The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (1963) is a fascinating and deeply disturbing book, which imagines all Western history as a seesaw between those who imagine that human nature can be perfected, and those who consider it hopelessly depraved.
The first group thinks that big government, central planning, eugenics, and strict population control can solve the problem of scarcity, dissolving all reasons for social conflict in a pink fog of mild goodwill and quasi-brotherhood. And it’s these perfectionists who are in charge at the novel’s outset, reacting to food shortages and environmental problems by imposing a rigid Malthusian scheme akin to China’s One Child Policy.
To emphasize the evils of heterosexual reproduction, the government encourages flagrant homosexuality, sterilization and even castration — granting plum positions via affirmative action to characters who will remind you of “Caitlyn Jenner.” Of course, this can’t last forever, and the conflict in the novel comes when rebels who emphasize man’s fallenness, to the point of wallowing in it, push back in the form of religious fanaticism and terrorism … an eerie prognostication of Islam’s response to the West’s Culture of Death. (Full disclosure: the author didn’t see quite that far ahead; his religious terrorists are radicalized Anglicans — a detail which is unintentionally hilarious.)