What is the true state of the world’s population?

What is the true state of the world’s population?

Emanuel Pastreich

Independent Candidate for President

The citizens of the United States are deeply confused by the discussion about the population of the world and its implications for humanity’s future. On the one hand, we have Bill Gates addressing the World Economic Forum about the population crisis in poor countries and suggesting that the powerful have a duty to do something to stop this dangerous trend of increasing poor people. On the other hand, we have the Rising Tide Foundation’s Cynthia Chung and Matt Ehret who argue in their writings, and specifically in their documentary series “Escaping Calypso’s Island,” that current approaches to economic growth, consumption, and energy are not particularly problematic, that there is no catastrophic climate change, and that concerns about overpopulation are part of a conspiracy of the powerful to limit human potential.

I wish to explain the nature of the population crisis in the world today, and to discuss briefly why the issue cannot be properly addressed in the current political discourse. I will not pile on statistics and academic references in this short essay, but rather I want to open up the floor for a meaningful debate on this critical subject. If others would like to enter into a scientific debate on this topic, I will be happy to provide more detailed information.

First, the current population of the Earth, now at over 8 billion and still growing, is a tremendous problem for our ecosystem, and for humanity itself, especially when combined with a culture and economy dedicated to consumption and extraction that rewards waste and punishes frugality. This enormous population, which uses far more energy, food, and water than required, is destroying the climate, the oceans, the soil, and decimating biodiversity at a frightening rate. The risk of human extinction is real. The problem is that alarmists suggest this problem is one for the next few years, or next few decades, when it is more likely one for the next few hundred years. But since no research or economic planning by governments or research institutes today considered the fate of the Earth for the next five hundred years in its economic calculations, things have been allowed to slide along until we reached the current catastrophe.

There are several reasons why we ended up with such an enormous population. Although the reduction in child mortality as a result of better medications and neo-natal care in the 20^th century, and especially after the Second World War, did result in an increase in population in certain regions, the spread of birth control methods offered the potential to keep down the population at the same time. The increase in population cannot be attributed simply to medical improvements.

The rapid growth in population after the Second World War was in most cases driven rather by government policies to increase population intentionally. In countries like China, explicit policies to increase the population were pursued; in nations like the United States, European countries, or South Korea and Japan, a culture that promoted raising children and a family life as an ideal (and housewives as a proper role for women) was advanced so as to increase the population in the 1950s and 1960s. This policy was pursued for various reasons, but the central reason is virtually ignored.

The market-driven economies of the United States, Europe and Japan (and their imitators) increased the population because the economy was evaluated in those countries only from the perspective of corporations and banks, thereby making consumption and economic “growth” (consumption, extraction, and overproduction/waste) the primary economic goal for society. In such a system, producing more consumers was essential so as to increase demand and consumption. Thus, population growth helped the economy if, and only if, the economy is measured in such terms. That is to say that families who use no money, take care of their family members on their own, and who create their own clothes and furniture, and grow their own food were considered to be a negative for the economy whereas parasitic economic units like investment banks, the stock market, private equity, and bonds dealers are treated as an important part of the economy, and contributor to the mythical “gross domestic product.” The fact that mass consumption, and large populations, would have a catastrophic impact over the following 100-300 years was not even considered.

The population was increased in China and other “socialist” countries for the simple reason that much of socialism in the twentieth century was built upon an acceptance of capitalist economic systems. Marx, and most of his followers, assumed that capitalism was a state that humanity must pass through to get to socialism, and that socialism should be also based on mass production, consumption, growth, and “development” rooted in technological change. Socialism meant only that bureaucrats would redistribute the products of a highly industrialized society in a more equitable manner, not that fundamental questions would be raised about whether industrialization was a positive, or mass production and consumption were in the long-term interest of humanity.

Thus, the incentive to increase population as a means of expanding the economy and production, and consumption, was also a major factor in the communist block because socialism meant a more fair distribution of products via a massive bureaucracy, not a fundamental rethinking of the concepts of finance, investment, production, consumption and growth.

Over the last thirty years, however, it became clear even to the psychopaths running Goldman Sachs that population growth and the push to make all citizens into crazed consumers was destroying the environment in a way that would impact even billionaires.

However, the need for consumption and large urban populations was so deeply rooted in the entire economic system, and so essential to the bottom line for the parasitic banker class that makes all the decisions, that the issue could not be addressed directly.

In fact, countries like South Korea and Japan whose populations are declining are treated as being in deep trouble. It is true that South Korea, Japan, and other nations with rapidly aging populations are in trouble because of the economic system they embrace, and also because a society dominated by the elderly who prioritize their own selfish needs over the long-term wellbeing of youth, will make dangerous short-sighted decisions. These are real problems that must be addressed.

After the period of population decline, however, nations like South Korea and Japan will clearly be in a far better position when they have smaller populations that are actually able to support themselves with the food produced domestically and that are freed from the deadly “free trade” nightmare employed by multinational corporations to imprison citizens and create dependency on products provided by logistics, distribution, sales and marketing companies encircling the world who suck wealth out of the local economy through their franchises like Amazon, Wal-Mart, and McDonalds for payment to their globalist masters.

So how did the masters of the universe, the heads of private equity firms, investment banks, central banks, and their billionaire clients decide to cure the population problem that is destroying the natural world while at the same time clinging to an ideology that holds up large populations as essential for national power, and demands overproduction, mindless consumption and thoughtless extraction as a prerequisite for the unscientific and destructive process known as “economic growth?”

Squaring that circle was no easy task. Fortunately Wall Street had a few geniuses like Bill Gates who liked to play CEO for the 120 or so billionaire/trillionaire families of the earth. So, what was the solution to the population problem they came up with, one which does not violate the demand for consumption and growth?

It was simple: Kill off seven billion or more of the world’s population using vaccines, wars, poisonous foods, and other new (“silent”) weapons and make a lot of money selling the vaccines, weapons, and security and propaganda systems used to do so.  

That is right, the entire COVID-19 operation is not a “gain of function” virus that escaped from a lab, nor is it a plot of a few “bad apple” rich people (as opposed to nice billionaires) who are possessed by Satan. It is a cool-headed plan to reduce the global population rapidly in light of the catastrophic collapse of biodiversity, the destruction of the oceans, the spread of deserts, the poisoning of water and soil, and the radical alteration of the climate because of emissions and other modifications of the environment.

The billionaires are pursuing a very logical, matter-of-fact, solution and they have a lot of establishment people on their side who assume that they too will survive because the billionaires need their expertise, and also their propaganda knowhow, in order to force-feed the current nonsensical agenda to the common working man and working woman.

Those elites: professors, journalists, politicians, government officials, corporate CEOs, public intellectuals and writers, are sadly mistaken, however. The Billionaire parasite class has every intention of slaughtering them as well, in much the same way that Jewish councils (Judenraete) set up by German administrators of the final solution in ghettos were promised exemption from the death camps only to be packed up as well once their work of convincing the Jewish population to cooperate was complete.