The Great Balancing Act: If His Facts Were Right, Moore Would Still Be Wrong

Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, doesn’t look at all like what you’d normally expect factionalist political propaganda to look like. In Planet of the Humans Moore plays at being in the middle between environmentalists and industrialists. The documentary presents itself as a reasonable third alternative to the typical industrialist versus environmentalist bickering. Yet at the same time it seems to refute every major claim environmentalists make and support every major claim industrialists make. There are also more than a fair number of factual inaccuracies in it, as many reviews have attested to.¹^,²

Planet of the Humans uses the appearance of expertise to make itself sound authoritative to educated non-experts while at the same time framing itself as exposing the lies of corrupt intellectual elites in order to appeal to the values of the average person.

I like to think that I’m an intelligent person with decent critical thinking skills, and yet I fell for Moore’s propaganda hook line and sinker. If not for the fact that I have friends and acquaintances all across the political spectrum, I might not have found out about the factual inaccuracies in the documentary at all. Furthermore, if I only trusted sources that agreed with all my political views then I wouldn’t trust the experts when they say Planet of the Humans got their facts wrong. (Actually I wouldn’t trust any sources at all, because no one agrees with all of my political views. But I digress.)

This genie isn’t going back in its bottle. Planet of the Humans is going to fool many people. Simply banning the documentary won’t stop that. If anything that will make it worse. If it gets censored, people will be more likely to believe it. After all, the average person asks, why would the video be hidden from the public eye unless it revealed something that those in power wanted to hide?

So if facts and data aren’t sufficient to fight the misinformation, and censorship isn’t either, what’s left?

What’s left is to make people lose interest in what Moore’s documentary has to say. Facts and data only matter because they affect human decisions about things that humans care about. Instead of just trying to prove that Planet of the Humans is factually inaccurate, the more effective way to counter the harm the documentary does would be to prove that its main argument would be wrong even if every factual claim it made were entirely accurate. Such would make the factual inaccuracies of Planet of the Humans no longer matter.

As it so happens, the documentary digs its own grave on this issue, too. Moore claims that all of the solutions to the environmental crisis that environmentalists have proposed so far are entirely unfeasible except for drastic population reduction. Even if this were true, that wouldn’t mean that population reduction is the only possible solution. It would only mean we haven’t thought of a better one yet.

After all, every new problem we've faced since the dawn of human history was considered unsolvable when first encountered. Despite that our species has solved a great many problems throughout history. Our current environmental predicament is no different. Yet Moore fails to take this into account in his documentary. He focuses only on solutions that humans have already proposed and argued about and doesn’t recognize the sheer abundance of potential solutions that have yet to be explored.

If nothing else, I agree with Moore that the natural environment is precious and worth protecting (assuming that’s what he actually believes). After all, we depend on nature’s resources to live! But if someone believes that billions of people need to die to save the environment and the human species from destruction, they’re simply not thinking outside the box.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the last time there was a major mainstream call for large segments of the human population to die as a means of protecting the environment, it was in the 1940’s. As in, the 1940’s in Nazi Germany.

Many people don’t remember this, but environmentalist arguments were part of the justification Hitler used for the holocaust.³ Of course, that doesn’t give us license to utterly trash the environment and do whatever we want with it. Just because Hitler cared about the environment doesn’t make the environment less valuable.

However, what it does mean is that these issues are more complicated and nuanced than they might first appear. At the very least, we ought to have a global conference discussing this situation honestly and comprehensively before giving up and letting billions of people die off.

But even if we don’t have a global conference, there are still other obvious things we can do besides mere green energy campaigns or giving up and letting billions of people die off. I was able to think of one such solution in less than five minutes once I seriously considered the problem.

And what is that solution?

The short and snarky version:
Humanity needs more territory! Have civilization-building video-games taught people nothing!?

The longer more serious version:
Instead of letting billions of people die off and returning quality of life to the crap-sack of antiquity, improve the education systems and use more efficient and reliable power sources (nuclear power) in order to extend nature’s deadline long enough to make spaceships that can support life! Then we could start extracting resources from other planets.

While it’s true that there’s no such thing as 100% clean and renewable energy sources (The law of entropy makes that impossible a priori), there are still some energy sources which are cleaner and more efficient than others. Nuclear power isn’t perfectly clean and efficient, but in terms of cleanliness and efficiency it’s in a whole other league than coal or natural gas.⁴^,⁵^,⁶ Planet of the Humans doesn’t talk about nuclear power at all.

Another way to help solve our environmental and energy problems would be to improve the education systems. Improving the education systems would allow us to use our resources more efficiently. And I don’t just mean in terms of teaching people how to conserve electricity from appliances. Our bodies and brains run off of electricity too, which we get from a variety of bio-fuels (or in other words food). When people improve their skills, they’re able to accomplish bigger or more impressive feats or goals, to perform more effectively at tasks and activities, for a lower energy cost.

When you do things more effectively, that effectiveness is defined by yours or others’ goals or values—that is to say, what kind of outcomes you or they want. When you fulfill a value or goal that other people have, you are in a fundamental sense providing them a good or service, creating economic value for them. If people become more skilled, they won’t need to use as many calories for the same amount of work, which means they are able to use the energy they get from their food more efficiently, allowing them to do more work and create more economic value than they would have been able to before.

This process could help us generate out-of-the-box solutions to our everyday problems which could potentially lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, or solve our problems in some other way we haven’t thought of yet, without any significant reduction in population size. Indeed, having more people gives us more problem-solvers and more collective brainpower to solve problems with! This process is a big part of what civilization is made of.

Another way to think about this is in terms of the Malthusian Trap. The Malthusian Trap, also known as the Population Trap, is a vicious boom and bust cycle of human civilization. Here’s how it works:

New sources of energy or resources lead to abundance of such energy or resources and thereby improve quality of life.
This is then followed by population growth (having more resources means more people can live at the same time).
The population growth leads to the energy or resources available per person decreasing back to what it was before discovering new sources of energy or resources.
That lowers quality of life back to where it was before such discoveries until the next such discovery is made.⁷

I don’t think one can permanently “escape” the Malthusian Trap. The Malthusian Trap is simply a manifestation of the tendency for organized structures to fall apart if people don't make an active effort to maintain them. It’s the law of entropy as applied to human civilization. All work, no matter how tangible or intangible, is physical work that requires energy input. All goods and services that human beings can provide each other require energy input in the form of effort, from farming and building roads to designing games and helping different people understand each other better.

However, humanity can still “escape” the trap in the sense of continuing to build organized structure, to build civilization up higher, to continue improving quality of life, to turn the clock forward, to move on with our lives, to keep investing energy into our existence.

As I see it, there are four ways of “escaping” the Malthusian Trap:

Increase the death rate
Lower the birth rate
Find and use a larger or more efficient source of energy/resources/economic value (i.e. versatile multipurpose crops like hemp, or fuels like natural gas and nuclear power)
Increase people’s skills in a variety of areas so they can use energy more efficiently in different contexts

Additionally, if you increase people’s skill at teaching skills to each other, you make it so that they can teach each other skills to a greater extent for a lower energy cost. This would increase the rate at which our species’ collective knowledge and skills advance, including in fields that are relevant to extraterrestrial resource extraction and the construction of life-supporting spaceships.

As mentioned in the previous list, one solution to the Malthusian Trap and to our environmental predicament is to decrease the birth rate. Decreasing the birth rate is possible. Instead of letting most people die off, it would be more ethical to simply lower the number of people being born. The most obvious way to do this would be through birth control methods that already exist like condoms, abortions, and decreasing frequency of vaginal intercourse (full blown abstinence or decreasing frequency of humans mating entirely need not be necessary for that, there are other types of human mating practices that don’t result in children).

Some less obvious ways of lowering the birth rate would involve addressing the motivations for why people choose to have children in the first place and helping them channel those motivations in other ways. For instance, parents often choose to have children because they want to start a family. Their own parents, siblings, cousins etc. often live too far away to provide the kind of community and social support structure that families in large part exist to provide. If we redesign our social environment to make it easier for people to form familial relationships with and live with those they aren’t related to by blood, that would go a long way towards decreasing the birth rate because fewer people would feel like children are necessary to have a family.

I would also argue that part of the reason our society is so dysfunctional is because we’re expecting one or two parents to raise all of their children by themselves. Yet parenting is probably the hardest full-time job there is, literally. If a child has four or more parents to share the workload of caring for and raising them, those parents would be less stressed and less overwhelmed by their responsibility. As the saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child.”

Moore brings up the possibility of lowering the birth rate at one point in his documentary and dismisses it out of hand with hardly any discussion. He cites the fact that no other species has ever collectively limited their reproduction before. However, no other sentient species has dominated the planet like we have before. There are a lot of aspects of our current situation which are unprecedented. And again, just because something has never been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be.

I will also note that drastic cuts in the human population would severely lower quality of life because they would drastically lower the number of problem-solvers and would eliminate much of our problem-solving infrastructure in the process. Many organizations, movements and projects for the common good would simply cease because of insufficient people to work on them and each person who is still alive not having enough time to work on more than a couple of them.

A big part of the mechanism by which technology and industrial energy infrastructure has created prosperity over the past couple centuries is by freeing up people’s time so that they can provide more goods and services that they couldn’t provide previously, thereby solving problems that weren’t solved before.

While one might naively expect that all resource shortages can be solved by population reduction, much of the resources of modern civilization are intangible services which emerge from lots of people working together. If too many people die off, those services won't suddenly be in surplus, they’ll simply be gone.

Even if Planet of the Humans were entirely factually accurate, its suggestion that we “let nature run its course” by letting billions of people die off would still be dangerously premature. There are other solutions to humanity’s current environmental predicament besides that which don’t require reliance on non-nuclear renewable energy sources. We just need to implement them.

You can watch Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, here.

The Great Balancing Act

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

If His Facts Were Right, Moore Would Still Be Wrong

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