You know those articles from financial planners with their sage advice for people who want to get out of debt, increase their savings, or plan for retirement? Inevitably it boils down to two brilliant tips: Spend less. Earn more.
That's right, folks, if you want to have more money tomorrow than you have today, you will need to bring in more than you spend. There's just no other way.
The financial experts present this information as if it is a revelation, a deep cosmic secret that they achieved after years of study and professional experience. They write columns and books, they run seminars for those who are smart enough, motivated enough, READY to learn their secret to wealth. The teaser is free, but if you want to know the secret you'll have to pay handsomely for it, which is ironic.
(I understand that many people need help with overcoming bad spending habits or otherwise getting on their feet. I'm not making fun of people who need help or those who provide it, just the way “experts” rename, repackage, and complicate basic information to make themselves sound smarter.)
I bring this up because the same brilliant formula applies to “managing” the world's population. We are increasingly warned that there are too many people in the world. The situation is quickly spiraling out of control. The planet is overpopulated! If very rich and powerful people that no one elected to be in charge of the world don't do something about it, we will soon run out of food, water, air, and other essential resources.
They insist that this is true. Since they are rich and powerful, and they can pay for all kinds of studies and charts and graphs to support them, and politicians and media companies to repeat their message constantly, we must believe them.
Well, if there are too many people and not enough resources, we can do one of two things: increase the resources, or decrease the number of people. If there is not enough food, for example, we can either grow more food, or eliminate some people.
The rich and powerful people have uniformly decided on the latter.
Then, to make sure we never have this problem again, we can prevent the survivors of this planetary purge from reproducing in large numbers.
If we just let things run their course, at some point we would presumably run out of food and then some people would die. That would be most unpleasant. To prevent this from happening, we can be proactive and eliminate large numbers of people up front.
If we're already going to manage the situation, we might as well eliminate the most undesirable inhabitants of the world, those who are consuming far more of our precious resources than they are worth. This includes the elderly (the unentitled ones), the sick, the poor, people with dark skin, religious people (they tend to be against culling the population), people who want to have many children (they tend to be religious), and those who are too selfish to allow the rich and powerful to control everything for the greater good.
Of course, this is only a stopgap measure. We need long-term planning to ensure we never have too many people. To this end, for generations the rich and powerful have been promoting various “solutions” to the existential threat of too many people occupying their planet. What they all have in common is preventing children from being born. It's for everyone's good, including the children!
Their war against children is rebranded in sterile terms (pun intended), which often mean the exact opposite of what they are actually doing. Preventing women from becoming pregnant at all is promoted as “birth control”. Encouraging women to murder their unborn children is promoted as “reproductive rights”. Death camps for unborn children are run by “Planned Parenthood”. Planned unparenthood, you mean.
The murder of unborn children is referred to as “abortion”, which is so much more polite. Women are urged to murder their children to promote “female empowerment” and “women's rights”, by performing the least womanly act imaginable, the greatest abuse of power, the most horrific violation of another human being's rights.
To make this even more palatable, the rich and powerful have assured them that this child inside them, this miracle of God's creation, their own progeny, is really none of these things. It is just a clump of cells (unlike the rich and powerful). It is worth more dead than alive, for living babies cost money, and dead babies can be sold.
Relax, it isn't even alive at all, they assure the nervous mother who feels the life inside her. They can change the meaning of a word to solve any problem! The clump of cells isn't really alive until it emerges and can live on its own, they declare. In reality, it isn't dead until they kill it, but we can't concern ourselves with reality when we are running out of food.
The rich and powerful have been aggressively “educating” people to have smaller families, and would love to outlaw having more than one or two children. If people aren't convinced by the “education” to stop having children, we'll just have to force them (reproductive rights, indeed). Who isn't excited about the government controlling how many children people have? Especially dark-skinned people; it's for their own good. And poor people; it's inhumane for them to have children. And religious people; they don't care about the world like the rich and powerful atheists do. And people with imperfect genes; we need to weed them out. Heil you-know-who!
Funny how these same rich and powerful atheists who believe there are too many people in the world, and we have to prevent children from being born, really, really, REALLY want everyone to take lots of injections of interesting things so that we can all be healthy, live longer, and have more children. They are obsessed with educating us about how important this is, and having the government force us if we still don't see the light. You would have to be crazy not to be excited.
You have to give the rich and powerful atheists some credit. All that “education” has really paid off. Even religious people have bought into much of it. They encourage their children to “delay marriage”, further delay having children, and to use “birth control” to prevent having “too many”. After all, we all love children, but children are burdensome and expensive, and pose the greatest threat to humanity's continued existence. We have to be practical on the micro level, like the rich atheists are on the macro level.
Religious women in particular have increasingly embraced this message. They have come to view marriage and motherhood not as the essence of womanhood, but just another item on a to-do list – and nowhere near the top. They need to achieve “fulfillment” (in ways that would have been anathema to our matriarchs) and “independence” (which is code for not needing a man or being devoted to one). This requires ongoing formal education deep into adulthood, followed by climbing the ladder in the corporate world – at least until the twilight of their childbearing years. After achieving these priorities, they will consider getting married and/or becoming a mother (no father necessary).
If they regret putting other things first, they can't have a do-over. Marriage opportunities will be more limited, and lost years are gone forever.
What does the Torah say about all this? God's first instruction to the human race is to be fruitful and multiply, to fill up the earth (Bereishis 1:28). Nowhere does the Torah indicate concern with filling up the earth causing insufficient resources. After all, it is God's role to provide for the life He sends into this world, and God is infinite. The world will never run out of essential resources merely by virtue of human procreation. We are not even allowed to worry about such things; it is blasphemous.
No wonder those who don't believe in God, who wish to control the world instead of Him, promote such blasphemy.
The notion that we must “control” the world's population by murdering people, sterilizing them, and preventing children from being born was always so preposterous that Chazal had little need to discuss it. The “enlightened” notion of worldwide genocide, sanitized as “depopulation”, to save humanity and the planet, seems to be a relatively modern achievement, a new low of moral depravity.
There is, however, one source that is especially relevant. The Chovos Halevavos (Duties of the Heart) was written by Rabbeinu Bachye nearly a thousand years ago. In the section on Cheshbon Hanefesh (taking stock of one's soul), chapter three, he presents a list of thirty points for consideration. In the final note he writes as follows:
After you go out to this world, no person can bring your sustenance to you without God's assistance on your behalf, nor add to your body or take away from it. If only you realized that if the world were entirely for you alone, without any inhabitants, this wouldn't increase the amount of food ultimately coming to you like the size of a mustard seed. Similarly, if the number of people in the world doubled, it would not take away from the food that was decreed for you like a mustard seed, not less than this amount or more.
Similarly, none of the other creations can benefit you or harm you, nor can any of them increase the days or your life or decrease them...
Do you think 8 billion people is too many, that continued population growth is “unsustainable”? Blasphemy! If there were 80 billion people or 800 billion people, God would increase the supply of everything we need to accommodate all of them, each with individual attention. Controlling the population, deciding who shall live and who shall die, who shall be born and who shall be hacked to death in the mother's womb, who shall produce children and how many, is not only a war on humanity, but a war on God Himself.
I have two simple words for these monsters who come dressed as saviors, who claim that many people will need to make “sacrifices” and even be sacrificed for the sake of everyone else.
You first.
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