NOTICE ARCHIVE - 12/06/2021The Population Alarmists were an exciting coalition. Some simply disliked people who believed in a God who ban condoms and abortions. Others were most afraid of the Chinese. Some were probably gentle humanists who became stressed and distressed by people in such high number that they were no longer able to discern individuals. The really funny ones were the ones who only half-heartedly blamed their disgust for man as a species. With lustful longing, they could speak of coming plagues and famines.
There's really one thing that worries about the World population. That's what they'll spend their days doing. It is not exactly that unemployment will rise. Rather the opposite. People have an amazing ability to find something to fill their days with and the better off they get, the less the invention has to do with obvious needs.
In the last 20 years, the proportion of university graduates in most countries has multiplied. These people have specialized in something. IT for example. Or material physics. Or gender pedagogy. Of course, everybody think that their specialty is utmost important. Otherwise they would have chosen something else. And after three or four years of investing time, all these people think their specialty is even more important. Otherwise, they would be directly self-destructive.
The problem is that the more specialties we have, the greater the competition become for attention. It's triggered for fight. Almost all specialists will think that they, or at least their subject, gets too little attention.
But suddenly one specialty breaks through and the silence of the public breaks out. Epidemiologists rise in full speed, pushed by the lobby, to the podium of the Most Important Specialist of the World. Superman has come to save us from the evil alien virus.
Just these Specialists have researched, conferred and established a common picture of what is to come. And what is to come are real disasters, which only epidemiologists can master. New rules must be established. Closed boarders. Sneezing spies, motivated to turn over their friends or parents, a necessary sacrifice to grant the existence of civilization. Health passports. Test results tattooed on the skin. Compulsory body inspection. Vaccination in masses. There is even a kind of high priest for this specialty. His name is Neil Morris Ferguson and he rules from Imperial College London. Hardly anyone has been able to sneeze in the last 15 years, without he is coming up with a report showing that hundreds of thousands will die. Of course, he has almost invariably been seriously wrong. But he is still there, because now got enough specialists all over the world and they joined forces in a global coordination never before experienced.
In the future every specialty longs to be taken seriously. Every specialist wants everyone to understand that what they are doing is most important of all. And when it comes to an opportunity to leave everything else behind for the most important thing of all - my specialty - society does not have much to argue.
We did not have that problem when we were so few that we had to specialize in obvious needs. The shoemakers knew we knew they existed. But now we are so many that the world is full of specialists who feel overlooked. They are just waiting for their chance to take over.
