I've been feeling a bit guilty for not doing something special for my paid subscribers, and since this post was a lot of work to put together (10,000 words, damn ... I think this is the longest thing I've written yet on Substack), I decided to put most of it behind a paywall. For now. I'll take it out from behind the paywall in a week, but paying subscribers get the first crack at reading this, and at ripping my ideas to shreds in the comments.
This is great, lots of sensible ideas. I will say that "idleness" is not generally a word that can be accurately applied to a mother looking after a nursing baby, unless she is a) neglectful or b) has an absolute potato baby, and they are rare.
Baby rearing is usually very hands-on and physical. My baby only started having reliable, >20min naps after 8 or so months, and that was my housework time. Previous, he usually only slept in the day being walked in the pram, and hated a sling. I've been able to do freelance WFH for 30-60min per day, but only since he's been about 14months old and naps better (and can mostly toddle about with me while I do housework).
My point is, there is not much WFH you can safely or reasonably do while looking after little babies/toddlers. School-age kids may be a different matter though, and even just losing the commute time is helpful for balancing child-rearing and paid employment.
You're absolutely correct, looking after babies is serious work. They require regular attention. WFH as currently conceived, essentially a 9-to-5 in your jammies, doesn't work with that. The kind of work women did before then - e.g. sewing, spinning wool, that kind of thing - is the kind that can be put down and picked up whenever, on the schedule of the small child. That's element is essential. Also, worth noting that earlier societies gave women a few months off from that immediately after childbirth.
Fascinating piece and much to ponder. Am not criticising the content of any of your ideas but under present conditions there is no way pro-natal policies will even be contemplated. Regimes that encourage the elective removal of viable reproductive tissue from the children of their own people are thrilled by the fertility crisis as an excuse for a) way more immigration and b) more innovation in reproductive medicine (transhumanism on steroids).
BTW fertility rises naturally after wars and epidemics of fatal disease. A great die-off (or kill-off) generates new life.
Fertility is inseparable from family formation. At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) opportunities for forming and maintaining nuclear families and enabling fertility are becoming rationed by class. The modal family unit in the upper middle class is nuclear, but this is no longer the case for everyone else. This is the regime's way of managing the surplus or replaceable population. The traditional family survived as long as it did only because gov'ts wanted fresh bodies for the infantry and needed to secure regime legitimacy by buying popular support (the welfare state).
So long as employers have access to global labour markets there is simply no incentive for industry to support pro-family policies. And the state has zero interest in building or legitimising small social units that it cannot control.
Readers interested in pursuing this topic may find the links below helpful.
This recent piece by Genevra Davis is well worth a look.
I would like to contribute an observation: it’s perfectly possible to say very bluntly to women that 1. if a man does not want to get a women pregnant and look after her children, he does not love her, and 2. vice versa. It should be a meme—love equals children. This is understandable even by dumb, horny men (speaking from personal experience) and it helps to weed out bad marriage candidates. Also 3. it’s easy to be clear that biology requires children to be breastfed for about two years each for maximum vigour (the implications actually bode very well for humanity), and that denying children this opportunity for greater height, IQ, and emotional health this is tantamount to child abuse. Meme: breastfeeding equals love. It’s probably also worth stressing that 4. vaccination carries risk of brain damage (cf Exley et al.) and brain-damaged kids will be expensive and stressful to raise: but conversely, healthy, whole children will be much more amenable to being civilised. Meme: if your kids misbehave, it’s cos you vaxxed ‘em. We could also try memes like 5. “On birth control? No thanks!” though I don’t know if that can actually be pulled off.
Sorry, the military doesn't need draftees to do their time and be cannon fodder. A lot of time is invested in training. Helicopters require a huge support staff including mechanics. No room for error. Needs tons of parts Imagine the work on an aircraft carrier. From fueling, weapons systems, take-offs, Landings, and maintenance to actually sailing the ships. Same for subs.
No need ( from the actual military perspective ) for volunteers or draftees.
Ditto to Mssr. Carter. There's really no reason theses memes can't be getting air time (e-time?) now, dumped into the highest echelons of the internet to trickle down into the subculture like a vial of fertility potion being poured into the headwaters of the Tiber
Very interesting food for thought! The problem is large-scale, multifaceted, and many generations in the making, so I admire your willingness to write a proposal for reversing this trend. We really need a complete cultural overhaul, from top to bottom. Absent a Caesar figure orchestrating it from above, we'd need something like a large-scale religious revival, because religious movements are one thing that absolutely can transform a culture and increase fertility rates (obviously a real religious movement, not a sinister counterfeit like Marxcissism). I don't know how likely a big religious revival is -- it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility, especially if we have the right combination of black-swan events causing cataclysmic cultural upheavals and making people desperate enough for spiritual meaning and connection, but I don't think a large-scale revival is probable enough to count on as a solution. Maybe Tree of Woe's religious project can come into play here?
What you said about removing the government red tape that's hindering people from doing things like starting home businesses is absolutely spot on. This would be beneficial for a variety of reasons, and facilitating the formation of families would no doubt be one very positive outcome out of many. It really is incredible the degree to which byzantine regulations interfere with, needlessly complicate, and inflate the costs of so much in life -- things that earlier generations just took for granted and did without much thought (and definitely without much tax liability or the proper permits or any of that). Come to think of it, I remember you had an excellent post about that (or more than one) -- I remember you gave the example of getting a dog then vs now, and how that one example really demonstrated the degree to which all this artificial bullshit has been heaped on top of what used to be natural and straightforward.
Anyway, you've provided a lot of interesting ideas and good insights to consider! Great post!
I think we're already living through a religious revival of a sort, in fact two of them. Marxcissism is sort of an antireligion, as it's self-sterilizing, but the reaction against it qualifies as something very much like a religious revival. There's the Christian nationalist angle obviously, but I think even the secular reactionaries are motivated by something similar to a religious impulse.
And indeed, I've written about the insane degree of bureaucratic sclerosis strangling the life out of us on a few occasions. That's a recurring theme here.
"the insane degree of bureaucratic sclerosis strangling the life out of us"
The boxes. We have this love/hate relationship with order and structure. It helps us grow and gives us foundations, but then the walls start to close in.....
The trick is understanding where you are in the cycle.
There's always a good reason for every new regulation, law, fence, restriction, and mandate. But they add up ... the totality of them form an open air prison.
Very much so. So many of these laws and departments would be so much better if they were established with hard sunset provisions, to keep them from outliving their usefulness, taking on a life of their own, and growing into yet another monstrosity that chokes the life out of the society that gave rise to it.
Exactly. It's that feedback between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement. Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
We are just in the middle, where the feedback loops are most complex. That's why we need to begin to understand the dynamic and not just get caught up in it.
Even the cycles of birth and death are part of it.
If you really want to get into the weeds, here is a draft I wrote last week, given the implosion looks imminent, so it's kind of where I see people might be willing to start to consider, probably by this fall;
I disagree. The Fertility rates for Spartans were already declining before the wars with Persia and greatly declined after winning the peloponnesian war. War did accelerated it. The thing was that Sparta mostly stayed out of many conflicts until the Peloponnesian War, and yet the population had already dropped from a peck of 8000 males in the 5th century to that of 1000 males in the mid 4th century.
So the next question would be what cause the decline. Well I would say it was baked into the whole system.
1. After winning the Messenian Wars of the 7th century BC Sparta had now taken a subjugated population Helots. These people were enslaved and force to work the land while the Spartan men trained. Over time the population of Helots outgrew the Spartans and the fear of revolts.
2. Boys were separated from their families at the age of 7. Become State property. This is a long term problem of no family bonds, only to that of the state. The very opposite of how the Roman family and state worked, probably why Rome become the empire it did and Sparta did not.
3. Spartan men were not allowed to live with their wives until age 30. Women were require at age 20 to get married.
4. Spartan Economy.
As already said in point 1 Slavery was a major part of the economy. Unlike other Greek States the slaves could not buy their freedom and also the number of Slaves out numbered the citizens. No coins or gold, all trade was with iron bars. It become a problem in the 3rd century BC corruption from Persian coins and gold.
Perioikoi free men who could not be Spartan made such necessary items as shoes, red cloaks for the soldiers, iron tools like knives and spears, and pottery.
Innovation and ideas would be slow to change in such state. I think the only times it did was in case of war or uprisings. Lysander is great example.
5. Spartan women had more rights than other Greek women. I let Aristotle say it from Politics (Book 2, section 1269b) "Hence this characteristic existed among the Spartans, and in the time of their empire many things were controlled by the women; yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by the women? The result is the same. And although bravery is of service for none of the regular duties of life, but if at all, in war, even in this respect the Spartans' women were most harmful; and they showed this at the time of the Theban invasion,2 for they rendered no useful service, as the women do in other states, while they caused more confusion than the enemy."
I dislike plastics as much as the next guy, but it’s my understanding that much of the current plastic market is fueled by byproducts of oil refining, and if it weren’t made into consumer goods would have to be disposed of in a costly manner.
It's not so much that plastics per se need to be wholly eliminated. There are a large number of valid use cases. They just shouldn't ever be permitted to come into contact with food or drink. That should be at the level of a religious prohibition, like the Torah's injunction against allowing meat and milk to touch.
Oct 23, 2023·edited Oct 23, 2023Liked by John Carter
Re: housing, the problem with urban apartments is not so much their size-in-square-footage, it's their use of interior and exterior space (to put it blandly). Urban apartments divide themselves up into useless single-purpose travel-size compartments and have far more interior space dedicated to things like hygiene that the medieval huts would have located outside.
Meanwhile the useful spaces are designed as if for a dollhouse. I don't even know how people manage to cook in the tiny little kitchens, but cramming half the family in there to prepare a real meal is a circus act at best and a hospital visit waiting to happen at worst. I guess they answer is they don't cook unless they're hipsters and just got done watching Julie and Julia or Hell's Kitchen or whatever lately is motivating hipsters to toy with fire and sharp objects in enclosed spaces.
As to exterior space, "go outside and play, honey" is a bit of a joke when you live on the 34th floor of a slumtower surrounded by an encampment of drug addicts and mental cases, which describes more urban living situations every day. Let alone are there resources, tools and work to be done right outside your door, such that the house isn't crowded all day yet never empty, and still fit to raise a family in.
TL;DR, I think your GTFO the city ideas are all much better than bunk beds to solve the housing problem.
Yeah there's a reason I devoted so much space to means of redistributing the population to small towns. That said, not everyone will go, and our urban spaces are so poorly designed that it's almost impossible for us not to do better.
Well, between boomer expiry and some people moving out of the city maybe some of those awful little apartments will have a few walls knocked down to make enough space to live sanely. The joke is that they'll be further subdivided into coomer pods but I don't know how long that is profitable before suicide takes its toll on your tenants.
Interesting piece. Not sure I know that many people (anyone) that can bench their own body weight and run a five minute mile though. I mean I left humanity behind some time ago and have benched more than five plates but I think a 10 minute mile would be a challenge even with training.
One thing that you didn’t mention is more fertile cultures like Islam allow a husband to have multiple wives (not a Muslim btw) with the limitations placed on the man’s financial and educational resources (not time for instance). It’s certainly an interesting model and in some ways more effective by fertility rates.
As to the 5 min mile, a good jogging speed - as in not elite, just fit - is about 8 mph, so yes, you're right that a 5 min mile is a very high standard.
We effectively have polygamy already - Tindergamy is just informal harems with birth control pills. In any case polygamy is typically socially corrosive.
Five plates is an impressive bench. Presumably you don't mean 5 plates on each side of the bar, but in total? In any case I don't think a bodyweight bench press is an unreasonable goal for a teenage boy - assuming a modal weight of 175 lbs, that isn't so much.
In some respects it’s socially corrosive to those Islamic societies especially with all the left over men. Is it more corrosive than what we have in the west though?
Five plates a side so ten plates in total (plus the bar), hence I don’t think I could do a ten minute mile without training for it as I’m considerably more than 175lbs. Most people can bench their body weight but combining that with a five minute mile I think would be near impossible (maybe David Goggins or the like could do it?).
Yes. But then in order to do that I’ve had to be over 260lbs, probably north of 300lbs now. Hence problems with running a mile in any kind of sensible time.
Yes, obviously. Damn you must be a beast. I'm impressed.
Clearly, optimizing for strength is contraindicated for cardio, as I know from personal experience. In any case though I'm certainly not suggesting that every teenage boy be trained to the specifications of a competition power lifter, or for that matter a marathon runner. The goal should merely be fitness.
"To the contrary, physical achievement should be an absolute requirement to graduate high school. Body fat over 20%? Can’t bench your own weight? Can’t run a five minute mile? Sorry, no diploma for you. It goes without saying that similar curricular standards should be enforced at universities."
Yeah I can't do any of that. Even when I was training for marathons (I finished both with times well over 5 hours) my body fat hovered slightly above 20%. In high school I was able to run a mile in around 7 minutes. Five? Really? Beching my weight? No idea.
I think people grow from their strengths and shrink from their weaknesses. I'm not sure I'd want to enforce any rigid policy except this one: a lot of problems would sort themselves if government stopped incentivizing and disincentivizing things. With energy for example generous subsidies have kept a lot of unprofitable things afloat. Taxes and regulatory compliance have become in many cases the tail wagging the dog situations. The same could definitely be said about growing food and building homes and a lot on this list. People might find out quite on their own that grandma provides a valuable source of childcare which benefits both sides, that multigeneration households hold clear advantages, and that growing GMO soybeans has higher net input costs than allowing some cattle to roam free on native grasslands in the area. Coconuts don't want to grow in Canada.
Such economic calculations would always come down to EROEI or energy returned on energy invested equations. Working from home has clear advantages especially for women with young children. When I got pregnant with my older daughter one of my first considerations was finding a job that would allow me to work from home.
It's become squre peg in round hole calculations all around. There is no valor in the sacrifice of producing the next generation of humans in the corporate realm. At best it's tolerated. At worst it's punished directly through lost opportunities...
The fitness standards were really more aimed at the boys ;) Obviously, healthy body fat percentages for girls are much higher, and upper body strength expectations much lower.
Spot on regarding the state's role in warping things via broken incentive structures. That's a huge part of the problem.
Heathy body fat for men is 8 to 20%. For Women it is 20 to 32%. So yes you are right women are higher and honestly they need the extra energy stored up for making babies
It's right there in the name. DINK connotes "these people of suck, they're having too much fun." SINKs aren't having fun, and they're dragging us under. It's much more depressing.
What is the deciding factor to produce quantity, say Micky D's, over local restaurants, other than it's cheaper in bulk and therefore more profitable?
What do those pushing equality really want, other than a cut of the pie as it is? Aka, reparations, welfare, diversity hiring, ubi.
If you make quality a social ideal, rather than allowing any and all judgement, aka, qualifications, to be cancelled, then we have to develop stronger social purposes, than just finding a tit.
Basically I'm saying you are focused on effects, not causes.
The problem with our culture is that we patch the problems, rather than dig down into the causes, so we blame it on some other dumb fuck and not try to figure out this game of divide and conquer.
Life is inherently subjective, aka, biased. We have to figure out how to deal with each of us being the center of our point of view and not try to make these enormous political, social, cultural boxes and cram everyone into them.
I wanted to read this back when it first came out but I wasn't a paying subscriber back then, so I'm reading this now. Originally, I was going to offer only a single comment (the one at the bottom), but I see enough errors in the article that I need to start writing my comments as I read. So,
> As we saw in part 2 with the example of Israel – the lone developed state with above-replacement fertility – while culture is extremely important, cultural factors alone are insufficient to reverse the trend.
Your data in Israeli fertility is incomplete. Some 70-80% of Israelis are actually completely Westernized and have below-replacement fertility. What keeps the overall Israel afloat are the Haredi cultists (AKA ultra-orthodox Jews) which have 5 or more children per woman. But the problem is they are completely nonfunctional, with women doing man's jobs and men being baby-makers and spending most of their youth studying Talmud and other legal texts. As a consequence, Haredi men are basically uneducated and are no better economically than those illegal migrants the US has been getting so much. Add to this their shot-through consciences and it should be obvious Israel is actually worse off than "the West". The only thing Haredis have going for them is that they aren't migrants pre-selected for being expendable men but are the outcome of local births which mean for each Haredi man there is one Haredi woman. Unlike migrants whose sexes are unbalanced.
> With the exception of matchmaking AIs, none of the solutions suggested here are particularly expensive at the macrosocial level.
Hard disagree. They are not expensive monetarily, but they will impose massive social costs. Furthermore, are young people going to submit themselves to meddling by their older relatives when we can infer it was those very older relatives' practices that created this entire mess to begin with? It was boomers that gave up on marriage, after all.
> A human female’s fertility peaks between her late teens and late twenties, and falls off a cliff in her thirties.
While the quoted sentence is correct, this section suffers from misunderstanding of human biology, so it ultimately produces a wrong solution. First, there's no way for the human body to determine which ova are "best" and which are not. But okay, maybe all the "young" ones are fine so by definition all eggs in her twenties are "best". Regardless, there's actually this theory that has been kicking around for a while which says mammals REGENERATE their oocites. It has been proven in mice, AFAIK. So we have to keep the option open that even humans regenerate their ova. Next, men also absolutely suffer around year 35. In case of women, the chance of bearing chidren with Down's syndrom rises after their 35th year, but for men the chances of bearing children with Edwards' syndrom rises. The only silver lining is that children with Edwards' syndrome don't last more than a year or two, unlike children with Down's syndrome. Next, there absolutely is a limit to the human brain's plasticity and it absolutely decreases with age. Bluntly: if women put off education, they won't be able to learn once they try. The brain will be too underdeveloped and too unplastic for them to learn anything.
> The Pill
I'm 100% certain the Reality is more complicated than that. :) As an example, look at the crash in fertility in some Communist countries, like Serbia and Croatia, both part of FPR Yugoslavia at the time, and compare it to the crash in Capitalist countries. It's about the same but with a 10 or 20 year delta. I suspect it has more to do with either people's free will-based choices, embodied in the prevalent culture at the time, or else with the Calhoun-style destruction of the psychological lineage, which I'll talk about at the end of the comment.
> The idea here would not be explicitly ideological at all: the basic concept is just getting young people to move to rural areas where they can have lots of kids.
I suspect this will get nowhere. You need a driving factor, a MacGuffin, that both gets people off their asses and into the wilderness (literally) and makes them unite together in lifelong bonds, above and beyond marriage. You need a treasure. Ideology or religion is such a treasure. Living in space is such a treasure. (Economic and/or social) Autarchy may be such a treasure (although it is ideologies' twin sister). BTW, this also has the danger of becoming Globohomo's wet dream so, again, ideology plays an important part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94Jbd5l1_k
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There's also a general remark I want to make, and it's regarding the incentive structure and child labor. In general, hunter-gatherer societies have low fertility because children are a major drag. The tribe can't move fast, it keeps members occupied and not foraging etc. OTOH, agrarian societies have huge fertility because once a child is just a little grown, it can help in the field. And the kid can't really NOT help, for various reasons. ;) So there is a clear incentive to make as many kids as possible, in order to maximize productivity. This can be seen most clearly in the case of Java, which for the last ~two centuries has been booming in population because they live in a sweet spot where their land is fertile and also can be made more fertile by more labor-intensive agriculture. So they made ever more kids to have ever more labor.
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> The young are essentially told to figure it out themselves, and most are lost in a confusing and contradictory landscape
In effect, what Calhoun managed to prove is that 'life' isn't merely biological, or doesn't just merely depend on a biological lineage, but also has at least the psychological lineage. To survive, a species/population must not only propagate it's genes, it also has to propagate it's culture, worldview, wisdom, emotional stability, in a word, it's psyche. By managing the rat's environment, Calhoun managed to kill this psychological lineage, and ultimately kill off the population without harming their bodies. Notice: when a selection of biologically healthy and fertile-age rats are removed from the late-stage 'Universe' and placed into a new enclosure, *they don't reproduce*. Their psychies are completely shot-through and destroyed.
I propose a similar thing happened to humanity. In most of the industrialized societies, Western and Eastern, the transfer mechanism for the psychological lineage has been broken. Modern people are mostly broken husks shuffling around as zombies. Emotionally unable to bear children, even though their bodies are perfectly capable of it, and their intellects clearly percieve the need for it. Some support for this can be found in boarding schools for indigenous peoples, which were very popular from the late 19th century all the way through the fifites. And not just in the West, but also in the East (USSR had many). What was the fertility of such peoples? Compared to the 'white' peoples living in the same adult circumstances, but who didn't go through boarding schools as kids?
So, of the things you propose and list here, I suspect 'Village life' is the one which might actually help most, if you can make it work. https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/how-to-not-die-while-carrying-35 However, perhaps the transfer mechanism involved childcare by the elderly? In that case, your last point would be also very helpful. But note the cultural issues of the state taking kids from parents and entrusting them to the care of unknown (childless?) elders. After all, if those childless elders are so smart and wise, why haven't they made their own kids? Instead they're now going to try and inculcate *my* children when their obviously broken shams of lives! xD And also the cultural aspect: what stories are kids going to be told? Can you imagine the shitstorm if you take Croat/Bunjevac children from Catholic parents and entrust them to Serb and Orthodox elders for cultural inculcation? Wow, some things might get burned down, and some people beaten up. :) Not that this wasn't done on the grand scale between Hungarians and Slavs, on both sides of the Hungarian-Yugoslav border. ;) As I said, boarding schools and "cultural liqudation" was *very* popular from the late 19th century all the way through the fifties, in both West and East. ;) Hey. Maybe that's the solution to the riddle (national homogeneization which was practiced on a MASSIVE scale during the middle 20th century all over the world)? o.O
(1) It is possible, and I do this all the time, to read all Substack articles if you can tolerate reading two lines at a time to see in the background past the frontgrounded subscription entreaty. (2) I publish all my articles in three places, Medium.com, Thinkspot.com, and now here in Substack, and Thinkspot.com run by Jordan Peterson is the cheapest (US $12/year), so there are multiple options. And Medium.com allows everyone to read 3 free articles/month, just like a lot of online publications, so it's still entirely possible to read all my writings for free on Substack and Medium.
Good finish to this series of essays. I think that much of this program can be implemented quite easily on the level of the individual or the small community (perhaps by design), which we really ought to be doing. Most of the trends that drive poor fertility are, as you identified, working through mostly cultural trends which can easily be reversed in subcultures. Whichever group can fix most of these for themselves will have a tremendous advantage in 20, 40, 60 years as they stay young and everyone else ages
Even if civilisation in her totality cannot be saved before she's crushed by Clio's heavy judgement, portions of it - the best portions ideally - can be
This is exactly correct - while the solutions proposed here can certainly be adopted at the state level, they do not necessarily need to be (although some of them, such as prohibitions on seed oils or plastics touching food, are much easier to maintain with state force).
I've been feeling a bit guilty for not doing something special for my paid subscribers, and since this post was a lot of work to put together (10,000 words, damn ... I think this is the longest thing I've written yet on Substack), I decided to put most of it behind a paywall. For now. I'll take it out from behind the paywall in a week, but paying subscribers get the first crack at reading this, and at ripping my ideas to shreds in the comments.
This is great, lots of sensible ideas. I will say that "idleness" is not generally a word that can be accurately applied to a mother looking after a nursing baby, unless she is a) neglectful or b) has an absolute potato baby, and they are rare.
Baby rearing is usually very hands-on and physical. My baby only started having reliable, >20min naps after 8 or so months, and that was my housework time. Previous, he usually only slept in the day being walked in the pram, and hated a sling. I've been able to do freelance WFH for 30-60min per day, but only since he's been about 14months old and naps better (and can mostly toddle about with me while I do housework).
My point is, there is not much WFH you can safely or reasonably do while looking after little babies/toddlers. School-age kids may be a different matter though, and even just losing the commute time is helpful for balancing child-rearing and paid employment.
You're absolutely correct, looking after babies is serious work. They require regular attention. WFH as currently conceived, essentially a 9-to-5 in your jammies, doesn't work with that. The kind of work women did before then - e.g. sewing, spinning wool, that kind of thing - is the kind that can be put down and picked up whenever, on the schedule of the small child. That's element is essential. Also, worth noting that earlier societies gave women a few months off from that immediately after childbirth.
Fascinating piece and much to ponder. Am not criticising the content of any of your ideas but under present conditions there is no way pro-natal policies will even be contemplated. Regimes that encourage the elective removal of viable reproductive tissue from the children of their own people are thrilled by the fertility crisis as an excuse for a) way more immigration and b) more innovation in reproductive medicine (transhumanism on steroids).
BTW fertility rises naturally after wars and epidemics of fatal disease. A great die-off (or kill-off) generates new life.
Fertility is inseparable from family formation. At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) opportunities for forming and maintaining nuclear families and enabling fertility are becoming rationed by class. The modal family unit in the upper middle class is nuclear, but this is no longer the case for everyone else. This is the regime's way of managing the surplus or replaceable population. The traditional family survived as long as it did only because gov'ts wanted fresh bodies for the infantry and needed to secure regime legitimacy by buying popular support (the welfare state).
So long as employers have access to global labour markets there is simply no incentive for industry to support pro-family policies. And the state has zero interest in building or legitimising small social units that it cannot control.
Readers interested in pursuing this topic may find the links below helpful.
This recent piece by Genevra Davis is well worth a look.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/29/when-every-child-is-a-choice/
Ditto an old one by Mary Harrington.
https://unherd.com/2020/06/incels-could-become-the-new-vikings/
Brilliant, world-saving article!
I would like to contribute an observation: it’s perfectly possible to say very bluntly to women that 1. if a man does not want to get a women pregnant and look after her children, he does not love her, and 2. vice versa. It should be a meme—love equals children. This is understandable even by dumb, horny men (speaking from personal experience) and it helps to weed out bad marriage candidates. Also 3. it’s easy to be clear that biology requires children to be breastfed for about two years each for maximum vigour (the implications actually bode very well for humanity), and that denying children this opportunity for greater height, IQ, and emotional health this is tantamount to child abuse. Meme: breastfeeding equals love. It’s probably also worth stressing that 4. vaccination carries risk of brain damage (cf Exley et al.) and brain-damaged kids will be expensive and stressful to raise: but conversely, healthy, whole children will be much more amenable to being civilised. Meme: if your kids misbehave, it’s cos you vaxxed ‘em. We could also try memes like 5. “On birth control? No thanks!” though I don’t know if that can actually be pulled off.
These are great.
The two-year breastfeeding time span is quite crucial. Yet another reason why work-from-home should be strongly emphasized for young mothers.
One more idea: Compulsory military/community service for non-parents at 21.
This would go for two years, on low pay, and the only way out is to have a child to look after.
edit: age 21 for women, 23 for men.
edit 2: You have to change the incentives: In this system, not having children costs a couple a total of 4 years of professional development.
Sorry, the military doesn't need draftees to do their time and be cannon fodder. A lot of time is invested in training. Helicopters require a huge support staff including mechanics. No room for error. Needs tons of parts Imagine the work on an aircraft carrier. From fueling, weapons systems, take-offs, Landings, and maintenance to actually sailing the ships. Same for subs.
No need ( from the actual military perspective ) for volunteers or draftees.
True. But it's not about need.
The problem with financial incentives to have babies is that most people value time more than money.
There needs to be a time incentive to have children (avoid years of mandatory service).
You could also use this draft to man the mushrooming aged care facilities.
Seeing what growing old alone looks like should spur young people to have more kids.
Ditto to Mssr. Carter. There's really no reason theses memes can't be getting air time (e-time?) now, dumped into the highest echelons of the internet to trickle down into the subculture like a vial of fertility potion being poured into the headwaters of the Tiber
Very interesting food for thought! The problem is large-scale, multifaceted, and many generations in the making, so I admire your willingness to write a proposal for reversing this trend. We really need a complete cultural overhaul, from top to bottom. Absent a Caesar figure orchestrating it from above, we'd need something like a large-scale religious revival, because religious movements are one thing that absolutely can transform a culture and increase fertility rates (obviously a real religious movement, not a sinister counterfeit like Marxcissism). I don't know how likely a big religious revival is -- it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility, especially if we have the right combination of black-swan events causing cataclysmic cultural upheavals and making people desperate enough for spiritual meaning and connection, but I don't think a large-scale revival is probable enough to count on as a solution. Maybe Tree of Woe's religious project can come into play here?
What you said about removing the government red tape that's hindering people from doing things like starting home businesses is absolutely spot on. This would be beneficial for a variety of reasons, and facilitating the formation of families would no doubt be one very positive outcome out of many. It really is incredible the degree to which byzantine regulations interfere with, needlessly complicate, and inflate the costs of so much in life -- things that earlier generations just took for granted and did without much thought (and definitely without much tax liability or the proper permits or any of that). Come to think of it, I remember you had an excellent post about that (or more than one) -- I remember you gave the example of getting a dog then vs now, and how that one example really demonstrated the degree to which all this artificial bullshit has been heaped on top of what used to be natural and straightforward.
Anyway, you've provided a lot of interesting ideas and good insights to consider! Great post!
I think we're already living through a religious revival of a sort, in fact two of them. Marxcissism is sort of an antireligion, as it's self-sterilizing, but the reaction against it qualifies as something very much like a religious revival. There's the Christian nationalist angle obviously, but I think even the secular reactionaries are motivated by something similar to a religious impulse.
And indeed, I've written about the insane degree of bureaucratic sclerosis strangling the life out of us on a few occasions. That's a recurring theme here.
"the insane degree of bureaucratic sclerosis strangling the life out of us"
The boxes. We have this love/hate relationship with order and structure. It helps us grow and gives us foundations, but then the walls start to close in.....
The trick is understanding where you are in the cycle.
There's always a good reason for every new regulation, law, fence, restriction, and mandate. But they add up ... the totality of them form an open air prison.
Very much so. So many of these laws and departments would be so much better if they were established with hard sunset provisions, to keep them from outliving their usefulness, taking on a life of their own, and growing into yet another monstrosity that chokes the life out of the society that gave rise to it.
Preach.
Exactly. It's that feedback between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement. Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
We are just in the middle, where the feedback loops are most complex. That's why we need to begin to understand the dynamic and not just get caught up in it.
Even the cycles of birth and death are part of it.
If you really want to get into the weeds, here is a draft I wrote last week, given the implosion looks imminent, so it's kind of where I see people might be willing to start to consider, probably by this fall;
https://johnmerryman.substack.com/publish/post/135326630?r=7aidy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
> The Spartans emphasized physical education for their women, because they understood that strong women bear strong warriors.
Well, the Spartans notoriously also had a massive fertility crisis of their own.
This is true, although my impression is that this is because their men kept dying in war.
I disagree. The Fertility rates for Spartans were already declining before the wars with Persia and greatly declined after winning the peloponnesian war. War did accelerated it. The thing was that Sparta mostly stayed out of many conflicts until the Peloponnesian War, and yet the population had already dropped from a peck of 8000 males in the 5th century to that of 1000 males in the mid 4th century.
So the next question would be what cause the decline. Well I would say it was baked into the whole system.
1. After winning the Messenian Wars of the 7th century BC Sparta had now taken a subjugated population Helots. These people were enslaved and force to work the land while the Spartan men trained. Over time the population of Helots outgrew the Spartans and the fear of revolts.
2. Boys were separated from their families at the age of 7. Become State property. This is a long term problem of no family bonds, only to that of the state. The very opposite of how the Roman family and state worked, probably why Rome become the empire it did and Sparta did not.
3. Spartan men were not allowed to live with their wives until age 30. Women were require at age 20 to get married.
4. Spartan Economy.
As already said in point 1 Slavery was a major part of the economy. Unlike other Greek States the slaves could not buy their freedom and also the number of Slaves out numbered the citizens. No coins or gold, all trade was with iron bars. It become a problem in the 3rd century BC corruption from Persian coins and gold.
Perioikoi free men who could not be Spartan made such necessary items as shoes, red cloaks for the soldiers, iron tools like knives and spears, and pottery.
Innovation and ideas would be slow to change in such state. I think the only times it did was in case of war or uprisings. Lysander is great example.
5. Spartan women had more rights than other Greek women. I let Aristotle say it from Politics (Book 2, section 1269b) "Hence this characteristic existed among the Spartans, and in the time of their empire many things were controlled by the women; yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by the women? The result is the same. And although bravery is of service for none of the regular duties of life, but if at all, in war, even in this respect the Spartans' women were most harmful; and they showed this at the time of the Theban invasion,2 for they rendered no useful service, as the women do in other states, while they caused more confusion than the enemy."
https://www.fcusd.org/cms/lib/CA01001934/Centricity/Domain/3209/10_Athens%20and%20Sparta%20Readings.pdf
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/123/spartan-women/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/283916
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3pk467b6
That would require absurdly high casualty rates. Especially considering Sparta's reputation as being the ones who normally won.
There were never that many Spartans at any given time, I think only a few thousand. But as I said, it's not something I'm deeply familiar with.
Well ten thousand is the number normally given for the size of a typical polis.
I dislike plastics as much as the next guy, but it’s my understanding that much of the current plastic market is fueled by byproducts of oil refining, and if it weren’t made into consumer goods would have to be disposed of in a costly manner.
It's not so much that plastics per se need to be wholly eliminated. There are a large number of valid use cases. They just shouldn't ever be permitted to come into contact with food or drink. That should be at the level of a religious prohibition, like the Torah's injunction against allowing meat and milk to touch.
yes.
On work: Eliminate make-work jobs.
I mean the office jobs we all suspect only exist to keep the excess college graduates busy.
HR, admin, 'Journalism', marketing, all employ mostly women and produce nothing of value.
Hard agree.
Re: housing, the problem with urban apartments is not so much their size-in-square-footage, it's their use of interior and exterior space (to put it blandly). Urban apartments divide themselves up into useless single-purpose travel-size compartments and have far more interior space dedicated to things like hygiene that the medieval huts would have located outside.
Meanwhile the useful spaces are designed as if for a dollhouse. I don't even know how people manage to cook in the tiny little kitchens, but cramming half the family in there to prepare a real meal is a circus act at best and a hospital visit waiting to happen at worst. I guess they answer is they don't cook unless they're hipsters and just got done watching Julie and Julia or Hell's Kitchen or whatever lately is motivating hipsters to toy with fire and sharp objects in enclosed spaces.
As to exterior space, "go outside and play, honey" is a bit of a joke when you live on the 34th floor of a slumtower surrounded by an encampment of drug addicts and mental cases, which describes more urban living situations every day. Let alone are there resources, tools and work to be done right outside your door, such that the house isn't crowded all day yet never empty, and still fit to raise a family in.
TL;DR, I think your GTFO the city ideas are all much better than bunk beds to solve the housing problem.
Yeah there's a reason I devoted so much space to means of redistributing the population to small towns. That said, not everyone will go, and our urban spaces are so poorly designed that it's almost impossible for us not to do better.
Well, between boomer expiry and some people moving out of the city maybe some of those awful little apartments will have a few walls knocked down to make enough space to live sanely. The joke is that they'll be further subdivided into coomer pods but I don't know how long that is profitable before suicide takes its toll on your tenants.
Interesting piece. Not sure I know that many people (anyone) that can bench their own body weight and run a five minute mile though. I mean I left humanity behind some time ago and have benched more than five plates but I think a 10 minute mile would be a challenge even with training.
One thing that you didn’t mention is more fertile cultures like Islam allow a husband to have multiple wives (not a Muslim btw) with the limitations placed on the man’s financial and educational resources (not time for instance). It’s certainly an interesting model and in some ways more effective by fertility rates.
As to the 5 min mile, a good jogging speed - as in not elite, just fit - is about 8 mph, so yes, you're right that a 5 min mile is a very high standard.
We effectively have polygamy already - Tindergamy is just informal harems with birth control pills. In any case polygamy is typically socially corrosive.
Five plates is an impressive bench. Presumably you don't mean 5 plates on each side of the bar, but in total? In any case I don't think a bodyweight bench press is an unreasonable goal for a teenage boy - assuming a modal weight of 175 lbs, that isn't so much.
In some respects it’s socially corrosive to those Islamic societies especially with all the left over men. Is it more corrosive than what we have in the west though?
Five plates a side so ten plates in total (plus the bar), hence I don’t think I could do a ten minute mile without training for it as I’m considerably more than 175lbs. Most people can bench their body weight but combining that with a five minute mile I think would be near impossible (maybe David Goggins or the like could do it?).
Holy fuckballs Batman. You mean to tell me you've got a 495 lb bench?
Yes. But then in order to do that I’ve had to be over 260lbs, probably north of 300lbs now. Hence problems with running a mile in any kind of sensible time.
Yes, obviously. Damn you must be a beast. I'm impressed.
Clearly, optimizing for strength is contraindicated for cardio, as I know from personal experience. In any case though I'm certainly not suggesting that every teenage boy be trained to the specifications of a competition power lifter, or for that matter a marathon runner. The goal should merely be fitness.
"To the contrary, physical achievement should be an absolute requirement to graduate high school. Body fat over 20%? Can’t bench your own weight? Can’t run a five minute mile? Sorry, no diploma for you. It goes without saying that similar curricular standards should be enforced at universities."
Yeah I can't do any of that. Even when I was training for marathons (I finished both with times well over 5 hours) my body fat hovered slightly above 20%. In high school I was able to run a mile in around 7 minutes. Five? Really? Beching my weight? No idea.
I think people grow from their strengths and shrink from their weaknesses. I'm not sure I'd want to enforce any rigid policy except this one: a lot of problems would sort themselves if government stopped incentivizing and disincentivizing things. With energy for example generous subsidies have kept a lot of unprofitable things afloat. Taxes and regulatory compliance have become in many cases the tail wagging the dog situations. The same could definitely be said about growing food and building homes and a lot on this list. People might find out quite on their own that grandma provides a valuable source of childcare which benefits both sides, that multigeneration households hold clear advantages, and that growing GMO soybeans has higher net input costs than allowing some cattle to roam free on native grasslands in the area. Coconuts don't want to grow in Canada.
Such economic calculations would always come down to EROEI or energy returned on energy invested equations. Working from home has clear advantages especially for women with young children. When I got pregnant with my older daughter one of my first considerations was finding a job that would allow me to work from home.
It's become squre peg in round hole calculations all around. There is no valor in the sacrifice of producing the next generation of humans in the corporate realm. At best it's tolerated. At worst it's punished directly through lost opportunities...
The fitness standards were really more aimed at the boys ;) Obviously, healthy body fat percentages for girls are much higher, and upper body strength expectations much lower.
Spot on regarding the state's role in warping things via broken incentive structures. That's a huge part of the problem.
Heathy body fat for men is 8 to 20%. For Women it is 20 to 32%. So yes you are right women are higher and honestly they need the extra energy stored up for making babies
[Slow clap]
Got some sort-of-friends I'm gonna call "SINKs" and see what happens.
I mean. Technically I'm one myself, so.
We all wore DINK like a badge, I'll be curious what the connotations for this one are. There are a few more built in.
It's right there in the name. DINK connotes "these people of suck, they're having too much fun." SINKs aren't having fun, and they're dragging us under. It's much more depressing.
t. SINK
My particular subculture is big on 'SILK'... single income lots of kids.
How did I miss that!?
Ok, this is strange. I can't comment here from my phone.
Weird. I'm on my phone now.
Well, I assume it counts you as a paid subscriber. On my phone it says I can't comment cause I'm not a paid subscriber.
That's weird. I set comments to be open to all.
When profit trumps quality, which it does in every category, society is fucked.
We can't even wrap our minds around the fact that a medium is not a store.
We are still extremely primitive, no matter how complex the tech is.
I think in many cases it's quantity trumping quality, and in others equality trumping quality.
What is the deciding factor to produce quantity, say Micky D's, over local restaurants, other than it's cheaper in bulk and therefore more profitable?
What do those pushing equality really want, other than a cut of the pie as it is? Aka, reparations, welfare, diversity hiring, ubi.
If you make quality a social ideal, rather than allowing any and all judgement, aka, qualifications, to be cancelled, then we have to develop stronger social purposes, than just finding a tit.
Basically I'm saying you are focused on effects, not causes.
The problem with our culture is that we patch the problems, rather than dig down into the causes, so we blame it on some other dumb fuck and not try to figure out this game of divide and conquer.
Life is inherently subjective, aka, biased. We have to figure out how to deal with each of us being the center of our point of view and not try to make these enormous political, social, cultural boxes and cram everyone into them.
Nature is the vibes, not the boxes.
I wanted to read this back when it first came out but I wasn't a paying subscriber back then, so I'm reading this now. Originally, I was going to offer only a single comment (the one at the bottom), but I see enough errors in the article that I need to start writing my comments as I read. So,
> As we saw in part 2 with the example of Israel – the lone developed state with above-replacement fertility – while culture is extremely important, cultural factors alone are insufficient to reverse the trend.
Your data in Israeli fertility is incomplete. Some 70-80% of Israelis are actually completely Westernized and have below-replacement fertility. What keeps the overall Israel afloat are the Haredi cultists (AKA ultra-orthodox Jews) which have 5 or more children per woman. But the problem is they are completely nonfunctional, with women doing man's jobs and men being baby-makers and spending most of their youth studying Talmud and other legal texts. As a consequence, Haredi men are basically uneducated and are no better economically than those illegal migrants the US has been getting so much. Add to this their shot-through consciences and it should be obvious Israel is actually worse off than "the West". The only thing Haredis have going for them is that they aren't migrants pre-selected for being expendable men but are the outcome of local births which mean for each Haredi man there is one Haredi woman. Unlike migrants whose sexes are unbalanced.
> With the exception of matchmaking AIs, none of the solutions suggested here are particularly expensive at the macrosocial level.
Hard disagree. They are not expensive monetarily, but they will impose massive social costs. Furthermore, are young people going to submit themselves to meddling by their older relatives when we can infer it was those very older relatives' practices that created this entire mess to begin with? It was boomers that gave up on marriage, after all.
> A human female’s fertility peaks between her late teens and late twenties, and falls off a cliff in her thirties.
While the quoted sentence is correct, this section suffers from misunderstanding of human biology, so it ultimately produces a wrong solution. First, there's no way for the human body to determine which ova are "best" and which are not. But okay, maybe all the "young" ones are fine so by definition all eggs in her twenties are "best". Regardless, there's actually this theory that has been kicking around for a while which says mammals REGENERATE their oocites. It has been proven in mice, AFAIK. So we have to keep the option open that even humans regenerate their ova. Next, men also absolutely suffer around year 35. In case of women, the chance of bearing chidren with Down's syndrom rises after their 35th year, but for men the chances of bearing children with Edwards' syndrom rises. The only silver lining is that children with Edwards' syndrome don't last more than a year or two, unlike children with Down's syndrome. Next, there absolutely is a limit to the human brain's plasticity and it absolutely decreases with age. Bluntly: if women put off education, they won't be able to learn once they try. The brain will be too underdeveloped and too unplastic for them to learn anything.
> The Pill
I'm 100% certain the Reality is more complicated than that. :) As an example, look at the crash in fertility in some Communist countries, like Serbia and Croatia, both part of FPR Yugoslavia at the time, and compare it to the crash in Capitalist countries. It's about the same but with a 10 or 20 year delta. I suspect it has more to do with either people's free will-based choices, embodied in the prevalent culture at the time, or else with the Calhoun-style destruction of the psychological lineage, which I'll talk about at the end of the comment.
> The idea here would not be explicitly ideological at all: the basic concept is just getting young people to move to rural areas where they can have lots of kids.
I suspect this will get nowhere. You need a driving factor, a MacGuffin, that both gets people off their asses and into the wilderness (literally) and makes them unite together in lifelong bonds, above and beyond marriage. You need a treasure. Ideology or religion is such a treasure. Living in space is such a treasure. (Economic and/or social) Autarchy may be such a treasure (although it is ideologies' twin sister). BTW, this also has the danger of becoming Globohomo's wet dream so, again, ideology plays an important part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94Jbd5l1_k
---
There's also a general remark I want to make, and it's regarding the incentive structure and child labor. In general, hunter-gatherer societies have low fertility because children are a major drag. The tribe can't move fast, it keeps members occupied and not foraging etc. OTOH, agrarian societies have huge fertility because once a child is just a little grown, it can help in the field. And the kid can't really NOT help, for various reasons. ;) So there is a clear incentive to make as many kids as possible, in order to maximize productivity. This can be seen most clearly in the case of Java, which for the last ~two centuries has been booming in population because they live in a sweet spot where their land is fertile and also can be made more fertile by more labor-intensive agriculture. So they made ever more kids to have ever more labor.
---
> The young are essentially told to figure it out themselves, and most are lost in a confusing and contradictory landscape
I find a parallel with the Calhoun experiments facsinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o
In effect, what Calhoun managed to prove is that 'life' isn't merely biological, or doesn't just merely depend on a biological lineage, but also has at least the psychological lineage. To survive, a species/population must not only propagate it's genes, it also has to propagate it's culture, worldview, wisdom, emotional stability, in a word, it's psyche. By managing the rat's environment, Calhoun managed to kill this psychological lineage, and ultimately kill off the population without harming their bodies. Notice: when a selection of biologically healthy and fertile-age rats are removed from the late-stage 'Universe' and placed into a new enclosure, *they don't reproduce*. Their psychies are completely shot-through and destroyed.
I propose a similar thing happened to humanity. In most of the industrialized societies, Western and Eastern, the transfer mechanism for the psychological lineage has been broken. Modern people are mostly broken husks shuffling around as zombies. Emotionally unable to bear children, even though their bodies are perfectly capable of it, and their intellects clearly percieve the need for it. Some support for this can be found in boarding schools for indigenous peoples, which were very popular from the late 19th century all the way through the fifites. And not just in the West, but also in the East (USSR had many). What was the fertility of such peoples? Compared to the 'white' peoples living in the same adult circumstances, but who didn't go through boarding schools as kids?
So, of the things you propose and list here, I suspect 'Village life' is the one which might actually help most, if you can make it work. https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/how-to-not-die-while-carrying-35 However, perhaps the transfer mechanism involved childcare by the elderly? In that case, your last point would be also very helpful. But note the cultural issues of the state taking kids from parents and entrusting them to the care of unknown (childless?) elders. After all, if those childless elders are so smart and wise, why haven't they made their own kids? Instead they're now going to try and inculcate *my* children when their obviously broken shams of lives! xD And also the cultural aspect: what stories are kids going to be told? Can you imagine the shitstorm if you take Croat/Bunjevac children from Catholic parents and entrust them to Serb and Orthodox elders for cultural inculcation? Wow, some things might get burned down, and some people beaten up. :) Not that this wasn't done on the grand scale between Hungarians and Slavs, on both sides of the Hungarian-Yugoslav border. ;) As I said, boarding schools and "cultural liqudation" was *very* popular from the late 19th century all the way through the fifties, in both West and East. ;) Hey. Maybe that's the solution to the riddle (national homogeneization which was practiced on a MASSIVE scale during the middle 20th century all over the world)? o.O
I'm going to write a few articles commenting on this article; this is the first one: https://nonviolence.substack.com/p/martian-tries-to-save-humanity-from
Are you sure you want it behind a paywall?
(1) It is possible, and I do this all the time, to read all Substack articles if you can tolerate reading two lines at a time to see in the background past the frontgrounded subscription entreaty. (2) I publish all my articles in three places, Medium.com, Thinkspot.com, and now here in Substack, and Thinkspot.com run by Jordan Peterson is the cheapest (US $12/year), so there are multiple options. And Medium.com allows everyone to read 3 free articles/month, just like a lot of online publications, so it's still entirely possible to read all my writings for free on Substack and Medium.
Okay. Just wasn't sure as I noticed it was your first post, and thought perhaps you'd done so by accident.
Good finish to this series of essays. I think that much of this program can be implemented quite easily on the level of the individual or the small community (perhaps by design), which we really ought to be doing. Most of the trends that drive poor fertility are, as you identified, working through mostly cultural trends which can easily be reversed in subcultures. Whichever group can fix most of these for themselves will have a tremendous advantage in 20, 40, 60 years as they stay young and everyone else ages
Even if civilisation in her totality cannot be saved before she's crushed by Clio's heavy judgement, portions of it - the best portions ideally - can be
This is exactly correct - while the solutions proposed here can certainly be adopted at the state level, they do not necessarily need to be (although some of them, such as prohibitions on seed oils or plastics touching food, are much easier to maintain with state force).