Let’s clear one thing up first. The word “conspiracy” evokes something sinister, or nutty, or both. Yours truly is neither a “conspiracy theorist” nor a “tin foil hat” guy. Nonetheless, the increasing chatter about “plots” or “plans” to reduce population should be considered.

On a balmy summer day in 1979, something downright weird happened in Elbert County, Georgia. A mysterious stranger materialized at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company. Calling himself “R. C. Christian” (a pseudonym), he commissioned a 119-ton granite monument, saying the project was 20 years in planning and was sponsored by “a small group of loyal Americans who believe in God.” 

The almost 20-foot-tall granite monument, shrouded still in mystery, has become known as The Georgia Guidestones. The Guidestones bear ten inscriptions, repeated in eight languages. They are:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Globalism’s Ten Commandments? Interesting that the most specific inscription, #1 on the list, is population reduction. When the monument was unveiled in 1980, world population was 4.5 billion. It is now 7.9 billion, a far cry from the Guidestones’ 500 million.

Why were the Guidestones erected? World fertility has declined by 52 percent since 1964. Are the Guidestones part of a long-term “one-world” conspiracy to reduce world population?

Fast forward to 2021. Artificial Intelligence. Fast-food joints run entirely by robots. Next up, medical diagnostics. AI, touch screens and robots are more efficient than humans, with no need for family time or sick leave. In a strictly economic sense, there will undoubtedly be a “surplus population” per Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Now comes entrepreneur and political strategist Steve Bannon warning of a dystopian world where technology convergence, including artificial general intelligence and regenerative robotics that can write their own code, will replace much of the workforce, thus the need to reduce population.

There is also Elon Musk & Company’s Neuralink (brain-machine interfaces). Per Bannon, such high-tech convergence, including the DNA-editing CRISPR “…where on one side there is Homo sapiens and the other side is Homo sapiens plus” could be an endeavor to “perfect” the human genome so people can be more intelligent, athletic, healthy, beautiful and compliant. CRISPR can add, delete, and “edit” DNA as easily as we can edit documents.

How about cyborgs? A cyborg is defined as either a person who is part machine or a robot who is part organic. While high-tech prostheses controlled by the brain are wonderful, with promising prospects for overcoming human paralysis, there is seemingly no limit to neural enhancement. The philosophy of Transhumanism supposedly favors “the use of science and technology …to overcome human limitations and improve the human condition.”

Such bionic enhancements will inevitably limit the economic need for human beings. When people are valued solely for economic utility, they are subject to the iron law of supply and demand like any other good or service.

Very powerful people want population reduction. See The Times’ “Billionaire Club in bid to curb overpopulation” (Sunday, May 24, 2009). Here’s Bill Gates at a 2010 TED Talk: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.”

Also, it is quite fashionable, at least in the West, to help “save the planet” by not having children. Legions of PC people subscribe to this. Climate is always changing, and science has yet to quantify how much this or that contributes to it.

Then just before The Holidays (formerly known as Christmas) I ran across a brilliant essay by Professor Michael Anton in New Criterion.

Most appropriately entitled “Unprecedented,” it is an examination of recent cultural trends influencing Western Civilization:

An odd feature of our time is the coupling of mass hyper-sexualization with mass barrenness. Some argue, plausibly, that the link is direct: hyper-sexualization disconnected from procreation inevitably leads to fewer babies. The degree to which crashing fertility is simply an effect of modernity versus a deliberate plan by our rulers is an open question. It is certainly true that every economically and technologically developed society, regardless of region, culture, race, or religion, suffers from cratering birthrates. [emphasis added]

But it’s also true that our rulers advocate and celebrate careerism, consumerism, self-centeredness, casual sex, delayed marriage, (let us say) “non-fecund” couplings, and, where and if all that fails, small families—“for the environment,” you understand. In other words, when and where the (allegedly) inexorable process of modernity is overcome by the innate human desire for love and family, the regime eagerly steps in with propaganda to bully men and women out of such longings. I suppose there is a near-historical precedent for this, namely China’s one-child policy, in effect from 1980 to 2015. But that was implemented to relieve (it was thought) a looming Malthusian crisis, a fear that cannot reasonably apply to contemporary America, whose birthrate is 1.64 and falling like a stone. China itself, whose leaders want its people to live on, abandoned the policy. Meanwhile, America unofficially does everything it can to suppress native births. Has this ever happened before in a country not even plausibly facing a “population crisis”?

Wow. Did you catch that? “The degree to which crashing fertility is simply an effect of modernity versus a deliberate plan by our rulers is an open question.” 

Folks, it is an open question. Is all this talk of population reduction the fruit of a conspiracy? For the record, I don’t know. But it is a widely held belief, thus we should move the discussion out of the shadows.

The Lancet’s 2017 study (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) projects that global population will peak in 2064 at just above 9.7 billion, and drop by at least 10 percent by 2100. Some demography wonks say that The Lancet’s projections are conservative, and once the pace of population decline starts, it will accelerate. 

Wonder what our MercatorNet community thinks about all this?

Happy New Year!