Garrett Hardin, Dr. Evil, Part 1
Review of Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Garrett Hardin belongs to the group of radical world population controllers that includes Paul Ehrlich and the Zero Population Growth Movement, Ted Turner, Jacques Cousteau, Al Gore, the Clintons, and the other notables at the Club of Rome. Ehrlich has made many false predictions, which have served to discredit his line of Enviro-lying. We get physically ill if we think about Ehrlich’s lies, so we’re moving over to Garrett Hardin’s recent revisionist book to discredit this line of Enviro-liars once and for all. Hardin is such a bad liar he makes us nauseous, but we can hold our nose and get through this terrible stink. Unpacking Enviro-bullshit isn’t something we want to do every day. You feel dirty just coming into contact with these Enviro-weasels.
Hardin argues that there are no benefits to an increase in the world’s population and many negative outcomes, including overcrowding, increased pollution, a shortage of natural resources, more wars and conflicts, and increases in crime. Of course, he doesn’t offer any evidence of correlation between overpopulation and these “outcomes,” but this list sounds convincing, doesn’t it? Let’s add, more pimples, more bad first dates, more garbage cans tipping over, and more rude salespeople to this list. You can add your pet problems as well. As long as you pile on the negatives and forget about the positives, you’re right in Hardin’s game.
We’re not going to give you the horrible details of the world population genocide in today’s post, but when we do give them to you, remember that Hardin prefers these atrocities to the problems named above.
While Hardin is busy thinking about how more people might inconvenience him, he never considers that human life itself could be good. The word “good” isn’t is his vocabulary.
Hardin believes in scientific progress but has his doubts about “social progress.” But oooh, he changes his mind and decides that social progress is real and is due to the undermining of the medieval authority structures of church and throne together with an assault on custom as superstition. He cites Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) as an example of literary ridicule of social manners leading to the destruction of false social authorities. As if social manners had improved lately.
Hardin ridicules the idea that “Near Eastern” religions that are 2000 years old are equipped to deal with modern problems. We happen to agree with this point. Christians and Moslems are very poorly equipped to oppose the biggest problem of our century, the New World Order and the Enviro-propagandists who wish to exert control over the world.
Hardin then postulates a hypothetical objective observer who can reason through modern dilemmas as his final authority. Unfortunately, Hardin isn’t a thinker, let alone an objective observer. He’s an Enviro-Nazi. We’ll show in this post that Hardin cannot locate an authority, let alone a hypothetical objective authority, to replace those “false social authorities” he has dismissed from history, along with their etiquette.
Hardin notes that classical economics of the Adam Smith tradition never discussed limits, but the new science of ecology does introduce the concept of limits and hence is superior to economics. Hardin believes ecology has the power to transform both economics and ethics into a new paradigm that can guide the economics and politics of the future.
A lot of dumb Greenies have wasted a lot of intellectual effort in this project of modeling economics on ecology to produce an “ethical outcome” that squares with their ideas of wealth redistribution and resources left in the ground. All you need to know about this phony project is that the Communists tried it first and utterly failed. The only intellectual difference between the two is, the Commies modeled their economy on the false ideas of Karl Marx while the Eco-asswipes model their economics on the pseudo-science of ecology. But specifically, the fallacy in this line of thinking is the ecological concept of limited resources in a natural environment applied to human economics. The idea of limited resources cannot be quantified, and on this failure their whole pseudo-science falls apart.
Remember, science operates by postulating a hypothesis, gathering data to support it, and quantifying the data. Science is reductionist, translating natural phenomena into numbers to create a mathematical version of nature. But environmentalism cannot gather any data to support its pseudo-concept of resource limits for the human economy. “Resource limits” is imaginary thinking. Environmentalism draws its conceptual basis from evolution and ecology, neither of which is a science. Since their pseudo-sciences can offer no robust data sets, Environmentalist apologists such as Hardin must engage in sophistry to convince extremely retarded liberals that their thinking is something else besides New World Order propaganda justifying genocide.
Hardin cites Malthus’ population law: that population would increase geometrically whereas food supplies would increase arithmetically, thus defining a future limit to population growth through natural limitations. Hardin criticizes Mathus’ law as incorrect reasoning, but he cites the concept of environmental carrying capacity as the updated and correct version of Mathus’ “insight.” Funny, Malthus was wrong about natural limits, yet his “insight” into environmental carrying capacity is just the right trick. If you believe this, they can sell you the whole death program.
“Environmental carrying capacity” and a “limit to resources” is how they con naive people into becoming Green Idiots. Challenge these concepts and mankind’s enemies will dissolve into confusion. Everything else in Hardin’s line of argument is beside the point, smoke and mirrors, misdirection, superficial musings.
Hardin cites the Christian Tertullian of the third century AD, who raised the question of scarcity in De Anima. Terrullian noted that pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as blessing as they prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race. Hardin notes that there has been a shift in Christian belief over the centuries toward a view that God created the earth for man’s pleasure rather than condemning man to a life of toil and struggle. Christians today are much less tolerant of death from perceived injustices than the early Christians were. This is Hardin’s way of appealing to a Christian authority to dismiss contemporary Christian pro-life ethics. In its place he proposes consequential ethics. He points out that a future of scarce resources and high population would be a relatively “heartless” future and worse than any remedies to unchecked population growth.
As if Hardin and his circle were kindly old grandfathers with their forced sterilization programs, helping humanity avoid a terrible fate that never comes and isn’t even within sight.
Ah, but haven’t there been real famines in the twentieth century? Yes, all caused by cruel, heartless Communists and corrupt dictators.
In order to fool you, the Enviro-con artists need to create a picture of future mass suffering that is worse than the suffering they cause. The Enviro-commies are committed to imaginary “mass destruction” scenarios to instill fear and obedience to their control while covering up their population control crimes.
Just trust me on this, we’ll support it with details in a later post: What the Enviro-death squads have done to Third World people around the world is is so shocking that even cruel Darwinian socialists and feminists have backed away from supporting it. But Hardin doesn’t want to tell you anything about how family planning clinics have actually operated. The imaginary disaster scenarios are widely publicized, but the actual details of population control are suppressed.
Hardin defends predictions of eco-disaster as nothing more than scientific projections of present demographic trends, as if projection were science. He insists that the many false predictions of catastrophe are well-intentioned, mathematically based ideas rather than scare tactics and exaggeration. But many statements of population control advocates indicate that they purposely engaged in scare tactics and false predictions to get support for population control. Hardin is not being honest in his defense of population “projections.” Review the quotes at The Green Agenda if you are naive about deliberate Enviro-lies.
Hardin uses the agricultural metaphor of pruning to defend his assertion that we must get rid of superfluous living material in order to improve the quality of life and arrive at a sustainable growth model. This is fallacious reasoning by analogy. His analogy equates collective human life with a single plant. Pruning helps the tree by cutting the branch, but preventing births doesn’t help those people who were not born. To make you into a co-conspirator, you must be led to believe that eliminating people helps those who survive. But this is very difficult to prove, and Hardin doesn’t prove it.
But if he says it over and over again, you might leap past the part where you ask for evidence and just assume these Eco-monsters know what they are talking about. Hardin doesn’t really know anything, he just surfs around, raising and dropping arguments, trying this and that, musing, throwing out a few key words, hoping to catch a few stupid liberal fish in his net.
Hardin defines conspiracy as “breathing together”– not meetings of anti-social planners but “breathing the same air.” Refer to our previous post, Intended Consequences, to grasp how much funding and meeting and squabbling goes on in the depopulation conspiracy. There is as much scheming and posing and arm-twisting and intimidation and greed among these elites as there is in a Democratic Congress.
Hardin admires Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and believes it was responsible for turning the paradigm away from unlimited economic growth to an understanding of limits and balances operating both in nature and hence by analogy in human economics. Carson’s false characterization of DDT as dangerous was based on liberal junk science and led to millions of deaths from malaria around the world when DDT was banned. You have to be really evil to admire Rachel Carson’s phony anti-DDT campaign.
Hardin next argues that moral requirements change as scale changes. He asserts there is nothing wrong with having a single child, but there may be something wrong with having more children under conditions of population pressure. Hardin believes that society consists of certain “sheltered classes” who can afford parenthood and thus are never forced to make difficult decisions about abortion. But having a child is something very different for a poor single mother. Hardin salutes Margaret Sanger for realizing the difficulties childbearing posed for many poor women. Hardin believes that everyone benefits when women are freed from bearing unwanted babies. Hardin points out that birth control clinics also provide information about fertility problems, hence they are not a single-focused institution promoting birth control and abortion.
Well, that was reassuring, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t you just relax and trust Planned Parenthood’s good intentions? You see, it’s not about world population control, it’s about fertility information.
Hardin distinguishes between birth control and population control, an individual decision versus a community directive. One must deal in this argument with the individual good versus the common good. Hardin believes that birth control benefits the individual parents, the individual children, and the society as a whole. Hardin celebrates the “blessing experienced by the woman who is spared a lifetime of more or less reluctant service to an unwanted child.”
Many people agree with this line of thinking, but its validity depends on an appeal to convenience that was never part of the original eugenics conspiracy. Eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger were interested in eliminating inferior genes from the gene pool and breeding a “race of thoroughbreds.” In practice, poverty has been taken by courts as evidence of inferior genes and justification for forced sterilization.
Hardin is really arguing that lower population is always good for the individual (mother?) and the community, but this is not true. The inability to quantify resource scarcity makes it impossible for the controllers to specify when population reduction is “needed,” so they allow this vague concept to “float around” as their justification for reduction programs. Notice they never advocate population growth as necessary for robust economic functioning for any society.
The Enviro-dodgers only play one side of the game, population reduction always. If your population declines dangerously, don’t bother to call Dr. Evil for the solution. They don’t deal with building anything up, they just scare you with the worst scenario and put in their programs to make people go away. You see, they are not scientists, they are propagandists. They don’t really solve problems, they kill people. It’s a one-size-fits-all program here.
And if you ladies are still worried about the inconvenience of a child, Al Gore proposed the solution in his 2000 presidential campaign: state child care neglect for all the 3- and 4-year-olds so you can take your rightful place in the workforce. Socialism is empowering. Don’t worry, the guys whose jobs you took will pay for it.
So-called community directives to control population have always come from globalist New World Order elites, not from local communities engaged in rational decision making about resources compared with population size.
Hardin seems to stake his argument on Enlightenment rationalism, but he actually recognizes that any appeal to inherent rights falters on circular reasoning, and he quotes demographer Paul Demeny that rights are devoid of content. He does note that particular local conditions are the decisive factors in any appeal to rights, and he defines this as a moral position. Hardin ventures into the thicket of the controversy over whether natural rights came first and then lead to legislation or whether legislation defines rights. Hardin sides with Bentham’s argument, that imaginary natural laws lead to imaginary rights in law (nonsense upon stilts), whereas legislation ensures rights for particular nations and peoples. In this argument Hardin seems to be favoring local legislation over any idea of universal inherent rights, including a right to reproduce. This argument is simply an attempt to argue against a right to reproduce while maintaining loyalty to the Enlightenment, from which the idea of rights emerged as the inducement to found republics. The globalists are (Communist) human rights advocates, so Hardin needs to undermine any argument for a right to reproduce. If there is a fundamental right to reproduce, Hardin’s attempt to make coerced population reduction look moral falls apart. Other universal rights advocates have refocused this argument on the “rights of the child” as a way of arguing against a right to reproduce.
Hardin enters the problem of “the authority to decide” by noting that the British Royal Society in the nineteenth century claimed that no one had authority over nature, that is, nature was the supreme authority. Science has essentially rejected the idea of self-evident truths, natural laws in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, first principles, foundational truths, etc. Hardin believes that science has no authority but consensus among scientists. In so asserting he overlooks the power of the national academies of science, science under socialism, the inherent bias toward socialism in scientific enterprise because scientists mainly get their living from the socialist state.
Hardin is desperately in search of some authority to support his anti-human agenda. Here he skips over science and settles on “nature,” but he switches his position later in the book. Generally the population controllers yearn to be considered scientists rather than what they really are, pseudo-scientists, and they search long and hard for moral justification for their anti-life agenda. That is why they are so tedious.
Hardin argues against the “mainstream” economic view that resources are infinite, when combined with man’s ingenuity. Hardin dismisses economics of infinite resources (the Julian Simon school) and points out that Simon’s statistics were in error. This is a convincing argument as Hardin presents it within his limited context, but Hardin’s presentation is not the entire story of the opposition to population control. Economists such as Julian Simon stepped forward to argue against population control because the United Nations had issued phony population statistics, and the Carter administration had recycled these phony numbers in an alarmist report. Demographic statistics are notoriously unreliable as censuses were not common until after World War II. In any event, the population controllers came to power as world population was declining, so their reliance on statistics would always be questioned even if the UN hadn’t jiggered the data.
Nothing has fooled people into believing the world is overpopulated more than these falsified UN statistics. For some reason people trust the UN, even though its corruption is so pervasive that UN watchdog groups investigating corruption have disbanded because they cannot make a dent in UN corruption.
Hardin argues that human wants are practically infinite and hence all wants cannot be satisfied. Hardin cites the following as a law of economics:
We can’t cure a shortage by increasing the supply,
Because increasing the supply encourages a higher population that will then assert even greater demands for supply. Is this really an economic law? We don’t think so. The increasing GDP rates in the Western nations have been achieved as population has declined. Hardin’s “law” isn’t a scientific law, of course, because you need actual data sets to raise a hypothesis to the level of law. It’s just something Hardin made up. We think the real law is, the higher up you go in the New World Order pyramid, the less valuable the life below you appears to be.
You can’t cure a shortage by increasing the supply? What the hell is he talking about? Shortages are fixed every day by supply increases. What Hardin is implying, not proving, is that all economic growth must stimulate population growth and then end in disaster. This seems like a straight line, but after “population growth” you need to insert “everything works well for a long time,” and then insert “economic growth can lead to population decline.” You see, real life is a little more complex than Hardin makes out. Did he fool you?
Hardin’s example of this law is that adding lanes to freeways merely increases traffic and ultimately increases the traffic jam. He seems to ignore the obvious fact that adding lanes to freeways also increases the number of cars able to drive on the freeways. Hardin never acknowledges the obvious good that occurs when wealth is increased.
If Hardin’s “law” were followed by economic planners, no one would ever increase the production of anything. In this appeal to a false “law,” Hardin is implying that the population must be frozen at some level. Hardin rejects Smithean economics’ reliance on individual motivations, which assumes that individual decision making will lead to the greatest good for the community. Hardin asserts that ecological economics requires some control over the community in the interest of posterity, and his next search for authority leads him to evolution.
Hardin argues that the concept of natural selection relies on the idea of limits or shortages in the natural environment as a mechanism for selecting the species that survive. Hardin refers to the behavior of the European swift bird as an example of nature’s rationalism. The swift bird mother pushes unhatched eggs out of the nest if she perceives cold summer weather than will not enable her to feed all of the young she has produced. Hardin explains that future fertility can make up for present loss of young; the important criterion is for the bird to feed the maximum number of hatched chicks and not waste effort gathering food for those that might not survive. By analogy, humans should do the same, and this is not an unethical position but a corrective to the absolute value of life neverending, life proliferating everywhere, under all circumstances. This mother bird behavior is not murder but rather is an investment in reproductive success according to the law of natural selection. Natural selection is the supreme moral law for Hardin, and all behaviors should line up with its rationality.
“The maximum number of hatched chicks that might survive,” “wasted effort,” and “those that might not survive” are the weasel concepts in this example. They can’t be calculated, so they are just building blocks for the pseudo-science. Natural selection itself is not an arbiter or an agent within nature. Natural selection isn’t a noun. Nature doesn’t select. An abstract noun cannot act. “Natural selection” simply means, they all died. Nature itself is an abstract idea. They fool you with abstractions, then ask you to think of nature as the supreme authority and humans as birds. Sure, some dumb liberals might wish to evolve into small monkeys to put themselves under “nature’s law,” but the rest of us would prefer to remain human and live in a human economy, thanks anyway.
Nature isn’t man’s authority on anything, but you see how desperate Hardin is to find some justification for his project of going against every human impulse to growth and every society’s joy in life. Hardin can’t really find a death cult among humans, so he finds the death arbiter in natural selection and ignores nature’s life impulse and abundance.
Environmentalism is an anti-human death cult. This is not the result of science, or of superior thinking. The death cult is built-in from the historical precedents in Malthusianism and eugenics. The connection between Malthus and Darwin is your clue for your own future research.
Key terms to reject: limited resources, environmental carrying capacity, scientific projections, superfluous living material, pruning, sustainable growth, breathing the same air, community directives, nature as supreme authority, UN population statistics, increasing supply increases population, ecological economics, control over community, the natural environment selecting, nature’s rationalism, wasted effort, investing in reproductive success.
Identify these false concepts as the building blocks of Eco-pseudoscience. Purge these terms from your thinking and spray your disinfectant on any Enviro-clod who uses them. The Enviros are carriers of pseudo-science promoting the world depopulation death cult. Their best allies are Chinese Communists. You must eliminate these evil Eco-weeds from your garden if you are going to build a good society free of Marxist control.
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