The Voyaging Morons' Congress

"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

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"So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone."

Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars

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"The gun is good! The penis... is evil! The penis shoots seeds"

Zardoz

(a movie which I have never watched, for reasons including but not limited to Sean Connery's crotch)

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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.

 

Major spoiler alert for all three.

 

 

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?

Return from the Stars

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea"

"Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."

different versions of The Road Goes Ever On by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Spoiler alert:
Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars is more of a gradual expansion on themes discernible from the start (reintegration, alienation, finding purpose) with no traditional grand reveal, but you might still want to read it first.

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"It was a civilization that had rid itself of fear.
[...]
For we, in the course of ten years, had gone through so many horrors, everything that was inimical to man, that wounded him and crushed him, and we had returned, sick of it, so very sick of it; any one of us, hearing that the return would be delayed, that there would be a few more months in space to endure, would probably have leapt at the speaker's throat. And now we -- no longer able to stand the constant risk, the blind chance of a meteorite hit, that endless suspense, the hell we went through when an Arder or an Ennesson failed to return from a reconnaissance flight -- we immediately began to refer to that time of terror as the only proper thing, as right, as giving us dignity and purpose.

[...]

"The public is not aware. . ."
"Of what?"
"Of the fact that the spirit of exploration is dead. That there are no expeditions, they know. But they don't think about it. They think that there are no expeditions because expeditions are unnecessary, and that's all. But there are some who see and know perfectly well what is going on, and what consequences it will have. Has already had."
"Well?"
"Pap. Pap and more pap for all eternity. No one will fly to the stars now. No one will risk a dangerous experiment now. No one will test a new medicine on himself now. What, they don't know this? They know! And if the word got out who we are, what we did, why we flew, what it was all about, then it would be impossible, you see, impossible to conceal the tragedy!""

from Return from the Stars
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Generally speaking, I see three kinds of SciFi dystopias.

The 1984 variety present a blatant shithole of a society, which only the most brutal militaristic autocracy and/or pervasive government propaganda could attempt to glorify.

The Fahrenheit 451 type aren't halfway bad for about a quarter of their inhabitants. Bread and circuses abound if you can afford them. Sure, all your neighbours are being marginalized, disenfranchised, ostracized in the classic or figurative sense, lobotomized or just plain exterminated, but if you merely crank up your drug dosage or are willing to squint hard enough, you can almost ignore the planet being gradually mismanaged into the gutter.

The Brave New World sort are objectively nice, pleasant places to live, so long as you lack any ambition beyond fleeing, feeding, fighting and fu-ornicating. Usually not even the fighting. Such tales' basic complaint is that humanity has lost that special something, that spark of humanitude, that shit-flinging ape spirit, that pioneering near-pining, that thirst for unquenchableness or, as some might tastefully venture to ad, a taste for adventure.

I don't know whether Stanislaw Lem ever wrote one of the first type. He did write at least one novella set in the second type. 1961's Return from the Stars was his stab at the third... sort of... maybe? Despite stories like Solaris or His Master's Voice reshaping entire sub-genres of SF, his various works were in themselves very difficult to pin down to a particular ideology.

Return from the Stars begins with an explorer returning from relativistic spaceflight to find Earth incomprehensibly altered after more than a century - the entire first chapter is a somewhat overextended description of the narrator lost in a... spaceport? shopping mall? he can't even tell. For all its glitz, the new human norm is revealed to consist of dystopian mind control via chemicals and indoctrination both subliminal and liminal, rendering the entire populace risk-averse to the point of catatonia. The Earth has been made a safe space. The narrator rages against such control and that's where most authors would have stopped, with the manly-man from the past trying to teach a decrepit future how to fight or possibly flight. Lem went several steps further.

Whatever the author's initial intentions for the book, it's worth noting that it somehow became at least partly a commentary on war veterans attempting to re-enter peacetime society. Don't even try to tell me that first paragraph I quoted isn't really about the glorification of WWII. Awareness that the glory of risk-taking is so often ginned up post facto serves to temper and offset the rage against enforced caution, and unlike most entertainment which glorifies the consumer's own status quo, Return from the Stars ends with the narrator allowing himself to fit his new surroundings, psychologically separating himself from the ideals of the mid 20th century. Even more astoundingly, this itself is not a blanket renunciation of exploration as an ideal. Against expectations, the chemically castrated populace of the future allots the narrator's colleagues, other former explorers, resources to restart the space program, with the implication that the old-timers are instigating some moderate degree of social change. Thus by the end the world of the future seems a great deal less dystopian, and the main thrust of the story is rather toward mental flexibility, adaptability and personal freedom, with the understanding that freedom of action implies freedom of inaction and freedom from harm implies the freedom to risk.

While worth reading in itself (despite translation difficulties) it's also a story I'd recommend not to the young but to my own age group in dealing with the young, as many scions of  the '80s and '90s attempting to communicate with snowflakes are very much cast in the role of morlocks among eloi. There's something encouraging about the narrative's willingness to find worth in a society over-ridden by a farcical, facetious, absolutist emphasis on self-castration and political correctness, without trying to make war upon it.