Essays in Idleness

The great majority of the world’s population is dead. Even the statisticians concede this. Counting only the last fifty thousand years, they suggest, more than 108 billion of us have been born. (More precisely, 108,760,543,790, as of 1st July 2019; presumably at midnight GMT.) Yet only seven-point-seven billion are still alive. Every week, another couple of million “pass,” as we say, using a sporting metaphor.

Among the demographic experts, there is no agreement on how many remain unborn.

There is also the vexed question, of how abortions are to be counted. I would think they are a “force multiplier” on the side of death, to use the language of the Pentagon. But count them dead, and a feminist may have a spittle-flecked nutter. Should we then count them as never having died?

I get my figures from the PRG, incidentally. (This is the meejah-beloved Population Reference Bureau, not to be confused with the People’s Republic of Batfluvia.) If one attentively reads their claims, however, one learns that “99 percent” of the accumulated people never provided reliable census information. And thus we get some insight into their methods.

Notwithstanding, just think of all those people: a sum of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. (And then there are those harder to categorize, like Joe Biden.) The plurality of the deceased must by now have reached landslide proportions, no matter how hard we, the living, have tried to resist.

While, in apparent defiance of the pope, I think Filipinas and others should “breed like rabbits,” I must confess it is an uphill struggle. Within less than a century most of our children will have died, too. The toll keeps outpacing our most diligent efforts to “level the playing field.”

Indeed, when the pundits in the fever swamps declare that we’re all going to die, or even that only one or two billion will go down (thanks to Trump or whoever), I respond with a yawning, “So what?”

Statistically, that’s like putting down a cat. (“The thing sleeps twenty-three hours a day already. What’s an extra hour?”)

I say the recent Natted States election was fraudulently stolen, and might refer to thousands of affidavits, forensic analyses of machines, and the probabilities against novel, startling voting patterns. But that is the weak argument.

For while I admit that a few million dead Mericans were in fact allowed to vote, the great majority weren’t. Some hundreds of millions of valid Merican citizens — both native-born and naturalized — were thus denied the franchise. And while we don’t know how long that country is going to last, let us charitably add several hundred million unborn — just arrogantly “cancelled.”

We say democracy is “one man one vote,” but even after adding women, the shortfall is appalling. And not even all the living voted. What about that?

As the great majority are, or rather were, extremely “conservative” — by any current standard — the results were more than a little skewed. And more, when one considers that the great majority in the future will be more than a little reactionary, too. (Long have I argued that the Republican Party dangles, way too far out on the Left.)

Tradition. Legitimacy. A constant Moral Order. Hereditary continuities. Violent opposition to any kind of change. Surely, every “democrat” in spirit will endorse these principles; and if some radical nihilist Supreme Court won’t throw out the election, the rest of us should.