When each of us decides to buy something, we first consider the price. Yet society at large has long bought the idea of continual growth in population and production without adding up the final reckoning.
"The final reckoning" sounds a little terrifying, doesn't it? The Christian often thinks of "the final reckoning" as the Last Judgment: that moment when the human soul stands alone before Christ, the Just Judge. All his faith, thoughts, and deeds are weighed in the balance at that instant, and the final eternal destination of his soul is determined. But this is not the kind of reckoning Ms. Meadows and her co-authors are considering. Good materialists that they are, theirs is a much less metaphysical kind of reckoning.
The copy continues:
Now a team of MIT scientists, with the aid of a giant computer, has completed a study of the future if present growth continues. Their inescapable conclusions are beyond anyone's grimmest fears. Possibly within as little as 70 years, our social and economic system will collapse unless drastic changes are made very soon.
Again, terrifying, right?
Can you guess when The Limits to Growth was written?
Answer: 1972.
The phrase "with the aid of a giant computer" should have been the give away.
This book was one of of a series of very highly touted and extensively promoted works, like Paul Erlich's Population Bomb, that predicted that humanity was only a few scant decades away from total annihilation unless immediate, drastic changes were made to our economic and social systems.
Does that sound at all familiar? If you've been reading this blog semi-regularly, it should.
The same class of literary, scientific, corporate, and cultural anointed ones are saying the same things today that they did in 1972, but with extended time frames, of course. I guess the human race has been given an extension for good behavior—another 20 years before the damage we are doing becomes irreversible; another 50 years before complete and total destruction is assured. Conveniently, those spaces of decades are beyond the frame of most people's memories and lives. So the expounders of catastrophism are rarely, if ever, called to account for their errors.
Among the anointed class and their followers, catastrophism is perpetually popular. Prophets of Doom are never without an audience.
Now consider the types of immediate changes are that commonly demanded by the high priests of catastrophism if we are to avoid the inevitable materialist apocalypse. In The Limits to Growth, the solution is the attainment of "planetary equilibrium." This is to be brought about by reducing industrial output, reducing demand for raw materials, and other strategic reductions both numerous and varied. But all of these solutions are predicated upon the reduction of one particular resource which, if not reduced, will scotch the whole deal:
The number of human beings.
We are the problem. The ultimate solution is: less of us.
Note that the solution is never less of the anointed ones.
This final solution has been spoken sotto voce by the anointed ones for decades now. Recall the Georgia Guidestones monument which stood in Elbert County, Georgia. The very first precept carved into this enigmatic monument urged mankind to "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature."
Of course, that would require the reduction of 95% of the Earth's current population.
Even if the Georgia Guidestones were blasted to pieces by a vandal in 2022, this extreme reductionist concept has not disappeared—far from it. If you look carefully at the hottest of hot button issues being pushed loudly and incessantly by the wise sages in Brussels and northern Virginia even to this day, every one of them has the ultimate side effect of — less of us. For example:
- Climate change: The entire climate change theory begins and ends with the thesis that humanity is a scourge on the planet, and ultimately the only way to save the oceans, the rain forests, the prairies, wolves, owls, ocean sunfish, caracals, skinks, and bird-eating spiders is — less of us.
- The rainbow agenda is predicated upon the idea that sterile sex acts are the moral equivalent of the procreative act between husband and wife. If you have ever wondered why such unnatural acts are pushed with such unrelenting ferocity even upon the youngest of children in schools, here is your reason. Such acts, if practiced widely and exclusively, can not result in more of us.
- The unending push for universal contraception and abortion on demand without limits results in much less of us. Abortion alone has resulted in over 60 million less of us since The Limits to Growth was written.
- The ongoing fanatical campaign to mandate that children receive as many vaccines as early as possible seems to run contrary to this thesis. It also blatantly contradicts the perennial slogan of the pro-abortion movement: "My body, my choice." On the surface, vaccination campaigns which can save millions from potentially deadly viruses seem like they would work against the goals of The Limits to Growth. And indeed, prior the the 1970s, that may have been the case. But within the past 40 years, the number of vaccines mandated or pushed by government, medical, educational and cultural orgs has exploded while the overall health of Americans has progressively declined. Add to this occasional slips by population control obsessives like Bill Gates who said that if we do a really good job on vaccines, we could reduce population growth by 10-15%, and recent scholarship pointing to higher miscarriage rates associated with the COVID vaccine (here and here), and suddenly the unremitting vaccination efforts morph into yet another path to making sure there will be less of us.
- Trans-kids. Perhaps the most lunatic obsession of the political and cultural anointed ones over the past decade has been the push to make the medically-assisted destruction of one's genitals into a childhood fad. If you're following me on the above points, then the rationale behind the spread of this social virus should be obvious: if you make yourself into a eunuch or otherwise sterilize yourself as a child, you can't make more of you. And even if you come to your senses later in life, it will be too late.
- Finally, there's euthanasia which is being embraced throughout the West at a depressingly rapid rate. Touting the practice as a voluntary end to suffering, the proponents encourage the elderly and disabled not to be a burden on their families. It's worth pointing out that the burden, such as it is, would be much more easily handled if parents had more than zero or one children, and said children had more than zero or one grandchildren. In Canada alone, which established euthanasia under the MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) program in 2016, nearly 100,000 Canadians have been put down—over 5% of all deaths in that God-forsaken realm which is doing an excellent job making sure there will be less of them to burden their burgeoning population of newcomers.
There have been a few pockets of resistance to the mindset promoted and embraced by the authors of The Limits to Growth and their ilk.
The Catholic Church took the lead in opposing this demand for childless sterility early on with the publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968, a truly prescient document that was released to much chagrin four years before The Limits to Growth was published. The Church's effort seemed to thrive for the next several decades, but has lost steam over the past 15 years. This is thanks in large part to a Vatican that can't get out of its own way when it comes to promoting the Culture of Life. Today, Catholics are faced with a situation where even the Pontifical Academy for Life, established by Pope Saint John Paul II, features fellows who publicly dissent on contraception, abortion and other long-established Church teachings on sexual ethics. Until prelates rise to leadership who are willing to promote actively the Church's perpetual teachings on these questions, and purge our institutions of the "less of us" mentality, the Catholic Church will remain on the sidelines at best.
While all this reductionist navel-gazing is going on in the West, the Islamic world has largely rejected this approach and the results over the past 100 years are stunning. As one example, Turkey's authoritarian president Erdogan regularly calls out contraception as the equivalent of treason and urges Turkish families to embrace three or more children. "One or two (children) is not enough. To make our nation stronger, we need a more dynamic and younger population. We need this to take Turkey above the level of modern civilizations,” Erdogan has said. “In this country, they (opponents) have been engaged in the treason of birth control for years and sought to dry up our generation." Despite this rhetoric, Turkey's fertility rate has declined over the past 20 years, a situation which Erodgan calls "a disaster." Even so, Turkey's population growth continues to outpace that of every large European nation.
A quick look at the statistics shows where this is all heading:
The combined population of the UK, France and Italy in 1926 was about 125 million.
The combined population of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey in 1926 was about 40 million.
Today in 2026, the combined population of the UK France and Italy is about 194 million.
Today in 2026, the combined population of Egypt, Iran, and Turkey is about 289 million.
Those three large European nations had roughly three times the population of those three large Muslim nations, but are now on a trajectory to have half the population in a decade or two.
For an even more stark contrast, Spain currently has a population of about 49 million. The country of Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, by contrast, has a population of 43 million. When The Limits to Growth was written, Yemen had a population of about 8 million.
Keep in mind that these stats do not take into account the large numbers of non-native immigrants living in European countries today, many of whom are Muslim.
Though the West whole-heartedly embraced the ludicrous alarmism of works like The Limits to Growth, the results of this unfathomably foolish strategy do not appear to resemble anything like the envisioned planetary equilibrium.
Meanwhile, the Islamic world has largely rejected the dire warnings of the catastrophists which they categorize correctly as Western imperialism. They are also smart enough to understand that the catastrophist idiocy of the West will be a boon to them in the future. If you doubt that, do a quick search for Islamic scholars and imams who say the quiet parts out loud. Erdogan in Turkey isn't the only one preaching the ultimate Islamic victory via demographics.
As author Mark Steyn says on a regular basis, "The future belongs to those who show up for it."
If you're wondering why the anointed elites in the West are increasingly cozying up to Islam, here is your answer. In their short-sightedness, they believe that they will be able to remain leaders by welcoming and enriching the masses of Islamic newcomers who are surging into Western countries. But our modern anointed ones are as wrong about that as were their intellectual progenitors in The Limits to Growth. What many of them don't realize is that the Great Satan that is frequently denounced by Islamic political and religious leaders is actually them—the Western intellectual class, the political and cultural elite, the ideological colonialists (as Pope Francis called them), the champions of diversity and intersectionality: the soulless secular Left in the West.
The Islamic crocodile won't even do the Western anointed ones the favor of eating them last.
As for the rest of us, it appears that many, even among Catholics, have been taken in by the toxic rhetoric to be found in works like The Limits to Growth. The inevitable result will be less of us, too.
What needs to happen immediately is that the ideological errors which have grown out of works like The Limits to Growth need to be discarded by the West immediately.
A return to the philosophy of Humanae Vitae would change everything in a generation.
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