by From Ikonoclast (originally a comment) It’s strange in a time of gross over-population that dystopian fiction so often focuses on hypothesized fertility crises. We see this in The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men, for example. This is when the real problem is of course the diametric opposite. The earth has a vast over-population crisis of humans and an accelerating decline of all other forms of life (the sixth mass extinction). It leads me to wonder if genuine fears are deflected by an invocation of the opposite in story-telling. Dystopian and horror fiction give us a delicious thrill of vicarious fear when we actually feel fully secure that “that could never happen”. What people enjoy about disaster storytelling is feeling proof against the specific disaster depicted. It could only
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from Ikonoclast (originally a comment)
It’s strange in a time of gross over-population that dystopian fiction so often focuses on hypothesized fertility crises. We see this in The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men, for example. This is when the real problem is of course the diametric opposite. The earth has a vast over-population crisis of humans and an accelerating decline of all other forms of life (the sixth mass extinction).
It leads me to wonder if genuine fears are deflected by an invocation of the opposite in story-telling. Dystopian and horror fiction give us a delicious thrill of vicarious fear when we actually feel fully secure that “that could never happen”. What people enjoy about disaster storytelling is feeling proof against the specific disaster depicted. It could only happen to others or so we think. We are not so foolish and purblind as the people in the story so that could never happen to us. Actually, we are as foolish and purblind but in a afferent way. The laws of nature would never recoil against us and seriously threaten us with zombies. Actually the laws of nature do recoil against us and are about to do so in a catastrophic manner, though probably not by generating zombies. Although, it must be said that humans infected by capitalist ideology are pretty much like mindless zombies in the way they consume today without thought for a sustainable tomorrow. Are mindless zombies a projection of what we fear we have really become? Are we truly afraid of ourselves, of our inner mindlessness, as we indeed should be?
Political messaging is story-telling. The true fear must be deflected by a false fear and indeed the best false fear for this purpose is the diametric opposite of the truth. The false fear of China (or the CCP) about its demographic crisis is of a piece with this. Its ageing demographic is not a problem while technological production increases in efficiency. True, it could be a problem when the global catastrophe hits. But that crisis will be made even worse by having an overall larger population. If or rather when the real crisis hits, the demographic old age bulge will solve itself. Sad to say, old people die rapidly under challenge. We see this with the COVID-19 pandemic, the first of the great natural challenges of this century to be generated by our insane levels of global over-population, over-production and over-connection.