Thanos Was Wrong

Back in 2018 I wrote an extensive review on the film Avengers: Infinity War, and in it I briefly expressed my fear about the message it conveyed through its antagonist, Thanos.

Thanos is rightly seen as one of the best, if not the best antagonist ever displayed on the white screen. For me personally it's a close call between Thanos, Darth Vader and Sauron, but Thanos wins on account of him being the most recent, and the scale of his destructive power. Sauron threatens Middle Earth, Darth Vader (and the Galactic Emperor) threatens a galaxy far, far away, but Thanos threatens the entire known universe. And he's about to kill half of all life in it. In the original Marvell comic Thanos wanted to kill half of the universe to impress Death, the woman he'd fallen in love with. But for the movie he was given a different motivation, one that garnered him a lot of fans and admiration because ultimately his reasons were benevolent...

This benevolence behind his motivation was one of the main reasons why Thanos worked so well as a tragic antagonist, so I can't entirely condemn the film's writers for their choice. But still... The reason why Thanos wants to kill half of all life in the universe harkens back to the theories of eugenicists like Thomas Malthus or Malthusianism; the belief that growth of food supply can't keep up with (exponential) population growth. The film does explore why Thanos is wrong morally speaking, but it fails to spell out why he's wrong mathematically and causally. I found this regrettable and dangerous, as this immensely popular film would most certainly reignite belief in one of the most widely misunderstood topics related to the deplorable state of humankind.

You see, it's generally understood that economic growth and growth of the food supply follows population growth. This sounds so rational and logical; we make more stuff and more food when there are more mouths to feed, rational and practical beings that we are. Unfortunately this reasoning is exactly backwards. It's the exact opposite, it's the other way around. The population grows because we make more stuff and more food. Just like the populations of predators grow after the population of prey grows. And we're not rational and practical beings, as we've devised a socioeconomic configuration that's based on growth, no matter the consequences. That's capitalism, if you didn't figure that out already. It's so irrational and impractical that we produce enough food to feed the world's population almost twice over, but manage to not feed adequately almost half the population. It's so wrongheaded that we've got all the space in the world (literally) but cramp almost all of us in densely populated and highly polluted cities.

So Thanos was wrong. But so are we. We're so wrong that in the wake of this magnificent film many articles were released praising Thanos, not for his strength, not for his singular focus, not for his willingness to sacrifice everything to reach his goal, but for the goal itself. Fortunately many articles describe how Thanos was wrong, but not in the way I just described. Some did discuss the complexities surrounding the concept of overpopulation, like this one from Forbes Magazine: Is Thanos Right About Overpopulation In 'Avengers: Infinity War'?. But I've found none that simply said that overpopulation isn't a problem at all, and some described how Thanos garnered a substantial fan-base: Tons of 'Avengers: Infinity War' Fans Think Thanos Might Be Right.

Part of what makes Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War so scary is that his “evil” plan makes a certain amount of rational sense: The greatest enemy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t Thanos, it’s overpopulation that will eventually lead to famine and ruin. By writing his own narrative, Thanos becomes the hero if he succeeds in wiping out half of the universe’s population from existence from. Thanos isn’t a generic villain like Ultron or Steppenwolf that simply wants to destroy everything. He’s much more calculated, even logical in his approach, and more than 20,000 people in the real world agree with him enough to subscribe to a subreddit called /r/thanosdidnothingwrong. Even in moral philosophy, they’re probably not alone.
_{source: Yahoo! Entertainment}

Avengers: Infinity War was a great movie, and it explored a lot of moral questions in a smart way, like the divide between deontological versus utilitarian perspectives captured in Captain America's remark that "We don't trade lives." But please, don't believe even for a second that there are too many of us. Population growth is on the decline and will probably plateau sooner rather than later. And if you truly believe population growth will become a problem, consider that the wealthiest parts of the world have the lowest birth-rates; the trick is to elevate all parts of the world to that same level of wealth.

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