A Modest Proposal for Today*
To save human civilization at a lesser cost in human suffering than competing proposals: a mass adultocide!
Speaking at the latest ineffectual climate conference, Barack Obama confessed: “Folks in my generation have not done enough to deal with a potentially cataclysmic problem that you now stand in here.”
Yes, the young are now standing waist-deep in a climate-cataclysmic cesspit. We humans aren’t very good at thinking in terms of probabilities, especially when it comes to climate change. On this issue, we tend to hear silly disagreements over whether — during a child’s lifetime — climate change will cause significantly greater human suffering (droughts, floods, heatwaves, super storms) or the collapse of human civilization (famines, mass migrations, and wars, all caused by the physical effects of climate change). The probabilistic reality is, we run a lesser but not insignificant risk of human civilization collapsing, and a greater, nearly certain risk of significantly increased human suffering. There’s also a probability, less likely, that we solve the climate crisis, and the broader ecological crisis of which it is a central part. More on that below.
Obama acknowledged that the young have “real anger at older people” - and that their anger is justified. Later, he mentioned that “young activists from all over the world” are “taking up the baton on climate change”.
But what if, instead of a baton, they picked up clubs? Or knives? Or guns?
I ask, because Obama reminded me of a cult classic film, ¿Quién Puede Matar a un Niño? (Who Can Kill a Child, also remade nearly shot-for-shot as Come Out and Play). The film’s 8-minute opening credit sequence is composed of newsreel footage of children killed in the Holocaust, the Indo-Pakistani wars, the U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the Nigerian civil war. The message being: wow, adults sure have committed a lot of unspeakable atrocities against children! (Yet to be added to the list of atrocities: the children who die from famines, mass migrations, and wars caused by increased droughts, heatwaves, and flooding.)
Then the film starts, with a British tourist couple visiting a remote island in Spain, and discovering that all of the adults are missing. They soon learn that the night before, all of the children on the island had spontaneously united to murder all the adults. The adults were powerless to defend themselves from the marauding bands of children; after all, who could kill a child, even in self-defense? <Spoiler alert!> The few adults left are eventually killed — often with gleeful sadism by young children and teenagers. The last remaining (adult) survivor tries to escape by boat, but he is swarmed by knife-wielding children at the dock. As he beats bloody with an oar child after onrushing child, the coast guard arrives, and promptly shoots him dead. The children play the victim to draw the coast guard men off their boat, then steal their rifles and shoot them. In the final scene, the children of the island decide to take their revolution global, sailing off to convert the whole world’s children into adult-massacring revolutionaries. A girl asks one of the departing boys, “Do you think there are children outside of this island who want to play this way with us?” The boy answers, “Yes, in the whole world there are many children. Many.”
It got me thinking: Obama and this film director have a point. Hypothetically, wouldn’t it be better for the world, for our species, if all children starting killing the adults? This might be the best option we have to avoid ecological catastrophe, and offer hope for the future of human civilization. After all, the people who are impeding the solutions to climate change are all adults. And as a matter of justice, adults are the ones responsible for the dire future children are facing. (Or would face, if they don’t start massacring adults now.)
Granted, if all the world’s children just up and murdered all the world’s adults, clubbing, stabbing, and shooting them in droves, it would cause some problems. To my knowledge, there are no children who know nuclear power plants well enough to keep them from melting down, or nuclear weapons command and control systems well enough to disable them. So the children would have to keep some of us adults alive, at least until they acquire the necessary know-how.
In fact, the children would really only need to start killing a small subset of adults: the richer, older set. If several thousands of the world’s most powerful investors, executives, and politicians were shot, poisoned, or bludgeoned to death by their own children and their children’s friends, it would create quite a spur to action for the rest. If I were a powerful politician previously focused exclusively on not upsetting the wealthy, it wouldn’t take more than a dozen or so front-page stories about my former donors and peers being perforated into bloody sponges by scissor-wielding schoolchildren for me to come to Jesus. Yes, it’s hard to take away some economic freedom from the biggest owners of the economy. But it’s required if we are to transform the economic system for long-term sustainability. And it would be a lot easier to do when the owners are all looking over their shoulders for the next human wave of bloodthirsty children. Greta Thunberg already inspires a weird amount of rage in many adults. Imagine the terror she** could inspire with a couple dozen pairs of adult ears hanging from her belt! Just a few thousand closely targeted child-on-adult killings, pour encourager les autres, might do the trick.
However, I must admit that my critics have a point: can we really expect children to be so discerning in their murder spree? How would they distinguish between a major oil investor with a sociopathic disregard for others, from an activist investor seeking to use share ownership to force oil companies to mothball their fossil fuel reserves and retool into renewable energy companies? Sadly, with children running this adultocide, it’s unrealistic to expect that only the guilty will perish.
Besides, even if children proved capable of a just discernment — if they were the Solomon of serial killers — the idea of children massacring the world’s most powerful adults to encourage the others sounds a lot like terrorism. And since terrorism is always wrong (which is why terrorists like Georg Elser are universally condemned), our proposal must stick closer to the plot of the film, with children massacring all adults, in principled equality.
My heart filled with the utmost sincerity, I profess that I have not the least personal or financial interest in promoting this necessary solution. Quite the contrary: I am forty years old myself, so I too am on the chopping block. My sole motive is the public good and the survival of human civilization, by eliminating the impediments to the structural transformation of the global economic system that is the only way to avoid ecological catastrophe.
Additionally, this proposal would go some way toward reducing the problem of economic inequality, since most wealth is owned by adults, and upon death wealth is split up — among a few relatives, at least. (It’s incrementalism, yes, but we mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
I admit, this might not be the most politically correct idea. Some may even be offended at the suggestion that the world’s children should immediately begin murdering adults indiscriminately (or discriminately). But what are the alternative proposals?
One proposal is that the world’s most powerful governments might cooperate on implementing the plans scientists have already mapped out, directly building a renewable energy infrastructure to provide for global energy needs. But the world’s most powerful governments are in the U.S. and E.U., where there is a widespread allergy to the idea of using the government to command the economy (that is, to command the owners of the economy). There, a powerful intellectual argument against government intervention in the economy holds sway, the essence of which is: because freedom. So instead of doing what governments most evidently can do in wartime, the U.S. and E.U. governments will most likely continue to do whatever the owners of great wealth allow them to — which so far has been very little.
Also, government officials listen to Bank-of-Sweden-Prize-in-Economic-Sciences-in-Memory-of-Alfred-Nobel laureate economists who, starting from bonkers assumptions, reason with flawless mathematical logic to the conclusion that climate change will barely affect “the economy”. This sort of argumentation is the spoonful of sugar that helps the subservience-to-those-with-enough-wealth-and-influence-to-affect-politicians’-careers go down. “Hey, maybe the climate scientists whose models are run on supercomputers and feed on massive amounts of real world observations are wrong, and the economic scientists whose models fit on a few dozen pages of a journal and are based on assumptions so discordant with the real world that their conclusions only apply in fantasy are right! Who am I to say? Besides, my donors and their employed intellectuals tell me that ‘the economy’ will be harmed if the government tries to avert catastrophe.” So, that’s unlikely to work.
Another proposal is that “investors”, the “global investor class”, or just “business” will save us. This is technically possible. The owners of the world’s largest companies could unite and coordinate, using their vast resources, to do the same thing that I just discussed the world’s most powerful governments doing. However, companies operate under “hard” budgetary constraints, and in an emergency requiring nothing less than restructuring the global economy, “soft” budgetary constraints — which only governments can chose to enjoy — are quite helpful. I’m with the CEO of Munich Re on this: “I think it’s an illusion. It’s not only that we [businesses] don’t have the mandate. We don’t have the means, honestly.” Furthermore, if getting just the U.S., E.U., and BRICS governments to unite in cooperation to restructure the global economic system is the mother of all coordination problems, then what is getting the Forbes Global 2000 biggest corporations to do the same? The matriarch of all coordination problems? La capa delle tutte cape of all coordination problems?
A third proposal is that a deus will just up and spring ex machina. That is, some magical technology will be developed that governments and the investor class will use to stop climate change and fix all of the other problems that make up the ecological crisis, from plastics pollution to biodiversity loss and land contamination. Well, I certainly can’t dismiss this idea out of hand, but let’s just say that I need some assurances before I drop my adultocide proposal.
A final proposal, less widely discussed in the media outlets owned by the investor class, is revolution. But not a sensible, possible revolution like that of children massacring all adults: an infeasible left-wing sort of revolution. The idea is to overthrow existing governments and replace them with governments willing to reduce the power of “business” by directly implementing the plans scientists have devised to run the world on renewable energy. The problem with this proposal is that there are no revolutionary parties or organizations with the numbers or discipline to carry out a revolution. In the U.S., there are almost certainly more armed men in QAnon-believing militias than there are people even idly fantasizing about a left-wing revolution, let alone actively organizing for one. The means of mass communication — the technologies we use to spread information into millions of heads — are owned by people who have nothing to gain and everything to lose from a revolution. The internet offers some possibilities, but as it is currently structured, a critique of the latest edition of a monopoly American football videogame gets more views than anything left-wing and revolutionary. (Though the guy in that 800,000-view videogame video is basically making a left-wing political economy critique of the industry and its media.)
Besides, even if such a party did begin to get organized, the U.S. government today has spying powers that make 1984’s Big Brother seem so technologically retarded, by comparison it’s nearly libertarian. And the U.S. security state wants to have a left-wing revolutionary movement to crush; wants it so bad they even resort to making revolutionary movements up, like the “Black Identity Extremists”, just to experience how it would feel to suppress left-wing movements like in the old days. Oh no, the Black Identity Extremists — they’re going to slit all our throats by a thousand paper-cuts from an Ibram X. Kendi book! So no, clearly a left-wing revolution is less reasonable than a child-led mass adultocide. (I just hope the security state employee reading this modest proposal is literate, interprets it accordingly, and so doesn’t put me on a no-fly list or worse!)
After weighing the evidence, and considering the alternatives, I think we all can agree. It has to be the children: they are our future, our hope, and hopefully, with any luck, our executioners!
*In case anyone is offended by this modest proposal itself, and not the insanity it should be making apparent, please read this A Modest Proposal, and think a little.
** Especially were she a melanated member of one of the thousands of indigenous communities around the world bearing the brunt of the wealthy’s neo-colonial climate destruction, but that is for another piece and a theme I wholeheartedly entrust to Karim.
Your proposal of children putting an end to ruling class by killing off the adults is similar to mine. In the revolutionary uprising, I dream of, I would hope that it would be the old to be the cannon fodder in the push to take down the Oligarchies around the world! It has been mentioned many times in different spaces discussing how to start such a revolution, that it must be “Either you are with us or you are against us!” It would be you die fighting with the revolutionaries or you are the target of the revolution.