Once upon a time, in an introductory anthropology class, we watched a documentary in which a Peruvian man said he's thankful to the Americans who came to study the ruins near his village, for bringing plumbing and a grade school education with them. He foresaw a better future for his five children.
Today is international children's day in... well, you know, some international places. International places with children. Granted, lots of places vary this date - oh, by the way, Thailand? You're doing it wrong. So wrong.
Anyhoo, today much of the world is celebrating those wondrous little bundles of smells, because as a species with already insanely high parental investment compared to most of the animal kingdom, we're obviously not obsessed enough already with the fruit of our loins. So allow me to celebrate this feast of spawning with a link.
Hooo-eee, lookit dem numbers fly!
Seven and a half billion of us filthy overgrown monkeys running around, and most of them so fucking stupid, uneducated or just beaten over the head that they still think fairies up in the clouds will solve all their problems. Stop breeding already! Ya wanna celebrate children? Stop shitting out so many of the damn things that they have to fight over scraps all their lives against the screaming hordes of other superfluous naked apes. Despite the impression left by the popular computer game series by that name, civilization is not a numbers game.
The population around 1600 C.E. was around five to six hundred million. That world of Copernicus, Galileo, Shakespeare and Newton consisted of one-fourteenth today's human mass, only a tiny educated sliver of which managed to produce any thought worth expressing. The Athens of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great numbered around one hundred to one hundred and forty thousand, a population a bit smaller than that of... ida know, let's say Provo, Utah or Melitopol, Ukraine or Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. I eagerly await the inevitable rise of the great schools of Provo, Melitopol and Ijebu-Ode - and make it snappy, 'cause we could sure use a few more Aristotles right about now.
Breeding is not progress. Quite the opposite. You've likely heard the insipid propagandistic catchphrase "Children are our country's greatest resource" - true, and this is a resource bought and sold like any other. For anyone but the rich, anyone except the puppet-masters who maintain a stranglehold on all natural resources (and/or as the old Marxist catchphrase holds it, the means of production) the only currency we have to trade with are our body/mind combo package, our ability as individuals. The rich must capture or purchase our cooperation, and they are always eager to devaluate it.
An abundance of humans cheapens the individual human. The more of you there are, the less one unit of "you" buys. If you're one in a million, there are now seven and a half thousand of "you" interchangeably disposable for your boss to fire, for bankers to bankrupt on a whim, for generals to use as cannon fodder. That is your children's fate: disposability inherent in the eyes of their own brothers and sisters, the power elite's abuse nascent in an overcrowded womb. A world of more dogs to eat more dogs. Just like in the Civilization games, it's the millennial, domineering, megalomaniacal puppet masters who benefit from the ever-thicker glut of bricks in the wall.
You want to help struggling third-world countries? Send them condoms, not food. Popularize tubal ligations and make sure abortion clinics always outnumber orphanages.
Back when we watched that documentary with the inane social "scientist" propaganda, I was the only one to raise my hand and ask "yeah, a school's good, and plumbing's good, but is anyone handing out condoms?" The man had five kids. Will his five have five each of their own? Will those twenty-five fighting for one twenty-fifth the share of whatever life a dusty Andean plateau can offer be twenty-five times as eager to accept the interference of rich foreigners in exchange for a few scraps of condescending "humanitarian aid?"
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