"Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent"
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Ellis isn’t merely worrying about crowded cities; he’s drafting a moral permission slip. The line’s rhetorical trick is its shrugging inevitability: “whether we like it or not” pretends to be neutral observation while smuggling in coercion. It frames population reduction as a technical “task,” not a political fight or an ethical minefield, and “speeding up” turns a demographic trend into something that ought to be accelerated by design. That choice of verb quietly invites intervention.
Context matters because Ellis sits at the hinge point where early psychology, sexology, and social reform blur into the era’s hard-edged “scientific” management of society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anxieties about poverty, “degeneracy,” and national decline fed Malthusian arguments and, notoriously, eugenic policy. Ellis often positioned himself as progressive on sexuality and women’s autonomy, which makes this sentence especially revealing: the language of liberation can share a toolkit with the language of control. You can hear the administrative voice of modernity - measurable problems, scalable solutions - applied to human reproduction.
The subtext is triage. “Urgent” implies a looming catastrophe, but it never specifies whose lives, whose births, whose futures are treated as the problem. That ambiguity is the point: it allows readers to project their preferred targets while keeping the claim sounding like sober realism. In a century that repeatedly tried to “solve” social issues through bodies, Ellis’s calm cadence is the warning. Technocratic urgency is often how power learns to speak politely.
Context matters because Ellis sits at the hinge point where early psychology, sexology, and social reform blur into the era’s hard-edged “scientific” management of society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anxieties about poverty, “degeneracy,” and national decline fed Malthusian arguments and, notoriously, eugenic policy. Ellis often positioned himself as progressive on sexuality and women’s autonomy, which makes this sentence especially revealing: the language of liberation can share a toolkit with the language of control. You can hear the administrative voice of modernity - measurable problems, scalable solutions - applied to human reproduction.
The subtext is triage. “Urgent” implies a looming catastrophe, but it never specifies whose lives, whose births, whose futures are treated as the problem. That ambiguity is the point: it allows readers to project their preferred targets while keeping the claim sounding like sober realism. In a century that repeatedly tried to “solve” social issues through bodies, Ellis’s calm cadence is the warning. Technocratic urgency is often how power learns to speak politely.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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