One of the Oldest and Most Evil Imaginary Problems: All of us, far more often than we realize, have been repeatedly told that “The biggest problem facing mankind is overpopulation.” This is intoned, with varying degrees of solemnity and seriousness, billions of times a day all over the world.
It has been etched into so many of the brain’s memory that is has become part of core beliefs. It is repeated so often that it has nearly become a living thing in our mind, blocking healthier, pro-life thoughts. It has become a sine qua non for the enlightened among us. Thoughts and concerns about overpopulation unknowingly modify our thinking about nearly everything that we consider.
The problem is made to appear to be more than merely real, but actually dangerous. Once people are convinced that overpopulation is dangerous, the deadly solutions to the imaginary problem seem so idealistic that it’s actually hard to think of them as the various forms of induced death, diseased and shortened lives, and sheer selfishness that they are.
Actually, there is no problem with “overpopulation”. Growing populations are healthier, richer, and better off than shrinking ones. Catholic theology is pro-life, so The Church does not consider a growing population to be a problem. She has faith that God will provide us with what is necessary for life.
Limiting and reducing life is a concept given first pseudo-intellectual respectability for our age by Malthus, a Protestant clergyman. He’d been raised with the nincompoop idea that Rousseau was a hero, which helped divert him into the Culture of Death. He was complimented by Marx on his “discovery” that population needed to be controlled. A couple of generations later, Stalin put what his intellectual grandfather commended into effect, slaughtering twenty million “excess” people “for the good of the State”.
Like most Imaginary Problems, the basic reason for decrying overpopulation is a glorification of selfishness. “Since there may not be enough for me, then there must be fewer of you.”
Most of the populations that are said to need to be controlled have two things in common: they are poor and largely unarmed. Those who believe in population control can encourage identifiable groups of them to kill each other in large numbers by giving modern firearms and ammunition to groups that will exterminate those they want to eliminate, often those who have the misfortune to live near planned wildlife preserves, mineral deposits, oil fields, and proposed hydroelectric dams.
The firearms are useless without ammunition. Though the guns will last for decades, if not centuries, ammunition can be hard to obtain. In our time, ammunition is produced on increasingly automated machinery at the ends of complicated supply lines, all the components of which are so expensive to build and maintain that there are ever fewer factories that produce it in ever greater quantities.
It is no coincidence that those who control the ammunition sources control the infantry and police firepower in every client state. If the newly armed group of killers, and Africa is full of them, will not get rid of enough poor, less well armed people, the flow of ammunition will be diverted to those who will. Those who support such”population control” know that the killing of the helpless is ongoing. They proclaim it to be “good”, even as they claim themselves to be “enlightened”.
Other groups reduce populations by keeping people from having DDT. That insecticide once kept native peoples and their children from having malaria kill them at rates that have risen from near zero to, currently, a million a year. In this country, spraying for disease-carrying insects is as normal as swatting a horse fly. But, Africans, Asians, and South Americans, particularly Indian tribes, aren’t allowed to have the DDT which would save them. While knowing that people are dying painful deaths, or are otherwise crippled and in pain from malaria, those who cause the death and pain congratulate themselves for “helping the environment”.
The early popularizer of malarial death was a woman named Rachael Carson. Her criminalizing of DDT, single-handedly, was responsible for more deaths, again, now at a million + per year, than any other person in history. Is she in an especially painful place in Hell? Yes, but she’s not alone in that maximum degree of suffering. There are always lots of similarly oriented souls, dozens, if not hundreds in every university, who would have just as eagerly done the job she did for death. All of them who share her goals will share her fate, usually without the brief moment of notoriety she enjoyed during her soul’s days in the clay.
What the selfish see as “excess populations” are also reduced by keeping proper nutrition and medical care away from people. The countless thousands of groups that pretend to help the poor by keeping them poor make sure they can’t have electricity, refrigeration, and medicines. “We don’t want so much technology that we destroy in-place, local cultures. It is important that they be maintained as they are so that we may study them. Yes, the people may die sooner because of spoiled food and lack of antibiotics, but that is a small price to pay to keep from contaminating our studies of their culture.”
