The (De)Population Bomb

or... Paul Erlich goes to the movies.

After decades of experimentation, the environmental activists have finally settled on the phrase “Climate Change” to describe the threat posed by what used to be called Anthropogenic Global Warming. We’ll have to wait and see if this latest euphemism for “Expensive Totalitarian Government” sticks long term, but it’s worth noting that “Global Warming” wasn’t the environmental movement’s first attempt to brand this all-of-government effort to throw us all back to the Stone Age. Nor was it Hollywood’s first attempt at backing the effort with effective propaganda.

The drive to punish humans for what activists perceive as our careless consumption-based destruction of the planet goes further back than that. Way back in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, when the fear was not global warming but the return of a catastrophic global ice age. Activists called this human problem “Overpopulation.”

There were just too many of us on the planet, and that had to change somehow.

Enter Hollywood on its white horse to save the day with movies like “Logan’s Run’ and “Soylent Green.” Movies that warned theater-goers about all the horrors that would soon befall us if the population continued to grow unchecked; movies that took their cue from Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), one of the most culturally influential books of the period.

(Above: The eternal question… is Soylet Green people? Or are people Soylent Green?)

The problem, as the dystopian sci-fi movies of the 60’s and 70’s proved, is that reducing the population by force is an ugly business. Those who engaged in violent de-population were the villains in these movies, not the heroes. And for a long time, even unto the dawn of the new Millenium, American movie-goers rejected the framing of humans on Earth as a Virus.

Not that Hollywood stopped trying, of course. Remember this gem from “The Matrix” (1999)?

Incorrect, Agent Smith, wrong on every point, in fact. We are mammals. And unlike say, the White-Tailed Deer, who will indeed overpopulate an area until disease and starvation reduces the population violently, humans actually do seek an equilibrium with their environment. This is because we tend to value the lives of individual humans and understand famine as an unacceptable and preventable state of affairs. In this way, Human beings are different from every other species on Earth. We have the intellectual capacity, theoretically, to dream up technological solutions to whatever problems we create so that disease, famine and political murder on a grand scale do not become necessary.

The dystopian movies of the “Population Bomb” era and beyond may have been popular with audiences, but the message (mostly) went over like a lead zeppelin. Ronald Reagan, the 1980’s and the era of conspicuous consumption proved that unequivocally.

And anyway, who wants to be on Agent Smith’s side?

What was needed, the propagandists realized, was a campaign of persuasion rather than fear. A “nudge” rather than a “shove.” If we could convince humans to voluntarily reduce their own numbers, we could save the planet without all the bloody messiness of movies like “Soylent Green”, Logan’s Run” and “The Matrix.”

And that was the real genius of the slow evolution from “Population Bomb” to “Global Warming” to “Climate Change.” The propagandists perceived, correctly, that folks didn’t like the idea of being herded into euthanasia pods. But they did like the idea of voluntarily reducing the population over time in ways that required very little personal sacrifice. Things like having fewer children, for example. The term of art these days is not “De-Population” but a much more clinical and less ominous phrase… “De-Growth.”

And Hollywood responded enthusiastically. By the turn of the Millenium, the 40-year-old unmarried childless Man-Baby had become the most common character archetype in the comedies Hollywood produced, and children were often portrayed as the end of life’s joy, rather than the beginning.

Eventually, younger generations responded to this relentless propaganda push. Today they are delaying marriage and family-building, often forever. They have embraced abortion-on-demand, the recreational use of drugs which wreak havoc on fertility, physician-assisted suicide and even “gender-affirming care” which is, at its heart, a mass sterilization program.

As a result, U.S. birth rates have plummeted, and what we face in 2024 is not “over-population”, but “de-population.”

And here it seems that the environmental activists, Leftists all, have finally outsmarted themselves.

A declining population is catastrophic for the Leftist project. For one thing, it threatens to destroy the welfare state Ponzi scheme, which is dependent on an ever-growing supply of young workers to pay into the system. For another, a declining population reduces the chances that the human race will produce the sort of game-changing scientists and entrepreneurs who will one day develop the ability to solve complex environmental problems without bankrupting all the nations of the Earth and casting billions into poverty and despair.

The way I see it, there’s really only one option left if we want to save the planet…

Sex!

What we need is a crash program moonshot effort to get people making babies again. And Hollywood will need to be at the tip of that spear, too. I think it’s time for the sex comedy (“Porky’s”, “Revenge of the Nerds”, “Risky Business, “American Pie”) and the erotic thriller (“Jagged Edge”, “Body Double”, “Fatal Attraction”, “Basic Instinct”) to make a triumphant return to America’s movie theaters.

It certainly couldn’t hurt, and it would be a lot more fun than living in a world that has become something much more depressing… a dystopia in which there’s no one left to go to the movies at all.

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