Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Malthusian-Transhumanist Riders of the Pale Horse

Hubbard and Salk: Kindred Consciousnesses, Malthusian Evolutionaries

Hubbard’s Malthusian-eugenic crisis cosmogeny was also shared by her “kindred spirit,” Jonas Salk [1], who was also influenced by Teilhard de Chardin. Best known as the acclaimed virologist who developed the first widely administered polio vaccine, Salk, who was hired by the UN to compile a report on overpopulation, advocated for Malthusian population control as a necessary condition of conscious evolution. Salk’s legacy continues on through the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which was formed with the help of Hubbard. Today, the Salk Institute, which has ties to the WEF, is promoting aspects of the “sustainable development” agenda, while also advancing conscious transhuman evolution through research and development projects specializing in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) for “computational neurobiology.” 

In 1964, Hubbard met Jacob Bronowski, who informed her that he was working with Jonas Salk to establish the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. According to Hubbard’s autobiography, she became excited about the prospects of the Salk Institute, and Bronowski put her in touch with the publisher of the Scientific American, Gerry Piel, who “was forming a society for the [Salk] institute” [4]. In turn, Hubbard proposed to Piel that the Salk Institute establish a “‘Theatre for Humanity’ to dramatize emerging values based on our knowledge of the evolution of life” [4]. These “emerging values” would serve as a cultural medium that could steer the evolution of human consciousness toward compatibility with the technological evolution of human biology and human civilization.

Piel prompted her to write up her proposal, which she drafted into a letter that she sent to the Salk Institute where Jonas himself read it. In the Book of Co-Creation: Our Crisis Is a Birth, Hubbard recalls how Salk telephoned her back to say, “You have expressed my dream . . . You have stated my vision far more clearly than I could . . . [W]e must be two peas in the same pod! May I take you out to lunch?” Immediately thereafter, according to Hubbard’s autobiography, she and Salk referred to each other as “kindred spirits” [1].

Accompanied by Warren Weaver, who was the Chairman of the Board of the Salk Institute, Jonas rendezvoused with Hubbard. In The Hunger of Eve: One Woman’s Odyssey Toward the Future, Hubbard compared this experience to “Eve stepping out of the garden” and “eating of the Tree of Life. It meant learning how to become a conscious participant in the designing process of life, discovering the laws of the universe, . . . and learning to cooperate with ‘the gods’—or the process of evolution” [4]. During this encounter, Hubbard asked, “Jonas, so you believe Teilhard was right about humankind uniting into one body, a new organism progressing toward an unknown future?” [4]. Salk responded, “Yes, of course, that’s natural” [4].

Later that same day, Hubbard professed, “Jonas, I want to help bring forth in the arts a new image of humanity commensurate with our capacity to shape the future” [4]. Salk replied: 

“Barbara, . . . You and I are scooped out of the same genetic material.  . . . We’re psychological mutants . . . Every now and then evolution produces precisely the right type of person for the needs of the time. You’re such a person: a bearer of evolution. It’s all in you. You’ve got the script inside, the attraction for the future, the desire to be responsible for the whole, your willingness to learn, to connect separate disciplines and people. You’re a bi-valent bonding mechanism. You’ve got hooks at both ends!” [4].

In Conscious Evolution, Hubbard narrates how she asked Salk “what was ‘wrong’ with me — my love of the future and my desire to connect with everything. He smiled and said, ‘Barbara, these are not faults, [sic] these are exactly the characteristics needed by evolution. You are a mutant’” [2].

According to Hubbard’s biography, she would later meet up at the Salk Institute with Jonas, “Jerry Hardy, the publisher of LIFE,” and “another ‘scoop’ of the same genetic material, Al Rosenfeld, science editor of LIFE magazine” [4]. Hubbard relays that “Jonas wanted to bring the finest molecular biologists from the world to the institute to do research into the basic knowledge of life; then the humanists and the artists were to follow. But he had not finished the buildings, and already I was designing the first play on the stage of the Theatre of Humanity. I was ahead of what could be done” [4].

This impasse would end Hubbard’s involvement with the Salk Institute, but she and Salk would continue to share common commitments to spreading the “emerging values” of conscious evolution. In three books, Man Unfolding, Survival of the Wisest, and Population and Human Values, Salk, like Hubbard, propagated Malthusian praxis as a cultural primer for conscious evolution.

In his 1972 book, Man Unfolding, Salk advocated that humankind must “unlearn” its traditional “philosophies” while “consciously” evolving “new” systems of “values” and “rules” that will “bring about a measure of control over growth both of population and of greed in man, excesses of each of which might be thought of as cancers of man.” In a chapter titled “Health as Wholeness,” Salk posited that, in order to avert ecological “damage that may be irreparable,” the cancers of overpopulation and overconsumption must be excised by pushing the human species to “move consciously to form an organism of mankind as part of an eco-system related to a purpose.  . . . [T]he kind of exclusiveness and competitiveness that have pre-vailed, which tend to exhaust rather than conserve resources, . . . will, in time and of necessity, have to be abated.” Stated differently, Salk postulated that Malthusian ecological catastrophes can be prevented through the superorganic evolution of collective-conscious “values” and “rules” for controlling overpopulation and sustaining “limited resources.”

To consciously evolve a Malthusian culture of population control and proto-sustainable development, according to Salk, the “genetic-somatic” evolution of human biology must be augmented by the “culture-induced evolution” of human consciousness. Salk hypothesized that human evolution is driven by the dialectical “mechanisms” of ecology, biology, and consciousness, including the dialectics “of organism and environment, of genes and soma, and of intuition and intellect,” respectively. In turn, Salk resolved that the “new man,” whom Hubbard referred to as “homo universalis,” or the “universal human,” must harness conscious evolution to steer the ecological dialectic between the human organism and the natural environment by applying his “intellect” and “intuition” to progressively invent new technological and cultural methods of stewarding natural and human resources. As a result, the “new man,” according to Salk, will consciously “bring about consonance between his outer environment and his inner self.” 

In “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard mirrors Salk’s call for Malthusian population control as an essential element of collective-conscious evolution:

“[t]hey had reached a limit to growth: pollution, stagnation, over-population.  . . . 

In the late period of the biosphere, human beings have reached a point where they can no longer continue to reproduce themselves. You have reached a limit to growth on planet Earth. To reproduce yourselves you are transcending yourselves. You have discovered the pattern of synergistic self-organization. Synergizing humans working to overcome limits become the pattern in which the co-creative human emerges.”

Hubbard added that “[t]he advance through nature means the conscious evolution of yourselves as a god-like species, stewarding this Earth and all life on it.” Stated differently, Hubbard, like Salk, believed that Malthusian limits to population growth would catalyze the conscious evolution of a new “co-creative human,” which would synergistically steward the planet’s natural and human resources.

In his 1973 Survival of the Wisest,Salk expanded on his theory of how Malthusian overpopulation crises instigate the genesis of evolutionary epochs during which consciousness and genetics coevolve. Borrowing from Lamarckean epigenetics and Maslow’s psychology of being, Salk postulated that conscious evolution, which steers biological evolution, is driven by the dialectic between “BEING” and “EGO,” while biological evolution is fueled by the dialectic between genetics and somatics.

According to Salk, as the bioevolutionary drive of genetic reproduction culminates in overpopulation, ecological crises threaten the survival of BEING, which is the teleological kernel with which consciousness is endowed by the “Cosmos.” Consequently, these ecological crises spark a revolution in consciousness that redirects EGO, which functions as the cognitive intermediary between the consciousness of BEING and the natural environment, toward collectively regulating population growth and resource consumption by scientifically and technologically reorganizing sociocultural and political-economic systems. It is worth noting here that Salk’s notion of BEING as consciousness is an invocation of Abraham Maslow’s transhumanist “psychology of being” [5]. Maslow, who was Hubbard’s mentor, set up the Eupsychian Network where Hubbard collaborated with figureheads of the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential Movement along with other conscious “transhumanistic” evolutionaries dedicated to pastoring “all societies and all peoples . . . toward becoming one world and one species” [5].

To illustrate Salk’s Malthusian theory of conscious evolution, Survival of the Wisest examined charts that quantify the overpopulation predictions of Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the Population Bomband Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, both of which consider sterilization, abortion, and food rationing policies as bulwarks against ecological catastrophes caused by overpopulation. In Survival of the Wisest, Salk compared the Malthusian forecasts projected by Ehrlich with population data calculated by eugenicist Raymond Pearl. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Pearl, who was a participant in the League of Nations World Population Conference, charted fruit fly population growth, which was graphed as sigmoid curve data. Salk analyzed Pearl’s fruit fly population curve in contrast with lemming and human population curves in order to estimate whether the population growth curve of the human species, which is hitting its Malthusian inflection point, will prove to mirror the fruit fly sigmoid curve, which levels out, or the lemming curve, which cycles through “periodic catastrophe . . . with enormous loss of life.” In brief, Salk posed the question: will humanity consciously stop itself from bringing about overpopulation catastrophes, or will the dire predictions of Ehrlich’s Population Bomb come true? The answer to this question, according to Salk, depends on whether human consciousness can “metabiologically” evolve new “values” that cultivate Malthusian control of population growth and resource consumption.

Although Salk speculated that the “future population growth in Man will tend to stabilize at an optimal level described by an S-shaped curve,” he nonetheless warned that “[a] major threat to the species is attributed to the increasing size of the human population” and that the “diagrams” explicated in Survival of the Wisest “also show that former attitudes in respect to growth in population can no longer continue. Now self-imposed restrictions of freedom in this respect will be necessary not only to preserve other freedoms but to keep the quality of life from falling to a level that would soon become intolerable.” To be sure, Salk postulated that “the sigmoid curve of population growth . . . reveals that survival depends upon the development of means for the adjustment of the behavior of individuals appropriate to protection from autodestruction.” In order to “protect” the human species from “autodestruction,” Salk posited that imperative “self-imposed restrictions” must include “controlling births.”

According to Salk, as the human population growth curve hits its potential sigmoid “inflection point,” there is a shift from “Epoch A” to “Epoch B.” During Epoch B, the human species will either be decimated as a result of ecological catastrophes, or humankind will consciously evolve new cultural “attitudes and values” into a new “set of principles of metabiology” that will “guide the development of the BEING and EGO of Man” through Malthusian policies, including population control and resource conservation, which will “bring Man’s agenda and Nature’s agenda into closer harmony.” Similarly, in “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard forecasted that humankind must consciously evolve “along with planetary shifts which are occurring at a metasystem level” in order to harness “co-creative technologies” that can save “a closed-system Earth” from the ecological “breakdown” of “growing population” and “pollution.” 

Eight years after the publication of Survival of the Wisest, the sigmoid curve data and the “epochal change” theory in that book were rehashed in another book, Population and Human Values: A New Reality, which was co-authored in 1981 by Salk and his son, who were commissioned by the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) to compose the book as “a report” analyzing UN “projections of population growth.” In compiling Population and Human Values,the Salks collaborated with the UN Chief of the Estimates and Projections Division, Shunichi Inoue. The Salks also consulted with “Rafael Salas, Tarzie Vittachi, and T. N. Krishnan of the UNFPA” along with Carl Haub of the Malthusian-eugenic Population Reference Bureau. It is worth noting here that Hubbard also collaborated with the UN where she gave a speech promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which affirm the Neo-Malthusian population policies of the UN International Conference on Population and Development.