The 1970s was a pessimistic decade. America’s mood was foul. If you asked almost anybody what the future held, the answer would be: decline.

The Vietnam war was still tearing the country apart, pollution was a terrible problem, the economy was slowing, and the Soviet Union appeared to be on the rise. Fashion was execrable, and American cars sucked. Our closest ally, Great Britain, was wracked by strikes that paralyzed the country, and that seemed to be our future.

The only thing that didn’t suck entirely was music. Pretty good music in the 1970s.

So it is unsurprising that the mood in both academia and popular culture was similarly foul. In the 1960s ecology had caught on, and by the 1970s it has become an apocalyptic cult. Paul Ehrlich was predicting the imminent extinction of mankind, resource depletion, climate alarmism was a rising force, and the population bomb was on everybody’s mind. Ehrlich predicted famine in the 1980s, including the imminent starvation of billions of people.

Sound familiar? Much of what we heard then is back in fashion, mildly transformed. It’s not the population bomb that will kill us. It is climate changed, caused by too many people who are too wealthy.

Today’s prophets of doom, unlike the 1970s, own the culture. They run the schools, academia, the government bureaucracy, the MSM, and the world’s international institutions. They sell the same vision, with better special effects.

So it makes sense to me to look back at what the doomsters were telling the public back in the 1970s.

It was 50 years ago that the movie Soylent Green came out. Set in 2022 (50 years after the movie was filmed, 49 since it was released), it portrayed a world on the brink of collapse. Grossly overpopulated with 7 billion people (a billion less than were on Earth in 2022), there was no longer any room, any food, any sea life, or any respect for human rights. Global warming was destroying everything.

A tiny oligarchy ruled over a population stripped of their basic humanity whose source of sustenance was reduced to tasteless crackers of Soylent Green–which, famously, was made of the processed corpses of people who had been euthanized.

The story itself is irrelevant; its cultural impact derived from its presentation of the dominant view of the future as presented by the intellectual elite. The future was filled with misery and death due to the depredations wrought by a consumerist capitalist society raping the Earth.

The details are different, but that is pretty much the future being sold to us by the same class of people today.

It was a pretty bad prediction of the future, all things considered. With the Green Revolution, food production has far outstripped population growth. The availability of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, luxury goods, living space have all expanded. Abundance, not scarcity, defines our world. If you transported a person from the movie premier in 1973 to 2023, they would see a paradise around them, not the dystopia that Soylent Green predicted. Hand them an iPhone and they would marvel.

What impact has the reality of global abundance compared to the predicted scarcity had on our culture? Paul Ehrlich is still revered, the pessimists now run everything in our society, and children are indoctrinated to believe that the world portrayed by Soylent Green is in our future. As I said, the special effects are better and the stories more sophisticated, but the same basic themes are being promoted today.

If you look a bit deeper, though, there is a significant difference: today’s leaders are actively working to bring many of the dystopic elements of the movie into reality, not prevent them.

Faced with abundance, they prescribe a future where you own nothing. In a world with food abundance, they prescribe closing farms and ranches. In a world where information is still mostly available if you look for it, they prescribe more censorship. In a world where ignorance is optional, the elite promote it. In a world where living space has expanded, they do their best to cram everybody together and restrict mobility.

And in an era where energy abundance is easily possible, they close down power plants and replace them with unreliable energy sources. Brownouts are becoming a 21st century reality.

Was Soylent Green a dystopia, or a road map for the Elite? Yes, and yes.

Canada has taken the movie’s health care cue: euthanasia. Europe has taken its food prescription: restricting agriculture and promoting alternative sources of protein (bugs, not people). Urban planners have embraced the density model, with “15 minute cities” and restrictions on mobility. Everybody in the world is adopting energy restrictions.

Populations are scared into accepting restrictions on abundance, being warned that the alternative is a future that looks eerily like Soylent Green. But it is the restrictions themselves that promise to bring that future to us.

Since poverty has been shown not to be inevitable, our cultural betters are trying to will it into reality.

It is long past time to push back against the cult of austerity. It’s not only that their predictions of doom are bunk–they have been since Malthus. It’s that they are willing those predictions into reality. They are the ones in charge now.

UPDATE:

By coincidence, 60 Minutes actually featured a segment on Paul Ehrlich last night! What a joke!

“The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Humanity is consuming 175 percent of what the earth can regenerate. Biologist Paul Erlich says that our current way of life is unsustainable. https://t.co/AwaKLZFGsj pic.twitter.com/MU1jHpuMwI

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 2, 2023