- To reverse the fertility decline, financial incentives aren’t enough. We need to shift our culture in a pro-natalist direction
- To do that, we need some kind of religion that can guide its members in that direction, while insulating them from the antinatalism of our current culture.
I also agree that Israel is an example to follow. In that country, even secular Jews are having above-replacement fertility. This has happened because the government has striven to make family formation not only affordable but also normal and expectable. Visitors often remark that “this is a country where hot chicks have kids!”
I disagree with some of your secondary points. Financial incentives can help shift cultural norms. Once we have enough people having children, other people will want to follow because humans tend to be imitative and conformist. This is a big reason for the current fertility collapse. Wherever childlessness is sufficiently widespread, it becomes the cultural norm, and people with children will begin to feel isolated and even freakish.
I also disagree with your argument that “an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction.” Yes, if we look at Europe, we see that fertility rates are higher in northwest Europe, even among the indigenous inhabitants, and that is also where we find the largest immigrant communities. There is a link between the two demographic trends, but I think it’s less direct:
- Northwest Europeans have been more open to immigration partly because they have a long history of individualism, individual rights, and weak kinship ties.
- For the same reason, they are more accustomed to having children without assistance from kin (aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.)
- Modernity, and the social atomization that comes with it, thus has a less dramatic effect on their fertility rates than it does on the fertility rates of other societies, where kin are supposed to play a role in family formation.
Fertility rates will thus plummet in any kin-oriented society that adopts our cultural/economic model of individualism and high labor mobility.
#1 is better then the rest on most every metric, and TFR is just one of them
Even so, Nordic fertility is low and falling. Importing a bunch of Muslims to Stockholm hasn’t increased native TFR.
If you think you’re going to be replaced you stop investing in society and become defensive. Either you stop caring about the long term (don’t have kids) or you horde your resources away to invest in fewer children (who obviously will be growing up in some kid of hostile state where they are a minority).
I also don’t really buy that East asia is “conservative”. Whatever the abortion laws in Korea were, the government was spouting anti-natalist propoganda everywhere and sticking an iud in anything that moved. As for porn I can assure you an awful lot of it is produced and consumed in Asia.
These are secular materialist societies that are doom looping because kids don’t increase lifetime dopamine hits in that context and it’s all that matters.
I think Israel secret sauce is that its very nature has kept it from going full WIERD. You never go full WIERD.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic? Where do Israelis (other than the guys with the cool sideburn coils) depart from those WEIRD ingredients?
Israel is an explicit ethno-state. Its purpose is to be Jewish. And its Jewishness requires closed borders to non-Jews and universal conscription for an army that fights periodic wars of survival to protect its Jewish nature.
This sense of blood and soil is genetic in character, even Jews that don’t belief in the Jewish faith believe in Israel and have high TFR.
This is an explicit rejection of the core tenets of globalist progressivism. I think that Freddie DeBoer actually sums up the fundamental incongruity between Israel and progressivism pretty well, I’d just go read him.
Since Israel at its very core of being can never fundamentally fit in with international progressivism this protects it from going full WIERD. Going full WIERD would mean forming a one state solution with the Palestinians and having Israel be voted out of existence by them.
Israel is less blood and soil than South Korea is and DeBoer is a hyperventilating baby who has some complex about Israel because his commie parents spent too much time with Trotskyite Jews. The real reason is that fertility is fundamentally memetic. People look at people who are like them and have the same rough number of babies. Ultra-Orthodox have a lot of babies in Israel, just like they do in America and everywhere else. The National Religious look at Charedim and copy them, but a bit less. Normie traditional-secular Israelis look at National Religious and copy them but a bit less. Secular Israelis look at normie Israelis, but a bit less.
There are others I think. I reject his conclusion but I also reject progressivism.
I think Israel has done a dance for a long time where its nature rejects progressivism but the importance of Western Jews (all those billionaires) amongst other factors allowed them to get a kind of unprincipled exception that is running out.
Thanks for the links, dunno how I missed these first time around. They were certainly within the period I've been reading Freddie. Perhaps Israel/Palestinian overload post 10/7...
While I agree that instilling the value of childbearing as a religious value in one's own children is a good pro-fertility move, I'm not sure that I really see the point of trying to make a "new religion" out of it. Plenty of regular, non-Amish Christians can and do teach their children that it is important that they, too, have children of their own. Attempting to frame this as a "new religion" seems like adding a lot of extra baggage for no extra value, and comes across as being motivated by simple anti-Christian animus.
With that said, my personal belief from everything I've read and observed, is that the only means of raising fertility rates (other than simply waiting out the current decline) would be to effectively ban women from large sectors of the economy, accomplished through both cultural and legal means. As you correctly point out, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between productivity and fertility. If we want more fertility, we must remove productivity as a viable path. Perhaps that is not actually possible. Perhaps people don't like that answer and won't go for it. But I do believe it's the only thing that would actually work--a world in which women mostly don't work, except perhaps in a select few areas, and a childless woman is seen as a low-status failure.
I can't really blame women for not having children in a world where we expect them to be the same as men when it comes to the economy, jobs, career, etc. The costs of children are real and very high, and disproportionately borne by the woman. Of course they don't feel prepared to pay that price if they already work some corporate job 40+ hours a week.
The other option, as I mentioned above, is to just wait it out. Fertility isn't going to somehow keep declining down to 0 such that humans actually go extinct. At some point, rates will level off or even reverse. But what that will look like is anyone's guess, and it very well might be after everyone reading this post are all dead.
I tend to think Malcolm is right about needing a "new" religion. Just tagging on "having lots of kids is good" to the set of religious values won't necessarily produce the results that you'd like long term if it's not properly integrated within the belief system and some sense of the divine. I think Jonathan Haidt makes that pretty clear that attempting to form groups which last long-term on secular bases just doesn't really work, and I think tagging things onto an existing religion without conceiving of an ideological link between the existing mythos and that which you're trying to tag on just won't really work. I personally will need to get started on properly studying my birth religion (Hinduism) since I do find myself strongly agreeing with its values. I already have an emotional connection with a higher power conceived of as the Gods that I've been praying to my whole life, even if I intellectually can't say for sure that they exist. But that "meaninglessness," in true absurdist fashion, invites me to believe something that still resonates with me and makes my life richer.
Christianity already has some very pro-natalist strains, though. Catholicism for example even bans contraception! If that's too extreme for you, Eastern Orthodoxy places a great emphasis on the importance of childbearing as a primary purpose of marriage, to the point that many Orthodox priests would hesitate to bless the marriage of a couple who intends to remain childless, but they still allow for contraception to "space" children and such. These are religions that already have thousands of years of tradition and hundreds of millions (in the case of Catholicism, over a billion) of people. Why try and re-invent this wheel all by yourself? It seems naive ("I am the first person to ever think of putting pro-natalism in religion!") and conceited ("I'm going to be the one person who finally does religion right!").
Well as Malcolm already pointed out in the piece, even heavily Catholic areas are by no means immune to the effects of technology, education, and wealth. You should take more seriously his critique that all of these developed in a pre-industrial and pre-internet age. Part of the reason that they did as well as they did until now was because there were enough people outside of urban areas who were able to somewhat re-enact small community living, but now even someone growing up in rural areas can be put in touch with the urban mono-culture via the internet. The whole point is that, at least within a liberal state, there will be an enticing push for the elite of a community to desert it for greener pastures, and this is very understandable because it can be quite isolating in childhood and early adulthood to be much smarter/innovative than everyone else around you. I don't remember who pointed this out, but whatever the gap is between a person with IQ 100 (average) and someone who is retarded (~70) is the same gap between someone with IQ 130 and someone with IQ 100. While not exactly as bad in practice, it does put a somewhat hard limit on how much these people can relate to each other.
Also the point is not necessarily that you will "do religion right" because different communities will resonate with different belief systems, just that there should be a lot of attempts so that competition and time can produce one that is suited for the future. Also Hinduism has a longer history and probably a richer view of human psychology on account of the heavy meditational practices. They have a good sized population, but since they don't really proselytize, they don't grow much outside of being born into it.
Just to clarify, my instincts also tell me this will likely not be successful and that a new religion will likely arise out of something spontaneous and mystical that couldn't have been conceived of logically. At times Malcolm would do well to re-acquaint himself with Sowell's "constrained vision," but I don't think he's a utopian, just very concerned with human survival and evolution.
By Catholic areas you mean some broken ass former communist countries in Eastern Europe that outlawed religion for 50 years and some dysfunctional southern Europeans states with low average iqs and bad economies?
>Well as Malcolm already pointed out in the piece, even heavily Catholic areas are by no means immune to the effects of technology, education, and wealth.<
Sure, but if even the ancient religion with over a billion followers that bans contraception can't keep fertility rates up, why would we expect one random guy's new "religion" that he made up on the spot to do it? If you did want to try and boost fertility through religion, it seems to me that you'd be much better off working within something like Catholicism instead of trying to start your own thing from scratch.
This is like looking at US politics and thinking to yourself, "I'm going to make my own political party all by myself" instead of just working within either the Democrats or Republicans to gain influence. How well is that likely to go?
Well as a libertarian, I reject the uni-party except when I need to vote defensively. My goal is to make politics more local and decentralized, not to continue the ratcheting effect.
And you'd be better equipped to do that as an operative within the Republican Party than as anything else. The Libertarian Party and any other right-wing splinter parties simply siphon votes from Republicans and help Democrats win.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
I will be looking into your work....it sounds very interesting.
I myself participated in the California Cryobank program....I have around 30 genetic offspring in addition to the children I have with my wife. I would be curious to hear what role you think this technology may play in your "vision". It's not a space age religion or anything...but it was the best idea I could come up with.
Yeah, I intend to contribute heavily to cryobanks because I think, given my strong desire to have children since I myself was a child, my offspring would be considerably more interested in family and child-rearing than the average person today. Fertility is heritable after all.
Just be aware that most places have an age cut off of 35.
I don't think most people put the pieces together about this option before they reach 35...cause when youre young you don't really think about the importance of genetic legacy.
It's an interesting psychological mystery why more modern men don't pursue this option...as biologist have known for years that the ultimate male Darwinian goal is to have multiple offspring with no resources commitment. Strange that, now that it is actually possible, more men don't do it.
It is a large time commitment because you have to get through a rigorous screening process and then make bi weekly specimen deposits for about 12 months. During that time you can't really masturbate or have much sex because you will not get paid if youre count numbers are too low.
When I did the program around 10 years ago I made about 6K over the entire year.
The only drawback I see to this option is that around 50 percent of the clients that use sperm banks are same sex couples. That may or may not be an issue...I don't think it's known yet how that may effect outcomes.
Also...FYI you get paid more if you agree to interact with your offspring when they reach 18 years old (if they so choose)
Well I'm 24 currently, but I've never had my sperm levels checked. I just know that I'm not overweight, in decent shape, and have T levels in the normal range, so I'm hoping that means my sperm counts are also in the normal range — though I'll be taking efforts to exercise more and eat more healthily in the near future (i.e., within next week and onwards). And it's just my luck that they incentivize parental interaction because I actively want to interact with all my children; if there were any option where I could make my contact information available to the parents so that they can choose whether to introduce me into their kids' lives before adulthood, I would absolutely be open to it. Plus then I can share my values and beliefs with them in hopes that some of them might come to identify with them, especially given their genetic inheritance. While I am a homosexual, my physical, psychological, and intellectual attributes are all quite healthy, and my relative aptitude for STEM will likely make my sperm just that much more competitive when it comes time for people to choose.
Unlike my friend Eugene Nier, I’m an atheist who’s happy that atheists aren’t breeding. And yes, I hate myself for being an atheist. The solution proposed in this article is wildly simplistic. This is an extremely complicated issue for so many reasons. I’ve studied and have read so much philosophy, history, anthropology and evolutionary psychology that the one thing I do know is that most of us don’t know 💩. The variables change over time but it’s literally impossible to know when it will change. Then when that change occurs what will be the result? If that change brings positivity in the short term will it be a long term negative? Who knows. Most of us can’t see past our own lives and maybe a generation or two to even see what we may be trading off.
I think there’s some brilliant guys discussing this subject but they will never be heard or taken seriously, for now at least. One example of this is what Nietzsche said about what creature comfort will bring to society. Well…he appears to have been right and not just a little right but bullseye target right. My understanding of that is probably why I can’t stand atheism. It can only exist either in a vacuum of individualism and comfort where a tiny percentage of elites get to truly benefit from it. But then there is the other side of that story. By us sacrificing ourselves this way we can help those elites get to where they want to go. It’s so cruel that I’m starting to believe it might just be how the Fermi paradox is solved. Elites of an intelligent species realizing that most of its species are useless and has to be done away with.
Elite atheists use memetic theory to manufacture consent. I’m sorry but I don’t see a difference between that and any other dogma. What is true is irrelevant and if you tell me that it’s truth that matters;it doesn’t. Not for me and probably not for you. Not saying that it doesn’t matter to someone or several someones. The chances of it being you or I in this Substack and inside this comment section is slim to none. Atheism is a complicated mechanism that ultimately becomes a selection event. It’s happened before and far more than once. Same game; just different players. We just think we’re breaking new ground with our form of godlessness.
When is our species going to become extinct? Maybe tomorrow, at 8 pm?
Using this "concern about the extinction of the human species" due to a decline in reproduction to promote irrationalism is... certainly irrational.
It would be necessary to see if the slowdown or even a negative birth rate is not a logical result according to the equation between the number of humans and the available space and the current technological development.
If we consider that our planet is finite and the resources are also finite, perhaps what is happening is that a self-regulating mechanism is acting.
We should investigate this side before making catastrophic predictions about the disappearance of our species.
What about Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Henry Kissinger or Klaus Schwab? Didn’t they say exactly what you just said there? And I don’t even have a problem with that thinking. A guy I like very much says far worse than them about humanity and I respect him much more than any of those guys. See…those guys use memetic theory to plot and plan and make you believe 💩 for their ends. Why don’t they just give it to you like it is and tell you what they want? No…they have to coerce you much like religion does 😆. They know why they have to do it; I know why they have to do it. It’s just a different kind of dogma but dogma nonetheless. If you’re all about Nietzsche and have read all of Jason Reza Jorjani’s books then forgive me. You’re one of the real ones and you’re about it. If you’re a Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins atheist then you’ve got nothing. Two of the fakest dudes in the game. A lifetime of atheism reduced to 💩.
|«My understanding of that is probably why I can’t stand atheism. It can only exist either in a vacuum of individualism and comfort where a tiny percentage of elites get to truly benefit from it.»|
But you got that out of the way! Now it turns out that the powerful benefit from atheism? And what about what they have historically benefited from religion? Marx was not wrong when he stated that “religion is the opium of the people.”
Your way of reasoning is deceitful, you invent an enemy and argue against him.
|«Who’s we? Who should investigate this and why would it matter to you?»|
Although the end of the human species due to the decline in birth rates is not among my daily concerns, it is an idea that I have read repeatedly, and I am interested in understanding the arguments of those who support this. So far I can't make logical sense of them, and I recommend exploring other ideas that explain what they see as something catastrophic. Any thinking being would gladly accept this suggestion. It is not the best thing to make recommendations that could perhaps be wrong. Whoever acts like this, half blindly, is either irresponsible or has a hidden agenda.
The only meaningful way to increase fertility is to embrace the Hatchery. No amount of tax cuts or childcare subsidies will make a big difference. Face it, when people are free to choose, they choose to have fewer children. Embracing backward religiousness or ethnonationalism to boost fertility will lead to bad outcomes. If we rely on the religious and xenophobic to have children, then ignorance and dysgenic fertility will lead to a degraded humanity. Embryo selection, surrogacy (eventually ectopods), and state-run facilities to raise said children is the only way forward.
I generally agree, but I would caution you to "be careful what you wish for" when suggesting state-run facilities to raise the children. If it's still a liberal state, then it will be even more adept than the current system at enculturation of the young into the "urban monoculture." I personally prefer the Hoppean type of society where we live in decentralized communities with differing inner cultures/norms/specialties but that outwardly relate to each other via free market mechanisms. I haven't the faintest idea how we would get there, but it seems sustainable from the perspective of having strong communities and competition between them. Plus libertarian ethics are all about conflict-resolution, so there could be a decrease in the occurrence of war.
What utter nonsense. We should be imprisoning breeders, not rewarding them.
High birth rates always lead to higher crime, poverty, hunger and misery. Poverty is a key component of terrorism and the drug trade. Ending our addiction to growth is the only way to solve our problems.
I am very pronatalist and advise my young friends to "have more children and pay less attention to them. they'll be fine and they are wonderful as adults." But even I don't see the point of giving up your religion on the belief that your seed might have a better chance of surviving.
We keep the family genealogy, and when we moved we sorted through it and put it out on display for the children and grandchildren: a high school yearbook from1888, a seafarer's book from 1882, family reunion photos from the 1920s, church Christmas bulletins from the 30s... Our grandchildren didn't care. They were more fascinated by a photo of my wife at six in a dance recital costume. My children also care only as far as their own grandparents as well, even though we had many stories of their greats and great-greats. When we thought about it, neither did we care much beyond two generations.
In the other direction I care about my granddaughters - though less than I cared about my sons. If I am still alive, I doubt I will be much interested in their children. Our ancestors at a thousand years gave no thought to us and probably would not much approve or care about us. I feel the same way about my descendants in a thousand years. There is no evidence that I will even like the ones in a hundred years. Mere life extension into succeeding generations is only an abstraction. Who cares? Really? So my line does not survive, I'm supposed to care? These things are covered pretty thoroughly by Lewis and Tolkien.
We are built to care about the next 1.5 generations, and that's how the system works. Stretching beyond that is mostly imaginary.
I’ve had similar thoughts about ancestors and distant descendants. Maybe it’s because I read the Robert Heinlein sci-fi books when I was a kid and remember his character Lazarus Long (about 4000 years old at the time) encountering one of his 400 year old descendants. In short, Lazarus was annoyed, and bored.
This flood will come from groups as varied Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists – some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural isolation through intense cultural xenophobia.
As a moderate Christian, I take offense to that. I want us to progress and get off of this rock, but that doesn't have to come by trashing religion.
I think our problem is more basic than that. We have removed morality from the school system and erased the Ten Commandments from our lexicon.
In their place, the Marxists have instituted their own moral code, and they will be more evil than any other in history. They have pushed abortions, transsexual deviancy, and polygamous relationships, and they will seek to control this through community kitchens. Their motto will be "If you don't work and do what we say, you'll starve."
They have their first generation of Marxist-educated people going into business in the healthcare, energy, and political systems. If they get total control, they will kill more people than any other communist government in history. If you don't do what they say, you won't eat, you won't get electricity, you won't get gas, you won't get government healthcare. You'll simply be left out in the cold to die.
Once the Marxists take control, we won't be going anywhere except to a bleak dystopian future.
But I want a bright future where people can do what they want, live like they want, and have as many children as they want.
Shocking idea here, but maybe we don't actually need more people. It's not a "fertility collapse", the last 250 years have just been a, hopefully temporary, fertility boom. The historic normal has been a steady population, because that's what this planet, and any planet for that matter, can support. More humans is not a goal in and of itself. You make no mention of making sure that the people who reproduce are actually good quality people, and that's the only metric that matters.
The most effective thing we could do to make sure our people don't get outbred by the hordes is just to stop feeding them, because you're never going to convince the majority of Whites and Japanese to get enough children to outbreed the Africans and Mestizos. It would also be much less of an infringement on people's personal lives, so it's much more palatable to Big Normie.
AFAICT the strongest case for not needing anything quite so drastic is that:
-- The US had at-replacement TFR (2-2.1) consistently from 1989-2008, per FRED data. During this period it was somewhat more religious than today, but not hugely so, and not under any particularly great existential threat, nor particularly socially conservative/traditionalist.
-- If I understand Lyman Stone's work correctly, the decline since then is not a decline in number of kids *desired*, but an increasing gap between desired and achieved fertility. If the culture had really turned so decisively against childbearing as a life goal in that relatively short time, you'd expect a bigger decline in desired fertility.
This suggests that fixing whatever led to the post-2008 desired-achieved gap could plausibly suffice to keep a basically modern, secular, WEIRD society around replacement rate. Again, the median American in 2008 was somewhat more religious than the 2024 median, but hardly Amish or integralist or whatever. Maybe you can't just throw money at the desired-achieved gap, but it's got to be some combination of socioeconomic issues (e.g. housing abundance) and cultural issues (marriage matching problems plausibly due to social media induced loneliness) that are solvable through incremental fixes, not (counter)revolution.
You could solve it with money, but you’re right we probably won’t. Parents can’t vote on behalf of their kids, so there will always be cheaper votes out there to buy.
The nice thing about solving it with money is that culture will take care of itself. People that want more kids will form communities now that they can afford to
Varg Vikernes has about 7 kids - and raising them within his interpretation of Asatru/traditional Nordic religion. Interesting to see how he will go about the next generation - some of them must be early teens? Would be nice to some real multiplying.
I agree with your two main points:
- To reverse the fertility decline, financial incentives aren’t enough. We need to shift our culture in a pro-natalist direction
- To do that, we need some kind of religion that can guide its members in that direction, while insulating them from the antinatalism of our current culture.
I also agree that Israel is an example to follow. In that country, even secular Jews are having above-replacement fertility. This has happened because the government has striven to make family formation not only affordable but also normal and expectable. Visitors often remark that “this is a country where hot chicks have kids!”
I disagree with some of your secondary points. Financial incentives can help shift cultural norms. Once we have enough people having children, other people will want to follow because humans tend to be imitative and conformist. This is a big reason for the current fertility collapse. Wherever childlessness is sufficiently widespread, it becomes the cultural norm, and people with children will begin to feel isolated and even freakish.
I also disagree with your argument that “an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction.” Yes, if we look at Europe, we see that fertility rates are higher in northwest Europe, even among the indigenous inhabitants, and that is also where we find the largest immigrant communities. There is a link between the two demographic trends, but I think it’s less direct:
- Northwest Europeans have been more open to immigration partly because they have a long history of individualism, individual rights, and weak kinship ties.
- For the same reason, they are more accustomed to having children without assistance from kin (aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.)
- Modernity, and the social atomization that comes with it, thus has a less dramatic effect on their fertility rates than it does on the fertility rates of other societies, where kin are supposed to play a role in family formation.
Fertility rates will thus plummet in any kin-oriented society that adopts our cultural/economic model of individualism and high labor mobility.
In the developed world we have:
1) nw Europeans
2) southern europeans
3) former communist Europeans
4) East Asians
#1 is better then the rest on most every metric, and TFR is just one of them
Even so, Nordic fertility is low and falling. Importing a bunch of Muslims to Stockholm hasn’t increased native TFR.
If you think you’re going to be replaced you stop investing in society and become defensive. Either you stop caring about the long term (don’t have kids) or you horde your resources away to invest in fewer children (who obviously will be growing up in some kid of hostile state where they are a minority).
I also don’t really buy that East asia is “conservative”. Whatever the abortion laws in Korea were, the government was spouting anti-natalist propoganda everywhere and sticking an iud in anything that moved. As for porn I can assure you an awful lot of it is produced and consumed in Asia.
These are secular materialist societies that are doom looping because kids don’t increase lifetime dopamine hits in that context and it’s all that matters.
I think Israel secret sauce is that its very nature has kept it from going full WIERD. You never go full WIERD.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic? Where do Israelis (other than the guys with the cool sideburn coils) depart from those WEIRD ingredients?
Well you’re witnessing it right now aren’t you?
Israel is an explicit ethno-state. Its purpose is to be Jewish. And its Jewishness requires closed borders to non-Jews and universal conscription for an army that fights periodic wars of survival to protect its Jewish nature.
This sense of blood and soil is genetic in character, even Jews that don’t belief in the Jewish faith believe in Israel and have high TFR.
This is an explicit rejection of the core tenets of globalist progressivism. I think that Freddie DeBoer actually sums up the fundamental incongruity between Israel and progressivism pretty well, I’d just go read him.
Since Israel at its very core of being can never fundamentally fit in with international progressivism this protects it from going full WIERD. Going full WIERD would mean forming a one state solution with the Palestinians and having Israel be voted out of existence by them.
Israel is less blood and soil than South Korea is and DeBoer is a hyperventilating baby who has some complex about Israel because his commie parents spent too much time with Trotskyite Jews. The real reason is that fertility is fundamentally memetic. People look at people who are like them and have the same rough number of babies. Ultra-Orthodox have a lot of babies in Israel, just like they do in America and everywhere else. The National Religious look at Charedim and copy them, but a bit less. Normie traditional-secular Israelis look at National Religious and copy them but a bit less. Secular Israelis look at normie Israelis, but a bit less.
Thanks for the response—plenty to chew on there. I don't recall Freddie writing on the matter, but I'll for sure look into it.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/this-is-zion
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/can-the-liberal-democratic-project
There are others I think. I reject his conclusion but I also reject progressivism.
I think Israel has done a dance for a long time where its nature rejects progressivism but the importance of Western Jews (all those billionaires) amongst other factors allowed them to get a kind of unprincipled exception that is running out.
Thanks for the links, dunno how I missed these first time around. They were certainly within the period I've been reading Freddie. Perhaps Israel/Palestinian overload post 10/7...
While I agree that instilling the value of childbearing as a religious value in one's own children is a good pro-fertility move, I'm not sure that I really see the point of trying to make a "new religion" out of it. Plenty of regular, non-Amish Christians can and do teach their children that it is important that they, too, have children of their own. Attempting to frame this as a "new religion" seems like adding a lot of extra baggage for no extra value, and comes across as being motivated by simple anti-Christian animus.
With that said, my personal belief from everything I've read and observed, is that the only means of raising fertility rates (other than simply waiting out the current decline) would be to effectively ban women from large sectors of the economy, accomplished through both cultural and legal means. As you correctly point out, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between productivity and fertility. If we want more fertility, we must remove productivity as a viable path. Perhaps that is not actually possible. Perhaps people don't like that answer and won't go for it. But I do believe it's the only thing that would actually work--a world in which women mostly don't work, except perhaps in a select few areas, and a childless woman is seen as a low-status failure.
I can't really blame women for not having children in a world where we expect them to be the same as men when it comes to the economy, jobs, career, etc. The costs of children are real and very high, and disproportionately borne by the woman. Of course they don't feel prepared to pay that price if they already work some corporate job 40+ hours a week.
The other option, as I mentioned above, is to just wait it out. Fertility isn't going to somehow keep declining down to 0 such that humans actually go extinct. At some point, rates will level off or even reverse. But what that will look like is anyone's guess, and it very well might be after everyone reading this post are all dead.
> But what that will look like is anyone's guess
What that will look like is various high fertility religious traditions taking over.
I tend to think Malcolm is right about needing a "new" religion. Just tagging on "having lots of kids is good" to the set of religious values won't necessarily produce the results that you'd like long term if it's not properly integrated within the belief system and some sense of the divine. I think Jonathan Haidt makes that pretty clear that attempting to form groups which last long-term on secular bases just doesn't really work, and I think tagging things onto an existing religion without conceiving of an ideological link between the existing mythos and that which you're trying to tag on just won't really work. I personally will need to get started on properly studying my birth religion (Hinduism) since I do find myself strongly agreeing with its values. I already have an emotional connection with a higher power conceived of as the Gods that I've been praying to my whole life, even if I intellectually can't say for sure that they exist. But that "meaninglessness," in true absurdist fashion, invites me to believe something that still resonates with me and makes my life richer.
Christianity already has some very pro-natalist strains, though. Catholicism for example even bans contraception! If that's too extreme for you, Eastern Orthodoxy places a great emphasis on the importance of childbearing as a primary purpose of marriage, to the point that many Orthodox priests would hesitate to bless the marriage of a couple who intends to remain childless, but they still allow for contraception to "space" children and such. These are religions that already have thousands of years of tradition and hundreds of millions (in the case of Catholicism, over a billion) of people. Why try and re-invent this wheel all by yourself? It seems naive ("I am the first person to ever think of putting pro-natalism in religion!") and conceited ("I'm going to be the one person who finally does religion right!").
Well as Malcolm already pointed out in the piece, even heavily Catholic areas are by no means immune to the effects of technology, education, and wealth. You should take more seriously his critique that all of these developed in a pre-industrial and pre-internet age. Part of the reason that they did as well as they did until now was because there were enough people outside of urban areas who were able to somewhat re-enact small community living, but now even someone growing up in rural areas can be put in touch with the urban mono-culture via the internet. The whole point is that, at least within a liberal state, there will be an enticing push for the elite of a community to desert it for greener pastures, and this is very understandable because it can be quite isolating in childhood and early adulthood to be much smarter/innovative than everyone else around you. I don't remember who pointed this out, but whatever the gap is between a person with IQ 100 (average) and someone who is retarded (~70) is the same gap between someone with IQ 130 and someone with IQ 100. While not exactly as bad in practice, it does put a somewhat hard limit on how much these people can relate to each other.
Also the point is not necessarily that you will "do religion right" because different communities will resonate with different belief systems, just that there should be a lot of attempts so that competition and time can produce one that is suited for the future. Also Hinduism has a longer history and probably a richer view of human psychology on account of the heavy meditational practices. They have a good sized population, but since they don't really proselytize, they don't grow much outside of being born into it.
Just to clarify, my instincts also tell me this will likely not be successful and that a new religion will likely arise out of something spontaneous and mystical that couldn't have been conceived of logically. At times Malcolm would do well to re-acquaint himself with Sowell's "constrained vision," but I don't think he's a utopian, just very concerned with human survival and evolution.
By Catholic areas you mean some broken ass former communist countries in Eastern Europe that outlawed religion for 50 years and some dysfunctional southern Europeans states with low average iqs and bad economies?
>Well as Malcolm already pointed out in the piece, even heavily Catholic areas are by no means immune to the effects of technology, education, and wealth.<
Sure, but if even the ancient religion with over a billion followers that bans contraception can't keep fertility rates up, why would we expect one random guy's new "religion" that he made up on the spot to do it? If you did want to try and boost fertility through religion, it seems to me that you'd be much better off working within something like Catholicism instead of trying to start your own thing from scratch.
This is like looking at US politics and thinking to yourself, "I'm going to make my own political party all by myself" instead of just working within either the Democrats or Republicans to gain influence. How well is that likely to go?
Well as a libertarian, I reject the uni-party except when I need to vote defensively. My goal is to make politics more local and decentralized, not to continue the ratcheting effect.
And you'd be better equipped to do that as an operative within the Republican Party than as anything else. The Libertarian Party and any other right-wing splinter parties simply siphon votes from Republicans and help Democrats win.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
I will be looking into your work....it sounds very interesting.
I myself participated in the California Cryobank program....I have around 30 genetic offspring in addition to the children I have with my wife. I would be curious to hear what role you think this technology may play in your "vision". It's not a space age religion or anything...but it was the best idea I could come up with.
Yeah, I intend to contribute heavily to cryobanks because I think, given my strong desire to have children since I myself was a child, my offspring would be considerably more interested in family and child-rearing than the average person today. Fertility is heritable after all.
Just be aware that most places have an age cut off of 35.
I don't think most people put the pieces together about this option before they reach 35...cause when youre young you don't really think about the importance of genetic legacy.
It's an interesting psychological mystery why more modern men don't pursue this option...as biologist have known for years that the ultimate male Darwinian goal is to have multiple offspring with no resources commitment. Strange that, now that it is actually possible, more men don't do it.
It is a large time commitment because you have to get through a rigorous screening process and then make bi weekly specimen deposits for about 12 months. During that time you can't really masturbate or have much sex because you will not get paid if youre count numbers are too low.
When I did the program around 10 years ago I made about 6K over the entire year.
The only drawback I see to this option is that around 50 percent of the clients that use sperm banks are same sex couples. That may or may not be an issue...I don't think it's known yet how that may effect outcomes.
Also...FYI you get paid more if you agree to interact with your offspring when they reach 18 years old (if they so choose)
Well I'm 24 currently, but I've never had my sperm levels checked. I just know that I'm not overweight, in decent shape, and have T levels in the normal range, so I'm hoping that means my sperm counts are also in the normal range — though I'll be taking efforts to exercise more and eat more healthily in the near future (i.e., within next week and onwards). And it's just my luck that they incentivize parental interaction because I actively want to interact with all my children; if there were any option where I could make my contact information available to the parents so that they can choose whether to introduce me into their kids' lives before adulthood, I would absolutely be open to it. Plus then I can share my values and beliefs with them in hopes that some of them might come to identify with them, especially given their genetic inheritance. While I am a homosexual, my physical, psychological, and intellectual attributes are all quite healthy, and my relative aptitude for STEM will likely make my sperm just that much more competitive when it comes time for people to choose.
Stop the religion.!
Enough of religion, it has done enough damage to us!!
Well, you atheists aren't breeding, thus making you dead ends according to your own evolutionary theory.
"Well, you atheists aren't breeding, thus making you dead ends according to your own evolutionary theory."
Well, you religious dogmatists should be happy about that.
Unlike my friend Eugene Nier, I’m an atheist who’s happy that atheists aren’t breeding. And yes, I hate myself for being an atheist. The solution proposed in this article is wildly simplistic. This is an extremely complicated issue for so many reasons. I’ve studied and have read so much philosophy, history, anthropology and evolutionary psychology that the one thing I do know is that most of us don’t know 💩. The variables change over time but it’s literally impossible to know when it will change. Then when that change occurs what will be the result? If that change brings positivity in the short term will it be a long term negative? Who knows. Most of us can’t see past our own lives and maybe a generation or two to even see what we may be trading off.
I think there’s some brilliant guys discussing this subject but they will never be heard or taken seriously, for now at least. One example of this is what Nietzsche said about what creature comfort will bring to society. Well…he appears to have been right and not just a little right but bullseye target right. My understanding of that is probably why I can’t stand atheism. It can only exist either in a vacuum of individualism and comfort where a tiny percentage of elites get to truly benefit from it. But then there is the other side of that story. By us sacrificing ourselves this way we can help those elites get to where they want to go. It’s so cruel that I’m starting to believe it might just be how the Fermi paradox is solved. Elites of an intelligent species realizing that most of its species are useless and has to be done away with.
Elite atheists use memetic theory to manufacture consent. I’m sorry but I don’t see a difference between that and any other dogma. What is true is irrelevant and if you tell me that it’s truth that matters;it doesn’t. Not for me and probably not for you. Not saying that it doesn’t matter to someone or several someones. The chances of it being you or I in this Substack and inside this comment section is slim to none. Atheism is a complicated mechanism that ultimately becomes a selection event. It’s happened before and far more than once. Same game; just different players. We just think we’re breaking new ground with our form of godlessness.
Unlike you, we actually care about everyone's souls, and yes you have one whether you want to admit it or not.
When is our species going to become extinct? Maybe tomorrow, at 8 pm?
Using this "concern about the extinction of the human species" due to a decline in reproduction to promote irrationalism is... certainly irrational.
It would be necessary to see if the slowdown or even a negative birth rate is not a logical result according to the equation between the number of humans and the available space and the current technological development.
If we consider that our planet is finite and the resources are also finite, perhaps what is happening is that a self-regulating mechanism is acting.
We should investigate this side before making catastrophic predictions about the disappearance of our species.
What about Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Henry Kissinger or Klaus Schwab? Didn’t they say exactly what you just said there? And I don’t even have a problem with that thinking. A guy I like very much says far worse than them about humanity and I respect him much more than any of those guys. See…those guys use memetic theory to plot and plan and make you believe 💩 for their ends. Why don’t they just give it to you like it is and tell you what they want? No…they have to coerce you much like religion does 😆. They know why they have to do it; I know why they have to do it. It’s just a different kind of dogma but dogma nonetheless. If you’re all about Nietzsche and have read all of Jason Reza Jorjani’s books then forgive me. You’re one of the real ones and you’re about it. If you’re a Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins atheist then you’ve got nothing. Two of the fakest dudes in the game. A lifetime of atheism reduced to 💩.
Who’s we? Who should investigate this and why would it matter to you?
|«My understanding of that is probably why I can’t stand atheism. It can only exist either in a vacuum of individualism and comfort where a tiny percentage of elites get to truly benefit from it.»|
But you got that out of the way! Now it turns out that the powerful benefit from atheism? And what about what they have historically benefited from religion? Marx was not wrong when he stated that “religion is the opium of the people.”
Your way of reasoning is deceitful, you invent an enemy and argue against him.
|«Who’s we? Who should investigate this and why would it matter to you?»|
Although the end of the human species due to the decline in birth rates is not among my daily concerns, it is an idea that I have read repeatedly, and I am interested in understanding the arguments of those who support this. So far I can't make logical sense of them, and I recommend exploring other ideas that explain what they see as something catastrophic. Any thinking being would gladly accept this suggestion. It is not the best thing to make recommendations that could perhaps be wrong. Whoever acts like this, half blindly, is either irresponsible or has a hidden agenda.
The only meaningful way to increase fertility is to embrace the Hatchery. No amount of tax cuts or childcare subsidies will make a big difference. Face it, when people are free to choose, they choose to have fewer children. Embracing backward religiousness or ethnonationalism to boost fertility will lead to bad outcomes. If we rely on the religious and xenophobic to have children, then ignorance and dysgenic fertility will lead to a degraded humanity. Embryo selection, surrogacy (eventually ectopods), and state-run facilities to raise said children is the only way forward.
You'll end up with a eusocial society of bugmen.
I generally agree, but I would caution you to "be careful what you wish for" when suggesting state-run facilities to raise the children. If it's still a liberal state, then it will be even more adept than the current system at enculturation of the young into the "urban monoculture." I personally prefer the Hoppean type of society where we live in decentralized communities with differing inner cultures/norms/specialties but that outwardly relate to each other via free market mechanisms. I haven't the faintest idea how we would get there, but it seems sustainable from the perspective of having strong communities and competition between them. Plus libertarian ethics are all about conflict-resolution, so there could be a decrease in the occurrence of war.
The OP you're responding to is a follower of the urban monoculture.
What utter nonsense. We should be imprisoning breeders, not rewarding them.
High birth rates always lead to higher crime, poverty, hunger and misery. Poverty is a key component of terrorism and the drug trade. Ending our addiction to growth is the only way to solve our problems.
This has already been solved: higher rates of higher education for women = lower fertility. Men "do" and women "create"
I am very pronatalist and advise my young friends to "have more children and pay less attention to them. they'll be fine and they are wonderful as adults." But even I don't see the point of giving up your religion on the belief that your seed might have a better chance of surviving.
We keep the family genealogy, and when we moved we sorted through it and put it out on display for the children and grandchildren: a high school yearbook from1888, a seafarer's book from 1882, family reunion photos from the 1920s, church Christmas bulletins from the 30s... Our grandchildren didn't care. They were more fascinated by a photo of my wife at six in a dance recital costume. My children also care only as far as their own grandparents as well, even though we had many stories of their greats and great-greats. When we thought about it, neither did we care much beyond two generations.
In the other direction I care about my granddaughters - though less than I cared about my sons. If I am still alive, I doubt I will be much interested in their children. Our ancestors at a thousand years gave no thought to us and probably would not much approve or care about us. I feel the same way about my descendants in a thousand years. There is no evidence that I will even like the ones in a hundred years. Mere life extension into succeeding generations is only an abstraction. Who cares? Really? So my line does not survive, I'm supposed to care? These things are covered pretty thoroughly by Lewis and Tolkien.
We are built to care about the next 1.5 generations, and that's how the system works. Stretching beyond that is mostly imaginary.
I’ve had similar thoughts about ancestors and distant descendants. Maybe it’s because I read the Robert Heinlein sci-fi books when I was a kid and remember his character Lazarus Long (about 4000 years old at the time) encountering one of his 400 year old descendants. In short, Lazarus was annoyed, and bored.
This flood will come from groups as varied Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists – some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural isolation through intense cultural xenophobia.
As a moderate Christian, I take offense to that. I want us to progress and get off of this rock, but that doesn't have to come by trashing religion.
I think our problem is more basic than that. We have removed morality from the school system and erased the Ten Commandments from our lexicon.
In their place, the Marxists have instituted their own moral code, and they will be more evil than any other in history. They have pushed abortions, transsexual deviancy, and polygamous relationships, and they will seek to control this through community kitchens. Their motto will be "If you don't work and do what we say, you'll starve."
They have their first generation of Marxist-educated people going into business in the healthcare, energy, and political systems. If they get total control, they will kill more people than any other communist government in history. If you don't do what they say, you won't eat, you won't get electricity, you won't get gas, you won't get government healthcare. You'll simply be left out in the cold to die.
Once the Marxists take control, we won't be going anywhere except to a bleak dystopian future.
But I want a bright future where people can do what they want, live like they want, and have as many children as they want.
Why is any religion necessary to increase fertility? Just explain the consequences of low fertility to the populace.
Immigration of non-native ethnic or racial groups without strict restrictions is a recipe for disaster.
> Just explain the consequences of low fertility to the populace.
Singapore tried that. Turns out the "lie back and think of England" approach doesn't actually work.
"Singapore tried that. Turns out the "lie back and think of England" approach doesn't actually work."
That doesn't mean it wouldn't work in Western countries.
What's your solution?
Get back to God.
LOL. Most Americans profess a belief in God. What's the problem?
Not these days.
Scientism. I'm not even being mean about it, this is faith in science as the god that delivers a future galactic civilization. Rapture in a rocket.
I would be grateful if a source for the claim that multi-ethnic societies had higher TFR than mono-cultures would be provided.
Shocking idea here, but maybe we don't actually need more people. It's not a "fertility collapse", the last 250 years have just been a, hopefully temporary, fertility boom. The historic normal has been a steady population, because that's what this planet, and any planet for that matter, can support. More humans is not a goal in and of itself. You make no mention of making sure that the people who reproduce are actually good quality people, and that's the only metric that matters.
The most effective thing we could do to make sure our people don't get outbred by the hordes is just to stop feeding them, because you're never going to convince the majority of Whites and Japanese to get enough children to outbreed the Africans and Mestizos. It would also be much less of an infringement on people's personal lives, so it's much more palatable to Big Normie.
AFAICT the strongest case for not needing anything quite so drastic is that:
-- The US had at-replacement TFR (2-2.1) consistently from 1989-2008, per FRED data. During this period it was somewhat more religious than today, but not hugely so, and not under any particularly great existential threat, nor particularly socially conservative/traditionalist.
-- If I understand Lyman Stone's work correctly, the decline since then is not a decline in number of kids *desired*, but an increasing gap between desired and achieved fertility. If the culture had really turned so decisively against childbearing as a life goal in that relatively short time, you'd expect a bigger decline in desired fertility.
This suggests that fixing whatever led to the post-2008 desired-achieved gap could plausibly suffice to keep a basically modern, secular, WEIRD society around replacement rate. Again, the median American in 2008 was somewhat more religious than the 2024 median, but hardly Amish or integralist or whatever. Maybe you can't just throw money at the desired-achieved gap, but it's got to be some combination of socioeconomic issues (e.g. housing abundance) and cultural issues (marriage matching problems plausibly due to social media induced loneliness) that are solvable through incremental fixes, not (counter)revolution.
You could solve it with money, but you’re right we probably won’t. Parents can’t vote on behalf of their kids, so there will always be cheaper votes out there to buy.
The nice thing about solving it with money is that culture will take care of itself. People that want more kids will form communities now that they can afford to
> You could solve it with money
No, you can't. You'll run out of GDP to tax first.
Hail the placenta!
Varg Vikernes has about 7 kids - and raising them within his interpretation of Asatru/traditional Nordic religion. Interesting to see how he will go about the next generation - some of them must be early teens? Would be nice to some real multiplying.
https://x.com/BornLik23266/status/1767602470983815593?s=20
https://x.com/CachetMarie/status/1752317846565061090?s=20
Fan-page:
https://twitter.com/nocontextvarg?lang=en