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)
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