Hans Rosling effectively only poses at solving a problem. He does not realize how hypothetical his perception is. His presentation is abstract, binary, quantitative and digital. Note how smugly he and his audience conclude with the sentiment that the Western model should be the foundation of a brave new world! The story that it is analog is nonsense. His perception is not relatively blind, as if against some perfect vision! It is completely blind. The phenomenological map he uses is totally unrepresentative of the world. It is right to think of ideal “truth” as a pipe-dream. However, misdirected problem solving is exactly about such brave new truth.

My understanding is that in a progressive, interacting global dynamic as humanity are engaged in, there is no ultimate truth other than terribly shortsighted (closed system or axiomatic) truths: and nearly all so-called problem-solving is similarly shortsighted or bigoted for being out of place. Problems at the scale of the subject of this clip is anything but conducive to home and garden type of problem solving. The delusion that there can be effective progressive problem solving at the global scale is reflected in the accelerating decimation of the biosphere.

So what about conservation and alternative energy, etc? The most well-meaning green measures are token – and dismally too little too late. The machine is split in blindly specialized engines so the whole rolls on. Rosling does not seem to realize that from a human animal perspective the kind of nonsense he is talking is symptomatic of technological singularity by artificial intelligence long ago integrated in our brains and now increasingly transcending our brains. For instance, he promotes production, consumption and capitalism by parading esoterically abstract positives like individual wealth, sustained population and child survival. He sees civilization as a human-directed project, and not as the mechanically, self-organizing cosmic emergence that it is. In this and other shortsightedness he is inadvertently engaged in the kind of chronic perceptual distortion driving humanity into posthumanism, which is the extinction of humanity.

Skeptical philosophy of the kind I express, in full and not token awareness of the vacuity of reason, may yet be the way to get out of the mess. Widespread realization and development of my theme may rationally slow down, scale down and shut down the kind of civilization now driving the well-meaning but twisted and overheated, life-destroying mindset in the world.