Dom Alhambra

Who knew that Objectivism could be associated with any hippy dippy environmental perspective? For those few Objectivists out there, let me use your language to explain the importance of our inhabited environment for you:

Since things are what they are, since everything that exists possesses a specific identity, nothing in reality can occur causelessly or by chance. (Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It)

Do you ever wonder why shootings, depression, social anxiety, poverty, addiction, or crime now occur on a day-to-day basis? Why do so many that live in material abundance seek solace in their deformities and traumas? How can companies like ExxonMobile can provide so much to the world without one word of thanks? It is because nothing in reality can occur by chance; a near-ageless, complex, natural ecosystem is at odds with our established wants and desires.

How can this be so? Why can’t the natural laws of the earth and universe provide us with the abundance promised by our parents and their parents and their parents?

Unfortunately, it is because we have lived in an age of irrationality for 10,000 years, under the guise of civilization, which can be summarized as the belief that the human population may grow beyond what the planet can provide. Or as the Christian God said, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and hav dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Don’t let Darwin fool you: the dominant species does not always last the longest. Our culture, which has dominated for ten millennia, can be brought to its knees by its own residence. The dominant species was able to clear the area of competitors for a period of time before it eventually starved, because it did not know the natural laws of the earth: that one cannot over-exploit an area for an extended period of time, that the earth can only support so much of one species’ needs, that the “success” of the earth is not predicated on the dominant species.

Objectivists, I ask you: What rationality have we had for 10,000 years when we extol the virtues of an agriculturalist who reduces the bio-diversity of the earth by one acre for each acre that they convert into corn and soybeans? We are now approaching 8 billion people compared to the few billion people we had in the mid-20th century: do you believe that we can continue converting the earth into agriculture for our growing population? Where do you find the rationality in the basis of our society? The basis of civilization?

Objectivists, I ask you: What rationality have we had for 10,000 years when our justice system is predicated on people breaking the laws? We have created a society in which people are incentivized to criminalize themselves to stay ahead of poverty and mediocrity. From the beginning of agricultural surplus, we assigned people to guard this abundance in case thieves would want to acquire food to stop their hunger. How can one blame these thieves, who were previously gatherer-hunters that could feed themselves in just two hours compared to the eight or twelve or sixteen hours that they must to earn food each day?

Objectivists, I ask you: Where do we go when we hit twelve billion, twenty billion people? Do we continue believing that another acre of corn will solve the hunger, or a larger government payout will solve the poverty, or more access to mental healthcare will solve the depression, or perhaps we just wait until people forgot that they were told from a young age to “be fruitful, and multiply”? How are we to deal with a culture that equates procreation with material success?

Objectivists, you have been trapped in a global culture that is at odds with the very foundation of your belief system. You have searched for small government and rational thinking to round out your ideological objectives. But as you push for these two goals, the world continues to burn because the Law of Identity is being ignored by the greater population: If A is A, then the Earth is a finite substance that can maintain so many of a species for so long. For the sake of rationality, consider the scarcity of land and inhabitable earth that we have when you are planning out another Objectivist rally or convention. In the most objective terms, we have given ourselves away to the mystics who promise unlimited fossil fuels, coal, and ozone layer, yet the facts tell us differently. Our near-8 billion population tells us that despite the growing number of industrial farms cynically producing our food, a portion continues to live in poverty—financial, intellectual, spiritual. Not even a portion with these terms; our spirit diminishes with every new destructive technology to harvest more fuel, with every new person created for no other reason of cultural pressure, and with every person set on keeping up with our global Joneses.