(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)

(If you haven’t read Parts 1 - 3 yet, please do so first; the series will make more sense in chronological order.)

If you think that China’s one-child-per-family policy is severe, have I got a surprise for you. Each new smaller generation coexists with the preceding larger generations until the latter have passed on. One child per family would bring world population down to sustainable levels in about 30 years. We don’t have 30 years.

To avoid the three-hundred-Hitler holocaust would require a policy of one child per two to four families. You can call that “baby rationing.” It would also require a 60% economic contraction in the wealthy nations: slamming the global economy into reverse on a scale that would make the 1930s depression look like a dress rehearsal. And it would require a degree of redistribution of essential resources that would not just “look like” global communism, it would be global communism. Taken together, these measures can be called “draconian overdrive.”

Let’s say we wanted to save as many human lives as possible, and decided to take these steps.

Start with baby rationing. The simplest way to enforce it is to sterilize 1/2 to 3/4 of the humans of reproductive age. (In fact the numbers will vary, but for the point of this essay, the heuristic works well enough.) Those who weren’t sterilized would logically seek to hook up with each other to reproduce. After their first baby, “snip-snip,” sterilize them as well. If their baby doesn’t make it to adulthood, that’s a bonus for population reduction, helping to offset the occasional case where someone manages to sneak around the rules.

How are you going to get 1/2 to 3/4 of the people into clinics to get snipped? Most of them won’t go willingly. You have to use main force and drag them in, kicking and screaming as they go. Envision for a moment, armed officials of government knocking on doors and dragging people to the clinics, or into mobile “snip wagons” parked conveniently nearby. Imagine the degree of totalitarianism it would take to enforce that against the certainty of revolt and armed uprising.

I could go on about the “economic depression” part (think of the mass unemployment and unwilling mass migrations) and the “global communism” part (think of the mass corruption), but you get the idea. Each of these elements would also generate the necessity for further totalitarian measures.

Envision enormous numbers of dispossessed people milling around waiting for the next delivery of food to the store shelves, and in an uproar over mandatory snip-snip. Envision what it would take to maintain “control,” or even a semblance of a functional government and economy. In order to make it “work” we would have to descend into a collective hell.

Now the fact is that we are about to descend into a collective hell anyway, with starvation, pandemics, and resource wars, all caused by overshoot of carrying capacity. But there is a difference. If someone falls off a cliff, it’s a tragedy. If they jump, it’s suicide. If they’re pushed, it’s murder.

The hell foisted upon us by our collective stupidity is the penalty for acts that in and of themselves are not as obviously culpable as the acts required to put the world on draconian overdrive. Either way, intention does not excuse outcome.

We can save the humans at the expense of our humanity. Or we can save our humanity at the expense of billions of humans. This is what’s known as a Hobson’s choice, for which a classic example is, “would you rather die by shooting or by hanging?”

When is a choice not a choice? When it’s a Hobson’s choice.

And yet, there is another option.

I say this with provocative intent in mind:

Transcend.