What I recently watched unfold before my eyes at the movie theater had a bizarre synchronicity, considering how much thought I’d given the topic lately: the overpopulation myth taken to its inevitable conclusion. Thanos, the villian of the latest Avengers film, is a dupe, religiously devoted to the idea that the universe itself is overpopulated, and must be cut in half via genocide on a mind-boggling scale. That may or may not be a spoiler. Stranger still, it seems almost as if Thanos has been given this justification for total evil as a way to make him a sympathetic character. A more human touch, since he’s doing this for the good of the universe. His overpopulation thesis, when he tells it, is an overt cue for the audience to slowly nod their heads in reluctant agreement that yes, resources are finite, and, to his eyes, populations are exploding at an unsustainable rate. Therefore, he must step in and do the hard but necessary thing of murdering half the universe. Thanos doesn’t appear to have ever heard of the Simon/Erlich wager, comparative advantage, or economics at all. Which also props up my theory that the overpopulation argument is an appeal to the “man-in-the-street”, in that, on the surface, it appears imminently reasonable, in exactly the same way that trade protectionism, socialism, and nationalism appear very reasonable.
Thanos is what you get when you convince enough people that “overpopulation”, whatever that means, is a problem that must be remedied.
More on this tomorrow.
