Overpopulation

According to psychologist Theodor Reich, masochism is not actually an enjoyment of pain, but a way to gain control over pain. In other words, a human being sees a painful occurrence as inevitable. There is no way she can avoid it. She feels helpless. So, in order to gain a degree of control over the situation, she connives to bring the pain on herself, which promotes the false idea that she actually enjoys pain—that she desires suffering—that she wants to be hurt. By and by she becomes unable to experience pleasure. She learns to delay gratification, and, in doing so, feels a stronger sense of self-mastery. She becomes stoic and disciplined. Although she takes no joy in it, and although she intends only to decrease her sense of impotence, she begins to destroy everything around her—not out of hatred or pride or greed, but unconsciously—as an effort to lessen her feeling of helplessness and to escape her inevitable victimization.

Now, I’m not really into sado-masochism (a million other kinky things, but not that), but, explained as it is above, I can understand its appeal. I can understand how easily a person’s desires can be changed, how easily a person can be convinced to take pleasure in something that actually causes physical pain and harm. It’s easier to cope with an imposition, after all, if you can convince yourself that the imposition isn’t an imposition—that it’s what you really want. In fact, it’s exactly this human ability to delude ourselves that makes our current capitalistic system possible.

As explained by Slavoj Zizek, capitalistic society is more effective than socialism because it adds an extra layer of injunction. Socialism tells you that you have to stop playing with your friends and go visit your grandmother, whom you don’t like, because you’ll be in trouble if you don’t. Capitalism still demands that you visit your grandmother, but it tells you so in a different way. “No,” says the capitalistic parent, “you don’t have to visit your grandmother. You can be selfish, if that’s what you really want. I thought you were better than that, but, well, if that’s what you want…. You can stay here and play with your friends and let your family down. That’s your decision. We don’t mind. If you don’t want to be with your family who loves you…. I mean, maybe you’re not the caring, loving child we thought you were. What kind of person doesn’t love their grandma and enjoy visiting her? I don’t know. Maybe you’re a little less considerate and colder than we thought. That’s too bad. But, you know, don’t worry about it. You do whatever you want to do. It’s your decision.”

And, of course, the Capitalistic child isn’t stupid. He knows what he just heard: “You not only have to go visit your grandmother. You have to LIKE IT!”

And if a child learns how to obey the second injunction, to “like it”, he doesn’t have to obey the first injunction, or, more importantly, to even acknowledge that an injunction exists. If I’m able to convince myself that I like being a slave, then I’ll probably have an easier time dealing with my enslavement. Because I won't have to even acknowledge that I'm following orders, I’ll have a better, healthier life on the plantation—but I’ll also be more likely to remain a slave. And as long as my enslavement continues, thanks to the omnipresent human incentive to make the best of a bad situation, I can never completely trust myself or my desires, even when the desire is one as seemingly natural as having kids.

For most of my life I wanted to be a father, and a part of me still does. When I tell people that I don’t want to have kids, I don’t really mean that I don’t “want” kids, what I mean is that I’ve made a decision not to have kids because I don’t think it’s a socially responsible choice. There are too many humans on the planet, and I don’t want to add to the problem—so, to honor the landbase, I’ve repressed my desires and decided to remain childless.

Still, when I watch a movie about a father bonding with his son or daughter, when I see men my age come alive as they re-live their childhoods through their offspring, when I realize how much of a minority I am because I’m not a father, when I realize there might not be anyone around to take care of me as I get older, when I listen to fathers talk with pride and selfless love about their kids, when I see assholes turn into caring and mature human beings after becoming fathers, I start to feel regretful, even scared, and I wonder if I’m making the right choice.

That’s why it’s easy for me not to get preachy about the issue of overpopulation. Not only do I sometimes question my present beliefs about my personal responsibility in curtailing the problem, but I understand why people have kids in spite of world overpopulation. I understand the desire. Plus, I’d be a hypocrite to condemn others for having kids, because I haven’t always felt the way I do now. When I was married, my wife and I talked about and agreed to start a family but then divorced before we could follow through on our plans. Even then, I knew overpopulation was a tremendous problem in the world, but I had no intention to help remedy the matter by remaining childless. Back then, I didn’t really feel like I had other choices. Simultaneously, I didn’t really feel any sense of responsibility for the choice I had made about starting a family.

But I’ve changed. And the most obvious difference between then and now is that I’m not married. As a practical matter, I can’t have children, or at least not without huge negative complications. And I make no secret about the fact that my current views evolved as a direct result of my divorce. Put frankly, deciding that I didn’t want kids, or, more to the point, that I didn’t desire to be father, helped me cope with the fact that I couldn’t have kids—and, for a while, I was in denial about my true feelings. But I’m not anymore. I now fully acknowledge that I want children—I want to be a father—but I’m also firm in my decision to remain childless—in my decision to repress that desire.

In other words, I no longer use my beliefs about needing to neutralize the problem of overpopulation as a mask for my impaired ability to have children. I don’t have to cover up my desire anymore to cope with my disappointment. At the same time, my disappointment isn’t what it used to be. More to the point, my desire to be a father is now outweighed by my desire to act on my beliefs about ecological responsibility. The latter desire, I now believe, will lead to more happiness than the former. Like I said, I’ve changed. And in addition to not being married, I’m now in an environment where I don’t feel like I need to be married to fit in. That makes a huge difference. If I still lived in Utah, where I grew up, I would not have remained single for as long as I have—and I definitely would have had children by now—because I wouldn’t know of any other appealing options. My choices would be narrowed, and I would not be able to imagine a happy bachelor’s life nor would I be as aware of the problem of overpopulation as I am now, if I still lived in the area where I grew up. Even to this day, when I go back home to visit, I’m made to feel like a failure because I haven’t started a family and because I’m well passed the age in which you’re supposed to start a family. Let’s face it, getting married and having kids is part of our culture’s recommended story—a rite of passage for all respectable citizens, an initiation test. And if you don’t live up to those expectations, you are considered a failure. While the injunction to have kids is stronger in Utah than it is Colorado, the injunction still, indisputably, exists.

And most likely for that reason, though it’s less powerful, I still have some desire to be a father. The fact that I now have more and better options for being creative has lessened my desire but it hasn’t killed it. Unlike when I was planning a family, though, I no longer trust my desires. Just “wanting” children isn’t enough. I’m now convinced that my desire to have kids isn’t really a desire; it’s an order. And because of that awareness, it’s easier to repress the pseudo desire. And I couldn’t have that awareness if I didn’t live within an environment that shows very concretely that fatherhood isn’t necessary for personal fulfillment—if I didn’t live in an environment where I can safely question and distrust my desires, and, in turn, become better acquainted with my passions and their sources.

Put another way, my desire to have kids, as well as my current desire not to have them, is a social not a biological urge. I’m not biologically predetermined to want children. And that isn’t only true for myself and other men; it’s true for women, as well. I grant that we might have a biological urge to create and nourish our species and our bloodlines, but, to me, that doesn’t translate into a biological urge to procreate. If you put a dozen worms in a jar and then reduce their food supply, the worms will stop procreating. The worms’ behavior seems to suggest that preserving the land base and thereby respecting carrying capacity, overrides the urge, if it exists, to have baby worms. And, as writer Derrick Jensen joked during a recent lecture I attended, “worms don’t even have brains!” Worms, because they can’t rationalize, can’t be manipulated with thought the way humans can and, consequently, can’t be misled about their desires and urges. They act on instinct, and instinct tells them to stop having baby worms when there isn’t enough food to go around. It says that quality of life, not just quantity, matters. It says that you have to involve yourself in your surroundings, respecting the needs of the land’s other inhabitants—that your self and your species and your bloodline extend to your entire environment and not to certain narrow and clearly delineated boundaries. It says that, for worms, respecting the ‘other’ is the most efficient way to ensure a certain quality of life for the ‘self’.

No doubt, in my mind, that in our present situation we would act the same way as the worms in the bottle if we weren’t following orders—if we were more receptive to our passions than to our duties. That isn’t difficult to prove, either. Look anywhere in the world where women’s rights are increasing, where women can more honestly and more effectively assess their human needs, and the birth rate is in decline. But in places where women, the primary victims of globalization-induced poverty and nearly all human rights abuse, have fewer rights, the birth rates are exploding. In the non-industrialized parts of the world that are being used mainly as fodder for western enterprise, where modern power is most evident—in parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa—and in places where the culture publicly endorses the subjugation of women (not coincidentally the same regions)—the birth rates are growing exponentially, while in Europe and America, places where feminism has at least taken root and is at least given voice to and where power is more diffused, the birth rates are not sufficient to maintain current population levels. And it’s only within minority western communities—the Black and Hispanic communities in America and immigrant populations of Europe, within communities where, because of economic disadvantages, members have fewer opportunities and subsequently fewer freedoms—that birth rates continue to rise.

Put simply, the more enslaved within our current system a person finds herself, the more likely she is to have children. And it’s easy to understand why. If you’re born into a certain level of enslavement, you have little control over your actions. You have little say in how you define yourself as a person. You don’t have the right of self-determination, and, as a result, you become defined by your masters—by male masters, mostly, who offer you only the roles that serve their interests—the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. The reason that the US and other developed nations haven’t sufficiently supported Third World family planning programs and the reason that many non-industrialized nations don’t see overpopulation as a problem is obvious: it’s because you can’t solve the population problem without solving the problems of misogyny and oppression, two elements required by the dominant culture to function. If you give women more options, options that don’t support the power structure, and if you give men more options than the ones in which they dominate women (and support the power structure), you weaken the hierarchical and oppression-based system that rules us. You weaken patriarchy. What world leaders implicitly realize but don’t allow into their consciences is that the problems related to overpopulation—concomitant problems of world hunger and poverty, for example—are primarily women’s issues. More broadly, as suggested by Riane Eisler, they’re issues that challenge the very foundations of the andocratic/dominator system that all nations on the planet currently practice. If you advance the rights and choices of women, if women come to be known as more than just breeders, we will no longer need society as we know it. The system would collapse, because giving in to women means giving in to the very thing that modern society is trying to rise above—nature.

So, we cope as best we can. By accepting traditional roles, by convincing ourselves that those are the roles we most want to adopt, we cope better with our subservience. We learn to like it. That isn’t to say that the desire to be a mother or father isn’t real, only that it’s a manufactured desire. It isn’t pre-determined. Nor am I suggesting that the desire to be a father or mother is intrinsically unhealthy. Under certain circumstances, the desire might be created by forces other than coercion and will complement the needs of the environment. In the present-day world, though, the human desire to have children is destructive and, I believe, a-natural. It decreases what I believe all living things most desire—freedom.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we blame those with the desire, on the slaves making the best of their enslavement. To solve the population problem, we shouldn’t add on more layers of injunction. We shouldn’t, like China, start passing laws to prohibit having too many children and thereby increase current levels of servitude. Nor, as we do in America, should we do more to enable people’s desires, desires that simply serve the status quo and not the individual. Instead, we need to challenge and re-think our desires, which isn’t possible so long as we remain in positions of confinement. To solve the population problem we need to create new desires and new opportunities. More precisely, we need more not less freedom. We need to give people the world over the right to self-determination, the right to create their own stories and their own self-definitions, and not force people to adopt a way of life that gives one a choice between awareness and misery or false-happiness and increased enslavement. Barring that, barring a complete change in and destruction of our current dominator-based way of life, we can at least show people, ourselves included, that slavery isn’t inevitable; it isn’t biologically pre-determined. As artists or spokespersons, we can give others a glimpse of alternative fulfilling lifestyles—create even an artificial view of life that exposes people’s current desires as the social creations they are and which points the way to other realities, to epistemologies that favor opening of the self and not constriction; if we can’t literally expand people’s freedoms, we can expand their imaginations and thereby make it easier to acknowledge and resist our confinement. In a phrase, we can provide people with new visions and new insights—to allow both sexes a means for achieving personal fulfillment—for being creative—other than having kids.

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Civilization is advancing not so much on the back of humanity, but, eerily enough, without it.

Murray Bookchin

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Riane Eisler The Chalice and The Blade; Slavoj Zizek Zizek!; Philip K. Dick Valis; Murray Bookchin The Freedom of Ecology