Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism by Robert Zubrin (PDF)

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There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a species whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its deadly consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world.Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, industrial development, and, most recently, fear-mongering about global warming. Merchants of Despair exposes this dangerous agenda and makes the definitive scientific and moral case against it.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review The book is replete with scientific studies and facts, though it is Zubrin’s view on the people and history behind antihumanist movements that is the most disturbing. Whether pointing out that the first Green Party was founded under the leadership of August Haussleiter, a former Nazi SS officer; that Fujimori’s genocide in Peru was funded by international aid; or that Qian Xinzhong was given the first United Nations Population Award (together with Indira Gandhi) after forcing thousands of Chinese women to abort their children, Zubrin paints a dark and disturbing picture of antihumanism that’s worth everyone’s time to read. –Publishers WeeklyRobert Zubrin’s masterful study makes for riveting reading. Merchants of Despair is a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress. –Steven W. Mosher, President, Population Research InstituteMerchants of Despair is an extraordinary and important book. This fascinating volume carefully traces developments of the Malthusian hypothesis right up to the present: through eugenics to population control and genocide; through the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and extreme environmentalism to climate change and the myth of global warming apocalypse. Robert Zubrin has my nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. –S. Fred Singer, Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years About the Author Robert Zubrin is the author of numerous books, including Energy Victory and The Case for Mars, a bestseller on space exploration and the human future. He is the president of Pioneer Astronautics, a fellow of the Center for Security Policy, the founder of the Mars Society, and a contributing editor to The New Atlantis. He has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and nine U.S. patents granted or pending. He lives in Golden, Colorado.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Zubrin is right on just about every count. The only flaw is a lack of appropriate skepticism.I bought this book expecting to agree with Zubrin. I heartily agree that the “Merchants of Despair” have sewn irrational fear about DDT, nuclear power, climate change, genetic engineering, overpopulation and world hunger. He has a long chapter on the devastating effect of the one-child policy in China.The centerpiece of the book is the famous 1980s bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon about the changing price of commodities over time. Ehrlich and the Club of Rome contended that humanity was running out of resources. We would overpopulated the planet and starve. Actually, as Zubrin points out with a number of useful graphs, food per capita increased significantly even in the poorest countries, notably India.Zubrin is right to say that the increase was due to human ingenuity. A lot of great brains working together, such as Norman Borlaug in agriculture and the silicon geniuses, allowed mankind to increase productivity faster than population. Even as the earth’s population expanded from under one billion to more than seven billion over the course of a century, our ability to feed ourselves more than kept up.Where he goes wrong is to project this trend to infinity. This remarkable increase appears to have been a one-time event caused by the constant increase in intelligence in Europe and Northeast Asia over the course of the prior millennium, culminating in the Industrial Revolution, the harnessing of electricity and fossil fuels.Newton and Gauss’ physics, Maxwell and Faraday’s work on electricity, the increasing exploitation of coal and petroleum had a transformative effect. They led to the electrification of the entire world, electronic communications, the train, the steamship, the automobile and the airplane. The last such major innovations, atomic energy and computers, are already fifty years old and they have not transformed our lives as dramatically as the above-named.I was surprised that fully half the book consists of an attack on Darwinism as practiced and especially on eugenics. Zubrin is especially harsh on Darwin’s acolytes Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, the Huxley’s and the leaders of world industry of that time. These people feared that the world would be overrun by the “lesser races.” There was already concern that the best and brightest were not reproducing themselves.An Englishman today would say that these fears were not misplaced. Like just about every ethnicity in every time, the swarms of immigrants protect their own and dislike the other, in this case native Englishman. Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” prediction of a half-century ago appears to be being borne out. Francis Galton would certainly not repent of history having proven him wrong.Zubrin is an optimist and a humanist. In his conclusion he writes “In a world of plenty, antihumanism declares that the hungry may not eat. Where there is space enough for everyone, antihumanism insists that myriads must be slain to make room for others. Where cures are available to avert disease, antihumanism demands that they not be employed. When new technology could make power cheaper and cleaner, antihumanism cries halt. When improved crops offer more food with fewer chemicals, antihumanism says no. Instead of welcoming the human spark of inventive genius, antihumanism decries it as a threat. When the human race improves nature, antihumanism condemns it for doing so, and calls for arrest and severe punishment. Where democracy allows for freedom of thought and conscience, antihumanism seeks to submerge reason and compassion and turn citizens into a herd.”He is too optimistic about human nature. He makes a twofold denial of evolution. First, he denies that evolution is a process of differentiation that has resulted in human populations being significantly different. Secondly, he does not want to acknowledge that nationalism, ethnocentrism, is innate, part and parcel of evolution.Zubrin’s history is several decades old. For the past half century at least the countries of Europe and North America have been hammered with messages of white guilt. They have been told that they are uniquely evil, responsible for colonialism, slavery, and the second-class status of people of color not only in their own countries but throughout the world. It is remarkable that the native Caucasian inhabitants of these countries have swallowed and internalized the message.Included in the message that we are historically evil is reference to our treatment of women and sexual minorities. The notions that a woman’s place was in the home, and that homosexuality should be shunned, were evolutionarily favorable to those who held them. They had been tenants of the Christian church. The message of the past fifty years has been cast as one of freedom. We are free to abandon traditional senses of obligation to wife and family; traditional senses of how to channel one’s sex drive; traditional senses of how a family is constituted; traditional senses of obligation to the society and restraint when it comes to our own pleasures.We have a situation in which the smartest major populations in the world are not coming close to reproducing themselves. Francis Galton’s fears are being realized. Moreover, just as Galton noted in his day, the most intelligent strata of European and American society are the ones who are tending to have the fewest children. Intelligence being at least 80% hereditary, the median intelligence of even the native populations of Europe and the Americas are declining. See

⭐and Helmuth Nyberg’s books on the subject.Zubrin’s case for increased productivity depends on human ingenuity, which in turn depends on human intelligence. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed remarkable innovations in just about every field of human endeavor. However, as the eugenicists said, they also witnessed a reversal in the long-term trend toward increasing intelligence. That decline, at first slow, is now accelerating.The result is that most of the population no longer has the intelligence required to understand the wonderful arguments that Zubrin makes in this book. The leading nations of the world are more and more nations of sheep, accepting the propaganda that is fed to them, just as Zubrin says.Zubrin is absolutely right that the world’s resources would be adequate to support a growing population. Whether or not it would support the burgeoning populations of Africa and the Middle East is a moot point. Going to his primary point, it will never be put to a test. We are too stupid and fearful to try.This book is a five-star effort, a masterful survey of the ways in which the supposed best and brightest of mankind are dooming our species.MERCHANTS OF DESPAIR – TABLE OF CONTENTSCHAPTER ONE – Thomas Malthus, the Most Dismal Scientist JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION EXPORTING STARVATION TO INDIA FOCUS SECTION: THE DATA THAT PROVES MALTHUS WRONGCHAPTER TWO – Darwinism’s Moral Inversion THE DESCENT OF MANCHAPTER THREE – The Birth of EugenicsCHAPTER FOUR – Deutschland über Alles WAR OF THE RACESCHAPTER FIVE – Eugenics Comes to America ELIMINATING THE HUDDLED MASSES EUGENICS SPREADS AMONG THE ELITECHAPTER SIX – The Nazi Holocaust MAN AGAINST MAN BY THE LIGHT OF PERVERTED REASON THE HOLOCAUST BEGINS THE WORLD TURNS ITS BACKCHAPTER SEVEN – Eugenics Reborn REPACKAGING EUGENICS AND POPULATION CONTROL THE ESTABLISHMENT EMBRACES POPULATION CONTROLCHAPTER EIGHT – In Defense of Malaria MASTERFUL PROPAGANDA FOCUS SECTION: THE TRUTH ABOUT DDTCHAPTER NINE – Scriptures for the Doom Cult FOCUS SECTION: THE FALLACY OF LIMITED RESOURCES THE AVAILABILITY OF FOOD THE QUESTION OF FINITUDECHAPTER TEN – The Betrayal of the LeftCHAPTER ELEVEN – The Anti-Nuclear Crusade FOCUS SECTION: THE TRUTH ABOUT NUCLEAR POWER TECHNICAL CONCERNS OVER NUCLEAR POWERCHAPTER TWELVE – Population Control: Preparing the Holocaust BETTER DEAD THAN RED DESTROYING THE VILLAGECHAPTER THIRTEEN – Population Control: Implementing the Holocaust INDIA INDONESIA PERU CHINA SUB-SAHARAN AFRICACHAPTER FOURTEEN – Better Dead than Fed: Green Police for World Hunger THE GREEN BIOTECH BLOCKADE FOCUS SECTION: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS THE GREEN REVOLUTION BIOTECHNOLOGY CASE STUDIESCHAPTER FIFTEEN – Quenching Humanity’s Fire: Global Warming and the Madness of Crowds THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT IS GLOBAL WARMING REAL? HUMAN SACRIFICE FOR WEATHER CONTROL ENERGY STARVATION THROUGH CARTEL ACTION THE IRRATIONALITY OF “INDIRECT ANALYSIS” CREATING A GLOBAL ANTIHUMAN CULTCHAPTER SIXTEEN – The Mind Imprisoned or the Soul Unchained Acknowledgments NOTES ILLUSTRATION CREDITS INDEX A NOTE ON THE TYPE

⭐Merchants of DespairRobert Zubrin ©2012A short Book Report by Ron HousleyRobert Zubrin, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer, offers us a fascinating account of how the anti-humanist philosophy of Thomas Malthus (1798) marked the beginning of organized, establishment backlash against the very principles which the American Founding Fathers attempted to codify and pass down to future generations.It is a story that flies beneath the radar of most citizens today; but it is a story which continues to work its black magic in every realm — from destroying historical Civil War statues to appeasing and emboldening terrorists intent on imposing their beliefs on the entire world.The 19th century saw academia set the stage for a Malthusian force to solidify into a culture-wide revolt against science, against reason, against political liberty. The philosophic and moral undermining of America was set in motion almost from the moment of its founding.Zubrin makes it sound like the decline of Western values was spearheaded by Malthus and Darwin; and then implemented over the decades by a litany of powerful figures, most recently Rockefeller; James McNamara; Gen. Westmoreland; even LBJ himself who was persuaded to withhold emergency food from a starving India (1966) until that nation agreed to impose forced sterilizations on its rural peasantry; Rachel Carson; Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger; and entire United Nations agencies whose goal was to reduce world population.But the real culprits behind what Zubrin calls “Merchants of Despair” were the 19th century philosophers who began a vast rebellion against reason and freedom: Kant, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Marx. Sadly, Zubrin does not highlight this crucial aspect of his own thesis. What turned Malthusian and Darwinian assessments into a mass cultural movement was the philosophers’ organized attack on man’s ability to reason, calling for a return to “faith” and “feeling” as the basis for knowledge.Among the late 20th century Malthusians is Paul Ehrlich, whose “The Population Bomb” I read back when I was in school; millions of free copies were distributed to college students all over the country.Little did I realize what a Malthusian even was; little did I realize that Ehrlich was part of a long history of activists promoting population control and the dismantling of human liberty; little did I realize how essentially aligned he was with the burgeoning statist agenda that was gaining a foothold in our culture.Ehrlich’s falsehoods, like those of Rachel Carson, offered a launching pad for the junk science behind so much of today’s regulatory establishment — regulations purposed with limiting and controlling our formerly free choices. When Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation proved false over and over again, it was never apparent why Stanford University wasn’t embarrassed to have him on its faculty.The big lesson for me in Zubrin’s book is that Malthusianism is still pervasive in our culture, responsible for anti-humanist decisions impacting all of us today; who knew?!There is even a Malthusian, “let’s reduce the population” meme behind nuclear energy politics. Without abundant, affordable energy, billions (1.2 billion) in the third-world are still without electricity today. But raising up third-world populations is contrary to the anti-humanist objectives of the Malthusians (“better dead than fed”). And so it naturally follows that the Malthusians would be against nuclear energy, just as they are against any other pro-human technology.Zubrin offers a new sense of perspective on Malthusianism’s goal to control the population: its effects on our energy industry; its effects on our cultural sense of morality; its effects on the vibrancy of our economy; its effects on public policy, where government gets to replace reason with force in dealing with us.We all remember the first “Earth Day,” right? The day deliberately chosen for “Earth Day” was Lenin’s birthday; after all, “Earth Day” activists and Lenin both wanted the same thing: state control of all our lives. But now with “Earth Day,” the agitators could pretend that the “good of mankind” was the goal we all had in common(!). Lenin, indeed.The common thread amongst all the various Malthusian movements (think: deliberately starving millions in India in the 1800’s; eugenics and racial cleansing killing millions in the mid-1900’s; Earth Day and the call to destroy industrial civilization) is a basic anti-humanism. And today we have the majority of Americans under 30 years old calling for outright socialism (think: Bernie Sanders), as if socialism hadn’t failed everywhere it was implemented — killing over 100-million innocents in the 20th century.There are scores of Malthusian-inspired movements, each with different names attached.They want us to turn the lights off; to turn our air-conditioners off; to abandon our internal combustion engines; to leave a smaller carbon footprint; to embrace zero growth; to acknowledge that humans are pollutants; to adopt Malthusian environmentalism; to stop impacting the climate; to condemn GMO foods, even as GMOs saved billions from starvation; to slow down or even stop industrial civilization. Since Nixon, the Malthusian environmentalism has been solidly embraced not only by the “progressives,” but by the “conservatives.”Conservatives were never able to figure out what principles were at play — so they were never able to offer up a rational alternative to the anti-humanist fervor on the Left.It’s truly horrifying to discover in story after story how entire populations have been forced into starvation, malnutrition, and disease merely because fashionable Malthusian elites (throughout a 200 year history) have implemented the political power to outlaw life-saving innovations, one after the other, right up to the present day.Global WarmingJust at the moment (1971) when Ice Age doomsayer, John Holdren (later to become Obama’s science advisor), was being sidelined by slight temperature increases, the anti-humanist Malthusians stumbled upon their next pretext to stifle worldwide economic growth, and thus to suppress population growth: carbon dioxide.Their new movement (which they would call AGW) did not select water vapor as its target greenhouse gas even though it is thousands of times more impactful — because they couldn’t figure out a way to control it using political coercion; not so with the far more insignificant carbon dioxide, which they saw as an ideal target to regulate, in their quest to control industrial civilization.This is the type of work which has tones of “conspiracy theory” behind it. But there is conspiracy here only insofar as it is conspiratorial to contend that ideas drive history — for this is a tale of cultural decline driven by bad ideas.What Zubrin hints at but never says directly is that the Malthusian anti-humanist agenda to limit population is all made possible by the mystical, anti-reason resurgence of collectivism which was the product of 19th century German philosophers; and that the Malthusians are just one component of the 200 year decline of Western civilization.So if you are unclear about why today’s college graduates are sympathetic to tyrannical socialism; if you are unclear about the moral perversion of nationalizing health care; if you are unclear about the origins of today’s hate America movement; if you suspect that something has gone wrong with an entire generation willing to turn a blind eye to mass killings in the name of equality (or in the name of population control), then you might invest a little time to explore Zubrin’s book.

⭐This is an excellent and timely book. While some reviewers here seem taken aback by the heated tone of Zubrin’s prose, it is perhaps a welcome rejoinder to a lot of the equally heated rhetoric down the years. There is little doubt that while some of the motivation behind those concerned about population growth is based on benevolent concern about human welfare, a lot of it isn’t and hasn’t been, at all. Paul Ehrlich is a particularly egregious example of this, and well deserves Zubrin’s ire.Another reviewer on this board says Zubrin is lying about DDT. That is a pretty heavy accusation to make unless one can prove he was actually falsifying data to suit his argument. I suggest one goes back to view the footnotes and check the data.Zubrin is no free market cheerleader – he is quite supportive of a significant role for the state (arguably more than I would want to see) and he can sometimes imply or state that atheists are immoral and cruel. While the Judeo-Christian perspective and its outlook can be seen as supportive of humanity and life, it is a bit unfair to assume that someone taking their philosophy of life from a non-religious basis would be less concerned. Take someone steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment, for example.Zubrin is a fan of human terraformation of Mars, and this is likely, initially, to be a state-run project. Personally, much as I like the idea of visiting new worlds, the more that states keep out of the way, the better, given the mess they typically make.Caveats aside, this was a good read. I just hope Zubrin’s blood pressure has recovered from all that fierce rhetoric.

⭐In this book, Robert Zubrin spells out the crossroads that humanity is presently faced with.Growing up in the UK, as a 1980s child, and later as a 1990s teenager, I was frequently exposed to the alarmist message, given by schoolteachers and other well meaning elders, that time was running out for humanity to deal with “pollution”. During my years in primary school, the message was one of industrial resource depletion, destruction of the rainforests, and the imminent depletion of atmospheric oxygen. Later, at secondary school, I was taught by my geography teacher about the perils of intensive farming, and the folly of cheap electricity from nuclear power.In both cases, the message was clear: Unless something was done within the next ten years to rectify the situation, I wouldn’t live to be an adult.The human race would run out of oil, out of industrial feedstock, out of food, or out of air. World War Three would be fought over whatever scraps remained. If we somehow survived all of these perils, we would all be “dead from pollution” by now. I even watched children’s TV programs about it.As an adult, I find myself living in a world where I’m conspicuously not dead. I live in a world where the global human population has already risen far higher than the Earth was supposedly able to sustain. Oil and industrial resources are in such oversupply that the industries that produce them are in financial troubleWhen I was very young, I saw the Ethiopia famine played out live on BBC Children’s Newsround and Blue Peter, where we saw images of children, just like us, dying in a humanitarian disaster. Many of us, young as we were, wondered whether we could do something to prevent this. After all, if we had food, could we not spare some for the Ethiopians?It was declared at this time that nothing could be done to prevent this, because the Ethiopians “breed like rabbits” and had brought this disaster upon themselves. While many young people at the time asked questions about how to end global poverty and hunger, we were told that this was a naïve dream, which would be impossible to achieve in practice.My parents had made a point of sitting me in front of BBC2 Star Trek repeats as a young child. As I became an adolescent, I was confronted with the exploits of Jean-Luc Picard and his extremely smart and resourceful crew. The stories of Star Trek The Next Generation told of a brave future, where technological advances and human maturity allowed us to overcome the scourges of poverty, famine, disease and war. In this plausible future; humanity has grown up as a species and has solved the problems that my generation desperately wanted to solve (but, we had been told, were unsolvable). Technologies needed to make such a future a reality seemed within reach. If only my generation could somehow ride the wave of the computer revolution that was gaining momentum at the time…Such thoughts remained confined to the realm of the hopeful imagination, until I became aware of Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan. As heretical as it may sound, Robert Zubrin has found a way for humanity to break away from the Earth and become a multi-planet and eventually interstellar species, without invoking the usual “sci-fi tricks” and insane costs that such plans usually require.In Merchants of Despair, Robert Zubrin debunks the myths of Manthusian Orwellian despotism. If you want to understand Zubrin’s plans for human expansion into space, then I recommend reading Zubrins books: “The Case For Mars”, “How To Live On Mars” and “Entering Space”.

⭐An articulate presentation of the Malthusian cause starting from Malthus himself. An important reminder of the extent to which our understanding of the reality of progress can be distorted by people who don’t understand real-world improvement in human flourishing.

⭐I read this book because I loved his other book, “The case for Mars”he never says that the population can increase forever, no sensible person would believe such a thing, however it is undeniable that our resources, food, energy and drinkable water per capita have increased much faster than our population, this is entirely logical since our technology is on a steeper exponential curve than our population.starting out I was very sceptical of some of his claims, especially about global warming (I’m still not convinced by his arguments)However in areas which im quite familiar, such as Nuclear power, Zubrin is spot on about the exaggerations and out right lies that have been propagated to advance a specific agenda.I enjoyed reading the book but felt shell shocked by some of the material, I would love if someone could fact check some of the claims, Eg such as DDT having no clear link to cancer or killing birds.Whether you love it our hate it, this book will make you think.

⭐I make it a point to read works which I disagree with on a semi-regular basis to help offset the echo chamber of daily life. This book certainly did that. As an environmentalist, this book opened a lot of questions and added interesting context to many aspects that the environmental community as a whole takes for granted. It’s a stark reminder of how we can get caught up in group think.The historical and political side was utterly horrifying and somehow at the same time facinating. If you’re looking for a well written book that will make you question what you may have been taking for granted, pick this one up.

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