Where is the next Einstein?
Where is the next Einstein? If you ask population growth advocates, they’ll tell you its all a numbers game. Just keep growing your population and sooner or later the next Einstein will pop into the world with theories and ideas to solve all our problems. This seems to be a fair enough argument to many.
But I beg to differ, I will argue that the next Einstein is already here. Probably, so too the next Marie Curie, Dr Shirly Jackson (look her up), the next Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci. With over 8 billion humans, now calling this planet home, there is plenty of talent right here, right now, to statistically generate at least some of the calibre of those people mentioned. People who, in the past, only came along every 50 to 100 years.
No, the problem today is not lack of numbers, as the growth obsessed would have you believe, it is in fact too great a number.
Billions of people across the world now live in poverty or greatly reduced circumstances, with no prospects for advancement. Denied opportunity through lack of education, intellectual sponsorship, inequality, and by sheer weight of numbers as overpopulation overwhelms economies, opportunity and finite resources.
People with so much potential talent in the key areas we so desperately need in today’s world sit hungry in mud shelters, or are busy scraping water from the bottom of a muddy well. People currently more focused on survival than on genuine progress, intellectual advancement, the arts or the general enhancement of our world.
The current narratives obsesses over growing populations, growing economies, and on perpetuating outdated paternalistic or religious traditions, denying our young Einsteins the chance to ever realise their talent, unless by good fortune, one is born into the right circumstances.
Sadly, in the world today, the “right circumstances” only seem to be on offer for the top 10%, maybe 5%, of the global population. The rest are left on the scrapheap doing what they can to survive- selling drugs, joining gangs, prostituting their bodies, or opting out of life altogether because it all just got too bloody miserable. There, among the forgotten bones upon which economic growth builds empires, lies your next Einstein.
Across the world, in the ghettos of Abuja, Johannesburg and Rio, even among the lower classes struggling with the high cost of living, low wages, unemployment and social decay across so much of the supposedly developed world there simply are not the resources, or opportunities to realise the full potential of all our people. Too many left behind, too much talent squandered.
Somewhere banging on an old tin in ‘Nowheresville’ is a potential Charlie Watts. Somewhere playing two bits of fishing line strung across an old box is the next Jimi Hendrix, and somewhere drawing numbers in the sand, soon to be swept away by the next gust of wind, sits our next Einstein.
