Furthermore, the absurdity of modern life is blatantly revealed by those economic aspects that essentially, and regressively, determine it. On the one hand, an economy of necessities has decidedly become an economy of excess, one of whose causes is the overproduction and progress of industrial technology. On the other hand, overproduction requires, for the sake of the market, that a maximum volume of needs be fed and maintained among the masses: needs that, on the brink of becoming customary and 'normal,''' entail a corresponding, growing conditioning of the individual. The first factor here is the very nature of the dissociated productive process that has, as it were, taken modern man by the hand, like an unleashed giant incapable of restraint, thus confirming the saying: Fiat production pereat homo! (Let there be production! Let man perish! — Werner Sombart). While in a capitalist regime not only greed for profits and dividends has a part in this senseless increase in production, but also the objective necessity for capital reinvestment in order to prevent a blockage paralyzing the entire system, another more general cause of the senseless increase of production along the lines of an excessive consumer economy is the necessity to employ labor to combat unemployment. As a result, in many states the principle of overproduction and overindustrialization, exacerbated by the demands of private capitalism, has become the very dictator of sociopolitical planning. So a vicious circle forms, the opposite of a system in equilibrium, of processes well contained within sensible boundaries. \nThis naturally brings us to an even more prominent aspect of the absurdity of modern existence: the unrestrained increase and growth of the population, occurring along with the regime of the masses, fostered by democracy, the 'conquests of science,' and the unselective welfare system. The procreative pandemic or demon is effectively the principal force that incessantly feeds and sustains the entire system of the modern economy, with its mechanism ever more conditioning the individual. Proof positive of the derisory character of the craze for power nurtured by today's man is the fact that this creator of machines, this dominator of nature, this inaugurator of the atomic era, is not far above an animal or a savage when it comes to sex. He is incapable of controlling the most primitive forms of the sexual impulse and everything connected with it. So, as though obeying a blind destiny, he ceaselessly, irresponsibly, increases the formless human mass and supplies the chief driving force to the entire system of the paroxysmal, unnatural, and ever more conditioned economic life of modern society, creating at the same time innumerable hotbeds of social and international instabilities and tensions. The vicious circle then becomes that of the mass, which, with the excess potential of a workforce, feeds over production, which in its turn seeks ever-larger markets and masses to absorb the products. Nor can we ignore the fact that demographic growth has an index inversely proportional to the social scale, thus adding a further factor to the general regressive process.

• anti-consumption
• the spectacle
• capitalism
• society
• conditioning
• market
• greed
• progress
• economics
• consumerism
• unemployment
• population growth
• lust
• sexuality

One can hardly doubt that consciousness, like the ability to resist disease, confers an immense adaptive advantage on any individual who possesses it. In the search for a causal agent capable of synergizing cognitive activity and thereby of playing a role in the emergence of the hominid, researchers might long ago have looked to plant hallucinogens were it not for our strong, almost compulsive avoidance of the idea that our exalted position in the hierarchy of nature might be somehow due to the power of plants or natural forces of any sort. Even as the nineteenth century had to come to terms with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. Being stoned seems to have been our unique characteristic.

• consciousness
• evolution
• adaptation
• existence
• psychedelic drugs
• drugs
• nature
• science
• fear
• religion
• humanity
• population growth
• power
• doubt
• activity
• disease
• plants

In 1800, London was the world's largest city with one million people.  By 1960 there were 111 cities with more than one million people.  By 1995 there were 280, and today there are over 300, according to UN Population Fund statistics.  The number of megacities (with ten million or more inhabitants) in the world has climbed from 5 in 1975 to 14 in 1995 and is expected to reach 26 cities by 2015.

• humanity
• london
• population growth
• society

The core argument is very simple: America has a problem and the world has a problem.  America's problem is that it has lost its way in recent years - partly because of 9/11 and partly because of the bad habits that we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society's ability and willingness to take on big challenges.\n\n 'The world also has a problem: it is getting hot, flat, and crowded. That is, global warming, the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable.  In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change.  How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century.

• climate change
• humanity
• population growth
• society
• usa
• animals
• life
• will
• change
• america
• energy
• poverty
• plants