Bryan Caplan finds himself confused by the link between recognizing the importance of IQ and wanting most of humanity dead. He argues for acceptance of fact without rancor, but seems perplexed by the vitriol expressed (h/t Outside In):
My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch. People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a No-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forced sterilization for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forcible exile of people with low IQs – fellow citizens, not just immigrants. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate murdering people with low IQs.
…If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.” The sensible response is, “Are you mad? That doesn’t justify murder.” Advocating brutality in the name of your superior intellect is the mark of a super-villain, not a logician.
Generally, his point is agreeable, but that is mostly because human groups require a span of IQs to cover all of the roles in society. Every general needs soldiers, and every soldier needs a cascade of leaders in order to give him guidance so that he is not left alone and confused to make decisions he has no hope of getting correct.
However, as one of the misanthropes he describes — or as we might call it, a “human quality control advocate” — I can attest to the power of wanting to purge the weak. This comes more from the conditions of our time than an innate will to do harm based on this realization.
Let us look at the factors involved:
Overpopulation. There are too many of us, and too few good ones, especially in power. The urge to purge the excess and pare away the useless is great because daily, we see many people whose absence would make life better.
Idiocracy. The herd rules us. When we look at the products available and the decisions made by our leaders, it is clear that mass opinion sways the day, and like a demonic compass it always points toward full retard.
Stupidity. Our time is stupid. The cities are ugly, the jobs moronic, the culture idiotic. We want a war on stupidity and bad decision-making, and associate it with the stupid people we see among us.
We also live in a time of lies. IQ is denied, as well as most other natural and intelligent things. When people “wake up” from the stupor of egalitarianism, they react as does any consumer who has been defrauded: with injured rage.
The temptation is to make a continental mass grave to remind future humans not to go down this path because it ends badly. This arises as much from the perception that all decency and truth are lost on this world, and that all is futile, which produces a suffocating rage.
A more sensible view is that we could divide the useful from the useless. A janitor who does his job in a conscientious way and does not live like a degenerate is necessary just as a rocket scientist is, but people of any intelligence level who are given to evil merely thwart the realization of the good.
This would be done informally, in a natural method, if applied intelligently. A hierarchy of natural leaders would be set up; they would decide who to retain, and send the others away. Those who could not find a place would have to relocate to easier places to live, like the third world.
So guess what happens when a population reproduces rapidly without the typical consequences that nature metes out to all expanding groups? This population soon experiences the Tragedy of The Commons at an exponentially accelerating rate. They have no means or method to deal with it. They predictably export this problem far and wide. What did this look like in history? (If you’ve got time to relax with a cordial and watch).
Let these people sail into your lands untouched, and you’d better say a prayer for Lindisfarne. The Vikings were directly analogous to the ecological concept of the invasive species. Nothing in
Western or Southern Europe could stop them. Most didn’t try until it was Happy Frikking Easter, 9th Century Paris.
In order to survive, The Vikings had to export their excess population. Since the whole Adopt-A-Ragnar Program didn’t seem to go well, they had to pretty much be bungholes about it until Ethelred The Unready got the message and ponied up the Danegeld.
Germany’s Chancellor is the modern Aethelred. The Magic Dirt Hypothesis is her excuse and facade behind which she gives it up like Debbie doing Dallas. You see, I don’t entirely blame Islam for the rapes terrorizing Scandinavia the way Ancient Vikings terrorized Britain and France. However, I blame the negative externalities of Islamic Culture and Sharia Law for making the Arab World similar to the Old Viking World in many respects. It encourages being fruitful and multiplying, but in many respects it forbids the necessary innovations needed to support a large population in a tolerable standard of living. Thus, the Hammer of The Gods drives their ships to new lands. Valhalla, they are coming.
Columnist David Goldman famously described Islam as a ring of spears aimed at the rest of the world. It has reached a point where, like the Vikings, the Islamists must expand, must conquer, or in the end they will die in mass waves. They descend now upon Sweden, Germany and any other country blind enough to take them. They are overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly impoverished. They seek their women the way the Romans did amongst The Sabines. And that is the real #Rapefugee Crisis.
To solve this crisis, we must force the Vikings to stop raiding. We need to deny these raiders access to any booty. Send them back home like a pack of hounds of ill omen. Make them fix the Islamic World and sort their problems in house. Make them face what Christianity had to face in the wake of The Thirty Years War. They must face the grim dilemna of having to evolve or die. Only when their violence fails does their Renaissance truly begin. Only when conquest is not a means to prosperity and expansion will the #Rapefugee Crisis truly end.
There is a predictable pattern to the way that mass media news outlets report on events. First reports tend to be highly sensational, and either due to ignorance, bias that favors an ideological narrative, or bias towards the popular (“clickbait”), also tend to leave out or misreport important facts. This departure from truth is further amplified by social media, which promotes simple explanations that point the blame solely at a guilty few who can be satisfyingly hated due to presumed malicious motivation. We have explicated the steps in this cycle previously.
So it is with the Bahamian swimming pigs. After seven of these beloved creatures were found dead on their tiny home island, the first, biggest, wave of mass exposure this event received cast the blame onto a few reckless tourists who through cruel stupidity fed the pigs alcohol. This was a popular framing, first because it allowed people to indulge in feel-good hate against an unfair oppressor, and second because it allows advertisement of an easily achieved personal moral superiority: look at these pig murderers, I would never murder a pig for laughs, and therefore I am good, even though that’s a very low standard for good.
Though initial reports suggested that tourists had given the pigs fatal doses of alcohol, Humane Society inspector Ventoi Bethune told National Geographic that the dead swine had likely ingested sand.
Veterinarians who visited the site found large quantities of sand in the deceased animals’ stomachs, which Bethune says may have been caused by a recent influx of visitors throwing small amounts of food on the beach.
“The pigs have been on the island so long, they are used to foraging for natural food,” Bethune says. The pigs would only go the beach for an occasional treat.
But with the increase in tourism, the pigs are relying on humans more than ever.
Though the modern mindset is shaped from an early age to expect harm from intentionally evil agents–like comic book super villains–in reality those threats are not so great, because they’re rare, easy to spot, and easy to deal with. If the pig murderers had been a few malicious individuals, we could imprison, exile, or execute the culprits and the problem would be completely solved; at least until another set of this rare type of person appeared.
What is in fact far more dangerous is carelessness and well-meaning naiveté. This is commonplace; its negative effects are far more difficult to spot, and there is no obvious solution.
None of the individuals responsible for the pigs’ deaths intended to kill the pigs. None of them expected it to happen, and most likely the vast majority don’t even realize that it happened. If we wanted to assign blame, we would have to hand out a large number of fractional pig murder sentences, which is absurdly impractical and ineffective. And to hate those responsible, to declare ourselves morally superior, we would need to pass a higher standard than the cartoonish modern conceptions of morality such as “don’t be a dick”. Those who fed the pigs probably thought they were being nice, friendly, and good.
But we are able to sketch out some direction that a solution would take if we leave behind the need to blame as the most important component of a solution. Assigning blame is important when it means holding people responsible for their failures, but becomes a distraction from solutions when punishment and retribution take the place of identifying causes.
In this case we see that the pigs died because they ate too many bits of food left in the sand, which was the result of a combination of too careless humans, and too many humans. From there we can propose either making the human visitors less careless (good luck), or reducing the number of human visitors to the island.
Though this is less satisfying than beating a few assholes, it would mean the remaining cute swimming piggies would be less likely to die — and that is what really matters.
Humanity existed in a “knowledge bubble” for the last few centuries, having discovered enough to draw dangerously over-broad conclusions, but not enough to see what was actually going on. As more information comes forth, the old theories die, and we rediscover traditional wisdom. Recent archeological evidence affirms the Platonic, Spenglerian and Evolan view of civilization collapse:
Researchers in Guatemala have found evidence of a 1,200-year-old massacre in an ancient city called Cancuén, the capital of one of the richest kingdoms of Maya civilization. The discovery, deep in the jungle of highland Guatemala, provides a snapshot of the Maya civilization as it began to collapse.
…”When they started excavating (the site), the archaeologists started hitting bones, and then more bones, and then more bones, and we then began to realize that the entire bottom half of this swimming pool was filled with human bones,” Demarest says.
Precious adornments found near and on the skeletons — including jade, carved shells and jaguar-fang necklaces — led the team to conclude that the people massacred had been nobles.
Civilization collapse is brought about by success. Civilization is, after all, organization of humanity. Specialization of labor and economies of scale lead to greater efficiency and thus wealth. At that point, many who could not survive without civilization are able to survive, and eventually, they rebel against civilization — because by definition, they do not understand it or that it requires leadership and hierarchy — and in doing so, destroy it.
Another basic question regarding the collapse, decline, or transformation of the lowland cities and kingdoms at the end of the Classic period is why in many areas Maya leadership did not respond with effective corrective measures by the stresses generated by internal, as well as external, factors. Cross-cultural studies of culture change show that “complex societies are problem-solving organizations, in which more parts, different kinds of parts, more social differentiation, more inequality, and more kinds of centralization and control emerge as circumstances require” (Tainter 1988: 37).
Yet the K’uhul Ajaw failed to respond with effective corrections of infrastructural problems. Their ineffectiveness was most likely due to the canons of Maya leadership and its limited range of action. The elites of most Classic Maya kingdoms, in general, did not manage subsistence systems or production or exchange of utilitarian goods. Most Maya polities, while held together by the rituals and authority of the center, were decentralized with local community or family-level management of most aspects of the economy. This decentralized system facilitated adoption of farming systems to the local microenvironment (e.g. Dunning et al 1997; Dunning and Beach in press).
[H]aving their role defined in terms of ritual and inter-elite alliance and warfare, it is not surprising that the K’uhul Ajaw responded through these same mechanisms to problems such as demographic pressure or ecological deterioration. They naturally reacted by intensifying ritual activities, construction, or warfare — the activities within their purview.
Plato points out the same thing: drones are left to manage their own affairs locally, in accord with natural selection. Given help by civilization, they grow in number, and then blame others for the local results of this overpopulation. They want their leaders to fix the problem caused by their own acts, which is classic scapegoating.
We can see in our world today that different types of civilizations have different types of governments. The third world favors kleptocratic strongmen; the “second world” has token political leadership, and local leadership by mafiosi; the first world prefers organized governmental systems which take on attributes of the other two systems based on the degree of decline. In other words, civilization is a spectrum from primitive to complex structures.
The rise of overpopulated drones creates a large audience for third-world style government. They cannot manage themselves, and want government to do it instead, so they depose their leadership and replace it with managerial government. This in turn exhausts the elites, who by taking up their traditional roles in the ensuing government have become slaves to managing unruly and self-destructive children, and they fade away as a result of this existential stress and misery.
Babysitting of this nature is the hallmark of declined or declining civilizations, and represents the root of Leftism, which is an organized form of Crowdism or the collective defense of individualism, which is what everyone who wants to be managed desires. He wants to avoid having to make reality work for him, and instead be told what to do in some things so that he can do whatever he wants everywhere else.
Without being cruel, we might refer to those who need to be managed as incompetents. They cannot take their small local farms and make them work, mainly because as a group, they have reproduced too frequently to sustain themselves. Those who need to be managed desire strong government to be accountable for their welfare, usually through wealth redistribution since they cannot produce wealth locally owing to overpopulation, and their political actions inevitably involve killing off the elites to take their wealth.
Since they are incompetent, and mismanage their own wealth, their seizure of wealth produces a temporary boom — including more population — and then a consequent crash, much like happened after the French and Russian revolutions.
By the time western conquerors arrived, the Mayan civilization was in full decline, which meant that it had a few ceremonial elites of a weakened nature and many peasants. The Spanish were able to overthrow this empire with only 500 men, many of whom were sick with jungle diseases, because the peasants saw an opportunity to further depose the elites. In so doing, they conveyed themselves into slavery, from which they “liberated” themselves in the early 1800s, promptly becoming a third-world society ruled by disease, corruption, unsanitary conditions and crime.
In the first world, we overthrew our elites during the years 1916-1968 by removing their political and economic power. Since that time, we have been ruled by incompetents. In principle and in result, our actions achieved the same end that the Maya did.
From this example, we see that civilization collapse comes about through lack of hierarchy. Leadership does not micromanage its people; it handles the bigger questions of diplomacy, war and cultural direction. As a result, it is always caught by surprise when the incompetents gang up on it and others, in fear of violence, go along with it. Then those others must suffer under rule by tyrants, fools and criminals.
The perpetual rallying cry of the incompetents is “equality.” They realize they are bankrupt, and want to take from others to subsidize themselves, thus become parasitic because civilization depends on hierarchy to exist. As long as one allows the quest for equality to continue, the health of the society will plummet until it reaches third-world status.
Greenpeace has released a new interpretation of the recent United Nations report on human resource use.
The article states:
The report shows that consumption of Earth’s primary resources (metals, fuels, timber, cereals and so forth) has tripled in the last 40 years, driven by
population growth (increasing at about 1.1% per year),
economic growth (averaging about 3% per year over the same period) and
consumption per person, worldwide.
Notice the order of these sources of consumption: first and foremost is population growth, which never reverses itself in the long-term, and is consistent at about 1.1% per year across all years. On the other hand, economic growth only has an “average,” despite varying widely internally, and no figures are given for consumption per person.
This casually confirms — because saying it outright might cause mass panic — that overpopulation is the driver of all pollution, including the dubious “climate change” which is used as a proxy for the increased demands for consumption caused by rising population.
In fact, climate change is the deflection from the problem of overpopulation. Democracy, which is based on the idea of equality, cannot accept any reduction of population. Population reduction either requires hierarchy, where we rank people by importance and let the good ones breed, or random killing, which would signify a failure of managerial nanny-state government.
Liberal democracy requires constant growth because it is a circular Ponzi scheme: government gives benefits to its citizens, who then spend it, which keeps the value of the economy high enough that the tax-and-spend can continue. For this to work, constant immigration and exploitation is required.
As democracy collapses, it becomes clear that its inability to act on issues like overpopulation, social decay and government over-reach was the cause of the loss of faith experienced by its citizens. The deflection of climate change is just its attempt to hide this collapse for as long as possible.
Based on what I have read on amerika.org thus far, I know that you attribute deforestation to be a primary cause of climate change. So I was wondering what you thought of Donald Trump’s seeming unwillingness to take a stance on the issue. I am aware of the energy plan on his website, yet he always fails to mention any details from it when pressed on the issue in interviews. He always falls back on blaming China which is contradictory as they recently ratified the UN Paris Agreement, of which he plans to somehow revoke any further US involvement. This suggests to me that the majority of Trump’s energy plan is all but an afterthought as it is never really given it’s due attention unless it has to do with creating more jobs. While I would like to give him my vote, this is all very troubling.
This is an interesting question and deserves an in-depth answer which others may appreciate as well. Here is what was sent back to this alert reader:
There are two answers here: practical in terms of the game, and realistic in terms of what must be done.
In the world of the practical, Trump will do his best to avoid this issue because it is entirely a Leftist creation designed to load their solution as an assumption. There is no winning hand for him to tackle this without opening another front, and the answer will be nuanced, so that is bad politics.
In realistic terms, deforestation _caused by overpopulation_ is the problem. One huge solution to this is to destroy immigration entirely and cut all third world aid, both of which Trump has hinted at wanting to do.
This means that his solution is one he cannot admit, but that he has already mentioned, just not in relation to global warming.
Michael Crichton wrote a book named State of Fear in which he attacked the myth of global warming, pointing out that measurements of temperature change were not consistent globally, suggesting that instead local effects were responsible for warming.
The liberal establishment basically crucified him and he died of cancer a few years later.
However, as has happened with every one of his theories in his books dating back to the 1960s, Crichton was right. Check out this entertaining report from China:
Researchers have found evidence that the pollution engulfing China’s cities enhances the warming effect of cityscapes, raising the temperature by one degree Celsius. Writing in Nature Communications, they say it’s not the bigger cities that suffer the most, but those with the worst of a certain type of air pollution.
Cities tend to be hotter than countryside areas because of the Urban Heat Island effect—the density of buildings and the materials they are built out of absorb heat and radiation from the sun extremely well, but don’t readily release it at night, keeping the area warmer for longer.
As written here some years ago, the culprit in cities is most likely the vast amount of concrete used because it holds on to both heat and moisture unpredictably, and covers over natural regulatory mechanisms like earth and forest. Those tend to absorb water during the day and release it just before dawn, creating a natural cooling cycle.
In addition, heavy particulate pollution like that from car exhausts creates a kind of blanket over the city which increases its temperature. For a great example, examine Los Angeles: a flat plain in a large desert valley, it gets hottest when the smog serves as an insulator. After a rain, when smog is visibly reduced, the city is cooler and the air better.
Global warming is a proxy for human effects on the environment. As usual, humans have created a phantom problem that is smaller than the real problem, which is huge. The huge real problem is overpopulation, because on a finite earth, the more people we cram into it the more we exclude nature, including these regulatory mechanisms. People are terrified of that idea, so instead they are campaigning against actually functional appliances and non-electric cars, pretending that this pretentious course of action avoids a problem because it addresses one part of it.
As more evidence comes out which shows that global warming is a local problem, the herd will have a panic attack because then, the big problem will come into view. That problem requires us telling some people they cannot breed or migrate, which violates the Leftist feel-good ideal of equality, and will precipitate the downfall of Leftism as a concept.
The primary goal of the Left is to make you hate yourself. When you hate yourself, and by extension hate the society that produced you, your self-esteem is savaged and you need a salve. That comes in the form of ideology which convinces you that you can become a hero by merely transferring power and wealth to the less fortunate.
Our entire society in the West is in the grip of this mythos because it provides a convenient means of overthrowing those might know better so the lower echelons are granted license to misbehave without consequences. It is no wonder they demanded guaranteed jobs so they could not be fired, casual sex so they could fornicate, and social benefits so even screwing up royalty would not endanger them.
They want to engage in typical lower-caste and third world behaviors, meaning intoxication and fornication in lieu of achieving anything, but them to do that, the hold on power by those who know better needs to be destroyed. From this comes the anti-hierarchy, individualistic nature of the Left: they do not want to be held accountable, and use “equality” to universally legitimize all behaviors so that their pointless and slowly destructive activity is beyond criticism.
To achieve this end, the Leftists have invented a series of myths about how terrible our society is. Through our choice to rise above the third-world level of “everyone do whatever they want,” we have become environmental destroyers, angry, destructive and most of all, bored and miserably self-hating like a Valium-addicted suburban housewife. In contrast, they say, the third world is a place of peace, environmental balance, love and happiness.
This Noble Savage myth exists not for the savages, but so that we feel bad about ourselves and our choice to have standards. Just relax — or chillax — and stop trying so hard, Western Man. Everything is OK; it’s all good, as the hippies say. Stop worrying about hygiene, productivity, social order and culture. Just go with the flow… be the flow. Like those Noble Savages, who are happier than you are.
Unfortunately, like all ideological myths, this one is also not very true. Over at The Spectator, Toby Young writes about the puncturing of a Leftist myth and the retribution that followed:
In her book, Dreger summarises the thought crime that turned him into such a plump target: ‘Chagnon saw and represented in the Yanomamö a somewhat shocking image of evolved “human nature” — one featuring males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualised drug use and ecological indifference. Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rainforest Indian family.’
Chagnon debunked a sacred myth: that there was something uniquely bad about the West that allowed us to gain power and wealth. Our acts, in the eyes of this myth, went against the way things were before, and so our power is ill-gotten and our wealth, theft. The innocent Indians never had those problems, so we should feel bad about being the source of the world’s destruction and to rectify it, relax our standards and live more like those Indians.
Except that to a student of history or eyes-open observer of the real world, this binary myth — with the good Indians and the evil Westerners — makes no sense. People are people, and societies operate according to their level of integrity and evolution, not some simplistic moral play. The Indians in North America were dispossessed after they attacked colonists, and similar events have happened whenever civilized cultures have contacted the uncivilized.
Much of the “oppression” we read about in history happened when adventurers encountered cannibals who endangered them, and fought back and won. We can always ask Michael Rockefeller about the dangers of cannibals, except that we cannot because he met his end at their hands despite approaching in peace without being a threat. The Noble Savage myth is often stated and always over-stated.
In addition to that, we now know that the peaceful Siberian immigrants in North America may have exterminated many species of large edible mammals. We know this is a likely possibility because these species vanished very quickly, which is a telltale of overhunting more than any other factor, and because we know these tribes hunted them in large numbers. We also know now of the inter-tribal violence not just in North America but Central and South America as well.
The naturalistic fallacy holds that humankind exists in peace and harmony with nature in its primitive state, but the credible evidence shows otherwise. Humans use nature for their own purposes. When a society becomes sufficiently evolved to have leaders who care about such things, humans are restrained from exploiting resources to death, and wildlands are conserved as little-used hunting preserves of the aristocrats.
But in its disorganized state, humanity behaves like yeast, consuming all of the resources available and then dying out or dying back, much like the villagers on Easter Island. The reason for this can be found in the underlying informational order to reality. Each individual has an incentive to exploit resources to the maximum, as Garrett Hardin once wrote in “The Tragedy of the Commons”:
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.
1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
In the anarchic order of nature which liberals idealize, humans exist as benefit-maximizing actors in competition with others. If they or their families hunt more, they thrive more; others try to do the same. Extinction occurs not by killing every last animal, but by killing so many that the population drops below safe breeding levels and a coup de grace from disease, drought or famine carries them into the void.
We face a similar state in the world today. Under Western Hegemony, order was established and populations stabilized. With the post-colonial regime, each society is now competing with its neighbors instead of having them as fellow states under a Western empire, and as a result, each is attempting to outbreed and then defeat its neighbors. The result is a new tragedy of the commons which will consume every resource everywhere on earth if allowed to run its course, now made easier by Western technology like repeating rifles.
This state of lawlessness was created by liberal takeover which has made the West hate itself, and the Noble Savages versus hateful Westerners narrative guided that process along. As we look toward the next millennium, we should think harder about not repeating the errors of the past, especially those which we have concealed from ourselves with artful myths in the service of liberal ideology.
I am not asking for five minutes of your time today to preach a gospel of kindness, equality and tolerance. If you’re looking for such a thing, you have plenty of other people to choose from. The whole world, from the Pope in Rome, to the President of Russia, the CEO of Coca Cola anyone you’ve ever heard of claims to stand for these values. These values are universal, they govern our societies, we see them as so self-evident that we never even question them.
As civilized beings, we take over certain values we interpret as self-evident. They are self-evident to us, only because we are genetically programmed to adhere to them. Our brains are smaller than those of our ancestors and our digit ratios reveal our genetically emasculated nature. It is us alone, who eschew violence. It horrifies us to our very core. What happens among chimpanzees on a daily basis hits the news when it occurs among our own specimens.
There is a simple factor here at work. The secret of our success is that we export violence. The industrialized holocaust that happens to the beasts delivered on our plate, or the various organisms killed to make way for our farms and plantations are kept out of the spotlights. To us this is not violence because it affects non-humans. To us this is a way of life. And as our numbers grow, so too grows the violence that we export.
After successful genocides, streets and landmarks are renamed, as new people take up residence, hoping that nothing will remind them of the slaughter that created space for them to live. So too, nothing serves to remind us of the vast forests that covered all of Europe. There exists no monument for the trees that were felled to grow the grain that sustains you. The giant oyster reef that once covered the bottom of the North Sea before its eradication through bottom trawling is memorialized only by a late 19th century British atlas. Nothing serves to remind the world of the violence we have inflicted on the entire non-human world. To us a new normal exists, of a sea composed of desert and a countryside composed of grain.
It’s easy for us to say that some hypothetical future person should not come into existence, especially when we reduce them to a number. Nobody would mourn if he heard today that the projections by the United Nations are wrong, that Nigeria by 2100 will not have 900 million people, but rather, a mere 800 million, because women decided to start using contraception. We don’t mourn those who do not come into existence, even though each and everyone of them is as unique as those of us alive today.
When more people come into existence, we collectively accept that this will be a mistake that we will have to cope with. We convince ourselves that something will show up in the near future that will turn what has been a zero-sum game played between humanity and non-humans since the dawn of civilization into a scenario where both can benefit, even as all evidence shows that the destruction accelerates.
But why should it be a given that only those who might be born in the distant future might be excessive? Could your neighbor’s pregnancy be an excessive one? Could someone you know be the product of a birth that should not have happened? We forget to take contraception, pregnancies happen, then our flexible and irrational minds adapt to reinterpret another burden as a gift. Margaret Sanger declared in 1919 that the world is already overpopulated. Such an observation implies that most of us should never have come into existence.
The question we ought to ponder is what added value the billions of us who now clutter up this planet serve. What is something you would genuinely miss, in a world with half as many people? To you there would be nothing but benefits. There might still be fish in the ocean. You might not have to spend until retirement paying back the debt you had to enter just to call a plot of physical space your own.
The second question to ponder is the inherent mediocrity of most of human existence. We value all human life that exists over non-existence, but why? When children are asked what they wish to do when they are adults, none of them respond that they wish to sit in cubicles and stare at screens. Nobody ever chooses to be born to a mother like June Shannon, who invites a man into her house who sexually abused her daughter. Those of us who are born into such circumstances tell ourselves that we have to cope with it, a price worth paying over non-existence.
When we are born into mediocrity, it is hard to acknowledge that our mediocrity should not exist, but perhaps we are capable of recognizing it when it affects others. If you imagine, that God informs you that by 2050, your nation will be identical to its current state, except for the addition of 50 million people who will live in slums, their existence characterized by illiteracy, open sewage streams and rampant rape, drug addiction and prostitution, would you consider that an enrichment? If not, then why should West Point, Monrovia exist today?
When you take a honest look at the world, how many billions of people live lives that you would not prefer over non-existence? Would you thank the Angel Gabriel, if he informed you that after hard negotiation he had managed to arrange a reincarnation for you as a young Ugandan girl who will have her breasts ironed by her mother to protect her against rape by adult men?
To me it is self-evident, that most people alive today should never have come into existence. Nor am I ashamed in any way to differentiate, to declare that some births were a better decision than others. It’s obvious to me that June Shannon should never have reproduced. If she had abstained from reproduction, some space would have been freed up in another family, where a girl might be born who would not be sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend, a girl who might have an enjoyable life worth living.
There is a Dutch expression that soft healers make stinking wounds, meaning that solutions that avoid pain tend to exacerbate the underlying problem. Is it not a soft solution, to implore the teeming masses through soft rhetoric to abstain from suppressing their own misery by bringing more of it into this world, only for us to be ignored time and time again?
Africa will have three and a half billion people by 2100, forced to share a continent that will not grow in size with them. If those people had a say in the matter, most would not choose to be born in Africa, nor would they choose to be born as Muslims. They would make the same choice that most sensible people around the world would make. They would choose to be born in rural Scandinavia, to good looking upper-middle class friendly parents.
To abstain from cruelty, can sometimes be the biggest cruelty. The cruel question that has to be pondered, is whether it is time by now to start over with a clean slate. Most of humanity exists in a state of mediocrity, a mediocrity that has to destroy the lives of elephants, orangutans and other animals for us to be able to sustain it. Most of them will never be great poets or artists, functional literacy is the most they can hope for.
There is no reason to think that anything of genuine value would be lost if most people were to disappear today. The science of biotechnology would allow us to preserve those who are capable of producing societies worth living in, the type of societies that people risk their lives on the Mediterranean sea for to reach. I would say that it is long overdue.
It might seem like a massive cruelty to some of you. I can not help but wonder however, what the opinion on this matter could be of the orangutan mother who escaped with her child from the man-made fires that destroyed the Indonesian rainforest she lived in, only to be physically attacked by people whose village she fled into. Perhaps she is able to judge our species more objectively.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s liberals enjoyed talking about how the personal was the political, or how our lifestyle decisions created political change. They were right as concerned social issues, because personal choices created a wave of change and resistance. But with everything else, the personal simply became a substitute for the political, which was then ignored.
Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern. Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all). But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans. Let me go further: even to conceptualize this problem in terms of personal virtue and blame seems to me like a tragic mistake, one on which the environmentalists and their opponents colluded. Given the choice, I’d much rather that the readers of this blog flew to all the faraway conferences they wanted, drove gas-guzzling minivans, ate steaks every night, and had ten kids, but then also took some steps that made serious political action to leave most remaining fossil fuels in the ground even ε more likely, ε closer to the middle of our Overton window.
Although this post is based on the ludicrous fiction of global warming, itself a surrogate activity for what is actually needed which is lessening of human population and through that, land use, the article makes a solid point: our personal choices do not matter because we are among the few who are wealthy enough to worry over such choices. What matters instead is policy, and here I disagree with him yet again. In policy terms, the best thing we can do for the environment is to eliminate the social safety net, consign as much land as possible to national parks, end immigration and deport all non-WASPs. The above would reduce USA to a quarter of its current land use and retain the highest performing members and traditional basis of its population.
