I've said this before, but although I am not in favor of killing off large swaths of the current population, I do firmly believe there are too many people on this planet.
If I cannot afford on a middle-class income to live in a climate conducive to human survival where I don't have to see or hear other people (unless I choose to) because too many people want or need the same land, driving up prices, then there are too many people. If there is not enough non-owned land available in good growing regions for homesteading by the "next" generation, there are too many people.
Granted I am an introvert, but I am not the only one. I don't want to live in a hive or a 15-minute city or a high-rise apartment building, or even a subdivision where neighbors intrude (innocently or intentionally) on my solitude, my privacy, and my property rights. I want nature around me and food that grows naturally, and a modest but comfortable home on enough land that I don't have to see or hear or interact with anyone else unless I choose to "go into town" to do so. But I cannot, because I am not wealthy enough to buy and pay taxes on said land even after working middle-class-income jobs for decades, because there are TOO MANY PEOPLE competing for it.
Sure, maybe there could be enough "food" to feed lots more people, and room to house them crowded into small spaces, but what about quality of life? The rich can afford nice homes and space for themselves and their offspring, but if most of us cannot afford to have a good quality of life because too many other people are competing for that quality (whatever constitutes quality to each of us,) what is the point of breeding more and more bodies just because we can keep them alive? That way lies madness, IMHO.
Almost EVERYTHING is owned by about 1% of the population. "its all one big club...and we ain't in it !"
And ...... anyone who envies the open spaces and FREEDOM ( relative to today !) . of times gone by ,represents a small and diminishing segment of the population.
I try to enjoy the small , simple pleasures that are afforded to us misfits . "quality of life" ?
Just some junk food and an iPad for most of the 8 billion humanoids today.
Good point, but there are still so many of us who want some of those open spaces and freedom that they are too expensive for most to afford even when they are owned by other private citizens. 🤷♀️
Too expensive because the "game" of wealth accumulation is not played on an even playing board . Never was, but the puppet masters have thrown out any attempt to even make it possible for any but a small percentage to get ahead...... and stay ahead. For the majority of hard workers who attempt to earn enough to "buy" some freedom .......suddenly the rules are changed. A click on the BANKS system and voila....."money" is created and distributed to the top . Suddenly ( and i mean suddenly) .....properties are bought up by the ultra rich people, who already own most everything (think Blackrock , Gates, etc ) , and then everything is twice the price ! and the kicker.....your TAX , insurance, rent , upkeep also is twice the price . AHHH, but not your income. Or your SS .
Substitute "privite citizens" for slaves working for the company store ( the rulers, ie govts, bankers, corporations) and one can see that personal freedom is almost impossible to attain for the honest individual .
Work all your life to try to get ahead ........... but wake up to find the goalposts were moved again . They even have a name for the game : Inflation .
And the humanoids just keep on running ..... on the hamster wheel constructed by the Monsters.
Exactly. 10 years ago I could have bought almost three times the house and land for the same money as now. (And of course my current home's "value" and taxes and insurance have gone up concurrently.) But my SS retirement has not even come close to keeping up with inflation... almost every pitiful cost of living increase is immediately gobbled up by an increase in Medicare premiums. I feel like an overworked swayback horse plodding along toward that carrot held in front of me that is always just out of reach! And the weight I pull just keeps getting heavier. No matter how I cut costs, eliminate luxuries like new clothing, satellite tv, or restaurant meals, and turn the heat down... I never quite arrive at "retirement." I had to go back to work to make ends meet, and believe me age discrimination is real!
I'm curious (no need to disclose anything to this unknown NET person) ....
so, what is your age and area in US ?
i grew up east coast....... lived in Texas hillcountry for some time.... and also many years Bay Area in Ca. (those places 30 odd years ago ! ....when they were small and quite nice)
Since a young age, however, the prescribed american dream was not mine.
A rebel without a cause ..haha... one might say. I managed to survive , single, with some entrepeneurial ventures (coffee shop owner in my twenties) ... and some others to follow..
Then i packed it all in... a bit tired of the strain of living frugally ( but i was saving ) . Took some trips overseas and found Thailand in its original free and peaceful culture (yes, at that time 30 plus years ago) . Its not an easy road, leaving ones homeland, but i had no real family or relationships to tie me there . Life here, pretty darn adventerous, carefree, and without the heavy hand of govt (ala usa) .
One world govt now seeping in everywhere, but living costs for those who know how are about a tenth of western countries . Many retirees , as i think you know, are finding countries to retire to . Many others, that don't, are experiencing your struggles. And many others just losing it all due to the financial catastrophe that the overlords deviously call "inflation" , that has ruined them .
I am in my late 60s and now live back in the midwest where I was born and raised. I've also lived on the east coast and SF Bay Area (more like 40+ years ago!) and even Hawaii for a few years. Never been to Thailand, but I had a co-worker who went for a month and loved it.
Yes, I am aware of people retiring abroad... if I didn't have pets and people who need me close, I might consider that kind of move myself.
The very thought that the lie can be told and implemented that Earth has too many people and so many people must be eliminated is, obviously, authoritarian porn. The money to be made whilst doing this is the fluffer. Or maybe it is the other way around.
While we can feed the 8 billion+, we may die in our own garbage. Plastic waste is now in all our food, water and air. We consume plastic daily. Anyone taking a look at some beaches in less developed countries will cringe at the amount of garbage washing up on the shores. We have folks here that haul it away to landfills for us. AI will compete with us meat beings for energy usage. Access to clean water will become more of a challenge for many, as well. Like any population, whether it's deer or humans, it reaches a point where the area can't support the population. We now feed the population with factory foods with little nutritional value often grown on industrial farms that have depleted soils saturated with cancerous glyphosate. I chose not to have children, never had a desire to be a parent and knew I would suck as a parent. There are some parents that should have followed my lead. The world can support more people but what is the condition of that world and health of the population?
Human population doubled three times between 1900 and about 2020. From 1 to 2 to 4 billion…and now it’s at 8+ billion.
And the wonderful thing? The growth has been entirely in the Dependency populations of earth! I.e., the ones incapable of sustaining themselves, for whom a smaller and smaller minority of humans are expected to provide not only all the basics of food, clothing, shelter, water, etc., but an ever escalating set of demands, like lucrative Pharma products, “food” grown in labs using Frankentissue, and perpetually expanding AI- and robotics-based everything.
MY GOODNESS IMAGINE THE INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES!!
This is why I am SO looking forward to living in the amazing WORLD OF THE FUTURE, where population doubles three more times between now about about 2100.
Imagine what a GLORIOUS world it will be with 64 billion humans—all but a few hundred million of whom need to be provided for like dependent factory farm livestock on a planet-wide H-sap ranch! Imagine the profits! Imagine the wonderful automation needed to deliver this wondrous future! Imagine the glorious surveillance!
And by god, think of how many more doublings we could have if we just ground up everybody into a fine powder and covered the earth in silos! QUADRILLIONS AND QUARDRILLIONS!
Plus we can replace nature with…well, I don’t know what, but surely nature is as passe and boring as the vacuum tube!
My goodness, al, people pay thousands of dollars each year to tote their skinnerbox around with them in their pocket. That's the piece I didn't say (I had ranted long enough for such a medium). There are people who would be ecstatic to live in a Hive. And they are all people who likely would not have existed prior to 1900. People who are here solely because of the Green Revolution, and other mass redistributive schemes, both technical and economic. Meanwhile those of us completely ill adapted for Hive Life are expected to carry everyone else on our backs...while bowing to/worshipping the Hive and its Queens. The Queens get quality--everyone else gets only quantity.
You probably have heard the story of how someone once asked the esteemed myrmidologist/entomologist and all-around amazing man E.O. Wilson what he thought about Marxism.
He reflected for just a moment then replied in his soft Alabama burr, "Great theory. Wrong species."
And yet there appear to be, at this point, on this planet, many millions, perhaps even billions, of "humans" whose inclinations more resemble hive-dweller arthropods. (And boy, was "covid" a pair of THEY LIVE glasses for the ones in my own circles.)
As I noted in another comment on this thread, one reason that the whole philosophy of GREEN LINE MUST GO UP is in place is because at some point the economics and public policy of the world got seized by the bankster/financier class, for whom nothing matters but perpetual doublings. I.e., the exponential function. Which Prof. Al Bartlett of UC-Boulder lectured on so brilliantly in the '70s through '90s. So now nothing matters but that. Not Nature, not Spirit, not the Soul of Mankind, only perpetual UP UP UPPITY UP. And you surely know--not even hive insects do that.
Brilliant! We differ on our definitions of "capitalism" —I view it as voluntaryism, but that's a quibble. That our "leaders" are intellectually bankrupt is obvious to some, but the woke & unwoke majority still clamor for a lead duck to quack after. The majority is innumerate & illiterate, that's clear, —that our elites are conceptually arithmetically limited is also evident. Nevertheless, a massive population collapse is underway to anyone that looks at the current worlwide fertility trends. Good or bad? —The universe yawns at the question.
That humans can be an endless fount of creative innovation is an unrealized dream of a small minority that believe that real capital is not silver & gold, but hearts & minds.
On a "happy" note, our current depopulation event is not along trenchlines: just the result of hollow men "whimpering."
Humans are tribal and hierarchical. Since the majority fail to accept and keep present in our minds this obvious fact - when setting up systems to help ameliorate the nastiness that comes from such instincts - we’re doomed to repeat cycles between oligarchy and anarchism. I’m a voluntarist myself, have “The Most Dangerous Superstition” on my shelf, dog-eared, highlighted and noted. Doesn’t change the reality that a coalescence of power within any system is inexorable. The most ambitious and power-driven will eventually create a tribe of their own. There are two limitations to it, well actually two-sides of the same concept: the coherence of each group (oligarchs vs masses).
It's a status trend. Being a mother in western society is about as low status as you can get, all the blather about how important we are aside. No western woman is going to deliberately condemn herself to career suicide unless she is married to an oligarch.
Well, I believe that some women choose to not have kids. Some do want careers (or freedom?) more than families. I just knew from childhood that I wanted no kids. I had no interest in raising any children. It is difficult to raise a family with just one income anymore. It does take a lot of sacrifice. I fully support and appreciate any woman who chooses to stay at home to raise their children. Once the kids get older though, they may want to seek out some kind of employment if they find that sitting home is becoming mind numbing. It's not like the olden days when women spent the entire day cooking, feeding the livestock, sewing, running a spinning wheel... Sometimes people need something to keep themselves fulfilled and occupied. It may be less status and more economically necessary to continue working.
Interesting ideas and analysis. You seem to suggest that “carrying capacity” in a just society would not be a concern, that human population is somehow self stabilizing. Maybe so. Hard to be sure as there’s never, as far as I know, been a just society, certainly not on a global scale.
Is any arithmetic useful in understanding human population? Or chimpanzee population? Or rattlesnake, or syphilis spirochete population, or potato population, or octopus or pick your organism? Should we organize, manipulate, influence these numbers at all? Is transforming tall grass prairie to wheat fields just another sign of the hubris of human biological analysis and arithmetic?
Not big on Rees or his student Wackernagel (whose college project, the “ecological footprint,” has somehow gained major traction among the foundationerati despite its horrifically weak spreadsheet underpinnings and opaque political and propaganda rootings).
“Overshoot” is hard to quantify because the Perpetual Doubling Worshippers can always degrade human experience with automation and claim things are in fact better because your cell hive has Starlink and HAL 9000. I mean Siri. The rush to turn existence into a high tech Kowloon Walled City is real.
The real master thinker on this topic was UC-Boulder prof Al Bartlett. His classic lectures on the exponential function were, last I checked, removed from YouTube, but if they are diggable up, there is no better introduction to this most crucial of topics.
Crucial in part because the global, central-bank-managed, fiat-currency and usury-based monetary system is entirely grounded in perpetual doublings, per management of the exponential function via a series of financial manipulations. Personally I don’t think anyone should be allowed to vote or use the internet—or even be allowed out of the house—if they can’t pass a simple quiz on how the exponential function works.
Nicholas Gomez Davila wrote, “The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.” The current fashion is to blast those who can create advanced civilizations, and demand the perpetual doubling of those dependent on them for their survival. This is, of course, thinly veiled anti-white racism, but let’s not digress there.
My darling about 20 years ago was receiving (for reasons we could never suss) invitations to “Ecological Footprint” events. At one point darling dropped a note to the organizers asking how they could justify everyone jetting off to Rio one time and some island in the Mediterranean the next, while asserting that jet travel constituted the largest part of “developed nations’” (white people’s) “resource consumption.” Why didn’t they meet via teleconference?
The reply? “You know, it’s easy to criticize, and a lot harder to do something about the problems that need attention!”
Okily dokily.
It’s 25 years since I last took a plane flight. We, and now I, have heated our house with wood from our land in that time. Our total driving is under 5,000 miles a year.
Do I get some sort of eco-credit? Nope. Just bashing for driving a 15 year old Tacoma and eating meat, and growing weary of having my household budget constantly drained ostensibly on behalf of the planet’s Huddled Masses, but really on behalf of the Professional Enviro Caste.
Ok…the earth may be coping, just, with 8 billion, but surely carrying capacity is real when forest destruction, pollution, desertification, water scarcity, etc, are all *very* real & serious issues. If we are to say this could all go away through better wealth distribution equations, modern China is the best(?) ‘example’, but they still have *huge* problems they are struggling to manage…& with a declining population now too.
This essay makes many good points, but then fails to wrap it into a worthy, pro-people conclusion it seems imho…what are the anti-Ortes solutions we need then??
"The eight billion people alive today, thriving beyond Ortes’s wildest nightmares, are living proof that carrying capacity is a lie. The question isn’t whether Earth can support human life but whether humanity will break free from oligarchical ideology that treats people as problems rather than solutions. Ortes’s three billion limit has been shattered. It’s time to bury his ideas alongside the dead empire that spawned them."
8 billipn people "thriving" ? C'mon ! At least a third do not have enough to eat . And the horrible state of the depleted soils where GMO "foods" are grown, with a fraction of the original minerals and nutrients of times gone by .
I go along with the figure of three billion ...... And even with that an almost imposssible planwould be needed ,where the management of sustainable agriculture and the almost impossible task of trying to create a healthy and homogenous world population where life is truly something to cheer about.
But if anyone thinks this world today is thriving ...... i applaud their delusion.
I am not too concerned whether or not the concept of 'carrying capacity' is real, I know from my own experience that when I was growing up, the world population was 3.6 billion, or half that of today. It was a poor town, but literally every life quality index was objectively far, far better than today. Yes, globalist greed and machinations are behind much of this, but there is a huge part that is simply numbers and demographics. I prefer life with half the number people on the planet, having lived it. Now, as far as what to do about it, that is another story. But you have to face empirical truths to solve them, don't you?
"Among the patrician class, maintaining wealth concentration required extraordinary measures. Only one son per family could marry, typically the youngest, while the others remained celibate to prevent the family fortune from being divided"
In ancient Rome it was very difficult for a father to disinherit a child. If certain strict formal procedures were not followed in making the will, the disinherited child could take the will to court and have it overturned.
So, suppose you are a farmer in ancient Rome. You have an average-sized farm of say, 300 acres. You and your wife also have 9 children. Can you see the problem?
Even today, Italian inheritance laws come from the laws of ancient Rome. Italy's civil code says that every son must receive part of the estate.
BRILLIANT ‼️♥️my sentiments exactly .... what a wonderful essay to start my day ... the composition of thought and analysis of this article is simply divine... I couldn’t have done but I can certainly appreciate the genius of it... thank you 🙏🏼 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👍🏼
I've said this before, but although I am not in favor of killing off large swaths of the current population, I do firmly believe there are too many people on this planet.
If I cannot afford on a middle-class income to live in a climate conducive to human survival where I don't have to see or hear other people (unless I choose to) because too many people want or need the same land, driving up prices, then there are too many people. If there is not enough non-owned land available in good growing regions for homesteading by the "next" generation, there are too many people.
Granted I am an introvert, but I am not the only one. I don't want to live in a hive or a 15-minute city or a high-rise apartment building, or even a subdivision where neighbors intrude (innocently or intentionally) on my solitude, my privacy, and my property rights. I want nature around me and food that grows naturally, and a modest but comfortable home on enough land that I don't have to see or hear or interact with anyone else unless I choose to "go into town" to do so. But I cannot, because I am not wealthy enough to buy and pay taxes on said land even after working middle-class-income jobs for decades, because there are TOO MANY PEOPLE competing for it.
Sure, maybe there could be enough "food" to feed lots more people, and room to house them crowded into small spaces, but what about quality of life? The rich can afford nice homes and space for themselves and their offspring, but if most of us cannot afford to have a good quality of life because too many other people are competing for that quality (whatever constitutes quality to each of us,) what is the point of breeding more and more bodies just because we can keep them alive? That way lies madness, IMHO.
Almost EVERYTHING is owned by about 1% of the population. "its all one big club...and we ain't in it !"
And ...... anyone who envies the open spaces and FREEDOM ( relative to today !) . of times gone by ,represents a small and diminishing segment of the population.
I try to enjoy the small , simple pleasures that are afforded to us misfits . "quality of life" ?
Just some junk food and an iPad for most of the 8 billion humanoids today.
Good point, but there are still so many of us who want some of those open spaces and freedom that they are too expensive for most to afford even when they are owned by other private citizens. 🤷♀️
Too expensive because the "game" of wealth accumulation is not played on an even playing board . Never was, but the puppet masters have thrown out any attempt to even make it possible for any but a small percentage to get ahead...... and stay ahead. For the majority of hard workers who attempt to earn enough to "buy" some freedom .......suddenly the rules are changed. A click on the BANKS system and voila....."money" is created and distributed to the top . Suddenly ( and i mean suddenly) .....properties are bought up by the ultra rich people, who already own most everything (think Blackrock , Gates, etc ) , and then everything is twice the price ! and the kicker.....your TAX , insurance, rent , upkeep also is twice the price . AHHH, but not your income. Or your SS .
Substitute "privite citizens" for slaves working for the company store ( the rulers, ie govts, bankers, corporations) and one can see that personal freedom is almost impossible to attain for the honest individual .
Work all your life to try to get ahead ........... but wake up to find the goalposts were moved again . They even have a name for the game : Inflation .
And the humanoids just keep on running ..... on the hamster wheel constructed by the Monsters.
Exactly. 10 years ago I could have bought almost three times the house and land for the same money as now. (And of course my current home's "value" and taxes and insurance have gone up concurrently.) But my SS retirement has not even come close to keeping up with inflation... almost every pitiful cost of living increase is immediately gobbled up by an increase in Medicare premiums. I feel like an overworked swayback horse plodding along toward that carrot held in front of me that is always just out of reach! And the weight I pull just keeps getting heavier. No matter how I cut costs, eliminate luxuries like new clothing, satellite tv, or restaurant meals, and turn the heat down... I never quite arrive at "retirement." I had to go back to work to make ends meet, and believe me age discrimination is real!
I'm curious (no need to disclose anything to this unknown NET person) ....
so, what is your age and area in US ?
i grew up east coast....... lived in Texas hillcountry for some time.... and also many years Bay Area in Ca. (those places 30 odd years ago ! ....when they were small and quite nice)
Since a young age, however, the prescribed american dream was not mine.
A rebel without a cause ..haha... one might say. I managed to survive , single, with some entrepeneurial ventures (coffee shop owner in my twenties) ... and some others to follow..
Then i packed it all in... a bit tired of the strain of living frugally ( but i was saving ) . Took some trips overseas and found Thailand in its original free and peaceful culture (yes, at that time 30 plus years ago) . Its not an easy road, leaving ones homeland, but i had no real family or relationships to tie me there . Life here, pretty darn adventerous, carefree, and without the heavy hand of govt (ala usa) .
One world govt now seeping in everywhere, but living costs for those who know how are about a tenth of western countries . Many retirees , as i think you know, are finding countries to retire to . Many others, that don't, are experiencing your struggles. And many others just losing it all due to the financial catastrophe that the overlords deviously call "inflation" , that has ruined them .
I am in my late 60s and now live back in the midwest where I was born and raised. I've also lived on the east coast and SF Bay Area (more like 40+ years ago!) and even Hawaii for a few years. Never been to Thailand, but I had a co-worker who went for a month and loved it.
Yes, I am aware of people retiring abroad... if I didn't have pets and people who need me close, I might consider that kind of move myself.
Cities are a result of social engineering, and the fact that the very wealthy "owns" large swathes of land that could be shared.
There is enough for everyone but not for one man's greed.
The very thought that the lie can be told and implemented that Earth has too many people and so many people must be eliminated is, obviously, authoritarian porn. The money to be made whilst doing this is the fluffer. Or maybe it is the other way around.
While we can feed the 8 billion+, we may die in our own garbage. Plastic waste is now in all our food, water and air. We consume plastic daily. Anyone taking a look at some beaches in less developed countries will cringe at the amount of garbage washing up on the shores. We have folks here that haul it away to landfills for us. AI will compete with us meat beings for energy usage. Access to clean water will become more of a challenge for many, as well. Like any population, whether it's deer or humans, it reaches a point where the area can't support the population. We now feed the population with factory foods with little nutritional value often grown on industrial farms that have depleted soils saturated with cancerous glyphosate. I chose not to have children, never had a desire to be a parent and knew I would suck as a parent. There are some parents that should have followed my lead. The world can support more people but what is the condition of that world and health of the population?
You are so right!
Human population doubled three times between 1900 and about 2020. From 1 to 2 to 4 billion…and now it’s at 8+ billion.
And the wonderful thing? The growth has been entirely in the Dependency populations of earth! I.e., the ones incapable of sustaining themselves, for whom a smaller and smaller minority of humans are expected to provide not only all the basics of food, clothing, shelter, water, etc., but an ever escalating set of demands, like lucrative Pharma products, “food” grown in labs using Frankentissue, and perpetually expanding AI- and robotics-based everything.
MY GOODNESS IMAGINE THE INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES!!
This is why I am SO looking forward to living in the amazing WORLD OF THE FUTURE, where population doubles three more times between now about about 2100.
Imagine what a GLORIOUS world it will be with 64 billion humans—all but a few hundred million of whom need to be provided for like dependent factory farm livestock on a planet-wide H-sap ranch! Imagine the profits! Imagine the wonderful automation needed to deliver this wondrous future! Imagine the glorious surveillance!
And by god, think of how many more doublings we could have if we just ground up everybody into a fine powder and covered the earth in silos! QUADRILLIONS AND QUARDRILLIONS!
Plus we can replace nature with…well, I don’t know what, but surely nature is as passe and boring as the vacuum tube!
https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/
Wait, what’s that you say? They’re only projecting 11 billion humans by 2100?
ER MA GERD IT’S A GLOBAL DEPOPULATION GENOCIDE!!!!!!!
hahaha Well said , mi amigo ...... the more the merrier !
You will live in a box...... and pull the lever to get your sustenance. No brain .... You will be happy !
My goodness, al, people pay thousands of dollars each year to tote their skinnerbox around with them in their pocket. That's the piece I didn't say (I had ranted long enough for such a medium). There are people who would be ecstatic to live in a Hive. And they are all people who likely would not have existed prior to 1900. People who are here solely because of the Green Revolution, and other mass redistributive schemes, both technical and economic. Meanwhile those of us completely ill adapted for Hive Life are expected to carry everyone else on our backs...while bowing to/worshipping the Hive and its Queens. The Queens get quality--everyone else gets only quantity.
You probably have heard the story of how someone once asked the esteemed myrmidologist/entomologist and all-around amazing man E.O. Wilson what he thought about Marxism.
He reflected for just a moment then replied in his soft Alabama burr, "Great theory. Wrong species."
And yet there appear to be, at this point, on this planet, many millions, perhaps even billions, of "humans" whose inclinations more resemble hive-dweller arthropods. (And boy, was "covid" a pair of THEY LIVE glasses for the ones in my own circles.)
As I noted in another comment on this thread, one reason that the whole philosophy of GREEN LINE MUST GO UP is in place is because at some point the economics and public policy of the world got seized by the bankster/financier class, for whom nothing matters but perpetual doublings. I.e., the exponential function. Which Prof. Al Bartlett of UC-Boulder lectured on so brilliantly in the '70s through '90s. So now nothing matters but that. Not Nature, not Spirit, not the Soul of Mankind, only perpetual UP UP UPPITY UP. And you surely know--not even hive insects do that.
Brilliant! We differ on our definitions of "capitalism" —I view it as voluntaryism, but that's a quibble. That our "leaders" are intellectually bankrupt is obvious to some, but the woke & unwoke majority still clamor for a lead duck to quack after. The majority is innumerate & illiterate, that's clear, —that our elites are conceptually arithmetically limited is also evident. Nevertheless, a massive population collapse is underway to anyone that looks at the current worlwide fertility trends. Good or bad? —The universe yawns at the question.
That humans can be an endless fount of creative innovation is an unrealized dream of a small minority that believe that real capital is not silver & gold, but hearts & minds.
On a "happy" note, our current depopulation event is not along trenchlines: just the result of hollow men "whimpering."
Humans are tribal and hierarchical. Since the majority fail to accept and keep present in our minds this obvious fact - when setting up systems to help ameliorate the nastiness that comes from such instincts - we’re doomed to repeat cycles between oligarchy and anarchism. I’m a voluntarist myself, have “The Most Dangerous Superstition” on my shelf, dog-eared, highlighted and noted. Doesn’t change the reality that a coalescence of power within any system is inexorable. The most ambitious and power-driven will eventually create a tribe of their own. There are two limitations to it, well actually two-sides of the same concept: the coherence of each group (oligarchs vs masses).
Is it a fertility trend or a conscious choice trend? Some developing (aka third world) nations are still growing in population.
It's a status trend. Being a mother in western society is about as low status as you can get, all the blather about how important we are aside. No western woman is going to deliberately condemn herself to career suicide unless she is married to an oligarch.
Well, I believe that some women choose to not have kids. Some do want careers (or freedom?) more than families. I just knew from childhood that I wanted no kids. I had no interest in raising any children. It is difficult to raise a family with just one income anymore. It does take a lot of sacrifice. I fully support and appreciate any woman who chooses to stay at home to raise their children. Once the kids get older though, they may want to seek out some kind of employment if they find that sitting home is becoming mind numbing. It's not like the olden days when women spent the entire day cooking, feeding the livestock, sewing, running a spinning wheel... Sometimes people need something to keep themselves fulfilled and occupied. It may be less status and more economically necessary to continue working.
Interesting ideas and analysis. You seem to suggest that “carrying capacity” in a just society would not be a concern, that human population is somehow self stabilizing. Maybe so. Hard to be sure as there’s never, as far as I know, been a just society, certainly not on a global scale.
Is any arithmetic useful in understanding human population? Or chimpanzee population? Or rattlesnake, or syphilis spirochete population, or potato population, or octopus or pick your organism? Should we organize, manipulate, influence these numbers at all? Is transforming tall grass prairie to wheat fields just another sign of the hubris of human biological analysis and arithmetic?
Idk.
To educate oneself on Population Overshoot, watch the following YouTube video by William Rees...
https://youtu.be/3MVmkIYy9aI?si=5-daklCkTshYKEIu
Not big on Rees or his student Wackernagel (whose college project, the “ecological footprint,” has somehow gained major traction among the foundationerati despite its horrifically weak spreadsheet underpinnings and opaque political and propaganda rootings).
“Overshoot” is hard to quantify because the Perpetual Doubling Worshippers can always degrade human experience with automation and claim things are in fact better because your cell hive has Starlink and HAL 9000. I mean Siri. The rush to turn existence into a high tech Kowloon Walled City is real.
The real master thinker on this topic was UC-Boulder prof Al Bartlett. His classic lectures on the exponential function were, last I checked, removed from YouTube, but if they are diggable up, there is no better introduction to this most crucial of topics.
Crucial in part because the global, central-bank-managed, fiat-currency and usury-based monetary system is entirely grounded in perpetual doublings, per management of the exponential function via a series of financial manipulations. Personally I don’t think anyone should be allowed to vote or use the internet—or even be allowed out of the house—if they can’t pass a simple quiz on how the exponential function works.
Nicholas Gomez Davila wrote, “The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.” The current fashion is to blast those who can create advanced civilizations, and demand the perpetual doubling of those dependent on them for their survival. This is, of course, thinly veiled anti-white racism, but let’s not digress there.
My darling about 20 years ago was receiving (for reasons we could never suss) invitations to “Ecological Footprint” events. At one point darling dropped a note to the organizers asking how they could justify everyone jetting off to Rio one time and some island in the Mediterranean the next, while asserting that jet travel constituted the largest part of “developed nations’” (white people’s) “resource consumption.” Why didn’t they meet via teleconference?
The reply? “You know, it’s easy to criticize, and a lot harder to do something about the problems that need attention!”
Okily dokily.
It’s 25 years since I last took a plane flight. We, and now I, have heated our house with wood from our land in that time. Our total driving is under 5,000 miles a year.
Do I get some sort of eco-credit? Nope. Just bashing for driving a 15 year old Tacoma and eating meat, and growing weary of having my household budget constantly drained ostensibly on behalf of the planet’s Huddled Masses, but really on behalf of the Professional Enviro Caste.
Let's just face it ......... this world is really fkd ! George Carlin knew this 30 + years ago.
I am surprised that this substack came up with the ......"More, More, More !! " theme .
Too many ten dollar cappucinos.... i guess
Thank you for another informative piece 🙏🏻
Wow, everyday I am amazed by the extent and the sophistication at play in so many lies we live in!
Ok…the earth may be coping, just, with 8 billion, but surely carrying capacity is real when forest destruction, pollution, desertification, water scarcity, etc, are all *very* real & serious issues. If we are to say this could all go away through better wealth distribution equations, modern China is the best(?) ‘example’, but they still have *huge* problems they are struggling to manage…& with a declining population now too.
This essay makes many good points, but then fails to wrap it into a worthy, pro-people conclusion it seems imho…what are the anti-Ortes solutions we need then??
"The eight billion people alive today, thriving beyond Ortes’s wildest nightmares, are living proof that carrying capacity is a lie. The question isn’t whether Earth can support human life but whether humanity will break free from oligarchical ideology that treats people as problems rather than solutions. Ortes’s three billion limit has been shattered. It’s time to bury his ideas alongside the dead empire that spawned them."
8 billipn people "thriving" ? C'mon ! At least a third do not have enough to eat . And the horrible state of the depleted soils where GMO "foods" are grown, with a fraction of the original minerals and nutrients of times gone by .
I go along with the figure of three billion ...... And even with that an almost imposssible planwould be needed ,where the management of sustainable agriculture and the almost impossible task of trying to create a healthy and homogenous world population where life is truly something to cheer about.
But if anyone thinks this world today is thriving ...... i applaud their delusion.
I am not too concerned whether or not the concept of 'carrying capacity' is real, I know from my own experience that when I was growing up, the world population was 3.6 billion, or half that of today. It was a poor town, but literally every life quality index was objectively far, far better than today. Yes, globalist greed and machinations are behind much of this, but there is a huge part that is simply numbers and demographics. I prefer life with half the number people on the planet, having lived it. Now, as far as what to do about it, that is another story. But you have to face empirical truths to solve them, don't you?
"Among the patrician class, maintaining wealth concentration required extraordinary measures. Only one son per family could marry, typically the youngest, while the others remained celibate to prevent the family fortune from being divided"
In ancient Rome it was very difficult for a father to disinherit a child. If certain strict formal procedures were not followed in making the will, the disinherited child could take the will to court and have it overturned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_law_in_ancient_Rome
So, suppose you are a farmer in ancient Rome. You have an average-sized farm of say, 300 acres. You and your wife also have 9 children. Can you see the problem?
Even today, Italian inheritance laws come from the laws of ancient Rome. Italy's civil code says that every son must receive part of the estate.
https://www.quora.com/Can-someone-disinherit-their-children-in-Italy
BRILLIANT ‼️♥️my sentiments exactly .... what a wonderful essay to start my day ... the composition of thought and analysis of this article is simply divine... I couldn’t have done but I can certainly appreciate the genius of it... thank you 🙏🏼 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👍🏼
sometimes i can't wuite figure out .......... is this comment a joke or ????
oh well.......... certainly one of the emoji worshippers . Wai oh Wai . My oh My !