Democide
If you can't be bothered empowering them to be better, just convince them to donate their bodies to "science".
You’ve got a problem. You’re a group of powerful ideologues who view morals as an obstacle to pursuing the hypothetical greater good. All you know is all you need to know, as you have access to data stolen from every “person” who has relinquished the sanctity of their privacy to the new god of information; Artificial Intelligence. Yet, all that is not the problem you’re concerned about; you’re not concerned about power’s corruption of your being. You’re worried about population levels, resource distribution, and the stability of the planet’s climate, and rightly so; why should you be concerned about the problems in your own house when the issues outside of it are far worse?
Pretending to solve these problems diligently can be challenging, especially when you don’t care about these problems because the power you’ve accumulated has corrupted your being. However, you must pretend to address them! Your mob of useful idiots has made these issues famous, and you must satiate their demands lest they turn on you and eat you. How to do that, so you maintain power and improve your ability to hoard more? More importantly, how do you do that while acknowledging that your dismissal of morals is not common amongst the masses? The answer? Make them think similarly to you through subversion of their values!
The first problem you should address is population levels; why should you tackle this first? Because if you can lower the population levels dramatically, you’ll kill three birds with one stone. You’ll make more room, allow for fairer resource distribution, and the climate will get cooler because there will be fewer farmers/farters. You can’t do this cheaply; you can’t just shoot or starve them openly because the masses will notice and cut your heads off as they did with Marie Antoinette and King Louis The Sixteenth.
Furthermore, it would be best if you could gain a lot of data on how technology and gene therapy work on the human body. That way, you kill more birds with one stone and accumulate more power through this democide than just wasting all these valuable bodies. Let science kill them while providing valuable input toward amalgamating technology with biology for your long-term benefit. However, you must be careful not to kill too many at once, lest the masses notice and revolt. That’s the benefit of clinical trials; you need a placebo group and informed consent. Therein lies another problem, how do you get around informed consent? Oh, that’s easy; create a bullshit ethical argument claiming that informed consent gets in the way of pursuing the greater good.
Yet, that won’t be enough, many of the “persons” aren’t that stupid, and many will figure it out. So, you’ll need to hide this science experiment behind a name that no one will question because of the century of conditioning conducted around that name’s efficacy and safety. That way, it won’t matter when people point out that it doesn’t address the hazard by name or function. Instead, the masses will accuse those that point out simple facts of putting them at risk, all while they consent to have their immune systems destroyed in the name of science that will hypothetically benefit us.
What to do with the ones that figure it out? Ignore them, slander them, and ostracise them as conspiracy theorists. It doesn’t matter that conspiracies exist, and we who have accumulated the most power are experts at conspiring. Repetition works on those we teach to believe anything we repeat, especially if we have a monopoly on their attention. Killing the “awake” would be foolish; we need these people to solve problems. When this mad experiment fails, we may need them to improve our science and philosophy. We are master opportunists, not geniuses. A genius knows why maintaining morals is essential when pursuing the “greater good.”
They know that oblivion awaits any who convince themselves that the good needs to be moved aside to pursue the hypothetical good. They comprehend that a contradiction cancels out the existence of a concept, and they know that live in reverse is evil. If life is the embodiment of the good, then it should go without saying that if you have to move good/life out of the way to pursue the enhancement of good/life, then you have gone down a path that will end in contradiction and oblivion. If problems exist in your world, choosing a solution path that does not rely on evil acts is best.
Instead of attempting to lower population levels, teach the population to value the sanctity of their surroundings. Instead of reducing the population of resource consumers, use your highly successful marketing tactics to encourage them to be mindful of their consumption. Instead of pretending to address climate change, point out the real problem, the over-abundance of materialistic influencing.
Sadly, they won’t increase the level of moral intelligence in the world; they need ignorant stupidity to maintain power. They won’t encourage people to be mindful of their consumption; they need the consumption of scarce resources to maintain control. They won’t promote symbiotic behaviour either; they’re parasites and enjoy their own company.
