We don’t need to pray to any god or saint to rescue us from them. We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war – and we usually succeed in doing it.
For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
Misfortune or stupidity on the collective level resulted in mass famines.
Though hundreds of millions still go hungry almost every day, in most countries very few people actually starve to death.
In France, for example, 6 million people (about 10 per cent of the population) suffer from nutritional insecurity.
Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine.
In the eighteenth century Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead. Today, the poor are following this advice to the letter.
In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition.
In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.
Altogether the pandemic killed between 50 million and 100 million people in less than a year. The First World War killed 40 million from 1914 to 1918.
Whereas a human infected with the smallpox virus dies within a few days, an HIV-positive patient may seem perfectly healthy for weeks and months, yet go on infecting others unknowingly. In addition, the HIV virus itself does not kill. Rather, it destroys the immune system, thereby exposing the patient to numerous other diseases.
In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes.
Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.
Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy.
Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.