Explaining Darwin's unexpected 1860s success : rising populations of labourers same time as the rise of their cheaper, more mallible replacement, the hydrocarbon energy slave

Unexpectedly, during the the 1860s, the global modern elite - including Darwin himself - found a little something to applaud inside the vast concept forest that was his theory of 'Natural Evolution'.


He and they basically rejected his key idea that evolution was totally directionless and that the variants that selection acted upon were thrown up totally by chance.

But elites everywhere seized upon the idea that they and not Darwin had actually invented : that Life was not a linked chain of being with every species needed to keep all the other species alive, as supposed for centuries.

Instead they took up the new claim that life was actually an enormous one-time track meet, entitled the Survival of the Fittest ---- with all the losers destined to slowly starve away.

That simply wasn't so - or at the very least, Darwin never actually said that.

Admittedly, in a very long lifetime of words, he totally buried the lede, but ultimately Darwin did say that Life was actually about a million races a year, each and every year, from the beginnings of Life in the yesteryear on into eternity.

Darwin-the-scientist said that each tiny little niche held its own race and as the niche changed, so a new race was run within it.

But Darwin-the-Manchester-Liberal, like almost all modern elites in the 1860s, tended to deny these claims and instead to fall in with Herbert Spencer's views about the survival of the fit instead.

Why ?

Cruel Timing

I believe it can all, Auschwitz,Hunger Plan East and all, can be put down to an unfortunate coincidence in timing - or mis-timing.

Mid Victorian families, like all earlier families, had lots of pregnancies because most kids died before birth or before the age of five.

Ten pregnancies to get five kids to survive to youth, so their labour could add to the income of the family farm or other human labour oriented family business.

Now in the 1860s, more of the traditional ten pregnancies were surviving to birth and even beyond the age of five, because of fewer reoccurring national famines and purer drinking water,etc.

National populations were soaring.

But once families realized that (a) more kids were surviving to their teen years and (b) less and less labour, including child labour, was going to be needed, they would reduce their pregnancies way way down.

But connecting the dots would take time - introducing a critical "lag".

Overcoming that demographic lag in understanding changing circumstances could take decades - it took exactly 100 years  for birthrates to fall in rural Antigonish, for example, as my partner Rebecca can personally attest!

At the very same time, smart minds among the greedy and ambitious were realizing that with cheap abundant hydrocarbon energy about, machines (machine energy slaves) would be much cheaper, much more reliable, much less tireless, much less likely to demand unions or vote for anti-capitalist governments, than human slave labourers.

But the rising national human survival rates were producing much more human labourers at the exact time the elites were deciding they needed much less.

A much older, much less hypocritical age might have just led the surplus labourers out into a wintry howling wilderness to die out of sight, but modern mass media and modern photography made that solution, as marxist-latte-lapping-academics are wont to say, "problematic".

The optics - and there would always be optics ( Aylan Kurdi as a recent example) - would look as "bad", as morally bad as this effort really was.

So Evolution cum 'The Survival of the Fittest' emerged just at the right time.

Now Evolutionary failure and Mother Nature could be blamed for Man's evil doings --- basically his finding as many ways as possible to speed Nature's reduction in the number of human "useless mouths", without getting caught at it.

But of course, as Hitler, Stalin and Tojo discovered during WWI and as we are still re-discovering in 2015, humanity's replacement, the mechanized slaves, can't always do many things (usually downmarket manual things, ironically enough) as well as people paid minimum wage and kept on unpaid 'call' for all hours.

Human Labour Shortage Looming

In fact, I predict that by the 2060s, the world will  face a simply enormous human labour shortage.

Another mistimed coincidence, in fact the exact reverse side of the 1860s situation.

Only now we will be running out of (cheap) hydrocarbons to do our dirty hard work just at the very time as our world fills up with retired ancients like me, demanding to be maintained in the swell lifestyle to which cheap hydrocarbons have accustomed us ...

We genuinely regret species loss - but we don't lose sleep over it

Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion

If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.

If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.

If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the Hunger Plan - though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.

There is always a market for movies made up of violence porn - and scenes of mass murders by bullet or gas chambers fills that pornographic need.

Slow starvation deaths makes for bad Hollywood

But extended scenes of slow starvation deaths are much more - not less - painful to watch --- even, or perhaps especially, for violence junkies.

Hollywood has no interest in making movies about slow quiet destructions of human lives and cultures by benign plenticidal neglect.

Slow quiet death (through inadequate land and hence food & fuel resources) to all aboriginals who refused to join modern progressive scientific industrial society was always and everywhere the implicit Hunger Plan from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Our extra special animus against relatively small numbers of powerless aboriginals requires some explaining.

It was because of their great moral power : they dared to question the unquestionable good of Progress and Modern Science and Technology, even as they themselves were clearly slowly starving to death in dismal living conditions.

They dared assault our innermost superego and awake long suppressed doubts we all had about the path of Progress- and for this they must die to let our superegos regain control.

Thirty years later - would the US Civil War have even been fought ?

In 1865, fighting and dying to defend the right of one person to buy another person for the equivalent today of a million dollar home, seemed to make great economic sense.

But that quickly changed as mechanization replaced human hand skills and as the cheap energy slaves embodied in engines and fossil fuel replaced the energy from fragile human and animal slaves. 

In the 1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium and his minions expected to extract great wealth from the Congo - but mostly from inert non-living wealth.

They saw no real economic need to keep the people of their Congo alive as forced labour, for working on future renewable resource plantations for example.

They quickly killed off half the entire population - ten million - the world's greatest mass murder ever.

King Leopold's plenticidal indifference

Some they deliberately murdered - but most died through plenticidal indifference.

For to their modern minds, the Congo seemed to have a plentitude of people-to-be-fed-and-clothed - far more than needed to exploit it successful with machinery and fossil fuels.

Best to let the excess 'useless mouths' died quietly from hunger - off stage.

They almost got away with it - perhaps if they had laid off those public capitations of heads and hands - they might well have.

Today, similarly, we can't really get away with the roundup and deliberate killing of a few hundred wolves or feral ponies without a huge hue and cry.

But if 95% of all the frogs in the world die because of a fungus disease spread worldwide as a consequence of a 1950s human pregnancy test, we will all purse our lips for a moment, sigh and then get about with our lives.

Our consciences almost clear.

The world is filled with a plentitude of frogs and frog species - how many do we really need anyway - won't one or two species be more than enough ?

The Sixth Extinction by plenticidal indifference and the Aboriginal (and other) Hunger Plans --- you tell me the moral difference...

The price of human life to racists : in 1861 Texas vs 1941 Belorussia

In the early 1860s , a Texas racist could buy good cotton land for $6 an acre - a big half section of 320 acres went for $2000 ------ about the same price as ONE top quality (young skilled healthy) slave.

Needless to say, in this age before modernity's machinery, you needed far more than one such field hand to work all those acres.

So the prudent kept their slaves as healthy as they could , for as long as they could.

Because most of the South's wealth was in human being slaves, not in land, buildings or machinery.

But when the Nazi racists invaded Russia in 1941 they saw it not as a land of milk and honey but as a land of machinery : all oil refineries and tractor factories , with no need at all for enslaved Slavs .

The Slavs were all to be starved to death as superfluous to needs, under the infamous Hunger Plan.

Because the Era of Modernity was greatly opposed to human slavery --- as far too expensive and far too inefficient --- at least as compared to enslaving iron and petroleum.

This opposition to human slavery was called 'Progress.'

But in the end , the Nazi racists' best known machines - their 'big iron' panzers - ran out of petroleum and so once again slaves (teams of enslaved farm oxen) were called forth - to haul them into battle ....

Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.


Conventional human-oriented (infantry and land battle oriented) war was thus not eugenic but dysgenic - killing the fit and preserving the unfit.

A new long range mechanical war directed at the enemy's civilian-operated war factories and their workers was the alternative.

Fit middle class men no longer crawled through the mud - they cooly pushed buttons at the complex command centre of large machines of war : battleships, submarines, bombers, tanks, long range rockets.

They aimed to hit hard and accurate from a long - safe - distance away.

By war's end, tanks could penetrate a half foot of hardened armour from a safe mile away and submarines had torpedoes that could travel 25 miles as could battleship shells.

In the air, bombs were routinely dropped from 25,000 or more feet up and rockets travelled up to 250 miles away to hit cities.

Morally, they were all just stand-off weapons for the squeamish.

Now naval and aerial blockade campaigns could ensure that hundreds of thousands of babies starved slowly to death 2500 remote miles away --- so as not to offend any (diminishing) middle class sensibilities.

German 1A troops were kept fit and fed by starving to death the 4Fs of Eastern Europe.

Britain and America had hoped to never have their 1A troops directly engage 1A Axis troops on German and Japanese home territory.

Killing enough 4F Germans and Japanese by direct civilian bombing and indirect naval blockades should cause the enemy 1A army to surrender first without any need for your own 1A army to be bloodied.

It didn't work in Germany but it sort of did in Japan - after the American A-bomb, in combination with an old-fashioned infantry-led direct land assault by the Russians, tipped the scales.

My stance ?

If you have to defeat an evil-doer by extreme force ( and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo fit that bill) and you have greatly superior population numbers - as the Allies ALWAYS did , the answer is clear.

The means that produces the least deaths among your side and the enemy's side of conscripted soldiers and conscripted civilians is a massive infantry led direct assault on the enemy's home territory on simultaneous multiply fronts.

Britain ,France - even America - were not willing to overwhelm the Axis by large armies - if much/most of the people in those victorious large armies were their colored colonials.

(Let remind you that the largest volunteer army history has ever seen yet was the WWII Indian army.)

If Indian concerns had been addressed and India conscripted at WWII (let alone WWI) levels , the Indian Army might have cowed even Hitler into a negotiated peace rather than be overwhelmingly defeated by 10 million dark Indian infantrymen on German soil.

In WWII, we would rather have lost to fellow white racists than to win by means of a multi-colored armed forces that would give those coloreds the moral means to demand independence or basic human rights.

If the war had to be won by means of people we considered unfit - we'd rather just lose --- the unfits' role in the war were simply to be pliant blockade and bombing victims on the other side.

Luckily , one group of unfits - Dawson's unfits - rejected that role.

Instead these 4Fs repeatly rescued dying 1A soldiers with big needles of cheap, plentiful "Penicillin-for-All" ....