Family Time

Contrary to the trendy rationalism espoused by mere experts, there are of course a number of perfectly valid reasons why people become breeders, and why their lords and masters tend to urge them on. The first and most popular reason is that a supernatural entity ordered it a long time ago. Another, doubtless unrelated to the first thanks to the loftier perspective typical of priestly classes, is racism: if there are fewer of Us, there will be more of Them. A third, popular among leaders, is the principle of divide and rule: the more people, the more poverty, the fewer resources, the less education, the more people. The virtues of this circle have always been apparent to the kind of tribal saviour currently known as the "rightwing populist", whose characteristic enthusiasm for breeders and babies is often neatly counterbalanced by a tendency to get people killed in satisfyingly large quantities. Finally, the urge to breed in times of danger is well known, and since the present global extinction event cannot help but affect human populations eventually, it is only natural that parents should be anxious to give their own genetic inheritance the best possible chance of surviving this century's increasingly likely cull. That in doing so they should hasten and exacerbate the cull, for which their grandchildren will presumably blame and exterminate the grandchildren of The Others, is of course only human, and of course ever so sweet.