What's funny is the whole trendline could invert in less than a decade of just gettin' it on, old-fashioned style. But instead a kind of sexless Cyber-Shakerism has taken root, and the bastards responsible for this bloodless, sterile, nihilistic world are preaching for more of the same as solutions. The problem is and has always been spiritual in nature, but also market driven. We make less of that which is not widely valued, including people.
But like I said in a different context, all it would take is one great storm of hope, mettle and joy to prevail. Sounds like a tall order, but the good thing is these resources range from cheap to free, and we were born with all the requisite tools between our ears and legs.
What you have is a mind virus at work, in times past you might have referred to it as brainwashing. Most leftists that I have talked to in my day say they hate humanity and think what we should all go extinct. These people are not having children, and don’t think you should have children either. Where did they learn this? Public school. This brainwashing has been going on for decades, and now with the tranny stuff and climate change farce it has reached a deafening crescendo.
Simple solution: ban the Pill. This would solve a bunch of our hormone imbalance problems as well.
More nuanced solution: rethink the liberal arts paradigm entirely:
"The liberal arts career path is a leisurely career path. This was fine for antiquity's leisure class. It also worked for aspiring celibate priests during the Middle Ages. But as a standard career path for sizable fraction of society, this is a model for moral disaster.
"The biological urge to make babies cuts in years before the liberal arts model prepares people to support a family. Our society struggled hard enough to get men to postpone sex until 21 back in the old days, when a college degree was enough to get a real job quickly after graduation. After World War II, our corporations had a large appetite for white collar workers (aka bureaucrats) and they were willing to finish the training that colleges and high schools started.
"Thanks to the dumbification of our high schools, it takes a Bachelor's degree to get jobs which once required just a high school diploma and decent grades. Today's Master's degree is becoming yesteryear's Bachelor's. And since we are sending people to college who aren't college material, many are taking 5-6 years to get what was supposed to be a four year degree. And since we are cranking out more degrees in the bureaucratic arts than there are bureaucratic positions, college is often followed by low paying internships. Thankfully, student loans and starter homes in safe neighborhoods have grown ever more expensive. It's party time!
"Fornication before marriage has become the norm for our educated elite. And it's going to stay that way as long as we keep the age of viable middle class family formation pushed into the upper 20s and beyond."
Our problem is not depopulation. It's Kornbluth's Marching Morons scenario.
Data point: the Amish are having plenty of babies. They stop formal education after 8th Grade. We take our brightest and send them to 20th Grade or more, and then have them do a post doc or internship. Anyone who is grad school bound should be partway through his or her major by the end of high school. In the series linked above (three parts), I outlined some ideas for making that happen.
The fertility crisis is an opportunity for the regime to further develop its capacity for micro-managing the population. It is likely that several solutions will be attempted simultaneously. They will have differential effects. A singe coherent response across the West is most unlikely.
Completed fertility has a negative linear relationship to real wages for females. The opportunity costs of women from the elite and the economically privileged sub-elite strata are higher than those of the general population. This suppresses fertility at the top.
Those who have the means to do so will outsource reproduction via commercial surrogacy. This is essentially a sexless form of temporary concubinage for reproductive purposes. A banal, low intensity, form of Gilead without the febrile rhetoric or the drama.
Unless the populist backlash can successfully put a stop to it, replacement level immigration will continue in much of the West. The dynamics of integrating economies on a planetary scale make it difficult for nations to avoid. The price of market access for Western goods and for support against the USSR in the Cold War was mass immigration (in most of Europe mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa was an effect of the energy crisis in the 70s). Even if immigration can be slowed, it will not be stopped.
Biopolitically the current regime has no interest in the posterity of the many, who are replaceable.
It has no interest in the genomic continuity of the population as a whole and is actively hostile to the emergence of any political force that might express such an interest.
Accordingly, the regime is indifferent to difficulties with family formation, familial maintenance or replacement level fertility amongst the general population.
Key regime constituencies benefit from the disruption or de-prioritisation of traditional family structures (employers, feminists), while others benefit from the mismanagement of fertility on a mass scale. This fortifies the elite’s interest in sponsoring forces hostile to inherited social and cultural norms (feminism, gender fluidity, LGBTQI).
The emergence of a sub-proletariat (by definition either involuntarily unmarried or unable to support stable families) within the working class is in no way problematic for the regime…it reduces pressures for higher wages, facilitates further mass immigration and disrupts the transmission of unchosen or inherited attachments.
Both the sub-proletariat and the voluntarily infertile understand intuitively that they have no personal or familial stake in the posterity of the country and, hence, have a diminished interest in maintaining any commitment to its future. This situation suits the regime perfectly and they will do what they can to preserve it.
I am available for repopulation efforts 24x7. Pureblood. No charge.
Another possible issue are natural cycles we're not even aware of creating stress in our populations. Things like solar cycles/magnetic pole flips/etc have to weigh heavily on our collective unconscious. People and all animals breed most when they perceive a good future.
Something really terrible has happened during the past three years of The Madness to this global collective zeitgeist. I still feel like I'm living in the Twilight Zone.
The simple fact is that we live in a toxic culture. Everything is monetized, digitized, sterilized to the point there is minimal social connectivity. Our networks of social reciprocity are monetized in order to be taxed. Raising children is an intensely social activity, of extended families and villages. The sense where you can have lots of children, because they can free range within the community and be cared for. Not feeling they have to be kept under lock and key and monitored constantly. Certainly drag queen story hour in schools would give any sane person the creeps, but it really goes a lot deeper than that. A healthy society and community is a function of collective responsibility, with rights as reward, not rights as ordained and responsibility as optional.
Worrying about birth rates in this situation is missing the big picture.
People are simply organically responding to the situation. Fix it and they will have more kids.
I was on a podcast earlier this week and the host asked me “how do we combat genetically enhanced humans born in synthetic wombs?”
And my response was basically yours.
Enhanced at what cost? What are they missing emotionally, mentally, physically that otherwise millions of years of natural evolution has accounted for?
It reminds me of climate change in that sense - it’s such a nebulous & unfounded fear, that induces hysteria in a particular kind of person.
Excellent as always. Something often missed about the Hungary approach is it is designed to encourage non-Gypsy babies (Hungary has a big Gypsy problem)--they don’t work, so don’t pay income tax, so it does not encourage them.
(I’m half Hungarian, and in fact am visiting now.)
I agree it is values; my thoughts here. As to solutions, this is a great series!
Jun 12, 2023·edited Jun 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
re Israel: As I understand it, the relatively high birthrate is driven by modern and ultra orthodox. Secular Ashkenazim (wealthy, liberal) have a birth rate lower than that of any European country; for secular Sephardim (poor, conservative) it's similar to eg Hungary. I think for the Arab minority it's at replacement level. Eventually Israel will reach a demographic differential inflection point, after which its population will explode with the exponential ultraorthodox growth kicking in. So expect a modern orthodox martial elite annexing larger territories and dumping Haredim there.
For the rest of the world it's more complicated. I think Finland, for example, will become majority Laestadian (fundamentalist Lutheran) some time next century. These aren't Amish - they are integrated and involved in contemporary society (and, most importantly, the workforce). For some countries, this point will be arrived at long after the native population become a minority, so the future is harder to predict (in Finland, under current projections the religious Finnish and Swedish minorities will become a majority before the immigrant populations outnumber the native secular Finns).
Jun 19, 2023·edited Jun 19, 2023Liked by John Carter
This problem will solve itself, as soon the state pension/ ponzi scheme systems collapse. Which will be a very welcomed development, as it is the most degenerate and evil institution ever conceived by man. (More immoral and inhuman than slavery imo.)
If you logically analyze it, people who rely on state pension, are basically cannibal vampires, who are forcibly consuming the life energy of their own children (and grandchildren) trough the insidious use of a third party (the state).
It will be ugly of course, probably billions will die in the coming conflicts.
For most people it's hard to stomach, that this cycle of civilizational development is probably already over. We failed to reach "escape velocity", and it is increasingly unlikely that it will happen before the complete collapse of the system.
(Escape velocity = to have he prospect to create community out of the reach of central authority. In our case this would mean at least interplanetary space travel, since there is no place on Earth you can run away from the globopsycho machine anymore.)
I think the best one can do is to try to conserve the knowledge somehow. So those who will rebuild, can do it quicker and avoid some of the mistakes. (Much like the discovery and translation of roman texts inspired the renaissance.)
-> The parallels between our current trajectory and the fall of Rome is quite hilarious actually. Nothing is new under the sun, just a teaser list of the similarities:
- zero interest rate policies and constant state bailouts for large crony institutions
- debasement of currency
- insane regulatory burdens for small business
- destruction of the middle class ever increasing wealth gap in favor of the elites
- grain dole for the dirty plebs (universal basic income)
- depletion of cheap energy resources (the Romans had huge industry in current day Spain, using wood as fuel, as the local resources depleted, they had to haul it from ever larger distance, much like shale oil has a much lower yield "EROEI", then previous pristine oil wells.)
- scientific stagnation
- increasingly rigid and inefficient education system
- abandonment of religion as a cohesive force
- effemination of man (Rome even had a gay tranny emperor. Not joking!)
- increasing power of woman in society
- the military gone trough the same transformation: starting with a citizens militia, turning into a "professional" standing army, and then degenerating into the use of mercenary proxies (PMC's in a nutshell)
Question about the israeli data: are they for the entire population or are they sorted by ethnicity? I suspect that israeli jews have lower natality than does israeli palestinians, you see.
Speaking of, there's no nativity crisis if viewed species-wide; Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent more than make-up for the shortfalls in Europe and the Americas/Oceania. F.e., African migrant women in Sweden typically have 8 children or more, having their first at age 16. Lots of kids and not many years between each generation. Them living in or even growing up in an industrialised nation hasn't really affected their nativity-patterns, even the third generation barely shows any decline in nativity. The same holds true to alesser extent for arabs of all sorts and also for kurds and gypsies.
The whole problem posed is not what it seems:
Our leaders of all kinds in the West sees declining nativity, yes, but among which groups? That, they do not want to discuss or even speak out loud, because that would mean they'd have to admit putting a higher and intrinsical essentialist value on their own people before any other group of humans (and since the narrative is "all humans are equal", i.e. fully replacable with any other human... cognitive dissonance hits them hard).
If declining population alone is a problem, then migration solves it. However, if the population is desired to have certain traits in the right amounts, then migration instead creates and exacerbates problems. If it is a certain population only that is desired, then apartheid, segregation (aka ethnically centered nation-states with strict border controls and harsh migration policies) plus some form of eugenics is needed - all of it politically impossible to consider due to narrative imperatives and also history.
In the long term, the fertility crisis is caught up in the transition to a transhumanist future in which reproduction is intensively managed by the biomedical industry.
Reducing expectations for family formation and fertility, making the processes potentially problematic for as many as possible, would make it easier for experts to exert control via proffered solutions.
The new reproductive technologies (above all gene manipulation) will inevitably play a role in creating the new castes that are beginning to form.
I don't usually comment much, but maybe a good idea for helping fertility would be retaking the education institutes. That would be a good idea in general, but I think school anti-natalist propaganda is an issue a lot of people aren't aware of. When I was little so very long ago the teacher would take us to feminist seminars which would tell all the little girls that they should not risk having kids, because if the man divorced them they would become a poor single mom. In retrospect I remember so many girls being told this; how many keep it in their hearts as adults?
Inevitable result of the feminist movement in conjunction with “ everyone can go to college” and endless government loans for the last 2 generations. The delay in pursuing marriage and parenthood has led to a more self centered life- those habits and patterns become hard to meld into stable marriages focused on families. The “ I don’t want to burden the planet” crowd are just justifying their self centered lifestyles. You cannot build on a weak foundation- and here we are.
Given that, as stated, governments can only take/redistribute wealth and not create it, I‘m a much bigger fan of the ‘take less’ hungarian/mid century approach to incentivising births than the ‘redistributive’ path. It’s much less of an incentive for the lower classes which don’t pay tax anyways.
What's funny is the whole trendline could invert in less than a decade of just gettin' it on, old-fashioned style. But instead a kind of sexless Cyber-Shakerism has taken root, and the bastards responsible for this bloodless, sterile, nihilistic world are preaching for more of the same as solutions. The problem is and has always been spiritual in nature, but also market driven. We make less of that which is not widely valued, including people.
But like I said in a different context, all it would take is one great storm of hope, mettle and joy to prevail. Sounds like a tall order, but the good thing is these resources range from cheap to free, and we were born with all the requisite tools between our ears and legs.
What you have is a mind virus at work, in times past you might have referred to it as brainwashing. Most leftists that I have talked to in my day say they hate humanity and think what we should all go extinct. These people are not having children, and don’t think you should have children either. Where did they learn this? Public school. This brainwashing has been going on for decades, and now with the tranny stuff and climate change farce it has reached a deafening crescendo.
Simple solution: ban the Pill. This would solve a bunch of our hormone imbalance problems as well.
More nuanced solution: rethink the liberal arts paradigm entirely:
"The liberal arts career path is a leisurely career path. This was fine for antiquity's leisure class. It also worked for aspiring celibate priests during the Middle Ages. But as a standard career path for sizable fraction of society, this is a model for moral disaster.
"The biological urge to make babies cuts in years before the liberal arts model prepares people to support a family. Our society struggled hard enough to get men to postpone sex until 21 back in the old days, when a college degree was enough to get a real job quickly after graduation. After World War II, our corporations had a large appetite for white collar workers (aka bureaucrats) and they were willing to finish the training that colleges and high schools started.
"Thanks to the dumbification of our high schools, it takes a Bachelor's degree to get jobs which once required just a high school diploma and decent grades. Today's Master's degree is becoming yesteryear's Bachelor's. And since we are sending people to college who aren't college material, many are taking 5-6 years to get what was supposed to be a four year degree. And since we are cranking out more degrees in the bureaucratic arts than there are bureaucratic positions, college is often followed by low paying internships. Thankfully, student loans and starter homes in safe neighborhoods have grown ever more expensive. It's party time!
"Fornication before marriage has become the norm for our educated elite. And it's going to stay that way as long as we keep the age of viable middle class family formation pushed into the upper 20s and beyond."
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-5-teach-more-practical-arts
Our problem is not depopulation. It's Kornbluth's Marching Morons scenario.
Data point: the Amish are having plenty of babies. They stop formal education after 8th Grade. We take our brightest and send them to 20th Grade or more, and then have them do a post doc or internship. Anyone who is grad school bound should be partway through his or her major by the end of high school. In the series linked above (three parts), I outlined some ideas for making that happen.
The fertility crisis is an opportunity for the regime to further develop its capacity for micro-managing the population. It is likely that several solutions will be attempted simultaneously. They will have differential effects. A singe coherent response across the West is most unlikely.
Completed fertility has a negative linear relationship to real wages for females. The opportunity costs of women from the elite and the economically privileged sub-elite strata are higher than those of the general population. This suppresses fertility at the top.
Those who have the means to do so will outsource reproduction via commercial surrogacy. This is essentially a sexless form of temporary concubinage for reproductive purposes. A banal, low intensity, form of Gilead without the febrile rhetoric or the drama.
Unless the populist backlash can successfully put a stop to it, replacement level immigration will continue in much of the West. The dynamics of integrating economies on a planetary scale make it difficult for nations to avoid. The price of market access for Western goods and for support against the USSR in the Cold War was mass immigration (in most of Europe mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa was an effect of the energy crisis in the 70s). Even if immigration can be slowed, it will not be stopped.
Biopolitically the current regime has no interest in the posterity of the many, who are replaceable.
It has no interest in the genomic continuity of the population as a whole and is actively hostile to the emergence of any political force that might express such an interest.
Accordingly, the regime is indifferent to difficulties with family formation, familial maintenance or replacement level fertility amongst the general population.
Key regime constituencies benefit from the disruption or de-prioritisation of traditional family structures (employers, feminists), while others benefit from the mismanagement of fertility on a mass scale. This fortifies the elite’s interest in sponsoring forces hostile to inherited social and cultural norms (feminism, gender fluidity, LGBTQI).
The emergence of a sub-proletariat (by definition either involuntarily unmarried or unable to support stable families) within the working class is in no way problematic for the regime…it reduces pressures for higher wages, facilitates further mass immigration and disrupts the transmission of unchosen or inherited attachments.
Both the sub-proletariat and the voluntarily infertile understand intuitively that they have no personal or familial stake in the posterity of the country and, hence, have a diminished interest in maintaining any commitment to its future. This situation suits the regime perfectly and they will do what they can to preserve it.
I am available for repopulation efforts 24x7. Pureblood. No charge.
Another possible issue are natural cycles we're not even aware of creating stress in our populations. Things like solar cycles/magnetic pole flips/etc have to weigh heavily on our collective unconscious. People and all animals breed most when they perceive a good future.
Something really terrible has happened during the past three years of The Madness to this global collective zeitgeist. I still feel like I'm living in the Twilight Zone.
The simple fact is that we live in a toxic culture. Everything is monetized, digitized, sterilized to the point there is minimal social connectivity. Our networks of social reciprocity are monetized in order to be taxed. Raising children is an intensely social activity, of extended families and villages. The sense where you can have lots of children, because they can free range within the community and be cared for. Not feeling they have to be kept under lock and key and monitored constantly. Certainly drag queen story hour in schools would give any sane person the creeps, but it really goes a lot deeper than that. A healthy society and community is a function of collective responsibility, with rights as reward, not rights as ordained and responsibility as optional.
Worrying about birth rates in this situation is missing the big picture.
People are simply organically responding to the situation. Fix it and they will have more kids.
I was on a podcast earlier this week and the host asked me “how do we combat genetically enhanced humans born in synthetic wombs?”
And my response was basically yours.
Enhanced at what cost? What are they missing emotionally, mentally, physically that otherwise millions of years of natural evolution has accounted for?
It reminds me of climate change in that sense - it’s such a nebulous & unfounded fear, that induces hysteria in a particular kind of person.
Excellent as always. Something often missed about the Hungary approach is it is designed to encourage non-Gypsy babies (Hungary has a big Gypsy problem)--they don’t work, so don’t pay income tax, so it does not encourage them.
(I’m half Hungarian, and in fact am visiting now.)
I agree it is values; my thoughts here. As to solutions, this is a great series!
https://theworthyhouse.com/2019/02/12/book-review-empty-planet-darrell-bricker-and-john-ibbitson/
re Israel: As I understand it, the relatively high birthrate is driven by modern and ultra orthodox. Secular Ashkenazim (wealthy, liberal) have a birth rate lower than that of any European country; for secular Sephardim (poor, conservative) it's similar to eg Hungary. I think for the Arab minority it's at replacement level. Eventually Israel will reach a demographic differential inflection point, after which its population will explode with the exponential ultraorthodox growth kicking in. So expect a modern orthodox martial elite annexing larger territories and dumping Haredim there.
https://i.redd.it/ov91tlelc4151.jpg
For the rest of the world it's more complicated. I think Finland, for example, will become majority Laestadian (fundamentalist Lutheran) some time next century. These aren't Amish - they are integrated and involved in contemporary society (and, most importantly, the workforce). For some countries, this point will be arrived at long after the native population become a minority, so the future is harder to predict (in Finland, under current projections the religious Finnish and Swedish minorities will become a majority before the immigrant populations outnumber the native secular Finns).
This problem will solve itself, as soon the state pension/ ponzi scheme systems collapse. Which will be a very welcomed development, as it is the most degenerate and evil institution ever conceived by man. (More immoral and inhuman than slavery imo.)
If you logically analyze it, people who rely on state pension, are basically cannibal vampires, who are forcibly consuming the life energy of their own children (and grandchildren) trough the insidious use of a third party (the state).
It will be ugly of course, probably billions will die in the coming conflicts.
For most people it's hard to stomach, that this cycle of civilizational development is probably already over. We failed to reach "escape velocity", and it is increasingly unlikely that it will happen before the complete collapse of the system.
(Escape velocity = to have he prospect to create community out of the reach of central authority. In our case this would mean at least interplanetary space travel, since there is no place on Earth you can run away from the globopsycho machine anymore.)
I think the best one can do is to try to conserve the knowledge somehow. So those who will rebuild, can do it quicker and avoid some of the mistakes. (Much like the discovery and translation of roman texts inspired the renaissance.)
-> The parallels between our current trajectory and the fall of Rome is quite hilarious actually. Nothing is new under the sun, just a teaser list of the similarities:
- zero interest rate policies and constant state bailouts for large crony institutions
- debasement of currency
- insane regulatory burdens for small business
- destruction of the middle class ever increasing wealth gap in favor of the elites
- grain dole for the dirty plebs (universal basic income)
- depletion of cheap energy resources (the Romans had huge industry in current day Spain, using wood as fuel, as the local resources depleted, they had to haul it from ever larger distance, much like shale oil has a much lower yield "EROEI", then previous pristine oil wells.)
- scientific stagnation
- increasingly rigid and inefficient education system
- abandonment of religion as a cohesive force
- effemination of man (Rome even had a gay tranny emperor. Not joking!)
- increasing power of woman in society
- the military gone trough the same transformation: starting with a citizens militia, turning into a "professional" standing army, and then degenerating into the use of mercenary proxies (PMC's in a nutshell)
and the list could go on and on.
Question about the israeli data: are they for the entire population or are they sorted by ethnicity? I suspect that israeli jews have lower natality than does israeli palestinians, you see.
Speaking of, there's no nativity crisis if viewed species-wide; Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent more than make-up for the shortfalls in Europe and the Americas/Oceania. F.e., African migrant women in Sweden typically have 8 children or more, having their first at age 16. Lots of kids and not many years between each generation. Them living in or even growing up in an industrialised nation hasn't really affected their nativity-patterns, even the third generation barely shows any decline in nativity. The same holds true to alesser extent for arabs of all sorts and also for kurds and gypsies.
The whole problem posed is not what it seems:
Our leaders of all kinds in the West sees declining nativity, yes, but among which groups? That, they do not want to discuss or even speak out loud, because that would mean they'd have to admit putting a higher and intrinsical essentialist value on their own people before any other group of humans (and since the narrative is "all humans are equal", i.e. fully replacable with any other human... cognitive dissonance hits them hard).
If declining population alone is a problem, then migration solves it. However, if the population is desired to have certain traits in the right amounts, then migration instead creates and exacerbates problems. If it is a certain population only that is desired, then apartheid, segregation (aka ethnically centered nation-states with strict border controls and harsh migration policies) plus some form of eugenics is needed - all of it politically impossible to consider due to narrative imperatives and also history.
A Gordic knot, yes?
In the long term, the fertility crisis is caught up in the transition to a transhumanist future in which reproduction is intensively managed by the biomedical industry.
Reducing expectations for family formation and fertility, making the processes potentially problematic for as many as possible, would make it easier for experts to exert control via proffered solutions.
The new reproductive technologies (above all gene manipulation) will inevitably play a role in creating the new castes that are beginning to form.
I don't usually comment much, but maybe a good idea for helping fertility would be retaking the education institutes. That would be a good idea in general, but I think school anti-natalist propaganda is an issue a lot of people aren't aware of. When I was little so very long ago the teacher would take us to feminist seminars which would tell all the little girls that they should not risk having kids, because if the man divorced them they would become a poor single mom. In retrospect I remember so many girls being told this; how many keep it in their hearts as adults?
Thank you for the mention of patrick.net memes @"John Carter"! It really boosted my traffic.
Inevitable result of the feminist movement in conjunction with “ everyone can go to college” and endless government loans for the last 2 generations. The delay in pursuing marriage and parenthood has led to a more self centered life- those habits and patterns become hard to meld into stable marriages focused on families. The “ I don’t want to burden the planet” crowd are just justifying their self centered lifestyles. You cannot build on a weak foundation- and here we are.
Given that, as stated, governments can only take/redistribute wealth and not create it, I‘m a much bigger fan of the ‘take less’ hungarian/mid century approach to incentivising births than the ‘redistributive’ path. It’s much less of an incentive for the lower classes which don’t pay tax anyways.