Fast forward a couple hundred years, to England where a newly born male child was named Thomas Robert Malthus.  Malthus was born into the Enlightenment, a second renaissance of sorts, and none could deny it’s importance or its sweeping ramifications.   

But like Galileo Galilei before him, Malthus was not pioneering anything scholars in distant lands had not known for centuries.  Europe was still just waking up from seven hundred years of Caesarean Apartheid.  Europe was rediscovering the world and trying to cope with the image derived from classical literature with their first hand experience with Empire.

The world was hardly as romantic as it appeared to be in legends and myths, and so it was all too easy for scholars to scrap the myths altogether and start fresh.  Scholars like Malthus, armed with more accurate globes, and a heliocentric model of the solar system, realized the system we depended on, planet earth, had limits.

The planet was not, in fact, boundless as it was once believed to be. 

Mathus’ contribution came in being, if not the first, then the loudest proponent of demography, the newly minted science of population studies.  Using algebra, the new math that Ibn Sahl used when quantifying the properties of efficacious optics, Mathus explored the logistical limits of Behaim’s “earth apple”.

Precisely how many people, Malthus wondered, could possibly fit on a planet as finite as earth?

The answer to that question, which Malthus toiled over for a considerable amount of time, induced an existential panic among Enlightenment Scholars.  Malthus understandably observed, and adequately quantified the logistical limits of our planetary system.

And what did Malthus conclude?  That we were all about to die of starvation.

Mind you, by the time the Enlightenment came around, existing Church doctrine had been found lacking in many ageless doctrines, at least as far as the proof department was concerned, so there was little if no incentive to disbelieve Malthus. 

Compounding wavering support for Church doctrine was the Holy Bible itself, which predicted the End Times would be inaugurated by widespread famine and disease.  Thomas Robert Malthus merely calculated a date certain.

To put Thomas Robert Malthus into contemporary contexts, he was the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes of his day.  He learned a little math in college, then started screaming we’re all going to die.

In in 1834, when Malthus died – and not of starvation mind you, – the population of Earth is estimated to have been 700 million.  That doesn’t sound like a lot to us today, but we have grown accustomed to billions, whereas Malthus had to use all of his fingers and toes just to arrive at his sums.

Annual population growth of that age was just one tenth of one percent, but that was enough to convince Malthus we were all doomed.  Imminently.  In fact, no single scholar contributed more to the theories of Karl Marx than Malthus.  Because of Malthus, Marx focused, almost exclusively on just the creature requirements of human beings.

If Malthus was correct, and everyone agreed that he was, depriving any human being their creature requirements was tantamount to murder.  Under the influence of opium and suffering in the midst of a Malthusian Crisis, Murder is precisely what Karl Marx proclaimed the world’s Nobility, aristocracy, industrialists and merchant classes were guilty of in The German Ideology.

Fast forward to today and we can all agree that Thomas Malthus was clearly wrong on all accounts.  And while that is comforting to everyone which does not share the Skeptical School’s addiction to narcotics, neo-Marxists remain convinced Malthus was a man ahead of his time.  Doom, neo-Marxists insist, is just around the corner.

The harvest may not have failed, as predicted by Malthus, but its delayed demise was only attributable to the fossil fuel industry which, according to equally dubious mathematics, are about to be exhausted.

According to neo-Marxists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, humanity is teetering on the precipice of extinction, all because of the usual suspects.

Malthus remains, perhaps, the most relevant figure in accredited academia because, since Malthus first broke his calculator, doomsday professors following in his footsteps have leapt off one intellectual cliff after another.

Do not expect this lemming like reflex among the Skeptical School to learn from their mistakes.  Extremist and alarmist movements in accredited academia are not new, are grounded in fuzzy mathematics and are always proven wrong within decades.

But extremists among accredited academia can do extraordinary damage in such a small window of time. 

The panic that Malthus set off among leading scholars, Karl Marx among them, forms the existential angst behind each and every Malthusian Crisis to rears its ugly head since 1848.

In fact, as the remainder of these essays will document, a Malthusian Crisis which occurred in 1918 provided the moral high ground seized by the National Socialist Worker’s Party and justified the extremes and extent of the Socialist Holocausts of the 20^th Century.

In other words, this occupational hazard I allude did not merely effect one man.  Accredited academia boogie mans Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist Worker’s Party, in part, to obscure the role the academic community played in the world’s first War of Extinction.

Following another epiphany in 1905, Skeptics in accredited academia were no longer able to trust Noblesse Oblige and to deliver to deliver the human race from imminent extinction.  In 1905 Europe, it was decided, Malthus may have been wrong in the 1800s, but he was about to be proven right in the 20^th century.

All the mathematicians agreed.

The epiphany of 1905 will have to wait.  You will want to know everything that resulted from Ibn Sahl’s lens in order to appreciate just how insane the Socialist International was in the early part of the 20^th Century. Next