Homocentric Universe

DARWINISM WAS NOT THE ONLY EVIL MALTHUS UNLEASHED:

The Nonsense Explosion (Ben Wattenberg, 1970, New Republic)

Finally, we must take note of the new thrust by the Explosionists: population control. Note the phrase carefully. This is specifically not “family planning,” where the family concerned does the planning. This is control of population by the government and this is what the apocalyptics are demanding, because, they say, family planning by itself will not deduce us to a zero growth rate. The more popular “soft” position of government control involves what is called “disincentives;” that is, a few minor measures like changing the taxation system, the school system, and the moral code to see if that won’t work before going onto outright baby licensing.

Accordingly, the demographer Judith Blake Davis of the University of California (Berkeley) complained to a House Committee: “We penalize homosexuals of both sexes, we insist that women must bear unwanted children by depriving them of ready access to abortion, we bind individuals to pay for the education of other people’s children, we make people with small families support the schooling of others. . . .” (Italics mine.)

Now, Dr. Davis is not exactly saying that we should go to a private school system or eliminate the tax exemption for children, thereby penalizing the poor but not the rich – but that is the implication. In essence, Senator Packwood recently proposed just that: no tax exemptions for any children beyond the second per family, born after 1972.

The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies.

Dr. Garret Hardin, a professor-biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, “In the long run, voluntarism is insanity. The result will be continued uncontrolled population growth.”

Astro-physicist Donald Aiken says, “The government has to step in and tamper with religious and personal convictions – maybe even impose penalties for every child a family has beyond two.”

Dr. Melvin Ketchel, professor of physiology at Tufts Medical School, writes in Medical World News: “Scientists will discover ways of controlling the fertility of an entire population . . . the compound . . . could be controlled by adjustments in dosage, [and] a government could regulate the growth of its population without depending upon the voluntary action of individual couples . . . such an agent might be added to the water supply.”

And Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”

What it all adds up to is this: why have a long-range manageable population problem that can be coped with gradually over generations when, with a little extra souped-up scare rhetoric, we can drum up a full-fledged crisis? We certainly need one; it’s been months since we’ve had a crisis. After all, Vietnam, we were told, was “the greatest crisis in a hundred years.” Piker. Here’s a crisis that’s a beauty: the greatest crisis in two billion years: we’re about to breed ourselves right into oblivion.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You: Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis. (Ilyse Hogue, Feb 20, 2026, The Bulwark)

The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.

RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.

Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.

The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.

The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”

WE’LL HAVE PLENTY LEFT WHEN WE CRASH INTO THE SUN:

The postliberal war on economics (Phil Magness, Feb 06, 2026, The Argument)

In a 2007 blog post, Deneen predicted an impending societal collapse from environmental degradation, noting “in all likelihood we’ll experience some severe civilizational dislocation in coming months and years as a result of peak oil.”

Peak Oil Theory was a trendy doctrine from the 2000s that foresaw an imminent natural resource depletion, whereupon fossil fuel energy production would enter into a rapid and irreversible decline. Widespread shortages and economic collapse would soon follow as our oil-dependent economy could no longer sustain consumption at current levels.

It has since fallen by the wayside among environmentalists as new fossil fuel exploration and better extraction technologies vastly expanded the world’s estimated oil reserves. Green activists today have shifted their arguments to emphasize climate change as their leading concern, even arguing for intentional fossil fuel sequestration on the grounds that the Earth’s atmosphere cannot handle the emissions that would arise from currently known oil reserves.

But for Deneen, the snapshot claims of late 2000s Peak Oil Theory provided the “eureka” moment that led him to develop postliberalism. He recounted this much on his blog:

[W]hen I learned about “peak oil” – that is, the imminent depletion of roughly half the world’s oil reserves, and by far the easiest accessible and cheapest stuff – it finally made sense to me why a political philosophy that I had long held to be fundamentally false – modern liberalism – nevertheless had prospered for roughly the past 100 years and had gone into hyper-drive over the past half-century.

Modern liberalism – the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., biotechnological improvement of the species) – is against nature, and therefore ought not to have “worked.”

In this telling, the posited resource limitations of Peak Oil Theory revealed not just the source of the coming environmental disaster, but its culpable party, which is to say liberalism — and specifically economic liberalism — itself.

The explosion of economic prosperity from the 18th-century stirrings of the Industrial Revolution to the present day depended upon fossil fuel in the literal sense. In Deneen’s reasoning, that fuel came from a limited resource that would soon be depleted. The Great Enrichment of the modern era, and indeed humanity’s escape from the multi-thousand-year Malthusian Trap of hunger and stagnation, only came about through artificial means that elevated humanity’s economic consumption beyond its “natural” state.

From Darwinism to Marxism to PostLiberalism, no bad idea has done more damage than Malthusianism.