Covid and conspiracy part three - the problem of people

According to the World Economic Forum the problem is… you.

Not just you, also your kids, in fact especially your kids.

I am also the problem, it's us, we are the problem. There's simply too damn many of us. 

The Forum (WEF) even reverently trots out perhaps the world’s the world's most loved man to say would it would be better if we’d never been born because population will “stabilize” at a level higher than the poor old Earth can accommodate.

“I can’t think of a single problem that would be easier to solve if there were less people,” David Attenborough says elsewhere.

It might be selfish but however much I like hearing him describe  sea dragon mating rituals, frankly if there is to be a cull I’m not volunteering and he can lead by example.

To be fair he hasn’t called for thinning out the human herd, although he does advocate “population policies” and ominously warns if we don't stop recklessly bringing babies into the world nature will.

Suddenly he seems a bit less cuddly.

In previous posts I looked at theories about what might be "behind" Covid, which often cite the WEF and I started to look at their ideas, which appear to have a pretty disturbing lineage.

I now turn my attention to what seems to be an underlying and fundamental principle of the WEF’s thinking, a notion that deserves its own special gallery in any Museum of Intellectual Infamy.

It's the idea that there one day there will be too many humans and they will exhaust the Earth’s resources, or alternatively pollute the planet beyond survivability.

"We're doomed, doomed" by vengeful wrong-treated Gaia is the perennial prophecy that enjoys a triumphal march through our institutions and our popular culture despite being, at least so far, in every measurable way completely and utterly wrong. 

Perhaps the most influential populariser of the idea that we are threatened by “overpopulation” and human flourishing is “unsustainable” was an English clergyman called Thomas Malthus.

He reasoned that people could literally keep multiplying by having big families but food could only increase at a more incremental geometric rate by adding more blocks of limited farmland.

This would lead to starvation and violent chaos.

Fast forward and world’s population has increased but this has been more than matched by increases in food production.

While Malthus’s thinking seems logical it isn't and what it omits is that people are endlessly inventive and adaptive, so we now need less farmland to feed more people than ever before.

Famines, which have decreased, are caused by war or politics rather than a lack of possible food.

It has been racistly assumed, including by our favourite naturalist, that famines in Africa were the result of "overpopulation, but Africa is far less densely populated than Europe.

World hunger continues to decline even as the population grows and the same can be said for all sorts of other metrics of human wellbeing.

The thing that makes life better and even reduces pollution and the birth rate, if that’s what concerns you, is wealth.

Building wealth obviously creates opportunities and solutions, hamstringing this only allows problems to fester and probably worsen.

We don’t really need to plan for “sustainability”, what is not sustainable will become self-evident because it will start running out even though, as we saw with Ehrlich's lost wagers, that has yet to happen for any major commodity. 

To a large extent that’s what the price mechanism does, when something becomes scarce its price goes up spurring the effort to employ substitutes.

So you don’t need to find the Soylent Green aisle at Coles just yet.

If you watch the Walking Dead, which I did until life in the Zombie apocalypse started to positively envious compared to life in lock downed Victoria, that show keeps tell you more people are a liability because of limited food supplies.

However, it never seems to realise until perhaps near the end that more people are an asset.

There are more to do the work, there are more to come up with ideas and new ways of doing things, there are more to allow specialisation of tasks, which allows civilisation.

In as far as people are “the problem” they are usually also the solution.

However, that’s anathema to the Malthusians.

Perhaps most famous Malthusian is US biologist Paul Ehrlich who wrote the 1968 best-selling warning of a people apocalypse “The Population Bomb”.

Every prediction made in The Population Bomb failed to go off and Ehrlrich even lost a whole series of bets.

Like any true believer that has not made him reconsider his theories.

The best known organised group of Malthusians is the Club of Rome, which was started by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and claims a high-powered membership of corporate, government and academic figures.

Which makes it sound awfully similar to another such endeavour that has grown out of a former Axis stronghold. 

It appears the WEF and the Club of Rome, which despite its name is now based in Davos, were very simpatico from the start.

Peccei himself addressed the third WEF forum in Davos summarising the Club’s best known publication “the Limits of Growth”, which was commissioned by the WEF.

The work argued we had to curb population growth and resource or face some sort of collapse.

As neither of things is threatening the end of the world as we know it the Club of Rome has simply pivoted to Climate Change as has the WEF.

Hence we now get Carbon Footprints rather than Peak Oil.

Catastrophe it seems is always around the corner unless we repent of our wasteful ways and sinful need to procreate.

However, catastrophe is the way of the world.

Species have come and gone in astonishing numbers even before we arrived on the scene and the planet has, yes over many eons, veered from one extreme to another.

The idea that nature is some sort of balanced eco-system is really a fairy tale that could be out of Disney.

Obviously humans have an effect on this but it isn't even all bad, we may even be preventing some animals from going extinct based on how cute they are as mascots for totalitarian-friendly sporting events.

What is really meant by “sustainability” is really stasis, which takes us back to the Garden of Eden metaphor, which Attenborough used when describing to the WEF what mankind had allegedly destroyed.

It's not just Attenborough telling us that the way to "save the planet" is by having less people.

If that is the case it brings us back to the ugly companion of ideas about limiting who gets to breed and who doesn’t - eugenics.

This "field" is what the work of Malthus largely served to inspire as well as evolution apparently.

In my next post I will look at some of the horrors and tragedies associated with eugenics and efforts to stop "overbreeding” and why a static world suits the Philosopher Kings and their religious sensibilities.

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