X-Message-Number: 33003 Subject: Re: irrationality of the rich From: David Stodolsky <> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:03:02 +0200 References: <> On 29 Oct 2010, at 11:00 AM, CryoNet wrote: > > Are there examples of seriously rich people deciding that "at their age" > they will just lie down and die, in order to make room for new people, > despite assurances from the medical authorities that whatever ails them can > be "cured". If so what age? 65? 95? 125? > The point is that there is no deciding. Suppression of death related thoughts ensures that. Therefore, it is the cultural frame that determines what is acceptable. If you measure the safety features on a car, you can compute that a human life is valued at a couple of hundred thousand USD. However, nobody explicitly says, "A human life is worth 200 K, so adding 4 kilos of steel to the bumpers is a false economy". Unconscious soc-cultural assumptions determine the decision. > > Finally, many believe in overpopulation, global warming, energy and resource > shortages, etc. and feel that it would be immoral not to 'make room' for the > new generation. > This type of belief serves the same role as those things designated as 'sins' by the Church. That is, it is immoral to consume what is needed by future generations. Thus, even consideration of life extension is rejected. These New Age religions are misanthropic. Just like the traditional Christian view of man as a 'sinner', the (earthly) individual is devalued: The World Has Cancer and the Cancer Is Man. (Gregg, 1955)1 ---- 1 A. Gregg as quoted in Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome (Mesarovic & Pestel, 1974) page 1. MacDougal (1996) comments: "If you picture Earth and its inhabitants as a single self-sustaining organism, along the lines of the popular Gaia concept, then we humans might ourselves be seen as pathogenic," Jerold M. Lowenstein, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has written. "We are infecting the planet, growing recklessly as cancer cells do, destroying Gaia's other specialized cells (that is, extinguishing other species), and poisoning our air supply.. From a Gaian perspective... the main disease to be eliminated is us" (Lowenstein 1992). Dr. Lowenstein isn't the first physician to examine the planet as a patient and find it afflicted with humanoid cancer. As a long-time official of the Rockefeller Foundation, responsible for recommending financial grants to improve public health and medical education, Dr. Gregg traveled widely in the years following World War II and observed the worldwide population boom. By 1954 he had seen enough. In a brief paper delivered at a symposium and subsequently published in Science, Gregg (1955) compared the world to a living organism and the explosion in human numbers to a proliferation of cancer cells. dss David Stodolsky Skype: davidstodolsky Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=33003