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The Big Lie About Too Many People
An Essay - How Malthus and the East India Company invented overpopulation to justify empire
August 31, 2025 | By Lies Are Unbekoming
How a plagiarized equation became the perfect crime: making the victims blame themselves for their poverty. From the Irish Famine's million dead to today's climate colonialism, Malthusian thinking has justified every modern genocide by converting political choices into natural law. The British needed to explain why their industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery—so they invented overpopulation. The theory persists because it still serves the same masters: turning artificial scarcity into cosmic inevitability, transforming solidarity into foolishness, and convincing good people that letting others suffer serves some higher purpose. This is the story of how empire learned to call murder mathematics.
Preface
I've been working on this essay on and off for a couple of years, but it was a recent exchange about the planet's "carrying capacity" and "limited resources" that got me to finish it off.
I don't believe in the idea of a “carrying capacity” the same way that I don't believe in “safe and effective,” the greater good or in Climate Change™. These aren't contrarian positions for their own sake. They're recognitions that certain "scientific facts" function as empire-grade "fast thoughts"—ideas that seem so obviously true they stop further thinking, trapping minds into predetermined conclusions about scarcity, fear, and the necessity of “elite” centralised control.
The concept of carrying capacity, when applied to humans, assumes we're like bacteria in a petri dish—consuming resources until we hit a wall and collapse. But humans create resources through technology and social organization. We turned sand into silicon chips, air into fertilizer, sunlight into electricity. The "limits" keep receding because the model is wrong. We're not consumers but creators, not mouths but minds.
Yet this Malthusian logic persists with remarkable tenacity. Educated and compassionate people genuinely believe that helping the global poor have children threatens the planet. That fertility in Africa endangers civilization. That there are simply too many people. These beliefs feel scientific, natural, inevitable.
But here's what should be a simple truth: the only people who should determine family size are husband and wife. That's it. Full stop. No government planners, no UN agencies, no billionaire philanthropists, no climate activists, no economics professors—just the two people creating and raising the life. When couples are genuinely free to choose, with accurate information and without coercion or manipulation, everything else takes care of itself. Prosperity naturally moderates fertility. Education expands options. Security reduces the need for children as insurance. The demographic transitions that took centuries in Europe happen in decades elsewhere when people have real freedom and opportunity. But that's precisely what Malthusians cannot allow, because free people making free choices don't produce the crises that justify intervention. So instead we get synthetic hormones pushed on teenagers, financial pressures that make children unaffordable, propaganda that makes fertility shameful, and a culture that treats the creation of life as an environmental crime. The very people who should have no say in reproduction—distant bureaucrats and corporate interests—have made themselves the arbiters of who may have children and how many.
As this essay will show, the whole thing is cover for the abuses of oligarchy and their empires. Every famine in modern history has been policy. Every "overpopulated" nation has been deliberately underdeveloped. Every call for population control has protected wealth while punishing poverty. The theory that began as British imperial propaganda persists because it still serves the same function: making systemic exploitation appear as natural law.
The most insidious part is how Malthusianism makes cruelty feel like wisdom. It transforms solidarity into foolishness, compassion into danger, and human flourishing into existential threat. It convinces good people that letting others suffer serves some higher purpose.
This essay traces that deception from Malthus's plagiarized equations through Ireland's engineered famine, India's colonial extraction, and today's climate colonialism. The pattern never changes: create scarcity, blame population, propose "solutions" that entrench the very systems causing the problem.
We don't face a population crisis. We face a power crisis—too few people controlling too many resources. Once we see that clearly, different futures become possible.
The Architecture of Deception: How "Carrying Capacity" Works
Before we trace the history of the overpopulation myth, it's crucial to understand the rhetorical machinery that makes it so persistent. "Carrying capacity" isn't just wrong—it's wrong in precisely calibrated ways that make it impossible to refute. This isn't accidental. It's how ideology disguises itself as science.
A thought-terminating cliché - Once someone accepts "carrying capacity," inquiry stops. Complex questions of political economy collapse into simple arithmetic. Why is there poverty? Too many people. Why environmental degradation? Too many people. Why do famines occur? Too many people. The phrase prevents analysis of actual causes—land concentration, financial speculation, deliberate underdevelopment. It's an answer that prevents questions.
A motte-and-bailey argument - The "motte" (the defensible position) is the truism that Earth is finite. No one denies this. But the "bailey" (the real claim being advanced) is that current suffering is natural and certain populations must be controlled. When challenged on population control, proponents retreat to the motte: "Are you denying Earth has limits?" Once safe, they return to advancing the bailey: sterilization programs, conditional aid, preventing development. The reasonable premise shields the unreasonable conclusion.
A reification fallacy - "Carrying capacity" sounds scientific, like load-bearing capacity in engineering—something you could calculate. But for humans, it's not a discoverable number but a political construct entirely dependent on assumptions about technology, distribution, and social organization. The carrying capacity of a society using stone tools differs from one using nuclear power. Yet the concept gets treated as if it were as measurable as gravity.
A naturalistic fallacy device - Political choices about resource distribution, technology use, and economic systems get laundered through "natural" carrying capacity. When millions starve while grain rots in warehouses, that's not policy failure but natural correction. When technology is denied to developing nations, that's not imperialism but respecting natural limits. Contingent social arrangements appear immutable.
A kafka trap - Disagreeing becomes evidence of its truth. Point out that humans have consistently transcended predicted limits? You're told this proves we're in "overshoot." Note declining fertility? That's evidence we've "hit capacity." Cite technological solutions? They're "temporary" and "unsustainable." Show historical failed predictions? That just means catastrophe is even closer. Every observation confirms the theory.
An unfalsifiable premise - For animal populations, carrying capacity makes testable predictions. For humans, every failed prediction just pushes catastrophe forward. Malthus predicted imminent disaster in 1798. Paul Ehrlich promised hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s. The Club of Rome forecast resource depletion by 2000. When apocalypse doesn't arrive, true believers don't abandon the theory—they revise the timeline. It's not science but eschatology.
Most fundamentally, it's a depoliticization device - It removes human agency from the equation, converting political problems requiring justice into technical problems requiring management. Instead of asking "Who controls resources and why?" we ask "How many people can Earth support?" Instead of challenging systems of extraction and exploitation, we debate demographic projections. Power disappears behind the seemingly neutral language of ecology.
Understanding these devices is essential because they appear throughout the history that follows. From Malthus to modern climate discourse, the same rhetorical tricks make political choices appear as natural facts, transform victims into problems, and convert solidarity into foolishness. Once you see the machinery, you can't unsee it.
1. The Big Lie
In 1798, an English clergyman employed by the British East India Company published an essay that would reshape how the world thinks about poverty. Thomas Malthus claimed to have discovered a "law of nature": population grows geometrically while food production increases only arithmetically, therefore poverty and starvation are inevitable. This wasn't science—it was propaganda dressed up as mathematics.
The theory served a precise political purpose. As Britain's industrial revolution created unprecedented wealth alongside unprecedented misery, as common lands were enclosed and peasants driven into urban slums, the ruling class needed an explanation for poverty that didn't implicate them. Malthus provided it. The poor weren't poor because of exploitation or deliberate economic policies. They were poor because they had too many children.
William Engdahl, in A Century of War, exposes the strategic deception at work. Malthusianism functioned as what we'd now call a "psyop"—a psychological operation designed to rationalize the British Empire's systematic underdevelopment of its colonies. Rather than admit they were deliberately preventing industrial development to maintain economic dominance, British elites could blame the poverty they created on the "natural laws" of population.
The most damning fact about Malthus's theory is that he didn't even create it. He plagiarized it from Giammaria Ortes, a Venetian writer who had attacked Benjamin Franklin's optimistic views about population growth in 1774. Malthus took Ortes's arguments, wrapped them in pseudo-mathematical language about geometric and arithmetic progressions, and presented them as scientific discovery. The British establishment immediately recognized the theory's usefulness and made Malthus famous virtually overnight.
Please go to Lies Are Unbekoming to continue reading.
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The Venetian roots of Malthus and liberalism with Daniel Estulin and Matt Ehret:
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