The Logic of Thanos: Malthus, False Utilitarianism, and the Zero-Sum Immigration Debate

It’s pretty clear when you listen to anti-immigration hardliners that, for them, the immigration debate has little to do with creating a…

Josh Brolin
Josh Brolin in Avengers: Infinity War (2018)www.imdb.com

It’s pretty clear when you listen to anti-immigration hardliners that, for them, the immigration debate has little to do with creating a sane border policy. Rather, it’s about fear, about race, about competition.

This attitude has a historical pedigree in the United States, dating back to our founding but coalescing around a set of race-based quotas in the late 1800s and early 1900s designed to limit immigration as much as possible to Protestant whites. The rhetoric was racist, first and foremost, as much of today’s restrictionist argument is, but it often couched it in sustainability terms. The need, the restrictions said, was to preserve what defined America and Americanness. For the early restrictionists, that meant maintaining a mostly white, Protestant population and strict limits on immigration from China and Eastern and Southern European nations from which Jews and Catholics were emigrating.

The quota approach remained in force, tweaked as our definitions of whiteness and Americanness shifted, until the 1965 immigration reforms that passed as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Gone were the quotas and, in their place, a new system ties to family and work was developed. And yet, the rhetoric that drive the quota system never went away.

Restrictionist groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform no longer make explicitly racist pleas; instead, like much of the Republican Party in recent years, they have altered their language, adding a scientific veneer, and recasting their racism as a concern for sustainability.

This is where Thanos and The Avengers: Infinity War comes in. Thanos, an immensely powerful titan, is on a mission to collect the infinity stones, which The Collector explains in Guardians of the Galaxy are remnants of the six original “singularities” or power systems that, when “the universe exploded into existence,” were “forged into concentrated ingots”that emanated great power and could be used “to mow down entire civilizations like wheat in a field.”

Thanos sees this power as a cleansing force, with him being the only one with the foresight and strength to act. He tells his adopted daughter, Gamora (a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy who hates Thanos), that the universe has grown to an unsustainable point. He had used his power as a titan in the past to destroy individual planets — like Gamora’s — and essentially hit the reset button.

“I saved you,”he tells Gamora.

Gamora: No, no, we were happy on my home planet.

Thanos: Going to bed hungry. Scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I was the one who stopped that. You know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bullies and clear skies. It’s a paradise.

Gamora: Because you murdered half the planet.

Thanos: A small price to pay for salvation.

Gamora: You’re insane.

Thanos: Little one, it’s a simple calculus. This universe has finite its resources, finite… if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.

Gamora: YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!

Thanos: I’m the only one who knows that. At least I’m the only who the will to act on it.

Ultron, in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, makes a similar argument. He was created out of hubris by Tony Stark and expanded and adapted beyond his programming. He reinterprets his primary directive — to protect the world — as a proscription for eliminating humanity, the world’s chief threat, and remaking it in his image.

“I think a lot about meteors. The purity of them. Boom! The end. Start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild.”

Thomas Malthus posited that populations grow geometrically but food supplies grow mathematically, with population outpacing food and creating shortages and, ultimately, resource wars. Malthus, according to AAG Center for Global Geography Education, called for “various checks on population growth” that “he categorized as ‘preventive’ and ‘positive’ checks,” notably efforts to minimize family sizes.

But Malthus also “He saw positive checks to population growth as being any causes that contributed to the shortening of human lifespans,” which moves him into Thanos territory. “He included in this category poor living and working conditions which might give rise to low resistance to disease, as well as more obvious factors such as disease itself, war, and famine.”

The goal, ultimately and above all else, was to rein in population growth and re-establish a sense of sustainability.

That’s Thanos’ goal, too. Thanos describes Titan as being “like most planets. Too many mounds, not enough to go around.” It was a planet facing extinction, and he “offered a solution,” a chance to restart the clock by eliminating a large part of the population ”at random.”

His solution — “genocide,” as Dr. Strange points out — is repulsive and evil, but he makes it sound reasonable, almost logical. “Dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike. And they called me a mad man.”

What Thanos fears is what Malthus describes. And what the audience has grown used to: Sea waters are rising, as are atmospheric temperatures. Weather has grown more volatile, as has the economy. Millions have been driven from their homes by war, famine, environmental catastrophes, economic blight. The refugees are terrified, but so are those who have been lucky to evade the worst of this. They pull up the draw bridges, dig their motes and build their walls. They view it as a zero-sum game, one in which there are winners and losers and in which the only way for losers to win is for them to take what the winners have earned.

This is why they view taxes as confiscatory, rather than an obligation one has to the community, and why the see immigrants and refugees as so dangerous.

FAIR, for instance, claims that immigration is “the major engine that continues to drive U.S. population growth” and that population growth is our most significant environmental threat.

Enlightened public policy is crucial to protecting and managing the diverse and delicate ecosystems throughout the United States, but failing to acknowledge the impact of rampant immigration makes it nearly impossible.

This plays to the xenophobic narrative, but it is not an accurate portrayal of what is happening. FAIR and other restrictionists leave the impression that we can safeguard ourselves by being less a part of the world, by ending immigration, by closing our borders and limiting our population growth. This assumes a domestic scarcity that just does not exist. Environmental and economic problems are not arising because of scarcity, but because of an inequitable distribution of resources that leave the poorest among us most vulnerable to the environmental damage caused by the richest. This is the case in the United States and globally. Shutting the door will do nothing, but guarantee that millions will continue to live in poverty and misery, while increasing tensions between the various groups — national, ethnic, racial, religious — we’ve forced into competition.

Dialogue transcription from IMDB.