
Having read the below article in Scientific American, I have to confess it actually addresses many good points. It drives home the facts that endlessly growing consumption (capitalism, essentially) is unsustainable and a declining human population would help solve many of our greatest challenges.
It also goes on to note that we (read: our leadership and ourselves) have to get our shit together on a number of fronts, including putting human rights square in the center of the overall solution of reducing population growth, consumption, etc.
But here’s the problem: our world is run by a bunch of greedy, thoughtless wealthy elites who don’t see us as human, who don’t give the slightest fuck about us. The politicians are just puppets they manipulate.
We keep asking things like why has COVID been allowed to run rampant? While many of us have surmised the answer – the mass culling of us proles – here we have it now laid out in a major publication, in Scientific America. The authors don’t point fingers, but I’m happy to do so.
COVID was a gift to the Davos crowd (the billionaires, essentially). They’re perfectly aware of how dangerous SARS-CoV-2 is, and they’re also perfectly aware of how transmission can be prevented. And even those who aren’t in the Davos league but are rich enough know better send their kids to Davos-safe schools (e.g., Ashish Jha and Rochelle Walensky).
But the oligarchs tell us – the proles, the worker bees, the expendables – through their bought and paid for politicians and media outlets that it’s just a cold, just the flu, nothing to worry about! Masks are bad. Vax and relax! Or don’t vax at all. It’s all good. You do you!
Just like from the movie “They Live,” our purpose in life is to breed, to work, to consume, to enrich the billionaire class, and maybe create a few more Davos scions who are seen as sufficiently morally bankrupt as to be worthy of elevation.
“But how long can mass disablement and death go on before even the Davos elite are impacted?”
Good question. I don’t have a specific answer, but let’s consider: there are currently around 3,000 billionaires (depending on which source you read) in the entire world who’ve amassed over $12 TRILLION in wealth. And remember, that’s only what those 3,000 or so individuals have in their pockets, it says nothing about additional assets – and power – they may directly or indirectly control, including politicians across the globe.
That 3,000 works out to about 0.0000375% of the world’s population; I figure it’s likely more like 100 to 500 families, as some of the billionaires are in the same family groups. Even if you added in the 56 million or so millionaires globally, that’s only 0.7% or so of the population. And let’s face it: in the eyes of the billionaires, the millionaires are just higher-ranked proles, nothing more. Even our wealthiest politicians are nothing more than boot-licking kapos to the billionaires.
So, do you think the billionaires and their families NEED anywhere close to 8 billion people to build their yachts, service and fly their private jets, or – when the climate becomes so extreme we proles are dying by the millions – to raise their atmosphere-controlled gilded domes and ivory towers? Of course not. Somehow, I’m sure they’ll have the “human resources” they require.
I doubt the super wealthy want to live in cages, though, even gilded ones. They must realize how the endless human growth and consumption that has made them wealthy beyond dreams is also poisoning their world (yes, to them it’s “their” world, not ours). Granted, some won’t give a damn and want to do the ultimate YOLO in their own lifetimes. Others, like Musk, think they’ll find salvation on Mars; I suspect he and his followers will be badly disappointed. Still others, I suspect, would like to salvage this planet. They don’t want to live in a shithole any more than we do.
To do so, however, billions of proles globally must die. Yes, billions. But this is a difficult problem to solve. While war could do it (and would make a LOT of money in the process), war is messy, has a great deal of uncertainty (you don’t want someone blowing up any of YOUR yachts or mansions!), and the only way to kill billions in a reasonable amount of time is the generous use of nuclear weapons, which are *really* messy.
Starvation can help, but typically works only on impoverished countries: most of the problems (e.g., climate catastrophe, pollution, etc.) beyond raw “surplus population,” as Scrooge might say, are actually created by the wealthy countries, and starvation isn’t going to work on them. The same with water: while some countries in the northern hemisphere (the rich) are going to suffer under the coming water shortages, they won’t suffer enough. A few million dying here or there simply won’t do.
What about…a plague? A pandemic? Hmm. Now that has some possibilities. We’ve had several major human depopulation events stemming from plagues in the past. You could argue that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have a high enough fatality rate to really “do the job” (and I’m not being glib as I write these awful things: I believe this is the cold calculus the Davos elite are using to compute our fates). That would be true, perhaps, if we only take into account deaths from acute infections – a few tens of millions in three years is hardly a dent, after all!
On the other hand, mass disablement leading to latent sudden death, infections by other pathogens due to compromised immune systems, premature death, the collapse of health care services leading to more deaths, plunging life expectancy among the proles…now we’re talking!
And yet, one set of problems remains: how to get people to embrace mass infection, disablement, and death when viral transmission can be broken fairly easily? If people were properly informed about the virus, the pandemic could be brought under control with a proper layered strategy enabled globally, which would cut the party short.
How to get past this conundrum?
That’s an easy one: lie to the proles! Terminate collection and distribution of the data showing what the virus is doing. Demonize or outright prohibit masking and other mitigations, along with the people promoting them or trying to get the proles to see the truth. Demonize vaccination for one demographic, and make it difficult to get vaccinated/boosted with vaccines that already do little to prevent infection, transmission, and long COVID for another. Have the billionaire-owned politicians and media outlets censor information about the pandemic except to say it’s over, COVID is no worse than a cold or the flu, vax and relax. Live your best life! YOLO!
This is what they’ve done, and on a global scale. SARS-CoV-2 may not be THE solution…but it could go a long wy. Consider where we’ll be in 10 or 20 years with multiple infections per year if we don’t globally try to stop it: hundreds of millions, and quite possibly billions, will die of the sequelae or other infections, if not from the acute infections themselves, or being left to die after being disabled, or “humanely euthanized.”
Even climate change: could that be intentional? The rich and shameless know it’s real and what’s causing it (us, primarily from using fossil fuels), but they’re doing nothing to change course. Why?
A workable theory is that they WANT it to happen, because it will likely kill hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, in a matter of decades. There will still be habitable, even nice, places left, and that’s where the billionaires will have us proles build their new ivory towers.
But what about supply chain disruptions? Grain and food shortages? Water? Fuel? Energy? Surely the “big issues” are going to disrupt the rich and shameless as millions or billions die, right? Right?
No, they’re not. Remember, these are people who buy blue water yachts on a whim, often have multiple personal helicopters and private jets, plop down millions of dollars for a warehouse full of fancy cars, have mansions on every continent but Antarctica, and enjoy a lifestyle that most of us literally can’t even imagine. They see themselves as lords and act like it.
Do you think ANY of the things that affect our survival are going to affect the Davos elite? Don’t be foolish: they simply buy their way to the front of the line for anything and everything they want. When it comes to it, they’ll have their own personal armies just like feudal lords of old. There’s no “competing” with this demographic: they take what they want, when they want. They don’t even see us as real people. The only value we provide in their world is whatever we can do for them. And right now, the vast majority of us are nothing but useless eaters in their eyes and just need to die, the faster, the better.
But what about productivity? If too many of us die, won’t we stop making them rich? Again, literally billions of us could die and there would be plenty of proles to keep them in comfort: they control the system, they control the dynamics, and they’ll rearrange things to suit their needs. When you own all the assets that are worth owning (that’s called “privatization,” folks), the nature of “income” and wealth change, and the rest of us be damned.
That’s what it really boils down to: this small group of people (and those who are really pulling the levers are no doubt only a small subset of this group of 3,000 or so) have damned the rest of us to suffering and death. They have embraced SARS-CoV-2 and likely climate change as at least part of the solution to planetary overpopulation. They’re driving this agenda, which is a long-term one, home through their influence over and ownership of our leaders, media, and various proxies who have been waging a war of information to convince us that mass infection is good, that mass disablement and death are normal, that there’s no reason to worry about climate change. Everything’s going to be okay. For them, at least.
Finally, if you think this is limited to one party or another, or one segment of the political spectrum, you’d be sorely mistaken. The Davos crowd aren’t liberals or conservatives. As I said earlier, they see themselves as lords unto themselves, and we are here only to serve them.
“Useless eaters” was at least implied by Kissinger. Easily seen as one of the top billionaire servants, Kissinger epitomizes the sociopathy of his clique. Millions of deaths are squarely on his hands. I don’t think billions trouble him.
Of course, the winners of the greatest depravity were the Nazis. “Lebensunwertes Leben” described those “unworthy of life”, who were just what “useless eaters” were called back then.
The billionaires do hold all the cards, but their hubris blinds. They do not control events, physics, or unintended consequences. I’m sure you’re right that their PR flacks and ‘internal messaging’ have loads of PowerPoints showing how everything is planned out and under control, this is the same delusion of a “neat and short little war” that will be over by Christmas. It’s never like that. Not that they won’t try, of course. So far, it’s all going their way.
The fact that covid is essentially airborne AIDS is a very dangerous thing to be playing with. The billionaires don’t have secret drugs or vaccines that actually work. While the rich and connected hid out in the hills during the European bubonic plagues, the social disruption that came about from so much death wasn’t something the lords anticipated. Peasants could make all kinds of demands they couldn’t before, and make them stick.
All that aside, you’re more right than wrong. Humans in general, and billionaires in particular, use their rationality merely to justify and rationalize their base drives and desires. They’ve never been told “no”, so why would this impending catastrophe be different?
Personal aside. Maybe a decade ago, when it was clear we weren’t going to do anything about biosphere collapse and likely destruction of most macrobiotic life (because that’s really where we’re heading, full speed ahead) I remember thinking: well, none of the rich countries will give up a single crumb of their lavish riches. (Who are the useless eaters, again?) What could reduce human numbers quickly enough to turn the trend around? War wouldn’t do it, especially nuclear war. The only thing I could think of was a plague. And here we are today!
Great post!
I Lol-ed at some parts. Harsh but true, yet darkly funny.
“And let’s face it: in the eyes of the billionaires, the millionaires are just higher-ranked proles, nothing more. Even our wealthiest politicians are nothing more than boot-licking kapos to the billionaires.”