The Silver Bullet, Part 2: Less is More — Much More

By Roger Payne

In my previous blog I pointed out that if you accept the premise that overpopulation is the root cause of all of humanity’s biggest problems, then if we all work on having fewer children, we will also be helping to reduce all of the world’s major problems.

I also noted that we need to get rid of the near-prohibition on even talking about overpopulation, because only when we get rid of it can we start applying what I’ll call the Two Step Program—a method that has been successful in the broadest possible variety of human cultures and that works its magic without anyone forcing anyone else to do anything. I.e. it is not like the policy China recently revoked which penalized couples for having more than one child—there’s nothing mandatory about the Two Step Program. It’s entirely voluntary. Here it is, in all of its complexity:

Step 1) Offer women a free education.
Step 2) Offer everyone free contraceptive materials plus free instruction in their use.

Wherever and whenever both of these approaches have been tried, the rate of increase of the population has started to fall.

That means that the effectiveness of the Two Step Program has already been demonstrated. We know it works and we know how to use it. But most importantly: it lowers population growth rates voluntarily. Reversal is achieved without anyone telling anyone else that they have to use contraceptives; free contraceptive materials are simply made available free, and each person is left to decide for herself, or himself whether to use them. If they don’t want to use them, fine. If they do want to use them, fine. If they want 10 children, fine. If they want one child or no children, fine.

For many people, the big deterrent to having no children or only one is that it seems to be so purely negative. But a small family offers ENORMOUS advantages.
It is those benefits that are the subject of this blog.

Let me offer a list of some of the positive things that having one child or no children bring:

• You avoid the astronomical costs to yourself and the environment of raising more  children… and grandchildren.
• You can give one child your full attention.
• You can give one child the best education.
• You can give one child the most healthy diet.
• You can give one child the healthiest and best lifestyle.
• If you have one child and he/she follows the same principles that your child did you will have only one grandchild.
• If you have only one grandchild you can give it your full attention and offer greater help in giving it the best education, most healthy diet, and best lifestyle.
• You will have more time yourself for other things (and have more fun doing them).
• Every street, every store, every public space, every space of any kind you occupy will be less crowded.
• You will experience fewer traffic jams.
• You will waste less of your life waiting in lines.
• Your commuting time will be shorter.
• The price of housing will be lower… everywhere.
• Your world will be more tranquil.
• You will see more stars, even when you are close to cities.
• Your life will feature more encounters with more abundant, and more unusual wildlife. And if you live in the country the dawn and dusk choruses of birds will be richer and more enchanting.

But of most direct advantage to you and your child will be that if you and your friends have worked hard enough to persuade several others to follow your example, then every other problem the world faces will be starting to get smaller. E.g.:

• Global warming will start to slow down and will eventually stop.
• The oceans will start becoming less, rather then more acidic, and coral reefs and seashells will start to reappear (although, alas, extremely slowly).
• Species extinction rates will slow down and will eventually return to their almost unimaginably slow normal—a rate between a thousandth and a ten thousandth of the current, Anthropocene extinction rate).
• The air you breathe will become cleaner and less polluted.
• The water you drink and in which you wash your food, your dishes, your clothes, your child and yourself will become less polluted.
• The ocean in which you swim, and in which the fish you eat grow up, will become less and less polluted (as will, of course, the fish).
• And you will have better luck fishing, because there will be more and bigger fish.
• When you snorkel you will have better underwater visibility.
• Hunger and homelessness will come to an end.
• The rate of topsoil loss will slow to far less significance.
• Aquifers will refill.
• There will be fewer causes (and excuses) for wars.

But the best of all, “Oh my best beloved,” you will not have to apologize to your child or grandchild for having done nothing to help solve the world’s biggest problem. You can, in fact, boast about having participated in its solution. And you will not have to tell your grandchild what a tiger was.

Or an elephant.

Or a rhinoceros.

Or a panda.

Or a pink dolphin,

Or a cheetah.

Or…

Well, you get my point.

We have come to the really hard part: doing something to achieve these benefits. You and I must both stop postponing action—must stand up and do something about overpopulation. One thing we can do is to spread the word about how utterly important the advantages of having a small family are.
But that will only happen if take the time and the initiative to talk to, and write to, our friends and relatives, about this uncomfortable subject, all the while emphasizing the urgency of slowing overpopulation and the importance of keeping families small (for there is, unfortunately, only one way to lower population size humanely and that is to reduce family size).

Step one is getting the world to pay attention to how important small families are. And I believe that that will only transpire when people understand how enormous the advantages are of having fewer children.

So now comes the thing that is hardest for me, personally, to do: in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that although I love them individually, collectively, and in all of their combinations, I have four children. I realize that in the eyes of most people, that gives me no right to offer any advice whatsoever about family size.  However, my excuse is that all of my children were conceived before The Pill became broadly known and broadly available (I realize that, like all excuses, that’s pretty weak).
Each child was a triumph of biology over whatever form of birth control my wife and I were practicing at the time, and always because some previous technique had failed. But it is because of that history that I think what I have to say does have value and may be something that should not just be discarded out of hand. For I have noticed that if someone who has failed at something is willing to be honest about why they failed, their advice is likely to be more valuable than the advice of someone who succeeded at it. For example: I would rather hear about driver safety from someone who has survived an accident than from someone who’s never experienced one. (The corollary to that is that because I am in the latter category I realize that I know less about what strategy is likely to fail than those who have suffered the consequences of such failures.)

During the time that has passed since the years in which I was busy failing at non-reproduction, contraception has experienced several game-changing advances. The one that finally saved my wife and me was my getting a vasectomy (I couldn’t find a people-doctor willing to risk doing it as it was an illegal procedure at the time so I got a veterinarian to do it). It was as clear then, as it is now, that in any partnership it’s the man who should have such an operation; for we men only require a local anesthetic, whereas the equivalent operation for a woman requires a general anesthetic, and that can be life-threatening.

My reason for offering this vivid example of too much information about one’s private life is to say that having personally experienced it I know that after a vasectomy sex is not less pleasurable, it is more pleasurable. You can’t detect any differences in sensations yet you now know there is no longer any danger that you’ll give your partner an unwanted pregnancy—something she appreciates as much as you do, and demonstrates by her reaction.

In summary:
Smaller families offer monumentally positive advantages, both for individuals and society. If enough people can be persuaded to experience those advantages, the problem of overpopulation can be solved—by advocating for the Two Step Program:
1) Offering women a free education.
2) Offering everyone free contraceptive materials plus free instruction in their use.

Given how many other problems will be lessened by ending overpopulation, I suggest that there is no greater mischief any dogma can create (religious, moralistic, or otherwise) than placing obstacles in the path of techniques whose goals are to reduce the human population without pressure.

The Two-Step Program achieves such a reduction and it is time for all of us to participate in promoting the goal of solving the population problem equitably by employing such techniques.

© Roger Payne