21A038 Depopulation? by Jim Davies, 10/5/2021  

Occasionally I've encountered, as perhaps you have, people who think the human population (now close to 8 billion) is much too large, and needs to be drastically reduced.

Ted Turner is one; he favors a total of "two billion or less", and it's scary to recall that he founded CNN, so is a major influencer of public opinion. Others may include Bill Gates and his pals in the World Economic Forum - whose stated intent is not to kill people but to induce them to have fewer children; not to slash population but to slow its growth. But then there's a Mr R C Christian in Georgia who erected this "Guidestones" monument to enshrine his belief that an ideal world population would be 500 million, or one-sixteenth of its current size. He does not explain how he'd get rid of the other fifteen sixteenths.

Governments have a terrible record of killing people; not just in wars, grim though that is, but of civilians in their domains even when no war is raging. Professor R J Rummel spent his life trying to measure that toll; he shows a count of 262 million for the 20th Century alone. Although he calls this "Democide" - governmental killing of people supposedly under their "protection" - the student must decide whether each outrage was deliberately planned (like Hitler's Jewish liquidation) or just as an incidental, unplanned result of some other policy (like Mao Tse Tung's fanatical drive to impose Communism on farmers.) None of them cared, so all of them were psychopaths; but indifference to unintended deaths is not quite the same thing as deliberate extermination.

Gary Barnett, who writes frequently and well for LewRockwell.com, takes the latter view; that governments are planning to kill off a large portion of our race. On 9/18/2021 he wrote:

This [plan to enslave us] has been fully outlined in the UN’s Agenda 21 and Agenda 30, and in the aptly named “Great Reset’ agenda described by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. In reality, it has but one objective, and that is to achieve total global governance and universal control over all. To be successful in this venture, many hundreds of millions, or more likely billions, will need to be murdered.

He's right of course about the "objective", but wrong, in my view, about the "need" to murder hundreds of millions. Many may well incidentally die in the process of their insane push for power, and they won't care; but I don't agree that mass murder is one of their purposes. Here's why.

1. There's little precedent. For ten thousand years, governments have polluted human society by striving to rule it, and have waged war upon war so as to achieve that domination; but with a few exceptions have not set out to kill people just for the sake of killing. Hitler's slaughter of Jews is an exception, and even that was executed after the alternative of exporting them was closed to him; but yes, he did carry out a deliberate program of extermination. So did some in the Balkan conflicts of the 199os. Arguably, the Turkish killing of Armenian Christians was another genocide. But generally, deaths were incidental to other objectives of the government psychopaths.

2. It's counter-productive. The aim of all government people is to rule; to enjoy the exercise of power over others, to live well off their labor, to enslave them. If they are dead, none of that is possible. They absolutely need a large base of subservient, submissive labor in order to achieve their basic aim; the larger it is, the more luxuriously they can live, and vice versa.

3. It's very difficult to begin large-scale murder while simultaneously retaining the support (or at least, acceptance) on which all governments depend. The trick is always to convince the ruled that being ruled is good for them; that government is necessary. It never is, but that deception is vital; in Ayn Rand's felicitous phrase, governments depend on "the sanction of the victim." People have to be continually fooled, for a small clique of masters to remain on top of a large heap of serfs, and killing them is a poor way to preserve the needed approval.

There's an interesting counter-argument to #2 above, which holds that there is indeed a benefit (to the rulers) to be gained from murdering a large number of those upon whose backs they live, namely: the bigger the society, the more trouble they face from refuseniks, protesters, anarchists, etc who would try to topple them; and that further, there's no downside from such large-scale murder because in the emerging technical, AI-driven society there is just no need for grunts, who will no longer have any value. But is this true?

I think not. First, try a reductio ad absurdum: suppose the rulers kill off everyone (except themselves, of course) so that the society they rule has nobody for them to rule. That wholly destroys the point of their lives; it takes all the fun out of being top o' the heap, for there is no heap. Nobody is producing anything for them to tax and live off. Then they will die. Won't do.

Second, take a look around, at where the resistance to government is strongest today. Are the rulers of the biggest countries under siege, and vice versa? - Not at all. China (1.5B) and India (1.3B) are by far the biggest countries, and each of their governments has, unfortunately, a very tight grip over those large populations, and have had it for centuries. In contrast, the most vigorous protests against the Covid Tyranny are taking place in Australia, whose people number only 0.026B. Disquiet is vigorous also in France, Germany and Britain, each with less than 0.1B. Libertarian thought and scholarship has taken best root, perhaps, in the USA; population, 0.3B. So the correlation alleged is, if anything, negative.

But in the automated future, do governments need a large work force? Perhaps not. If a small population, aided by robots, produces as much wealth for the rulers to plunder as a large one did in yesteryear, perhaps the difference is surplus to government requirements. So it behooves us, certainly, to be wary; in particular not to accept a government jab, with substances unknown except that they are certainly not what they are called: "vaccines."

Are they poisons? No, for that would kill the most compliant portion of society first, which cannot be in the rulers' interest. Are they, or will they become, behavior modifiers? - that would make a lot more sense than mass murder. Just use the present hysteria to inject everyone with a potion to make them more closely resemble sheep - if it exists, and perhaps it does. Or if not yet, it soon will. Either way, let the watchword be...