When
overpopulation is brought up as a negative, we typically tend to think of the
Malthusian characterization of
population as a drain on
resources -- the sort that, absent
preventative intervention, ends in
famine or
war. And yet, we never think of the inherent breakdown in societal
cohesion and
traditional social structures necessarily occasioned by a sufficiently massive and booming population.
Modernly, we see some obliviously seeking to return to a world with
values which were held "in simpler times" -- when the global population was 1/3 (or less) of what it is today -- without realizing that population increase itself is what has gutted cultural cohesion and destroyed
traditionalism. It boggles the mind how we can literally observe
population growth breaking down cohesion because groups of people who actually know each other become desperately disparate, and yet people will not recognize this as it is happening before their very eyes.
Let me break this down: Any growing population will have increasing diversity of views, which will lead to growth along all opposing fringes, which will allow sufficient growth of
fringe views to consolidate and metastasize into
politics and
policy. This is a mathematical truth. If 1 out of every 100 people in a society is some sort of an outlier to the norm of rest, then a population of 1000 means there's but ten of them, and a population of a billion means there's ten-million of them, able to assert the strength of a ten-million-strong movement against all the fractured countermovements.
Pineapple on Pizza:
Consider a concrete example:
pineapple on
pizza. Consider a town of 100 people, where there is one natural
occurrence through chance of
birth of a guy who
loves pineapple on pizza, and a girl who kinda
likes it, and another guy who doesn't care for it at all, but is tolerant of the other two, and 97 who think it is blasphemous and reprehensible and must be banned (or worse, probably worse). Well, in that town, the only way pineapple gets on pizza is if the one person who
loves it gets such a pizza, and in the
privacy of his own home, secretly adds pineapple to it. Naturally, that town will have no place to actually purchase pineapple on pizza, and the one person who loves it will never dare confess as much aloud. Indeed, they may well be ashamed of their socially unacceptable yearning.
But if we multiply the population tenfold, now there are
ten people who love pineapple on pizza, and another ten who like it, and another ten who don't but think those who do ought to be allowed to have it. It is possible that despite the 970 condemning denizens, those twenty who like or love it may well find each other, and try to carve out a secret place for themselves to enjoy the dish. And, beyond that, knowing that they are not
alone in this desire, they may well feel validated in it, and their resolve to enjoy this dish may be strengthened. Multiply the population by ten again, and now we have a small city of 10,000 people -- much harder for the city authorities to keep tabs on everybody -- with a hundred people (as many as the entire original village) who love pineapple on pizza, and many more who like it or morally support allowing it. Three-hundred people within a city of 10,000 is enough to support a subculture, one wherein those who live in it, raise children in it, have neighbors it in, will come to see pineapple on pizza as an acceptable norm, and the prohibition against it as backwards.
Multiply by ten twice more and we have a large city of a million people, where a strong population of
10,000, a city-within-the-city, are absolute pineapple-on-pizza lovers. Maybe more, maybe some of the next 10,000 who simple
like pineapple on pizza will, amidst so many who love it, decide that really they love it too. Maybe some of the 10,000 who are tolerant of it will be more willing to try it and a handful of those will decide that they like it alright. And of the 10,000 who
love pineapple on pizza, there will be a range, where perhaps the most passionate 100 will be positively militant in favor of pineapple on pizza, willing to declare their love for it in the face of even the greatest hostility.
And multiply the population a few more times and we have a billion people -- with a sovereign nation's worth of
ten-million who absolutely
love pineapple on pizza, and perhaps tens of thousands of those willing to declare that it is those who
oppose pineapple on pizza who are the blasphemers, who
must be destroyed!! If just one in a million of them are willing to carry out
terrorism for the cause of pineapple on pizza, well, that's ten terrorist attacks that can happen for the cause.
And pineapple on pizza is not representative of a purely
binary division. As the population multiplies, not only do known divisions grow, but the number of possible additional divisions multiplies exponentially as well.
Where We Stand:
The world's population now stands at eight billion. Stop to consider that the rate of population growth in the last
century, and much more so the last half century, is itself a
violation of every tradition known to man.
In living memory, the population of the planet has quadrupled, an experiment in radical expansion far beyond anything seen before. And it isn’t just expansion from two million to eight million, but to eight billion. Compare a classroom with one teacher teaching three dozen students — already spread thin in this effort — and suddenly this is multiplied to four times as many, with a disproportionate number of the new ones being unruly and self-obsessed, addicted to kinds of drugs not known before, using technology to cheat, egged on by like-minded peers.
If you are forty years old today, the proportion of newly-minted adolescents and teenagers in this world alone is probably far more than you would guess it is, and probably a far more burgeoning and unmanageable population than you can imagine.
Stabilization or even the slow
reduction of the population now doesn't undo the grossly destabilizing half-century of chaotic expansion. We are in uncharted, indeed unimaginable
territory, and it is as fascinating to watch this unfold as to watch in horror as a dam bursts over a village trapped in the valley below.