Al Gore Proclaims World Soap Day

by Wolf De Voon

Five years ago I examined and refuted Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" [Science 162 (1968) :1243-1248] in a private communication that was subsequently lost, and I no longer have the wit to reproduce it with similar energy or eloquence. Yesterday I suffered a complete mental breakdown while listening to Al Gore. Contact with other human beings is extremely difficult for me now. The most I seem able to do is listen to vapid radio broadcasts or read in silence.

Today I picked up The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome, a group of scientists organized by MIT to study "the world problematique."

If you are unfamiliar with this French expression, it refers to apparently real constraints on exponential increase of world population, industrial output, energy consumption, and pollution. The Club of Rome used their best efforts to devise a model of the global economic system in 1970 and predicted:

"The behavior of the system is clearly that of overshoot and collapse. The industrial capital stock grows to a level that requires an enormous input of resources. In the very process of that growth it depletes a large fraction of the resource reserves available. As resource prices rise and mines are depleted, more and more capital must be used for obtaining resources, leaving less to be invested for future growth. Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation, and the industrial base collapses, which have become dependent on industrial inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, hospital laboratories, computers, and especially energy for mechanization. For a short time the situation is especially serious because population, with the delays inherent in the age structure and the process of social adjustment, keeps rising. Population finally decreases when the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services."

Fearing an avalanche of skepticism, the Club of Rome reconfigured their global economic model with ideal assumptions: unlimited natural resources, stringent pollution controls (cut emissions to one-quarter of 1970 levels), increased agricultural productivity, and "perfect" birth control. Global starvation is delayed from 2010 to 2050, but the long-run forecast remains unchanged:

"The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse... [T]his behavior mode occurs if we assume no change in the present system or if we assume any number of technological changes in the system... [W]e have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior."

Hmm. Pretty bleak forecast. Population will increase, along with consumption and pollution, until the planet can no longer sustain economic growth. Whatever shall we do? The Club of Rome offered a solution:

"If there is cause for deep concern, there is also cause for hope. Deliberately limiting growth would be difficult, but not impossible. The way to proceed is clear, and the necessary steps, although they are new ones for human society, are well within human capabilities. Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a totally new form of human society... [E]quilibrium would require trading certain human freedoms, such as producing unlimited numbers of children or cunsuming uncontrolled amounts of resources, for other freedoms, such as relief from pollution and crowding and the threat of collapse of the world system. It is possible that new freedoms might also arise -- universal and unlimited education, leisure for creativity and inventiveness, and, most importantly of all, the freedom from hunger and poverty..."

It is not my purpose to debunk this theory or to quibble about growth variables used by the Club of Rome almost 30 years ago.

It is not important to me that Al Gore adopted an insane economic model: less growth, tougher pollution controls, more spending for education and leisure (rather than "wasteful" industrial output).

America got the Club of Rome message, loud and clear. Steel production is bad, bread and circuses are good.

I don't care. Let's pretend that the Club of Rome and presumptive President Gore are right. The world is headed for global chaos in 2050, unless every American citizen takes up environmentally-friendly badminton as a career choice.

I want you to agree with this scenario: that there is an ultimate, fundamental, inherent and permanent conflict between the general welfare (i.e., the greatest good of the greatest number) and your personal happiness.

Call it "Hardin Revisited" -- that public lands are always spoiled by selfish individuals, who have no rational economic motive to limit their use of natural resources.

Or call it "Mugler In a Can," in salute to the Supreme Court's iron precedent of police power -- that the legislature has a legal duty to prohibit individual liberty, to stop people from acting selfishly in their own interest.

Doesn't matter what we call it. Names mean nothing. Club of Rome is just a name. Al Gore is probably a collective hallucination; there actually is no such person -- just an empty shell of a man, without purpose or meaning or an original thought in his brain. He doesn't need any to be ceremonial President of a country club, a charity, or a nation. All he needs is a smile.

Imagine casting Al Gore as "Mr. Thompson" in a film version of Atlas Shrugged. He has John Galt arrested for selfish, illegal use of natural resources. What does Gore say to Galt? -- that the world is in a terrible state of affairs, that people are starving, that schoolchildren beg him to sacrifice his personal happiness for the greatest good of the greatest number -- and (with a modest rewrite of the original dialogue):

Galt answers: "Fuck you."

As a de facto anarchist, I advocate and rely upon the Fuck You school of political philosophy. It is important to me beyond measure, because the right of an individual to exist for his own sake is paramount, not merely as an issue of morality, but intrinsic to individual purpose. All examples of personal purpose benefit the whole of society, whether these may be innovators or serial killers.

Deprived of coercive power, beyond the fixture of one man's blood and bone, an individual cannot do much harm. Put him in a legislature, you multiply his wickedness by a thousand. Make him head of state and nothing good is possible. To all tyrants, all parents, all churches and dogmas, all cowards and comedians, all petty law-makers and law-keepers, the right response is always "Fuck you." I owe nothing to no one.

Obedience Junkies

This is not an attitude or a choice. It is a fact. We live in perfect liberty and government is a delusion, sustained by our refusal to say "Fuck you." The impulse to compromise, to obey, to tolerate inane pageantry and pretended obligation is a self-deceit, the wishfulness of a child at play. Wave the flag if you must. Don't try tell me it means something. It is a piece of cloth on a stick. It makes as much sense as waving a washcloth on World Soap Day.

No doubt that's next. Al Gore proclaims July 4th World Soap Day, to encourage everyone to wash their hands before handling food. In his anti-selfish psyche, where the greatest delusion of the greatest number is all that matters, there's nobody home in Al Gore's head to wonder if it matters that, in reality, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, proclaiming the inalienable liberty of individual men, free by natural right.

From The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 2, No 41, Dec. 7, 1998