In a statement that both surprises me and fails to surprise me at all, I have to confess to finding a certain amount of enjoyment in the music of one G.G. Allin. G.G. had a simple mission statement during his musical career. That is, he wanted to reclaim “rock and roll” from the corporate interests that had essentially taken it over. At least, that was the theory. What he ended up doing in practice was running about the stage and audience naked, shitting on himself, flinging shit at the audience, and trading punches with said audience.
But whenever I get to musing upon the decline of Human civilisation and the environment as a result of Human overpopulation, I get to thinking. One G.G. Allin song presents the simplest and most elegant solution to the problem. No, not Expose Yourself To Kids or Suck My Ass It Smells (yes, these are real song titles). I refer, of course, to the song entitled Legalize Murder. I will stick in a YouChoob fan-made video of this song so you have some idea of what I am on about (be warned that G.G. Allin videos tend to contain at least one thing that makes one wish they had not tried to watch):
Please do not mistake the use of this video in this article for an endorsement of G.G. Allin‘s views or way of life. There are two kinds of punk (at least in my view, and my view is the one that counts, so piss off). There is the kind that espouses anarchy and destruction, of which G.G. is obviously quite an extreme example. Then there is the kind that espouses tearing down the society that is clearly not working for the people in the audience and working to build something in its place that does. That is an important distinction because whilst the destructive, anarchic kind does get it wrong more often than not, every once in a while they touch upon an idea that is so right for the time and place that even Albert Einstein would ask why he did not think of that himself.
As with all ideas, however, the implementation is an important point. Simply allowing people to kill each other without fear of repercussion or consequence will cause our society and world more trouble than it is worth, and thus negate all of the good that I think the idea itself can do. No, in order for legalised murder to be effective, there has to be strict regulation not only of where the murder occurs, but who is fair game.
Films (and the novels they are poorly adapted from) like The Running Man or The Hunger Games sort of touch upon this idea to an extent. In the former case, enemies of the state are turned loose in a large open-area arena where soldiers with high-tech gear hunt them down for the amusement of an audience. The problem with this implementation is that it is expensive and extremely inefficient. If the match shown in the film is any guide, millions of dollars worth of technology is used to track and kill maybe three or four dissidents in one night. Yes, I will assume the show to be nightly for the sake of argument, and let us assume a constant rate of four people. That is only 1,460 people a year, and that is making the bold assumption that the show runs 365 days a year. To say that this would not even make a dent in the number of people born every year on a planet with seven billion people is an understatement. Natural disasters in India kill more than that in one hit. Cyclone 05B, which struck the Indian State of Orissa in 1999, killed at least 10,100 people according to unofficial estimates.
Yet when one assumes an average of 2.3 children per couple, and that the current seven billion Human population consists of around five billion persons capable of reproducing, even disasters in a dozen parts of the world killing 10,000 persons every month will not suffice to cut the numbers down. Not fast enough to restore sustainability in time.
If there is one killer of Homo Sapiens that can be relied upon to get the job done and get it done extremely well, without fail, year in and year out, it is Homo Sapiens. Which brings us back to the question of how we implement legalised murder.
One of the biggest problems with how we implement legalised murder, as has been depicted in films of every colour, is who gets to do it to whom. In such works as The Hunger Games, it is pretty well established that the competition is an open battle between the poor staged for the amusement of the rich. Unfortunately, divisions in our society often work along these lines, with even children being taught to think of each other as lesser or inferior for failure to display the appropriate symbols or membership badges of being part of the desired crowd. And this is entirely the wrong line to think along when deciding who gets it in the neck. Even the best implementation of this concept in film, Death Race 2000, gets it mostly wrong with road workers and roadside pedestrians providing most of the kills. The closest that the film gets to getting it right is in two scenes. One where Frankenstein (the late David Carradine) passes up running down infirm and disabled hospital patients, killing their doctors instead. The other is when Frankenstein runs down the President himself.
You see, most of the people with the power to make this sort of thing happen think to themselves that mass murder of the underclass by itself will take care of the problem they are addressing. To a degree, they are right. Undereducated, ignorant folk who see nothing wrong with churning out child after child whilst the world falls down around them would be a good choice to remove from the planet. But a significant part of the problem also lies in the manner in which these rich old assholes are essentially taking everything in our world for themselves and leaving nothing for the rest of us.
What the legalisation of murder needs in order to work effectively, other than large arenas with massive paricipation amounts, is an independent committee to determine who is put into competition. And it cannot just be a singular factor that determines eligibility. Rich, white, and healthy enough to spawn an army of children? In you go with nothing but what comes to hand if you get lucky. Not so rich, still white, and afflicted with diabetes? In you go, but we will give you an assortment of powerful weapons to make your task easier. The incentive to compete rather than cooperate being that getting out of the arena is not an option until the considerable populace within has been cut down by about ninety percent. And the gag is that if all the groups agree to just sit down and not fight, well, America has plenty of tools at its disposal for turning Human beings into splats on the ground, only a small percentage of which will leave said ground uninhabitable. Prize money or favours for the winning ten percent could also be determined by circumstance. But considering that we literally have billions of people we need to get rid of before the twenty-second century, perhaps the winning one percent out of millions might be the way to go. If we use the rate of one billion every ten years as a place to put our feet, then a yearly rate of a hundred million is the amount we need to boost the death rate in this kind of fashion in order to have any chance of averting disaster. That is, in order to neutralise the rate at which the Human populace is expanding, the death rate has to be boosted to more than a hundred million per annum. In order to bring the Human populace back down to sustainable levels before the year 2100, we need to increase the death rate by at least three hundred million per annum.
My proposal (or proposed idea, call it what you like) might sound cruel, unfair, or even mean to you. But when it comes to reducing the size of the Human population to something our planet can provide resources for, we basically have two choices. We can either reduce the population in the manner I propose or something like it, or we can let nature start to reduce the population for us. And if history has proven one thing time and time again, it is that we can always count on ourselves to be kinder to us than we can ever expect nature to be.
Our right to reproduce freely is now in such dire conflict with our right to live without fear of murder or fear of starvation and disease that one of these rights has to be repealed. You might not be on board with repealing the right to reproduce freely, but the time has come when if we do not repeal it now, we are going to have to start rounding people up lottery-style and making them murder one another.
Quite frankly, I would pay to see a cross-section of society, some three hundred million people all on an island the size of Hawaii, handed weapons and told no leaving until ninety-nine percent of the total are dead. But hopefully Humanity will smarten up a bit before that happens, and allow us proper control over how we reproduce.
I look forward to the first broadcast of legal mass murder in the next fifty years, in other words.
I Still Find It So Hard... 