To: oped@nytimes.com
Re: Our "more animal than human" nature and the "insanities of normality"
Date: Sunday, 8 August 04

According to an article in today's NYT, despite new and better products at lower prices, companies are finding customers less appreciative ("Companies Find They Can't Buy Love With Bargains").

 

This needs to be recognised for what it is: a symptom of man's "more animal than human" nature, which is threatening the survival of our civilisation, possibly even our species.

 

William Taylor's observations confirm my own, that most people are never satisfied, no matter how much they already have. Thus, there is no prospect of demand ever  levelling off, despite the material demands of the world's richest billion inhabitants already placing a non-sustainable drain and strain on our planet's finite resources and carrying capacity. 

 

The rich strive to become even richer (indeed and insanely, are encouraged to do so by our growth-dependent economy and its multi-billion dollar advertising and credit industries), while the less well-off are forever striving to catch up. 

 

Soon our planet will have 7-9 billion human inhabitants, most with little appreciation of what they have (once they have it), but an insatiable desire for more and more . . . . . Until the drain and strain proves too much for Spaceship Earth and brings our entire civilisation crashing down.

 

The Report, "Bargains Help Auto Industry Recover in July", in last Wednesday's NYT underlines the madness we are caught up in, but fail to recognise because of its "normality". There are so many of what I call the "insanities of normality" leading us towards our doom.

 

No, I am not a pessimist. Far from it. We have the ability to save ourselves, but only if we come out of denial and face up to the hopeless situation we have developed progressed and plundered ourselves into during the course of the past century or so, driven by our "more animal than human" nature. 

 

We have to create an economy and lifestyles based, not as they largely are now, on our primitive animal nature, but on our more enlightened, far less competitive and materialistic, human nature. It will involve initiating the greatest and most rapid revolution in human history. The 20th Century should have taught us how NOT to go about it, since failure is really not an option.