chapter of a book on the first few days of each month I mean actually I found easier to get right in and keep working day after day it may be a different spot yes subjects in advance and gave her some preparation would be better for example if we come here to give a workshop then we cram a certain amount of homework a day or two in advance and originally our fantasy for subsequent values was to go to the rent-a-house in Glastonbury hmm but I think today went well getting any problems so far why don't we just carry on and yes let's carry I mean that we were allowing the fact that we get together so rarely to dictate that we then try to jam too much into these things and that we might be better served in the end if we in an ideal situation did them more infrequently with more preparation I think we take that approach for volume three but volume two is I mean we the fact is that it's really difficult to get together and here we are we are together yes we do and if we don't like what we've done we can throw it away but we're regarded as the roulette approach we'll do six or seven maybe three or four of them we're like you don't know which one and if we can get together at other times all well and good but I mean it's hardly possible this is the only time we come to the world let's say we'll do one trial of improving we'll decide the subject two three months in advance and do anybody who wants to do homework and do so okay volume three is a phrase I hope to never to hear yes without doing this I assure you we'll have to bring back this that may have to come terms talking about it definitely won't suffice okay well let's roll oh it's maybe warmer do you want it oh well then let it bleed heat okay and that shines straight in my eyes okay all right because we're simply we may be getting into central it can also be dialed down we well try putting it off here are that's right that's quite a bit all right so we need to chant saving the world but we're going to change right so what will it be is that a home or a free or an Omaha perhaps the mantra of North America Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh do you have the sound you want Paul very good this particular trial log is titled saving the world and I thought it would be interesting to discuss this theme first of all because I think that there's a great deal of pessimism about the subject saving the world that people feel that if they can imagine a set of policies or actions that might be taken to save the world that then somehow these policies are unlikely to be realized because the inertia of human bad habits will somehow interfere with the best intentions and that hortatory ravings of the sermon on the mount variety have clearly failed if mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago so what's needed then is a notion or a set of notions which will somehow not run counter to the general flow of human needs weaknesses and expectations and yet create a radical change in the nature of our world and as I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin the one that I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over population all other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the earth which is in our own lifetimes reached a criticality anticipated by mouthless and other pessimistic thinkers in the past and yet even as we speak there is no serious assault on this problem population growth and its handmaiden resource depletion are running rampant over the surface of the planet is there anything that could be done to mitigate this situation and buy us a little time and I think the general feeling about this is no there is not that because people enjoy sex because people enjoy family life because people are not educated concerning birth control and so forth that somehow this is a problem we just avert our gaze from in the hope that perhaps war epidemic disease or some other natural catastrophe will intervene and do the work that we as human planners have been unable to do and I think this is a profoundly misguided and pessimistic position to take I was once challenged in a workshop I gave someone said to me well you're always talking to these entities in the higher dimensions why have you never asked how to save the world and at first I took it as a kind of facetious challenge on the part of someone who didn't really understand the protocols necessary for dealing with these entities on the higher planes but then I thought more about it and I thought if this is a legitimate source of information then this would certainly be a legitimate question to pose to these entities that profess such affection for humanity and so the next time I entered into dialogue with the chemical the botanical locos I posed this question how can we save the world and with a lag time of under a third of a second the reply was given each woman should bear only one natural child the logos told me I have to confess this was an idea that I had not given a great deal of thought to I don't think very many people have and so I would just like to sketch for you the consequences of this and some interesting facts that I've come upon in the process of looking into it first of all let's just take it at face value each woman should bear only one natural child and what would be the demographic consequences of this startlingly within 50 years the population of the earth would be cut in half without war epidemic forced migration government programs of sterilization so forth and so on if a policy like this were adopted by even a major percentage of the world's women the impact would be immediate in the succeeding 50 years the earth's population would fall by half again if such a policy were in place for a hundred and fifty years a serious social debate would ensue on a subject inconceivable to us are there now enough people in the world I took this idea and I began to look into the demographics of population and I made a very interesting finding which I have not heard widely repeated in the media even among the people who are concerned about the population problem and that's the following a child born to a woman in Malibu or the Upper East Side of Manhattan or Berkeley or Hampstead Heath in other words a child born to a woman in a high-tech industrial society in the upper class of that society will have between 800 and a thousand times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire this is something we are not often told when we think about the population problem we tend to think that it's little brown people on the other side of the world who just perversely refused to stop having children but in fact this is not what is going on converting a woman in Malibu to the notion that she should limit her reproductive life to one child is the equivalent to converting 900 to a thousand women to the same proposition in Bangladesh or Central Africa if we were to go to the third world and meet a woman who told us that her ambition was to have 800 to a thousand children before she died we would imagine ourselves to be standing in the presence of a social criminal a person so callous to the needs of the earth and the present state of humanity as to be almost beyond conceiving yet in fact this is the position held by any woman in a high-tech industrial society who chooses to have more than one child there are a number of interesting factors about this first of all if we were seriously to propose this idea one woman one child traditionally among demographers population policies have been most difficult to sell in traditional societies the traditional agrarian societies because in those societies having large numbers of children is linked to centuries of religious and social tradition and so then great frustration spreads back among the advocates of population control because these traditional women are unwilling to make this commitment in contrast to this think about the women in Malibu or Hampstead or the Upper East Side of Manhattan she is college-educated she has access to excellent medical information she is she should be an easy sell to this idea she's not burdened by centuries of religious tradition she is a modern secular progressive liberal person every woman of that type converted to this policy is the equivalent of converting 800 to a thousand women of the other type to this policy I mentioned at the beginning of this talk that it's important that the concerns and wishes of the individual be commiserate with this large-scale social goal notice that you can say to this college-educated upper-class woman how would you like to have more leisure time save a pile of money and be hailed as a political hero all you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child now to the obvious objection that people want large families and want more than one child you say the cities of this planet swarm with children without families we're not saying you can't have a house full of children we're simply asking that you address your unconscious genetic chauvinism and limit the expression of your own genetic heritage to one child you may fill your house with unwanted children from other parts of the world in fact we encourage you to do so so this is a plan where the goals of the individual and I think most women of this class I'm talking about would do desire more leisure time and are not immune to the attraction of saving money and would certainly like to think of themselves as behaving politically correctly now another interesting thing about this proposal is it's the first plan I've ever heard for having an impact on the destiny of our species that does not depend on men women claim that men run and ruin the world very well let women limit their reproductive activity to one natural child and save the world and increase their leisure time and wealth at the very same moment now several objections have been put forward to this idea the first is I've been told that I do not understand the nature of political power and the political power resides in numbers and that what I'm asking people to do is to diminish their political power by diminishing their numbers I reject this idea because if political power resided in numbers China would be the most powerful nation on earth followed close behind by India in fact these are they hardly place in the first five that's an archaic notion of what constitutes political power political power is constituted by money the control of abstract resources this is a plan by which more money would accrue to people who were making this step so I've asked myself why if our planet is truly threatened with extinction and social chaos by overpopulation we've heard nothing of a plan of this sort and I think that after some thought on the matter that the reason for this is because the capitalism is a the system under whose aegis we are operating and nobody knows how to make a buck in a situation of collapsing demographics in other words capitalism unconsciously rests on the premise of an ever-expanding population of workers and consumers of the goods which capitalism is set up to produce I don't think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future so I would submit to you that this extraordinarily simple idea appealing to all the venal drives of the individual could in fact be harnessed into a set of social policies which would very very quickly have a major impact on the planet in fact I'm interested in seeing computer simulations run how many of these high-tech women would have to convert to this notion before there would be an enormous freeing up of resources a very small percentage I mean I would suspect that if 10 or 15 percent of the women in the wealthy classes of high-tech societies were to do this there the impact on resource availability would be measurable almost immediately it isn't the poor woman in Bangladesh who should be preached at to limit her reproductive activity after all her children rest on the earth as lightly as moths or mayflies it is the children in the high-tech societies that consume more plastic glass steel petrol byproducts and so forth than whole villages of people in the third world so I put this idea out not only that it be debated on its own merits but because I think it shows that in trying to solve problems that we've come to think of as intractable we actually have fallen victim to a kind of failure of imagination and that some of the problems which we tend to think of as insoluble are in fact quite soluble if we will only make the imaginative leap necessary to think about them in these kinds of terms it was stunning to me to realize that without migration war disease coercion you could cut the earth's population in half in 50 years and make a whole bunch of people leisured and wealthy in the process seems to me astonishing that these kinds of things have been overlooked well well well well a provocative point of view to which firstly several objections immediately spring to mind and secondly to which I have a counterproposal or an additional one good my the Sheldrake plan for saving the world but before that first I should think that the incidence of single-child families probably is 10 to 15 percent of the class of women that you talk about already it's very common phenomenon the it's the number of children's inversely related to income it's a general rule and quite a lot of women already and you have one child secondly the adoption plan doesn't seem to me to work it would only work if the woman in Malibu adopted dozens of brown skilled skinned little children and then kept them living at a Bangladeshi level in her Malibu house the studies of adopted children adopted children in general are usually raised in a similar manner to people's own children and would immediately very important immediately promoted to the thousand folk comes can consumers I know families who adopted children from from Sri Lanka and from Hong Kong and Vietnam and so on and they're instantly promoted to the maximum consumption class by the very act of adoption so that point is I think quite invalid of course the adoption thing won't work so I think the principal objection to the scheme is a third point this is the very policy of the government of China is trying to enforce for two or three decades now each family to have only one child so the scheme has actually been tried and one has to say in the case of China it's had some success the birth rate is slower there than in India but it hasn't been completely successful because of the difficulty of enforcing it now take your point that it's easier to sell to women in Berkeley than it is to women in Shanghai but the I think the biggest problem to overcome is the prejudice against only children since all of us have had two children each if we ask ourselves why we had two children rather than one we certainly didn't have them because we thought we'd get more prosperous by having two children it must have been obvious before we did it that we'd be poorer it must have been obvious that there'd be a smaller amount of available resources to be spent on them there's a very strongly established feeling that somehow there's something wrong with being an only child and that seems to be the most powerful psychological obstacle that has to be overcome for this plan to be put into operation maybe I'll leave it there now I'll come later to my own patent scheme for dealing with the demographic situation yes well as I understand it you challenged the botanical logos to provide a solution and it came up with this plan and then you derived these demographic consequences which are startling to you and interesting and if we were to achieve the gain that this plan proposes we would then need a third step which I guess hasn't been done yet and that is to solve the problem how this plan is to be implemented so although I agree with Rupert not wanting to insult the entity in fact is the plan is not very original still I'm going to suggest that you go back to the entity to ask how this would be implemented because in your demographics there is this very big if if every woman and so on now for every family to have one child is not demographically different from many families on the average having one child that's a different implementation of the same policy and many countries developed countries now do have approximately zero population growth which means their average is about two right so this one is less than two and that's significantly less and that's interesting but as far as people adopting this plan putting this plan in force persuading people educate like there here's the big if how do you what is step three how do you implement this plan and this is as a matter of fact the real problem in saving the world and it's the one that we've been talking about in several meetings in the past do you use education this is a common theory that the reason that developed countries have achieved zero population growth is because of education or do you change the mythology I mean do all of the possibilities that we've discussed for making a paradigm shift a social transformation in general all of them would be applicable to this problem but which how what through education youth rewards how do you provoke the phase shift in consciousness which would result in people feeling as their personal goal to get the population growth of their neighborhood down to half well - 50% you have to point out this thing that personal wealth and leisure time will increase if this policy is followed in other words people will follow their own best interests so you have to you can't appeal to some higher set of goals you just have to say wouldn't you like to work less and have more money well I think there might be a solution to this problem but I doubt that's it I think that Rupert is right there's a preference based on actual experience for - not for - for zero or - what we would need here is to have more zeros and still some twos and what is really missing I think is for a large number of women to accept that they don't want to have any children at all that is the real problem then of course there already are many women who don't plan to have any children at all but to increase the proportion of women who are choosing that as their first preference the number of children they want to produce the entire lifetime is zero I think that's the difficulty yes well I think that celibacy is a misplaced impulse in this direction celibacy does it's arguable that it does anybody any good but if it were redefined to be thought quite a nice thing for people to make the sacrifice of having no children and such people were honored in society in the way that we now honor celibate priests or we recognize them as a special class if people knew that by having no children they would receive a certain measure of deference in society then large numbers of people might opt for that yes I absolutely reject the connection between sexual activity and reproduction I know I've heard that there is some kind of connection but I think that the women politically correct women in Berkeley and Santa Monica and so on that we're talking about they are mostly having children because they want to they've elected to I mean there are there are lesbian women who have children because they wanted there are some of the people who have children because they wanted to have a child they change that pattern only because they wanted to have a child that the wanted to have a child is the cause of reproduction not mysterious and unsuspected byproduct of being sexually active so I think we need in order to resolve this final problem in here in the entity's suggestion we need to find some educational or a mytho genetic strategy whereby people would really yearn to have zero children in that with or without sexual activity they have all kind of well I think this could be done in all kinds of ways through education through tax incentives through direct payment also I'm not I don't accept your direct payment I I don't accept the premise that faced with one's desire to have two children or if that were linked to wrecking the planet I think people would just have one child anyway yes well that's a possible breakthrough and in fact we don't know the consequences of having one child if it were generally accepted I think a lot of the one child talk that goes around has to do with the fact of the myth of the special character of the single child and daycares all kinds of social institutions could be retooled to make sure that these children spend a lot of time with other children so I don't see that as a tremendous barrier I agree with you I think we should encourage people one to have no children those people should be given special honor otherwise to have one otherwise to have one and never to have two and never to have two people should accept that nuclear families don't really exist in this society and so they're going to be single parents and that makes it more attractive to have just one that's right two single parents each with one combined in a house then in fact they'd have a sort of nuclear family with two children except both the parents would be female and the other thing is to start in these high-tech societies don't start in India and Sri Lanka that makes no sense whatsoever start in the areas where you're likely to make many converts then these third world societies which always which are tending to take their value systems from by emulation of the high-tech societies would see the positive feedback of these policies and could would quite naturally adopt them themselves in due time well I think we do have a plan this sort of rounded out well let's hear Rupert's other plan no I think we just raise one further objection which has to be overcome and first giving single children and single child families a better name this seems to me the most important and you think the easiest aspect of this plan that's I mean that seems very important studies are I never saw the case against two children until we'd already got to when I read an article in a newspaper in Britain the Guardian which was a fervent denunciation of the two child norm I'd never ever seen this before I'd seen plenty of things about what's wrong with any children but this said that having two children is grossly abnormal and in the past people had large families we've had multiple children multiple relationships with you have with two you set up automatically a dyadic relationship of jealousy possessiveness and fighting which creates a one-on-one competition situation which is a typical of the whole of human race in the past and that two children in fact may be a great deal worse than one now that was a strong argument the only time I've ever seen an argument put in favor of a single child as opposed to two and it was a well-put case and it had quite an impact on me it might even have influenced my own thinking on the subject had I read it before we'd had to so this this the this re-evaluation of the role of two versus one children is something that's a great deal more attention could be paid to studies could be made on the subject it may well turn out that this argument can be validated in all sorts of terms and the two child norm can be discredited in as a kind of myth or ideal in favor of the one child norm now that would be a highly constructive act together with social policies that would deal better with the problem of any children and all the rest of it somehow ways of living or where children spend their time with other children and anyone with a single child spend most of their time ferrying the child around to other houses so they can play with other children this could be made easier but there's a serious political objection to the whole thing which is that in a demographic society in a democratic society of one person one vote this the single most important thing that influences people's thinking about this question is being outvoted by the others in Canada in Ireland in Northern Ireland the great fear is the Catholics have more children than Protestants and they'll take over in the Soviet Union the fear many Russians have is that the Muslim Republic's have enormous birth rates compared with European Russia and that in a democratic Soviet Union they'll take over the fear in the United States surely must be that for the woman in Manitoba or Santa Monica that within five years maybe ten years Hispanics will take over control of Los Angeles within 25 years or 10 years 15 years of California and within 50 years of the entire United States and then they'll change the rules because they believe in larger families they wouldn't want to go along with this kind of norm that's the kind of objection which I think will strike people very deeply and raise tremendous fears I think there's an answer to that particular objection which is by takeover what you mean is claim an unfair amount of the wealth of the society or the resources of the political power but notice that in a society where this kind of policy was slowly taking hold all segments of society would grow more wealthy and there would be a diminishing anxiety about resource availability because there would be an ever-expanding available pool of resources in other words if we're going to cut the earth's population in half then there's going to be twice as much land and wealth to go around and so people would see themselves progressively enriched generally and specifically I mean in the world where the population is dropping by 50% every 50 years every time you got your mail you would learn that a distant cousin's line had died out and that his estates and bank accounts had been ceded to you so you think a chain letter principle is the one because Terence you already accepted the fact that in Bangladesh the population growth is not going to decrease only in Santa Monica and Berkeley no at first in those places I'm saying don't preach it in Bangladesh at first demonstrated in the high-tech societies and everyone else will follow along and as a society becomes more wealthy that means more educated the case will make more and more sense it's something that high it's interesting that the burden of working this all out would fall on the women in the high-tech societies who are have claimed that they have never taken their due role in human destiny and here would be a chance for them to step forward and lead us all into a better world by their demonstration well I think in the case of our own experience in our own families and co-parenting arrangements we had participated with our wives in a discussion about how many children and so on that probably would be the case in these high-tech developed countries and families and so on it would be sort of a partnership in many women that would have to come to this new understanding but women would take a clearly a flagship role in all this yes well suppose that yes suppose that Rupert's idea that a reason for large families and anxiety about the voting situation in democratic countries and well we could change the vote so that siblings the same mother would share one vote that would take care of that I think there are cleaner ways to take care of that I mean I see this objection but I think it could be met that social planners you could put in place incentives I think it could be met people are anxious they don't want to lose power or wealth or land and the very notion of a falling demographic reverses this pressure and everyone even the those for whom the policy is working least well are still living in a better situation than if the policy were not in place if the policy is not adopted or something like it we all lose if the policy is adopted most of us would gain well if we accepted just for the sake of discussion that the present population of the planet is an okay number then we don't have to seek a decrease then zero population growth on a planetary scale would be a goal let's just it's just a more general no it isn't true but for the sake of discussion let's consider that then we already have achieved our goal and developed nations many of them and not in the rest of the world so according to your idea if this would apply to the one child plan that the success of this plan would then diffuse over the underdeveloped countries that we should see that already happening and yet we don't know I think we do as in as standards of living rise population rates slow this has been observed all over the world I know but this standard of living is not rising because the population is growing and outstripping the resources and people have this enormous famine in Africa and their response to this famine is to have more and more children but for instance in Thailand South Korea the emerging industrial countries of Southeast Asia the population is slowing and the it's generally accredited to the rising standard of living and expansion of the industrial base yes I mean there's one further point perhaps not such a serious one which is the thing that terrifies people as well is is not just being outvoted by the increase of one section of the population relative to the other you know like Hispanics but also the question of immigration and in Vancouver for example within five years the probably majority of Chinese Hong Kong Chinese are flooding in every day great plane loads of them just buying up a lot of property in Vancouver Mexicans are flooding into the southern parts of the United States this idea of people flooding in you know the Germans are now getting worried that these Germans have they thought by unifying the country they could decrease immigration from East Germany in fact it's increased and now everyone in Czechoslovakia Poland Hungary with any ambition and who's prepared to move looks to Western Europe as the place to go any moment people in West Germany really afraid if there really is a kind of European economic free zone that includes all of Europe a free movement of peoples just what they've been claiming they want for 30 40 years they've been claiming this is what they want if that's what they get a hundred million Russians will probably want to move to West Germany you know that the problem of immigration it becomes is a very serious problem for a lot of people and this is another way reason as well as being out voted by demographic increase within the same country the problem of immigration from others you know the yellow peril these kinds of things have been but these immigrations are fueled by population uncontrolled growth of population well they're not because Eastern Europe has had one of the lowest population growth rates in the world in the last 30 40 years so the population of Romania and other countries in Eastern Europe's actually been falling much to the consternation of their governments they've had the lowest population growth rates anyway they've had negative growth rates the people aren't moving to the same and they want they're moving to the but you see that's just a problem we will always have problems what we're trying to do here is figure out how to save the world a chicken and egg problem because the is the logical consequence of your theory is that we have to solve all the other problems of the world in order to solve the population problem so the preposition at the beginning of your introduction that which which I concur that the population problem is the basic problem somehow that's not really so logistically that you have to all nations have to be developed nations people have to have education they have to accept this new idea they have to be impressed by the success of this plan as it's applied in other nations like all that implies the solution of all these problems so the demographic shifts of a constant population new locations would end because the inequalities of resources and that this would have been solved it well people will always migrate to where there are more jobs or better lives but if they are truly not migrating because of overpopulation in their homeland then they are emptying out their homeland and that means in the future there will be empty land to be reintegrated into the global economy the price Germany pays now by having millions of Poles move into Germany means that in the next century Poland will be a wonderful frontier for economic growth and a theater where people can build very stable happy lives yes well I'm not completely convinced I have to say because I feel that these basic fears about immigration pressure outvoted other people taking over a very very deep-seated and it would be extremely hard to remove those completely I think you would just pass the law as we have in the United States that being here doesn't give you the right to vote and most countries have laws like that I don't know other countries where if you're just there you can vote most countries make a very clear distinction between their citizens and recent immigrants and you have to establish yourself and citizenship is not automatic no well nevertheless the fact is that in Germany they have a problem with Turkish immigrants but it's not of being outvoted by them not no that's not the problem except in certain localized areas but there is this fear of kind of relative demographic demographic increase well maybe these are problems that are going on anyway but I mean I think that these would surface as soon as this policy of yours began to bite I think that the big sort of nationalist movements of white Caucasian movement springing up you know save the Caucasian race and that kind of thing and I think one needs to have some kind of plan in place in advance to counteract this very obvious reaction that would come immediately well I think you're right although these sorts of movements exist already what you would hope is that this was a solution and that therefore the consequences flowing from it would over in a fairly short amount of time outweigh the negative aspects of it and that people would see that their standard of living was rising there were more resources to spread around there was less a sense of encroachment and so forth and so on people could achieve zero population growth on a planetary scale as we could regard this as a halfway step from there they can progress you could give them a period of several centuries to get to the idea that what is really needed is a rapid reduction in the human population to 25% of its current strength but see the longer you wait the more resources you're using up I mean are there a couple of centuries worth of petroleum around are there a couple of centuries worth of hydroelectric power well I think if zero population growth on a planetary scale were achieved in the very near future if we could achieve that we could achieve anything well you would only achieve planetary ZPG if in large areas of the world you had less than ZPG because you they would be - you would be taking up the slack in those laggard areas but whatever it is it's even easier to achieve than what you're proposing because if people in Southern California let us say are seeing that their sector of the population is going to decrease to half within 50 years in the same span of time that these other folks are going to be multiplied by four then it's obviously not going to go no one is going to accept that why not the people in Southern California will be twice as rich the people in the other area will be four times more in poverty let us say another sector of the population in Southern California which is multiplying at the rapid rate with let's say 12% population growth per year so doubling the population in five years through immigration and increasing yeah well that's the birth rate in Mexico right now so there's an increasing 12% per year can't be 12% no no where's more than about 3.5% excuse me maybe to this transcript well I'm not saying you're not going to save the planet with a snap of the finger but since the other things on the table to solve this problem are thermal nuclear wars synthetic viruses pogroms genocide triage and computer-directed mass starvation this sounds to me like a pretty good idea this plan was conceived when I first went to India and was published in nature in 1974 and the reason I has a slight weary attitude to plans for solving the world's population is having had one myself and promoting it vigorously in international circles including various international aid agencies and I was working as part of one I had the air of people of influence and so on I was in a good position to do it and the fact that nothing's come of it over the following 17 years has slightly discouraged me anyway the scheme as it goes is quite simple it's based on the perception that in third world countries and in advanced ones but largely in countries like India where population growth is greatest people have lots of children not because they want to have lots of children acquire children but because they want to have lots of sons yes that point is I think quite clear that you can talk to any Indian any Chinese what they want is sons they don't want daughters yes the Chinese throw the daughters in the river yes and so the Indians practice female infanticide in Rajput and other castes and and that what they go and pray they spend good money on doing ceremonies in temples pooja's to try and have more sons than daughters incidentally this provides a test of the power of prayer of a statistical kind I checked out the male-to-female excess in the birth rate in India as opposed to other countries it's a hundred and six to a hundred males females in life births in India so it is in Western countries where there's no such strong prejudice so one could in favor of sons so clearly on a large scale the magical and religious means used to try and promote the parents of sons are not effective statistically speaking they may shift the balance in individual cases but anyway this the fact is they want sons now rather than trying to go against the tide trying to persuade people to have less sons or less children now you give them what they want now it's it was discovered in the early 70s that male sperm swim more strongly than female sperm and in vitro and test tubes if you put them in a viscous solution any viscous substance will do and they have to swim through it there's a progressive enrichment of male sperm getting through the other side there are other ways of separating them that have been investigated by the artificial insemination industry because with cows you basically want to have females rather than males so there's some research going into this anyway with human sperm like many other species male sperm swim stronger than female my proposal was a simple technical advance whereby a capsule of a viscous substance like carboxylethyl cellulose very cheap buffered at an appropriate pH would be inserted before into course into the vagina the sperm would have to swim through it in order to fertilize the egg and this would give a preferential enrichment of male sperm now the thing may be only partially effective it may only increase the chances is 60/40 instead of 53/50 which is the present ratio however even a slight increase as long as it was perceived as being increasing the chances would lead to a rapid adoption of this thing even if it was banned by governments the black market would spring up immediately the product would be extremely cheap to make assuming that this technical problem could be overcome you know you could make the product technically and the result of this let us assume that it could work to a little efficiency so promoting the chance of 75 to 25 in favor of science a reasonable assumption it would be widely adopted the proportion of boys would increase the number of children required to achieve the right level the desired number of sons would go down so there'd be a more adoption of birth control immediately but of course the main consequences would come within one generation time which is about 15 years in India since the average age of marriage for girls is about 14 in most parts of India then of course there would be the consequence would be a shortage of girls not all these young men could get married to girls or even if you had a system of polyandry developing the rate limiting fact for population growth is the number of women so you know women couldn't increase childbearing beyond one child a year maximum however many men they were married to or had sex with or whatever so there'd now be an immediate bottleneck on population growth population growth would begin to plummet that of course be social consequences associated with this and most Westerners who had this plan so well of course they'd all forget militaristic you'd have a pawn in wars that's not the reaction I heard from anyone in India the Indians don't have such a militaristic tradition they what would probably happen there is that you get a rising age of at which men could get married and instead of a diary system which is what causes people to not want daughters it would be the rapid development of a bride price system as people would have to bid higher prices to get the available girls which would solve another problem namely the low social status of women and desire not to have daughters and within 30 years the whole system would we re-equilibrate because the desire to have sons rather than daughters would cease to have the same motivation the entire social pattern would adjust it would there be social problems in between but nothing like the social problems caused by the doubling of the population in the next 25 years this plan which would go with the grain of what people want rather than against it technically conceivable and probably achievable if enough research were devoted to it none has been so fun here's I submit another way of tackling this although it doesn't address at all the impact on resources of children born in high-tech societies it's again a little brown people are the problem theory well it's well little brown people are the problem in large parts of Africa and Bangladesh and so on well yes but on a global scale it's the over consumption that goes on in the high-tech society that's true I read in the last week and I've forgotten where the inhabitants of Orange County California consumers much in terms of petroleum products raw materials and energy is the entire population of the Indian subcontinent this gives you a notion of the disparities that we're talking about yes yes well this is a separate issue I think the resource depletion the factor of 800 to a thousand that's a questionable I think Rupert's plan which does sound like like it would create a global decrease in the rate of population growth this is definitely would help save the world and furthermore I think that we could go into business and make a fantastic profit by selling the product at reasonable rates and in the end China so let's do it well I'm not sure it would save the world the problem is resource depletion however it happens we could just have rationing in Southern California then that would cover it by a factor of we're going to cut people back by a factor of 800 to a thousand well it sounds difficult but I think it's actually easier than affecting the population growth well that idea of cutting back consumption in Orange County California by a factor of 1000 seem to even leave Terrence speechless at least for the moment until we get to the next tape and I hope you picked up on what Rupert was saying about three or four minutes into this trial log the part where he was encouraging groups of people to get together and search out questions whose answers could actually be paradigm shattering you know I know enough about a lot of our fellow Saloners to know that right here in our own little clan there are a significant number of people who are every bit as intelligent and as creative as are these great trial augers so even if it's just you and one other person why don't you start asking the big questions the next time you're together you know rather than let the mainstream media dictate what you talk about I bet you'd be surprised at how many people you know are thinking much like you are but who are just afraid to be the one to break the ice so to speak you know maybe it's time to stand up and be counted when it comes to the evolution of human consciousness because if our minds and our emotions don't soon catch up to our technical know-how well I think we're possibly going to be the cause of our own extinction as a species which of course happens to unintelligent species I might add and hey what do you think about Terence's proposal that every woman and every man I should note that he added in later years but that each person should only have one biological child you know at first I didn't buy into the idea but when he said that in just 50 years that decision alone would reduce the Earth's human population by half well he at least got my attention and and what about the fact that a woman in the upper class of a high-tech society having just one child has the same negative impact on the planet's resources as a third world woman would have if she had 800 children Wow and I'm not sure those numbers are valid it'd be interesting to see where they come from but when you you put it that way assuming the numbers were valid well then the decision to have children really becomes a lot more difficult and I have to admit that I'm glad that I'm now past the age where decisions like that aren't going to come my way again you know I'm afraid that the way ahead isn't going to provide many many easy choices and I don't really think that there's any person or any group with all the right answers so the best you can do at least the way I see it is to just make the best decisions you can about things like having children and giving up red meat buying mainly locally growing organic food you know these decisions were once pretty simple but now they're no longer just casual decisions but our decisions that could have an impact not just on you but on your descendants and on the planet itself you know and in my humble opinion we're very near a tipping point one that I have a hunch is going to tip us into a much better basin of consciousness but it's still a tipping point and there's no better time than now to live as impeccably as you can it's time to stand up and be counted my friends because the stars are entering a new alignment and one that we aren't going to be able to ignore I don't think but for the impeccable well this may be the beginning of the best of times and and that's what it's going to be when these podcasts from the psychedelic salon return in a couple weeks if all goes even halfway according to plan we're going to have some really interesting new talks and interviews as well as the continuation of the trial logs and as well as some contributions from our fellow salonners in all I'm counting on having a wonderful time next year and I wish the same for you now before I go I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find at psychedelic salon org and if you have any questions comments complaints or suggestions about these podcasts just add them as comments to the program notes on the psychedelic salon org blog so that our entire community can get involved in these discussions or you can also post your thoughts on the psychedelic salon forum which you will find at the grow report calm where I also spend some of my online surfing time each week and for now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyber delic space be well my friends you you you (upbeat music) you {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.71 sec Decoding : 3.93 sec Transcribe: 5635.18 sec Total Time: 5639.83 sec