Fear, Control, and Death

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

P. A. Ritzer, Volume 34

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

And so for decades now we have been groomed by our culture to want to be able to play like children with the cosmically powerful—physically, mentally, and spiritually—gift of sexuality without consequence; with absolute, perverse, and irresponsible disregard for its reproductive nature; leaving mass wreckage in the wake. “Everyone has sexual sins.”

This brings us back to artificial birth control. Control again. Is that what the overpopulationist fears so much so as to support the slaughter of innocents, loss of control? That would not make sense because they do not have control. But they may well fear the loss of the illusion that they have control or are capable of having control or just the desire to have control. Is that it? The loss of control that they do not have but want to have? That seems to make sense. They may fear the loss of the control that they want, and perhaps believe they should have, but do not have. That would explain their deep emotion. It would fit with the hubris displayed. It would fit the mechanistic ideology. As quoted above (Part Nine), Mattias Desmet writes of the “ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge” (italics added). And like the narcissism treated of above (Part Five) it emerges as a result of the “societal increase of fear and insecurity” and manifests itself in what Desmet calls “regulation mania,” and “regulitis.”^¹

Desmet further observes:

Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response and one defense in our current way of thinking: increased control. The fact that the human being can tolerate only a certain amount of control is completely overlooked. Coercive control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.²

Wow: “The radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.” No small thing. In fact, in order to overcome the uncertainty and insecurity and consequential anxiety of the human condition due to the ambiguity resulting from the complexity of human communication through symbols, totalitarians would, and have tried to—whether as Maoists, Stalinists, Nazis, or present-day globalists—reduce human communication to that of animals, which consists of “unambiguous and self-evident signs.” As

Mattias Desmet

observes, “Totalitarianism is the ultimate attempt to rid ourselves of this uncertainty by withdrawing into a (pseudo)scientific certainty and merciless logic, by trying to reduce symbols to signs, and by trying to annihilate all variety in cultural expression.” And therefore Professor Desmet can conclude: “At this point, we are able to pinpoint the psychological essence of totalitarianism: an attempt to reduce the polysemy of human language to the monosemy of a sign system.”³ From that of man to that of animals. Totalitarians would, and have tried to, reduce human beings to beasts. And all in an attempt to gain more and more control in response to fear after fear after fear.

Fear and control: that brings us back to how we questioned above why Bill Maher was afraid of overpopulation, given that he apparently was very well off and comfortable. The same could be said for others who want to control population like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Al Gore, Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic Party, the Chinese Communist Party, or any others of the megalomaniacal class. For those individuals who are concerned about overpopulation—even if it were going to happen, which it will not—they would be dead by then anyways. In that same vein, perhaps the main reason people need not fear overpopulation is just that people die. And therefore, as the developing nations catch up to the life expectancy of the developed nations, the population will level off. Makes sense.

But what if that is the problem? Death? What if they cannot accept death? Well then, they would have a very different perspective on the world’s population. If they want to live forever in this life, it would only be fair that everyone else be able to do the same. Then there would be cause to worry that the earth could overpopulate. Then the world really would overpopulate, if nobody ever died. And then there would be cause to see other people’s lives as a threat to their own. I think there is something to that.

Still, though a nagging sense of fairness may contribute to their fear of overpopulation, we well know that the elitist globalist types have no problem causing or concurring with the deaths of others, whether through abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, or wars to bring about their utopias. It is not that they do not accept death; they are fine with it when it works for them, when they think they can control it.

Ah, control again. It would fit their professed world views and activities that they want to control death, to be in control of death. These control freaks can even deceive themselves about the control they believe they have or wish they had when it comes to life and death. And the life, not just the lives, of others are a threat to that deception. If your perspective is warped from a delusion that you will be able to control death, you could well see other people on the earth as a threat to your well-being. Abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, war—and add euthanasia, contraception, IVF, transgenderism, and mass trafficking of humans beings as if they were animals—all allow them to delude themselves that they have control over life and death.

But then comes their own deaths. What if they do not want to consider their own deaths? What if they do not want to accept their own deaths? The one thing that is inescapable, death. There is the leveler, there is the delusion buster, there is where gods die before the immortal God. “Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes even for kings he comes,” said Thomas More.⁴ Nicole Shanahan added about the tranhumanists, in the interview with Tucker Carlson cited above (Part Nine): “The people who are afraid to die; they don’t want to meet Lady Justice. And that’s what I think this transhumanism is all about. I think it is a deep fear of death.”⁵

I think Ms. Shanahan is profoundly correct. I believe these folks are afraid of death, and are afraid that there is a reckoning at death, and so they seek to defy death when it comes to them. It may well be that the sense of the immortality of the human soul that we all share to varying degrees may in these godless controllers be mistaken for a sense that they can extend their lives in the earthly world indefinitely. And it appears that one way they seek to extend their earthly lives—so fitting for the gods they deem themselves to be—is to convey their mortal lives into their inanimate machines rather than reckon with the immortal life granted by their Creator in which their delusions of control must disperse as the fogs of hubris that they are, and in which they will be held accountable for all the sins they have wrought in their pride.

There seems to be a twisted irony in the notion that these folks seek the control, the power that is impossible for them to realize, that believers ascribe to the God that the fearful reject or do not believe exists. Thus there seems to be a subconscious acknowledgment of the God they reject in their own longing for the power and control essential to the Deity. Is this not a desire for self-deification, and does not this desire for self-deification point to the need for the Deity that they so obviously are not? Hence, they are in rebellion, and their fear includes that of being relegated to the proper order, of facing reality which would require: the ruination of their imagined self-idolatry, the exposition of their true relationship with and rightful subordination to God, and the recognition they are not God and that God does not need them but that they need God. Like their ancient fallen master they proclaim: “I will not serve.” Instead they stand before God and his laws and defiantly proclaim: “You are not going to tell me what to do, I will have control, I will make my own petty rules, I will make sure we limit the number of children people bring into the world so that it corresponds to my vision of creation.” By what colossal act of pride could they in all their ignorance possibly know how many people are the right number on the earth for everyone to have enough? How could they even consider that they could know?

All the more pathetic is this eternally disappointing longing when considered against the belief that God invites us all to “become partakers of the divine nature.”⁶ The Catechism of the Catholic Church elaborates on this true divinization through quotations from fathers of the Church: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God” (St. Irenaeus). “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (St. Thomas Aquinas). “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (St. Athanasius).⁷ One might pause and consider how consequential it is that Bill Maher’s father abandoned that promise precisely in rejecting the Church’s teaching on contraception.

St. Irenaeus’ witness to the Word provides an occasion for us to once again ponder in a larger context

Mattias Desmet

’s contention that the human condition is profoundly influenced by “an intrinsic, irreparable lack” in human language.⁸ Here we might consider that contention in light of creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”⁹ Appropriately then, God spoke forth creation: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. . . .’”¹⁰ The Word is one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity and spoken forth begets creation and, after the fall of man, incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”¹¹ The Word, communication, language are integral to the communion of the Triune God; there is every reason to recognize that they would have no small place in man created in the divine image.¹² That provides the context for our consideration of Desmet’s contention in light of Eden, Babel, and Redemption in Part Five of this series: “Psychology, Communication, Love, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order).”

Be that as it may, beyond the perceived threat of others, the yearning for control, and the deification of self, could it be that population-control extremists are afraid of having others threaten the possibility, the desire, the appetite, even just the idea, to have whatever they want whenever they want it? Are they afraid that more people on the earth might threaten that inclination? Whatever their fears, there is no way around recognizing the raw selfishness from which those fears flow. We are all prone to selfishness since the fall of man. And behind the population-control mantra can be heard the age-old child’s cry, Gimme! “Gimme this, Gimme that!” as the toddler pulls everything he can get his hands on unto himself.

And ultimately, selfishness at its extreme is: “I am all that matters, and others are here for me to use, and if they get in the way of what I want, they should not exist or be removed and therefore can be justifiably eliminated (‘murdered. . . .kind of’).” Most of us fall somewhere short of that extreme, but how far from the extreme is the position that it is better that others be aborted than that I consider the possibility, the very idea, that I may not be able to have all that I want, that I may not be able to experience the world in the way I want, that someone else may make my life uncomfortable? “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”¹³ Thus, it would be better for me if we murder babies in the womb now rather than consider that I, me, mine may not have all that we want later. And thereby is displayed the appalling selfishness of imposed population control to fit the plan of the elite and how they think the world should work with its brutal slaughter of innocents in the womb and forced sterilizations.

And how much more evil is the pro-abortion, sterilization, and population-control position when those who hold it implicate the rest of us in it by using tax dollars, that citizens are forced to pay by law, to pay for abortion and global population-control programs? How evil is the need to implicate the whole human race in their own deadly selfishness? Diabolical. But we can follow that selfishness and opposition to religion far deeper into the overpopulation lie, the height of barbarity into which the controllers want to incriminate us all.

There is that need to control, that self deification again: “Not only will I do it my way but I will implicate you in it by forcing you to support it with your tax dollars.” Incorporated in that need to pull others into their crimes through tax-and-spend coercion is that ugly stinginess of Communism (and the preliminary stages to it). In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism: America’s Charity Divide–Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, Arthur C. Brooks through deep and thorough research arrives at the unmistakable conclusion that conservatives and Republicans are far more charitable than liberals and Democrats, largely because conservatives and Republicans are more religious, with all that that entails. In general with exceptions, conservatives give where they see need. In general with exceptions, liberals tax—even the givers—and spend where they will, even if it is anathema to many of those from whom they taxed the money.

Again, we are all given to selfishness and covetousness due to original sin. That being the case, it should be no surprise that it is religion that encourages us sinners to whatever generosity we muster. And out of that qualified generosity comes the perspective that tax-and-spend liberalism betrays that sinister stinginess in which others must contribute to and be implicated in what the liberal wants done however evil, including slaughtering helpless and innocent unborn babies. And in their tax-and-spend coercion the liberals also expose the greed and covetousness in their stinginess. Raise taxes to make other people pay to take care of the poor so that I may not be made uncomfortable by their poverty, their existence. And the poor naturally make those who have more than enough uncomfortable because, perhaps if they were to give, there need not be the poor, though that is by far an oversimplification that gives credence to Jesus’ words: “For you always have the poor with you.”¹⁴

Thus is the selfish mentality: “I will not willingly give. I will allow it to be taken from me as long as it is being taken from everyone else, and better, if it is taken more from the others, the rich—who are everyone other than I—whose wealth and privilege I covet. In fact we should raise taxes on those who I believe have more than I do, or who do not have the opinions I have, and make them pay for what I believe should be done, however evil.” Accordingly do the Democrats give our tax dollars to Planned Parenthood to “kind of” murder unborn children, and to other population-control organizations.

And that is where we will wrap up Part Eleven. The final Part Twelve should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

Please like, share, restack, or comment as you feel inclined.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

1. Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2022), 176, 68, 73.

2. Ibid., 6-7.

3. Ibid., 69, 113-14.

4. Robert Bolt (writer) and Fred Zinnemann (director), A Man for All Seasons, 1966.

5. Nicole Shanahan, “Jesse Kelly & Nicole Shanahan: Transhumanism, Kamala’s Plan to Take Your Guns, and How to Save Texas, The Tucker Carlson Show: Speeches (18 September 2024), 0:28:27 ff., TCN, accessed 31 December 2024, https://tuckercarlson.com/jesse-kelly-tour.

6. 2 Peter 1:4, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, RSV, Second Catholic Edition (2010).

7. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), para. 460.

8. Desmet, Psychology, 69-70.

9. Jn 1:1-3 (Ignatius).

10. Gen 1:3 (The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition [1966]).

11. Jn 1:14 (Ignatius).

12. Gen 1:26-27 (RSV Catholic).

13. Gen 4:8 (RSV Catholic).

14. Matt 26:11 (Ignatius).