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

For some time, there have been efforts to facelift the Malthusian-transhumanist bent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with a patina of New Age spirituality through a belief in “conscious evolution,” such as that propagated by futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard. Yet, notwithstanding Hubbard’s lofty invocation of “Christ consciousness,” her faith in conscious evolution holds that, in order to mitigate overpopulation crises, natural resources must be rationed through “sustainable development” economics while human resources must be neo-eugenically culled and biotechnologically engineered into a new transhuman species. In fact, with the blessings of Rockefeller philanthropy, Hubbard, who promoted sustainable development at the United Nations (UN) and collaborated with known Malthusians from groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Club of Rome, was one of the most radical advocates of population reduction in the name of spiritual evolution.

Across the internet, there has been wide circulation of an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript in which Hubbard declared that “one-fourth” of humanity will need to be culled in order to usher in a utopian New Age Order:

“[o]ut of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is elected to transcend . . . One-fourth is destructive.  . . . They are defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a ‘natural death.’  . . .

Now, as we approach the quantum shift from the creature-human to the co-creative human—the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers—the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body.  . . . 

Fortunately, you are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.” 

In my previous article in this series on Barbara Marx Hubbard, I had been unable to trace the provenance of the unpublished manuscript. Since then, I conducted some further sleuthing, and I was able to track down a copy of the manuscript in the possession of attorney Constance Cumbey, who is the acclaimed author of the The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism. Cumbey purchased several copies of the manuscript on multiple occasions, including once from Hubbard personally and once from Rama Vernon, who orchestrated a series of Soviet-American Citizens Summits that Hubbard attended along with Doug Coe, who was the figurehead of the Christian Fellowship Foundation, and Paul Temple, who funded the Fellowship and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences where Hubbard preached her Malthusian gospel of “conscious” transhuman evolution. For the full backstory on Cumbey’s exposé of Hubbard’s manuscript, watch the interview Courtenay Turner and I conducted at Cumbey’s estate.

Now that Hubbard’s infamous manuscript has been verified, it deserves an explication in this series. Henceforth, this article will examine how the manuscript, which is titled “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon (From the Book of Co-Creation: An Evolutionary Interpretation of the New Testament),” reveals further evidence of Hubbard’s Malthusian-transhumanist vision of the future. Moreover, this article will explicate how Hubbard’s “Alternative to Armageddon” preaches a gospel of Malthusian “crisis” evolution that was inspired by her spiritual idol, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; shared by her kindred evolutionary, Jonas Salk; and bankrolled by her beloved benefactor, Laurance Rockefeller. Furthermore, this article will show how Hubbard’s gospel of crisis evolution is being resounded by the WEF to push Malthusian policies under the banner of “sustainable development” to further the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. Additionally, this article will document how the legacies of Salk and Rockefeller continue to propel Malthusian “sustainable development” and transhuman evolution through the Salk Institute, Venrock, the UN, and the World Wildlife Fund. 

In the next and final article in this series, I will reveal how Hubbard’s affiliations with the World Future Society, the Human Potential Movement, and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution were connected to networks of alleged pedophiles and sexual abuse cults.

Baptism by Teilhard de Chardin’s Malthusian-Eugenic Crisis of Noetic Birth

In “Barbara Marx Hubbard: Godmother of Transhumanism and Synthetic Spirituality,” which was the first article in this series, I historicized how Hubbard’s vision of “conscious” transhuman evolution was inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Malthusian-eugenicist and Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin pontificated that overpopulation is fomenting an ecological tipping point culminating in a “crisis of birth,” which will bring about the noetic evolution of human consciousness. According to Teilhard de Chardin, the “noosphere,” or noetic “mind sphere,” of the universe is a cosmic “intelligence,” or “consciousness,” that evolves through human consciousness and, by extension, technology, which is spurred by Malthusian crises.

Not only was Hubbard’s transhumanism rooted in Teilhard de Chardin’s gospel of cosmic “crisis” evolution through the noetic “mind sphere” of the universe. But Hubbard’s Malthusian outlook on population growth and sustainable development, which has influenced UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset, was likewise inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, who believed human overpopulation should be eugenically culled in order to save the Earth from ecological “crises” that threaten the “birth” of evolutionary progress.

In a 1936 letter that was published in Letters to Léontine Zanta, Teilhard de Chardin asserted that, “at one and the same time there should be official recognition of: 1. The priority/primacy of the earth; 2. The inequality of peoples and races” (298). Similarly, in a posthumously published book titled Toward the Future, he pontificated that the “evolution” of the “noosphere” is predicated upon (1) the global “maintenance . . . of the natural resources available in the continents, which feed man’s individual and social body”; and (2)the “effective control, both in quantity and quality, of reproduction in order to avoid over-population of the earth or its invasion by a less satisfactory ethnic group” (299). In brief, in both his private letters and public writings, Teilhard de Chardin advocated the Malthusian-eugenic control of the world’s natural and human resources through the eugenic control of population quality and the Neo-Malthusian control of population quantity in tandem with Malthusian conservation of limited environmental resources.

In another book titled The Future of Man,Teilhard de Chardin posited that, in order to avert “famine” and other ecological catastrophes from overpopulation, the human species would need to cull its own population down to a “maximum” size while eugenically engineering the appropriate ratios and proportions of a “racial hygienic” caste hierarchy ranked according to “different ethnic types.” In a chapter titled “The Directions and Conditions of the Future,” which resounded the alarm of “Mr. [Henry] Fairfield Osborn [Jr.’s]” Malthusian treatise, Our Plundered Planet,Teilhard de Chardin postulated how: 

“earth’s population began to shoot up in an alarming fashion.  . . . Now we suddenly see the saturation point ahead of us, and approaching at a dizzying speed. How are we to prevent this compression of Mankind on the closed surface of the planet . . . from passing that critical point beyond which any increase in numbers will mean famine and suffocation? Above all, how are we to assure that the maximum population, when it is reached, shall be composed only of elements harmonious in themselves and blended as harmoniously as possible together? Individual eugenics (breeding and education designed to produce only the best individual types) and racial eugenics (the grouping or intermixing of different ethnic types being not left to chance but effected as a controlled process in the proportions most beneficial to humanity as a whole) both, as I well know, come up against apparently insuperable difficulties, from the point of view of technical organisation and from that of psychological resistance. But this does not alter the fact that the problem of building a healthy Mankind already stares us in the face and is growing more acute every day” (295).

To put it another way, for Teilhard de Chardin, the collective noetic evolution of the planetary ecosystem and the human species requires that the Earth’s limited resources be stewarded by a eugenically engineered elite who must enforce Malthusian birth control policies aimed at culling “unprogressive ethnical groups” from the human population so that those “unfit” races do not squander the planet’s natural resources. 

In yet another book titled Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin professed, “[n]ow eugenics does not confine itself to a simple control of births. All sorts of related questions . . . are attached to it. What fundamental attitude, for example, should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups? The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity?” These rhetorical questions insinuate that “unprogressive,” or “lesser,” races should be the primary targets of population control in order to prevent such “unfit” races from consuming the eugenic elite’s share of the Earth’s limited natural resources. In The Future of Man, Teilhard de Chardin indicated that the “unprogressive” hominids, who are essentially synonymous with the “unfit,” are those who balk at the “super-humanisation” and “planetisation of Mankind” which is necessary to consciously plan the collective noetic evolution of the human species and planet Earth.

To be sure, Hubbard did not overtly avow “race hygiene” eugenics. Nevertheless, echoing Teilhard de Chardin, Hubbard did envision that human population would need to be culled, and that the expendable populations would inevitably be those who are not spiritually “fit” to “progress,” or “evolve,” their consciousnesses toward noetic transhumanization and collective sustainable development. In “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard referred to “one-fourth of humanity” who are “defective seeds” and therefore “must be eliminated from the social body.” Hubbard declared that “[i]t is a case of the destruction of the whole planet, or the elimination of the ego-driven, godless one-fourth who, at this time of planetary birth, can, if allowed to live on to reproduce their defective disconnection, destroy forever the opportunity of Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, heirs of God.” In brief, although Hubbard did not explicitly espouse old school “race hygiene” eugenics, she did believe in the cosmic necessity of a “spiritual,” or “conscious,” Malthusian-eugenics that decrees the culling of a quarter of the population in order to save the planet and harness the noetic transhuman evolution of homo universalis.  

In the official publication of The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth,Hubbard, like Teilhard de Chardin, postulated the Malthusian crisis of the “limits to growth” crisis and the “population crisis” as a “crisis of our planetary birth” [1]. Similarly, in Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin declared, 

“[t]oo much iron, too much wheat, too many automobiles . . . and even too many children.  . . . [W]e must ask what this excess production means. Is the world condemned, as it grows, to automatic death by stifling beneath its own excessive weight? Not at all, we would answer. It is in course of gathering to itself a new higher body. At this crisis of birth, everything depends on the prompt emergence of a soul which by merely appearing will come to organize, lighten, and vitalize this mass of stagnant and confused matter.  . . . The resources at our disposal today, the powers that we have released, could not possibly be absorbed by the narrow system of individual or national units which the architects of the human earth have hitherto used.  . . . The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the earth.“

In short, Teilhard de Chardin believed that the overpopulation of the human species and the over-commoditization of the Earth’s natural resources are triggering a Malthusian “crisis” that will spark the “birth” of a newly evolved system of global governance over all the environmental resources across “the human earth.” 

Mirroring Teilhard de Chardin in her 1998 Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, Hubbard warned that there is an urgent “crisis” which can only be averted by the “birth” of a “planetary system” designed to control human population growth, natural resource consumption, and environmental pollution [2]. In a chapter titled “Our Crisis Is a Birth,” which is also the subtitle to the official publication of The Revelation [1], Hubbard asserted that: 

“[w]e must shift to renewable, nonpolluting sources of energy. We feel the pangs of hunger increasing as population escalates and more and more of us are hungry. All around us our old life-support systems are breaking down. What worked before has become destructive. We do not have much time to change.  . . . 

Yet, despite our fear and ignorance, we are learning to manage a planetary system.  . . .

Our crisis is a birth. We are one living system and we have come to the limit of one phase of natural growth on a finite planet.  . . .

[W]e may see ourselves as planetary midwives helping to deliver ourselves as a planetary system toward our next stage of life.” [2]

Similarly, in her 2012 book, Birth 2012 and Beyond, Hubbard professed that Malthusian ecological calamities resulting from overpopulation, overconsumption, and pollution are catalyzing a global “birthing crisis”: “[i]f you look at planet Earth as a whole system, it’s obvious that we’re overpopulating, [sic] we’re polluting, and we’re running out of resources. Like an infant that is reaching the ‘due date’ of its birth, we’re overgrowing ‘the womb’ of the Earth. Our ‘birthing’ crisis is inflicting pain and suffering for millions, as well as the possible destruction of our life support system” [3]. 

According to Hubbard, this “crisis” will “birth” the collective-conscious evolution of a new transhuman: species in tandem with a new world order: 

“The urgency of our global crisis is causing people to wake up all over the planet.  . . . What is now being born is transforming the old situation with the prospect of new solutions; and . . . it is helping to create a new world . . . 

And so, I believe . . . our crisis is potentially the birth of a more co-evolving, cocreative [sic] humanity.  . . .

[A] new type of human is emerging in the face of our shared global crisis. I call these pioneers ‘universal humans’ . . . This new person is moving toward cosmic consciousness and an ever-deepening spirituality.” [3]

In “Alternative to Armageddon,” alluding to the Club of Rome’s Malthusian treatise, Limits to Growth, Hubbard described this global “crisis of birth” as a Malthusian “meta-crisis of limits” that is midwifing the human species through a noetic “birth canal,” which will beget a “born again” transhuman species that can circumvent the “limits to growth” through evolutionary technologies, including “cybernetics,” “robotics,” and genetic engineering:

“[w]e entered the ‘birth canal.’ The meta-crisis of limits began. Resource shortage, over-population, pollution, alienation, confusion, malaise about the future, disconnection with the past. Experts with a womb-perspective advocated a ‘return’ to the simpler past, an adaptation to limits, a program of maximum conservation, and no growth. Futurists wrote of a paradigm shift from self-centered to whole-centered. Evolutionaries evangelized the extended gospel of Christ-capacities for all. Simultaneously these capacities turned on. These were the ‘post-natal’ technologies, developed within the womb of Earth for use after birth in the universal environment beyond the biospheric womb of Earth: astronautics, genetics, longevity, cybernetics, robotics.”

It is keen to note here that, in “Alternative to Armageddon,” Hubbard professed that the “universal woman,” or homo universalis, “gives birth to the first natural Christ,” and that “[t]his first natural Christ is transhuman, supra-human.” In other words, according to Hubbard, “Christ-capacities,” which are “turned on” through “‘post-natal’ technologies,” are “transhuman” capacities that are noetically “birthed” through the “meta-crisis of limits” to population growth and resource consumption.

To sum up, Hubbard carried the torch for Teilhard de Chardin’s Malthusian-eugenic “crisis” gospel as she prophesied that Malthusian “crises” would give “birth” to a noetic “Christ consciousness” which would technocratically engineer the sustainable evolution of a new transhuman species. Today, the WEF has adopted a “crisis of birth” ethos to drive the Great Reset by exploiting the COVID-19 “crisis” as an opportunity to accelerate the “birth” of a sustainable transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. In a WEF “Sustainable Development” article published in 2020 and titled, “Now Is the Time for a ‘Great Reset,'” WEF Founder and Chairman, Klaus Schwab, proclaimed that “[t]he COVID-19 crisis is affecting every facet of people’s lives in every corner of the world.  . . . [T]he pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” by “Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

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. 

In Population and Human Values, the Salks analyzed “demographic data [that] provide a basis on which to discuss the relationship between changes in population growth patterns and changes in human attitudes, values, and behavior.” Based on the data, the Salks estimated that “we can expect the human population growth curve to follow a sigmoid pattern. The level of the plateau [of the sigmoid curve] is still uncertain, however, and is subject to human influence. In the years to come, we face the challenge of understanding and facilitating a slowing of human population growth and, ultimately, of adapting to the conditions associated with a relatively constant population size.” Nevertheless, the Salks asserted that, “[a]lthough we have turned a corner and the rate of world population growth is presently decreasing, world population size is still rapidly increasing and will continue to do so for many decades to come. The further slowing of growth will require expansion of family planning programs and a general increase in availability of social, health, and educational services.” Failing to institute such population control policies, according to the Salks, could lead to “a total collapse of the human population.” 

Echoing the Salks’ “epochal change” theory of conscious Malthusian evolution, Hubbard envisioned “a time of quantum transformation” when overpopulation and resource depletion would be offset by family planning and euthanasia policies while, at the same time, “advanced medical technologies” would be harnessed to “extend life” and “build new bodies” for the new “universal life” of a transhuman homo universalis. In a passage from “The Revelation: Alternative to Armageddon,” which is reprinted almost verbatim in The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth [1], Hubbard wrote: 

“at a time of quantum transformation, . . . ‘[b]e fruitful and multiply’ goes too far and becomes over-population. ‘Preserve all life’ goes too far and results in undesirable technological prolongation of animal/human existence. ‘Give food and shelter to the people’ becomes the over-industrialization, pollution, inflation, and resource depletion by the developed world.  . . .

The feedback from the environment is rapidly informing you to stop doing in the future what was necessary in the past.

‘Be fruitful and multiply’ becomes ‘consciously conceive chosen children who will be given the opportunity of optimum development.’ 

‘Preserve all life’ becomes ‘the opportunity for chosen death, and chosen extended life.’ Thanatology and gerontology enter the scene. Death can be chosen by those who have finished their work on Earth. The purpose of advanced medical technologies is not to maintain animal/human bodies in a semi-vegetative state. It is to be used by the minds motivated to do new work in the new environments of outer space, to extend life, change bodies, and eventually build new bodies accustomed to the new conditions of universal life.”

Today, Hubbard’s futurist prescriptions for Malthusian population control and conscious transhuman evolution are being advanced by the Salk Institute. Even though Hubbard parted ways with the Salk Institute during its incubation period, her Malthusian vision of conscious transhuman evolution, which was shared by Salk, is reflected in the research and development projects of the Salk Institute, which has been contributing to sustainable development while engineering the building blocks for the new transhuman bodies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

In fact, the Salk Institute, which experimented with “RNA-targeting CRISPR-Cas technology to destroy the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ RNA” in 2020, has conducted extensive research advancing “genetic engineering,” including “CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing,” “gene editing-based stem cell therapies,” and “a new Salk tool, called CasRx,” which can “target . . . RNA.” At the same time, members of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and the Salk Institute’s Systems Neurobiology Laboratory, with the help of the United States Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), have been enhancing transhuman AI consciousness by “teaching artificial intelligence to . . . ‘think’ like humans” through “computational model[s]” that “simulate . . . how the brain’s prefrontal cortex . . .  control[s] the flow of information between different areas of neurons.” It is worth noting here that Nicola Allen, who is an Associate Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at the Salk Institute, is a member of the WEF, which is one of the key groups at the helm of pushing transhumanism and Malthusian sustainable development as the cornerstones of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset.

Hubbard and the Sustainable-Malthusian Globalism of the Rockefeller Dynasty

Hubbard’s Malthusian outlook toward conscious evolution was shared not only by Salk, but also by her “beloved patron,” Laurance S. Rockefeller [2], who bankrolled her Foundation for Conscious Evolution, which calls for “radical evolutionary technologies” to be bolstered as remedies for “a complex series of crises, most especially environmental . . . crises, [which] are acting as evolutionary drivers pressuring us to innovate and transform.” Rockefeller, whose Venrock venture capital firm has bankrolled transhumanist science and technologies, including biotech, nanotech, and AI, is praised by Hubbard in five of her books over a span of 22 years between 1993 and 2015 [1] [2] [6] [7] [8]. Not only did the transhumanist interests of Rockefeller and Hubbard converge, but they also shared the common belief that Malthusian ecological crises must be met with global “sustainable development” policies entailing human population control and environmental conservation.  

According to a biography titled Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance championed the Malthusian ecological philosophy of “his brother JDR [John D. Rockefeller] 3rd, whose interest in population control he shared.” The Malthusian philanthropies of Laurance and John D. III, the latter of whom was the chairman of the US Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, were inspired by their father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who funded Nazi eugenics programs through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. The Malthusianism of Laurance and John D. III was also inspired by John D. Jr.’s crony, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. The son of Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr., who was a co-founder of the American Eugenics Society (AES), Osborn Jr. was also the cousin of Frederick Osborn, who was both a director of the AES and a co-founder of John D. III’s Population Council. It was Frederick Osborn who professed that eugenic goals could be more effectively attained through “crypto-eugenics” under the guise of “family planning” and Malthusian ecology, the latter of which is a pillar of Hubbard’s transhumanist schema for “conscious evolution.” 

In Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance’s biographer records how “the young LSR [Laurance S. Rockefeller] learned from him [Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr.] quite early about the world’s growing problem with overpopulation — an interest shared with JDR 3rd . . . Above all, LSR recalled, Osborn helped him to understand ‘participating in doing,’ not simply . . . in passive philanthropy, but in playing an active role within his philanthropic interests.” Laurance was so inspired by Osborn Jr. that he beamed about how he “felt they shared an ‘interrelated energy field’; years after they met, Osborn recognized the younger man’s similar curiosity, sending him a portrait inscribed, ‘from one rogue to another.’” Not only was Osborn Jr. a muse for Laurance’s Malthusian ecological philanthropy, but “[o]ver the years Osborn and LSR worked together on many projects, from the goals of Save-the-Redwoods to the development of the Bronx Zoo into a Wildlife Conservation Society.” In 1972, honoring the legacy of his deceased Malthusian mentor, Laurance wrote a Reader’s Digest article on “The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Met,” which lauded “Osborn’s dynamism, . . . his writings on the post-war population explosion, and his sense of global responsibility.'”

About a decade after Laurance’s death, he was similarly eulogized by Hubbard in the dedication to her 2015 Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation [7]. As I document in “Barbara Malthusian Hubbard: From Limits to Growth to Agenda 2030,” out of the five books in which Hubbard lauds Rockefeller, four of them advance Hubbard’s calls for population control and sustainable development in order to avert Malthusian crises [1] [2] [6] [8]. In addition to spreading Hubbard’s Malthusian crisis gospel by bankrolling her books, Laurance also financed a Rockefeller Brothers Fund “Environmental Program” that “conduct[ed] scientific anticipatory analysis” of “the way in which population, resources, food, capital, pollution, and values interact.”

On top of funding Malthusian crisis propaganda and Malthusian environmental programs, Hubbard’s Rockefeller benefactor founded the Conservation Foundation, which was later merged with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF had been set up by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; and Julian Huxley:

• A former Nazi storm trooper, Prince Bernhard, who was also a founder of the Bilderberg Group, was the “honorary sponsor” of the Third Annual Meeting of the WEF. At this 1973 Annual Meeting, Club of Rome co-founder, Aurelio Peccei, who met personally with Hubbard in 1972, preached the Malthusian gospel of Limits to Growth, which would lay the groundwork for the sustainable development initiatives of UN Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset. The Limits to Growth thesis was resounded by Hubbard in several of her books, including Conscious Evolution[2]; Birth 2012 and Beyond[3]; Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence[8],and the published and unpublished versions of the “Book of Co-Creation” [1] [6].

• Prince Philip, who was kin to Prince Bernhard and several other members of Hitler’s Nazi Party, was the father of the current King of the United Kingdom, Charles III, who launched the WEF’s Great Reset and the Terra Carta mandate of the Sustainable Markets Initiative. In an anthology titled If I Were an Animal, which donated sales royalties to the WWF, Prince Philip confessed that he was “tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus” to cull the “population explosion” of the “human species” and, in turn, protect “endangered species.”

• The president of the British Eugenics Society and the first Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley coined the term “transhumanism” in his 1957 book, New Bottles for New Wine. In UNESCO’s 1946 mission statement, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, Huxleycalled for a global eugenics program and a global population control policy:

“[t]he recognition of the idea of an optimum population-size [sic] (of course relative to technological and social conditions) is an indispensable first step towards that planned control of populations which is necessary if man’s blind reproductive urges are not to wreck his ideals and his plans for material and spiritual betterment. The recognition of the fact that the wild life [sic] of the world is irreplaceable, but that it is being rapidly destroyed, is necessary if we are to realise in time that areas must be set aside where, in the ultimate interests of mankind as a whole, the spread of man must take second place to the conservation of other species.”

Not only was the World Wildlife Fund set up by these prominent Malthusians with the help of Russell E. Train, who was a Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee. But the WWF, which advances UN Agenda 2030 through the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, has explicitly advocated for Malthusian family planning programs. In brief, for the WWF, wildlife conservation and human population control are interlinked elements of sustainable Malthusian development. It is worth noting here that, in a 2020 WWF video, Sir David Attenborough, who is a WEF member, called for “stabilis[ing] the human population as low as we fairly can.” It is also worth noting that numerous other WEF members are also WWF officials, including Shi Wang, David Dao, Andreas Follér, Jim Sano, David Miller, Emilio Tenuta, Yuan Jiakai, Julia Novy, Carter Roberts, Mei Dewen, William Smith Stubbs, Rasmus Helveg Petersen, David Hoyle, Victoria Fuentes, Oscar Soria, Razan Al Mubarak, Jayesh Ranjan, Frances Seymour, Erin Simon, and Bubba Cook.

Wildlife conservation and population control are similarly hitched together by Hubbard in “Alternative to Armageddon,” which asserts that, in order to save “animals” from “killers,” a planetary “tribulation” must ensue so that “[t]he killers must not survive to become universal humans”:

“[h]uman history has been a difficult and as yet incomplete effort to overcome the mammalian defect programmed in our genes—killing animals and each other. We are heading toward the birth canal with this defect uncorrected . . . [H]undreds of millions are still killing animals and each other. 

This is why tribulations must be so severe on your planet. The killers must not survive to become universal humans.”

Ironically, Hubbard’s remedy for the killing of wildlife is the selective culling of human beings. It can be inferred that the “killers” who “must not survive” belong to the “one-fourth” of the “defective seeds” who must be “destroyed” in order to midwife humankind through its cosmic Malthusian birth crisis into a new transhuman species. Notice here that this passage reinvokes Hubbard’s “birth crisis” eschatology through the imagery of “heading toward the birth canal.” Notice also that this passage echoes Huxley’s decree that “man must take second place to the conservation of other species.” 

Hubbard also collaborated with WWF trustee Maurice Strong, who served alongside her on the Global Advisory Board of the World Future Society. According to Laurance S. Rockefeller: Catalyst for Conservation, Laurance had “conversations with and high regard for such individuals as Maurice Strong from the United Nations.” In fact, Laurance was a member of the US delegation to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, which was led by Strong, who later set up the 1992 UN Earth Summit Conference where the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of UN Agenda 21 were established as the precursors to the SDGs of UN Agenda 2030. Meanwhile, Laurance financed a battery of “sustainable development” projects as trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It is keen to note here that SDG 5.6 affirms the Neo-Malthusian “family planning” tenets of the Program of Action of the UN’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. 

The godfather of the SDGs, Strong was a WEF Foundation Board member who also crossed paths with Hubbard at the State of the World Forum (SWF), which was orchestrated by the first and only president of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Gorbachev, who was also a member of the Malthusian Club of Rome. The SWF also brought together an array of Hubbard’s New Age “allies” along with key WWF officials, including the WWF Senior Program Officer, Jaime Cavelier, and the WWF Chair, Ruud Lubbers, who was also the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. At the same time, the SWF also included several members of the WEF and the Club of Rome along with Laurance’s nephew, Steven C. Rockefeller, who was the Chair of the International Drafting Committee of Earth Charter, which Gorbachev co-created with Strong as a UN Agenda 21 proxy through a merger of Gorbachev’s Green Cross International and Strong’s Earth Council. According to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund website, Steven Rockefeller “became an RBF trustee in 1977 and joined Laurance and several like-minded cousins in embracing spiritually grounded approaches to a new ecological ethos.”

It is worth noting here that the Rockefeller dynasty not only purchased and donated the land upon which the UN headquarters were built. But the house of Rockefeller also financed some of the UN World and International Population Conferences that paved the way for the Neo-Malthusian population policies that are embedded into the SDGs of UN Agenda 2030, which Hubbard endorsed during her 2016 address to the UN High-Level Forum on the Culture of Peace. It is also worth noting that Laurance’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund and his venture capital firm, Venrock, have financed “sustainable development” technologies since 1980, and they continue to invest in “sustainability” enterprises today.

In sum, Laurance Rockefeller and Barbara Marx Hubbard shared a common Malthusian vision of conscious transhuman evolution. Through collaborations with the UN, both Laurance and Barbara advanced the Malthusian population policies that undergird the SDGs of Agenda 2030, which was spawned by their mutual comrade, Maurice Strong. By proxy, Gorbachev’s SWF brought together Strong, Hubbard, and Laurance’s nephew along with top officials from the UN, the WEF, the Club of Rome, and the WWF, all of which are pivotal institutions driving the Malthusian SDG initiatives of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In short, Hubbard’s liaison with Laurance Rockefeller intersected through momentous positions at the Malthusian nexus of world governance institutions, such as the UN; globalist Round Table NGOs, such as the WEF, the SWF, and the Club of Rome; and non-profit environmentalist foundations, such as the WWF.

Crisis, Reaction, Solution

Altogether, Hubbard’s gospel of Malthusian-transhumanist crisis evolution was inspired by her noetic muse, Tielhard de Chardin, shared by her “kindred spirit,” Jonas Salk [1], and bankrolled by her “beloved patron,” Laurance Rockefeller [2]. While Salk compiled Malthusian population reports for the UN, Rockefeller helped shape the formation of the WWF and participated in Maurice Strong’s UN Conference on the Human Environment, which laid the groundwork for Agenda 2030 and the Neo-Malthusian SDGs that Hubbard endorsed at the UN High-Level Forum on the Culture of Peace. Today, Jonas’s Salk Institute and Laurance’s Venrock, along with his Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are advancing “sustainable development” initiatives and transhumanist biotechnologies that align with their previously stated views. Meanwhile, as the Great Reset is barreling forward, Hubbard’s crisis collectivism has been assimilated by the WEF, which has been stoking fears of environmental crises and public health crises in an effort to goad populations into submitting to the biotech mandates and “sustainable development” overhauls of the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Ostensibly, these alarms of global crises could be tabulated as evidence validating Hubbard’s evolutionary crisis prophecy. Nonetheless, these crises could be contrived, exaggerated, or intentionally mismanaged in order to foment the ostensive emergencies necessary to coerce people into capitulating to the “sustainable” transhumanist technocracy of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. At a 1975 Lindisfarne Fellows conference titled “Conscious Evolution and the Evolution of Consciousness,” Salk gave a presentation that was contextualized within the prospects of a technocratic elite manipulating Malthusian crises in order to impose draconian systems of totalitarian control under the pretense of “crisis management.” William Irwin Thompson, the founder of the Lindisfarne Association, which was funded by Laurance Rockefeller, prefaced Salk’s lecture with the premise that “we are living in one of the greatest historical crises” which could pose “absolutely no other future ahead of us but a kind of authoritarian convergence of the military-industrial complex and the multinational corporations creating a form of crisis management by which a kind of new elite, possibly a computer scientist elite, will use the crises to gain new controls and manage society to take over.”  

Whether organic or astroturfed, environmental crises and public health crises are being leveraged by the technocratic globalist elites of the WEF and the UN in order to accelerate the sustainable transhumanist development overhauls of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is perhaps moot to quibble over whether the global elite sincerely intend to save the planet and evolve the human species, or whether they surreptitiously intend to “take over” the world. In either case, it remains incumbent upon conscientious free thinkers to balk when globalist elite technocrats, such as Klaus Schwab, or New Age gurus, such as Barbara Marx Hubbard, offer Malthusian-transhumanist “solutions” that are arguably worse than the crises themselves.

In the next and final article in this series, I finally will unveil how Hubbard’s affiliations with the World Future Society, the Human Potential Movement, and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution were connected to networks of alleged pedophiles and sexual abuse cults.

References:

[1]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: Our Crisis Is a Birth (The Book of Co-Creation) (Sonoma, CA: Foundation for Conscious Evolution, 1993).

[2]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1998).

[3]  Barbara Marx Hubbard and The Welcoming Committee, Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution (USA: Shift Books, 2012).

[4]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Hunger of Eve: One Woman’s Odyssey Toward the Future (Eastsound, WA: Island Pacific NW, 1989).

[5]  Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 2^nd ed. (New York, NY: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1968).

[6]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium (Mill Valley, CA: Nataraj Publishing, 1995).

[7]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation: The Promise Will Be Kept (Los Angeles, CA: Muse Harbor, 2015).

[8]  Barbara Marx Hubbard, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence (10 Steps to the Universal Human) (Charlottesville, VA: Walsch Books, 2001).