Henry's Emanations
Economic Growth
Economic growth does generate wealth, mostly material wealth. BUT it increases inequality and it has some terrible side effects.
It tends to mesmerise people into a materially comfortable false sense of security, isolating them from the environmental destruction that their material comfort is causing.
Economic growth makes poor people slightly richer so they don’t complain and makes rich people much richer so they fight like hell to keep it going.
Economic growth does increase human wellbeing and happiness but only in it’s early stages. Once it has lifted people out of extreme poverty, given them homes, welfare support, power, clean water and a few toys to play with, any further growth just increases inequality and wrecks the environment, and happiness levels go down.
Britain and the USA passed this point decades ago. In Britain, happiness levels have been declining since the 1950s even though incomes have tripled. The growth system has become an addiction, a millstone. It has the capacity to provide for everyone’s needs many times over and to liberate people from unnecessary labour, but it doesn’t do that, it would rather constantly create new needs to endlessly expand the treadmill of production and consumption.
Continuing to pursue economic growth now in the middle of a climate emergency is madness. Growth and sustainability are at odds. While we try to repair, reuse, recycle, re-purpose, share; growth tries to get us to buy knew things to make up for the lost GDP. It creates new ‘needs’ using advertising, built in obsolescence etc.
Growth only cares about GDP, wanting it to grow endlessly, but GDP measures all activity in the economy regardless of whether it is good, bad, pointless, destructive, wasteful etc etc.
Immigration Facts!
FACTS ABOUT IMMIGRATION
1. We can’t be sure what effect immigration has had on the UK because we don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t had the immigration.
2. Even if immigration has been good for us so far, that does not mean more will be good.
3. Immigration does NOT put extra strain on public services - any extra demand for services is canceled out by extra workers available to provide the services.
4. Immigration DOES put extra strain on resources, space, and mainly LAND. We can produce more of anything that the extra people might need, except land.
5. Land equates to food security. Britain imports nearly half it’s food and would really struggle to feed it’s people without those imports. We cannot rely on there always being food surpluses for us to import, especially as climate change starts to hit crop yields.
6. Wanting to control immigration does not make you a racist, isolationist, protectionist, fascist, hater of foreigners
Rich countries like Britain have low unemployment and this attracts people from poorer countries where unemployment is higher. This causes a general movement of people from poorer countries to richer ones - the rich countries become overcrowded and the poorer ones underpopulated. This clustering of people in the more successful areas is not good for anybody. So we control the movement of people.
Or maybe we can attack the cause? The inequality is the cause but to fix this would need massive shifts of wealth which would probably cause the rich economies to collapse.
Looking at it more philosophically, people tend to be reasonable happy with whatever level of wealth they are used to. And of course there are many types of wealth. When we talk about ‘rich’ countries we mainly mean rich in terms of money and material goods. Maybe some of the ‘poor’ countries are rich in terms of time, community, culture, satisfying lives.
Multiple Genders
There is a lot of fuss about the invention of large numbers of ‘genders’ and the enforced use of certain pronouns etc.
An ancient, hackneyed phrase really has this covered: live and let live.
We all need to adopt and promote the following attitude: human beings come in a huge variety and that’s a good thing. It makes life fun and interesting, let’s enjoy it! There’s no need for anyone to get aggressive.
If a person wants to identify as ‘X’ that’s fine and if anyone gets aggressive toward them because of it that would be wrong and bad. But if the person says ‘I am ‘X’ and I therefore I demand that you accept it without question, that you treat me in a very particular way and use certain words chosen by me, and if you don’t I will get aggressive with you, condemn you and possibly even try to prosecute you, that would be equally wrong and bad .
To suggest that there is no such thing as male and female (as some people do) is just silly. The overwhelming majority of humans are either male or female, but there is huge variation within that. I, for example, am definitely male, but I am typically male in some ways, untypical in others. The point is I don’t worry about it; I don’t agonise over a crisis in my masculinity or whatever. Yes I do happen to be male but above all I am an individual.
Understanding the biological differences between men and women is very helpful in understanding behaviour in general, but it tells us almost nothing about any particular person.
Labels can also be useful but can easily become millstones. Just be a person!