The short story "The Discarded" first appeared in "Fantastic" magazine in April, 1959.
When Bedzyk asks Annie whether she ever wondered why she was 'discarded,' she answers in a few pregnant lines. At first, Annie says, "It's that thing about Malthus." Here she refers to Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), whose famous Malthusian equation argues that an exponentially increasing human population on Earth will preclude any possibility of a state of happiness or utopia for humans.
"Too many people. No place to stand." John Brunner also wrote 'To Stand On Zanzibar', a novel dealing with the problems of overpopulation. The book uses the image that if everyone stood shoulder to shoulder we would completely cover the island Zanzibar.
In her discussion of Malthus, Annie says, "Too many people on Earth. No place to stand. The sheep look up." Scriptwriter Harlan Ellison was likely thinking of the 1972 dystopian science fiction novel by English author John Brunner entitled "The Sheep Look Up." The phrase comes from the poem "Lycidas" by Engish writer John Milton:
"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln [swollen] with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."
Ellison got it slightly wrong: the problem with the sheep (to overlook Milton's political and religious subtexts) is not that there are too many of them, but that they are starving, and with starvation come disease and the wolves that can easily prey upon them. The shepherd (the "two-handed engine") can't feed them, but can only try to fend off the wolf. Science fiction author Henry Kuttner also took a title from this verse for his 1955 story "The Two-Handed Engine," co-written with his wife C.L. Moore; that story is very different from Ellison's, but shares the themes of a minority of people who may be wronged, and of guilt.