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.
Exactly. So the question is - how can this be induced, ideally on a mass scale or, failing that, on enough of a subcultural scale to reverse the trend?
Marry women off as virgins, ban birth control, ban sex outside of wedlock... basically the same shit we did for thousands of years. Our ancestors would view us as savages
Oh dude, you are not going to win with this attitude. I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, but hey, "marry woman off as virgins"??? It is really humiliating, as it equates women to property. And it's completely unnecessary as it's logical consequence of your other two laws, except then it applies to men and women equally. You are one of the problems. Until women get the respect for being daughters, wifes and mothers, this ain't getting solved.
I don’t disagree that the language you objected to is indelicate but I believe the larger point that an earlier high view of marriage and family was abandoned to our detriment.
> The “Duke of Marlborough Effect” was mentioned by Richard Dawkins to refer to the increase in masculine libido that results from experiencing a victory, whether directly or vicariously. This was so-named from an entry in the Duchess of Marlborough’s diary, “His Grace returned from the wars today and pleasured me twice in his top-boots.”
"Sexless Cyber-Shakerism" is a very colorful but not at all inaccurate description of Gen Z and the late-Millennials who are seemingly the worst hit by whatever social contagion is melting their brains in real time. A friend told me that she think Gen Z is "re-inventing Bush Era Purity Politics", which seems to me like a ridiculous understatement because she said that after showing me a video in which some deranged androgyne with pink hair, sanpaku eyes, and that unflattering seed oil bloat to their face was genuinely, sincerely making the take that having sex - even just basic, standard, run-of-the-mill sexual congress - with a minor in the house is child abuse and pedophilia because the child may hear the sounds or walk in on the deed being done. I'll admit, I was young during the Bush years, but even then, I don't recall even the most vociferous Evangelical making a claim that absurd. At least, not anyone with a mainstream platform.
I think part of it, at least, is living in a culture that is saturated in pornographic content and hypersexual imagery, yet, for many of these individuals, they're not having any sex whatsoever. They've totally divorced the reality of what sex is from whatever their warped idea of sex is and turned it into this abstract thing that, at this point, is so vague and nebulous and overtaxed that "procreation" is barely even a footnote in whatever definition of the act they've constructed for themselves. These people both want to 'celebrate' deviant sex, fetishism, abuse, so on and so forth, but demonize "vanilla" sex. They demand respect for sex workers yet simultaneously demonize anyone who actually participates in "pay for play" or patronizes them in any way, as if somehow only the creep who's buying pictures off OnlyFans is culpable for what they're doing and not the girl taking her shirt off to begin with. They want to be "sluts" but they have a crippling fear of even being touched by other people in an even slightly intimate way, they want to expose themselves but not be looked at, they want to take but not give, so on and so forth.
Part of this comes down to, as most issues we currently face do, a case of wanting to indulge in bad behavior and not be held accountable for the consequences (e.g. I want to be able to act like a hussy and post racy pics of myself on line for validation but I also don't want any gross incel creeps to be gross incel creeps about it), but I think at least half if not more of it is due to the aforementioned decoupling and abstraction of reality versus fantasy through fetishism and overexposure (law of diminishing returns) via the internet that most of these people probably wouldn't even know how to engage in intercourse even if they had the opportunity.
I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this. I'd say that a good first step in starting this would be to ban pornography outright and introduce decency standards that range from harsh to draconian, but, for reasons much like those covered in the bit about that dreadful Handmaid story (I had the misfortune of being required to read it, myself), I'm not sure if that will ever be a truly viable solution, and if it ever will be, the time is certainly not now.
"I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this."
This is exactly it, yes. Radical physicality. Primal embodiment. Relegation of the the virtual to a tool rather than a recreation.
Phenomenal comment, btw. Puritanical perversion is one of the weirdest cultural brainworms eating its way through the collective mind right now. Caligula's schoolmarms.
And when we speak of the art that animates it, let us speak of The Chase, The Conquest (and, in the case of the female, making oneself *worthy* of chase and conquest).
"Relegation of the virtual to a tool rather than a recreation..." Or worse, a necessity. I've long preached this exact point -- treat digital technology as a useful addition to an embodied life. We need to prioritize having socially engaged lives that bring us closer to the unassailable physical world than the fantasy-fueled and highly-manipulable digital world. Thanks for the interesting (albeit frightening) content!
"I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this. I'd say that a good first step in starting this would be to ban pornography outright and introduce decency standards that range from harsh to draconian, but, for reasons much like those covered in the bit about that dreadful Handmaid story (I had the misfortune of being required to read it, myself), I'm not sure if that will ever be a truly viable solution, and if it ever will be, the time is certainly not now."
I understand what you mean, but I wonder if the genies aren't already out of that bottle, or if we'll run out of fingers to stopper all the holes in the dam. I think we should be leaning towards having more RL parties and games (and party games).
Well, I'm not sure there's enough people who are interested in plugging holes in the dam at all, and if there are, there's not enough to begin with. It sounds black-pilled, and maybe I am, but it seems to me like "progress" when it comes to certain things is less a sliding scale and more a match; it burns away until there's nothing left, and you have to light a new one. You can't un-burn it, likewise, you can't reverse certain things once they've been released (i.e. porn), because too many people just get too used to it, and it becomes so normalized that if you even suggest doing something to curb it, a not insignificant amount of people will protest, and violently, too (we haven't even seen what a "Coomer Revolution" might look like since there's never been any serious anti-porn movements of any real size, but look at how incensed people got over the proposed bill in Louisiana to require a government ID to access NSFW sites). Like, maybe the internet is currently burning near the tail end, and short of abandoning it for some other technology, or even some sort of parallel, alternative internet as some have suggested, may be the only way to kind of "reset" things. Not a perfect solution, and far from practical, but a solution.
Another example that comes to mind are dating apps. No one likes them. Everyone admits they're terrible. Yes, you have a small number of people in my age cohort rejecting them, and that's good, but at the same time, it's become so normalized that A) Zoomers, by and large, seem incapable of even understanding there are other ways of meeting people outside of dating apps and instagram and B) no one seems to have the motivation to provide an alternative system or an app that works differently than the competition. Thus, the number of users on these services continue to gradually increase, even though no one likes them, they don't provide the service they claim to provide for most of the users, and everyone can agree they make no one's life better.
I suspect I'm overthinking the problem on this one. The simple (and most appealing) answer is to just lean more into the physical world, but I also wonder if that, in itself, won't become a more as time progresses and the "internet of things" plots continue at pace, in which case you really would need to totally divorce yourself from the internet (and most likely society at large) to avoid being trapped in Zuckerberg's Dollar Store Matrix.
To put it simply - I find it difficult to imagine a way in which we "live in harmony" with this technology for too much longer. But I'll openly admit that I'm probably just being uncreative.
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.
Yes, the biggest cause of depopulation is leftism. From the UN/WEF depopulation programs to government-paid-for abortion on demand. I wrote about that in my post "Overpopulation
you will see that many of the causes of depopulation that he discusses affect Mormons, but Mormons are not suffering depopulation because few are leftists.
This means that the SOLUTION to depopulation is simple: DEFEAT and DISEMPOWER the left.
Easier than you might think. We're not exactly talking the laws of physics here, and fertility was anyhow much higher than replacement within living memory.
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 whole point of mass higher education is to delay entry into the workforce and to prepare the bulk of graduates for what Graeber called "bullshit jobs". Without bloated administrative bureaucracies and similar make-work schemes there'd be a lot of people even more frustrated by the system than there are now.
I wonder if they would be more frustrated. Without the indoctrination against blue collar work most of the potentially disaffected would find actual work to be highly rewarding. The bonus would be fewer make-work jobs and far lower costs for education. A different world.
It is hard to say without looking at long term trends in wages, living standards and the structure of the economy. There are disparities between graduates and non-graduates and until there is a fundamental shift towards guaranteeing a degree of security and wellbeing (livable wages capable of facilitating family formation for all full-time workers) people do not really have meaningful choices. They just go with the best available option and these vary wildly.
A different world is possible and would be vastly preferable.
I may be misreading but this sounds like more government intervention, not less. We have a dismal record of bigger agencies producing better results. What is a living wage? Who says? Surely it needs to be more than that. We have opened our borders and suppressed our wages at the same time we are increasing largesse at the expense of families who would raise children.
People always have choices, they don’t always make wise choices.
The size of the state and its choice of policies are endlessly debatable. But countries can chose to prioritise wages for domestic workers and affordable family formation as key aims of public policy if they wish to do so.
Banning birth control is not enough, Pandorans must be banned from hypergamy. Otherwise you just get more broken children from single mother longhouses. The managerial elite hates the small platoons of society starting with the family.
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.
Good summary. The fact that the regime profits from this situation - at least in the short term - is a large part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place. They did, after all, engineer it.
Whether that continues is another question. Falling fertility in the third world means that it will cease being a source of immigrants at some point. India is already below replacement, for example. African stock is not capable of maintaining a modern economy. No doubt the regime thinks they can make up the cognitive delta with AI, but I'm skeptical this will work out in practice. We still don't have a self-driving car, for example.
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.
This is certainly true. Underlying all the ideology and toxic memetics is a pervasive sense of doom that seems to emerge from our instinctive substratum.
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.
Jun 12, 2023·edited Jun 12, 2023Liked by John Carter
I've tried to explain why I see society as malfunctioning in the two essays I've put up on Substack and many previously on Medium, so I'd refer to them, rather than trying to rewrite them.
To put it succinctly, culture and civilization is a function and consequence of each generation passing knowledge down to the next, in a process that has gone on for thousands of years. So what happens if some of those foundational premises built into the core of civilization are wrong? To put it bluntly, if it's garbage in, it's garbage out. Like a geocentric cosmology, it just becomes layers of patches and ostracizing anyone daring to question the core principles.
Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. The source of classical Greek religion lay in fertility rites, where the young god was born of the old sky god and the earth mother. Yet by the time of Classical Greece, tradition had prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus.
So the story of Jesus, of royal blood, crucified and risen in the spring, served as an escape from the set in stone tradition. Thus the basis of the Trinity.
Though by the time Constantine adopted it as the Roman state religion, it too had started to calcify and the usefulness of the Jewish monotheism, to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic, was more a factor than the renewal. So the Trinity was blurred and buried. The Big Guy Rules.
Martin Luther tried pushing the reset button as well.
The fact is that a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, not some ideal of wisdom passing judgement on it. The light shining through the film, than the images and narratives played out on it. More the new born babe, than the wise but wizened old man.
So we live in a culture of boxes and any effort to break through them tends to be co-opted and monetized. We need to step back and better understand the totality, not just stick bandaids over the bullet wounds.
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.
It's very weird to me that people get all wrapped up about hypothetical science fiction scenarios while often ignoring very real, current problems. See also: robot apocalypse. And as you say, climate change. It's a way of sublimating inability to address actual challenges, I suspect.
Genetically enhanced superhumans are even further away than exowombs in my opinion. We haven't even figured out how to do selective breeding without loading organisms down with deleterious recessive traits, or accidentally breeding out useful traits. I suspect natural processes already achieve something very close to global fitness maxima, and the best we can do is task-specific optimization: breed dogs that are great bloodhounds, learn tricks, or whatever, but in every case would do very poorly in the wild against wolves.
Conversely, wolves do very poor if tried as bloodhounds, tricks, and so on. In this case, the yardstick used for measuring creates the problem, not the thing measured in itself.
Just had to pick that nit, I do need my daily fix of such.
Otherwise, absolutely! We cannot reproduce even 1/100 000 000 of the conditions real life imposes on organisms. I need look no further than my garden to see that.
The soil here, if you can call it that, is sand, gravel, and rocks from the Ice Age. Not quite Rogen-moraine, but close. Lots of stuff manages to grow in it anyway, but tomatoes? Uh-uh. No dice.
So, what to do? Create better, but not too good conditions. First year, our tomatoes lived indoors in pots. Second year the new plants lived outdoors in pots. Third year, they were replanted from the pots when larg enough. And so on.
This year, I put the seeds into ground I've turned into soil by using compost and mulch and put mini-hothouses made from old windows over them. That way, I can grow tomatoes in the soil north of 60.
Granted, tomatoes have one generation each year which brings my to the point:
Us modern western humans think in clock-time, always. We see a problem because we look a few decades back, and use those as a base for modelling the future a few decades forward.
Nativity needs looking at with a century as the shortest perspective, I think. That's 3-7 generations depending on rate of reproduction, or close to at least. Look at the population numbers for palestinians forcibly moved into what is now Jordan when Israel was founded, and their numbers today. They are (if I recall correctly) ten times their initial number despite living under extremely poor conditions for 70+ years or so.
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by John Carter
Consider Stephen Jay Gould's, "Punctuated Equilibrium."
In the equilibrium stage, growth fills out every niche and uses every resource, which selects for specialization and complexity. When that reaches a maximum limit, the system is open to collapse, the punctuation. Which selects for adaptability and resilience.
People, as a species, are physiologically suited for both roles, but prefer the pleasure over the pain. Though can't have one without the other, any more than can have up without down, or attraction without repulsion.
It's strange (or maybe not) that Kraschen's I+1 hypothesis has fallen out of favour not only in teaching but as a general principle.
Continously and consciously trying to become better at something, even routine stuff like doing the dishes, is perhaps the most crucial component to mental/spiritual balance on both the micro- and macro-scales.
This perpetual striving is then itself balanced against "man's gotta know his limitations" - the wisdom of experience and the twins called Need and Want.
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!
Thank you! That reassures me I'm on the right track. I'll be giving your essay a read before part 3 ... It keeps getting extended as I keep coming across new perspectives on this.
You're right, I'd missed that subtlety about the Hungarian approach. Clever of them - the GQ is certainly not something one wants to give the wrong answer to.
Hope you're having a good time in Hungary. I hear very good things about Budapest....
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.
Fertility in India and China is below replacement. The only continent with healthy fertility levels is Africa (and this is not necessarily healthy for the species).
You're certainly correct to identify differential fertility as the real problem, for us.
As for Israel, indeed ultra-orthodox and Muslim Israelis have higher fertility rates than the general population, but my understanding is that fertility is above replacement even for secular Israeli Jews.
Hungary's idea is probably the way to go unless old-school eugenics-policies are to be reinvented, plus banning abortion and contraceptives for the childless as well as tying civil rights and privileges to having children. All of it politically impossible in western nations, currently, and a much harder sell than mask-mandates or concentration camps for unvaccinated.
I think the "solution" (I'm personally in the "do nothing except stop migration and expel 95% of all non-European/non-white migrants and 100% of all moslems from Europe"-camp) will be that the state will offer cash grants for voluntary sterilisation, storing of eggs/sperm, and also cash grants for having children - but in a system rigged to stimulate the desired groups to procreate. Also, "free" kindergartens or simlar tax-funded or deductible communal childcare will be arranged, with curriculums tweaked depending on what group the kids come from.
See, if it's done Alpha-complex style we'll all see it for what it is, but if it's coached in the right lingo for respective target audience (should be a doddle for ad-men), we will instead see it as a reward for doing what's right.
So Lateesha and Jamal with three-digit SATs and IQs under 90 will get paid to get snipped, if they do it before having kids. Abraham and Ruth will get paid via tax deductions to have 4+ kids. Billy-Joe and Karen will get either, depending on where they fall class-wise and IQ/SAT-wise. (The actual scoring system will of course not use the terms I used above, it will have it's own Byzantine system, AI and algorithm-run to "make sure there's no discrimination going on".)
I apologise for the wall-of-text, but I find it very difficult to be brief on this topic. Sweden has looked this problem (lowered nativity/depopulation/skewed age-structure) in the eye since the late 1900s so we have a lot of research into it, and it predates plastics, vaccines, et c though I have zero doubts all of those things makes it even worse.)
There's a bit of a difference between eugenic policies and natality policies, which is nothing against the former, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. As it stands, policies aimed at raising birth rates aren't working - they're pushing on a string. More fundamental changes are needed, and cash payments, subsidies, free daycare, etc, aren't going to cut it. When we've successfully figured out how to raise the birth rate we can start trying to fine tune it.
This is where I argue we - as a species - do not need to raise the birth-rate; it will adjust itself on its own.
Population growth is only necessary (in a society with our technology or better) if the economy is based on continously and consequtively rising profits, i.e. present-day corporate capitalism, and/or if the culture is expansionist in attitude.
Otherwise, there's no problem. A new equilibrium will be reached in its own due time.
Of course, as I mentioned somewhere, if we instead see it as a value that a /specific/ race/culture/whatever group of humans continue to exist because it is a group we value higher than others, the whole thing changes - but then we must also be open and honest that that is our concern.
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?
Propaganda is really what the dysfunction runs on. A lot of our problems are imposed artificially through the education system feeding our young people harmful ideas. But I think it goes beyond just propaganda, its the culture we have been building in our educational institutions and out. To follow my example, why tell a seven year old child she is destined to go through a painful divorce, rather than lets say giving both boys and girls lessons about healthy relationships in their teens? Not one of those feminist speakers was a prophet who knew what was going to happen to the children they taught, but they already decided that it would be awful. Beyond ideology there's a kind of pessimism and nihilism that's borderline abusive to instill it in others during their most tender years
Absolutely. There's also a perversity to a system that legalizes no-fault divorce, and then turns around and tells girls "Don't get married, he might divorce you." Crabs in a bucket.
I suppose the answer would be to have younger artists and singers make the propaganda. They seem to be effective in forming the opinions of the zoomer crowd.
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.
That has contributed, yes, and in a big way, but the collapse of fertility in India, Japan, China, and the Middle East all point to the problem being more fundamental than feminism.
I think you are somewhat mistaken. In Japan, India and even in the Middle East, feminism has made inroads, specially in East Asia. Even though you would be hard pressed to find tatooed orcs in Japan, Korea and China, for the women of those countries, the priority is their career, children comes third and making their husband happy is not even in the list.
Don't take my word, a quick search can illuminate the truth...o a conversation with a few females of those countries. Don't let their good manners fool you, they are as willing to kill their unborn as are their western counterparts. In the middle east the infection is not as severe (as far as I know of) but in many of those "traditional" countries, women outnumber men in universities adn as Iran can attest, that's not a good sign at all...
I think it's because modern life is sucking us towards the eternal present, only caring about optimizing gains and never exploring new paths (traditionally the path of the young, now replaced by career-oriented education and tiger parenting) or taking a longer view of things (traditionally the path of the old, now replaced by second childhoods or part-time work to supplement pensions or asset management).
We all converge towards perpetual adulthood, pushing people farther and farther away from having children by making the optimization puzzle of adult life harder and harder.
I actually have an article coming out about this but it's scheduled on Friday.
At 7:21 (GMT) - shortly after 5am in proper (Antipodean) time - I wrote a comment about "assisted dying", contrasting that term with "euthanasia" based on the etymology of the word "euthanasia", that went as follows:
================================
Euthanasia and “assisted dying” are different terms though; the etymology of “euthanasia” is Greek for “good death” (like “eugenics” means good genes and “euphoria” means good feeling).
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My day always starts with VoxPopoli; Unz; Substack - in that order - so I promise I didn't pinch it from here.
This is getting weird: the other day I woke up with the word "Yehidne" at the front of my brain.
I thought it must be some disparaging term for Jewish people that I'd picked up somewhere - KEK.
An hour later it turned out that Yehidne is a little settlement near Artyomovsk which had been the focus of a small attempted recon action by the (doomed, almost-sub-unity TFR) Ukraine.
Jun 13, 2023·edited Jun 13, 2023Liked by John Carter
Sheesh, sounds undeservedly harsh (autistic?) 😒 Personal anecdotes do confer value in quite a few korero dimensions; we ain't no disembodied minds here, amirite? 🤭
That said, 'Nothing in excess!'—as inscribed upon Delphi stone 😏
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.
Exactly. So the question is - how can this be induced, ideally on a mass scale or, failing that, on enough of a subcultural scale to reverse the trend?
Marry women off as virgins, ban birth control, ban sex outside of wedlock... basically the same shit we did for thousands of years. Our ancestors would view us as savages
Agreed.
Oh dude, you are not going to win with this attitude. I don't disagree with what you are trying to say, but hey, "marry woman off as virgins"??? It is really humiliating, as it equates women to property. And it's completely unnecessary as it's logical consequence of your other two laws, except then it applies to men and women equally. You are one of the problems. Until women get the respect for being daughters, wifes and mothers, this ain't getting solved.
What does that respect look like in your opinion?
I don’t disagree that the language you objected to is indelicate but I believe the larger point that an earlier high view of marriage and family was abandoned to our detriment.
Well, there's the Duke of Marlborough effect: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Duke+of+Marlborough+effect
> The “Duke of Marlborough Effect” was mentioned by Richard Dawkins to refer to the increase in masculine libido that results from experiencing a victory, whether directly or vicariously. This was so-named from an entry in the Duchess of Marlborough’s diary, “His Grace returned from the wars today and pleasured me twice in his top-boots.”
It's an important question, and not an easy one. But one thing I'm sure of is that art must play a role in the answer (and maybe a very large one).
You will be unsurprised to learn that this is the first component of the solutions chapter, placed there because it is the most crucial.
Observe my unshocked face, kemosabe. Ironic, given my profile picture.
Now I regret not typing "massive, undeniable role," as was my instinct.
"Sexless Cyber-Shakerism" is a very colorful but not at all inaccurate description of Gen Z and the late-Millennials who are seemingly the worst hit by whatever social contagion is melting their brains in real time. A friend told me that she think Gen Z is "re-inventing Bush Era Purity Politics", which seems to me like a ridiculous understatement because she said that after showing me a video in which some deranged androgyne with pink hair, sanpaku eyes, and that unflattering seed oil bloat to their face was genuinely, sincerely making the take that having sex - even just basic, standard, run-of-the-mill sexual congress - with a minor in the house is child abuse and pedophilia because the child may hear the sounds or walk in on the deed being done. I'll admit, I was young during the Bush years, but even then, I don't recall even the most vociferous Evangelical making a claim that absurd. At least, not anyone with a mainstream platform.
I think part of it, at least, is living in a culture that is saturated in pornographic content and hypersexual imagery, yet, for many of these individuals, they're not having any sex whatsoever. They've totally divorced the reality of what sex is from whatever their warped idea of sex is and turned it into this abstract thing that, at this point, is so vague and nebulous and overtaxed that "procreation" is barely even a footnote in whatever definition of the act they've constructed for themselves. These people both want to 'celebrate' deviant sex, fetishism, abuse, so on and so forth, but demonize "vanilla" sex. They demand respect for sex workers yet simultaneously demonize anyone who actually participates in "pay for play" or patronizes them in any way, as if somehow only the creep who's buying pictures off OnlyFans is culpable for what they're doing and not the girl taking her shirt off to begin with. They want to be "sluts" but they have a crippling fear of even being touched by other people in an even slightly intimate way, they want to expose themselves but not be looked at, they want to take but not give, so on and so forth.
Part of this comes down to, as most issues we currently face do, a case of wanting to indulge in bad behavior and not be held accountable for the consequences (e.g. I want to be able to act like a hussy and post racy pics of myself on line for validation but I also don't want any gross incel creeps to be gross incel creeps about it), but I think at least half if not more of it is due to the aforementioned decoupling and abstraction of reality versus fantasy through fetishism and overexposure (law of diminishing returns) via the internet that most of these people probably wouldn't even know how to engage in intercourse even if they had the opportunity.
I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this. I'd say that a good first step in starting this would be to ban pornography outright and introduce decency standards that range from harsh to draconian, but, for reasons much like those covered in the bit about that dreadful Handmaid story (I had the misfortune of being required to read it, myself), I'm not sure if that will ever be a truly viable solution, and if it ever will be, the time is certainly not now.
"I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this."
This is exactly it, yes. Radical physicality. Primal embodiment. Relegation of the the virtual to a tool rather than a recreation.
Phenomenal comment, btw. Puritanical perversion is one of the weirdest cultural brainworms eating its way through the collective mind right now. Caligula's schoolmarms.
And when we speak of the art that animates it, let us speak of The Chase, The Conquest (and, in the case of the female, making oneself *worthy* of chase and conquest).
"Relegation of the virtual to a tool rather than a recreation..." Or worse, a necessity. I've long preached this exact point -- treat digital technology as a useful addition to an embodied life. We need to prioritize having socially engaged lives that bring us closer to the unassailable physical world than the fantasy-fueled and highly-manipulable digital world. Thanks for the interesting (albeit frightening) content!
Perhaps a good time for an emp war?
"I think it will take an extremely sharp cultural shift away from mass media and the internet and towards something more firmly rooted in the physical world in order to reverse this. I'd say that a good first step in starting this would be to ban pornography outright and introduce decency standards that range from harsh to draconian, but, for reasons much like those covered in the bit about that dreadful Handmaid story (I had the misfortune of being required to read it, myself), I'm not sure if that will ever be a truly viable solution, and if it ever will be, the time is certainly not now."
I understand what you mean, but I wonder if the genies aren't already out of that bottle, or if we'll run out of fingers to stopper all the holes in the dam. I think we should be leaning towards having more RL parties and games (and party games).
Well, I'm not sure there's enough people who are interested in plugging holes in the dam at all, and if there are, there's not enough to begin with. It sounds black-pilled, and maybe I am, but it seems to me like "progress" when it comes to certain things is less a sliding scale and more a match; it burns away until there's nothing left, and you have to light a new one. You can't un-burn it, likewise, you can't reverse certain things once they've been released (i.e. porn), because too many people just get too used to it, and it becomes so normalized that if you even suggest doing something to curb it, a not insignificant amount of people will protest, and violently, too (we haven't even seen what a "Coomer Revolution" might look like since there's never been any serious anti-porn movements of any real size, but look at how incensed people got over the proposed bill in Louisiana to require a government ID to access NSFW sites). Like, maybe the internet is currently burning near the tail end, and short of abandoning it for some other technology, or even some sort of parallel, alternative internet as some have suggested, may be the only way to kind of "reset" things. Not a perfect solution, and far from practical, but a solution.
Another example that comes to mind are dating apps. No one likes them. Everyone admits they're terrible. Yes, you have a small number of people in my age cohort rejecting them, and that's good, but at the same time, it's become so normalized that A) Zoomers, by and large, seem incapable of even understanding there are other ways of meeting people outside of dating apps and instagram and B) no one seems to have the motivation to provide an alternative system or an app that works differently than the competition. Thus, the number of users on these services continue to gradually increase, even though no one likes them, they don't provide the service they claim to provide for most of the users, and everyone can agree they make no one's life better.
I suspect I'm overthinking the problem on this one. The simple (and most appealing) answer is to just lean more into the physical world, but I also wonder if that, in itself, won't become a more as time progresses and the "internet of things" plots continue at pace, in which case you really would need to totally divorce yourself from the internet (and most likely society at large) to avoid being trapped in Zuckerberg's Dollar Store Matrix.
To put it simply - I find it difficult to imagine a way in which we "live in harmony" with this technology for too much longer. But I'll openly admit that I'm probably just being uncreative.
All this is true. So well put.
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.
Absolutely 100% true, yes. This is a huge factor.
Mind virus? If so it is an opportunistic infection that seeks out minds weakened by cultural pessimism.
Yes, the biggest cause of depopulation is leftism. From the UN/WEF depopulation programs to government-paid-for abortion on demand. I wrote about that in my post "Overpopulation
Leftist Untruth #14" https://michael796.substack.com/p/overpopulation?sd=pf
If you look at Carter's first post on Depopulation "Depopulocalypse" https://barsoom.substack.com/p/depopulocalypse
you will see that many of the causes of depopulation that he discusses affect Mormons, but Mormons are not suffering depopulation because few are leftists.
This means that the SOLUTION to depopulation is simple: DEFEAT and DISEMPOWER the left.
I came here to say just this. It's hard to fix a systemic cultural problem.
Easier than you might think. We're not exactly talking the laws of physics here, and fertility was anyhow much higher than replacement within living memory.
Our rulers seem to be anti-human, not a good sign for mankinds future.
committee of 300 states that environmental activism was created to make mankind it's own enemy... to seed self-loathing.
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.
Definitely onto something with education, which I'll be addressing in next instalment.
Possibly with the pill, although worth noting that Japanese women don't use it really at all.
You have probably come across this already...if not, it is exceptional.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/06/school-is-not-enough/
This may be of interest. It had some very interesting things to say and includes a point about fertility/family formation.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/the-zoomer-question/
The whole point of mass higher education is to delay entry into the workforce and to prepare the bulk of graduates for what Graeber called "bullshit jobs". Without bloated administrative bureaucracies and similar make-work schemes there'd be a lot of people even more frustrated by the system than there are now.
I wonder if they would be more frustrated. Without the indoctrination against blue collar work most of the potentially disaffected would find actual work to be highly rewarding. The bonus would be fewer make-work jobs and far lower costs for education. A different world.
It is hard to say without looking at long term trends in wages, living standards and the structure of the economy. There are disparities between graduates and non-graduates and until there is a fundamental shift towards guaranteeing a degree of security and wellbeing (livable wages capable of facilitating family formation for all full-time workers) people do not really have meaningful choices. They just go with the best available option and these vary wildly.
A different world is possible and would be vastly preferable.
I may be misreading but this sounds like more government intervention, not less. We have a dismal record of bigger agencies producing better results. What is a living wage? Who says? Surely it needs to be more than that. We have opened our borders and suppressed our wages at the same time we are increasing largesse at the expense of families who would raise children.
People always have choices, they don’t always make wise choices.
The size of the state and its choice of policies are endlessly debatable. But countries can chose to prioritise wages for domestic workers and affordable family formation as key aims of public policy if they wish to do so.
Banning birth control is not enough, Pandorans must be banned from hypergamy. Otherwise you just get more broken children from single mother longhouses. The managerial elite hates the small platoons of society starting with the family.
At least stop subsidizing it!
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.
Good summary. The fact that the regime profits from this situation - at least in the short term - is a large part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place. They did, after all, engineer it.
Whether that continues is another question. Falling fertility in the third world means that it will cease being a source of immigrants at some point. India is already below replacement, for example. African stock is not capable of maintaining a modern economy. No doubt the regime thinks they can make up the cognitive delta with AI, but I'm skeptical this will work out in practice. We still don't have a self-driving car, for example.
There are such vast numbers in the Third World that sourcing migrants is simply not an issue.
For now, yes, and certainly for the next decade or so. Before long however Africa is going to be the only place with a population surplus.
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.
This is certainly true. Underlying all the ideology and toxic memetics is a pervasive sense of doom that seems to emerge from our instinctive substratum.
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.
Indeed. And the purpose of this essay is - how can it be fixed?
I've tried to explain why I see society as malfunctioning in the two essays I've put up on Substack and many previously on Medium, so I'd refer to them, rather than trying to rewrite them.
To put it succinctly, culture and civilization is a function and consequence of each generation passing knowledge down to the next, in a process that has gone on for thousands of years. So what happens if some of those foundational premises built into the core of civilization are wrong? To put it bluntly, if it's garbage in, it's garbage out. Like a geocentric cosmology, it just becomes layers of patches and ostracizing anyone daring to question the core principles.
Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. The source of classical Greek religion lay in fertility rites, where the young god was born of the old sky god and the earth mother. Yet by the time of Classical Greece, tradition had prevailed over renewal and Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus.
So the story of Jesus, of royal blood, crucified and risen in the spring, served as an escape from the set in stone tradition. Thus the basis of the Trinity.
Though by the time Constantine adopted it as the Roman state religion, it too had started to calcify and the usefulness of the Jewish monotheism, to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic, was more a factor than the renewal. So the Trinity was blurred and buried. The Big Guy Rules.
Martin Luther tried pushing the reset button as well.
The fact is that a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, not some ideal of wisdom passing judgement on it. The light shining through the film, than the images and narratives played out on it. More the new born babe, than the wise but wizened old man.
So we live in a culture of boxes and any effort to break through them tends to be co-opted and monetized. We need to step back and better understand the totality, not just stick bandaids over the bullet wounds.
As Emerson said, "We are but thickened light."
Alt-right turbo ultra fascism... hopefully with trans-human tech priests and super soldiers flying around space in giant cathedrals.
Really funny comment considering your chosen nick.
The Starchild comes when the Long Watch of the Sensei is completed.
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.
It's very weird to me that people get all wrapped up about hypothetical science fiction scenarios while often ignoring very real, current problems. See also: robot apocalypse. And as you say, climate change. It's a way of sublimating inability to address actual challenges, I suspect.
Genetically enhanced superhumans are even further away than exowombs in my opinion. We haven't even figured out how to do selective breeding without loading organisms down with deleterious recessive traits, or accidentally breeding out useful traits. I suspect natural processes already achieve something very close to global fitness maxima, and the best we can do is task-specific optimization: breed dogs that are great bloodhounds, learn tricks, or whatever, but in every case would do very poorly in the wild against wolves.
Conversely, wolves do very poor if tried as bloodhounds, tricks, and so on. In this case, the yardstick used for measuring creates the problem, not the thing measured in itself.
Just had to pick that nit, I do need my daily fix of such.
Otherwise, absolutely! We cannot reproduce even 1/100 000 000 of the conditions real life imposes on organisms. I need look no further than my garden to see that.
The soil here, if you can call it that, is sand, gravel, and rocks from the Ice Age. Not quite Rogen-moraine, but close. Lots of stuff manages to grow in it anyway, but tomatoes? Uh-uh. No dice.
So, what to do? Create better, but not too good conditions. First year, our tomatoes lived indoors in pots. Second year the new plants lived outdoors in pots. Third year, they were replanted from the pots when larg enough. And so on.
This year, I put the seeds into ground I've turned into soil by using compost and mulch and put mini-hothouses made from old windows over them. That way, I can grow tomatoes in the soil north of 60.
Granted, tomatoes have one generation each year which brings my to the point:
Us modern western humans think in clock-time, always. We see a problem because we look a few decades back, and use those as a base for modelling the future a few decades forward.
Nativity needs looking at with a century as the shortest perspective, I think. That's 3-7 generations depending on rate of reproduction, or close to at least. Look at the population numbers for palestinians forcibly moved into what is now Jordan when Israel was founded, and their numbers today. They are (if I recall correctly) ten times their initial number despite living under extremely poor conditions for 70+ years or so.
Consider Stephen Jay Gould's, "Punctuated Equilibrium."
In the equilibrium stage, growth fills out every niche and uses every resource, which selects for specialization and complexity. When that reaches a maximum limit, the system is open to collapse, the punctuation. Which selects for adaptability and resilience.
People, as a species, are physiologically suited for both roles, but prefer the pleasure over the pain. Though can't have one without the other, any more than can have up without down, or attraction without repulsion.
Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline.
Yin and yang, rather than God Almighty.
Even the sexes are a biological yin and yang.
Yup, got to do both. No pain, no gain.
It's strange (or maybe not) that Kraschen's I+1 hypothesis has fallen out of favour not only in teaching but as a general principle.
Continously and consciously trying to become better at something, even routine stuff like doing the dishes, is perhaps the most crucial component to mental/spiritual balance on both the micro- and macro-scales.
This perpetual striving is then itself balanced against "man's gotta know his limitations" - the wisdom of experience and the twins called Need and Want.
Meaning is what's left, when everything meaningless has been edited out.
Signals in the noise.
We evolved to move, or we would be plants. Expand/consolidate.
Maybe they are onto something.
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/
Thank you! That reassures me I'm on the right track. I'll be giving your essay a read before part 3 ... It keeps getting extended as I keep coming across new perspectives on this.
You're right, I'd missed that subtlety about the Hungarian approach. Clever of them - the GQ is certainly not something one wants to give the wrong answer to.
Hope you're having a good time in Hungary. I hear very good things about Budapest....
Another on this topic:
https://theworthyhouse.com/2022/07/11/the-children-of-men-p-d-james/
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?
Fertility in India and China is below replacement. The only continent with healthy fertility levels is Africa (and this is not necessarily healthy for the species).
You're certainly correct to identify differential fertility as the real problem, for us.
As for Israel, indeed ultra-orthodox and Muslim Israelis have higher fertility rates than the general population, but my understanding is that fertility is above replacement even for secular Israeli Jews.
Second half:
Hungary's idea is probably the way to go unless old-school eugenics-policies are to be reinvented, plus banning abortion and contraceptives for the childless as well as tying civil rights and privileges to having children. All of it politically impossible in western nations, currently, and a much harder sell than mask-mandates or concentration camps for unvaccinated.
I think the "solution" (I'm personally in the "do nothing except stop migration and expel 95% of all non-European/non-white migrants and 100% of all moslems from Europe"-camp) will be that the state will offer cash grants for voluntary sterilisation, storing of eggs/sperm, and also cash grants for having children - but in a system rigged to stimulate the desired groups to procreate. Also, "free" kindergartens or simlar tax-funded or deductible communal childcare will be arranged, with curriculums tweaked depending on what group the kids come from.
See, if it's done Alpha-complex style we'll all see it for what it is, but if it's coached in the right lingo for respective target audience (should be a doddle for ad-men), we will instead see it as a reward for doing what's right.
So Lateesha and Jamal with three-digit SATs and IQs under 90 will get paid to get snipped, if they do it before having kids. Abraham and Ruth will get paid via tax deductions to have 4+ kids. Billy-Joe and Karen will get either, depending on where they fall class-wise and IQ/SAT-wise. (The actual scoring system will of course not use the terms I used above, it will have it's own Byzantine system, AI and algorithm-run to "make sure there's no discrimination going on".)
I apologise for the wall-of-text, but I find it very difficult to be brief on this topic. Sweden has looked this problem (lowered nativity/depopulation/skewed age-structure) in the eye since the late 1900s so we have a lot of research into it, and it predates plastics, vaccines, et c though I have zero doubts all of those things makes it even worse.)
There's a bit of a difference between eugenic policies and natality policies, which is nothing against the former, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. As it stands, policies aimed at raising birth rates aren't working - they're pushing on a string. More fundamental changes are needed, and cash payments, subsidies, free daycare, etc, aren't going to cut it. When we've successfully figured out how to raise the birth rate we can start trying to fine tune it.
This is where I argue we - as a species - do not need to raise the birth-rate; it will adjust itself on its own.
Population growth is only necessary (in a society with our technology or better) if the economy is based on continously and consequtively rising profits, i.e. present-day corporate capitalism, and/or if the culture is expansionist in attitude.
Otherwise, there's no problem. A new equilibrium will be reached in its own due time.
Of course, as I mentioned somewhere, if we instead see it as a value that a /specific/ race/culture/whatever group of humans continue to exist because it is a group we value higher than others, the whole thing changes - but then we must also be open and honest that that is our concern.
Fyi, your apology was rejected unapologetically 😝 Pls accept panegyric/eulogy/paean/encomium/accolades for a consolation prize 😊
Consolation prizes are the best, next after good sportsmanship-awards.
(Why yes, I've got zero competitiveness, who'd ever did you know that?)
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 can certainly believe that this is the societal vector that's being imposed. Whether it will work, on the other hand....
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?
This is a really excellent point. Thank you for commenting.
Propaganda is, you'll be happy to learn, the very first of the measures I'll be proposing. It is absolutely essential.
Propaganda is really what the dysfunction runs on. A lot of our problems are imposed artificially through the education system feeding our young people harmful ideas. But I think it goes beyond just propaganda, its the culture we have been building in our educational institutions and out. To follow my example, why tell a seven year old child she is destined to go through a painful divorce, rather than lets say giving both boys and girls lessons about healthy relationships in their teens? Not one of those feminist speakers was a prophet who knew what was going to happen to the children they taught, but they already decided that it would be awful. Beyond ideology there's a kind of pessimism and nihilism that's borderline abusive to instill it in others during their most tender years
Absolutely. There's also a perversity to a system that legalizes no-fault divorce, and then turns around and tells girls "Don't get married, he might divorce you." Crabs in a bucket.
Singapore tried using pro-natalist propaganda. The results have been disappointing.
I'm not surprised. State propaganda is rarely effective.
I suppose the answer would be to have younger artists and singers make the propaganda. They seem to be effective in forming the opinions of the zoomer crowd.
Thank you for the mention of patrick.net memes @"John Carter"! It really boosted my traffic.
Glad to hear it!
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.
That has contributed, yes, and in a big way, but the collapse of fertility in India, Japan, China, and the Middle East all point to the problem being more fundamental than feminism.
Truth
I think you are somewhat mistaken. In Japan, India and even in the Middle East, feminism has made inroads, specially in East Asia. Even though you would be hard pressed to find tatooed orcs in Japan, Korea and China, for the women of those countries, the priority is their career, children comes third and making their husband happy is not even in the list.
Don't take my word, a quick search can illuminate the truth...o a conversation with a few females of those countries. Don't let their good manners fool you, they are as willing to kill their unborn as are their western counterparts. In the middle east the infection is not as severe (as far as I know of) but in many of those "traditional" countries, women outnumber men in universities adn as Iran can attest, that's not a good sign at all...
I think it's because modern life is sucking us towards the eternal present, only caring about optimizing gains and never exploring new paths (traditionally the path of the young, now replaced by career-oriented education and tiger parenting) or taking a longer view of things (traditionally the path of the old, now replaced by second childhoods or part-time work to supplement pensions or asset management).
We all converge towards perpetual adulthood, pushing people farther and farther away from having children by making the optimization puzzle of adult life harder and harder.
I actually have an article coming out about this but it's scheduled on Friday.
*adolescence (perpetual) 🤔
Perpetual adolescence or present-orientation is probably a better way to put it, true.
Eeek.
At 7:21 (GMT) - shortly after 5am in proper (Antipodean) time - I wrote a comment about "assisted dying", contrasting that term with "euthanasia" based on the etymology of the word "euthanasia", that went as follows:
================================
Euthanasia and “assisted dying” are different terms though; the etymology of “euthanasia” is Greek for “good death” (like “eugenics” means good genes and “euphoria” means good feeling).
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My day always starts with VoxPopoli; Unz; Substack - in that order - so I promise I didn't pinch it from here.
This is getting weird: the other day I woke up with the word "Yehidne" at the front of my brain.
I thought it must be some disparaging term for Jewish people that I'd picked up somewhere - KEK.
An hour later it turned out that Yehidne is a little settlement near Artyomovsk which had been the focus of a small attempted recon action by the (doomed, almost-sub-unity TFR) Ukraine.
No one cares how your day went.
Maybe you should take this VoxPopoli post to heart:
https://voxday.net/2023/06/12/you-are-not-the-topic/
OK gamma
Sheesh, sounds undeservedly harsh (autistic?) 😒 Personal anecdotes do confer value in quite a few korero dimensions; we ain't no disembodied minds here, amirite? 🤭
That said, 'Nothing in excess!'—as inscribed upon Delphi stone 😏
The irony there is that Vox Day is certainly not above using personal anecdotes to make his point.
Smth smth to the tune of we're most vocally against the traits we hate in ourselves 😁
😂
That said, rather than mock Vox, I'm inclined to take it as a reminder not to become too self-indulgent with anecdote.