I typically don’t like or trust YouTube documentaries, but this one is well-researched, good for explaining the start of the anti-human depopulation mindset and agenda’s to those new to it, and kept me engaged the whole way through.
The Man Who Wants Us Dead
31 Oct 2023 YouTube | Rumble-Mirror
We’ve lit the fuse on a population bomb that will wipe out all of humanity. There is no tomorrow—mass starvation and genocidal wars over dwindling finite resources. The long-prophesied Norse Ragnarok, the Abrahamist Last Judgment, the Nuutungk Talongvaqa, the Hopi tribe’s “Last Day”.
If you’re an attractive, charming doomsday showman, the end is near, and if you’re a nerd whose best works solve the problem of airline overbooking, things have never been better because Armageddon is not just mythological; it’s a battle of science, nature, human behaviour, and two men. One, a goliath celebrated with academic accolades and public popularity. The other, a David relegated to relative obscurity.
It’s the story of a bet that bound them together eternally—a bet over a handful of natural resources that served as a proxy for our destiny. The lessons we learned from it have almost been entirely ignored because they defy every instinct we have about how to survive. (01)
The foundational question of their wager is more relevant now than ever. Are we paradoxically killing ourselves by existing? And if the facts say everything you think and feel is wrong, would you even care?
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world’s death rate.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich opened his doomsday prediction book, “The Population Bomb,” with those three sentences. (02) (03) (04)
Ehrlich was and still is an entomologist. His particular field of study is butterflies, and four years before publishing a book that would change the world, he popularized a theory of co-evolution—the concept that natural selection doesn’t happen in isolation, and that plants and insects can have a reciprocal relationship affecting both their evolutionary paths.
He spent decades thinking about how the world and all the matter and life within its ecosystem worked—minerals, water, plants, animals, humans—and he concluded that it didn’t. Or that it didn’t anymore.
He saw the end of the world as we know it, and he knew not only why it would happen, but he also knew how to stop it. (05)
When he was catching butterflies as a kid in 1930s New Jersey, his collection grew so large that it filled his bedroom, and he had to sleep in a different room.
He had no idea that his life was on a collision course with a boy born in the same year living just a few miles away.
Julian Simon’s interest was ultimately in economics, and the clash between Ehrlich and Simon was a decades-long debate to decide the fate of humanity, and… you? It’s a debate over morals, mankind, and math.
Nearly 200 years before the public wager between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon became the most famous bet in history, it started with a political economist whose students affectionately referred to as “Web-Toe”.
Thomas Malthus focused on economics and demography. (06)
In his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus wrote:
It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal. (07) (08)
Okay…? :/
His lifespan almost perfectly covered the beginning and end of the Industrial Revolution. He was at the centre of it in Great Britain. It was an unprecedented period of innovation. For the first time, machines operated by a growing urban population wove textiles, which were then traded throughout a global market of raw materials and finished goods. Improvements in mining and refining made iron production soar, and after 100 years, steam power had finally matured.
Life was getting better fast, but if you watched my video on Ignaz Semmelweis and the disgusting state of medicine in the early 1800s, you know that it was also quickly getting worse. (09) (10)
Despite all of these material improvements and increases in overall wealth, human suffering seemed more severe than at any point in history. Poverty, disease, and strife ravaged the lower classes of the England that surrounded Malthus, and the environment was being degraded, too.
The River Thames had been the lifeblood of the southeast of England since before Julius Caesar’s invasion, and Malthus watched it turn into a cesspool in real-time. Factories dumped waste directly into the river, including tannery chemicals and animal parts from slaughterhouses. Garbage was also just thrown in because why not? It’ll just wash away, and it was the perfect outlet for human sewage.
Treating the Thames like a living dumpster and infinite toilet killed wildlife, made London stink, and fuelled cholera outbreaks that killed tens of thousands at a time, and it really stunk. July and August of 1858 is known as the Great Stink, and Michael Faraday described the Thames as “feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface“. (11)
The point is, Malthus was witnessing progress that even his grandparents couldn’t have fathomed, and he was also seeing misery, social, and biological putrefaction, and an obviously unsustainable future.
He concluded that the problem was people. There were simply too many of them to fathom. He wrote,
It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence… (12)
To Malthus, the math is what made the threat of overpopulation so obvious, and the Malthusian catastrophe came down to comparing exponential growth to linear growth. Malthus argued that the human population left unchecked grows exponentially because people like having babies. (13) (14)
In the 1700s, women of the lower class tended to have about 8 children, with maybe 5 of them reaching adulthood. If two parents produce 5 kids, and each of those produces 5 more, and each of those produces 5, your family grows from 2 to 7 to 32 to 157 in just 4 generations.
That’s an increase of 7,750% in the human footprint, and it was an economic problem; the more people, the more available labor. The more labor, the lower the wages, and the lower the wages, the harder it is to get increasingly expensive food that everyone is competing over. Contrast that with an increase in food production that is not exponential. According to Malthus, the available farmland can only produce so much food, so people must starve by the millions to restore the balance.
He wrote,
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
and that was that. In the battle of geometric versus arithmetic progressions, the geometric side is going to win.
Malthus tried to depict man as he really is—inert, sluggish, and averse to labor, unless compelled by necessity. To him, humanity was dumb and lazy, especially the poor.
As Malthus wrote, England was the pinnacle of modern civilization, but it was also in the wake of having suffered through a costly 7 years war, the loss of its American empire, and the day-by-day threat of instability and conflict from Napoleon Bonaparte’s friends. If everything that got better also made things worse in the greatest country in the world, why would he have an optimistic outlook on the rest of humanity’s future?
