"In Catholic school
As vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised
By a lady in black"
Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark
________________________________________________________________
"So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not
awarded to just anyone."
Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars
________________________________________________________________
"The gun is good! The penis... is evil! The penis shoots seeds"
(a movie which I have never watched, for reasons including but not limited to Sean Connery's crotch)
________________________________________________________________
Population control is not just a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is inevitable.
About half a year ago at the height of the pandemic, I heard someone complain how heavily isolation measures were hitting families' internal dynamics, with children kept home from school every day to drive their progenitors insane. Even heretofore comfortably middle-class parents were suddenly discovering that 2.5 children were two too many. I reacted... perhaps predictably lycanthropic: well, who made them breed in the first place? The rejoinder came more cogent that I'd normally expect: their family size was planned in the context of a wide array of social services, guarantees on which their society unexpectedly defaulted in 2020. These people were born and indoctrinated into a culture encouraging them to follow their mindless, already dominant evolutionary prerogative to drown out their competitors in a tide of redundant progeny, assured they could simply jail their psychopathic little cacodemons for five days a week in communal care.
Stashing offspring in institutions (while always an option for the wealthy to dispose of the spare in "an heir and a spare") seems to have been popularized beyond limited monastic / military use by the British obsession with boarding schools. Sure, sure, you may not think of it that way, but public schools over the past century have acquired more and more of the functions of child jails, from fluff in curricula to justify extra hours to the proliferation of extracurricular activities. Sports clubs, drama clubs, sportsier clubs, music clubs, sportsiest clubs, religious clubs, clobbering clubs, anything, whatever it takes to ensure those hordes of disgusting, superfluous larval vandals don't see the light of day from September to June. The implied (false) promise is that you should breed as much as you can and we'll raise your kids for you.
In fact, the amount of encouragement states provide toward procreation makes an interesting observation: for all that no politician will ever utter the phrase "population control" the hunger of the rich for always more cannon fodder, always more wage slaves to lord it over, always more bipedal dogs to eat dogs, ensures that most societies do exercise population control... in the wrong direction!
So, with a billion of us soon to be vaccinated against the (current) pandemic and everyone presumably eager to resume bodily contact, let's reminisce about three Science Fiction tales speculating on the topic of population bombs.
1) The Palliative
"Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. [...] it is out of a deep sense of compassion and for the highest humanitarian reasons that this chemical hoax has been perpetrated"
The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971) opens with a scientific conference on overpopulation in which all arguments lead to concluding the end of the world. The narrator finds himself drugged and hallucinating, thereby experiencing one of the proposed solutions to controlling the masses firsthand. Placed in suspended animation, he awakes in a future built around a fully mature science of chemical mind control. After delving its deep dark secrets, seeing sequential layers of narcotic haze are covering up a reality of abject poverty, sickness and overcrowding, he once again wakes up in the present day to discover it was all a chemically-induced hallucination after all.
If this sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot, Lem turns out to have been a fan, which Dick in his customary paranoia interpreted as a COMMIE PLOT OMGWTFBBQ!!!
Though it slightly drags its build-up and rushes its climax, the book retains more than enough punch by its sequential unveiling of just how far denial of reality can drag a society. It supports my oft-repeated point that telepathy negates science as the solution to every problem becomes not solving it but making everyone think it's been solved. When introducing Lem's Return from the Stars I likened it to the softest, Brave New World sort of dystopia while counting The Futurological Congress as his version of a mid-severity, Fahrenheit-451 variety. This may seem odd, as the ending reveals standards of living to have dropped to 1984 levels... but they did so from neglect, greed and myopia, not active malice. Though obligated to point out the plot hole of absent libido-depressing mind control chemicals, I can almost accept the villain's claim that past a certain point, once the species' creative capacity was so terminally outpaced by its procreative capacity, little remained possible but to cushion its gradual collapse into itself. Like Bradbury's prophetic view of our futurepresent, Lem's is an Apocalypse bought and sold by market forces and the mindless glut of mass appeal.
2) The Surgical
"while
you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having
children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were
shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children - breeding, breeding. My
God, how they bred!"
The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth (1951) likely the most influential (if not directly famous) of these three examples, centers on dysgenics. A 20th-century scheister gets frozen by electricity (yes) and awakens to a monstrous population boom of common imbeciles mitigated by a desperately outnumbered minority of intelligent humans. With sterilization impossible for the sheer bulk of ape flesh which also makes warfare too risky (five hundred million tons of rotting flesh) the geniuses of the future, too honest for their own good, need the help of our common con-man to convince the human vermin of the world to exterminate themselves of their own accord. Inspired by Hitler's public relations campaigns for concentration camps, our hero sets up a program of fake rockets to "Venus" meant to lift five billion sub-humans out of the atmopshere where they won't stink up the joint. As a last measure, the future ubermenschen shove him into one as well, and the story ends with him hoist, quite literally, by his own petard.
Several points:
- The image of a compulsively dishonest real-estate speculator making absurd promises to hordes of degenerate rabble applauding the brilliance of such plans rang painfully true in the 2016 U.S. election, and has by no means lost relevance with the "other" party in power. "Defund the police" - how's that for a three-word rabblerousing slogan?
- Also, in 1951, with the world population closing on 3 billion, Kornbluth's vision of a future swarmed by 5 billion vermin might have seemed apocalyptic. We're now closing in on 8. Eight billion subhuman apes incapable of thought, of creativity, of reason, of anything to elevate them above the existential experience of rats, capable in fact of little beyond murderously producing more voracious, murderous walking redundancies.
- Impractical warfare, while necessary to set up the catchier plot point
of rockets to "Venus" comes across as too forced. The five billion
corpses wouldn't all rot at once. China's upcoming attempt to coin a new term, exclusive speciecide, shows how easy it is to prioritize the Tibetans or
Mongolians, then Hong Kong and the Uighurs, then Taiwan and Korea and
Vietnam, then Japan and Indonesia, then Europe and Africa and gradually the remnants of non-Han humanity. Just a few
dozen million rotting corpses at a time. Perfectly manageable.
- Kornbluth's most memorable point however (and one glossed over by works he inspired like Idiocracy) is that dysgenics and overpopulation go hand in hand. The more primitive a mind, the less it can extend beyond its instincts, the more easily it is driven to self-destruction in ensuring numeric supremacy for its gametes, the more easily it swallows the precepts of moral and racial purity and other big lies. Conversely, the more human life is cheapened by overpopulation, the more the rich can employ sheer numbers of wage slaves and cannon fodder in place of innovation or careful planning, the more that infernal coalition of rabble and rabblerousers can afford to exterminate the superior intellects they so fear and despise.
3) The Preventive
"there is no rational, equitable, scientific, technological, or
human answer to the dilemma of a population increasing in an insane
geometric progression. It admits to answering only with miracles - loaves
and fishes, manna from heaven, and the like. Twice I failed as
ecological engineer. Now I propose to succeed as the god that S’uthlam
requires. Should I approach the problem as human a third time, I would
assuredly fail a third time, and then your difficulties would be
resolved by gods crueler than myself, by the four mammal-riders of
ancient legend who are known as pestilence, famine, war, and death.
Therefore, I must set aside my humanity, and act as god."
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin (1986) is a book I've mentioned in passing once before. Though I'd hoped the success of Boobs and Dragons would revive attention for some of his older, better works, I'm not hearing much chatter to that effect. Tuf's draconian problem-solving (think Stannis Baratheon) especially in Manna from Heaven which closes his short story collection, might have something to do with that.
The series begins with Haviland Tuf acquiring a biological warfare spaceship and needing it repaired. To pay for said repairs, he indebts himself to Malthus-Spelled-Backwards, a planet increasingly unable to feed the constantly growing population it is unable to curb due to a religious prerogative to go forth and multiply... and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and -
He "solves" their problem by increasing their food production. Repeated returns to the planet for further payments find that every time, the S'uthlamese have taken the extra food and used it to extra-extra-copulate, bringing themselves time and again to the brink of mass starvation. By the end their military build-up hints they've arrived at the inevitable conclusion of every overpopulated society: let's forcibly under-populate some other place and split the difference!
Tuf gives them one final gift: a miraculous fast-growing plant yielding absurd amounts of food, thriving under nearly any conditions... and whose commensal microflora will sterlize 99.9% of humans.
Science Fiction can place in the realm of palatable, dramatic speculation ideas otherwise too uncomfortable or distant from our daily concerns for honest discussion. Population control will happen.
1) No matter if you can "mascon" your way to willful ignorance for a century (as we already have) you will eventually find your streets choked with humans playing the role of automatons.
2) Dysgenics and overpopulation are conceptual twins. The most basic function of life is reproduction at the expense of other reproducers. The more degenerate, the more basic your populace, the more its actions revolve around that single unanalyzed drive of murderous genomic replication.
3) Population control is inevitable. If it is not undertaken consciously, rationally and deliberately, it will occur naturally, by the time-honored expedients of starvation, epidemics and genocide. In the face of uncontrolled reproduction, any compensating scientific advances can only buy diminishing amounts of time.
Birth is murder. Life kills to live, supplanting other life. Quoth the giant talking stone head filled with guns: "Go forth... and kill!" A rising population is a de facto declaration of war against one's neighbours, because those extra humans will inevitably demand their lebensraum. The rich hoard and spend human lives like any other currency. If you see them investing in superfluous reserves of population, it's only so they can out-bid each other by lavish expenditure of same in bouts for supremacy. The marching morons and their populist drummers will always prove willing to control the population - of other populations.
Now, in keeping with this theme, I feel inclined to overpopulate this post by a fourth example of three:
4) The Endemic
"This is the year when the computer tells us that the planet is full at
last; the goal is achieved; all the striving of evolution crowned."
2430 A.D. by Isaac Asimov (1970) is a short story about the date when the mass of human flesh replaces all other land biomass. On the entire planet exists naught but human cities and oceans filled with a rapidly-reproducing plankton slurry to feed humanity and recycle its waste. That is all... except for one oddball who keeps a few non-human animals as pets, preventing his species from achieving the perfection of totality. In the end, he is convinced to give in to the "enlightenment" of the majority.
And kills himself.
"Over the vast continental buildings some five trillion human beings
placidly slept; some two trillion human beings placidly ate; half a
trillion carefully made love. Other trillions talked without heat, or
tended the computers quietly, or ran the vehicles, or studied the
machinery, or organized the microfilm libraries, or amused their
fellows. Trillions went to sleep; trillions woke up; and the routine
never varied."
The Malthusian nightmare is generally presented in terms of inevitable collapse. Yet success makes an even more horrifying scenario, in which the human disease is never treated but metastasizes into a uniform post-plasm, a fully evolved but terminally primitive totality having eliminated all possibilities beyond self-reproduction.
What's your end-game?
No comments:
Post a Comment