Neo-Malthusians and Scientific Research

(or 'Why Social Darwinists Hate Creativity')

[The following interview was published in yesterday’s english edition of Pravda.ru with a great introduction written by journalist Costantino Ceoldo]

Green New Deal are three words that have acquired great notoriety in recent times and seem to finally be the answer to the increasingly pressing requests coming from the variegated environmental world. The fear that our planet will undergo an ecological collapse that makes it an uninhabitable hell for humanity and the rest of living creatures, be they animals or plants, has prompted a part of Western society to reconsider its priorities and way of living. A part that is not very large, to be honest, but that has received a lot of attention from media, celebrities, no-profit foundations and now also from some governments.

Apparently, the new green revolution will guarantee us a bright future. Drastically reduced industrial pollution, zero-emission cars, super-efficient homes and workplaces, heated and powered by the energy of the sun: these are just some of the promises, written with fire on the rock, the realization of which will give us a new Garden of Eden planetary in size.

But will it really be like this? Some of the visionary benefactors who are heralds for these fabulous ideas continue to insist that the Earth is overpopulated and that it would be better to return to the situation of the early twentieth century, when the population on our planet was about a quarter of what it is today. The question then arises spontaneously on how to get back to that level quickly, with what methods and with what results.

Matthew Ehret is a Canadian geopolitical analyst, freelance journalist and co-founder of the Risingtide Foundation, whose website offers to readers many insights into these issues as well. An article by Ehret particularly intrigued me, dealing with the thorny issue of energy and in particular research on nuclear fusion. What follows is an interview with him, made with the idea of ​​going beyond the veil of official propaganda and probing the future that awaits us all with more realistic and disenchanted eyes.

Question: What is the Green New Deal? In your opinion, is there a secret part of it, hidden from the general public?

The Green New Deal is a perversion of the New Deal deployed by Franklin Roosevelt in the USA at the height of the Great Depression. While the original New Deal was based on a multipronged array of major policies that ranged from breaking up criminal banking houses, reigning in speculation, regulation, imposing protectionism to cultivate local production, blocking international central banking schemes for world government, and unleashing long term credit for large scale infrastructure, the Green New Deal is designed to achieve the opposing effect. Cooked up in the bowels of the City of London during the 2008-09 period, the Green New Deal is based upon a global overhaul of the world financial system which has again hit a systemic breakdown crisis, similar to that of the 1929 Great Depression. The difference being that the current reset is premised on using the tools of sovereign nations only as appendages of private global authorities to reduce the activity of human activity on the earth under the name of “green infrastructure”, “conservation” and “sustainability”.

Where the original New Deal increased the powers of industrial production of nation states and thus the power to support more people at higher standards of living, the Green New Deal demands that “green energy” replace bad (aka: ecologically unfriendly) forms of energy like hydropower, hydrocarbons, and nuclear with the effect of reducing the power availability and capacity to sustain our current population levels.

Question: Why do you use the term "neo-Malthusians"? Who are these people?

During the early 1960s, an anti-industrial growth movement began moving from the fringes into the mainstream consciousness premised around the conviction that humanity was intrinsically the enemy to nature. Utilizing linear computer models to input several variables like land availability, pollution, population growth, resource availability etc., future scenarios were charted by pure linear extrapolation that obviously calculated Armageddon-esque collapse points decades in the future… unless vast behavior modification and culling of the herd were not begun immediately. While the data and computing were more complex, the axioms and assumptions were identical to those utilized by British East India Company economist Thomas Malthus published 210 years ago in his Essays on Population (1799) which presumed the world would hit its maximum carrying capacity by the early 20th century. However, the problem with mathematicians who try to see the future from the filter of linear extrapolations like Malthus or his modern followers try to do, is that it is incompetent. Simply put, quantity cannot measure quality, and in their charts, there is no place for qualitative upshifts in new discoveries and the non-linear forms of scientific and technological progress that is the fruit of all true scientific (and even artistic) discovery. This is why this new movement became known as “neo Malthusians”.

Question: Said like this, it sounds a bit like the Spectre of depopulation....

That is exactly what this is.

Question: The model proposed by Malthus is very simple and linear: wouldn't it be appropriate to finally use a more sophisticated model to describe the trend of a population?

Yes, absolutely. Throughout the past centuries there have been many prominent thinkers who have observed the correlation between:

1. population growth rates and

2. applied scientific progress.

Scientific progress itself takes on a two-fold character of pure and applied, meaning that when a new discovery is made into the hitherto unknown laws shaping physical space time, it doesn’t immediately affect the entire population levels. Something else must also occur for that to happen because each new discovery still has to be:

1. communicated to others, and thus

2. recognized and absorbed as new knowledge (which rarely happens without an immense amount of resistance).

Once this communication of new ideas begins to take hold, new powers of invention and experimentation begin to be expressed with the effect that new and better forms of technologies can be brought online improving the human condition and productive powers of labor. Think of what happens when the discovery of electricity is applied to human voluntary behavior in terms of the power of communication which condense time and space between people, and also the powers of industrial activity powered by electricity vs older forms of animal or human labor.

The effect of improving our economic performance in this manner results in an increased potential carrying capacity of our species as a whole. That is to say, we can sustain more people at higher standards of living. In final examination we find that humanity’s very relationship with the universe is tuned in this manner as new resources are brought online that were formerly not resources in earlier states of ignorance and we are liberated by the former boundary conditions pressing upon our population potential. This relationship between the mind of individual original thinkers and human population growth is something that Malthus despised since it upset his mathematical formulas which are very much premised upon an obsessive sense of control of what already exists and not creation of that which exists not. 

You will find a current of thinkers in world history stand in direct opposition to Malthusians (and yes there were Malthusians before Malthus) and some of the most exceptional among them in my mind are:

• Gottfried Leibniz,

• Benjamin Franklin,

• Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton,

• economist Matthew Carey,

• his son Henry (advisor to Lincoln),

• economist Friedrich List,

• Russian Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky.

In our modern contemporary age I would encourage people to study the works of the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche who took this science of anti-Malthusian population growth to extremely refined levels of analysis.

Question: How does scientific research on quantum computers and artificial intelligence fits into a neo-Malthusian paradigm?

Although Malthusians despise the creation of new discoveries and their application in ways that benefit humanity, they are more than willing to steal new discoveries and use them for their own benefit in ways that bring humanity into greater states of enslavement. Artificial intelligence as we see it sold today is premised on a major fallacy which is the belief that the powers of machine learning are analogous to human mental activity with the exception that machines can calculate faster, apply deductive and inductive logic to process information quicker and thus will render the slower processing machines called human minds redundant and obsolete in time. This line of thinking does not recognize the fact that thinking machines themselves are limited to what is put into their programs by a creative human being governed not by formulas but by intentions, ideas, identities etc. which are inexpressible by a computer or logical positivist. As an example, a machine can improve its performance in playing chess or any other process that obeys a certain fixed array of “rules”, but it cannot create a qualitatively new game, nor can it break the underlying rules that are built into their programming and which are blocking new knowledge from being discovered.

That said, while both “AI”, automation, machine learning, and quantum computing could and should be used by humanity to benefit our species, the oligarchical system that operates on Malthusian assumptions wills that these only be used by the master class to keep the human herd controlled and systems of production, consumption and distribution of goods limited according to certain formulas of “optimum carrying capacities”.

Question: Nuclear fusion, hot and cold: two parallel sabotages?

Absolutely. Fusion funding was massively slashed in the USA by the late 1960s as the Malthusians increasingly took control of US energy policy. Trilateral Commission member James Schlesinger (energy czar of the USA) played a vicious role in this. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s a fear of nuclear power in general was cultivated by Three Mile Island (which we are increasingly seeing was the effect of sabotage) and also the events of Chernobyl which was a highly overrated crisis which resulted in very few deaths and radiation levels far below what we find naturally occurring on many beaches in Brazil.

The psychological impact was to cause fear of atomic power to really take over the zeitgeist as we gave our consent to the criminal sabotage of new lines of scientific and technological progress, with many of the most promising lines of research on stellarators, laser fusion and plasma research destroyed on the one hand and increasingly the majority of our “fusion science” resources were absorbed into gigantic projects like France’s ITER tokamak that is based on extremely limited designs without much hope for achieving commercial viability for many generations. Many promising “outside the box” fusion projects which break from the standard model assumptions of the atom (many of which are keeping us locked into senseless modes of research bearing no new discoveries) have been funded by the US military and the industrial complex associated with it and when these projects begin to bear fruit we find funding cut, the leading scientists and engineers iced out of operations or muzzled and prevented from publishing their research publicly.

One most tragic case study of this occurring is Dr. Robert Bussard’s Polywell technology. It appears that at least among the west, under current conditions the safest approaches to carrying non-standard theory fusion research forward with the least amount of sabotage is found in the private sector with a great example being Eric Lerner’s fusion LLP founded in 2008, with only six employees and a hairstring budget of several million dollars/year but with experimental results that are near miraculous for sustained extremely hot plasmas.

Question: Is it possible to abandon fossil fuels without incurring the deliberate murder of a part of the human race?

No. The current productive powers of labor needed to sustain our eight billion lives on earth would be immensely sabotaged by removing fossil fuels from our energy basket, in favor of “green” sustainable energies that generate unreliable low-grade electricity incapable of supporting modern industrial activity. As an example, why “renewable energies” are not actually even renewable, you cannot even make windmills using windmill energy. The types of energy intensive mining activities needed to build solar panels cannot themselves be maintained by solar power activity. The truth is that at least for the coming decades, if we are serious about eliminating poverty, then humanity must increase and not decrease use of “fossil fuels”- especially as far as Africa is concerned which must have the right to use the abundant resources under its soil as a driver for industrial growth.

Question: What do you think of Covid? Now there is a lot of talk about the Omicron variant…

Based on everything I’ve seen since day one, the current pandemic is the effect of a highly centralized system of data set controls, mass behavioral modification and health care protocol controls which have no bearing on reality. Data sets are manipulated to project false numbers of Covid cases, and Covid fatalities with a complicit corporate media invoking states of psychological panic in the population in order to shut down thinking, and deflect attention away from the real causes of the systemic breakdown of the financial system which began to fall apart long before COVID was created as a boogeyman.

Question: Russia, China and other countries do not seem to be following a depopulation script... Are Western elites simply committing suicide?

This is a perfect case of ivory tower thinking breaking down when pressed up against actual human thinking. The western liberal “rules-based order”, governed by technocrats is still following the same old uncreative script that has been animating the post-WWII period. There once were creative grand strategists that laid out the terms of this post-1945 Great Game in the form of Bertrand Russell, HG Welles, Sir Julian Huxley et al. But those actual creative misanthropic game masters have long since died, and the 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation technocratic managers now manning the helm of the western unipolar ship have themselves been processed through the anti-creative systems of education and culture which were constructed to smother the creativity in their victims while maintaining a caste system of hierarchical controls. 

The new Schwabian technocrats entirely lack any signs of actual creative powers and are just obsessed with the script they have been obedient to for decades. Russia and China have both had their own recent battles with this sort of technocratic infiltration with Soros’ agent Zhao Ziyang nearly running a coup in 1989 in China before being purged, and we all know the devastation done to Russia during the 1990s. But now both great nations have shown an incredible power of creative flexibility and are fortunately under the influence of intelligentsias that appear to have a very good grasp of the agencies obsessed with bringing about a post-nation, anti-population, one world government. Both nations have created the foundation for a new multipolar system of win-win cooperation founded upon constant rates of scientific and technological progress which is exactly what is needed to flank the closed system thinking of the oligarchy.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas (which you can purchase by clicking those links or the book covers below). In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .