Is it possible to abolish war by relieving population pressure (and thus do away with the all-too-evident evils of war) through constructing a moral code under which population is limited to resources?

Without debating the usefulness or morality of planned parenthood, it may be verified by observation that any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand. Some human populations did so, in Terran history, and other breeds moved in and engulfed them.

Nevertheless, let’s assume that the human race manages to balance birth and death, just right to fit its own planets, and thereby becomes peaceful. What happens next?

Soon (about next Wednesday) the Bugs move in, kill off this breed which “ain’ta gonna study war no more” and the universe forgets us.

— Excerpted from STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Anson Heinlein, 1959

One of the loonier Leftist trends – of a great many – these days is the notion that it is necessary to limit the number of children that people have in order to ensure that we no good, very bad, awful, nasty, horrid, terrible, dreadful, disgusting, doubleplusungood HOOMINTS don’t chew up all of dear old Mother Earth’s resources.

This is not, by the way, a new notion. The idea that we humans would precipitate massive global ecological crises through overpopulation and overconsumption was the guiding principle behind Paul Erlich‘s predictions of doom in his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb. And it wasn’t even his idea to begin with. This idea that Mankind will eventually overbreed to the point where total population will exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity dates back at least as far as one Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.

The Malthusian Catastrophe theory posits that sooner or later a population’s growth and expansion must be checked by famine and disease. And, actually, for large parts of human history, this was a perfectly valid hypothesis that generally did fit the facts of life.

Why?

Because human populations tended to grow geometrically, as the Rev. Malthus observed, while the resources needed to sustain those populations tended to grow arithmetically.

In concrete terms, this means that if you start with, say, 2 people, they in turn will have at least two offspring, so you end up with 4 people, and those two children will in turn have at least two offspring each, so you’ll end up with at least 8 people, and so on and so forth. The geometric series of population numbers will look something like this:

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, …

You can substitute whatever units you like – tens, thousands, millions – but that is pretty much what human population growth looks like, or used to look like throughout most of our history as a species.

But the available amount of resources grows in linear, not geometric, fashion. Which is to say, if you have 10 bushels of wheat “today” to feed 2 people, “tomorrow” you will have 20 bushels, and “the next day” you’ll have 30, and so on.

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to figure out that eventually, the available amount of food and other resources needed to sustain a population will be exceeded by the total population drawing down on those resources.

Again, this was a valid hypothesis throughout much of human history, and the reality is that humans did run into some serious problems with feeding ourselves repeatedly. The reason was simple. For most of the past 10,000 years or more, the basic methods by which humans grew and raised and gathered food did not really change. There were precious few technological advancements that made it possible for a single hectare of land to yield more crops.

The problem with the Malthusian Catastrophe theory has always been one of internal logic. Its conclusion is valid, but not sound, because the moment you knock over its founding assumptions, the whole thing simply falls apart.

The major assumption has always been about the nature of population versus resource growth. The moment that you throw out the assumption that resource growth is a linear arithmetic series, the hypothesis falls apart.

We can observe that resource growth since the 19th Century has been exponential in nature, thanks to the tremendous technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, the Machine Age, the Green Revolution (involving crop yields, to be clear), and the Digital Age.

The result has been that for the better part of 200 years, the human race has known a huge expansion in resources that has been more than sufficient to offset the growth in its population.

But this Malthusian Catastrophe theory never seems to die out, primarily because there is always some sort of catastrophe that lurks around the corner, and the more gullible among us – huge masses of us, actually – are whipped into a fearful frenzy in an effort to make us cowed and terrified.

The latest such frenzy, at the end of a LONG list of them, is of course the impending “climate change” catastrophe.

This idea has been expressed under a variety of guises and names. In the 1970s, it was known as “Global Cooling”, which we were told would lead to massive global crop failures, freezing, mass starvation, and a new Ice Age. Then in the 1990s it was reinvented as “Global Warming” – a stunning inversion if there ever was one – and we were told that the world would heat up because of human activity to the point where Earth would become an unlivable Hell, and the polar ice caps would melt and submerge our greatest cities.

Neither set of predictions came to pass. Humanity has multiplied and expanded and gone from strength to strength.

So the name of the Great Terror was changed, yet again, to the anodyne and frankly useless label, “Climate Change”.

Never mind that the entire hypothesis behind “Climate Change” is faulty and that the methodologies used to measure, model, and predict global temperature trends are all utterly useless. Never mind that every single major prediction made by the “Climate Change” alarmists and fantasists have failed to come to pass. The great lie persists to this very day.

And it has been used, repeatedly, to trick people into limiting their own behaviours.

This tactic has proven to be rather effective in limiting the expansion of the very people that the white, European (or European-derived), Christian nations of the West need in order to sustain themselves and continue their existence as the most advanced and comfortable nations on Earth.

Take a look at this graph of projected population growth:

The mathematics are determinate in this regard. The future belongs to Africa and Asia, because that is where the vast majority of the world’s population will be concentrated.

Let us be very clear about what this means.

The average African IQ ranges from 83 in Egypt to 56 in Equatorial Guinea.

By contrast, the average East Asian IQ is somewhere between 100 and 108, depending on which country you live in. But the average non-East Asian IQ is quite a bit lower – roughly 90 at the upper bound, down to about 80 or so at the lower bound.

The average white IQ in Western nations is somewhere around 103.

Those who do not believe that differences in IQ are consequential, will have a very hard time explaining why it is that African nations are such consistent disasters and shitholes, while East Asian and European nations are the most advanced in the world.

Again, it does not take a mathematical genius to figure out that if you have huge numbers of poor, uneducated, low-IQ people expanding well past the ability of their nations to house, clothe, and feed them, then they need to go somewhere.

That “somewhere” will be into those countries that do not wish to breed or expand.

And that means that the nations most at risk, are the ones that are refusing to have children.

If you are of a certain philosophical bent, you might be inclined to think that this push to make us fearful and terrified of some monster that we cannot see, hear, touch, or remotely understand is deliberate…

The reality is that the world is dangerous, and always has been. There is never a “perfect” time to get married, settle down, have children. If you wait for that perfect time, you will wake up one day to find that it has long since passed you by.

And the reality is that for the vast majority of men, their children will be the only lasting legacy that they give to this world.

Every man, whether he admits it or not, seeks immortality. Since it is physically impossible for us to live beyond a certain point – though we keep pushing the outer limits of that point – we must by definition find another way to achieve the same end. A few of us manage to do this through the works of our hands and our minds – such as Leonardo da Vinci or Michaelangelo in the arts and sciences, or Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar through their military exploits.

But 99.999% of men will never, ever achieve such heights.

The only way for them to achieve that dream of immortality is through their children – so that their genes may be passed along, and so that their ideas and beliefs and values may endure.

If you do not think that this is important, then you must ask yourself: where did you get the moral code by which you live your life? Did it suddenly spring out of the depths of your mind, as if by magic? Or was it passed down to you by older and wiser men?

And if you believe that the moral code that you follow makes sense, and is shared by those who are very much like you, and is also better than the moral codes followed by other peoples…

How, then, can you possibly justify not passing on that code to another generation of young men?

The truth is as it has always been: the future belongs to those who show up to fight for it. And the Western nations have, with very few and very honourable exceptions such as Poland and Hungary and to some extent Russia, given up on that fight.