A family acquaintance, a fellow named Fred Ikle, who had caught Henry Kissinger's attention and coat tails at the Defense Dept. in the late 1960s with a savage attack on East Germany that I still can't talk about, had a magic number for Earth's population. Two billion, max. He had charts from everywhere, racial demographics, etc... The two billion figure came straight from Kissinger. At the time of this conversation, the earth's population was around 4 billion, so he was talking about ridding the world of about 2 billion. Others went further, figuring 200-250 million people worldwide would be more optimal, and provide room for a healthy growth in population of the "new human," born post-event, without the baggage of the "old world." They talked like this unfortunate staffer who spoke recklessly for the record:
'There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it….' 'Our program in El Salvador didn't work. The infrastructure was not there to support it. There were just too goddamned many people…. To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females….' The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease like the Black Death….'
Thomas Ferguson, State Department Office of Population Affairs
He was far from alone, there were armies of Fred Ikles and Tom Fergusons out there; at RAND, at Tulane, at UCLA, at CIA, etc, exemplified at the top by the people I dedicated Triage to—Nitze, McCloy, both Dulles brothers, etc. The machinery we are now unavoidably witnessing has been being assembled for decades, and with AI and the moral collapse via acquisition of a free press, the information space, which for many years was not able to be entirely controlled, is now theirs as well.
One thorny detail that people like this are known to discuss in surviving the largest mass death cycle in human history is how to survive the aftermath--how would you manage to control the servant class, the security class? In a post-legal world the realities of a Praetorian Guard are stark. Why would your security detail not kill you and take your stuff? It's a valid question, right? If only we could develop robots to perform those types of duties.
