The Only Way Out of the Fertility Crisis is Through

When I was in High School, my High School science teacher had an entire unit on the risk of human populations overrunning the resources of the planet, arguing that human reproduction was on the brink of causing a massive ecological disaster. In college, a professor of my friend told her class how the Catholic Church was irresponsible in banning contraceptives, as the populations in South American countries was unsustainable. While, twenty years later, there are still leaders who hold on to this mythology who have not gotten their firmware updated, you are haring this less and less, to the extent that there are worries that rapidly decreasing populations is going to cause an economic and social catastrophe that is without precedent.

That the fertility of developed nations is going off a cliff is nothing new, with Africa being the only continent with sustained fertility from its native population. If one looks at the stats since the 1960’s though, they are entering the same precipitous decline as everyone else. Within 20-30 years, most of Africa will be at below replacement fertility with everyone else. This has been a trend everywhere, no exception, since the 1960’s, and in this early stage no one has turned it around yet. No. improving fertility from 1.3 to 1.6 from aggressive family policy isn’t turning it around, as the core miasma is still there.

The immediate issue hitting these massively depopulating societies is having a massive log of old people too feeble for work required to keep society running. The young are entering an age where they will be wage slaves to prop up the massive population of old and infirm. Unsurprisingly, as the countries have gotten old, so has their politics, as places like the United States is run by old geriatrics that should be playing with their grandkids.

Countries have reacted to the prospect of GDP not going up with massive importation of foreigners, with even Japan bending the knee. Of course, many Western countries are going it for very different reasons than Line Go Up, but immigration is seen by the economic class as a bulwark to ensure that there is always growth, regardless of the cost. The small fact that human capital varies wildly between peoples, or the various cultural conflicts being imported doesn’t matter. When you’ve dissolved social capital into money, the name of the game is to make enough money to escape the damage you have caused.

Everywhere Western values have triumphed, fertility is below replacement. That being said, no developed country is doing well, with even Middle Eastern countries seeing their fertility reach dangerously low levels. The only countries with strong fertility are in Africa, and these are also plummeting. Within the next fifty years, we could easily have a scenario where most of the world has catastrophically low fertility, and instead of the fears of overpopulations, we could see a massive shrinking of all populations.

The reasons people are coming up with for this are wide-ranging, going from the psychological to the deeply biological.

Liberalism is a poison the West is slowly acclimating to

This is one of the most interesting theories, espoused strongly by such writers at Imperium Press , that argues Liberalism is a slow acting poison that destroys bonds, kinships, and deep rootedness in the ways of a people. As the connection to the people falls away, people see less and less of a point in continuing a line, as the ancestral links to continue one’s lines has been broken.

The interesting twist is it’s argued that the West essentially poisoned itself but is now developing anti-bodies while spreading the poison to the rest of the world. It’s argued birthrates are starting to go up again, and other countries, especially in Asia, are reaching utterly devastating TFR’s with no end in sight.

Leisure has sucked the vitality out of people

In the 1960’s John Calhoun did a study, now famously called The Mouse Utopia Experiment, testing what would happen to generations of mice in a controlled environment where all their needs are taken care of. The first generation takes full advantage, eating the easy food and reproducing as would be expected.

As the generations progressed and the population increased, however, strange things started happening. The mothers would inexplicably stop caring for their young, the males became isolated, neurotic, and no longer interested in sex.

Population collapsed, and mice no longer acted in any normal social way, and the “Utopia” became a nightmare.

Crowded Environments are a Fertility Sink

Another interpretation is that it wasn’t the leisure that brought about the failure of the “Utopia”, but overcrowding. The argument is that crowded environments make people far less likely to want to reproduce, possibly out of a primal instinct to avoid overpopulation. Since more and more people live in cities now, it would be reasonable to assume this would affect fertility in these countries, especially tightly packed ones like Korea. Cities also make it very hard to build close bonds, as paradoxically the lack of privacy makes it very hard to create exclusive, intimate relationships.

Not Enough Feminism

Since women have been “liberated”, it’s argued they no longer have the social pressure or obligation to have kids. Since in many cultures throughout history, women didn’t really have the choice to have children or not, it’s been argued the incentives are not there for women to want to have more children. They say there needs to be more equality, more maternity leave, and a more respectful environment for women before they will call their strike off and decide to bring more children into the world.

Too Much Feminism

On the corollary, there’s the argument that feminism is a social killer, and women’s education and status seeking has created an environment that has too few high-value men. Since women want to marry up, the increase in women in colleges makes the math impossible for all of them to be satisfied in a mate. The loosening of sexual more have also made pair-bonding with a mate, and the State’s monopoly on violence and massive social safety net has made what the man brings to the table, security, outdated. Paradoxically, creating a world safe for women has made men seem superfluous. Add to this a court system that is implicitly anti-male, as even in modern times people sympathize with a woman far easier than a man, and you have a situation where neither men, nor women, can get what they want. The solution in this case isn’t more feminism, but eliminating every bit of feminism, up to and including female suffrage.

Economics

It’s been argued it’s impossible to raise a family when both parents have to work to make ends meet, inflation is sucking up middle class income, and children are becoming more and more expensive. While kids used to be inexpensive, now it’s required to buy them safety items like car seats. You have to move to a “good school district” and pay a heavy fine in housing prices. Also, expectations have increased, where in order to get ahead little Jimmy needs to have five extra-curriculars, and you’ve going to be a glorified chauffeur for most of your children’s life. And let’s not even think about college for the time being. Maybe, if you’re lucky', you’ll be able to talk to your kids for a few minutes each day.

Social Anti-Natalism

While large families were accepted and even expected at certain times, that’s now far in the past. Now people will look at you weird, or even show you hostility if you have more than three. The social constructs that make child-rearing easier, like parents, relatives, and neighbors have been atomized as parents have moved further and further away from their childhood homes to get employment, and as fewer kids are born, it becomes a cascade effect where it’s harder to find like-minded parents to ease the burden. There’re just less kids around.

Destruction of Male/Female spaces

It’s a strange paradox that the elimination of bonding opportunities with one’s own sex can hinder finding a mate. One would assume that is men and women mingles in literally every aspect of their lives, they would interact more and, by logic, have more opportunities to find a mate. Recent cultural upheavals have shown the error of these ways. As these spaces have disappeared, so have the sexes ability to understand themselves as a biological creature, and as a distinct entity from the opposite sex. They are forced to act in odd abstractions so as to not offend the alien mindset that is in the other sex and frustrates the men and women as they can’t speak frankly to one another.

Gone too, is the mystery and ritual involved in coming of age. It’s no longer considered appropriate to create a male-centric rite of passage where a boy can feel he has become a man, and a member of a tribe. For women, even things like bridal showers are becoming more and more events for both sexes, even as the men would prefer to put a gun in their mouth that suffer through it.

There is a deep loss of sense of place in the world, and avenues to understand and live with one’s body. This is probably why frumpy clothes is now the fashion in college campuses around the country as women simply don’t want to feel feminine. It’s why men play games from their dorms instead of walking up to a woman and talking to them, something that modern society now deems toxic. Without rituals like dances, celebrations, and the like, there’s no grounding in what it really means to be a man or a woman, and their biological feelings are either repressed or put into strange and unproductive outlets.

Technological Simulacra

The explosion of the virtual space has formed a secondary world outside the confines of one’s body. Pr0n sites gives every sort of taboo arousal at one’s fingertips. At the same time dating sites give women the feeling of infinite abundance, with a new man available every time she swipes. Add this to the neuroticism of social media apps that makes one fear the possibility of ruing their perfect online presence through something like a real-world relationship, and one sees a bubble wrap environment that is far safer than the messy realities of day-to-day life.

As one abstracts oneself into an online avatar, that online avatar becomes more and more one’s cage, leaving one unable to have authentic experiences and feelings into. The abyss truly gazes back at you.

The Chemicals are Turning the Frogs Gay

There has been extensive research done regarding the effect microplastics, xenoestrogens, etc. corrupting natural sexual activity, and it’s been known for some time testosterone is falling off a cliff. People like Raw Egg Nationalist are sounding the alarm bells on the possibly civilization collapsing risks that all these foreign chemicals are inflicting on us. When everything from your mattress to your tea bag could be poisoning you, it feels like everything is hopeless. We already see this effect in nature with strange sexual patterns of frogs and the like, something environmentalists conveniently look the other way for. Then there’s the Covid vaccine, which showed the possibility it lowered fertility significantly.

So what is it?

A little bit of everything (minus too little feminism). And there’s no effective way to deal with all these vectors without completely rehauling our society. One notices that everything stated above is a clear fertility killer, and the only possible positive of the modern age is the ability to connect with the opposite sex, which likely ended up being a detriment. Another is the loosening of sexual mores, which initially increased sexual relations, if not fertility, and not young people are not even having sex.

Chesterton’s Fence

One is forced to come to the conclusion that the complex and seemingly arbitrary rules that enforced sexual relations had a logic to them, stemming from centuries of evolutionary forces on social structures that showed the most “fit”, i.e. the one that made people have babies. You can argue about fairness, equality, and reason all one wants, but Nature showed what was the fittest, and we discarded it without a second thought due to the idea of a perfectible and malleable humanity.

The funny part of Nature is she doesn’t go away, and the same forces that created these social mores will see them reemerge in a new but similar form as societies figure out how to use old tried-and-true methods in our technological age. The Techno-optimists are hitting a wall, as their dreams of using technology to solve the issues caused by technology sound inhuman and, more importantly, won’t work. You can create as much artificial wombs as you life, but you still need a people who thinks it’s worth maintaining them and raising the children that come out.

The black-pill is there is no civilizational solution that can be implemented. The white-pill is you can create small communities that buck the macro trends and slowly, your culture will be the one that reproduces and survives. What world they inherit will likely be a dark one, but everyone knew it wasn’t going to be easy.