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This post is a follow-on from a conversation with @Amadan, who observed that I wasn't reading his posts correctly. I thought that hiding an apology behind a button most wouldn't click through would be what the kids used to call a bitch move, so I decided to make it a top level post.
^^^I ^^^also ^^^didn't ^^^want ^^^the ^^^effort ^^^to ^^^go ^^^to ^^^waste
You know what, I went back and read through the thread and it turns out I was misremembering the order of things. I thought you rejected faceh's proposal about tightening college admissions with the browbeating comment. My mind gets a little clouded with this subject sometimes. I think I owe you an apology in the form of a bit more effort, so here goes:
My belief is that the TFR crisis can be broadly understood in terms of basic economics. Sure, there are a million billion variables that go in to the exact shape of the curves, but I believe the fundamental problem is that the supply and demand curves don't meet at a point that produces a longitudinally viable volume. Therefore, any proposed policy must influence those lines to move TFR upward. To put it bluntly, this involves coercing either bid up or ask down. Browbeating. And we need to do it while remembering the goal isn't just more children, but ones raised in wholesome environments that set them up for the social and economic success we need to operate our societies, so "pay women billion dollars per child" is out. I'll note that some of these solutions involve catching women up to around the level of browbeating that men currently experience, and I hope this doesn't run afoul of the standard because it doesn't involve much additional browbeating on men. Lastly, I'd comment that these are not my preferred solutions, mostly because they involve coercion, which is a game I believe when played under real cultural and political conditions will result in much male loss and few additional births to show for it—but more pragmatically because I believe they are impossible to implement on a timescale that matters. I think the only real way out is to quintuple down on our current strategy of hoping for technology deux ex machina.
However, if we were willing to implement some painful measures to buy ourselves some more time, here's what that might look like if it were up to me:
Demand side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for men:
Supply side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for women:
If you haven't noticed, there's a strong pair of themes that run through these propositions. They mostly involve offering men a more durable ownership share in family formation, and women more durable guarantees regarding child-rearing. I know some readers are probably bursting at the seams to point out that a lot of this is just traditional marriage and romantic norms with extra steps. Why don't we just stop beating around the bush and go back to what works? Uh huh. How's that been working out? Mainstream conservatism has taken notice to how unpopular this position is and has largely adapted to this reality by promoting what I've take to calling neotraditionalism: offering a model of male obligation without the durable ownership. Good luck with that.
But this does cut to what I believe is the core of the issue. I think that advocating for any program that even smells like the above would get you accused of being a cryptopatriarch in a cool minute. The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction. There's also the question of societal patience. This is separate from the consideration of TFR and its consequences. As many including some here have contentedly noted, the current crop of men don't seem to bear an eagerness to form and maintain families that's just waiting to burst out given a few tweaks in policy and culture. This isn't something my program would change. I don't think any ever could. Men as a class have been subject to a campaign of demoralization and dispossession that began decades before I was born. Undoing this may very well require awaiting a completely new generation of men to come of age. This would require a level of patience with the male sex our civilization transparently does not possess, not even remotely close.
These are insurmountable problems. There's nothing to be done.
Would you like to hear about my $100T longevity moonshot instead?
I like this sentiment and I'm going to use it to comment more broadly on what I see as an aggravating tension between Tradition and Traditionalism. I'm use those two words so I can play off the "all -isms are bad" meme.
Tradition is a set of beliefs, values, and, importantly, ongoing or repeated behaviors that are inherited from the past with the goal to preserve the present and pass on to the future.
Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at "how it used to be" with the implication that "it" used to be better. There's going to be some kind of attempt at vaguely repeating the behavior of the past - often incomplete - and a lot of rhetoric about the past. There will be close to zero deeply held beliefs and values under the surface. As Rob Henderson might say, it's mostly about signalling. These are the RETVRN people. I mentioned a young woman like this in previous post.
I think these are your "neotraditionalism" people (all -isms are bad!). And I agree with you that these very "neo-trads" would never vote for some of the ideas you have laid out. Why? Because it would be bad for them, personally, as individuals. And thus I trace this back to the rise of hyperindividualism (isms! isms! isms!).
I'm not advocating for actual collectivism the way Mamdani did in his inaugural speech today. I'm advocating for the idea that there was a society before that gave us what we have to day and our job is to sustain it and then pass it on. That's the chain of real capital-T Tradition that did sustain so many different human societies up until about the 20th century. The proto-causes are still up for debate; was it the industrial revolution? global financialization of capitalism? the "trauma" of WW1/2? I can't weigh in with authority here, but I can point to one thing that I think is key:
The Baby Boomers broke that chain of real capital-T Tradition. In both directions. They looked at their parents with their going to church and waiting for matrimony and not smokin the wacky-tobaccy and said "Peace and Love, Man!" before inventing the pill, porn, no-fault divorce, equality, feminism, and affirmative action. Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
Gen-X kind of got caught in the crossfire, but when you could work at a coffee shop in Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and date a quirky mid in the 1990s, it was kind of ... whatever, cool, I guess.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while." Instead, 90% + of Mil-Z-enials are somewhere between "Government provided everything, tax the rich" and "Fuck it, Imma get mine. Let's hit some crypto scams, bruh" Both of these are anti-social and, of course, non Traditional. I agree heartily with you that only a hyper minority of mostly religious or strongly philosophically disciplined / metaphysically driven people in these two generations are seriously committing to "we can rebuild, and our kids will benefit."
How this all plays out is that we're going to see a slow motion culling of the population where we can afford it most - young men. We know this because it has already happened. I don't even need to quote the stats anymore. Opioid epidemic, 6 - 8 million prime age males out of the workforce, incels, no friends etc. A great way to sidestep demographic gravity is to led some deadweight drop. That's bleak and I know it. It's also what's happening.
The next necessary ingredient is peeling back the feminist lie of fulfillment in a career alone. This is already starting. When TradWife tiktoks trend for a while and then we get backlask like "is having a boyfriend cringe?" articles, it means the ideas are now circulating and its just a matter of time before some percentage of women decides "fuck a job, I want babies." It doesn't have to be that great a number, it just has to be present outside of the semi-sequestered religious communities (Amish, FLDS, etc.)
The thing that keeps me up at night is how long all of this could take. Returning to my original framing, the people who buy into Traditionalism aren't actually willing to do what needs doing to fix things because it will probably mean accepting a slightly materially less comfortable quality of life for some time and an absolutely lower social quality of life as well (i.e. getting branded as a kind of weirdo). But they will gesture vaguely to things like "encouraging earlier marriage" and "keeping a family together." But will they endorse women not going to college? Will they endorse no-fault divorce? Of course not. And I wonder how long this will draw the pain out, especially when the other side (progressives) are offering sprinting into oblivion. The Traditionalism-ists don't need to really dig deep to retain political and social sway when their opponents are literally recommending self-castration, baby murder, and neo-surfdom.
As I've said before in this thread and as Amadan said below, I don't want to control women (or men) from a State perspective. If a woman wants to get three PhDs and never marry, that's on her - just as it would be on a man. But, right now, we're actively subsidizing those decisions socially, culturally, and even financially whereas were suppressing capital-T tradition socially and culturally. This isn't "boo hoo unfair!" this is drawing out the agony for society.
I'm a little confused by this section. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, a full decade before the first boomers were born. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, when the oldest boomers would have been around 19.
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