A deception is going around in regard to what will happen to the world's inhabitants in the coming years. Specifically, some people are saying that the global population will rise to some figure and remain there indefinitely. They pretend to have accounted already for the diminution of energy resources, but they are lying.

If all the energy available to humans came at a rate that would neither increase nor decrease with time, on the principle of "use it or lose it," the world's population would rise, and level off, according to a logistic curve.

Suppose we were to put a tribe of people into a prison, with men and women together. Every day they would be given the same amount of food. If any were left over, as too much for them to eat, it would spoil within a few hours and become inedible. They would not be able to save food from one day to the next, but would be entirely dependent on the next day's ration. In such a case, their population would grow logistically. At the point where there were too many people to feed, the weakest members of the tribe would starve: babies; old people; sick, injured or handicapped people; and people who became unpopular, for whatever reason. Continued births would require continued deaths...somewhere, but the population would remain at the "levelled off" size.

The United Nations and most economists would have you believe that this is the sort of thing that will happen to the world's population, except that they don't want you thinking about some people being sacrificed to make room for others. But they are wrong.

The population curve will look more like this.

Logistic growth changes to a rapid decline.

Why? As fossil fuels deplete, all other uses of energy will be sacrificed to two things: agriculture and military power. The rate of production will be kept as high as possible for as long as possible, which means that for a while the global population will track the logistic curve. But sooner or later, perhaps about 2040, there won't be enough oil left for both food and guns. At that point, the powers that be will choose to keep themselves armed and turn famine loose upon the world.

When agriculture no longer has government subsidized supplies of fertilizer and fuels, the world's food production will drop to 10% of what it had been earlier. Breakdowns in transportation will make the food shortage even worse, and probably about 95% of the world's population will die off in perhaps ten or twenty years.

Go back to the comparison we were using with the imprisoned tribe. When their numbers grew to match the daily ration of food, they could increase no more. Every birth required a death. The population held steady in size, but there would undoubtedly be ruthless competition in regard to who lived and who died. You would not want to be politically marginalized in such a situation, lest the tribal warlord decide that you should starve so that someone else could have food.

Are you beginning to see why it is important for ruling elites to define what is politically acceptable thinking, and what is not? The only mistake the real-world elites have made in this respect is in their timing. It was too early for them to try to deceive the world about the supposed evils of racism and antisemitism. By jumping the gun, they gave us the time we needed to figure out the truth of these things, and thus to catch them at their game, far ahead of the moment the struggle for survival would get deadly serious.

Now imagine that the food supply for our imaginary tribe is suddenly cut by 90%. The warlord must decide quickly who lives and who dies, but he dare not identify the losers all at once. If he does, they will instantly become a self-conscious class and will join forces against him. The warlord's coterie of personal bodyguards might be overwhelmed by the vengeful mob. But when all was said and done, the population a month after the ration reduction would be no more than 10% of what it was earlier. Fighting over the food might make it much less.

What the warlord can do is engage in a series of deceptive games, in each of which a few must be sacrificed to the welfare of the many. Of course, that's what the warlord had already been doing occasionally: when a baby was born, he had to choose whether the baby would live or die, and, if the baby should live, who else must die to make room at the table. Now, though, the warlord must sharply accelerate the deaths, so that the tribal population again comes into balance with the food supply, and he must do it quickly, or he'll lose his leadership role to chaotic violence.

However, the warlord can't kill off 90% of the tribe so quickly that people catch on to his actual plans. He has to have pretexts. Those fellows over there were conspirators in a plot to hog all the food! They must die. After that cabal is dead, the warlord will "discover" another cabal with the same ambitions, and they must also die for treason. Of course, the actual conspirator here is the warlord himself. He's the one who plans to hog the food for himself and his chosen ones. But the warlord must play a dicey political dance to keep his authority while killing off the major part of his own tribe.

But that's not the worst thing that could happen to the tribe. No, indeed: there is something much worse than food-wars that could happen. If the tribal warlord tries to impose a policy of fairness in food sharing, he will guarantee that everybody starves, fairly, together. The entire tribe would die, not just some of it.

However, this suggests a way for the warlord to accomplish his purpose while preserving the illusion of fairplay. If the warlord and, say, his favorite 5% take half of the food "for the public good" (they eat it themselves), while distributing the other half of the reduced food allowance to 95% of the population and decreeing that this latter portion of the food must be shared "fairly," then he might keep himself and his chosen ones fed while watching (and laughing at) the struggles of the majority of the tribe. For this plan to work, the warlord must have a way of preventing the majority from finding out that the warlord's chosen ones are not sharing the burden of the reduced food allowance.

The two strategies - (1) using accusations of treason to divide the tribe against itself and (2) using a secret double standard with regard to food distribution - are not mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, complementary. If anybody is counting the food, the warlord can say that the counters are stealing and lying about what they counted. They must die! The tribal majority has (before the dying begins) only 5% of the subsistence level of food. The warlord and his chosen five percent of the tribe presents to the majority an appearance of confidence, strength and fairness. Individuals within the majority, trying to satisfy their hunger, will decide that it is better to confine their robberies and murders to the majority, rather than challenge the warlord's guards.

I expect that this is how it will work in the real world, too, during the die-off period. The government will pretend to be our friend and protector, when, in fact, it will be our enemy and exploiter. The people best able to seize and hold political power are usually not the same as the people who are most adept at living the pioneer life. The skills needed for war are not the skills of the craftsman or farmer. Creating and killing are different areas of competence. So how do the skills needed to survive after the die-off survive the violence of the die-off?

Points of further discussion.

1. Birth control defeats itself in the long run because it culls social responsibility out of the population of human breeders. The best way to control population is to control who dies; getting rid of the defectives just as nature would do, except that doing it faster would reduce the resource cost. Since political considerations can corrupt a program of eugenics/euthanasia, an objective measure of human fitness (e.g., Olympic style games and culture-free IQ tests) should form the basis of selection.

2. It is too late for drastic eugenic sterilization measures to spare humanity a severe population collapse.