Fear, Propaganda and Malthusian Theory

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. I had the opportunity to listen to some of the discussion put on by CNN with the Climate Change Forum, whereby the Democrat candidates for president went to a 7 hour long forum and were asked questions by a selected few audience members. Seven hours is a long time and not many could endure that, but I was able to at least get through some of the questions and answers for Bernie Sanders and in this report I will endeavor to respond to one particular question and Senator Sanders’ response.

A propaganda question and answer

Senator Sanders was questioned by a young woman and although I could not see her I could tell from her voice that she was young. Her question and the way she phrased it, that being one of, all smart and woke people feel this way was dripping with virtuous morality. I will paraphrase her question as follows: Senator Sanders, given that the world is overpopulated and that overpopulation is causing a catastrophic destruction of the world’s climate, isn’t overpopulation a question that is worthy to be addressed by presidential candidates.

Senator Sanders answer was “in a word, yes.” He went on to say that a woman has the right to control her own body so I presume he was connecting population control and climate catastrophe to abortion on demand. For that answer the senator received thunderous applause and, I suppose, a standing ovation. My answer to Senator Sanders and to the questioner will constitute the rest of this Report.

Limits of bodily control

Yes, Senator, a woman has the right to control her own body. Who could argue with your statement if it stands alone without explanation? A woman has the right to control her own body but children do not have that right whether they are male or female. They apparently have no rights and no choice at all in the decision of whether they should be allowed to continue their lives or not, and cold blooded homicide to eliminate them is obviously acceptable, and even desirable, to you.

In the Democrat world, with rare exceptions, human babies are just the disposable product of prior decisions. In fact, given the horrors of overpopulation, a woman killing her own child is actually a virtuous and morally courageous act.

Overpopulation is not settled

The questioner’s statement about overpopulation causing catastrophic damage to the planet’s climate was stated as if it were absolute fact, but in reality it is so completely untrue that it is ludicrous. She obviously believes her statement to be true and that is the real problem, and the real issue of this entire forum. The question, according to her and many others, is no longer debatable because it is “settled.”

Why is the question settled? Why can’t the issue be considered in open debate and why must we accept it as “settled”? A lot of important issues are being decided without any formal debate. Issues that are being decided without debate concern a lot of people, especially young people who unlike our questioner, actually have the best intent and want debate. They want to know if it is wrong to have children today or not. These questions have been asked and answered many times over the centuries but here they are again and we are not supposed to question or debate them.

Science yielding to propaganda

The people who impose the answers on us, along with their encouragers in the government and media,are telling us, we are the authority, you can’t challenge us. Science is supposed to be a rigorous process whereby theories are tested and revised in response to objective evidence.  The politicians and the other climate alarmists respond with the language of fear in order to persuade us to give up our liberty; just a bunch of lies to buttress the global elite’s chosen narrative for us. Science becomes just perverted propaganda.   

These issues of propaganda, fear and control are obviously not new to the world. From 1945 until 1989, the global threat was nuclear annihilation, but when Reagan and Gorbachev resolved that issue a new catastrophe had to be created. The RIO Summit in 1991 gave us the environment as the new terrifying threat to be fearful of and to give up liberty because of. The truth is that the lady’s statement about a population disaster has been disproven for about 250 years now.

Propaganda disproved: Thomas Malthus

In about 1750 a scientist named Thomas Malthus proposed a theory that became known as The Malthusian Theory of Population. His theory was that population increases exponentially while resources and food increase arithmetically. That means that population will grow faster than it can be fed and the world will starve to death in what Malthus called an unstoppable tide. According to Malthus, and I argue it’s also true of climate alarmists today, the victims of all the coming starvation are also the disease that caused it.

Propaganda bounce-back: excuses, excuses

Malthus’ proposition ran into and was destroyed by the industrial revolution. He lived when the earth’s population was about 700 million people and today its about 7 to 8 billion people so he was obviously mistaken.

His proposition may have been disproven but that didn’t dissuade others from going forward with it. The avenue that led modern Malthusians to their conclusions was that the same scientific and industrial revolution that allowed enough food production to feed the planet also brought changes in medicine, sanitation, etc., so people’s lives were extended greatly and, therefore, the theory is still valid.

Propaganda roars back: Paul Ehrlich

The best known proponent of modern Malthusianism is Paul Ehrlich of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Ehrlich was born in 1932 but I believe he is still at Stanford. He did his work on population in the 1960’s and his book, The Population Bomb, was published in 1968. It was a frightening book of apocalyptic prediction and became very famous in academic and scientific circles.

 I read his book in the early 1970’s and found it rather alarming so I took it to a friend who was a political science professor and asked him if he had read it. Yes, he said, I read it and it’s a bunch of nonsense. It’s all about power and control over us and an insistence that we surrender our liberty in order to drive out the fear of catastrophe that he says is coming. That opinion was a welcome one for me and it caused me to always ask for public debate and always question demands that we jump at any predictions of catastrophe.

How people believe the propaganda

What then, causes someone to believe, without any honest debate or inquiry, something that, if true, will require radical changes in lifestyle, for millions of people and will also require the surrender of the autonomy of the world’s population?

The Bobo Doll model

A partial answer can be gleaned from the work of Albert Bandura who at 93 years of age is professor emeritus at Stanford. Dr. Bandura published his Social Learning Theory in 1977 which was based on the famous Bobo Doll experiments conducted in the 1960’s in which he proved that people learn, especially children learn, by observing the role models around them. Children pay attention to some of the models around them, parents, teachers, etc., and encode (remember) their behavior.

Later, the child remembers or copies the behavior of the role models. The experiments proved that children are far more likely than not to reproduce the behavior that society deems appropriate at the time. This theory might help explain why the entire Western World seems to act as one when deciding what is acceptable to think or say. Children learn behavior by imitating role models and Dr. Bandura found that personality develops at the very basic deep level in early childhood then continues to develop on through adolescence.

Teachers as propagators of propaganda

It would be so easy to reprogram society by manipulating the role models that we and especially our children see every day. Teachers are role models who have been provided different role models than those I had in my day so it is not difficult to see why children are developing differently. Who actually controls what our children see as role models? I submit that it is television and Hollywood in general. The producers consult psychologists for the best role models to program society the way they want. TV is the most powerful delivery system for such role models. Who decides what role models Hollywood gives our children. Well, that is the question isn’t it?

Propaganda pervades children’s entertainment and education

When you take a hard look at that question you will see why society is evolving the way it is. Characters are designed by psychologists to be role models targeted at different demographic groups. Patterns of behavior and opinions of the demographic groups are manipulated through role models and the result of how they respond is monitored and adjusted with the advice of psychologists. The thinking of not just children, but the public at large, can be and is manipulated through movies and TV. In other words, people buy what they are told to buy and it is only a short leap from there to they think what they are told to think. Various demographic groups are programmed to act in “approved” ways.

Our kids become just creatures who are being programmed and taught how to behave, not by mom and dad, but by role models that may not even exist. Possibly, today’s model for your kids is just a celluloid image. This society based on celluloid images created by Hollywood and its psychologists has left a divided and confused America without a coherent sense of purpose and with a chaotic disunity enveloping it.

From Mao to the modern Democratic Party

This is the language and the tactic of fear created to control the violence and the power. The one who controls the violence controls the power. It was Mao who said power grows out of the barrel of a gun. He would certainly be a good role model for today’s Democrat candidates and the young lady who questioned Senator Sanders because he lowered China’s population by about 70 million. It is about striving for control and in order to have control we must be persuaded to give up our liberty to people who are smarter than anyone else and therefore most aggressive in regulating other people’s lives.

The Times becomes a propaganda rag

Examples of all this in our modern society, are abundant, but perhaps the best one comes from the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times. When the Mueller hearings came to an end and it was clear that the story of Russian collusion was a hoax, the Times held a board of directors meeting conducted by their executive editor, Dean Baquet. Details of the meeting were leaked to the public by Slate.com. Mr. Baquet told the Times Board that they had done well with Russia, having won two Pulitzers. He said nothing about how the prizes were based on lies and completely false reporting and should have been returned.

He went on to say that since the Russia story had run its course, a new angle would have to be found and that angle would be Trump is a racist, so they would hit that angle repeatedly just like they did with Russia. “I think we’ve got to change. I mean the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier… How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that is what we’re going to have to do for the next two years.”

Words mean things

So the Times is not about all the news that’s fit to print at all, but instead it’s about how the news can be spun to portray the President of the United States as a racist. I often quote one of my favorite columnists on the subject of the media and that is Paul Craig Roberts. From a column of September 9, 2019: “The only purpose of print and TV news is to program you so that you insouciantly go along with the agendas of those who rule you. Those who sit in front of TV news, listen to NPR, or read newspapers are programmed to be mindless automatons.”

Finally folks, it really comes down to what Humpty Dumpty said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass. “The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that’s all.”  

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.