The title says it all. People who proudly label themselves pronatalists—those who believe we should have as many children as possible to “save civilization”—are some of the most delusional, self-absorbed people walking the planet today. Their ideology is an intellectual black hole, sucking in any shred of logic or compassion and replacing it with crude genetic determinism, techno-utopian delusions, and a total disregard for the planet’s carrying capacity. They have convinced themselves that more people will fix the very problems created by, well, too many people. This is the a priori ignorance of individualism taken to its most asinine extreme.
A recent Guardian article, “America’s Premier Pronatalists on Having ‘Tons of Kids’ to Save the World,” lays bare the absurdity of these ideas. The movement—championed by billionaires like Elon Musk and backed by a cadre of wealthy, self-proclaimed “genius breeders”—rests on the laughable idea that they alone hold the genetic keys to humanity’s future. Their worldview is a cocktail of biological illiteracy, techno-fascist arrogance, and an utter blindness to the most pressing existential threats of our time. This isn’t just bad science—it’s eugenics in a cheap disguise.
The Delusions of Individualism Run Amok
We live in an era where personal ambition is not just tolerated but encouraged at the expense of collective well-being. David Sloan Wilson describes this phenomenon through multilevel selection theory: individual gains at lower levels of organization often come at the expense of higher-order stability. In other words, unchecked individualism disrupts the very structures that make civilization possible. Pronatalists epitomize this pathology. Their narcissistic obsession with perpetuating their bloodlines disregards the broader needs of society, the environment, and future generations. It’s scientific illiteracy at its finest.
Let’s be clear: more people is not a good thing. Not now. Not ever in the foreseeable future.
The Science Is Unambiguous: Mo’ People, Mo’ Problems
Let’s cut through the nonsense: adding more people to a burning building doesn’t put out the fire. It just guarantees more casualties. The data is overwhelming—our greatest crises, from climate change to public health disasters, are exacerbated by overpopulation.
Take COVID-19. Global travel and overcrowded cities created an express lane for the virus to spread, yet pronatalists act as though pandemics are an unfortunate side effect rather than a direct consequence of overpopulation, and this is just the beginning. More people mean more pandemics, more public health emergencies, and a greater strain on fragile medical systems.
The ecological consequences are even more dire. The Malthusian dilemma—briefly staved off by the Green Revolution—looms larger than ever. More mouths to feed means intensified industrial agriculture, soil depletion, water shortages, and a deepening reliance on synthetic fertilizers that poison ecosystems. We are not “thriving” under modernity—we are devouring the biosphere at an accelerating pace. The only viable solution isn’t more children but fewer. Drastically fewer.
And let’s talk waste. More people generate more sewage. More plastic. More pollution. More pointless consumer goods manufactured, used briefly, and discarded into overflowing landfills or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The math is simple: infinite growth on a finite planet is a death spiral. We are not suffering from a lack of humans. We are suffering from too many.
A Weird Point of Agreement: Societies, Like Ecosystems, Have Limits
I believe in building a bigger table, not kicking people away from it. But every table has a limit—there comes a point when the structure collapses under its own weight. That’s not bigotry. That’s social physics. Even the most well-intentioned social systems have a breaking point.
This is where I find myself in an unusual, begrudging sphere of agreement with people like Elon Musk, though I suspect for very different reasons. He sees civilization as a tech startup—scalable and endlessly expandable. I see it as an ecosystem, governed by limits. The unfortunate truth is that we are already at a breaking point. Housing shortages, overwhelmed hospitals, and underfunded schools aren’t products of xenophobia; they are material realities exacerbated by unchecked population growth. And right now, we are well past our sustainable threshold. This is where liberals tend to miss the mark. Immigration isn’t a question of race. It’s a question of social carrying capacity.
I saw this firsthand while living in Poland as my wife and I endured the grueling, expensive, and exasperating process of legal immigration to the U.S. When Russia invaded Ukraine, nearly ten million refugees flooded into Poland. Despite widespread solidarity, the nation’s healthcare, education, and housing sectors buckled under the strain. This isn’t a theoretical debate—it’s what happens when a well-intentioned system meets the hard limits of reality.
Final Thought: Pronatalism Is a Death Cult
Elon Musk and his billionaire breeding enthusiasts are not visionaries. They are not saviors. They are deluded aristocrats trying to construct an ideological justification for their genetic vanity projects. The idea that they, rather than the millions of starving, displaced, and suffering people around the world, are the “solution” to our problems is not just wrong—it’s utterly grotesque.
The future will not be saved by billionaire eugenicists producing dynasties of nepotistic elites. It will be saved by those willing to recognize that the most responsible decision we can make for our planet, our societies, and our descendants is to stop feeding the infernal engine of unchecked population growth. It’s a fundamental acknowledgment of modern ecological and biological theory.
The hard truth? We don’t need more people. We need fewer. Hard stop.
