All superweapons are plenticidal, even if they never kill anyone

1945's American-only atomic bomb was truly plenticidal (plentitude-reducing), but not because a full-out nuclear war would kill off thousands of the world's species in a few months.

It would have been just as plenticidal if it had never ever been used, but only threatened to be used.

Because its real target was not the Axis or even erstwhile allies like Russia - but rather Washington's favoured peace'n'wartime Allies !

Yes its real target were all the other bothersome friendly nations that Washington had to waste some much time mollifying all throughout the war.

But holding the world's only super-weapon puts an end to all that back and forth diplomacy and compromising and debating.

Conducting external affairs gets much simpler when you hold all the cards, make all the rules.

The Manhattan atomic Project was pursued at all speed and all costs, not because it would end the Axis coalition - but rather because it would end the Allied coalition.

Bet you don't find that fact in any of your professors' favourite books ....

PLENTICIDE - not Ecocide or Mundicide

Plenticide is the deliberate 'pruning back' of 'excessive' anything (and everything) - simply because some/many/all people feel totally overwhelmed by abundance, either some of the time or all of the time.

Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.

It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.

A nuclear war or a big comet might destroy all life on it and even destroy its atmosphere forever - but this mundicide - death of a planet's life - because it was not a selective pruning back but rather a total loss of life and choice.

A tiny bit more deliberate is the incidental killing of lifeforms as human activity expands - ecocide - because we have been warned repeatedly that expanding these activities will lead to these deaths.

Criminal neglect or culpable negligence seems to be the terms we are looking for to describe these planet-wide crimes.

Fear of overwhelming abundance

But plenticide refers to deliberate plans to kill lifeforms to deliberately reduce variety, debate, competition, complexity.

So the Holocaust system took up a well known insecticide Zyklon-B  and used it to kill off human 'competitors' (Jews , Romas, Slavs) as well as farm bugs - because they felt both made life much more chaotic and  complex for the German nation during WWII.

We fail ourselves if we only call such killing a genocide, because that says only what/who was killed and not really why.

That 'why' comes down to plenticide...

Plenticidal Extinction

It is catchier, but less informative, to say we are living in the time of The Sixth Extinction than to use a ten cent word like The Anthropocene Extinction.

But I argue that even using a word like Anthropocene doesn't really begin to scratch the surface about what is truly unique about this latest - deliberately plenticidal - extinction.

But first, let us agree that there is an even bigger danger in simply giving this current extinction a number instead of a fully descriptive name.

Because humans couldn't be around for the first five major extinctions here on Earth - events we could only read about in the past tense in school - we risk turning a global tragedy into a form of global Reality TV.

'Now you too can be an eyewitness to a major historical event - sixth time lucky !'

But Athropocene isn't much better : it simply means an extinction caused by human activities - as opposed to earlier extinctions caused by climate changes or huge balls of flaming rock hitting the Earth.

That flaming hunk of molten destruction was not a living thinking being - it couldn't have changed course to avoid hitting the Earth no matter how many poignant messages it received from the Pope, Bono and Bill Gates.

But we have been told, told for centuries, that our hunting behavior is killing the larger creatures (megafauna) species wholesale.

 Now, in the last few decades we've been warned we soon won't be able to count the species of all sizes we are driving into extinction each and every year.

We have slowed up - reluctantly - in a few small areas - sped up in many bigger areas.

We are thinking , moral, beings and we aren't really stopping this killing.

At some point we must ask if this killing spree is not simply a tragedy incidental to human activities but in fact deliberate on our part.

We humans annually kill far more creatures because they are 'pests' or 'weeds' than we do out of greed ( the classic case of greed leading to extinction being the passenger pigeon.)

Here in Atlantic Canada many fisherman openly advocate killing off all the seals - not for their pelts or for use as food - but simply because they compete with us humans for something we truly value - the cod.

Its the old 'loaf of labour' theory modified.

The environment is just a mine of dead-like valuable resources in this view of reality.

Every pound of biological food energy that goes to the seal is a pound that doesn't go to Man.

Any thought that the seal and Man both do their small part in ensuring the ever constant global re-cycling of scarce carbon, oxygen,nitrogen, etc simply hasn't penetrated these thick skulls.

This view wants to see a world (that for now) that is one big level plowed field, stretching off past the horizon, totally sterile of any plant or animal or microbe we don't want there.

In the near future, this view won't even want that - no living beings will exist beyond humans (and even there ,only the healthy right-thinking humans will be allowed to survive) -- all our food will be made synthetically, out of rocks sublimated into steaks thanks to the energy of fusion fuel 'too cheap to meter'.

The chaos and competition of life is too much about for this mindset --- a clearing away of this vegetative undergrowth, this plentitude of life - is far overdue.

Plenticide the Plentitude of Life

Drain the gene pool as deep as it can go - human hubris has all the answers - plenticide off all our competitors and lets lie back and enjoy the non-living bounty of this Used-to-be-Green Earth...

If plenticidal pruning is always better than plentitude's chaos , then bigger is always better

Medicalizing Modernity

The  real reason why so many humans  can confidently proclaim that 'bigger is always better' without knowing in advance how 'bigger' will actually turn out , is because bigger always means fewer --- in any given biological, social or economic niche.

For example , instead of thousands of small town bankers all competing against each other in unpredictable chaotic ways, they can all merge into a few big national banks : each with just one CEO, one Board of Directors, one set of unbending lending rules etc.

Neat, tidy, orderly : Canadian static simplicity and predictability instead of American plentitude's dynamic chaos.

(So now you know why Canada and the US so differ in their industrial competitiveness !)

Yes, a merger into a bigger entity might mean more profits but it might not - for as many mergers quickly and costly de-merge as prosper - but that is not the real point.

Similarly those pea-counters in the media obsessed with seeing fewer municipalities (and fewer council members) are not really concerned about cost savings despite their claims.

This is because the hard evidence suggests that total for the new higher salaries, pensions and benefits for the fewer council members (and for their new support staff) far exceeds the total costs when we had many town councils with many councillors --- all paid peanuts and with no support staff.

This mantra is never ever really about more profits or fewer costs but is actually about maintaining own's mental health.

For billions of humanity, 'bigger is always better' really means 'much better for their own mental stability' : they simply can't handle too much change or variety very well --- it 'hurts' their head.

As for why, no one really knows for sure. We can tentatively blame it on their individual genetic brain chemistry, in combination with how they were individually raised.

This is not a full on/full off condition but something we humans all have in common, each of us set along a sliding continuum from 'manageable' to 'all-consuming'.

So always think of the mantra 'bigger is better' as a quasi-prozac pill and you'd be on the right track...

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.

Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities,  New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.

We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.

We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).

Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....

Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude

"Too much information".

Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.

Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.

They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.

But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time  and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries  , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.

The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization  had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.


This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.

Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.

A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.

Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.

Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.

Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.

Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.

Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.

While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

Martin Henry Dawson : The Agape Naturalist

In WWI , Philip Bent VC and Henry Dawson MC displayed great physical courage under enemy fire when they put themselves in lethal danger to rally their men to close a dangerous break in the Allied lines.

This was 'agape' valour in that they did not risk their lives simply for the men in their battalion whom they knew well (kith and kin) but rather they selflessly risked their lives for the entire overall Allied cause.

In WWII , Dawson displayed agape physical courage and moral courage .

Agape physical courage in the sense of selflessly sacrificing his health (and hence his life) to help total strangers.

Agape moral courage in the sense that his opponents were no longer the Hun but rather his own subculture of Allied doctors and scientists who were strongly opposed to his 'wasting' his (agape) penicillin on young people judged to be useless militarily.

But what did Dawson do in the 1920s and 1930s, between these two wars ?

I argue he was an agape naturalist in those years .

Perhaps because he was educated during the years of Alexander MacKay's regime as Superintendent of Education for Nova Scotia , Dawson displayed a wide catholicism of interest in the microbe world compared to other medical scientists and doctors of his era.

They tended to see microbes only as as bad germs to be ruthlessly eliminated or harmless avirilulent germs to be totally ignored.

Superintendent MacKay had gotten all Nova Scotia's rural and small town school children to regularly catalogue the start and end of seasons as marked by the first bloomings or first arrivals etc  of the various flora and fauna.

MacKay wanted to show how the life cycle of all life was affected by variations in the non-living world - the timing of the various seasons affecting directly when the first mayflower of the season appeared for example.

Perhaps this unique 'phenological' effort mentally rubbed off on the young Dawson - leading him to see life on Earth as sharing in a basic global commensality together.

Because during the 1920s and 1930s , Dr Dawson didn't just selflessly help those chronically ill humans dismissed as basically useless and worthless by most other people. He also regarded them as worthy in and of themselves , as they were.

He showed the same evenhanded regard for all when it came to all the 'odd' , 'useless' , 'unworthy of study', 'avirulent' microbes he chose to study at great cost to his career.

For just as he valued the great plenitude of human types, so he felt the same about the great variety and plenitude of non -human life not matter how useless they appeared to be to the rest of humanity.

Simply put,  I am saying that plenticide and selfishness and narrow group-love are much the same, just as support of plenitude  and commensality and agape love are basically the same.

With the sixth mass extinction - happening now - we are practising plenticide on a huge scale - and once again only the agape love of the agape naturalist will halt this madness .....

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....