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Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward. Yesterday the Committee released its first report detailing the potential consequences of lower fertility, aptly titled The Silent Crisis. Here is a link on the off-chance you know Swedish, or on the very on-chance you want an AI to give you the key takeaways: https://framtidmedbarn.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Nr-1-Den-tysta-krisen.pdf
Really though, the key graph is on page 18 and you don't need to know Swedish or have Grok ready to read it, because it's more or less shock horror demography-gore. Given current (or, if you look at the orange graph, slightly worse) trends without mass immigration the Committee estimates a whopping 40% decrease in the Swedish population by 2100. In actual numbers this brings the population down from a small-but-respectable ten million Swedes to about six million which roughly corresponds to the Swedish population in the year 1940. Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people. The last but not least horrifying part is the merciless shift in public spending: many municipalities will have to downsize schools and kindergartens in order to build more homes for the elderly, which in turn reinforces the circle of demographic disaster and suicide. Instead of happy children playing in kindergartens we'll have non-sentient dementia patients as the primary receivers of care in our society! There is a real risk of not only Sweden, but every corner of the West, becoming a wasteland of retirement homes.
I recently read Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler and I really am quite struck by some of the similiarities between Spengler's moody prophecies and what seems to happening all over the West (and most of the westernized world). Somewhere in all the gobbledygook about the historical meaning of numbers or whatever Spengler theorizes that demographic decay is ever a symptom of a civilization beginning to die. The picture he paints is one of eine entsetzliche Entvölkerung, a terrible depopulation, beginning with die Weltstädte, the World Cities, sucking up most able-bodied and sound men and women from rural areas, followed by a rapid decline in fertility due to urban individual values making life in general and children in particular into something doubtful and baseless, followed in turn by even more rapid urbanization until the final swift conquest and sundering of the entire civilization from Civ-style roaming barbarians brings the whole enterprise to an ignominious end. To be fair Spengler was no great thinker, and he was probably just extrapolating from the demographic decline of the early 20th century which was actually eventually solved. The glove does seem to fit though, doesn't it?
Anyway, the dangers of demographic decline is nothing new to the Motte, but I found it refreshing to see the consequence of the current trajectory put in plain text and graph by a state-financed publication rather than whispered on forums. There was a post here a while back linking to an unpleasant and depresing anti-children essay talking about how the fertility crisis is inevitable when women are allowed to choose freely (link: https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable). I think proponents of that particular case need to take a little bit more responsibility for where their ideas actually lead, rather than brush everything off with weak optimistic rambling about how a declining, decaying and rapidly aging population is nothing to worry about, and how the failure of the West and unending reign of Umbar and the Shadow might actually be a good thing, really, if you look at it from Sauron's perspective! I for one prefer the thought of all the Free People of the West continuing to perpetuate, sustain and rule themselves, and I will not apologize for this view.
Still, I for one am not despairing quite yet. The report itself is a good sign! In Sweden many seem to be realizing that there is indeed another crisis looming over us now besides climate change, and that it is little use making the planet more livable if there's no one left to live on it. Swedes are not nearly as dumb or naive as right-wing media would have many believe, and there is a strong hatred for immigrations here now coupled with a new appreciation for Swedish culture which bodes well for the future. Besides that, all the usual attempts (such as a strong welfare state, generous parent leave, et cetera) have already been tried here, which means we don't have to go through a bunch of ineffective non-solutions before we can move on to more innovative attempts. I for one think it would be interesting with a tax break for families coupled with a big tax hike for rich childless women. This would both create good incentives as well as clarify what society sees as the most valuable form of femininity. Many have posted much about this subject before, but I think it's ready for one more round. What does the Motte think about this?
(P.S. Later in January a follow-up report will be releaed with suggestions on how to rectify the problem, and if the Motte is interested I might make a post about that report too when it releases).
I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”. They are the world’s most urban population, living in the costly areas of NY and NJ, often in poverty. They are as diabetic, unhealthy and sedentary as any American, and ingest as many microplastics as any American. Their lifestyle is a similitude of the American graduate student or office worker. If I were to comment about the high TFR of the Amish in Beliz or today’s increasing TFR in rural Afghanistan, there would be a ton of confounding variables, but there are no non-cultural confounders for the Haredim. What do they do? Number of children is a mark of status, as a commandment and blessing; girls are taught to value motherhood as their glorious purpose and value in the world starting at the youngest age; they pride-maxx about their heritage / peoplehood; they privilege men over women. We don’t have the studies to disentangle which of these elements are causal, but it’s going to be at least one of these things and possibly all of these things. Their lives are biologically and environmentally the same as ours, in fact they might actually be less healthy on average.
Also, any TFR strategy has to consider the longterm eugenic / dysgenic outcomes. What sort of Swedes are you selecting for if you offer a lot of money to have children? Probably not the most loving or the most interesting Swedes. Why not make giving birth an act of love and ultimate interest? Then you are selecting for the prosocial and intelligent Swedes.
A big aspect of Haredi culture, and Amish/Mennonite/etc culture, is that people can leave. There's a big outer world to exit to.
I couldn't find good numbers for Haredim in particular. For Orthodox Jews in general, 67% of Orthodox Jews raised in Orthodoxy remain Orthodox as adults, and 94% remain Jews with the difference moving to more mainstream forms of Judaism. The best estimates I found for Haredi were casual, but guesses were around 5-20%, which aligns pretty closely with the Amish. Amish communities typically lose around 15% of their youth during Rumspringa. Amish communities probably land a little higher, a core anabaptist value is free choice, kids must choose to be baptized as adults even if they are raised their whole lives in the religion. The Haredi are more strict about retention, that's kind of their whole thing, so I'd imagine they land higher, but 5-10% seems realistic.
I'm more familiar with the Amish, they're really my people when it comes to weird high-TFR religious minorities, and I'd imagine it's easier for an Amish to move from the farm in Intercourse to Bernville or Kutztown and live a life that's not too dissimilar to the one they left in structure of work and values, just a little less restrictive. Compared to a Haredi who has to adapt to a really different lifestyle, but then they're urban oriented so maybe it's easier. I'd guess most Haredi just become Orthodox Jews, and most Orthodox leavers become reform Jews, etc.
Now, for most religions 80-95% retention would be brilliant work. Tradcaths and Evangelicals would be thrilled with those numbers. But it's not 100% and this creates important things to think about.
Much like private school numbers are often disputed because they simply expel problem students, who then have to attend public schools. Strict religious minorities shed their problem children, their overly independent women, their dreamers and disruptors. They maintain stability by expelling the problem kids.
For comparison, about 11% of Americans report having a substance abuse problem at some point in their lives, about 14% will go to jail for any period, about 5% will go to prison, somewhere between 6-14% will experience some form of homelessness, about 6% will be diagnosed with a Severe Mental Illness. Probably most of those numbers overlap.
The existence of a functional high-TFR minority does not serve as proof of concept for a functional high-TFR country.
This wouldn’t be unusual for Europe or America before the 20th century, though. Problematic people were normally shunned from the community. This was done either through shunning them from polite society (simply never invited anywhere) or literally kicking them out of the town. Christians would have a certain place where the lifelong penitents would stay during mass, in some eras. Also, don’t we shun them now? We just put our mentally ill on the street. Why is this an argument against copying the Haredi TFR scheme, and more precisely, why would you believe this criticism weighs against civilizational catastrophe? When nations face civilizational catastrophe from war, they postpone freedom and force men to be warriors and then force them at gunpoint to march to certain death in the most degraded condition. Surely we can expend 0.01% of the stress and just orient culture toward pronatality.
I think you're missing my point, I'm not debating whether it is morally permissible to do what they do, I'm debating whether it would work without a much larger host culture that absorbs your cast-offs.
When nations face civilizational catastrophe, they've been known to try many things that don't work. It is important that we check to see if the thing we're trying will work before we waste time on it.
Right but today we just throw our mentally ill and drug-addicted onto the populous streets to haunt the low-wage workers who take public transportation. Intermittently they spend an expensive night in jail or take an expensive ambulance ride to an expensive hospital. Sometimes they kill each other or give each other AIDs or just die. It’s very costly as is. I imagine the religious extremist would just confine them somewhere for their own good, which results in a fraction of the social and economic costs and is also morally superior.
You can't just introduce random elements into your hypothetical haredi society and assume the breeding will stay constant.
It’s more that, and I get that you imply this, both the Amish and Haredim (the latter are more dysfunctional) are kind of quirky minorities who exist within the envelope or the umbrella of the wider, modern, largely secular societies they inhabit. In Israel where they’re only 10-15% of the population they are already causing a lot of problems, refusing to fight despite the country being surrounded on almost all sides by a billion Muslims who would, if their own governments let them, gladly give everything to destroy them, and the leading haredi politicians go on TV to say that young haredi men can’t be conscripted because they do as much for Israel by praying as the soldiers do by fighting (seriously, this is the current line). It’s not sustainable. The Amish are less parasitic, but again if they got to 15%++ of the population there would be more concerns about assimilation, participation in wider society, demands for a renegotiation of their social security exemption etc would be more common.
More obviously, if the Haredim were the overwhelming majority in Israel, Israel would either be destroyed or the Haredim would have to radically change their culture. This is the clearest point in favor of your argument.
I am curious if we'll see an increased defection rate from high-tfr subcultures into a low-tfr mainstream as the low-tfr mainstream ages and the value of young people increases. Arguably, this is already the dynamic of third world immigration to aging first world countries.
But I wonder if we'll see more young Amish or Haredi defect as they get a better "deal" from a mainstream culture desperate for young people.
When I buy pretzels from the Amish girls at the best pretzel stand in the world in Intercourse, PA; naturally one sometimes daydreams about marrying a pretty Amish girl in a bonnet. Theoretically, this is possible, to marry an Amish or Mennonite girl, but it rather seems not worth the effort. Right now, if I found myself single, like generations of wealthy but balding middle age professionals before me I'd get into my convertible and drive over to the local liberal arts college library and say "Whelp, nothing to worry about, they're still making them." But what if they stop making pretty undergrads? Then does the incentive to put a lot more effort into marrying the mennonite pretzel girl start to make more sense?
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