The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.
Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don’t believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.
The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.
And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?
(Welcome back, everybody!)
The argument that “there are too many people and we need to reduce the population” has been for decades a thinly veiled excuse to justify eugenics. Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce? How will the social mechanisms work to reduce population? Who will hold that authority to dictate things and how will it be enforced? Historically, very violently and strictly enforced against marginalized communities. That’s how.
I literally said the problem is how we use them.
So the answer is we need to work towards societal change and structure ourselves to incentivize sustainability, not overly simplistic and unethical arguments such as “reduce the population” so we can maintain our shitty practices and kick the can down the road.
It also isn’t “top 2-3 billion”, it’s more like “top 2-3 thousand”.
Interestingly it doesn’t seem like those questions need to be answered, since the birthrate is dropping all by itself for some reason.
Microplastics causing infertility is the main reason for that. Hard to have babies when men’s nuts can’t properly produce viable sperm or women can’t properly form a placenta and their ovaries have atrophied.
There are also socioeconomic reasons where people are avoiding pregnancy, plus the breaking down of community togetherness exacerbating the “loneliness epidemic” and people just aren’t meeting each other and going on dates anymore, also due to socioeconomic factors. There is also the antinatalist movement but unsure as to the size of it.
Either way, the call to “reduce populations” is a bullshit argument. Just because it is happening naturally (or due to natural phenomena as a result of the externalities from human activity) doesn’t excuse the call for an authority to dictate that decision for others.
I really doubt it’s microplastics. There aren’t a bunch of people complaining of infertility. I would guess it’s socioeconomic.
I don’t think anyone likes the idea of anyone else telling them how many kids they can have, but they’ll probably take that over their kids starving. Probably won’t come to that.
Bruh, there are legitimate issues to reproductive health caused by microplastics. That’s just a fact. Microplastics are so small they can bypass the blood-testi barrier and disrupt spermatogenesis. They also leech chemicals into the blood that mimic certain hormones, fucking up our endocrine system which has a negative effect on reproductive health as well. There actually are a bunch of people having issues with infertility across the globe, and research shows it is due to microplastics affecting reproductive health, but the current media framing of the argument around microplastics isn’t highlighting that specific issue. It is being lumped in with the rest of the issues caused by microplastics and how we don’t fully understand just how harmful the build up is to our health overall.
The point is that falling birth rates is a multifaceted issue. It isn’t one or the other. It is both medical issues caused by microplastics and socioeconomic stresses.
Also, there isn’t a dichotomy between “being told how many kids you can have” and “having their kids starve”. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, so they don’t have to “take one over the other”. No one has to choose between the two nor should they be forced to choose by any body of authority.
Then where are all the people complaining they can’t have kids even though they want them? People aren’t having kids because they don’t want them.
Right, they’re not, but the odds of starving are lower when there are less mouths to feed. I read that pre-agriculture tribes limited their reproduction to live within their means.
Jesus fucking Christ, go read the research into the issue of rising infertility rates and see where they are getting their data from. That’s where the people are. You think scientists just make these numbers up? Just because you don’t constantly hear about it in the news means it doesn’t happen? Are you dull?
I don’t give a fuck what pre-agriculture tribes did. We don’t live in a pre-agriculture society. The point is that no authority should have control over the reproductive health of another, that unethically violates the autonomy of the individual and leads to eugenics.
People are not starving due to the rising populations; this is a bullshit, shortsighted framing of the argument that is rhetorically deceptive. They are starving due to the unethical distribution of resources. They aren’t starving because they have more mouths to feed, they are starving due to systemic oppression preventing them from accessing readily available resources with which to feed those extra mouths while a small percentage of humanity consumes excessive amounts of those resources while forcing wasteful production practices to chase after imaginary tokens of perceived value.
If we weren’t being forced as a society to produce so much excess for these small minded moguls of industry and restructured society to incentivize sustainability over profit generation, we would have more than enough to go around.
First point, I have read a bit and I’m unconvinced. People who want kids are having them, if they weren’t, it’d be all over the mainstream news. Childless people would be suing Dupont or something.
Second point, again, I agree, but there is an environmental carrying capacity and we keep degrading the environment.
Your third point is true, but I was referring to the increasingly uncertain climate future. There may come a year where there just isn’t enough due to an unlucky series of crop failures.
I can’t argue against the fourth point.
Bro you have way too much trust in mainstream news outlets. Things happen all the time that the media is silent on. Just because something is happening does not mean it would be in the mainstream news cycle, in fact more things happen every day that will never be reported on. That doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. Literally, scientific research proves as fact that there is a rising issue with infertility rates. That number has gone up, and prevailing research points to it being caused, in part, by the buildup of microplastics.
Second point, yes that’s true but that is not what was being discussed. Just because that is true does not justify a body of authority to dictate the reproductive choices of individuals. Also, just because those two points are true does not make the tertiary point that “we have reached peak population capacity” true. That claim is entirely false.
Third, also true, but again that wasn’t the topic and is only tangentially related to it. That’s a separate discussion on climate change and its causes.
You are arguing a strawman. Both the article and me are talking about people voluntarily chosing to not have children. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and neither with promoting the idea that this is totally ok.
And no, it isn’t just the top few thousand. Even if those were gone tomorrow we would still have very similar issues realistically speaking. But sure, limiting the excesses of the top few thousands would also help and is a politically reachable goal. Solving the over-consumption of the top 2-3 billion needs an strong change in mindset, and politics alone will not be able to do that. But at least many of these 2-3 billion are already getting few children voluntarily.
@poVoq @Doc_Crankenstein
Voluntary is… an interesting choice of terms, to say the least.
If you can and want, could you explain who these top two to three billion (holy moly!) consumers are and what is characteristic to their overconsumption?
If you don’t want to do this in this thread, Tag me in the appropriate toot.
I honestly believe that “we” aren’t going to do jack s**t. It’s a process which is nearly unsteerable. People are going to live longer and longer, and use resources that would otherwise be used by children they might have had. Society is going to be burdened by caring for the old, and this is going to reduce chances of caring for the young.
In nearly every developed country, population growth is slowing or population has already started decreasing. Only in the least developed regions (some areas of Africa) does the opposite still apply, but UN predictions (made by competent people) suggest the process just reaches there later.
So, every ethnicity’s population is going to be reduced. Every ethnicity can also consider if their numbers are adequate, too high or too low. If a nation feels threatened by disappearing from the maps, they can try to reorganize their society. Random ideas: a few laws that give parents various health and social security guarantees regardless of their employment status, especially in case they’re single parents, then maybe create a few dating sites that actually try to help their users find people they like, etc…
Yes, everything you said is good, and we should be attempting to restructure our society to be more sustainable and ethical in our use of resources but that is a much larger political discussion about economics. I know there are currently natural and sociopolitical phenomena that are slowing down the growth of certain regions but the reasons why is a much larger, multifaceted discussion. Populations will fluctuate naturally and that’s all fine and dandy.
but my point was specifically against those who call for attempting to steer the process in an effort to deliberately reduce the population through planned means which is intrinsically linked to eugenics arguments when you get down to the sociopolitical mechanisms of how that will be accomplished.