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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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It is trivial to change TFR

It's not even close to trivial -- you're just flatly using the wrong word here. If it was trivial, then most countries would have done so by now. Changing people's behaviors is already tough enough, but changing them on a wide scale and with something as nebulous as social standing is going to be monumentally difficult. The word you probably want instead is "obvious", that it's "obvious how to change TFR", and I'd agree with you there that this will almost certainly be the most effective method. Perhaps it would be the only effective method, at least assuming societies aren't suddenly willing to plow 50% of their GDP into natal subsidies.

The reason I call it “trivial” is because it is easy to change behaviors and values when you have complete control over education and media. As I mention, China can do this while America will be unable to do it. Education and media are antecedent to social values which are antecedent to behaviors. You can train a woman to crave settling down to have children young through exposing them exclusively to media where women receive respect and esteem and attention for doing so, where the women doing this are shown as beautiful and alluring, where it is depicted as a satisfying and an all-moral purpose, where “maternal moments” are artfully selected in media to only show its positives, and where everything which opposes this is shown as psychologically disastrous / ugly / low-status / shameful / selfish. At a more sophisticated level, you apply all of this to prenatal behaviors beginning at the doll-carrying age, eg the traditionally feminine qualities of being meek, caring, loving, and docile, which makes a woman more likely to have children later on for a variety of reasons. A girl who grows up attached to the idea of loving and caring for a doll becomes a woman who wants to do this to a child; a girl who grows up with a modest sense of worth is a woman who does not fantasize about marrying a werewolf pirate billionaire. This is all easy, it is trivial. Two weeks of cognitive labor by a CCP-appointed team of 140iq social psychologists will be able to fix their fertility eternally.

Or, more likely, they'll declare war on sparrows and lose. This is the CCP approaching a task that's legitimately difficult.

Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the efficacy of what you say if it was aggressively and correctly implemented. I'm saying none of this is "trivial" or "easy". Human culture is notoriously fickle, and governments can waste tons of effort trying to change it without having much of an impact. If any large nation would be able to do it I think China would be one of them, but that said it's not like China is run by some ultra-competent entity. The CCP has made tons of buffoonish errors, and it's very plausible that they end up spinning their wheels on this problem.