When some people are asked to imagine an apple, they don't form a picture of an apple in their mind's eye. They don't have a mind's eye. They download their programming from the talking heads daily, and are told what consensus to form. These people used to be valuable. They could perform mindless labor or hold a pike in a formation.
Today automation is more productive at lower cost, and pikes aren't how clay is held or taken. Allods have a choice between feeding and housing these people like curiosities in a zoo or eliminating them somehow. Creating mental challenges that failure to surmount results in failure to reproduce is that somehow, along with a little patience. But exigency presses, and simply reducing reproduction isn't sufficient. Feeding and housing 8B for ~80 years is insuperable economically without vastly more larceny than has been heretofore necessary, so inflation, jabs, war, and select catastrophic events are applied, to reduce the temporal duration of associated expenditures on habitat maintenance.
The future then we live now.