Population growth and harmful human lifestyles have pushed Earth's environment to the brink, threatening the future of its inhabitants. These ingrained behaviors will not be changed easily. Author David Louis Sussman spent his career as an international business consultant. He advocates for greater awareness of population issues. Through years of experience, he has seen firsthand the consequences of human behaviors; The Cosmic Cancer offers a prescription for Earth's salvation based on his observations. Human behavior in civilized society is responsible for much of the degradation in Earth's environment. Sussman analyzes fundamental issues that must be addressed: ¿ Failure to nurture our youth, even though we know they are the future ¿ Emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities in democracy ¿ Sexual repression and its destabilizing consequences ¿ Exploitation of mysticism by political and religious operatives ¿ The schism between science and philosophy, and the perils of grandstanding environmentalism ¿ The human behavioral repertoire has brought about colossal changes in the planet we inherited-changes for the worse rather than the better. This is not merely an American problem; our behaviors are universal. They are a part of the fundamental human condition. However difficult it may be, we must alter our behaviors now, in order to preserve the planet for generations to come. The Cosmic Cancer will show you how. It will not be an easy change, but it is necessary for the survival of humanity and the rest of life on our planet.

The Cosmic Cancer

Effects of Human Behavior on Life of Our PlanetBy David Louis Sussman

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 David Louis Sussman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-4726-9

Contents

Acknowledgements....................................................ixPreface.............................................................xiChapter 1 Introduction..............................................1Chapter 2 A Matter of Choice........................................15Chapter 3 How Many of Us Are Too Many?..............................32Chapter 4 The Jewel In Society's Crown..............................55Chapter 5 Rights Are Wrong In Democracy.............................85Chapter 6 Sexual Repression And The Peeping Tom.....................96Chapter 7 Spirit, Religion And Politics.............................104Chapter 8 A Road Not Taken..........................................142Chapter 9 To Be Or Not To Be........................................179Endnotes............................................................189Bibliography........................................................209Index...............................................................215

Chapter One

Introduction

Every one of us has exactly two parents. We probably have four grandparents, but not necessarily - in fact, we could have only one maternal and one paternal grandparent if our parents brought us into this world incestuously.

If we assume the normal pattern of parenthood, five generations back we would have 32 ancestors. Go back 10 generations and there would have been 1,032. Fifteen generations ago our ancestry, numbering 32,728, would have trouble finding seats in a modern sports arena. Beyond this our parentage begins to assume the proportions of the modern industrialized state - 33 1/2 million at 25 generations. At 50 generations, approximately a millennium, the numbers approach the astronomical at a little more than 1,000 trillion!

Modern humans have a history of about two hundred thousand years (about 4000-8000 generations). It is clear that the assumption of two distinct parents for each ancestor of anyone alive at this juncture and doubling the number of progenitors in each generation backward in time is patently untenable. In fact, there were only about 100 million humans in the year 1,000 A.D.

Over the span of modern human history there obviously has been a great deal of mixing and matching. How closely any two of us alive today are related can only be approximated, using the currently available state of the genetic arts. Considering the intermingling brought about by war, migrations, pilgrimages and the like, for all but the most isolated human populations, each of us is of uncertain parentage beyond a relatively minor span of history. We stand on the shoulders, or under the foot, of our ancestors, the great preponderance completely unknown. The amalgam of genetic and cultural strains, of which each of us is comprised, is beyond conventional analysis. Recent experience tells only a very small part of the story and is woefully incomplete at best, and in fact can be highly misleading. Any inferences drawn from analysis of behavior in a current social milieu fails to take into account the great river of history that resides in each of us. As Scottish biologist Richard Dawkins points out (River Out of Eden), we are all progeny of an unbroken string of survivors, those who had what it took in their respective eras to stay alive at least to the point of producing offspring. In another work (The Selfish Gene) Dawkins explains the relevance of kinship to what is commonly considered altruistic behavior, which compels us to think about the potential benefits of spreading knowledge about human relationships to the minds of every child in the world.

Steve Olson (2002) explains how race and other categorization of human populations tend to overstate divisions among us. We are much closer genetically than meets the eye. For example, he points out that every one of European origin living today had at least one common ancestor within the last few thousand years. If altruism were linked to kinship, one would anticipate far less strife among national and ethnic groups. The fact that we are more militant and contentious than might be expected is, to say the least, a disappointment.

For these reasons it seems inappropriate to analyze one's personal history. What can be learned in this way, when knowledge of such a large proportion of the underlying behavioral influences is lost forever? The 'choice' is rather to reveal impressions of human existence, for what they are worth, and little of the life experiences from which they were gleaned. This may appear presumptuous, but we all are inclined to have others see the world from our perspective, even though we do not fully understand it. There is no help for this - atavistic forces are at play.

We are limited by our own experience of birth and death to insist that there is a beginning and an end. But suppose that there isn't any isn't, that there is only what is. Then what nature provides may be the only game in the universe, which, despite all our attempts to intervene, to the contrary goes on its merry way without being constrained by our limited perceptions. 'God' may have created and may even be controlling things out there, but our rational faculties do not lead us inevitably to its existence.

The delicious part of this mlange is that our fate is not sealed, despite our inability to do anything about it. Nature plays her tricks with the billiard balls of life (see Chapter 3 A Matter of Choice), games of chance that obviate predictions about how they will respond to physical and 'emotional' interactions. For the observer this is the only interesting part of the panorama. This is what makes immersion in the currents of life a worthwhile endeavor.

There seems little doubt that humankind has now reached a state in which its numbers and consumption patterns have remarkably altered its habitat, comprised of virtually every corner of Planet Earth. Pundits have warned that humankind is in imminent danger of extinction. In fact, the rate of extinction of other species is now greater, from all evidence, than it has been since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 60 million years ago. There is little doubt that the culprit is humankind. Mass extinctions in the past have been associated with cataclysmic environmental events. This is probably the first instance of such extinctions resulting from the lifestyle of one of Earth's inhabitants, and there is little doubt that these other species are so many 'canaries in the mineshaft', harbingers of what is in store for humanity itself.

Something has happened to the feedback loop. Normal instincts of self-preservation, even in the absence of will, would be expected to precipitate individual countermeasures to avoid catastrophe, which would be reflected in the collective response. But knowledge about symptoms of imminent danger such as urban mayhem, children murdering children, alienated people reeking of hatred and seeking to inflict violence, even hysteria in music and other art forms, do not appear to register or elicit any serious response that would tend to alleviate them. We have 'selected' a path that we know to be wrong, but continue its traverse because we are powerless to correct, driven by forces stronger than rationality. The culprit is a form of dual personality disorder, epitomized by the words of Pogo, Walt Kelly's comic strip...