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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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I’m so not persuaded on this. Of course you can’t replicate the Haredi one-to-one, nor would this be desirable. But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture. The young men might spend 8-16 hrs per day studying the Torah, and then they spend probably 90 minutes of their time doing rituals. In exchange for this strenuous labor, they receive welfare benefits which still amount to a low income lifestyle. We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse. When they are done working, they still exist in a pro-fertile culture where status is judged by number of children &tc. And there are Haredi who work, they are big in Amazon fulfillment and places like B&H cameras. There working Haredi still have a high TFR. And they had a high TFR when they worked at Agriprocessors. So, while they do have a lot of schemes that give them benefits, those benefits are less than the money they would earn were they working for the same amount of time that they study.

Don't take this seriously, because I'm operating off "I seem to vaguely remember maybe reading this somewhere back when", but something about "why so many Jews in the diamond trade?" is because it allows the wives to run the business while the men devote themselves to study of the Torah, and is profitable enough to support such a lifestyle.

I don't think the Haredi men want to work in Amazon warehouses, they want to do what their culture tells them is the aim of life, and find a way to make enough money to support that life. Working eight hours a day in a manual labour job is not that way. If they push the wives out the door to do the warehouse shifts, large numbers of children in a family are not going to be possible.

But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.

A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.

The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.

Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.

So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions, something that commends a man more status than being even a billionaire. That’s part of the reason the older guys still continue to study. Yet even with this ruthless competition over status, the TFR remains high, because of the aforenoted confluence of pro-fertile cultural attributes. The Haredi man with a lot of money has worse marital odds than a poor Haredi man at a good rabbinical school. But both are getting married and both are having children.

Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

If everyone focused on this alone then it would cement the ruin of the entire civilization. Though I agree that’s the best advise for normal people, you actually do need people obsessing over TFR because our elites are lowkey retarded and senseless.

Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions

Doesn't the increasing population lead to an increased demand for rabbis?

zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism

That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.

You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.

Capitalism enforces a zero-sum status competition, regardless of whether it is positive sum in its economic consequences or not; actors compete over obtaining more wealth than their peers and a greater position than their peers. As you said, “enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status”, that’s a relative position which is zero-sum; having more wealth and prestige = more status = better marital outcomes.

The zero-sum status competition isn't enforced by capitalism. It's part of human nature, way down in the lizard brain; some direct descendants of dinosaurs are famous for it.

Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.

It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.

If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.

But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.

I think this is pretty nitpicky. In America, everyone pursues status according to financial success unless they belong to a cult or a university. It can be called any term you like. Your point above that the Haredi would compete over wealth upon entering the workforce doesn’t really make sense, as (1) Haredi in the workforce have lower status than the Rabbis and (2) such a competition wouldn’t harm TFR any more than the already-fierce status competition over learning the most Torah. It would need to be argued that participation in the workforce for the Haredi would somehow harm the status competition around having large families.

So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

And watch the fruits of your labor be taken from you (and your children) to pay for everyone else (including the Haredi) to have the lifestyle of their choice while you're busting your balls to make ends meet, dodging Child Protective Services because you don't have the requisite number of car seats, etc.

But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture.

It comes as a set.

We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse.

Working at an Amazon Warehouse is very different than studying the Torah. It's backbreaking. There are cruel bosses who expect results, and the chance of getting fired. Studying the Torah all the time is basically just the ancient Hebrew version of playing videogames.

The set is unrelated to 10 hours a day of studying. That is outside the set and something which they just happen to also do. When people possess the true set of pro-fertility cultural properties, like the Mennonites who do back-breaking labor in South America, or 1930s Germany which had enormous TFR gains due to cultural policy, then they also have more children, without having to study for 10 hours a day. And when Haredi stop studying or stop studying early, they continue having high TFR.

Unfortunately, the only two good proofs of the necessity of pro-fertility cultural elements are religious Jews and the Nazis. This makes it very difficult to persuade normal people to follow your line of argument, because it makes you sound like a genuinely insane person. But consider the Nazis saw a 40% gain of TFR and the shift was highest in urban areas, not rural areas.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366

Preliminary vital statistics for 1934 show that in the Western world there was a general arrest in the decline of the birth-rate which had been going on for a decade or more. In Hungary the birth-rate decreased from 1933 to 1934 less than half as much as it did a year earlier, and in Norway only one-fifth as much. In Poland the rate of 26.5 per 1,000 in 1934 represented no change from 1933, in contrast to a decline of 2.2 from 1932 to 1933. In Great Britain the birth-rate in 1934 is estimated provisionally at I4.8, slightly above the 1933 rate of 14-4, which in turn was well below that of I5.3 in 1932. In the United States the rise from 16.4 in 1933 to 17.1 in 1934 almost brought the birth-rate back to the 1932 figure of I7-3.? These changes are dwarfed, however, by Germany's experience. There the birth-rate was 15.1 in 1932, I4.7 in 1933, and 18.0 in 1934.

According to Nazi leaders, the suppression of abortion, the restrictions on giving birth-control information, and the offering of the various economic inducements have had less effect together on the birth-rate than the psychical revolution which has followed the Nazi rise to political power. They say that formerly the individual was considered the important unit, so it was natural that each person should think he should control his own body and decide the question of parenthood from his own point of view. Under Nazi leadership, however, the predominant importance of the state has been empha-sized. As a result it is claimed that a large proportion of the population already has come to feel that the body belongs only in part to the individual, and that the need of the state for children is the first factor to consider in deciding on the proper size of family.

The Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways rather than to incur the expenses connected with raising a family. This general attitude has been changed, the leaders claim, so that now child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. Even in the schools the youth are being incul- cated with these beliefs. Most important of all the psychical changes, according to the Nazis, has been the reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous regime, and that people were becoming increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere. With the change in policy under the present government Germany has again taken her place as an equal among neighboring nations and has indicated that she will maintain it. This has led to an emotional rebirth of the German people, for the future now appears rosy to them where before it was black. They feel again that theirs is a nation with a mission-one in which it is worth while to raise a family.

In the larger cities the birth-rate of I933 was above that of I932 for the first time in the third quarter, and the differential has steadily become larger up to the last quarter of I934. These turning-points in the birth-rate correspond to changes in the rate of uninterrupted conceptions nine months earlier, for the nation in the quarter following Hitler's accession to power and for the larger cities in the quarter preceding

the twelve states with the higher proportion of Catholics had an increase in birth-rate of 17.3 per cent compared with 21.1 per cent in the other thirteen states. [subtly important stat here; Catholics were less likely to be on board with Nazism, and so if the cultural elements of Nazism increases TFR, then we should expect that Catholics would not see greater gains; they are in a slightly different cultural ecosystem]

On the whole, therefore, it may be said that the forces tending to raise the birth-rate had least effect on Catholics and agricultural people-those least affected in previous years by the forces tending to lower the birth-rate [another subtly important stat. The agricultural were far less likely to be in an area where Nazi propaganda was present and powerful]

Berlin is well in the lead with a I934 birth-rate 48 per cent above that of I933, while at the other extreme Beuthen (in Silesia, very near the Polish border) shows an increase of only I2 percent

The birth rate continued to rise until the advent of war. Now consider that the Nazis, despite loving propaganda, probably had little idea how to create really good pro-motherhood culture, or that most of the larger effects would be delayed to when the indoctrinated come to age. Even their shoddy attempt at increasing TFR through culture worked, and they only got to see the smallest prelude of the TFR gains before extenuating circumstances nullified our chance to measure the gains.

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