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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.

Conservatives can survive just fine without leftists; leftists cannot survive without conservatives.

In contrast, Protestants and Catholics can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.

I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.

I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.

I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.

I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)

I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)

Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.

(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)

I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but the simple fact is it’s still parasitic in the most fundamental sense.

When you get old and live off pension money, it is younger people who must care for you. If you don’t have children, that means you are being sustained by someone else’s children—whom they invested enormous resources in and sacrificed much of their life (in the hedonistic sense) to rear.

When you let people who do not have children dictate policy, you are going to get policies that favor the parasite over the host. And parasites cannot ever win: they can simply destroy their host and die with them.

Control over policy must be in the hands of the fertile. There simply is no other option—Darwin will, given time, eliminate any group that doesn’t abide by this.

This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth; the old must personally provide people to care for them, merely offering items of value to other people for their care is still "parasitism". Maybe you could build an economic system around this idea, but just shoving it into our current economic system is special pleading.

This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth

I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.

With this perspective, what’s really happening is that the supply and demand of labor is changing over time: an aging population is a population where labor is increasing in value, since there are more old people needing care and fewer people available to do the caring.

If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.

Call my model radical if you want, but the fertility data speaks for itself: you will adopt a radical solution, or you will be replaced by those who do.

I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.

You were already taking an economic view, calling people who are living off pension money (that they presumably earned) "parasites". Presumably people who are living off employment income are not parasites, and that leads to the direct implication that you cannot store wealth.

If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.

Allocation? Are we doing central planning here? The young aren't not reproducing because they are poor, and certainly not because the old people are somehow claiming all their labor.

People are not reproducing because the government promises them the labor of other people’s children in retirement.

That is unlikely. Social security started in 1935.

It takes time for deep incentive changes of this sort to percolate. It wasn’t intended as a subsidy for childlessness, nor was it perceived as such.

But it nonetheless is.

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