Malth-y-nous

"The fiendishness of it all is that part of this mass deception is open and voluntary, letting people think they can draw the line between fiction and fact."

 

Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress

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Scribbling a rant on population had me sidetracked by the observation that it's become quite fashionable to shit on Thomas Malthus as having failed his predictions about mass starvation, unsustainable population size and collapse, along with other such predictions like The Population Bomb. But the core Malthusian warning, that resources are finite yet reproduction infinite, remains all too true. We are rapidly running out of natural resources from water to metals to fish, with garbage piling both land and sea.

 

If the Malthusian collapse has not occured worldwide quite yet, it is not because the concept was disproven but because endless strings of scientific inventions have allowed us to stretch the few resources we have farther, while destroying all other life to be replaced with our noisome breed. We are a mass extinction! We were overpopulated by the time the previous century even started, and advances in medicine, sanitation and food production all around that same time repeatedly amplified the problem over subsequent generations. Wonderful inventions, but each should have come with a spaying campaign.

 

Even the kindest interpretation of our refusal to address overpopulation shows it as infantile magical thinking, a blind belief that with every extra billion apes added to our hellish swarm, yet another sanitary or agricultural revolution will, must, surely cannot fail to yet again and again buy us another decade or two. An utterly unfounded and criminal reliance on the superhuman ability of a very few to constantly pull more rabbits out of fresh hats; even if scientists' ability to discover were infinite, we cannot know there remains any further stock of salvation discoverable! But let the hordes of 30IQ subhuman vermin breed to the horizons, and place the burden of stretching those horizons on the first nerd you see.

"The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath: I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."

Shrug. Humanity deserves to die. Let it die.

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edit: the title reference may have been a bit obscure, and hell, I wouldn't have known about Mallt-y-nos either if not for Tom Siddell.