As Dr. Peterson indicates, this has been known this for a long time. But it does not fit the agenda of those who thirst for power. That the climate has been changing for millennia is its twin. Useful lies to control the people.
The cynic in me argues that God doesn’t care about us, but then He spares this man at the edge of death – to enlighten us – and my position is weakened.
I’d add Covid to T-Rex’s list.
Overpopulation, Global Warming, Covid are all issues that are very complicated. So easy to declare that only experts can have an opinion. So easy to declare that they are critical problems that require mindless obedience to what you’re told. So easy to find facts that don’t fit and cause loss of confidence though …
I can’t get this to play. Do I need to subscribe to youtube Premium, or is something wrong with my computer?
Wow, this is very interesting and unfortunatly I think he is right. The last century was an incredible time of change from the time when large families and the ability of the kids to help work farms, tend family stores and the actual labor produced by physical work increased the value of the family unit. The ability to use muscles and basic knowledge in skilled and unskilled jobs has slipped away over the years since 1900 when plows were pulled by horses and mules and now 120 years later there are huge tractor systems run with gps thingy’s that can plow a whole county in a day or two where it would take hundreds of teams to plow and seed in a month or two. Think of all of the smaller family farms along with the small towns with local merchants and those days passed away well over a half century ago.
Now in the last thirty years a good number of the clerical, bookkeeping, legal support and banking jobs have been phased out. More manufacturing jobs have been replaced by machines run by computers and as stated in the video people are finding a lot of reason to not have children and that is sad. We have two daughters and a son in their 40’s and 50’s and it was delightful to have six of the eight grand kids ranging in age from 22 to 4 years old for Easter Sunday dinner and it makes me sad to think we might be the last generation of grandparents with a handful of grandchildren gathering in for family functions, we are not Catholic, just plain old Methodists, but we joined our local daughter’s family for Easter Mass with nine of us and I think worship and being thankful for what our Lord has provided helps keep my mental compass going in the right direction. This world problems thing has probably always been complicated and now in my later 70’s it is beyond my pay grade so, for me, a simple thank you Jesus is enough.
expat, I can get it to play. Maybe refresh this page and try again? Or put it in the YouTube search and then try it?
Eva Marie, Youtube Search didn’t work. I have a new cat who like to walk on my keyboard. Maybe he screwed something up. I’ll get someone computer savvy to look at things.
Now it works. The cat wants to jump in my toilet and climb in the dishwasher. I am trying to train him. He is a gray British short hair. His ancestors may have been at Lexington and Concord. He does have incredibly soft fur.
Interesting stuff from the 30% over the transportation mask lifting. First, of course, ad hominem attacks on the judge. Then the usual hypocrisy…a year ago when people were complaining about having to wear masks, the 30% said, “well, don’t fly!” Of course, now when the same response is laid at them for the opposite situation, they react like the selfish 4 year olds they are emotionally. And complaints about “taking away power from the federal government”; never mind when a judge rules in their favor it’s all well and good.
“…British…”
Where would we be without a little (or more than a little) Covid data manipulation?
‘Officials Manipulated COVID Data to Exaggerate Crisis, Mathematician Tells RFK, Jr.;
‘“Data was very easily used by influencers and decision-makers to fit particular narratives,”….’— https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/officials-manipulated-covid-data-mathematician-tells-rfk-jr/
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Key graf:
“It was clear I think from the start that most of the data that governments put out — not just the UK government, but most governments around the world … were kind of misleading because it was based on very easily manipulated statistics.”
The climate thing is related to this phenomenon of self hatred by elites. The hypocrisy is staggering as they fly around in private jets and tell us peasants to give up cars. Some may be related to the aftermath of World War I. We are still living with it. The massive casualties of the battle of the Somme caused by the stupidity of British generals led to an intellectual revulsion at western civilization. They marched 60,000 young men into machine guns at walking pace led by second lieutenants who kept them in nice even lines. We are still living with the consequences.
Someone at twitter said his 4th-grade daughter was given a bookmark which had a quote on it:
“The world is beautiful but has a disease called man” (Nietzsche)
My response: Are they trying to increase the youth suicide rate?
This is evil.
Mike K…no question, WWI led to a lot of revulsion at a lot of things. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel The Road Back (sort of a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front), one of the characters in the group of returning WWI veterans is Ludwig Breyer–a serious aspiring intellectual as a student, a dedicated and responsible officer in wartime. Now, he is shattered by the feeling that it was all for nothing:
“They told us it was for the Fatherland, and they meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry.–They told us it was for honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes..They stuffed the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism…And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can’t you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it!…The youth of the world rose up in every land believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other.”
I think this effect was much less in the US than in the European countries, though, due to our later entry in the war and our considerable lower level of casualties.
I reviewed the book–an unjustly neglected masterpiece–here:
WWI was indeed a destroyer of civilizations, but the Somme is a lot more complex than stupid generals and tidy lines.
I remember visiting the Boston Museum of Science when I was a kid and watching as their world population clock ticked ominously upwards. This was in the early 1970s when fear of the population explosion was at its peak. The movie Soylent Green was released in 1973 and the dystopian world it portrayed was set in the year 2022. That date seemed impossibly far off when I was a kid, but here we are and we haven’t resorted to cannibalism yet.
I spent most of my career producing population estimates for the Census Bureau and every now and then I would attend conferences where they would talk about the latest world population projections. I remember when they stopped talking about runaway population growth and instead focused on when the population would stabilize and if it would plateau or start to decline. I felt that they should have at least acknowledged that their previous doomsday scenarios were wrong.
The neo-Malthusian concept of overpopulation is so pervasive in our culture and the climate change hysteria is just the latest manifestation. The idea that people are a cancer on the planet and that they need to be somehow excised so the planet can “heal” is very persuasive to a lot of people. I think it’s the secular version of original sin.
When people have lost their faith in humanity, as many seem to have done, it is very hard to convince them to sacrifice their own pleasure to produce another generation who will only do more to harm the planet.
This is what Peter Jackson said about the British soldiers of WW1:
“It was their lack of self-pity that surprised me,” says Peter Jackson, who listened to more than 600 hours of interviews featuring First World War veterans while making his latest film They Shall Not Grow Old.
“We look on these guys with an enormous sort of pity now. We think that we sent these men into this industrial grinding machine. But they certainly didn’t think that was what was happening to them – there was no feeling sorry for themselves.”
IMHO it is the left that thinks there are ‘too many people’. And they decided not to have children. Now they realize their mistake. Which accounts for the incessant indoctrination forced on OUR children and grandchildren.
The future belongs to those who show up.
Thankfully, it won’t be the left.
I sometimes wonder who will take care of my leftist and childless acquaintances when they hit really old age. After a moment I figure it’s their own SELFISHNESS that caused their problems.
That Karma thing sure can stink.
I used to be into the de-population movement so I can understand why people get caught up in it. Overpopulation is the kind of issue that provides a “grand unified theory” for people to explain all the world’s problems and come up with a universal solution. They’ll trace environmental issues, disease, war, economic issues, and social unrest to overpopulation. That simplistic answer to all kinds of problems that seem insurmountable is very appealing.
Eventually, the hatred for humanity that the anti-natalists had and the dogged insistence that literally everything could be explained in terms of overpopulation got to be too much for me. Mass shooting? Oh, well, there are so many people no wonder some occasionally snap and go on a killing spree. A person is murdered? Oh, well, he or she shouldn’t have been born, anyway. I had a person try to convince me, in all seriousness, that humans were “unnatural.” While on tumblr in 2011 I had an “anarcho-primitivist” i.e. a person who believes civilization should be destroyed to save the planet tell me that some people would have to die in the quest to end civilization. As Peterson said, “there are too many people” is a blatantly genocidal statement. Once I realized that, I distanced myself from the anti-natalist/de-population/voluntary human extinction ideology.
This is why I stopped being pro-choice, too. I realized that killing humans to save humanity didn’t make any sense.
Dr. Peterson is wearing a great suit in that video!
Very cool! I hope some of his young followers begin emulating his style of dress, along with his philosophies of life. The world needs more grown-ups looking grown-up when out and about.
david foster,
Regarding America and Americans, there is an immense difference between sending soldiers a vast distance over an ocean to participate in wars on foreign shores and having the home front in one’s backyard.
Although much further in our nation’s past, the scars of the Civil War are still more damaging to our nation than the effects of World Wars I and II.
No question human population decline is one of the greatest, if not THE greatest issue for those of us alive today as we continue to anticipate and navigate the future. The fact that it is way down on the list of issues the U.N., our academics and the media focus on tells you a lot about the true nature of those institutions and the aptitude of those leading them.
As several here have pointed out, it’s not only NOT on their radar, they keep focusing on the opposite.
Malthus was right and wrong. There are limits to growth and population. In the main, though, they aren’t biological or technical: they are political.
Tuvea,
Regarding the Left not having children, it wasn’t a mistake. It was selfishness. Choosing to be a responsible and involved parent of children is one of the most sacrificial choices humans make.
The climate thing is related to this phenomenon of self hatred by elites.
The people in this world who actually hate themselves are quiet about it.
The French Laundry class do not hate themselves at all. They despise you.
shadow,
Mathematics changed me from my over concern of human over population.
I read that if all humans currently alive on planet Earth were given 1,000 sq.ft. of living space we could all fit in the state of Texas*. What?! That made no sense to me. I’ve been to many of the world’s populous cities were people are crammed together in tiny apartments in high rise after high rise. Texas isn’t small, but still…
So I did the math. It’s true.
That completely changed my perspective. Then I started searching out writings on human population from non-biased sources and learned the reality is nothing like what I had been hearing. I learned about Norman Borlaug. I learned that the number of trees on Earth is increasing. I learned polar bear populations are increasing. Etc., etc…
And then I started to read statistics on human birth rates. Whoa! To quote Dr. Peterson “a precipitous drop.”
*Interesting, when I Google’d in an attempt to verify that stat the first link Google fed me is to a website insisting the Earth is overpopulated and we humans have already damaged the planet beyond fixing. Oh, the moron who published the page also got the math wrong. By a factor of 10. But Google chose his site as the leader on the subject of fitting humans into Texas.
I posted this link on my local NextDoor … in a Private Group … and it was taken down. I was not banned for 2 weeks this time, though. If you live in an ultra Blue area, you are still subject to dizzying levels of censorship.
Hopefully, this was removed by some automated process on NextDoor? Or does our Group have a seething ProgWoke Dem who can’t abide anyone involved in WrongThink?
Now for something completely different. Have you heard of the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces?
“In April 2020 photos were leaked showing a partially completed mosaic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu and other high-ranking Russian officials, as well as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The Russian Orthodox Church initially explained the presence of mosaics featuring Putin and Stalin according to the tradition of depicting historical events – in this case, the 2014 annexation of Crimea to Russia and the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). However, later it was reported that the cathedral would not have any mosaics of either Putin or Stalin.[10] The Russian Orthodox Church explained that this decision was made taking into account the President’s own opinion.”
Here’s the Wikipedia write up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces
Here’s another write up: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/orthodox-cathedral-of-the-armed-force-russian-national-identity-military-disneyland
I always enjoy reading Rufus’ posts, a couple of reactions–
“Choosing to be a responsible and involved parent of children is one of the most sacrificial choices humans make.”
To be fair, though, the sacrifice is mixed with rewards. Humans, at least most, seem to get feelings of well-being and self-worth from being parents.
“I read that if all humans currently alive on planet Earth were given 1,000 sq.ft. of living space we could all fit in the state of Texas”
I had a similar experience riding the high-speed rail in China from Tianjin to Taiyuan. Holy cow! The land flowed by with barely any visible human habitation.
I love Nature for its beauty, for the knowledge I can glean from studying it, and for the use I can make of it to make my human life and those of my fellows easier and better. I recycle and pick up stray litter, not for Nature’s sweet sake, but because I don’t want to live in a pig’s mud hole. Nature doesn’t care, she’ll turn anything to her use. See Sara Teasdale: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains. Thinking that we can ruin the planet is mere hubris, but we can to some degree shape our local environment to better our own lives. Nature has never done anything for me except try to kill me every day of my life. I don’t return that indifference because I am human, and that makes all the difference.
Back in the 70’s, my girlfriend at the time did a study for class about population growth. That was the time when overpopulation was of great concern. IIRC, the only conclusion to be drawn was “it depends”. People don’t reproduce like bacteria, there are many factors that can have an influence that aren’t related to the availability of food and medicine.
I think many of our current population problems are the mutated descendants of eugenics. The original idea was to improve the species by limiting the reproduction of “inferiors”, but it became “limit the reproduction of humans”.
I learned about Norman Borlaug
One of the most significant human beings of perhaps the last thousand years and the vast majority of people have no idea who he was.
Frank–
I first encountered the Sara Teasdale poem in Ray Bradbury’s short story of the same name. Given Teasdale’s low opinion of humankind, I wasn’t surprised to learn that she died by suicide (overdose of sleeping pills) in 1933 at the age of 48– most likely believing that nature was as indifferent to her as to those who died in WWI (she wrote the poem in 1915 and gave it the subtitle “War Time”).
JimNorCal,
I absolutely agree on the rewards part, but I have had single acquaintances assure me that my wife and I bred for selfish reasons. We wanted to “make copies of ourselves.”
People striving to be moral and good marrying and working together to produce the next generation of people striving to be moral and good is crucial to humanity’s future. The culture I was raised in, the public schools I attended, the church I belonged to; supported that fundamental idea.
It will be interesting to see what a culture that promotes the opposite produces.
I know the population decrease is going on but not everywhere, can’t get all upset over another doomsday scenario
Skip,
I agree. These things have a tendency to sort themselves out. Just as people panic over sea level rise; whether man caused, or not, Earth ice melts or freezes and sea levels change. For millennia people in coastal areas have been slowly adapting to these gradual changes. Humans will figure out how to live with whatever the future number is*.
My point about the UN and academia, is both institutions are full of people who don’t have faith in lay people adapting to their environments. Therefore, it’s ironic they spend their days fretting over the opposite situation we currently find ourselves in.
*But it can be a serious, local problem. Japan, for example, is wrestling with social and political problems caused by decades of low birth rates.
The neo-Malthusian concept of overpopulation is so pervasive in our culture and the climate change hysteria is just the latest manifestation. The idea that people are a cancer on the planet and that they need to be somehow excised so the planet can “heal” is very persuasive to a lot of people. I think it’s the secular version of original sin.
Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” sometime around 1970, predicting that we’d all be starving by the year 2000. I think that clown is still alive. The late great Julian Simon was his nemesis and promoted the idea that people are in fact the greatest and most scarce resource. He famously won a bet with Ehrlich on whether commodity prices would be higher or lower by the end of some 10-year period. But actual evidence and prediction failures mean nothing to these doomsayers.
For those interested in the topic of world population, you might look at Hans Rosling’s presentation entitled “Don’t panic … showing the facts about population.” It’s a TED talk, but please don’t let that discourage you. Unlike Jordan Peterson, Rosling expects that population will plateau rather then collapse.
Rosling was a Swedish statistician who had a genius for illustrating data. He started the Gapminder Foundation to collect, analyze, and display reliable data about the world. They also try to determine the level of public understanding about that data, and they’ve developed a variety of teaching materials to reduce misconceptions.
Opera and Ballet
You can enjoy the art of opera and ballet while appreciating the art of architecture at the Latvian Opera House in Riga. Originally built in 1863 as the Riga German Theatre by Ludwig Bohnstedt, the neo-classical-style building is a work of art itself. Much of the grand building was lost to the great fire of 1882. Reconstruction was led by Reinhold Schmaelin. By 1887, it was the first building of its kind to have electricity from its own power station. Since around 200 performances take place each year, it should be easy to get the chance to attend one.
There are diverse precedents for the People, less our Posterity… social progress… planned parent/hood… wicked solution.
Years ago, I was first introduced to the assertion that a society’s demographics reveal its destiny by Mark Steyn. That’s self-evidently true.
Yet that doesn’t necessarily support Peterson’s argument for a coming population collapse, which rests mostly upon the expectation that birth rates will continue to remain below replacement level.
That is not at all certain. For instance, America’s current 335+ million pop. could in principle decline to 180 million and then start to rise again. The rate of increase could rise and fall over centuries. Finally stabalizing at replacement level.
Peterson rightly points to the Left’s nihilism with its implication that humanity is a cancerous virus (the Matrix). As long as that obscenity is culturally dominant, the West is doomed.
So one way or another, that dysfunction will have to be eliminated and the corrective will have to come from an internal source.
The sooner that corrective is applied, the less decrease in population humanity will have to endure.
So I looked up Norman Borlaug in Wikipedia, and found this…
In the early 1980s, environmental groups that were opposed to Borlaug’s methods campaigned against his planned expansion of efforts into Africa. They prompted the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the World Bank to stop funding most of his African agriculture projects. Western European governments were persuaded to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa. According to David Seckler, former Director General of the International Water Management Institute, “the environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa.”[36]
So the same, crazy, destructive people funded by the same anti-human foundations and governments that are promoting net zero went all in to starve as many in Africa as they could.
And yes, Norman Borlaug was a great man.
Rufus,
I have always believed that some people who choose to have kids are selfish. Like people who use IVF & surrogacy when plenty of children need good homes, people who say “I don’t know, I just do” when asked why they want kids, people who “just love babies,” wanting someone to care for you when you’re old, etc. Sure, some might do it out of a genuine love of humanity and a desire to create a better future, or for religious reasons, but there are selfish reasons to have children just like there are selfish reasons not to.
I bought the whole “Population Bomb” agenda. Lots of smart people were saying it. Must be true. Scared the bejesus out of me.
Robert Anton Wilson, a writer of the libertarian-hippie stripe (which used to be more common than today), helped me to see the matter more clearly:
___________________________
Or consider this quotation from Pop Ecologist [also beatnik poet] Gary Snyder, ‘But what I’m talking about is not what critics immediately call ‘the Stone Age.’ As Dave Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth, is fond of saying, ‘Heck, no, I’d just like to go back to the 1920’s.’ Which isn’t an evasion because there was almost half the existing population then, and we still had a functioning system of public transportation.”
In short, Snyder wants to “get rid of” two billion people. Those who believe that none of the Pop Ecologists realize that their proposals involve massive starvation for the majority should consider this question profoundly.
My big step out of the “Population Bomb” mentality was reading about Norman Borlaug, and books by tech-savvy people like Herman Kahn {futurist), John McCarthy (computer scientist), Julian Simon (economist/business professor) and Bjorn Lomborg (statistician), who explained that we are nowhere near exhausting the physical resources of the planet nor the creative resources of humanity.
Bjorn Lomborg is well credentialed, well informed on the facts, a good communicator, prolific writer and a talented speaker. Therefore the mainstream media ignore him.
Michael Schellenberger has traveled a similar path. A changer like Lomborg (and neo). Schellenberger is running for Governor of California. I wish him well.
In re the population decline discussion: two posts by Sarah Hoyt on the topic.
She repeats a couple of ideas and citations, but both are worth reading.
You don’t necessarily have to “get rid of” 2 billion people to drop the world population. You could conceivably approve of a future in 100 years in which there were 2 billion few people because so many chose not to procreate, and there is, after all, a time limit on each life.
What worries me is that human civilizations have not traditionally found a way to sustain massive sudden decreases in population any more than they’ve found it easy to adapt to massive sudden increases. The assumption that we could simply return to the 1920s, for instance, is fantastic. People don’t peacefully give up things like dentistry and competent medical care. What’s more, civilizations don’t quickly adapt to savage disruptions in complicated webs. It would be less like a time-travel back-to-Regency England fantasy and more like the civilization-wide catastrophe that ended the Bronze Age and was followed by the Iron Age only after a long, long, long very dark period.
Now, if we could slowly shrink in population, I can see that working. The thing is, some populations will explode while others collapse. It won’t be gradual or deliberate or uniform. It will be more like what happens when a bacterial culture is slammed by treatment, but a few survive and take over.
@ Wendy – very astute observations.
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As Dr. Peterson indicates, this has been known this for a long time. But it does not fit the agenda of those who thirst for power. That the climate has been changing for millennia is its twin. Useful lies to control the people.
The cynic in me argues that God doesn’t care about us, but then He spares this man at the edge of death – to enlighten us – and my position is weakened.
I’d add Covid to T-Rex’s list.
Overpopulation, Global Warming, Covid are all issues that are very complicated. So easy to declare that only experts can have an opinion. So easy to declare that they are critical problems that require mindless obedience to what you’re told. So easy to find facts that don’t fit and cause loss of confidence though …
I can’t get this to play. Do I need to subscribe to youtube Premium, or is something wrong with my computer?
Wow, this is very interesting and unfortunatly I think he is right. The last century was an incredible time of change from the time when large families and the ability of the kids to help work farms, tend family stores and the actual labor produced by physical work increased the value of the family unit. The ability to use muscles and basic knowledge in skilled and unskilled jobs has slipped away over the years since 1900 when plows were pulled by horses and mules and now 120 years later there are huge tractor systems run with gps thingy’s that can plow a whole county in a day or two where it would take hundreds of teams to plow and seed in a month or two. Think of all of the smaller family farms along with the small towns with local merchants and those days passed away well over a half century ago.
Now in the last thirty years a good number of the clerical, bookkeeping, legal support and banking jobs have been phased out. More manufacturing jobs have been replaced by machines run by computers and as stated in the video people are finding a lot of reason to not have children and that is sad. We have two daughters and a son in their 40’s and 50’s and it was delightful to have six of the eight grand kids ranging in age from 22 to 4 years old for Easter Sunday dinner and it makes me sad to think we might be the last generation of grandparents with a handful of grandchildren gathering in for family functions, we are not Catholic, just plain old Methodists, but we joined our local daughter’s family for Easter Mass with nine of us and I think worship and being thankful for what our Lord has provided helps keep my mental compass going in the right direction. This world problems thing has probably always been complicated and now in my later 70’s it is beyond my pay grade so, for me, a simple thank you Jesus is enough.
expat, I can get it to play. Maybe refresh this page and try again? Or put it in the YouTube search and then try it?
Eva Marie, Youtube Search didn’t work. I have a new cat who like to walk on my keyboard. Maybe he screwed something up. I’ll get someone computer savvy to look at things.
Now it works. The cat wants to jump in my toilet and climb in the dishwasher. I am trying to train him. He is a gray British short hair. His ancestors may have been at Lexington and Concord. He does have incredibly soft fur.
Interesting stuff from the 30% over the transportation mask lifting. First, of course, ad hominem attacks on the judge. Then the usual hypocrisy…a year ago when people were complaining about having to wear masks, the 30% said, “well, don’t fly!” Of course, now when the same response is laid at them for the opposite situation, they react like the selfish 4 year olds they are emotionally. And complaints about “taking away power from the federal government”; never mind when a judge rules in their favor it’s all well and good.
“…British…”
Where would we be without a little (or more than a little) Covid data manipulation?
‘Officials Manipulated COVID Data to Exaggerate Crisis, Mathematician Tells RFK, Jr.;
‘“Data was very easily used by influencers and decision-makers to fit particular narratives,”….’—
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/officials-manipulated-covid-data-mathematician-tells-rfk-jr/
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Key graf:
“It was clear I think from the start that most of the data that governments put out — not just the UK government, but most governments around the world … were kind of misleading because it was based on very easily manipulated statistics.”
The climate thing is related to this phenomenon of self hatred by elites. The hypocrisy is staggering as they fly around in private jets and tell us peasants to give up cars. Some may be related to the aftermath of World War I. We are still living with it. The massive casualties of the battle of the Somme caused by the stupidity of British generals led to an intellectual revulsion at western civilization. They marched 60,000 young men into machine guns at walking pace led by second lieutenants who kept them in nice even lines. We are still living with the consequences.
Someone at twitter said his 4th-grade daughter was given a bookmark which had a quote on it:
“The world is beautiful but has a disease called man” (Nietzsche)
My response: Are they trying to increase the youth suicide rate?
This is evil.
Mike K…no question, WWI led to a lot of revulsion at a lot of things. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel The Road Back (sort of a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front), one of the characters in the group of returning WWI veterans is Ludwig Breyer–a serious aspiring intellectual as a student, a dedicated and responsible officer in wartime. Now, he is shattered by the feeling that it was all for nothing:
“They told us it was for the Fatherland, and they meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry.–They told us it was for honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes..They stuffed the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism…And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can’t you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it!…The youth of the world rose up in every land believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other.”
I think this effect was much less in the US than in the European countries, though, due to our later entry in the war and our considerable lower level of casualties.
I reviewed the book–an unjustly neglected masterpiece–here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54294.html
Mike K:
WWI was indeed a destroyer of civilizations, but the Somme is a lot more complex than stupid generals and tidy lines.
I remember visiting the Boston Museum of Science when I was a kid and watching as their world population clock ticked ominously upwards. This was in the early 1970s when fear of the population explosion was at its peak. The movie Soylent Green was released in 1973 and the dystopian world it portrayed was set in the year 2022. That date seemed impossibly far off when I was a kid, but here we are and we haven’t resorted to cannibalism yet.
I spent most of my career producing population estimates for the Census Bureau and every now and then I would attend conferences where they would talk about the latest world population projections. I remember when they stopped talking about runaway population growth and instead focused on when the population would stabilize and if it would plateau or start to decline. I felt that they should have at least acknowledged that their previous doomsday scenarios were wrong.
The neo-Malthusian concept of overpopulation is so pervasive in our culture and the climate change hysteria is just the latest manifestation. The idea that people are a cancer on the planet and that they need to be somehow excised so the planet can “heal” is very persuasive to a lot of people. I think it’s the secular version of original sin.
When people have lost their faith in humanity, as many seem to have done, it is very hard to convince them to sacrifice their own pleasure to produce another generation who will only do more to harm the planet.
This is what Peter Jackson said about the British soldiers of WW1:
“It was their lack of self-pity that surprised me,” says Peter Jackson, who listened to more than 600 hours of interviews featuring First World War veterans while making his latest film They Shall Not Grow Old.
“We look on these guys with an enormous sort of pity now. We think that we sent these men into this industrial grinding machine. But they certainly didn’t think that was what was happening to them – there was no feeling sorry for themselves.”
IMHO it is the left that thinks there are ‘too many people’. And they decided not to have children. Now they realize their mistake. Which accounts for the incessant indoctrination forced on OUR children and grandchildren.
The future belongs to those who show up.
Thankfully, it won’t be the left.
I sometimes wonder who will take care of my leftist and childless acquaintances when they hit really old age. After a moment I figure it’s their own SELFISHNESS that caused their problems.
That Karma thing sure can stink.
I used to be into the de-population movement so I can understand why people get caught up in it. Overpopulation is the kind of issue that provides a “grand unified theory” for people to explain all the world’s problems and come up with a universal solution. They’ll trace environmental issues, disease, war, economic issues, and social unrest to overpopulation. That simplistic answer to all kinds of problems that seem insurmountable is very appealing.
Eventually, the hatred for humanity that the anti-natalists had and the dogged insistence that literally everything could be explained in terms of overpopulation got to be too much for me. Mass shooting? Oh, well, there are so many people no wonder some occasionally snap and go on a killing spree. A person is murdered? Oh, well, he or she shouldn’t have been born, anyway. I had a person try to convince me, in all seriousness, that humans were “unnatural.” While on tumblr in 2011 I had an “anarcho-primitivist” i.e. a person who believes civilization should be destroyed to save the planet tell me that some people would have to die in the quest to end civilization. As Peterson said, “there are too many people” is a blatantly genocidal statement. Once I realized that, I distanced myself from the anti-natalist/de-population/voluntary human extinction ideology.
This is why I stopped being pro-choice, too. I realized that killing humans to save humanity didn’t make any sense.
Dr. Peterson is wearing a great suit in that video!
Very cool! I hope some of his young followers begin emulating his style of dress, along with his philosophies of life. The world needs more grown-ups looking grown-up when out and about.
david foster,
Regarding America and Americans, there is an immense difference between sending soldiers a vast distance over an ocean to participate in wars on foreign shores and having the home front in one’s backyard.
Although much further in our nation’s past, the scars of the Civil War are still more damaging to our nation than the effects of World Wars I and II.
No question human population decline is one of the greatest, if not THE greatest issue for those of us alive today as we continue to anticipate and navigate the future. The fact that it is way down on the list of issues the U.N., our academics and the media focus on tells you a lot about the true nature of those institutions and the aptitude of those leading them.
As several here have pointed out, it’s not only NOT on their radar, they keep focusing on the opposite.
Malthus was right and wrong. There are limits to growth and population. In the main, though, they aren’t biological or technical: they are political.
Tuvea,
Regarding the Left not having children, it wasn’t a mistake. It was selfishness. Choosing to be a responsible and involved parent of children is one of the most sacrificial choices humans make.
The climate thing is related to this phenomenon of self hatred by elites.
The people in this world who actually hate themselves are quiet about it.
The French Laundry class do not hate themselves at all. They despise you.
shadow,
Mathematics changed me from my over concern of human over population.
I read that if all humans currently alive on planet Earth were given 1,000 sq.ft. of living space we could all fit in the state of Texas*. What?! That made no sense to me. I’ve been to many of the world’s populous cities were people are crammed together in tiny apartments in high rise after high rise. Texas isn’t small, but still…
So I did the math. It’s true.
That completely changed my perspective. Then I started searching out writings on human population from non-biased sources and learned the reality is nothing like what I had been hearing. I learned about Norman Borlaug. I learned that the number of trees on Earth is increasing. I learned polar bear populations are increasing. Etc., etc…
And then I started to read statistics on human birth rates. Whoa! To quote Dr. Peterson “a precipitous drop.”
*Interesting, when I Google’d in an attempt to verify that stat the first link Google fed me is to a website insisting the Earth is overpopulated and we humans have already damaged the planet beyond fixing. Oh, the moron who published the page also got the math wrong. By a factor of 10. But Google chose his site as the leader on the subject of fitting humans into Texas.
I posted this link on my local NextDoor … in a Private Group … and it was taken down. I was not banned for 2 weeks this time, though. If you live in an ultra Blue area, you are still subject to dizzying levels of censorship.
Hopefully, this was removed by some automated process on NextDoor? Or does our Group have a seething ProgWoke Dem who can’t abide anyone involved in WrongThink?
See if you think this would rise to the level of mis/dis/mal-information where you live …
https://www.city-journal.org/the-failed-covid-policy-of-mask-mandates
Art Deco @1:42pm,
Well stated, and, unfortunately, all too correct.
Why Does Music Only Use 12 Different Notes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvmzgVtZtUQ
I think you liked this guy before, anyway.
Now for something completely different. Have you heard of the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces?
“In April 2020 photos were leaked showing a partially completed mosaic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu and other high-ranking Russian officials, as well as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The Russian Orthodox Church initially explained the presence of mosaics featuring Putin and Stalin according to the tradition of depicting historical events – in this case, the 2014 annexation of Crimea to Russia and the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). However, later it was reported that the cathedral would not have any mosaics of either Putin or Stalin.[10] The Russian Orthodox Church explained that this decision was made taking into account the President’s own opinion.”
Here’s the Wikipedia write up:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces
Here’s another write up:
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/orthodox-cathedral-of-the-armed-force-russian-national-identity-military-disneyland
I always enjoy reading Rufus’ posts, a couple of reactions–
“Choosing to be a responsible and involved parent of children is one of the most sacrificial choices humans make.”
To be fair, though, the sacrifice is mixed with rewards. Humans, at least most, seem to get feelings of well-being and self-worth from being parents.
“I read that if all humans currently alive on planet Earth were given 1,000 sq.ft. of living space we could all fit in the state of Texas”
I had a similar experience riding the high-speed rail in China from Tianjin to Taiyuan. Holy cow! The land flowed by with barely any visible human habitation.
I love Nature for its beauty, for the knowledge I can glean from studying it, and for the use I can make of it to make my human life and those of my fellows easier and better. I recycle and pick up stray litter, not for Nature’s sweet sake, but because I don’t want to live in a pig’s mud hole. Nature doesn’t care, she’ll turn anything to her use. See Sara Teasdale: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains. Thinking that we can ruin the planet is mere hubris, but we can to some degree shape our local environment to better our own lives. Nature has never done anything for me except try to kill me every day of my life. I don’t return that indifference because I am human, and that makes all the difference.
Back in the 70’s, my girlfriend at the time did a study for class about population growth. That was the time when overpopulation was of great concern. IIRC, the only conclusion to be drawn was “it depends”. People don’t reproduce like bacteria, there are many factors that can have an influence that aren’t related to the availability of food and medicine.
I think many of our current population problems are the mutated descendants of eugenics. The original idea was to improve the species by limiting the reproduction of “inferiors”, but it became “limit the reproduction of humans”.
One of the most significant human beings of perhaps the last thousand years and the vast majority of people have no idea who he was.
Frank–
I first encountered the Sara Teasdale poem in Ray Bradbury’s short story of the same name. Given Teasdale’s low opinion of humankind, I wasn’t surprised to learn that she died by suicide (overdose of sleeping pills) in 1933 at the age of 48– most likely believing that nature was as indifferent to her as to those who died in WWI (she wrote the poem in 1915 and gave it the subtitle “War Time”).
JimNorCal,
I absolutely agree on the rewards part, but I have had single acquaintances assure me that my wife and I bred for selfish reasons. We wanted to “make copies of ourselves.”
People striving to be moral and good marrying and working together to produce the next generation of people striving to be moral and good is crucial to humanity’s future. The culture I was raised in, the public schools I attended, the church I belonged to; supported that fundamental idea.
It will be interesting to see what a culture that promotes the opposite produces.
I know the population decrease is going on but not everywhere, can’t get all upset over another doomsday scenario
Skip,
I agree. These things have a tendency to sort themselves out. Just as people panic over sea level rise; whether man caused, or not, Earth ice melts or freezes and sea levels change. For millennia people in coastal areas have been slowly adapting to these gradual changes. Humans will figure out how to live with whatever the future number is*.
My point about the UN and academia, is both institutions are full of people who don’t have faith in lay people adapting to their environments. Therefore, it’s ironic they spend their days fretting over the opposite situation we currently find ourselves in.
*But it can be a serious, local problem. Japan, for example, is wrestling with social and political problems caused by decades of low birth rates.
The neo-Malthusian concept of overpopulation is so pervasive in our culture and the climate change hysteria is just the latest manifestation. The idea that people are a cancer on the planet and that they need to be somehow excised so the planet can “heal” is very persuasive to a lot of people. I think it’s the secular version of original sin.
Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” sometime around 1970, predicting that we’d all be starving by the year 2000. I think that clown is still alive. The late great Julian Simon was his nemesis and promoted the idea that people are in fact the greatest and most scarce resource. He famously won a bet with Ehrlich on whether commodity prices would be higher or lower by the end of some 10-year period. But actual evidence and prediction failures mean nothing to these doomsayers.
For those interested in the topic of world population, you might look at Hans Rosling’s presentation entitled “Don’t panic … showing the facts about population.” It’s a TED talk, but please don’t let that discourage you. Unlike Jordan Peterson, Rosling expects that population will plateau rather then collapse.
The YouTube video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
Rosling was a Swedish statistician who had a genius for illustrating data. He started the Gapminder Foundation to collect, analyze, and display reliable data about the world. They also try to determine the level of public understanding about that data, and they’ve developed a variety of teaching materials to reduce misconceptions.
Gapminder is at https://www.gapminder.org/
Opera and Ballet
You can enjoy the art of opera and ballet while appreciating the art of architecture at the Latvian Opera House in Riga. Originally built in 1863 as the Riga German Theatre by Ludwig Bohnstedt, the neo-classical-style building is a work of art itself. Much of the grand building was lost to the great fire of 1882. Reconstruction was led by Reinhold Schmaelin. By 1887, it was the first building of its kind to have electricity from its own power station. Since around 200 performances take place each year, it should be easy to get the chance to attend one.
There are diverse precedents for the People, less our Posterity… social progress… planned parent/hood… wicked solution.
Years ago, I was first introduced to the assertion that a society’s demographics reveal its destiny by Mark Steyn. That’s self-evidently true.
Yet that doesn’t necessarily support Peterson’s argument for a coming population collapse, which rests mostly upon the expectation that birth rates will continue to remain below replacement level.
That is not at all certain. For instance, America’s current 335+ million pop. could in principle decline to 180 million and then start to rise again. The rate of increase could rise and fall over centuries. Finally stabalizing at replacement level.
Peterson rightly points to the Left’s nihilism with its implication that humanity is a cancerous virus (the Matrix). As long as that obscenity is culturally dominant, the West is doomed.
So one way or another, that dysfunction will have to be eliminated and the corrective will have to come from an internal source.
The sooner that corrective is applied, the less decrease in population humanity will have to endure.
So I looked up Norman Borlaug in Wikipedia, and found this…
In the early 1980s, environmental groups that were opposed to Borlaug’s methods campaigned against his planned expansion of efforts into Africa. They prompted the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the World Bank to stop funding most of his African agriculture projects. Western European governments were persuaded to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa. According to David Seckler, former Director General of the International Water Management Institute, “the environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa.”[36]
So the same, crazy, destructive people funded by the same anti-human foundations and governments that are promoting net zero went all in to starve as many in Africa as they could.
And yes, Norman Borlaug was a great man.
Rufus,
I have always believed that some people who choose to have kids are selfish. Like people who use IVF & surrogacy when plenty of children need good homes, people who say “I don’t know, I just do” when asked why they want kids, people who “just love babies,” wanting someone to care for you when you’re old, etc. Sure, some might do it out of a genuine love of humanity and a desire to create a better future, or for religious reasons, but there are selfish reasons to have children just like there are selfish reasons not to.
I bought the whole “Population Bomb” agenda. Lots of smart people were saying it. Must be true. Scared the bejesus out of me.
Robert Anton Wilson, a writer of the libertarian-hippie stripe (which used to be more common than today), helped me to see the matter more clearly:
___________________________
Or consider this quotation from Pop Ecologist [also beatnik poet] Gary Snyder, ‘But what I’m talking about is not what critics immediately call ‘the Stone Age.’ As Dave Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth, is fond of saying, ‘Heck, no, I’d just like to go back to the 1920’s.’ Which isn’t an evasion because there was almost half the existing population then, and we still had a functioning system of public transportation.”
In short, Snyder wants to “get rid of” two billion people. Those who believe that none of the Pop Ecologists realize that their proposals involve massive starvation for the majority should consider this question profoundly.
http://rawilson.com/right-where-you-are-sitting-now/
And yes, Norman Borlaug was a great man.
Rufus, Nonapod, Sexton Beetle:
Absolutely.
My big step out of the “Population Bomb” mentality was reading about Norman Borlaug, and books by tech-savvy people like Herman Kahn {futurist), John McCarthy (computer scientist), Julian Simon (economist/business professor) and Bjorn Lomborg (statistician), who explained that we are nowhere near exhausting the physical resources of the planet nor the creative resources of humanity.
Bjorn Lomborg is well credentialed, well informed on the facts, a good communicator, prolific writer and a talented speaker. Therefore the mainstream media ignore him.
Michael Schellenberger has traveled a similar path. A changer like Lomborg (and neo). Schellenberger is running for Governor of California. I wish him well.
In re the population decline discussion: two posts by Sarah Hoyt on the topic.
https://pjmedia.com/culture/sarah-hoyt/2018/01/10/theres-no-thing-overpopulation-n170393
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/04/20/every-generation-a-blast-from-the-past-from-march-9-2020/
She repeats a couple of ideas and citations, but both are worth reading.
You don’t necessarily have to “get rid of” 2 billion people to drop the world population. You could conceivably approve of a future in 100 years in which there were 2 billion few people because so many chose not to procreate, and there is, after all, a time limit on each life.
What worries me is that human civilizations have not traditionally found a way to sustain massive sudden decreases in population any more than they’ve found it easy to adapt to massive sudden increases. The assumption that we could simply return to the 1920s, for instance, is fantastic. People don’t peacefully give up things like dentistry and competent medical care. What’s more, civilizations don’t quickly adapt to savage disruptions in complicated webs. It would be less like a time-travel back-to-Regency England fantasy and more like the civilization-wide catastrophe that ended the Bronze Age and was followed by the Iron Age only after a long, long, long very dark period.
Now, if we could slowly shrink in population, I can see that working. The thing is, some populations will explode while others collapse. It won’t be gradual or deliberate or uniform. It will be more like what happens when a bacterial culture is slammed by treatment, but a few survive and take over.
@ Wendy – very astute observations.