The Big Lie of ‘Slow Growth’

When the News Media Analyze Population Growth, ‘Newspeak’ is the Norm – How Else Could Growing by Tens of Millions Be ‘Slow Growth?’

“Newspeak” was the official language of the fictional country of Oceania in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949. It was a language created and controlled by the totalitarian state as a tool to repress freedom of thought and concepts that the paranoid regime deemed threatening.

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), 1903-1950

According to Newspeak’s famous formulation, “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength.”

Nowadays we use the term Newspeak to denote any Orwellian language that deliberately manipulates our thought or obfuscates reality, as in “fast is slow.” Newspeak can be used to stamp the right “spin” on events and phenomena or, even more blatantly, to promote “the Big Lie.”

That expression is attributed to none other than Adolf Hitler. In his notorious 1925 book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote about employing lies so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

When it comes to their reporting on California population growth in particular and U.S. population growth more generally, most mainstream journalists lapse into Newspeak and promote the Big Lie that U.S. population growth is slowing down.

In ecological terms at any rate, nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. already has 320 million residents – heavy resource consumers all – making us the third-largest in world population after just China and India. Instead of slowing down or stabilizing, every decade our bloated population continues packing on another 25 to 30 million new consumers/residents or more, with no end in sight. It is an unfolding, slow-motion environmental calamity of the first magnitude.

Yet we hear little or nothing of this anymore, because it does not serve the vested interests of the morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt growth machine: that insidious, ubiquitous complex of business, economic and political players that profits from, and pushes for, perpetual population growth in California and the USA. The corporate media are ever the eager cheerleaders for this growth machine, both locally and nationally.

The Growth Machine

Forty years after “small is beautiful” became a catchphrase of the counter-culture 1970s, and the title of a best-selling, subversive 1973 book – subtitled “economics as if people mattered” – by the iconoclastic English economist (and brother-in-law of the celebrated physicist Werner Heisenberg) E.F. Schumacher, the mainstream news media in America still locks step in unison like a marching band, braying the simple-minded propaganda that “Bigger is Better!”

Democratic and Republican politicians alike trip over themselves to promote mass immigration and more growth, serving their paymasters and puppeteers on Wall Street, corporate boardrooms in Silicon Valley and Redmond, and in the offices of self-serving, power-hungry ethnic organizations like the National Council of La Raza, which single-mindedly seek to increase their clout in America by increasing the numbers of their own ethnic group.

E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977), author of Small is Beautiful, near his home in Caterham, Surrey

A couple of years ago, in an Issues piece I wrote for CAPS, I complained that reporters “missed the mark” in their analysis of the 2010 Census. They missed the forest for the trees. While despondent that the growth rate (measured in annual percentage) was slightly lower, they missed the big picture that the sheer numbers of people still being added to an already overpopulated state and nation were enormous…and had enormous environmental consequences (which were ignored altogether).

Indeed, absolute population growth in the U.S. during the decade from 2000 to 2010 was second or third highest of any of the 22 decades since the first Census back in 1790. But that was not what the news media told us. Instead, the media fretted that population growth – that implicit source of power and that sign of health among a people and vitality of economic well-being – why, that growth was slowing, and this was worrisome. The clear implication was that our sagging population needed a boost through more babies, more immigrants or, preferably, both.

Little appears to have changed, judging from a December 10 article in the Sacramento Bee. The Bee fussed that:

California’s once-soaring population growth slowed markedly during the last two decades, barely keeping pace with the nation…

The pathetic imagery is that of an exhausted marathon runner whose pace is faltering, and who is falling behind the pack in the race to victory and glory. Faster population growth is equated with winning the rat race to power and prestige!

And yet the Sac Bee article then informs us that the California Department of Finance expects California’s population to grow to 52.6 million by 2060, from 37.3 million in 2010, an increase of 15.3 million, or 41 percent. Only the four largest states in the entire country – California, Texas, Florida and New York – even have populations that surpass 15.3 million.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects the United States as a whole to grow by 35 percent to 417 million over the same period.

To make the preposterous claim that California growing by 15.3 million over the coming 50 years – more than 300,000 every year on average for half a century – is “slow growth” – is the very essence of the Big Lie to which the Big Media are complicit in our state and country.

According to this benighted, backward, simple-minded point of view, California and Californians would be better off if the state were even more overpopulated than it is today.

And we all know what a crock that is.