There already is a wall, and electronic surveillance and manpower. Illegal border crossings on the southern border have been dropping since 2001... and are down ninety percent in that time. The vast majority of people coming to the southern border are seeking asylum... which is a perfectly legal activity.

The real immigration "problem" comes from visa overstays with Canada being the main offender, at twice the rate of Mexico.

So a southern border wall is simply a Trumpian dogwhistle.

"I wonder though how we could control our innate urges to do better than the Joneses"

Competitiveness is an element of human character... In our society it is emphasized to the point of being a super power compared to some other lifestyles.... I mean that literally.

So, while competitiveness is a characteristic so is cooperation. What would a world society built on cooperation look like...?

{shrugs}

When I really get to thinking about it, it kinda boggles my brain.

So because of agriculture we've been led into defending fields that once supported anyone that walked across them. Because of agriculture we've had to develop money, and property and authority.

These things are not necessary to our survival... and the creation of them in a competitive environment leads to just about every human crime you can think of.

Without these things Human population doubled every ten thousand years... The lifestyle was sustainable and lasted some 190,000 years and generated a final human population of 5-10 million individuals.

There was still competition, and murder and every other expression of the human character... but the balance was much more even and less specialized. Can't go back to that even if we wanted to, but there are structural elements of these groups that could inform a more sustainable society and population within the energy budget given by the sun.

Getting there from here would likely be very difficult... to say the least.

Here's a vid:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-history-of-human-population-growth-and-carrying-capacity.html

You will note that carrying capacity changes over time as new methods are adopted.

You've already acknowledged that agriculture supports larger populations. Are you changing your mind?

Hunter-gatherers need much more land to live on than farmers. Different methods produce different population sizes.

I have no idea why you think a species change is necessary. We aren't dogs, we can chose different lifestyles and those decision have consequences.

Are you familiar with the idea of carrying capacity?

"The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water, and other necessities available in the environment."

So, would you agree that the Earth has a different carrying capacity if we adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle than an agrarian lifestyle?

"Your arguments are nonsense. Human energy comes from consumed agricultural produce"

Where does the produce come from?

Definition of agrarian (Entry 1 of 2)
1 : of or relating to fields or lands or their tenure
agrarian landscapes
2a : of, relating to, or characteristic of farmers or their way of life
agrarian values
b : organized or designed to promote agricultural interests
an agrarian political party

Environmental impact of agriculture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_agriculture

I'm not actually making anything up. There are observed differences between hunter gatherer lifestyles and farming... if you prefer. These observed difference are exactly as I've said.

You have only to examiner history to find record of the conflict of the two different lifestyles. Hunter gatherer lifestyles are significantly more sustainable and stable... when left alone. Tribal lifestyles tend to small group sizes with in-cooperation... and different views of property and what constitutes status.

I'd invite you to read Charles Mann, "1491" Or any of a number of historical documents discussing the generosity of indigenous tribes as a world wide pattern.

Here is a very concise example of how societies shape human character:

"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

"it is the supply of agriculture which created the large population." Yup which is precisely what I've been saying.

When we choose to live an agrarian lifestyle we chose agriculture... and this enabled large populations and emphasized certain elements of human character that have led us to the point of nuclear war or ecological collapse... or creating a child race of AI... whatever... things are murky in the future because of the failure of the current systems.

"Agriculture does not go beyond the energy budget of the sun, so the "false surplus" you refer to is completely fictitious."

Are you certain of that? What is a more efficient solar energy converter... a plowed field or a forest?

The false surplus come from the fact that it requires huge amounts of energy to create and defend a field. The total amount of energy spent requires additional energy inputs beyond sunlight... like human labor... which is also ultimately fed by solar energy. Whether stored in the form of fossil fuels or created from field of hay for draft animals. So when people start planting fields there is a local surplus for a small community at the cost of eco-diversity. Essentially a number of energy converting niches get destroyed in the service of mono-cropping. If one plant was capable of completely converting that region's sunlight into plant energy then that plant would have take over the area.

That same ground cover by a field could only support a very few wanderers. This allows a society to gain more territory... and create more fields. At the cost of increased labor requirements to develop and sustain the fields. Increase population and the cycle continues...

And this is important for you to note... at every step in this process the land occupied by civilization is supporting far larger populations than that same land could support in it's natural state.

Which of course means that agriculture is overdrawing the solar energy budget of that land.

I have some ideas, but it's important to note that I wasn't actually pointing out elements of human nature. What I was pointing out is that the model we base our society on tends to emphasize certain elements of human character... or nature if you prefer. In the case of an agrarian lifestyle what you see, is what we typically think of as human nature... competitive drive... greed... ego. But only because we have been in a sense domesticated to this pattern. These human traits are emphasized by our choice to defend a plot of ground rather than roam around finding stuff to eat.

If we look at the hunter-gatherer lifestyle we see a different set of human character traits emphasized by that choice. Ideas of property and time are different... tendency toward in group cooperation rather than competition. Things of that nature... Without any romanticizing of a noble savage.

A good example of the direct different that serves as a case in my larger point. When we dig up hunter gatherer communities, we find houses of similar kind and size. When a culture shifts to a agrarian mode, we immediately begin to see mansions and huts.

The point of all this is that mode of living matters when it comes to engineering a community. If the mode of living is not sustainable as agriculture is not, due to a variety of factors that amount to a negative running solar energy balance. (monocropping reduces diversity and reduces the ability of that area to accept solar energy in sustainable forms, plowing requires enormous human and/or animal/ and or fossil fuel energy inputs.. that require ever larger areas or ecosystem disruption...)...

...if the mode of living is not sustainable even in terms of tens of thousands of years... then it is not a wise choice for any long term society to adopt.

If we want to discuss developing a lifestyle model that emphasizes certain human character traits within that society then we'd have to come to some kind of agreement as to what the the ultimate goals are and then decide which human traits might best found a society to achieve those goals.

Think Frank Herbert's Dune.

So, sure I have ideas, and when everyone agrees I'm the ruler of the world... I'll start trying stuff.

Please no one make me the ruler of the world...

Actually, I think we are coming to a series of paradigm shifts, everything we see happening indicates a coming discontinuity.

What happens then will determine the elements of human character that history emphasizes in the coming age... if any.

Some ideas: Negative growth economy. Diversify production and power generation down to small group size. Recognize that human evolved to live in groups of 50-150 and use modern techniques to expand that to some optimum size that prevents the forming of large political blocs capable of changing the underlying society. Smaller conflicts are sustainable maybe even desirable under conditions of consent, larger conflicts are not. Group membership should not be coerced in anyway. Individual rights are equal to group rights in that neither should impose their will on the other. Same for individual to individual and group to group action. Probably do this by emphasizing a set of lifestyles that emphasize group cooperation at Navy Seal levels. The sanctity of human life needs to be correctly balanced against the ecosystem....

I could go on and on. Essentially bring down human population in a controllable way and start figure out the maximum sustainable human population we can achieve using the sun's energy budget and stick to that. If we want to expand we need to move into space... and develop the society that can do so.

Yet, this particular person who does so is a motivator or model to emulate. — TheMadFool

You can not emulate genius, you either are or are not. If we take the common meaning of genius.

You seem to be assuming that being driven to succeed is a universal good. We can point to driven people and wonder why they make weapons. If being driven to succeed is a good thing then why can it have such catastrophically bad results? Sometimes good does come of being driven to succeed, but sometimes not.

So maybe ambition is neutral and not necessarily a good thing.

Then you have to wonder about success. Is it really "success" to become less empathetic and caring as your wallet thickens? How can success involve the loss of key elements of a person's character?

Maybe an alternate strategy would be to be driven to wholeheartedly work for your community's success... I'm not saying to offer a product or service and demand wealth in return... but truly use whatever talent one has to forward the goals and aspiration of everyone. A billionaire builds himself higher first... with a nice long jump down to the rest of us. A humanitarian builds the community on the foundation of her talents.

We can not attribute anything like the second attitude to billionaires.

Why do community work and resources need to be concentrated into one pair of hands?

Leadership?

{snorts}

""It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452. Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million. The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude. One of them (Woodrow Wilson) later admitted that the war had been fought for business interests; another (David Lloyd George) had told a newspaperman: ‘If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t—and can’t know."

10,000 years of civilized history... ten times a thousand years of kings and the spiteful folly of kings... and still we cry to the heavens for a leader... a savior...

We aren't really very bright for an intelligent species.

Wealth is a lever one person uses to move the world.

Foolish to trust any human with that kind of power.

"Do you see how this is backward? We make demands on agriculture, because it is necessary to support the vast numbers of human lives, not vise versa."

Do I really have it backwards?

The vast human population we have is because of agriculture. Before agriculture human populations were much, much smaller. And the entire ecosystem existed within the energy budget provided by the sun.

So, we adopted agriculture not to support huge populations but because of the false surplus that agriculture produce, seemed a good way to increase our chance of survival. In pursuing that false surplus huge amounts of human labor is required, and society becomes reliant on the false surplus.

Whenever a population has a food surplus, the population grows.

The demands of agriculture created the large populations. We did not start with huge populations and then developed agriculture to deal with the extra mouths. Now one of the main problems we have is that we keep feeding people without controlling our reproduction.

We you add to that the other demands that the agrarian lifestyle puts on the human character, you end up with things like greed... property... authority... wars... markets... climate change...

None of these things are necessary to human survival and in fact lead to just the opposite.

We blindly chose a path 10,000 years ago that leads to a dead end

The thing about taxes is that they are set by a government which will quickly become owned by the wealthiest in the system. Any government...

Everyone uses money, why would we need government to cut the wealthy down to size especially when the government is paid to be inclined not to intervene?

What would happen to the economy if everyone with a loan payment decided to skip a month...

The same month?

When you say power elite, I read authoritarian. The use of authoritarianism is a choice that came along with setting up civilization... using crops... defending the idea of property. It ultimately comes down collecting a population with belief in some ideal or the other so as to concentrate large populations of human will into the hands of very few people.

It's also an idea that repeatedly fails in terms of stability of organization.

Now human will is so tightly concentrated that a single human being can launch weapons that will destroy the ecosystem.

We can't afford large systems of concentrated human power. Humans are evolved to exist in small groups with leaders who are directly connected to the people they are leading. In other words, if a small group leader screws up, the group is able to directly interact with the leader to express their disapproval.

Small group leaders that make bad decisions don't stay leaders for long.

In contrast to this large group leaders are quarantined from direct feedback from the vast majority of people being led. So the leader is no longer part of the community that sent him/her to Washington D.C. with the same general interests as the community that elected him/her. Instead the community of leaders in Washington D.C. becomes the elected leaders new community and the newly elected leader interest begin to conform with those of other leaders and not the community that elected them.

We have a fiction that presidents or politicians are our leaders...when in fact it is easily seen that billionaires are the true leaders.

I have very few interests in common with a billionaire, or the system that is currently doing it's best to wreck the planet.

"Profiting from the capitalist system is a totally another thing to profiting from a criminal enterprise or racket."

How do you figure?

It's pretty easy to start engineering something and come to an unexpected dead end.

We've engineered an agrarian society... we call it civilization and it's all essentially based on the demands of protecting a false surplus in order to support huge human populations.

Currently the false surplus is gained from fossil fuels. But ultimately everything comes from the source that grows the plant which provides the supposed surplus. The energy budget from the sun.

One of the demands of agriculture is hierarchy and specialization... and so society shifted away from hunter-gatherer in-group cooperation to in-group competition for resources. This shift to competition creates the space for hierarchy and systems of power.

Authoritarianism.

Capitalism, socialism, fascism, feudalism... These are all different forms of authoritarianism.

And each of these forms is a response to the demands of growing plants to create an alleged surplus.

It's not that Capitalism is failing, it's that the idea of civilization is failing. Capitalism is merely a response to the oft unconsidered demands of agriculture.

As it turns out basing the vast majority of human life on the demands of agriculture has run into a rather dramatic dead end.

Human caused climate change... uncontrolled tech expansion, the prioritization of greed in the human character... all of which are driven by authoritarianism as a means to support agriculture.

The fatal flaw? Large systems of power concentrate massive populations of will into the hands of very few people who can now use that concentrated power of will to destroy the ecosystem that nurtured us.

Hard to see this as anything other than what it is... a complete and utter failure of agriculture and the authoritarianism that derives from it in a variety of systemic flavors... like Capitalism or Socialism.

Let's say we are in a lifeboat. And I "own" the lifeboat and all the food and water.

Once I have everything everyone else owns, in return for a place on my lifeboat.

Why would I feed them or give them any water?

Why isn't the Earth a lifeboat?

Does might make right?

Wouldn't we have to start with a known wrong and then demonstrate that the application of force makes that know wrong... right.

For example. In what situation does the application of force make 2 = 6 objectively right?