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Notes -
Fecund privilege and the oppression of those who do everything right
Democratic and progressive ideology assume that each person ought to be valued the same in equations of political power. Representatives are allotted according to the number of inhabitants, presidential elections are dictated by the popular vote of states, and equity calculations are informed by population percentages. The infrastructure of our popular ideology is undergirded by a strange and rather aged idea, that each individual magically gets the same political points of influence at birth, regardless of any greater social concern. Yet this way of thinking breaks down when real world social justice claims are considered.
Imagine a situation like the Rwandan Civil War, where the Tutsi minority were killed en masse by the Hutu and their population significantly reduced. It is not morally sufficient to compensate the families who lost loved ones and to punish individual actors. The loss in political power of the Tutsi demands justice, because their reduction in population along with their impoverishment leads to a real loss of political power. Ignoring the specific details of the actual Rwandan events and political system (for example’s sake), in a basic model of democracy the Tutsi could have their future completely controlled by their genociders forever, because the political power lost due to reduced population/fertility is not compensated. The Tutsi would have a legitimate moral claim to re-exert their old political power, and yet our old “magic value” way of thinking about democracy contains none of the complexity necessary to make sense of the Tutsi claim. Adherents can only glue the justice together with ad hoc formulations, perhaps implementing a regional governance system or property compensation system or something other thing which avoids the real substance of the claim. This proves that there are moral considerations involving democratic power that are not adequately addressed by fecund privileged ideology.
For a second thought experiment, imagine two regions of a nation with different cultural values and interests. As chance would have it, a neighboring country invades one region and a defense is launched, and the invaded region valiantly defends the whole of the nation from the invaders. As a consequence their population is halved. The region behaved perfectly and sacrificed itself for the whole of the nation is now the one who might forever lose its past political influence. Does the “sacrificing” region have a moral claim that their loss of political power should be compensated in some form? If they do not, then the basis of our political system appears capricious and superstitious. A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. And this for reason other than the idea that the number of current human lives is somehow inexplicably valued over every greater concern, despite this number being essentially governed by chance and historically untied to production or any good.
Perhaps one last example. Within a tribe of 400 humans, 100 of them decide to spend more time working for the good of society, spending more hours raising up two great children versus their neighbors who have 8 and spend little time with them. Within the current fecund privileged system of democracy, the tribesmen who are putting in effort to make the whole of society better by raising better children wind up worse off than their less-caring neighbors, who inherit more of the tribe, whose families increase in influence, and who proliferate their habits and genes. (Remember that humans are living organisms governed by concerns of gene proliferation as much as a fruit fly or gorilla, and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t so, but even without genes, we can see how worse habits are proliferated). The tribesmen who make the better decision are punished in influence.
To hit home on my bolded assertion above: A constituency of a nation can do all the right things and be harmed from it, or can be harmed from chance. Our society, implicitly and explicitly, discourages high fecundity among those who do absolutely everything right. Our best and most obedient citizens are pressured toward paths that make fecundity difficult, and are propagandized to actually place a ceiling on their number of progeny. They are told that overpopulation is a problem and they incorporate that idea into their future family plans. They are doing everything right and their ancestors will be punished for it, with reduced political power due to the capricious notion of fecund privilege. Their cultural, behavioral, and genetic legacy is irrevocably worsened for making the right choices.
The children of our best doctors will have their power dwarfed by the children of a random 7/11 attendant who happens to be a Salafist, or a Hasidic person who abuses tax schemes to study only his holy book, or an Amish farmer who contributes little to the polity, or the migrants of a random Nigerian that chose children over more prosocial concerns. The legitimate moral concerns of our best citizens have no way to be expressed through the decrepit ideology of “magical political power allotment” and “fecund privilege”. The result is that the descendants, constituency, culture, genes etc of our best and brightest are oppressed by those who simply ignored the greater moral concerns and popped out more babies.
California has rules about how many women and ethnic minorities must be on corporate boards. We know universities have a bias against Asians, non-legacy whites and a bias for hispanics and especially blacks. We can just use these tools to social engineer our way to encourage higher fertility. At least most people can in principle be parents, while it's somewhat frowned upon if you pretend to be Native American or otherwise 'Indigenous' to get social privileges in university admission or elsewhere in politics.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/10/new-law-requires-diversity-on-boards-of-california-based-companies/
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/577722-more-than-a-third-of-white-students-lie-about-their/
We could legislate that companies must have a certain number of parents in high positions. You could improve it further by saying you get a composite score based on X number of children who meet X educational/health/other standards if you're worried about people neglecting their children. I think this would be a good kind of social credit score, perhaps getting additional points for military service or employment in prioritized sectors. If we really need aerospace or semiconductor experts, we should say '+100 social credit for those who meet X standard and work Y years in the sector'. You'd lose points for crime, obesity and maybe other antisocial activities. Your score would be an important factor in whether you get a promotion at work, whether you're hired or get into a prestigious university, it would get you a lighter sentence if you're found guilty of a crime before dropping accordingly. Maybe you'd get lower income tax as well.
Before people attack me about the authoritarian implications, we already have this system albeit informally, distributed between various institutions. This only quantifies it and redirects the energy in a meritocratic direction. It's much fairer for you to be judged on your actions than on your identity. I foresee objections about using the weapon of the Enemy against them, about losing our values. My answer is that sometimes fire must be fought with fire. If they have the Bomb, so must we. The power of the state and bureaucratic, freedom-reducing mechanisms like this is on a secular increase as technology improves and wealth increases. Somebody has to be privileged systematically in society, it's better that the rich and virtuous (or whatever approximation of such can be quantified) are privileged than the rich and tribalist/narcissistic.
What about people who don't have children because for reasons of health problems (physical, mental, whatever) they would be generating more of that inferior stock that OP was concerned about? Would they get credit points for not reproducing inferior children?
Rewarding people for negative action is rarely a good idea, it creates all kinds of distortions. It's the difference between rewarding/punishing and paying tribute.
You'd simply not get credit points for having bad children, or perhaps have them taken away if they're of the kind that has multiple arrests under the age of 18.
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