The plot of population reduction

Once a week I take my son, who is autistic, to his therapy sessions. Since he sees three professionals (a psychologist, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist) on the same day – and I don’t watch Globo, which is tuned to the television in the reception area – I decided to take a book to study. At the time, I chose “A revolução contra a vida” (The Conspiracy Against Life), by José Alfredo Elia Marcos, from Editora Estudos Nacionais.

By persevering in reading it only once a week (so as not to mix it up with other materials that I am studying at the same time) I have made great progress, more than halfway through the work. It is a reading where I can calmly “savour” each comma and understand a lot about how the satanic idea of ​​anti-natalism came about.

I won't be reviewing this book here – but I will be doing it on my YouTube channel soon – but I will be addressing a very important issue: the fallacy that the lower the birth rate, the better for the environment. For those who think this nonsense is new, they have no idea that it has been disseminated for over three hundred years.

Thomas Malthus, Anglican clergyman, economist, mathematician and Enlightenment thinker, is considered the father of demography, as he was also the “father” of population control; he said that the improvement of humanity would be impossible without strict limits on reproduction.

Malthus believed that the capacity for population growth would be infinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man. This is because, in his early essays, he presented a calculation in which, hypothetically, human populations grow, when not subjected to obstacles, doubling every 25 years. He stated that, while the means of subsistence grow in arithmetic progression, the population grows in geometric progression.

To apply population control, Malthus advocated what he called “natural control”; in addition, he classified population reduction methods into two types: preventive – aimed at reducing birth rates; positive – aimed at increasing mortality rates.

By being in favor of population reduction, he falsely demonstrated some kind of Christian value; he defended sexual abstinence and radically condemned prostitution, although he recognized that it could reduce the number of children. He also considered the use of contraceptive methods within marriage; it seems that Malthus foresaw what would happen two hundred years later: that contraceptive methods would contribute to promoting vice and promiscuity.

Within the positive methods, Malthus advocated the promotion of wars, famine, epidemics and wars.

“Hunger is not only a subtle pressure, but may be the most natural reason for people to be industrious and hard-working and to make the most intense efforts”

“…we must encourage the other forms of destruction which we ourselves force nature to employ (…) we will prevent the cure of diseases.”

“If population is prevented from increasing more than is convenient, one of the main incentives to offensive war will be suppressed.”

Like every idea – good or bad – Malthusianism has undergone upgrades over the years; its followers have added the defense of contraceptive methods, the secularization of marriage (which would cease to be a sacrament and become a mere social contract, without the obligation of having children), the standardization of divorce and even the end of the traditional family, all with the flimsy excuse of reducing the population so as not to affect the environment. Since Malthus, the idea has been to reduce the value of human beings and deify nature.

This movement gained strength in the 1960s with the sexual revolution, through the invention of the contraceptive pill; this disconnected sex from procreation and, at the same time, from responsibility towards others; because, with the solely sexual bond, the person is reduced to the status of mere object. And it is at this stage that sex becomes politicized.

The hippie movement was one of the main causes of this problem; it was a collective countercultural behavior of the 60s. The movement, in its essence, proposes a critique of traditionalism and thus develops a new lifestyle that rethinks people's relationships with each other and with the world, coining expressions such as “Peace and Love” and “Make love, not war”, promoting “free love” without distinctions.

This movement was one of the most used to promote the worship of nature in our days; mixing Eastern religions (Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism and others) and Celtic religions, its members practiced and promoted vegetarianism, rejecting industrialized products, consuming artisanal products, mainly in food the option for natural and organic products, with the practice of subsistence agriculture.

The reader may wonder: what is the relationship between population reduction and the worship of nature? Let me explain: when you remove God, the Creator, from the equation, there is no one to obey, there are no limits; therefore, the human being, God's first creation, created in His image and likeness, can be easily reduced to anything. And this is exactly what has been happening for three hundred years with the spread of antinatalist ideas.

But, with the grace of God, the more one studies, the clearer it becomes that the story “the larger the population, the lower the well-being of a country” is nothing more than a fallacy with the clear objective of population control.

The list of good researchers is immense, requiring one or more full issues of our Journal to deal exclusively with them. So, let's deal with the two most important: Julian Simon and Norman Borlaug.

Julian Simon was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland (USA) and a collaborator at the Cato Institute in Washington. In 1981, he published the work “The Last Resort”, dismantling the Malthiusian fallacy.

Fallacy 1: Having fewer children allows you to save more while spending less

They associate a better quality of life with luxuries (travel, expensive goods, etc.), when it is nothing like that. The reality shows that parents who have more children, even though they do not have luxuries, make more of an effort to provide the best for their offspring. It is proven that children give us a foundation and responsibility and motivate us to seek the best for our family.

Fallacy 2: Larger populations consume more resources

Excerpt from Simon's work:

“Population growth does not hinder economic development, as Malthusian theory argues, but raises living standards in the long run.”

A large population brings more opportunities; this explains the migration within our country of people leaving the North and Northeast and going to the Southeast, as this is the region where there are more resources. “Coincidentally”, this is where the majority of the Brazilian population lives.

Fallacy 3: With a larger population, more pollution and a worse quality of life

Recent history shows us exactly the opposite; after the Second World War, life expectancy increased, agriculture was modernized (allowing the population to eat more and better) and human beings, in their process of creation and modernization, use sustainability, also thinking about the environment.

For Simon, human beings are the greatest asset on earth, as they are the ones who create, innovate, reinvent and adapt.

“Human beings are not just additional mouths to feed, they are more productive and imaginative minds that help create solutions to human problems, thus leaving us better off in the long run.”

Take a look at the home appliances created in the last 60 years and see how they have greatly improved the population's quality of life: air conditioning, personal computers, Walkmans (which evolved into cell phones, which today have almost a thousand and one uses), washing machines (which have done much more for women than feminism), microwaves, among others. In short: the larger the population, the greater the technological investment in improving and making life more practical.

Norman Borlaug is considered the father of modern agriculture and is called “the man who saved a billion lives” because of his scientific work in Mexico, where he designed, multiplied and developed high-yield cereal varieties, mainly a disease-resistant type of wheat. In addition, he developed the technology needed to triple these crops.

From a militant of the Malthusian cause to a defender of agriculture and the population, he said at the ceremony of inauguration as an honorary doctor at the University of Granada, in Italy:

“I now claim that the world has the technology to feed a population of 10 billion people in a sustainable environment (...) The most pertinent question today is whether farmers will be allowed to use this new technology.”

This is the central point of all pro-population researchers: they unanimously state that the problem is strictly political. In other words, governments have no interest in promoting improvements in quality of life. In order to solve “problems,” abortion is promoted, wars are allowed (especially civil wars that still occur on the African continent today), viruses “mysteriously escape” from laboratories. There is a joint effort to eliminate human beings.

And after years and years of brainwashing to reduce population, the bill has arrived: according to data published by the consulting agency McKinsey, countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and the United States will have to double their productivity growth in the coming decades to maintain the living standards that were achieved in the nineties.

The report highlights that two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries where birth rates per woman are below the replacement rate of 2.1 children, which is necessary to maintain a stable population. This problem is particularly evident in OECD countries such as Japan, Italy and Greece, as well as in China and several Central and Eastern European countries, where populations are already declining.

Furthermore, the report calculated that in Western Europe, a decline in the proportion of working-age people could reduce GDP per capita by an average of $10,000 over the next 25 years. Such a decline would directly affect living standards, which have been a pillar of developed economies.

And isn't it true that Julian Simon was right? Who would have thought, right? (Contains irony).

There is no doubt that the population reduction project only aims to eliminate human beings.

For those readers who don’t believe this, I recommend reading the continuation of this article in the next edition, where we will discuss reports from some climate conferences. What some people call a “conspiracy theory” we call reality.

Article published in Revista Conhecimento & Cidadania Vol. IV No. 50 January 2025 edition – ISSN 2764-3867