New World Order University Forum

Review of Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Traditional religious ethics promoting life are an investment in failure, according to Hardin, because eventually all species must run into the brute fact of a hostile environment that limits population. All species must? Really? Prove it, Dr. Evil.

Ah, but he can’t prove it, he can only lead you to think that he is thinking scientifically and has some knowledge of “laws” operating in hostile environments, as opposed to unhostile environments. Wait, which environments are hostile and which aren’t? Please Dr. Pseudoscientist, tell us which are which. Notice the weasel words they use to fool you. Brute fact? No, brute overgeneralization based on the study of animal populations or tribes that actually did live in nature. Nothing proved here, just Enviro-pseudoscience. And, even if Dr. Evil could prove it, would that make the generations of life lived before the limit was reached not worthwhile?

If you follow this “logic,” nature is determining population size, not the human economic enterprise, and no life is worthwhile because it must end.

Hardin seems to be discontented with allowing reality to play out, so he advocates population control now rather than allowing man to continue his economic innovation. Is that really moral?

Hardin fails to recognize the circular reasoning at the basis of the definition of the survival of the fittest, and in fact he asserts a fundamentally unscientific proposition, that the idea of natural selection requires no experimental verification to establish the truth of the proposition. Pretty scientific, eh? Just assume it is true. Well, that saves a lot of effort, doesn’t it, Dr. Pseudoscientist?

This is a severe error for a scientist, but actually it is one of the most common errors in thinking among scientists in general and pseudoscientists in particular. This isn’t thinking, and it isn’t science, it’s a stance.

Hardin defines the implication of genetic survival among the fittest as the social problem of defining groups of different individuals that can survive not only environmental limits but the inherent disharmonies that always occur in mixtures. Hardin falls into the common error among biologists of believing that, since genes are preserved through “natural selection” (actually, through survival), genes must be the determinants of physical characteristics and behavior and nothing else matters. Yet, these same genetic determinists insist on a socialistic school system to indoctrinate students in the common myths of science and socialism. Why would you have an education system if genes determine characteristics and behavior? Hardin falls into the common error of identifying genes as having interests and intentions and believing that they rule or determine behavior. His genetic determinism leaves no room for human freedom. Genetic determinism was successfully rebutted before Hardin wrote this book.

We’re taking the side of human freedom and life excessively abundant over Dr. Doom’s genetic determinism, food supply determinism, and imaginary laws which are not laws.

If it’s a law, can human intervention change the outcome? If human intervention can change outcomes, then human agents are operating, not deterministic laws.

We exposed the fallacies of scientific determinism in The Hidden Masters. No scientific law causes anything or determines anything. Scientific laws are merely observed regularities. What scientists consider to be laws come and go. There are no laws of history or society or cultural development. But there are a lot of dishonest scientists who will not explain this to you.

Hardin asserts that species do not live in one environment but in many environments. This contradiction with accepted biological theory goes unexplored. What Hardin is pointing to here is the difficulty of defining an environment. The Enviros have given up on this analysis, they just define everything as one environment. Hardin posits that any calculation of fitness must involve a calculus weighing individual fitness versus environmental demands and admits the difficulties of weighing these two factors for any particular example. He doesn’t bother to explore this little formula with examples. Is he intellectually lazy or intellectually dishonest?

Hardin weighs the competing demands of altruism and egoism but falls into the unwarranted belief that these are personality types involving mixture of the ideals. Of course he presents no scheme of personality, merely a faith in the concepts he has adopted, without any testing. Hardin also subscribes to the “selfish gene” theory of Dawkins, as if genes had motives, and he falls into the common analysis of altruism as extended to kin as the prime altruistic behavior. Since he assumes that altruism is intended to preserve one or more common genes, it is not really altruistic but selfish. Really it is stunning to follow the “logic” of these supposedly sophisticated scientists and examine the poverty of their conceptual schemes. Not being willing to actually test any of these hypotheses, Hardin typically engages in thought experiments, analogies, and idle musings. Hardin concludes that altruism is a form of egotism and never imagines that altruism can extend beyond kinship despite the long history of human charity.

Hardin falls into a serious error with his statement (p. 71) that population continues to grow in almost every nation. This was not true in 1999, or even in 1968. But Hardin doesn’t bother to cite population statistics, which is rather strange for a book devoted to population control, no? Perhaps he doesn’t cite any statistics because he knows population is declining in most Western nations and cannot grow for very long worldwide.

Hardin concludes that there is a conflict between loyalty to kin systems and loyalty to larger organizations such as nations. But he doesn’t bother to explore this problem in depth; rather, he is satisfied to note that governments around the world are corrupt, both egotism and selective altruism can be socially destructive, and he awaits a savior from the discipline of political science.

We nominate Al Gore, political scientist, recipient of many awards, master deceiver and liar, who has fooled many schoolchildren into believing the “globe” is “warming.” Al Gore can lead you into more scientific frauds, more taxes, more bureaucracies of control, more corruption, more links between “hostile environments” and population problems than anybody. And, Al doesn’t fold when he’s proven wrong, he just keeps on plugging.

Or maybe Hardin is waiting for the Chinese Communists to announce how successful their population control program has been. Check it out here.

Hardin next addresses the issue of coercion and first dispenses with democracy and majority rule as effective means of shaping public policy. People voting has to be eliminated if the Enviro-controllers are to control everybody. That is why the funding for population control has been done cleverly, behind the scenes, so people won’t know what these millions are being spent on. If there was public inquiry into world population control, it wouldn’t be so easy to carry out. Make no mistake, population control is a global tyranny. Hardin is careful to insist that he does not necessarily support coercion, but he offers a definition of coercion as equivalent to persuasion. That is because the controllers have managed to coerce sterilization by using financial incentives, which appears to be persuasion. So, no problem. Just redefine coercion as persuasion. What the program really amounts to is exploitation of the weak and poor.

Hardin subscribes to John Locke’s view that the majority of men are ruled by fashions, but he doesn’t mention Green as a fashion. Whether men are ruled by fashion is beside the point.

Hardin then switches to a discussion of multiculturalism and concludes that multiculturalism is bad. He concludes lamely that coercion is always present under law, and so we should not be dismayed by coercion. Hardin then offers a discussion of scale in terms of biological analogies to single organisms. It is noteworthy how many biologists refer to analogies with the natural world as props for their arguments. Such arguments by analogy are always false, but biologists cannot resist this temptation. Hardin points out that the term “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron, even though we was arguing for sustainable growth earlier in the book.

Beware of writers who switch their beliefs later in the book. What you are really getting in this book is a weasel weaseling.

Hardin likewise criticizes the terms “global village” and “open community” as oxymorons. This at least puts Hardin a step above Hillary Clinton and her followers, but that isn’t saying much. Hardin takes a position against a global one-world order as he believes it would always break down into competing interests. Not if they control all the money, all the propaganda, and all the guns. He also points out that there would be no remedy to the corruption of the one-world government. Hardin then continues his argument against Christian ethics by asserting that our choices are not between good and evil but between two competing evils. He also asserts that human compassion and charity are misdirected and foolish, without bothering to ask anyone who has been on the receiving end whether he thought it was worthwhile.

Hardin admits that his philosophy involves choosing between evils and never characterizes anything as good. He stubbornly refuses to acknowledge any human value, particularly the value of human life, so we feel OK with characterizing him as Dr. Evil. Really, his position is, Dr. Two Evils.

Hardin next asserts that every species must have an enemy to set limits on its growth, otherwise successful reproduction creates the tragedy of extinction. This must be another of his imaginary “laws.” Isn’t it amazing that 99 percent of all species have gone extinct, and yet Hardin considers extinction a tragedy? And this from the man who elevated natural selection as his supreme authority when he couldn’t find an authority for his death program anywhere else. If extinction is a “tragedy” rather than natural, why is natural selection his supreme authority over human values?

Because the population controllers can’t fool you if they refer to human history. They need to make you think that humans are just animals living in nature rather than humans innovating in societies.

Hardin argues against the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply, by appealing to the present population of 6 billion as a scale too large to support the belief that everyone has a right to have as many children as (she) wants and every child has a right to live. Community control must triumph over these presumed rights, or catastrophe awaits. Hardin does not advocate genocide, merely a series of more repressive laws until the right balance of population is reached. However, Hardin does not say exactly what the right number of people is because he is unable to calculate the future productivity of the economy as the limiting factor. So he in effect simply advocates starting now to get things going in the “right direction” even though he cannot demonstrate what the right direction is. Actually, they started coercing population reduction a long time ago, and the numbers have been going in Hardin’s direction for decades, he just won’t admit it.

Hardin argues against Jefferson’s advocacy of equality by pointing out that humans always create social hierarchies. Hardin also points out that promoting the handicapped to positions of responsibility works against the interests of the community as a whole. Hardin then leaps to an argument against individualism and favoring community control. But Hardin goes off the track of this argument very quickly, as he often does, into a consideration of whether good science can emerge from a collectivity.

The more important question is, can good science emerge from Hardin’s environmental pseudoscience?

Hardin really falls into confusion with this particular discussion as he seems to believe in the Enlightenment and yet needs to argue against Enlightenment individualism to gain support for his program of control. There is no particular problem with promoting one Enlightenment ideal while arguing against another, but Hardin does not develop his arguments. This book is extremely s-u-p-e-r-f-i-c-i-a-l, like every liberal we have ever met. After while one grows impatient with Hardin’s short attention span.

Isn’t it amazing that liberals can pass themselves off as intellectuals when all they do is create a very tiny bag of contradictory concepts that they cannot successfully think their way out of?

Hardin argues against affirmative action programs and asserts that affirmative action should be called affirmative discrimination. He also argues against multiculturalism and recognizes the fallacy of a universal brotherhood of man. Hardin notes that all groups practice discrimination and a universal inclusion is meaningless. He also notes that nations are undermined when multiculturalism splits their unity. Moreover, not all cultural practices are acceptable. Hardin argues for a multicultural world and against a multicultural nation in the name of a true diversity. He does not worry about a multicultural world endangering peace, and he does not favor the present proposals for global unity, even though he was terribly worried about war at the beginning of the book.

We agree with Hardin on these points, but the rest of his argument is so dishonest that we don’t take any pleasure in his torpedoing of the building blocks of liberal enlightenment.

Hardin endorses the insight of Justus von Liebig (1830-1873) that population growth is limited by whatever required nutrient is least available, but this line of investigation also remains undeveloped and unsupported.

Hardin agrees that physical space is not the problem in the world as the entire world’s population could be fitted into the geographical area of the state of Rhode Island. Hardin also admits that it is difficult to identify a particular factor limiting population growth. Neither food shortages nor energy shortages nor space shortages provide population growth limits for the foreseeable future, so Hardin refuses to offer a mathematical answer to the question of earth’s carrying capacity. This is wise, for all such arguments have been rebutted by opponents of population control. Hardin then falls back on analogies and focuses his argument on the undesirability of the goal of maximizing the number of people who can live on the earth. For some reason Hardin equates this goal, which is the goal of no one, with the sin of greed. OK, he’s just getting weird now. We are not responsible for these thoughts.

In any event, despite these poor arguments, it becomes clear that Hardin is arguing for some minimum quality of life and the potential dangers of testing nature’s presumed limits. But Hardin does not trust nature to do the job of limiting population even though he relies entirely on biological conceptual thinking and elevated natural selection as the supreme authority earlier in the book. So there is a “human value” lurking somewhere in Hardin’s thought, even though he carefully steers away from discussion of human value. Presumably it is some vague “quality of life” that equates to his present standard of living.

Hardin bewails the humanitarian impulse at the heart of the welfare state that preserves unfit qualities among the population (the old eugenics argument). Similarly Hardin does not support immigration as he notes that immigrant labor always drives down the wage of domestic labor. Hardin notes that elites favor these policies because their positions are not endangered by large waves of immigration or by higher taxes or higher prices. In the end Hardin seems to value stability above all. The anxiety that drove Hardin to write this book may be, in the end, the belief that the world’s population cannot achieve an upper-middle-class standard of living without straining natural resources. But aspiring to live in the suburbs and have a Marxist university education is not a universal desire. Some people are interested in actually producing things.

Let us note that the Enlightenment sciences describe a dynamic universe, and anthropology reinforced the dynamic universe with a dynamic view of history, drawing sharp distinction with previous static ideas about comos. Yet the believers in dynamic evolution are uniformly devoted to freezing the planet at this particular moment of development so that no species go extinct and human population does not grow. Why the contradiction between dynamic nature and the ultraconservatism of the Enviros? Because, the real agenda is that they get to be the controllers. To justify their control, they must present a doomsday scenario that is worse than their control, and make their control appear moral. That is how they fool you.

Environmentalism is socialism. That is why it isn’t a science, it’s a political control agenda taking the form of a pseudoscience.

Hardin concludes that the population problem is difficult to solve because of the widespread belief in human rights, including the right to be free from hunger, the right to reproduce, and the right to pursue one’s individual economic interest. Hardin veers away from any discussion of human value in concluding his argument. He suggests that no one can know what the best form of government is, and he suggests that cultural values promoting reproductive rights must be attacked and destroyed. He seems not to recognize that destroying all cultural values that promote reproduction implies destroying all cultures around the world, which is why we push Hardin right back into the coercive New World Order controller camp that he has just tried to escape from.

Like many biologists Hardin cannot venture confidently into the conceptual space of human value. All of the poor thinking aside, Hardin’s basic anxiety is unjustified because the biggest problem in the world is declining populations, not population growth. We shall explain this in detail in future posts.

We think this is the most intellectually dishonest book we have ever come across. You will find the same false arguments recycled in other Enviro-liars’ publications advocating a Green agenda and world population control under their authority. They have to rely on garbage concepts, untested hypotheses, and weird liberal logic because they are trying to argue that their forced death cult is a moral proposition.

Celebrate life.

Key terms to reject: hostile environment, genetic determinism, selfish altruism, coercion is persuasion, sustainable growth, two competing evils, successful reproduction creates the tragedy of extinction, the right balance of population, earth’s carrying capacity, individual fitness vs. environmental demands

Pay close attention to these terms. They are not scientific terms, they are the weasel concepts of pseudo-science. If they pass through your filter, they will lay eggs in your brain. Maggots will hatch out of the eggs and eat your brain cells. The scar tissue will form a tiny envelope, called the liberal worldview. Everything in it will be false. You will become its victim. Like Dr. Evil, you won’t be able to make sense of the world or think your way out of the tiny prison they have created for themselves. Everything looks evil when you are evil and trying to justify evil.

The authorities Dr. Evil is looking for but can’t find do exist in history. They all called the Committee for Public Safety. They also have a religion invented by Robispierre called the religion of the Supreme Being, which consists of worship of nature and sex. They also had a depopulation program, which operated in two stages. First, the genocide against the Catholics and the aristocrats. Then, they compiled lists of unemployed workers they considered “surplus” after the French Revolution crashed the economy. They didn’t let nature decide, they used the guillotine. There is a name for this evil, too. It is called The Terror. Terror in the name of Reason. The war against population has been going on for a long time. They just don’t want to tell you about its history, or even how it operates today, directed by the elites at the top of the global pyramid of power. Their propaganda is fed into naive young minds by academic apologists such as Garrett Hardin, Dr. Evil. Don’t fall for their phony concepts, their sloppy thinking, or their death agenda. You’re better than that.

Socialism is a pseudoscience that attracts pseudoscientists like hyenas on roadkill. Both Stalin and Hitler funded weird pseudoscientists lavishly and adopted their beliefs. Socialism is a pseudoscience of false limits that exploits the weak and defenseless. You will become their roadkill and their feast. Look anywhere but Left for the potentials of human achievement, including economic achievement. Once the socialists achieve their control, depopulation is always their agenda because socialism creates unemployment (surplus workers) by stifling the economy.

Never surrender your power to the feminists and Eco-Nazis. Their game is controlling other people’s money to commit genocides and line their own pockets while indoctrinating you with socialist environmentalism.

Next: the gory details of the world depopulation movement.

Tags: world population control

This entry was posted by Director on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Depopulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.