“There is nothing answered without a question asked.”
The term final solution usually will find its way into the passages of commentary on the German National Socialists (Nazis). However very few people know what the initial question was that was first asked, nor by whom. In addition, even fewer recognize that Adolf Hitler was not the originator of the question or the answer.
In the case of the emerging social engineers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no one had greater influence than Thomas Malthus. A controversial person today and even more so in his day, Malthus wrote an essay named “Principle of Population” and raised the question for the first time on the dangers of overpopulation. The potential catastrophic outcome became known as the “Malthusian Catastrophe.”
The Malthusian Dilemma
Malthus, an English clergyman and economist, believed he recognized the issue of population and its impact on resources, the environment, and society in general. His research moved him to conclude that the rate of population increased faster than society’s ability to produce the resources to sustain it.
The implication on the economic structure of a society was also at stake. He added that with an increase of laborers out of proportion with the available work, large amounts of families would have no means to sustain themselves. With hunger, pestilences, and crime as a result of an impoverished majority, he claimed that action must be taken to “put a check on population.”
Subsequent models encouraged “voluntary celibacy” for “bad specimens” of the population, social standards regarding morality for the poorer classes, and a restriction on social interaction for some, were a few of the early
