Human Overpopulation: Are There Redundant People in the World?

Are there redundant people in the world?

From the perspective of the wisdom of Kabbalah, the answer is no.

Not only can our planet handle many more people, but contrary to today’s popular narrative about the “evils” of human overpopulation—that it increases global warming, climate change and disease, to name a few—a higher human population does not equate to more suffering.

Instead, when viewed from the perspective of humanity’s development towards its united future state, the formula looks like this:

The amount of people divided by the amount of suffering equals our ability to exercise free choice—to connect above the ego.

In other words, if there are more people, then the amount of suffering disperses among them, and as a result, everyone suffers less. For instance, say humanity needs to endure 1 million tons of suffering at a certain stage of its development. Then, what would you prefer: to be part of a humanity of 7 billion people that needs to deal with that 1 million tons of suffering, or to be part of a humanity of 2 billion people taking on that burden? It’s clear we’d choose the option where we’d suffer less.

How does this work? To understand it, we need to take a bird’s eye view of humanity’s development. We’re currently in a process heading towards a future where humanity will be connected as a single organism, where we’ll feel each other closer than we feel our own families. Today, we’re at a crossroad: We can either continue following the path of our growing egoistic nature, where we seek fulfillment on a background of gradually intensifying personal, social and global problems; or we can exercise our free choice to engage in this process positively, connecting above our egoistic nature and rising above the problems.

If we realize our free choice in this process and start connecting above the ego, then no single person on the planet will appear to be redundant. Instead, every person will be viewed as a very precious creation, inseparable from society, who carries a significant portion of humanity’s load on his/her shoulders. Each person would be as important as cells and organs in our bodies, each working for the benefit of the whole body and looking out for each other in the process.

Therefore, there is no such thing as redundant people. What is redundant is all the thinking put into restricting population growth. Instead of thinking about restricting the population, we should think about how we can guide our rapidly growing population towards a positively connected society. By doing so, we’d realize our ability to exercise our free choice and discover a new picture of reality above the one we currently perceive in the ego.