We are all Joe Biden (and Malthus was not a Reptilian)

Thomas Malthus was not an evil Reptilian alien, but propaganda has turned him into one.

This post was inspired by Joe Biden's disastrous performance at the recent presidential debate. It generated much sneering at poor Biden, showing, among many other things, how cruel our society can be—too much, really (*). But what impressed me most was how far from reality both debaters were. And how far from reality most of us are. Reality is fast becoming one of those “unknown unknowns” that Donald Rumsfeld mentioned, and you don’t have to suffer from senile dementia to lose track of what’s going on. So, let me discuss an example that appeared on my screen just a few days ago. One among many.

Recently, a post from the Corbett Report appeared in my mailbox. It was an old report from 2011, but it had resurfaced from the depths of the Web for some unfathomable reason. Full of insults against Thomas Malthus and the eugenicists who are planning our doom, it went viral and received several favorable comments on the social platform where it was posted and also on the site where it had been posted a year ago.

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this low-level screed, but I thought I would mention it to you as an example of how easily reality can be hacked, cut to pieces, mashed, cooked, hashed, and boiled: nouvelle cuisine or slop from the mess hall? What difference does it make?

So let me cite from the Corbett site:

Malthus himself, an Anglican minister, wrote that: “We are bound in justice and honour formally to disdain the Right of the poor to support,” arguing for a law making it illegal for the Anglican church to give any food, clothing or support to any children. Not content with consigning thousands of children to death for the misfortune of being born poor, however, Malthus also advocated actively contributing to the deaths of more of the poor through social engineering:

“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”

The beauty of this is that it is a complete invention.

Try as you may to find these words in the link where they are supposed to originate, and you can’t. Maybe they were proffered by Reptilian aliens, but they do not exist anywhere in Malthus's “Essay on Population.” Of course, the internet is vast, and I can’t exclude that you could find these words in some of Malthus’s letters. But, a search using the usual engines returned nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nul. صفر.

In another post (see below), I commented on how a sentence from one of Malthus's letters could be hacked out of the original text and presented as recommending genocide. It is clear from the complete text that Malthus was a generally benevolent person, not a bloodthirsty Reptilian (**). In that case, at least the sentence was there. But here, no. It is invented from scratch or taken from a well-hidden source.

Even more beautiful: no commenter bothered to check the source of the statement. Any lie goes once it is printed, and it suits the taste of readers.

Do you think the Corbett report is an exceptional case of madness that somehow found a way to appear on a Website? Not at all. Just look for keywords such as “eugenicists,” “The Club of Rome,” and “Malthus,” and you’ll find plenty of stuff that is not better than the Corbett report.

Just one recent example (2023) from “The Atlantic” Magazine:

China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

Yes, except that if you follow the chain of references, you arrive at a 2005 paper by Susan Greenhalgh that’s pure fantasy based on no data, as I described in a previous post.

And so, what is truth? We have been asking ourselves this question for two thousand years and still haven’t found the answer.

(*) Biden’s performance reminded me of my father's initial phases of dementia when he still tried his best to maintain at least a semblance of his former brilliance. Sometimes, he succeeded; sometimes, he didn’t. In any case, his destiny was unavoidable. Having watched it in my father’s case, I am not pleased to watch it in anyone, no matter what I think of him or her in political terms.

(**) I apologize to my friend Mera Te Aì 'Enge'ite, chief scientific officer of the Reptilian Starfleet, for this stereotyped view of the noble Reptilian race.

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From Cassandra’s Legacy, 2016 (slightly edited)

Malthus, the prophet of doom: Why bother reading the original when you can simply cut and paste from the Internet?

An excerpt from the book I am writing, "The Seneca Effect," that contains a chapter dedicated to the Irish famines. Above, the reverend Thomas Malthus (1766 - 1834)

The demolition of Thomas Malthus' work in our times is often based on accusing him of having predicted some awful catastrophe to occur in the near future, sometimes on a specific date. Then, since the catastrophe didn't occur, it follows that Malthus was completely wrong and nothing in his work can be salvaged. It is a well-tested method that was successfully used against "The Limits to Growth," the report to the Club of Rome that appeared in 1972.

Except Malthus never made the "wrong predictions" attributed to him, just as "The Limits to Growth" never made wrong predictions, either. There are no specific dates in Malthus' book "An Essay on the Principle of Population" for where and when famines or other catastrophes should occur. For instance, Malthus says that,

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

— Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter 7, p 44

You can surely say it is doomerish, but not something you can define as a "wrong prediction.” Events similar to Malthus' description really occurred before Malthus's time, and in the “Essay,” he normally refers to historical cases, especially those that occurred in China.

So, Malthus was not babbling about dark and dire things to come; he was describing and analyzing well-known events in his time. However, few people today seem interested in looking up the original text and prefer to maintain that “Malthus was wrong” by repeating the legend. And, by the way, even if Malthus had been guilty of “wrong predictions,” that doesn't mean infinite population growth could occur on a finite planet.

The other way to demolish Malthus's ideas is to paint him as evil, in the sense that he had proposed or favored mass extermination as a consequence of his ideas. This is also a common legend and a great injustice done to Malthus. Over the great corpus written by Malthus, it is perfectly possible to find parts that we find objectionable today, especially in his description of “primitive” people whom he calls “wretched.” In this respect, Malthus was a man of his times, and that was the prevalent opinion of Europeans regarding non-Europeans (and maybe, in some cases, still is, as described in the book “Can Non-Europeans Think?” by Dabashi and Mignolo, 2015).

Apart from that, Malthus’ writings are clearly the work of a compassionate man who saw a future that he didn't like but that he felt was his duty to describe. Surely, there is no justification for criticizing him for things he never said, as it can be done by cutting and pasting fragments of his work and interpreting them out of context. For instance, Joel Mokyr, in his otherwise excellent book titled “Why Ireland Starved”⁠ (Mokyr 1983) reports this sentence from a letter that Malthus wrote to his friend David Ricardo,

The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.

Clearly, this sentence gives the impression that Malthus was advocating the extermination of the Irish. But the actual sentence that Malthus wrote reads, rather (Ricardo 2005)⁠ (emphasis added):

The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil into large manufacturing and commercial Towns.

So, you see that Malthus wasn't proposing to kill anyone; rather, he was proposing the industrialization of Ireland to create prosperity in the country. Nevertheless, legends spread easily on the web, and you can see the truncated sentence by Malthus repeated over and over to demonstrate that Malthus was an evil person who proposed the extermination of the poor. Did Professor Mokyr truncate this phrase himself? Maybe not, but he was at least careless in cutting and pasting something that he read on the Web without worrying too much about verifying the original source.

The Web, indeed, is full of insults against Malthus. You can find an especially nasty (and misinformed one) attack against him at this link, where you can read that, yes, the Irish famine was all the fault of Malthus, who misinformed the British government, who then refused to help the poor Irish, who then starved - all based on that truncated sentence.

Sometimes, I feel we are swimming in propaganda, drinking propaganda, eating propaganda, and even being happy about doing that.

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Dabashi H, Mignolo W (2015) Can Non-Europeans Think? Zed Books

Mokyr J (1983) Why Ireland Starved. Routledge, London and New York

Ricardo D (2005) The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis