Thanos Was Right

Spoilers for Avengers Infinity War Below

First off, a movie is a movie.  It's fake, and even when it's based on true events it is still fake.  But sometimes you see something about a movie and it makes you think about the modern world and human nature and it kind of makes you think.  Avengers Infinity War would not really be one of those movies but then I saw this article and I actually had to disagree with it.

The article argues that Thanos' solution of eliminating half of the universe's population was a plot hole.  If he had ultimate power, why wouldn't he just double all of the resources?  The simple answer is that the movie needed a villian and Thanos was already established, and though he did it because some lady didn't want him (that lady being Death) in the comics, they still gave him a good "evil" reason to do it in the movie.  He witnessed his planet destroy itself as it exhausted its resources even after he warned them that it was going to happen.  So, he set out to make sure that wouldn't happen again.

Genocide is a pretty good villain move.  But, would have just doubling all the resources really had the same solution that Thanos was looking for?  Looking at human nature and the history of this world, probably not.  Doubling the resources would have just caused the population to continue to increase, the use of resources to continue to increase and in the end the same situation that he was trying to prevent.  We as a people don't know moderation.  We don't know a lot of things and that's what gets us into a lot of trouble.  We are already reaching a brink where the amount of people on this planet is starting to stretch things thin.

So would wiping out half of the population on Earth cause things to get better?  Again, probably not.  Without knowing the reason why it happened there would be nothing to learn from it.  It would scare the crap of all that were left though.  Maybe would even cause people to change for awhile, but only awhile.  It reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Bender was shot out of the Planet Express ship and met God.  Bender had been god to a colony on him for awhile and he watched as the people destroyed themselves.  God told Bender that if you meddle too much that the people will become reliant, but never help and the people will lose faith.

If Thanos let everyone know what he would have done then they would probably changed their way and had he seen them reverting to their old ways he could step in, had the Infinity Gauntlet not been destroyed.  But that would be too much for a movie.  Too much for any medium really.  And that's where we come back to the original answer.  It's a movie.  It's fake.  All bad guys in movies, and in real life to an extent, believe that they are the real heroes and what they are doing is for the greater good.  For a movie enjoy it and know that there is no consequence.  And in real life, don't be a jerk.  We can solve the problem that Thanos chose to solve with a method we don't have, and even if we did shouldn't use.  We need to be smarter about what we do on this planet, because if we don't then we'll end up causing what Thanos did in a lot slower and lot more devastating of a way.