A convo in the DMs reminded me of something funny about how neoliberals discuss population & genetics. Namely, how they always switch their position depending on what suits them. The Economist mag does this the most but so do others like Bloomberg. Lemme give you an example

Gregory Clark is an economist who does first rate data gathering & formal & historical analysis to produce absolutely atrocious—both scholastically & morally—conclusions, namely in his works ‘A Farewell To Alms’ about poverty/demography & ‘Son Also Rises’ about inequality

Among other things he argues the Malthusian trap is not only real but the central dynamics of economics & capitalism, that rich people having more kids meant ‘good’ bourgeois norms spread thru the population, & that intergenerational inequality is explained by genetic pedigree

Now, you might already be getting itchy, because of what normally follows, but the fact is that Clark actually takes the opposite view you’d expect—*because* success is genetic, it’s unfair, & there should be mass income/wealth distribution.

He also finds the idea that capitalism & globalization ended global poverty & helped the global south absurd & points out many people are less wealthy than they were a century ago in certain terms.

What’s more, Clark argues that while ideas can change history etc, They’re always reflections of economics, so that the bourgeois’ ideAs were the result of their position, & that excess fertility of the rich lead their norms to spread through the population etc

Now, I only bring this up, because whenever these books come out, The Economist gets all up in arms, says genetics doesn’t determine life outcomes, population & thus environmental policy are not a huge concern, & the bourgeois don’t just magically have ‘better’ ideas

Frequent readers will notice this is more or less the opposite of what they often say, and when anyone brings up that distributions are unfair & not reflections of talent they reach for genetics, & when environmental issues of production are raised, they reach for population.

If one looks at Economist Articles, as well as Bloomberg articles, on population etc, they come in several forms, which all blatantly contradict each other.

1. Population growth & Malthus we’re wrong! So we don’t need to save the environment. Yay capitalism
2. Evil environmentalists want to control your population & fertility!
3. Environmental policies are futile Cus of population growth
4. Population, not capitalism, causes poverty

In one recent hit job, Bloomberg claimed that thousands of scientists who signed a petition calling for immediate radical environmental action on climate were advocating mass population control, with all the attendant implications thereof.

When one reads the paper, there are SIX distinct policy areas, but Bloomberg only mentions 1 of them, the last one, indeed titled “Population” whose more or less first line is something to the effect of “we should be wary of calls for reductions in population”

Indeed, what it says, is that instead the focus should be on social equity, reproductive choice, justice & freedom, easing poverty, increasing access to birth control & family planning, and supporting children, & that these cant be imposed on people by force.

Now, of course, when they aren’t trying to baldly mis portray & selectively discuss scientific consensus, if one searches their articles, one finds tons of them saying that we are facing which problem? Overpopulation! Curious.

Now, the point isn’t so much that capitalist publications will lie & misinterpret (including one’s that are very well respected) or that they’re opportunists trying to undercut social policy—although this is all true—it’s that they do it in the same predictable patterned way

Which is to say, when population growth is being used to justify environmental protections, they say it doesn’t exist. When other kinds of environmental & ecological causes are being discussed as needing solutions, they’ll claim it’s futile because of population growth.

When environmentalists & scientists are calling for immediate climate action, they call them scary fascist malthusians who want to more or less eat your babies. But then when capitalism is being critiqued for causing poverty, they say no it’s over population (among other things)

When genetic determinism is being used to justify redistribution, they say it’s false & everything is determined by the environment etc. when people call for equity to redress imbalances of resources, they’ll point to genetic determinism to explain why they’re just.

Two points are of note here—this helps illustrate an old point that facts or analytic models don’t actually imply normative & social policies on their own (although they mind be associated with & assumed to imply them due to specific histories), but can be used either way

Genetic determinism, population growth, and ‘Neo Malthusian’ models can be used variously to support or dismiss redistribution, support or critique capitalism, support or dismiss environmental policy/environmentalists, & support or dismiss fertility policy.

This is true despite the fact that we know they overwhelmingly *tend* to be used in one way or another—namely that genetic determinism, resources curse, commons tragedy & population growth arguments are primarily used in a reactionary way

This form of reaction has three distinct but related forms:
1. One mostly concerns capitalism, social policy, poverty, distribution, their solutions, talent, equity & justice
2. The next concerns the futility or misdirection of ecological & scientific critiques

3. The final is used to justify liberal or right wing policies fertility policies, ranging from controlling reproductive freedom, to encouraging birth rates, to eugenics & dysgenics, To straight up calls for extermination

But what’s interesting is that the same people who primarily use these arguments in exactly this way, will also turn on a dime to slander environmentalists, scientists & leftists with them, or to deny them where they’re being used to justify social & environmental policies

Accusing ones enemies of being bad for doing the things that one actually does (& thinks are good) is an old tactic & one that is surprisingly effective for propaganda.

For example, look at US propaganda about the USSR or media portrayals thereof & their rivalry—almost without fail, every thing being used to show why the USSR is evil, is something that the US actually does, normally justifies & which the USSR in reality often doesn’t do.

This is how the media, entertainment, capitalist rags, ideologues & the state treat environmentalists, greens, ecologists & scientists, and they’ve been doing so for years—since at least the 60/70s in this exact formula, which is when environmentalism split from conservationism

Or, 1 can see it in conservative critiques of leftists or environmentalists as being privileged rich city folk in the professions & with an education,while at the same time arguing elsewhere that rich people are rich bc they are smarter, more moral, better educated & better genes

People love to repeat the analysis that conspiracy theories & reactionaries portray their enemies as simultaneously both very powerful & very weak, as being excessively good in one thing while perversely bad in another.

This, far from being some general inherent feature of reaction & conspiracy theories, actually has a defined contingent historical origin—antisemitism, & the idea often relayed to it of anri-communism &/or anti-intellectualism, and the ways specifically fascism took them up

To the degree one sees it elsewhere, it’s because of convergence, imitation, morphing, borrowing & descending from the above 3. Far from it being some intrinsic feature of all reactions, it’s one that other reactions & those they influenced, derived from the above.

It’s related to & overlaps with, but is distinct from several other modes of analysis which we can call:
1. ‘Too much of a good thing’
2. The lack of evidence is itself evidence
3. ‘The inexpressible kernel’ or in less haughty language what’s called projection mixed w ego threat

Or, as a certain now-cancelled author says very humorously & astutely about Harry Potter (if the length is imposing just read the first image which is funnier anyway—the latter just extends it)

This touches on all four of the modes i discussed (both strong/weak, plus the other 3 ones), and does so very humorously.

1. ‘Too much of a good thing’ is the argument that some virtue is a vice. This is common in antisemitism (Jews are too smart, too good with money, too internally loyal) & anti-intellectualism (too educated/smart/abstract),

Here’s 2 pieces on each of the subjects (2 for antisemitism, 2 for antiintellectualism):
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3190562/
2. https://salvage.zone/in-print/jewophobia-2/
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/opinion/the-decline-of-the-public-intellectual.html
4. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gross-academia-conservatives-hiring-20160520-snap-story.html (unfortunately one needs the full book on which this piece is based)

The third one is all too brief, so I’d recommend his book on Judgment. The 4th is an editorial based on his book why are professors liberal—so it only very abstractly addresses the issue. The book itself, however, has a whole chapter on conservative populist attacks on academia.

There are several works linking all 3 of these—antisemitism, anti communism, anti intellectualism— https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094724633662771205?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094724633662771205

This takes us to the third one—the inexpressible kernel. This analysis has been made by Slavoj Zizek, Moishe Postone, Franz Fanon, Jeal Paul Sartre, David Nirenberg, and others. I can link if you want but they’re all easily accessible.

The other place we see it is in anti communist propaganda—see Hunt for Red October, Red Dawn, Rocky movies or as this article discusses in an ironic way, Rambo. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/rambo-brought-the-vietnam-war-and-its-scars-home/

Inexpressible Kernel is just my fancy way of adding 3 or 4 concepts together:
1. False consciousness
2. Ideology
3. Psychological projection
4. Ego threat
Although they can & should be analyzed separately as well

Basically the idea is that one projects on the enemy An aspect of oneself that is contradictory. The US has an underdog ideology but is not the underdog. Jews as the material expression of capitalism’s contradictions. And so on

The final one—the lack of evidence being taken as evidence itself is old & quite quotidian. For example, it was used when critics of Japanese internment policy pointed out there had been no cases of sabotage/treason, and its a frequent staple of conspiracies.

Environmentalism, ecology, greens, scientific critiques of capitalism & so on have inherited all of these dynamics.

1. Environmentalists & leftists are paradigmatic cases of too much of a good thing arguments—education, privilege, background, concern for the world, intelligence, moral ideas, empathy, etc

2. Ecological arguments & the lacunae they expose are classic cases that bring out the inexpressible kernel. This is how capitalists can depend on both population growth & control but also use those to slander, critique & dismiss ecological & scientific argumenrs.

3. Finally, the lack of evidence being used as evidence is apparent in anyone’s discussions of climate or ecology as being grand conspiracies or their supposed hegemonic influence, and their focus on celebrities & cultural loci of these.

Population growth discussions by capitalist & state ideologies also express these three dynamics

1. Too much of a good thing is obvious, given the ideas about wealth etc & it was actually Malthus specific argument, as he argued that population growth was the source of wealth but that wealth produces idleness & thus becomes a curse in this case

2. The inexpressible kernel is that capitalism has a contradictory impulse here—it requires population growth AND social control. It needs a continually growing source of labor, demand, & employment, but too much of these and they become a threat.

3. That there hasn’t been a population crisis is proof there’s going to be a really bad one later. That there’s no evidence for there being a collapse without extractivism shows how serious the dependency is, etc.

Through these, the state & capitalism are able to project contradictory problems they create & necessitate, on to those critics of them. In others, the contradictions & externalities are portrayed as the flaws of those who wish to get rid of them.

Anyway, the long the short of it, is that capitalist & state propagandists, whenever issues of the environment, ecology, capitalism, injustice, the state, extraction, resource use, their arguments & framings become predictable & stereotyped selective contradictions

The areas where one sees this most explicitly is with population growth, ‘tragedy of the commons’, resource use, inequality, and unjust resource allocations—the ways capitalists use overpopulation & genetic determinism arguments is predictably selective & dishonest.

They hop between the advocacy of reaction, fascism, social control thru population control, eugenics, etc, and their use of these to slander their critics, to justify why current allocations/production is fair or to dismiss critics or the efficacy of solutions.