We Ignored the Warnings. Now YOU Pay the Price

”If you want more liberty and more consumption,  you have to have fewer people. We could even have 8 or 9 billion if we had a smart  dictatorship… and a low standard of living. We want to have freedom and a high standard  of living, we want to have a billion people.” This is Dennis Meadows -- he’s an example of  the people who wish you hadn’t been born. That think you are a drain on natural resources,  a drain on government. A financial burden, a burden to the planet and a burden to  others. The

y think that you provide less value than you receive -- and that you aren’t  capable of ever changing that equation. Most of them want you to fade away gently, never  to reproduce or to be replaced. But a few, like Meadows, would consider it a  net positive if you died right now. And it’s not just fringe academics -- every day you can tune into someone like  Bill Maher and hear the same thing: “And yet there are people, and I think  you’re one of them, who wants us to have more babies. I don’t g

et this, this… connect  those dots for me, because I think the problem with the environment is basically too  many people using too few resources.” We’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of a  science fiction film that perfectly represents this enduring sense of doom and, paradoxically,  an unshakeable hope in the human project. It was meant to be a warning, and the story’s  original author dedicated his book by saying, “For your sakes, children, I hope  this proves to be a work of fiction.” But

what the prophets of destruction who  continue to tell us that the world is coming to an end don’t understand -- including those  people who advocate for unconscionable actions in a misguided moral crusade to prevent  doomsday -- is that the solution that would keep us from a world like Soylent  Green’s is… actually the problem itself. So grab your plankton crackers, sneak into Waste  Disposal Plant No. 4, and let’s see The Unscene. Just like Charlton Heston’s “The Ten  Commandments,” Soylent G

reen was actually a book before it was a movie. And to understand why 50  years later more than a third of Nobel Laureates polled say the greatest plague on the human race  is the human race -- and why they want you to live differently, or not at all -- you need to plumb  the depths of a science fiction writer’s fears, their dystopian cinematic offshoot, and the  real people who consider it all to be prophecy. And yes, there are spoilers ahead. You probably  already know the line from Soylent Gr

een -- this guy got kicked out of an Arby’s for screaming  it -- and you’ll get it again. But in this film, every character and major plot point is  already shown in the trailer -- moviegoers in 1973 bought their tickets knowing 99% of  the story… because the intrigue doesn’t come from knowing what happens, or even who does  what. It comes from the why and the why not, and you’ll actually have a deeper perspective  on both if you know more going into it. Harry Harrison was an illustrator for Wei

rd  Science and Weird Fantasy -- he gained some notoriety for creating The Stainless Steel Rat.  But in the mid-1960s he had an idea to write a novel about the grim future consequences of  global overpopulation -- he called it “Make Room! Make Room!” and set it in the New  York City of 1999, population 35 million, on the cusp of a new millennium that he  wasn’t sure should be celebrated at all. In a 2006 interview, Harrison explained  that his idea came from a conversation with an Indian man 20

years before writing  his book. He said, “Make Room!” was: “... really the first book, fiction or  nonfiction, about overpopulation. The idea came from an Indian I met after the war,  in 1946. He told me, ‘Overpopulation is the big problem coming up in the world,’ (nobody had  ever heard of it in those days) and he said, ‘Want to make a lot of money, Harry? You  have to import rubber contraceptives to India.’ I didn’t mind making money, but I  didn’t want to be the rubber king of India! … But I

started reading a bit about  overpopulation, and got the idea for the book. It stayed in my head as I watched  the population trend going the wrong way.” To Harrison and the burgeoning doomsayer  elite of the 1960s, “the wrong way” was code for “up.” More people, more problems  -- to them, it was that simple. It was, and still is, the modern application of Thomas  Malthus’s theories about exponential population growth outstripping a food supply that  only grows linearly, or not at all. If you wa

nt the full background on the origins of  neo-Malthusian fervor, including Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” and his resulting bet with  Julian Simon about the fate of humanity, check out a video we co-produced with  Vsauce2 -- the link’s in the description. But a quick point about Ehrlich -- he,  too, decided the world was in trouble from an experience of India. He described a  "stinking hot night in Delhi," saying that: "The streets seemed alive with people. People  eating, people washing, peop

le sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People  thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… People, people, people, people. As  we moved slowly through the mob… the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires  gave the scene a hellish aspect." It seems like no one’s driven to think there’s  much of a population problem when they see 45,000 enrolled students strolling the UC Berkeley  campus, it’s more of a Third World thing. When he was outlining his ideas for Make Room!,  Har

rison fell victim to what 40 years later economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman  would call “the focusing illusion” -- that nothing is nearly as important as it seems while  you’re looking at it or thinking about it. It’s a very dangerous psychological force -- it’s what  drove Harrison, Ehrlich and others to think of a less-developed city and assume everyone there was  just as miserable as they themselves would be, that the regrettable outcome they witness must  be inevitable and that we’re

trending toward it rather than away from it. They think  -- ‘I’d hate this, so those people must be suffering.’ ‘I’d feel hopeless in those  circumstances, so they must feel hopeless.’ ‘I wouldn’t want to live like this, so it must  be a problem we should address at all costs.’ Both art and policy have  been built on this illusion. The funny thing about “Make Room! Make  Room!” is that there’s no mention of Soylent Green at all. In the 2nd chapter,  a character named Billy Chung finds a box of

“Soylent steaks… each flat and brown  and as big as his hand. He choked down the ‘crumbling’ pieces and “ate three  of the soybean and lentil steaks…” Soybean + Lentil = Soylent. The closest thing to the colored  Soylent foods in the film are the book’s “weedcrackers.” There’s a  market scene that describes them: “Around the entrance were the  weedcracker stalls with their hanging rows of multicolored crackers  reaching high overhead, brown, red, blue-green … The color came from the kind  of sea

weed the crackers were made from and the green always tasted better to her, less  of the iodiney flavor than the others had.” But one color of the perfectly-square  little crackers, the “Soylent Green” that’s only distributed to the masses  on Tuesdays, is the focus of the film. Chuck Braverman was specifically chosen to craft  the montage opening of Soylent Green -- he’d earned a strong reputation for kinestasis, or  fast-cut montages, that communicated a film’s entire ecosystem and ambiance in

a flash. It’s  an idyllic America of innovation, happiness, and growth. And then cities bustling with economic  activity and increasing satisfaction start to spin out of control -- not just more people and  more industry, but too many people and too much industry. By 2022 -- when Soylent Green is  set, not the 1999 of the book -- New York City is a hellscape, and its population of 40 million  lives in perpetual pollution, misery, and strife. And the first audio is an  Orwellian PA announcement:

“First Stage Removal. Streets  prohibited to non-permits in 1 hour.” We don’t even have to know what  that means to know that it’s bad. Charlton Heston wakes up as detective Andy Thorn  -- he’s Andy Rusch in the book. It’s a small, grim, shabby apartment -- but this is the  life of a public servant in Soylent Green’s New York. When he flips on the TV, he gets  a commercial from the Soylent Corporation: [Soylents Red and Yellow, new Soylent green, miracle food from the oceans of the world. In  s

hort supply, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day…] Edward G. Robinson is Sol Roth, Andy Thorn’s  “book” -- a sort of human library who’s a research assistant for a detective. Sol  and Andy share the apartment -- and their first interaction about food shows the pain of  knowing and the dangers of complacent ignorance. ANDY: “Why don’t you eat something?” SOL: “I’m not hungry enough yet.” ANDY: “It’s not bad.” SOL: “Tasteless, odorless crud…  you don’t know any better.” SOL (cont’d): “You know, when I wa

s a kid,  food was food! Now all scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil,  decimated plant and animal life. Well, in my day you could buy meat anywhere! Eggs, they  had, real butter! Fresh lettuce in the stores!” ANDY: “I know, Sol, you’ve told me before…” SOL: “How can anything survive  in a climate like this, a heat wave all year long… the greenhouse  effect, everything is burning up.” The lights flicker -- which means the elderly Sol  has to jump on a stationary bike to pum

p up the power again -- and Andy climbs over the suffering  masses in the to go into the disgusting city. There’s actually a cool bit of gaming  trivia in the apartment Andy’s sent to investigate -- you see the game before  anything even happens in the apartment. Shirl is playing “Computer Space,” the first  arcade cabinet and the first appearance of a video game in a movie -- it’s a “simulated  space battle that pits computer-guided saucers against a rocket ship that you  control.” And its cont

rols are awesome. Shirl goes out to buy fresh vegetables and meat  on the black market -- and while she’s gone, the apartment’s owner, William Simonson,  accepts his murder by a hired assassin: BILLY: “They told me to say that they  were sorry, but you had become unreliable” SIMONSON: “That’s true.” BILLY: “They can’t risk a catastrophe, they said.” SIMONSON: “They’re right.” BILLY: “Then this is right?” SIMONSON: “No, not right. Necessary.” And then it’s death by crowbar. Thorn shows up to inve

stigate. He interviews  Shirl, who isn’t really the victim’s girlfriend -- she’s considered “furniture,” and  she comes with the apartment. She’ll be part of the package for the next tenant. This was  actually a point of contention for Harrison, who was barred from being involved in the  film adaptation -- Soylent Green makes a lot more of futuristic female “furniture”  culture than Harrison does in Make Room. And Chuck Connors is Tab, Simonson’s  bodyguard -- veterans of television will recogni

ze him as The Rifleman, and  fans of Chuck Connors will remember that he played baseball in the Dodgers and Yankees  systems and in the NBA for the Boston Celtics before he was an actor -- and he was the  first professional basketball player to break a backboard, which is probably  a good resume booster for a bodyguard. But Detective Thorn doesn’t really seem to  be interested in the crime at all. He asks whether there’s a food inventory and if there’s  any booze -- he marvels at the running wat

er and soap, and he stuffs a silk pillowcase with  everything he can. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s corrupt, whether these are just the normal  perks, or whether he’s desperate -- or all 3. Part of his bounty is a set of books  he brings back to Sol -- Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015-2019,  Volumes 1 & 2, and Sol is thrilled: SOL: “Do you know how many books were published  before, when paper and presses worked? But he can’t get past the wilting, pitiful vegetables -- or the sli

ver  of beef, which moves him to tears: SOL: “How did it come to this?” ANDY: “We’re doing ok, we’re doing fine…” Andy tells police chief Hatcher that the  crime was an obvious assassination -- the alarm was off for the first time in 2  years, Shirl was out shopping with Tab, nothing was stolen at all. And while  the rest of the city is scrambling to get their Soylent Green ration on a  Tuesday, Andy and Sol have a feast. They’ve got silverware. They’ve got beef stew. They’ve got apples -- and A

ndy  doesn’t know not to eat the core. SOL: “I haven’t eaten like this in years.” ANDY: “I’ve never eaten like this.” SOL: “Now you know what you were  missing! There was a world once, you punk. I was there, I can prove it.” ANDY: “So you keep telling me…” ANDY (cont’d): “... when you were  young, people were better...” SOL: “Oh, nuts. People were always  rotten. But the world was beautiful.” It’s one of the most poignant moments in the  film -- because it’s true, Andy doesn’t know what he’s mis

sing. He’s always lived like this;  and to him, this struggle is just the way it is. If the masses scrambling for food and water  rations everyday knew what life used to be like, would they push back? That ignorance, probably  cultivated purposely, is part of control. There’s a scene in Make Room with a  similar theme -- Shirl is with Sol, an encounter that never happens in the film.  Shirl makes him coffee and says she’s been told it doesn’t taste like it used to, so she  asks Sol if he’d ever

tasted real coffee. “Taste it? Honeybunch, I used to live on it.  You’re a kid, you’ve got no idea how things used to be in the old days. You drank three, four  cups, maybe even a whole pot of coffee and never even thought about it. I was even coffee poisoned  once, my skin turned brown and everything, because I used to drink up to twenty cartons a day. A  champion coffee drinker, I could’ve won medals.” Andy’s totally ignorant about past standards  of living -- but he’s serious about his job, a

nd he’s serious about investigating the  murder. As his Book, Sol does his job, too: he finds out that Simonson’s background  was in freeze drying and food processing, and that’s how he rose up to  a Board position with Soylent. Andy steals a jam-covered spoon from Tab the  bodyguard’s apartment, and Sol knows what’s on it: SOL: “Strawberries! $150 a jar strawberries!” Something’s up here -- and the man who hired the thug to kill Simonson encourages the  Chief to shut down the investigation: MAN

: “The department wants to cooperate  with the governor’s office, right?” CHIEF: “Whatever you say, sir.” Andy and Shirl develop a relationship  -- it’s a major part of Make Room, which focuses on life in the city from  several different perspectives -- and their love progresses quickly because…  Andy is Charlton Heston in 1973. Andy goes to a church to interview a priest who heard Simonson’s last confession,  and the man is clearly traumatized ANDY: “THis is very important.” PRIEST: “I can’t he

lp you,  forgive me, it’s destroying me… ANDY: “What is?” PRIEST: “The truth.” ANDY: “The truth SImonson told you?” PRIEST: “All truth.” ANDY: ““What did he confess?” PRIEST: “Sweet Jesus…” And when Andy’s told by his chief  to close the case, he refuses. It turns out the government is engineering  a coverup, and while the Governor is in a “tree sanctuary” he gives an order for  a hit on Thorn, who now knows too much: GOVERNOR: “Just do what you have to do.” Well, there’s a Soylent Green problem

,  and the city is about to blow: COP: “I am asking you to disperse.  The supply of Soylent Green has been exhausted. You must evacuate the area.  The scoops are on their way. The scoops are on their way. I repeat,  the scoops are on their way.” Man: “TODAY IS TUESDAY!” The scoops are literally scooping people up and  throwing them into the garbage trucks -- and after Sol reads the Oceanographic report, he knows  why -- and he knows why Simonson was killed: WOMAN: “The corporation knew he  was n

ot reliable anymore. They feared he might talk, and so he was eliminated.” SOL: “Why are they doing this?” WOMAN:: “Because it’s easier. I think  expedient is the word. What we need is the proof of what they are doing before  we bring it to the council of nations.” SOL: “Good God.” WOMAN: “What god, Mr. Roth.  Where will we find him?” The truth of Soylent Green -- and the  state of humanity -- is too much for Sol, who walks straight to a euthanasia facility,  where he chooses a combination of hi

s favorite color orange and light classical music to  die to. On his way out of his earthly body, Sol is shown a giant imax style  montage of the world’s beauty. Thorn gets there in time to see the beauty  of the world that was -- wildlife, plants, nothing he could’ve ever imagined. Now  it could only be witnessed in death. Sol is finally ‘going home’ -- and Gerald Fried’s  “Going Home” score blends Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, Beethoven’s No. 6, and Grieg’s Peer  Gynt. It’s not that “home” is

the past -- it’s that home is the beauty of the world, its  culture, and its people. And throughout a film that shows multitudes who are in a literal  sense homeless, Sol is the most homeless of them all. He’s the embodiment of Durkheim’s anomie  -- the world he used to fit into is gone. Sol’s final request is that Andy proves to the  world that the megacorporation Soylent, and the government -- because it’s hard to tell where one  stops and the other begins -- both know that the plankton source

d for Soylent Green has run out.  Rather than admit to that to the population and face a revolt, it’s easier to maintain power  and control by substituting another ingredient. The fates of the priest, Tab, and Shirl --  you have to watch the movie for all that. And the same with Thorn’s epic infiltration of  Waste Disposal Plant No. 4 -- it’s an element of the film that Harrison hated, saying  it wasn’t “what the film is about,” and that it’s “completely irrelevant” -- but  it gets Thorn all the

proof Sol asked for. ANDY: “I’ve got proof, they need proof, I’ve  seen it, I’ve seen it happening. They’ve got to tell people, the ocean’s dying, plankton is dying,  it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people.” ANDY (cont’d): “They’re making our food out  of people, next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle, for food. You gotta tell’em,  you gotta tell’em! You tell everybody, listen to me Hatcher, you gotta tell’em!  Soylent Green is people! We gotta stop’em!” Well, ladies and Wojaks

, you got your line --  but Andy Thorn’s bloody fist is the last in a film of beautifully unanswered questions.  Does Thorn live or die? Does Hatcher, who is compromised by government pressure, fulfill  his promise to Thorn that he’ll tell the Exchange about Soylent Green? Or… does he maintain the  coverup? The masses sleeping in the church wake up during Thorn’s final fight scene, and  there’s a bit of symbolism in that -- but do they ever wake up to the truth about what the Soylent  Corporatio

n and the government are doing to them? And if they do… does it even matter? Both Harrison’s book and director Richard  Fleischer’s Soylent Green accomplish the highest goal of science fiction: to make you love  a story and think deeply about your own reality. For humanity’s doomsayers,  it was perfect propaganda. In some of the earlier editions of  “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich included a bit about Harrison’s  book right in the introduction: “Make Room! Make Room! presents a gripping  sce

nario of where current trends may be leading. Such scenarios are important tools in helping us  to think about the future, and in bringing home to people the possible consequences of our collective  behaviour. When such a serious goal can be achieved through an engrossing work of fiction we  are doubly rewarded. Thank you, Harry Harrison.” And we need to be fair about what  Harrison and Soylent Green got right. We actually have a food source with  the tongue-in-cheek name of Soylent that initial

ly used flour that came  from algae -- it was discontinued in 2016 because of the gastrointestinal  effects, and was replaced with algal oil. We do have significant environmental  challenges, and both political instability and restricted markets affect our  ability to feed too many parts of the world. The relationship between governments  and corporations? It’s now almost too incestuous to understand, let alone untangle. And we have a growing rift between  the people who understand the human cap

acity for beauty and flourishing and  those who think the opposite -- and who often simply don’t know that an  alternative to doom even exists. The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt disagreed, writing that, "This pompously prophetic thing  of a film hasn't a brain in its beanbag. Where is democracy? Where is the popular vote? Where  is women's lib? Where are the uprising poor, who would have suspected what  was happening in a moment?" We’d like to think all those forces would  keep something like t

he Soylent Corporation or the government in check -- but for the  doomers, the Harrisons, and the Ehrlichs, none of those solutions are possible. To  them, the story has nothing to do with restricting markets or forcing regulations  that nationalize farms and food production. They don’t see those initiatives as government  being oppressive or corrupt -- just that those elements were regrettably inevitable. And  they don’t even want to think that the 35 million New Yorkers in Harrison’s book or 

the 40 million in Soylent Green have the potential to be anything other than victims  of their own relationship with the planet. It’s been 50 years since the film and that  attitude is still the same -- but it was percolating in public a year before  Harrison even published Make Room! This video opened with a clip of Dennis Meadows  saying that the world would be better off if about 90% of existing people weren’t in it --  the group that made him famous was an extension of a 1965 meeting between

Aurelio Peccei, who was  then-president of Italian tech company Olivetti, and Alexander King, who was the Director-General  for Scientific Affairs for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the  OECD. One of Peccei’s speeches about the grim future of the world -- and the urgency of  intervening to stop it -- was making such an impact that US Secretary of State Dean Rusk  printed copies to distribute in Washington. Peccei’s sort of activism was actually his version of repayi

ng a society who  had been very good to him: “I feel… that I am very much in debt to society, and that my debt is long for being paid  back. I have to do very many more things to be square with what I have received from my  fellow countrymen, my fellow contemporaries.” Peccei and King both thought  that science, technology, and human innovation wouldn’t just not  improve the world -- they were convinced those forces would doom it. By 1968 they  had formed the “Club of Rome,” which was an interna

tional non-profit that brought  together members of the intelligentsia, businessmen, and political leaders with a mission  to address the impending global population crisis. Peccei said the Club of Rome was the  embodiment of "the adventure of the spirit" -- and he said "If the Club of Rome  has any merit, it is that of having been the first to rebel against the suicidal ignorance  of the human condition,” and that, "It is not impossible to foster a human revolution  capable of changing our pres

ent course." The implication is that you’re so stupidly  and hopelessly destructive to the human race and to the planet that you need to be  saved from yourself -- but thankfully, there’s a group of elite  minds to step in and help you. Peccei built the Club of Rome around the  concept of the ‘problematic,’ which posits that all the very real problems in the world --  healthcare, hunger, homelessness, criminality, poverty, education, everything -- were so deeply  interrelated that it was impossi

ble to solve any one of them. He said, "It is this generalized  meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the  'problematic' that inheres in our situation.” So, if you believe that you can’t make  a meaningful dent on any one of them, the question becomes how to  eliminate them all at the same time. The Club expressed its solution in the  1972 report “Limits To Growth” -- a 205 page treatment of the global condition and  the execution of World3 com

puter models that concluded humanity couldn’t continue on  its current path without ruining itself or the environment. Dennis Meadows headed  up the modeling researchers to combine the variables of population, food  supply, pollution, industrialization, and consumption of non-renewable resources  under the neo-Malthusian assumption that those problems would all escalate exponentially  while any improvements would come linearly. And the conclusion was that we  need far fewer people -- and that we

need to start on that project now. They describe the situation as Overshoot -- it’s  part of a Club of Rome YouTube video explainer: Overshoot. To overshoot means going  too far. To go beyond the limits… ”Limits to Growth provided an optimistic  answer. It said that forward-looking political action can prevent humanity from overshooting  planetary limits. The 12th and final scenario, the sustainable world scenario, showed how  it could be done, at pleast in principal, by stabilizing the world’s

population and the  industrial output per person, and the use of technology to preserve resources. In essence,  Limits to Growth said that if society succeeds in avoiding overshoot, there will be no need  for managed decline, or any threat of collapse.“ Without these immediate interventions -- really,  a brutal-but-necessary amputation of sorts meant to save the body -- humanity will be forced into  a catastrophic decline it can’t possibly manage. And yes, to the Club of Rome, that is optimism.

The counterargument is the one made by  Julian Simon and his book “The Ultimate Resource” -- he argued that the human population  is actually the driver of the solutions we need, and that the ultimate resource is human ingenuity  itself. Simon didn’t suggest that we’d be so certain to magically solve every problem that  we shouldn’t worry or change course -- just that humans have an incredible track record of  figuring things out: better food production, better markets, better political  system

s, better use of limited resources. One might suggest that’s optimism. But the doomsayer mentality hasn't just been  a theoretical worry. China’s 36-year long one child policy started in 1979; that was a direct  application of dealing with the problematic in one fell swoop. But the most sinister initiative  was a 1975 program funded by the World Bank, the UN Population Fund, and the Swedish  International Development Agency that carried out the forced sterilization of 6.2  million Indian men --

FEE’s own Jon Miltimore recommends Salman Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s  Children” as a glimpse into that horror. The Club of Rome hasn’t given up -- several  years ago their “Reinventing Prosperity” report suggested that you not just ditch your  car, but that industrialized nations have a responsibility to implement a one-child  policy to reduce environmental impact. And Dennis Meadows has actually suggested that  the appropriate solution is to embrace exactly the problem of intertwining corporat

e and government  interests that drove the plot of Soylent Green: It would be a big revolution to  bring companies and governments to give importance to the long  term. That would be a revolution… And occasionally they say the  really quiet parts out loud: “Well, since you are able to edit  out all of the stuff you don’t like, I can speak honestly… I don’t expect  that we’re going to avoid collapse. I’m not sure what it would look like. I  simply don’t know… it’s not knowable.” Remember that Mea

dows thinks we need about 7 billion of you gone -- or we  need a really smart dictator. The solutions that Meadows describes are somehow actually worse than the prophecies  of Make Room! or Soylent Green. Are freedom and liberty really part of a big,  fixed-size pie we’re all competing for bites of? Is an American citizen now, who’s one of  340 million people, only 10% as free as an American in 1860 -- who might well be an actual  slave -- because the population then was only 31 million? The pop

ulation of China in 1965  was half the 1.4 billion it is today. Is the average citizen in Beijing half as free  in 2023 as they would’ve been under Mao? Those of us who understand different types  of human organization and their consequences, positive and negative, know that it doesn’t  work that way. But it might not matter what you believe. It’s easy to criticize out of touch  elites for ‘let them eat cake’ style politics, especially when that cake is  frosted with pseudo-benevolence, but the

truth is that those elites matter. In a 2014 study called “Testing Theories of  American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” researchers showed  that support among the American middle class had absolutely no meaningful bearing  on whether a policy would be adopted. Support among the top 10% of income earners  doubled a policy’s chances of being adopted. Rob Henderson has a theory about “luxury  beliefs” -- positions that the wealthy and the elite can afford to hold because 

they’re entirely insulated from its moral or material consequences. When you live  at the level of Soylent Green’s Simonson, or the Governor -- fresh vegetables, meat,  drinks, a beautiful apartment, even more beautiful furniture -- you can afford to advocate  for policies that Andy and Sol pay the price for. And the people at the top are  actually less likely to get it right, for a few reasons -- and the first is the  increasing censorship of critical information. The studies that inform polit

ical opinion have  a rapidly-growing censorship problem -- it’s part cultural and part moral. Musa  al-Gharbi and Cory Clark write that: “Many academics self-censor to protect themselves  — not just because they’re concerned about preserving their jobs, but also out of a desire  to be liked, accepted, and included within their disciplines and institutions, or because they  don’t wish to create problems for their advisees. Other times, scholars attempt to suppress  findings because they view them

as incorrect, misleading, or potentially dangerous.  Sometimes scientists try to quash public dissent of contentious issues for fear that it  undermines public trust or scientific authority…” “Moral motives have long influenced scientific  decision-making. What’s new is that journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns  as legitimate reasons to suppress science.” And a study last month in the International  Journal of Public Opinion Research shows that the more politically sophisticated

one is, the  more biased one’s interpretation of evidence -- in part because they’re simply better at  manipulating and justifying its counterarguments. According to Robin Hanson, that same study  breaking down policy support by income also noted that “when there are groups that  elites see as more outside of themselves, as rivals competing with them for power, then  elites may push for policies that control, suppress, and disrespect such rivals.” And a study in Personality and Individual  Diff

erences shows that a worldview based on helplessness and victimization --  which presumably can include thinking one is perpetually on the receiving  end of everyone else’s genocidally calamitous behavior -- seems to “suggest  that such individuals are more likely to construct a vigilante identity organized around  monitoring their environment looking for signs of wrongdoing and delivering punishment.”  The study calls them “suffering saviors.” It also seems like people with high levels  of ‘dar

k triad’ personality traits are particularly active in environmental causes,  which seem to satisfy the needs of their ego. So we’ve got a class of people whose attitudes  carry outsized weight, who are misinformed, who then adeptly manipulate the evidence in  their minds so they can craft policy from which they are entirely protected  as they execute a psychological responsibility to take out their rivals  and punish dissenters through a cyclical mechanism that continually feeds their most  mal

evolent, destructive personality traits. If there is a “problematic” like  Peccei theorized, it’s probably that. But it doesn’t take intrusive,  life-threatening government policy to take us down this path -- not when so many  of us legitimately believe it’s inevitable. In a 2022 Pew Research Survey, nearly  4 in 10 Americans expressed belief that we’re living in the ‘end times’ --  so there’s a bit of work to do there. Reddit’s Antinatalism forum is 200,000 strong,  and it’s teeming with posts

confused about why anyone would introduce a child into a world  so full of suffering -- and expressing a bit of hope that more people seem to be “catching  on.” This reply to a Washington Post article about why Millennials aren’t having  kids is fairly common: “Why would you bring children into a world where humans may  realistically go extinct in their lifetime?” And this is all in stark contrast to the  evidence that’s all around us. Since Harry Harrison started thinking about whether he  shou

ld be the contraceptive king of Calcutta, the child mortality rate in countries like Uganda  and Kenya have gone from 30% down to about 5%. The Great Barrier Reef, which has been a  concern among environmentalists for decades, has the highest coral cover  that’s ever been measured. The Simon Abundance Index -- named  after Julian Simon -- shows that the availability of natural resources the  doomsayers say are desperately threatened by population growth has grown 420%  in the same era that popul

ation has grown by just 80%. More people has  actually meant many more resources. There is a tremendous amount of human suffering,  and there’s no shortage of work we need to do. But this is the essence of the battle that’s been  raging since Make Room!, The Population Bomb, Limits to Growth and Soylent Green -- and who’s  right? Well, Ehrlich and Meadows and the Club of Rome say their solution is the safe one, the  one that’ll keep future generations from being green crackers, because the Julia

n Simons of the  world only need to be wrong once for the world to implode -- and even the most severe restrictions  would surely be better than that. The opposition thinks that restricting liberty not only makes  our historically positive progress impossible, but that it guarantees exactly  the outcome we’re trying to avoid. And to navigate the world now, you do need to pick a side -- and most  importantly, you need to decide who to be. The best example is actually buried deep within  the world

of Soylent Green -- not in the film or the book it was based on, but in the life of the  actor who played Sol Roth, Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was a mainstay during Hollywood’s  Golden Age, and he’s popularly remembered as having that prototypical threatening  gangster voice we still use: “If you ain’t outta town by tomorrow morning,  you won’t ever leave it except in a pine box.” Soylent Green was Robinson’s 101st  film. In his book “The Actor’s Life,” Charlton Heston wrote that Robinson: “.

.. knew while we were  shooting, though we did not, that he was terminally ill. He  never missed an hour of work, nor was late to a call. He never was less than the  consummate professional he had been all his life.” Edward G. Robinson died of bladder cancer just  weeks after shooting wrapped on Soylent Green. It was his final role -- and his final  scene was a blend of unsettling and calm, hopelessness and hope. Heston delivered  his eulogy at the funeral, and wrote that: “I'm still haunted… by

the knowledge that  the very last scene he played in the picture, which he knew was the last  day's acting he would ever do, was his death scene. I know why I was so  overwhelmingly moved playing it with him". But after shooting there was a  small party for Eddie, a tribute to celebrate his 101st film -- Charlton  Heston was still dressed as Andy Thorn: “I want to thank you for coming tonight for this rather disorganized but deeply felt tribute  to a remarkable member of my profession.” Robinso

n was so small of stature  that the microphones obscure most of his face -- but he spoke the words of a giant: “To work, to create, to grow  and to give of yourself, that is one of the chief aims in  life. To have experienced it once, that’s a great experience. To do it 101  times, well, that’s really a small miracle.” By his final days, he’d figured it out.  Eddie had every reason not to bother -- and he understood that the world he was leaving  was problematic. But he also understood that he c

ould improve his little corner of the  world, that he could make the most of his talents in the rapidly-waning days he had  left, in such a way that he made the world a tiny bit better -- and he understood that  was enough, because he wasn’t doing it alone. Because even when everything  feels hopeless -- even when a man, or mankind, is given an expiration  date -- he still has a choice: he can surrender to his problems and the  world’s problems, he can be dehumanized into some processed and recy

cled version of  Soylent Green… or he can be the solution.