Neo-Malthusianism, the UN versus corporations, conspiracies of lies, and how the times do change: Lies, Incorporated, by Philip K. Dick

 A schedule switch, 'cuz holidays.  This morning, I shall do a thing I do on occasion, which is to revisit those old Philip K. Dick classics and examine how they are part-prescient, and part-back-asswards.  Stepping back from the day-to-day chaos of American politics and the two wars that have our attention (as opposed to the wars about which nobody cares), one of the rising tides in global politics has been neo-Malthusianism and with it, various fracas... fracases?  My spell-checker says that yes, the plural of 'fracas' is, indeed, 'fracases.'  That sounds like fricassee.  Anyway, there are fracases about population growth, resources, global versus national governance, the issues even intersect with wokeness because of how ESG scores are computed, and basically, it's a whole, big thing of finger-pointing and mutually-assured paranoia.  So, I shall blather about a Philip K. Dick novel because as I must remind any who read or listen, novelists often contribute more to our discourse, if we have the initiative to consider, than my useless and wretched brethren in academia.  And so, Lies, Incorporated.

As with so many near-future science fiction works written in the 1960s (first published in 1964, expanded in 1966), Dick's timing was what we call, in technical terms, a little off, but that actually allows us to make some important comments about the underlying political and economic issues.  We'll get to that.  It works like this.  In... the future!... the world is horribly, terrifyingly overpopulated, because this was a notion that terrified so many science-fiction authors in the '60s, and obviously, we've gotten over that, right?

What was the population and timeline?  We'll get to that.

Anyway, as humans fuck-- as humans are wont to do-- national boundaries and stuff change.  Among the changes (interestingly, Dick was nearly correct on the timing here) was the reunification of Germany and its renewed status as a global power.  Not bad, Phil!  Anyway, Germany's powerhouse status gives the country control of the UN, which is the world government, which, oooh, scaaary.  The UN, however, needs a solution to the overpopulation crisis, which is provided by a scientist who figures out a way to teleport people and things, but while communications can be sent back, teleportation itself is a one-way ticket.  They find a habitable planet-- Fomalhaut IX-- and start sending people to set up a colony, and with such an overcrowded Earth, there are plenty of volunteers.  The process is overseen by the corporation that owns the rights to the technology.

Of course, this is obviously a scam.  The only question is the nature of the scam.  The scam is as follows.

Teleportation is two-way.  The corporation that owns the technology is sticking people in labor camps and building a conscripted army in preparation to go back and overthrow Earth governments.

The inheritor of a company that had run long-haul ships, Rachmael ben Appelbaum, is a skeptic/conspiracy theorist, so he gets ready to set out on an 18-year trip via his own ship to Fomalhaut IX (with an 18 year return trip), until the head of a semi-autonomous pseudo-law enforcement agency called Lies, Incorporated (they use subliminal mind control tricks) recruits him, they all teleport to Fomalhaut IX with a private army, it all goes pear-shaped because it's a stupid plan, they get shot up with LSD because it was written in the '60s, (actually, the head of Lies, Incorporated gets zapped with a laser immediately, deservedly for putting together such a stupid plan) they blather about parallel worlds amid drug trips, and the core lesson is, how does a UN this stupid run the world?

Seriously.  I shall elaborate on that point, but Horst Berthold, the head of the UN (and really, the whole, damned world) comes across as moronic.  This may be the difference between evaluating the novel in 2023 versus 1966 (or '64), and it may have been a lazier aspect of the writing, but blinkering the whole world with a few video images?  Yes, I shall elaborate on Potemkin, because that is quite obviously a point of reference, but mostly, the overriding sense left by the Brain-ian plot to take over the world is that it assumes that nobody is more intelligent than his rodent companion.  That is ironic Dick-ish foresight, given an opening scene and occasional recurring bit involving rodent experiences being zapped into Rachmael's brain via a Lies, Incorporated computer glitch.

Anyway, let's do this thing.  Tom and Dick.  The only Harrys are the rodent dreams zapped into Rachmael's brain by computer glitch, and they are not really central to the plot.  Mostly, they contribute to the psychedelic/solipsistic silliness that has been done better elsewhere, and yes, I'll reference my man, Stan, later.  Who is Tom?  That'd be the real core of the book.  Thomas Malthus.  Remember him?  He was one of the most famously wrong economists ever.  I mean, if you count Karl as an economist, he'd win (lose) that prize, but Econ says "don't blame us, he's not an economist," which is why you will never encounter Karl in any Economics class.  Sociology, History, and all of the ___ Studies courses, filtered through Frankfurt, but that's all bullshit.  Econ?  Nope.  That should tell you something.

Anyway, Malthus looked at population growth and food production, put each on a line, and projected forward.  He noted that population growth, and hence, food needs, would cross over food production.  He asserted that this would create famine and catastrophe and DOOM, DOOM, DOOM!  Malthus died two centuries ago.  We're still waiting on that prediction of doom, which is running quite late by now.

What happened?  His problem was his failure to account for technological developments affecting food production.  That's the short answer.  One may elaborate, as many have when not falling down the Malthusian pit of wrongness, but Malthus keeps being wrong, and Malthusians keep making the same style of erroneous prediction.  Doom is always around the corner because OMG POPULATION GROWTH!  And then, when we cross the threshold and doom doesn't happen, there's another corner.

Fears of overpopulation are nothing new.  Obviously.  And they were a big theme in 1960s and 1970s science fiction.  Indeed, Stanislaw Lem wrote one of my favorites about it-- The Futurological Congress (1971).  You may not have seen Soylent Green, but you almost certainly know the gags about it.  That was 1973.  Get it?

Anyway, when Philip K. Dick wrote Lies, Incorporated in 1964 (it went through some revisions with title changes and things), he wanted to give you a HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE population figure.  A number that would scare the evershitting fuck out of you, and turn you anti-natalist.  In his attempt to pose such a number for the twenty-teens, he came up with... 7 billion.

We're at 8 billion now.

The world that Dick describes is one in which apartments are basically closets, even the rich can only get into restaurants by waiting for hours for hyper-exclusive, cramped, little rooms, and basically, go watch some dystopian horror-sci-fi thing about everyone living in cramped, underground, post-apocalyptic bunkers, in which all of nature has been demolished, and that's what Dick describes because population hit 7 billion.

We're at 8.

Thomas Malthus meets reality.  Again.

At some level, this kind of exercise is shooting fish in a barrel, even when it is Philip K. Dick, but this is more than merely pointing out the video-phone booth in Blade Runner, contrasted with the lack of replicants or interstellar travel.  This is a point that had been made, past tense, many times before he wrote Lies, Incorporated.  Malthusianism just never goes out of style.

That doesn't mean issues like climate change aren't real, or important, but the "we're all gonna die" apocalyptic indifference to the history of Malthusianism serves no one.

Dick could have calculated surface land area, divided by population, and seen the wrongness of what he was writing.

Is there a true Malthusian limit of population?  In principle, yes.  The Earth cannot support 10^100000 people, but are we at or near the Malthusian limit?  No.  There are real issues, but that ain't it.  Learn from history, and the history of wrong predictions.

Some day, I will do a thing about the history of wrongness, from Malthus and Marx to Fukuyama and modern nuttery masquerading as scholarship.

But not today.

For today, let us begin with overpopulation doomsaying, doom and how people assess their fears.  Within the novel, overpopulation is not merely a prediction just over the horizon, as it ever is within the mindset of the Malthusian, but a reality.  Pop quiz, hotshot, what do you do, what do you do?

Enter Sepp von Einem, with his promise of teleportation to a pristine and effectively empty world.  Do you take it?  If you are rational, it depends on whether or not you believe his promises.  You are told that it is a one-way-ticket.  So a) do you believe him, and b) given that nobody is returning, how do you assess the claims being made about Fomalhaut IX?

From the perspective of 2023, the idea of trusting von Einem or the corporation running the system sounds so absurd that one can hardly imagine anyone stepping into the machines, and really, even from the perspective of 1964, knowing what was known about German propaganda-- it is not an accident that Dick was writing about Germany-- skepticism should have been expected.  The colony was presented as a Potemkin village, intentionally.  There is even a scene once the head of Lies, Incorporated and his lieutenant get there, when they see the labor camps and say that they had feared concentration camps and instead see the Soviet model.  Anachronistic, yes, but intentional.  Anyone who believed in the Fomalhaut IX Potemkin was a moron.  And implausibly many people believed it, even for an earlier era.

The best one may say is that in desperation, one may suspend skepticism, but the biggest problem here is that even the supposed Head Honcho of the World, the big guy in charge of the UN, is duped.  He just, what, says oh, fine, I suppose I won't do any investigation into this highly dubious claim?

There is a bunch of technobabble about the reasons that the reverse trip cannot be made, but here's the thing about science.  Other scientists can investigate your claims.  We can check your math.  This whole thing only works if either von Einem pulls one over on literally every scientist in the world, or they just trust him too.  The latter possibility should be disregarded on first principles, and the former requires von Einem to be such a mathematical genius/bullshitter savant that he can convince a world with 7 billion people-- and consider how many math savants that includes-- of a proof with intentional errors, and maintain that year after year.

No.

The whole thing requires everyone, including those who are constitutionally incapable of doing so, to trust an absurdly suspicious set of claims, and to do so year after year.

Everyone in this book is a moron.  So this is a complaint, but now consider.  There are political fracases-- see, I just typed that-- about the UN and ESG and all that because ahhhh, fear the UN!!!!   Does the UN scare me?  No.  John Bolton is not a good person, but he was not far off in the following:  "There's no such thing as the United Nations.  If the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."  Right now, given the UN's full-throated embrace of terrorism, their endorsement of the extermination of the Jews, and their fecklessness against actual totalitarianism like Russia and China because of their structure, I am inclined to rejoice in the correctness of John Bolton.  I could tell the UN to go fuck itself, but how does a phantom fuck itself?  Probably loudly, and only on Halloween.  But if it is fucking itself, at least that's consensual, which is more than I can say about rape-as-weapon-of-war, which doesn't seem to bother them when used against Jews.

So yeah, they can fuck themselves.

Anyway, nationalists of various stripes (including some who also don't like Jews) blather about how we should all cower in terror about a one-world-government.  Sorry, I don't have it in me to fear all of the things I am supposed to fear, and certainly not the UN.  But blah-blah-something-something one-world-government, because ESG, net zero, whatever, I've lost track.

Lemme know when the black helicopters get here.  I care more about the black paragliders, which are endorsed by black lives matter, because Jewish lives don't.

Regardless, the pro-UN crowd does have a pronounced Malthusian accent, so if I point out the silliness of Malthusianism, I'm supposed to fear the UN.

But the UN, as Bolton noted, doesn't even really exist, and as worthless and feckless as the UN is in the real world, the UN is even more worthless in Lies, Incorporated.  It is one thing to be taken in by the Fomalhaut IX scam if you are an ordinary schlub, competing for a job with an actual, literal pigeon (in one ludicrous case).  You may be so desperate and miserable that you throw caution and sense to the wind, wind being something tunneled through the buildings rather than a natural phenomenon at that point.  Yet if you are the Secretary General of the UN, when that actually means something?

Or a scientist, capable of checking von Einem's math?

It says something about Dick's politics, and the politics of the era that the villains were corporate-types, and the UN were the good guys.  His authorial goal was to fake you out, with the UN being under German control, and the scientists too, because Germany=bad, but a 21st Century reading, in which a reunified Germany is just part of the modern, civilized world, leads to the problem that the UN is set up to look like the bad guys because they can't possibly be that stupid, can they?  Can they?  I mean, they have to be in on it, because otherwise, they're morons.  It's not that they're German, it's that if they aren't in on it, they're complete, fucking dipshits, and they cannot possibly be such useless wastes of carbon, can they?

Um, yes, they can, if the author wants everyone in the book to be a moron.

Hence, the UN versus the evil corporation.

Yet let's flip this around.  Here's how capitalism actually works.  Not "capitalism" as incorrectly defined by leftists who do not know what the word means, nor really what any word means.  Market competition is good because it produces efficient outcomes.  Government intervention, such as price-setting, is bad because it produces inefficiency, and that's the very short version.  Competition requires no monopolies.  One company here has a monopoly, and unrealistically because it assumes no one can check their math, or, they are granted a protected monopoly by rent-seeking, and if you need an explanation for why rent-seeking is both bad, and in direct opposition to capitalism, go read Buchanan & Tullock, and don't try to pull this leftist shit on what has two thumbs and actual knowledge of economics.

This whole system is a one-world-government set-up with a monopoly.  Monopolies are anti-capitalist because they are non-competitive.  Just because a "corporation" appears does not make the system capitalist.  Instead, once the scientists in this 7 billion person world start checking von Einem's math, either competition is introduced by technological insistence when the lie is revealed, or the existing corporation has to maintain its monopoly through rent-seeking, which is anti-capitalist.

The solution, then, is competition, introduced through capitalism, at which point, the whole thing falls apart.  Everyone sees that two-way teleportation is possible, and the colony on Fomalhaut IX is a Potemkin scam, von Einem and his buddies get taken down, none of this works.

What works?  Economic competition.  Capitalism.

Yet Dick wrote the whole thing as a UN versus corporation conflict, where the UN was on the side of light, and the corporation was the villain, in a case where the free market would have solved the problem years in advance of the whole plot turning to shit, all while any reasonably skeptical population would have called bullshit on that single corporation anyway.  In our world, or any reasonably realistic world, would this work?  No.  Aside from the observation that Malthusianism is bullshit, and Dick's own numbers show the silliness of the Malthusian freakout.

So here's the real deal.  Yes, there are 8 billion people on the planet.  Is that a Malthusian breaking point?  No.  Calm down.  If we were anywhere near such a Malthusian point, would a scheme like this work?  No.  It depends on way too much credulity, not just from the population, but from scientists, and governments.  The UN?  Yes, this really is about how feckless the UN is, but the idea of the UN being this feckless is precisely why the plot cannot work, because the corporation cannot protect its monopoly-- rent-seeking-- without effective government protection, so the whole scheme turns on a contradiction between the efficacy of the world government in the provision of rents and its total, incompetent stupidity, believing the most obvious corporate lie since tobacco, and even then, no, this is even more obvious.

Come the fuck on.

And the lesson is, there are real concerns about the world.  Climate change presents some serious, practical problems, we cycle through antibiotics at a high rate, there are always the threats of new pathogens, wars and instability, less developed regions still have high mortality from easily preventable causes like waterborne pathogens and malaria, and I could keep going, but direct your concerns to that which is real and practical, and not to that which has been recurring and facing repeated debunking for two goddamned centuries.

Also, in case any paranoid right-wingers ever stumble onto this, stop freaking out about the UN and the one-world-government.  Have you been watching these ass-clowns?  The thing Dick got right in the novel is the pointlessness of the UN.  Second grade class president in a podunk, little town means more than the UN.  And I am very happy about that, because I thought I was supposed to be pulling everyone's strings.  I mean, I'm a pretty well-off Jew.  Ph.D. in Political Science, tenured professor, official member of the "elite."  If I'm not in the club, what the actual fuck?

Buckethead, "Too Many Humans," from Population Override.