Churn

"if you want our ship to go back to Earth again, you are welcome to take her there yourself. Not me. Not there. If a man is seventy-five years old there now, he becomes officially dead. His heirs inherit, he can't own property, his ration books are canceled - anybody can kill him just for the hell of it. I didn't get these passengers on Earth; they were refugees at Luna City"

[...]

"No man is an island - " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is - a single organism, always growing and branching - which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods - killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be." But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don't have to like it - and I don't. "

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

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"Why don't you sterilize them?"
"Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done."
"I see. Like the marching Chinese!"
"Who the devil are they?"
"It was a - uh - paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they'd never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point."
"That's right. Only instead of 'a given point,' make it 'the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.' There could never be enough."
"Say!" said Barlow. "Those movies about babies - was that your propaganda?"
"It was. It doesn't seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive."
"So if you work with a biological drive - ?"
"I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility."

 

C. M. Kornbluth - The Marching Morons

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"soldiers! for Hynkel!"

The Great Dictator

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(working title: refugeriatrics)

 

If you've looked into getting a dog you've inevitably run into health warnings. Most of the most recognizable breeds (e.g. bulldogs, infamously) have acquired endless slews of congenital defects via a century of extremely narrow inbreeding to purify their appearance for dog shows. Thankfully, while the emphasis used to be solely on "caveat emptor" and possible vet bills, the conversation has shifted a bit from inconveniencing humans to concern for the pets' own quality of life. If what you think would look adorable in your purse is in fact more objectively a twisted, tortured monstrousity riddled with skin, gut, eye and ear infections, a barely trickling vascular system, high risk of cancer and can't even breathe properly for its mashed-in face, then you're not giving it a home, you're fabricating suffering.

On a completely unrelated topic, thirty years ago a college student expressed sympathy toward an Indian colleague for the Latur earthquake which killed ~10,000 people... and was somewhat taken aback by him just nonchalantly scoffing that ten thousand's nothing, they've got plenty more.

 

Well... yeah? They did. They do.

 

I've been noticing an annoying trend in recent years' news articles about governments bemoaning declining birth rates. Whether it's Korea or some small Greek village losing the war against urbanization, or baby boomer senescence in the U.S. and Europe, or even China! of all places, our overlords appear increasingly intent on convincing us we're somehow underpopulated.

 

In the U.S. at least (while few say it openly) by juxtaposing demographics many are implying we need more young to care for the increasingly senescent baby boomers... or in other words throwing more babies at the problem: a new boom to patch up the old one. First off, let's not pretend governments, corporations or anyone who flies in private jets give a shit about the elderly except to bleed them for artificial hips marked up two thousand percent, or that power hierarchies ever do anything, ANYTHING for humanitarian reasons, unless forced by fear of revolt. But more to the point, boomers will die before any babies born now have a chance to nurse them. More on that later.

 

Before I even get to the main stuff, let's point out humanity continues to swell uncontrollably with nine billion expected by next generation. While this predominantly comes from the usual culprits of the simian-termite hives throughout South Asia, South America and Africa, the U.S. itself is rife with Christian sects pushing their hicks to shit out fresh vessels for superstition by the litter, and I doubt any developed country can claim complete freedom from ye olde "go forth and multiply" idiocy.

 

So we need to mention shifting baselines. The few times overpopulation is even discussed, it's from a backdrop of modern life, of skyscrapers, megamarts and jammed highways. Governments talk to genZers as though 8.2 billion utterly redundant brainless apes constitute some manner of normalcy, and something would be lost by their reduction. But for millennials that number was 6 billion. We're talking merely the timespan it took for BadgerBadgerBadger! to be replaced with calling the U.S. vice president "brat" and that to go back out of style. We hit 5 billion when I was in kindergarten, and should the management check its complaints backlog you'll find my sandbox was already far too crowded! That same stage in my parents' lives saw the 3 billion mark, prompting Kornbluth to posit my eventual five as an apocalyptic overshoot. And when we hit 9 and 10 and 11 billion those who desire ever more cannon fodder and scabs will pretend that's normal too, and will continue demanding more slaves.

When we exterminated the last Tasmanian tiger we were 2 billion. Should we adopt that as our normal? Two billion unwashed, starving, illiterate sacks of ape shit riddled with disease. Every step up from there will require resources to be harvested, food to be grown, energy to be expended. Do you want to feed all those two billion and keep the same ecological footprint as the two billion from a century ago? Well, you're gonna need more land for each human proportionally. Better lower your sustainable population estimate by a hundred mil.

Do you want to house them in something other than my great-grandfather's wattle-and-daub cottage? Well, that's a lot of construction, better lower your estimate by another hundred mil.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you want their food to be not just plentiful, but also fresh, clean and safe to eat? That's even more effort per capita, more land use and resource use per capita.

Do you want heating for those homes, or golly gee, maybe even air conditioning?

Do you want to clothe them?

Educate them?

Educate them past basic literacy and arithmetic?

Vaccinate them so they're not crippled by polio and a pox upon ye?

Do you want potable water, a sewage system, trucking away garbage, a washer and dryer, roads to travel on and motorized transportation and two pairs of eyeglasses and aseptic medicine and dental fillings? 'Cause when that last thylacine croaked, most humans had no such things. Hell, many still don't.

Do you want internet access, and a game console, and a pocket computer with GPS and infinite video calls and a closet full of fashions and robotic prostheses if you lose a limb and experts doing maintenance instead of having to re-roof your own home with straw or buy wagon wheels from your cousin? Make-up and hair gel? None of that went into your original 2bil!

Every life-saving scientific discipline that didn't exist a century ago, that requires more technology than pulling teeth with a doorknob, means twenty or thirty million fewer humans you can support at that level. Look around your room right now and drop another ten million from the total world population for every consumer item you see that's made of plastic, rubber, stainless steel or copper wiring. Don't even get me started on anything with a battery!

 

What would be a sustainable population with a decent, comfortable lifestyle? I don't know. I suspect far less than two billion. Less than one. Maybe less than half. You can look up various estimates yourselves. But do remember every mansion and private jet must raze another town off the map, unless that town consists of nothing but mesolithic mud huts.

But of course we're not talking about keeping things livable, not for most of us. Nobody's encouraging overbreeding in order to correct overbreeding. "We need kids to take care of the elderly" is a smokescreen. They want churn. Out with the old, in with the new. Boom boom boom. Fresh corpses to replace the old. Whatever the pains of a senescent population, they are secondary to perpetuating overpopulation into yet more generations upon generations of same. Churn. As for the economy, fears of somehow lacking workers... oh, puh-leeze, workers to work what? More overbuilt minivans to sell to each other, and a new smartphone every year? While splitting the same resources even more ways?

 

At best, such hand-wringing covers up a more valid concern of being unable to defend against invasion either military or invited by one's own government as cheap labor. The world population is still growing. Only a small minority of educated countries show lower birth rates than hellholes like Sudan, and the better will be invaded by numerically overwhelming worse in the near future. This is true. But the better are not at fault for the crimes of the worse. Breeding out of control is still the crime, not failing to match crime for crime.

No, the rich want more poor. Scrap that whole list I rattled off above. In the eyes of those writing the propaganda, you deserve none of that. Churn. What the Trumps and Vaticans of the world want is dirt-farming peasants ready for conscription, is to starve you until you'll do anything for the scraps they throw you, and the best way to do that is to make more of you. Make you split the little you have many more ways, make you gnaw on the same soup bone with more siblings. They want to be able to brush off the deaths of ten thousand of YOU, because they have ten billion of YOU to spare. Nothing serves the rich quite like an abundance of poverty, quite like stupid, desperate hordes which can be easily manipulated against each other in territorial contests. Of course, the threat is more immediate: world war 3 will require cannon fodder. That is your children's only future: to be enslaved and exterminated by the Chinese so the rich can use your efforts and sacrifices to bargain themselves private empires under the new sinocracy.

 

Populations do not naturally self-regulate, but just like our desire for ripe fruit can be hijacked by processed sugar and our kin recognition can be hijacked by uniforms and slogans, mating rituals can be hijacked by their own preliminaries. Kornbluth's future geniuses were of course missing the detail that status is intrinsic to our reproductive drive, since wealth and power serve as guarantee for offspring viability. Therefore it is possible to sidetrack reproduction into a chase for status, as the story's primitive scheister did by enrolling the marching morons in a race for prime real estate, a fancier house. Nesting instinct for the gals, championships for the guys - not that men's opinion matters anyway, the uterine bottleneck being our rate-determining step. Safer ways to defuse those destructive instincts.This is in effect why current developed societies have seen a slight tapering off of birth rates, and that article about Korea spells it out quite clearly (though it's not clear if the authors understood the evo-psych / instinctual implications) by citing youth preferring rampant consumerism to family life. Well, more power to those Korean youths. Chasing boy-bands is idiotic, but still more intellectual a practice than changing diapers.

 

So let's circle back to that quality of life issue, vis-a-vis parenting itself. Why does human reproduction not rate the consideration we now afford that of dogs, of caring for their individual quality of life? Granted, I've met more dogs I like than hu-mons I like... but we're supposed to at least feign humanitarian motivations. What quality of life can you guarantee a child who will go to school with his neighbour's ten children all ganging up on him? What can you guarantee those ten? And, to voice that which none are permitted to voice, what can you give individuals to induce them to commit virtual suicide by procreating, by tying the rest of their lives to raising offspring? We have always assumed (and not unjustifiably) that animals will do anything to reproduce, that our strongest primitive instinct will force us to accept any indignity, any abuse, any punishment in return for being permitted to perform its eternal dictate. And here, at last, we're seeing a bare handful of humans out of the teeming brainless horde capable of at least temporarily deferring this basest impulse, not forced into monastic celibacy but of their own accord.

And they are condemned for it like career criminals.

 

If you want us lowly plebs to breed more, make it compatible with maintaining individual freedom and comfort. But they won't. I find it hilarious to hear our surgeon general paying lip service to improving parents' lives due to the inherent unending demands and stress of family life being detrimental to the whole family. Umm, it's not a bug, it's a feature. The fact you will do anything to promote your offspring makes you more easily manipulated. Being exhausted, and stressed, and obsessed, and broke, infighting and months-long divorce cases, all help make you a more obedient wage slave, all while producing more hopeless wage slaves. That the mere existence of progeny reduces progenitors to reflexively snarling beasts serves the rich and their propagandists far better than a populace with time and energy to devote to scrutiny of their machinations. What personal growth is achieved through producing soldiers for Hynkel? What is learned, what is considered, what is contextualized, above the mental level of a rat cooing over its litter? Spending every waking minute, every day, every year slave to the demands of highly expensive housepets you can't even flush down the toilet. Your life is over. Raising children is a self-destructive enterprise, a subversion of your own existence. Every child born is a parent's life debased to pre-sapient drives. It's easy for the rich to encourage it, since they sure as hell are not spending time raising their own brats. They have twenty nannies, private tutors, private physicians, separate wings of the mansion for every podling spawned.

So they'll keep encouraging it.

Here's a prediction: we'll soon see a surge in propaganda films, books, plays, games, advertisement, what-have-you, about big happy families and the joys of spawning. They will make parenthood and large litters a status symbol again, as it is in more primitive societies. Schmaltzy holiday flicks about big happy clans sharing meals, superheroines punching kaiju trying to eat their babies, coming-of-age stories about siblings banding together, endless reams of human interest stories about the "miracle" of spawning, heroic adulation of hick slatterns shitting out baby after baby as "super"-moms.

And it will work.

Most humans are subhuman. Most humans are vermin and vermin do not outcompete their betters by outperforming but by swarming, by ganging up on you, seven wives for seven brothers, then a generation later forty-nine thieves chopping Ali Baba to pieces for standing in their way. After which they'll tear each other apart too, but that's cold comfort to us earlier victims. That's the game plan. That's always been the game plan, since before we were human, since before we were even monkeys.

 

Churn.

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P.S.: I don't normally do dedications, but this one's for JG, a too-decent man I never had the courage to tell his family was killing him.