Society will eventually devolve into a totalitarian regime

Introduction Impersonal forces over which we have no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. For the moment let us confine out attention to the impersonal forces which are now making the world so unsafe to democracy, so very inhospitable to individual freedom. On the first Christmas day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty million, less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the seven hundred million mark. By the time of 1950 the world population had reached up to two billion five hundred million. Today, only sixty-four years later, there are seven billion one hundred twenty-five millions of us. And tomorrow what? Pesticides, antibiotics, and clean water are cheap commodities, whose effects on public health are out of all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest governments are able to provide some form of death control. Birth control is a very different matter. Death control is something which can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians working in the pay of a government. Birth control relies on cooperation of the entire people. It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world’s teeming illiterates possess, and an expenditure of more money than most of these millions can afford. Moreover, there are nowhere any religious traditions in favor of unrestricted death, whereas religious and social traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction are widespread. Death rates have therefore fallen in recent years with startling suddenness. Birthrates, on the other hand, have remained at their old level or, if they have fallen, have fallen very little and at a very slow rate. This population problem is not being solved. On the contrary, it is becoming graver and more formidable with every passing year. It is against this grim biological background that all political, economic, cultural, and psychological dramas of our time are being played out. The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, social stability and to the well-being of individuals, this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter. Even if, at some future date, emigration to Mars should become feasible, even if any considerable number of women were desperate enough to choose a new life, what difference would it make? In the course of the last five centuries quite a number of people sailed from the Old World to the New, but neither their departure nor the returning flood of food and raw materials could solve the problems of the Old World. Similarly the shipping of a few surplus humans to mars will do nothing to solve the mounting population pressures of our planet. The conditions will create a situation in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable. Not all dictatorships arise in the same way. There are many roads to tyranny; but perhaps the straightest and broadest of them is the road we are travelling today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers and accelerating increases.