The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.
Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don't believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.
The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.
And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?
(Welcome back, everybody!)
People really believe this thinly veiled eugenics argument?
There is plenty of resources to support humanity. The issue is solely in our societal structures and our distribution of those resources causing almost half of everything we produce to become waste because it profit couldn't be extracted from it.
We could cut most of our production, reducing our environmental harm, redesign our cities so they are not sprawling wastelands of parking lots and empty lawns, and there would be plenty enough to go around. That's real long term planning we need to have.
The problem is not that we do not have the resources, but rather the way humans chose to use them. Multiply that by 8 billion and we get a problem, although realistically the bigger problem are the top 2-3 billion or so that control so many resources.
In a world with a significantly lower population, the planet could absorb the issues we cause much better.
I don't see how this fact has anything to do with eugenics 🤷
The argument that "there are too many people and we need to reduce the population" has been for decades a thinly veiled excuse to justify eugenics. Which ethnicity's population are we going to reduce? How will the social mechanisms work to reduce population? Who will hold that authority to dictate things and how will it be enforced? Historically, very violently and strictly enforced against marginalized communities. That's how.
I literally said the problem is how we use them.
So the answer is we need to work towards societal change and structure ourselves to incentivize sustainability, not overly simplistic and unethical arguments such as "reduce the population" so we can maintain our shitty practices and kick the can down the road.
It also isn't "top 2-3 billion", it's more like "top 2-3 thousand".
I honestly believe that "we" aren't going to do jack s**t. It's a process which is nearly unsteerable. People are going to live longer and longer, and use resources that would otherwise be used by children they might have had. Society is going to be burdened by caring for the old, and this is going to reduce chances of caring for the young.
In nearly every developed country, population growth is slowing or population has already started decreasing. Only in the least developed regions (some areas of Africa) does the opposite still apply, but UN predictions (made by competent people) suggest the process just reaches there later.
So, every ethnicity's population is going to be reduced. Every ethnicity can also consider if their numbers are adequate, too high or too low. If a nation feels threatened by disappearing from the maps, they can try to reorganize their society. Random ideas: a few laws that give parents various health and social security guarantees regardless of their employment status, especially in case they're single parents, then maybe create a few dating sites that actually try to help their users find people they like, etc...
Yes, everything you said is good, and we should be attempting to restructure our society to be more sustainable and ethical in our use of resources but that is a much larger political discussion about economics. I know there are currently natural and sociopolitical phenomena that are slowing down the growth of certain regions but the reasons why is a much larger, multifaceted discussion. Populations will fluctuate naturally and that's all fine and dandy.
but my point was specifically against those who call for attempting to steer the process in an effort to deliberately reduce the population through planned means which is intrinsically linked to eugenics arguments when you get down to the sociopolitical mechanisms of how that will be accomplished.