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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish 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 suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/
In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.
One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!
Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.
Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.
In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.
So I was listening to Gad Saad on Joe Rogan recently, not really haven't heard about anything he's done since probably 2018 or so. And he's laying out his thesis about a parasitic idea. This thing you see that causes such a strong emotional reaction, it overrides your entire brain and even your survival instinct, and your priorities, even your identity, is replaced. And by example, he brings up Queers for Palestine. Joe, seemingly entirely missing the point, just rebuts "Yeah, but what if they've seen the images coming out of Gaza that are so upsetting, they feel irresistibly compelled to be angry about it and protest it?" With much sympathy for this perspective. Yes Joe, that is precisely the "parasitic idea" infection vector being described, thank you for participating. And he goes on missing the point for another 90 minutes or so.
But I digress. Everything about this national behavior sounds like a country hijacked by a civilization scale parasite. The country possesses zero survival instinct, even to propagate itself into another generation. And yet it happily throws it's blood and treasure away on... what exactly? Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster? Giving all the land to Africans faster? It's absolutely baffling.
It's a shame one way or another billions will die before either the parasite wins, or the parasite is exterminated with gigadeaths of collateral damage.
I think this is exactly what is happening.
For most of human history, the selection of cultural memes and biological genes has been more or less aligned. The most successful cultures were those that produced high birthrates, because creating more people was the best way for cultural memes to propagate themselves. Horizontal transmission of cultural memes between separate lineages was relatively rare; most cultural replacements were accompanied by population replacements. In this environment, cultural memes and genes were more or less symbiotic, and what was good for one was good for the other (with the exception of some edge cases).
Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.
We have no psychological immune system adapted for this. It's too novel, too powerful. It's like we're North Americans being exposed to European colonist diseases for the first time. However, this cannot go on forever. The parasitic memes are burning through hosts, and the remaining hosts are being selected for resistance to the parasites. The psychological immune system is beginning to take shape, but the process is too slow.
I've argued in the past that this could be a potential candidate for the Great Filter; that any civilization that develops radio — and thus could potentially be detected over interstellar distances — is quickly devoured by parasitic memes and collapses. Add that an industrial revolution is a once-per-planet event… (at best; another Great Filter candidate I like to propose is getting your planet's Carboniferous Period just right.)
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Ukraine is being killed, not committing suicide.
Ukraine was having a fertility crisis even before the war.
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If I'm in an MMA match, and I'm put in an armbar, and I don't tap, did the guy I'm fighting break my arm, or did I make him break my arm?
What if NATO is on the sidelines yelling at me that I can still win this thing?
It's like you're in an MMA match, and the guy you're fighting is going to kill you if you lose (but he's going to walk away regardless).
Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?
Ukraine gets to choose between being Russia's puppet state and being used as a buffer between it and NATO, or being NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans. Such is the fate of minor nations. There will almost certainly be more Ukrainians in three generations under Russian dominion than NATO. Unless you stretch the definition of Ukrainian to mean anyone on Ukranian soil, but then what was the point of keeping Russians out if you can just change the meaning of words and suddenly everyone is Ukranian?
Yes. Numerous Russians, including Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin, have said that one of the goals of the war is the elimination of Ukrainian nationhood as an idea and making the Ukrainians understand that they are actually "little Russians". Dugin at least is a serious thinker, and this qualifies as genocide under the standard definition.
By that definition the America I grew up in has been genocided.
Which I do actually believe, but I'd appreciate if an ounce of worry for Ukraine was spared for the remnants of my peoples.
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How do you figure it for a genocide? In almost any reasonable measure, both Russians and Ukrainians are Orthodox Christian Slavs. They’re probably as close as something like England and Australia or Canada. If England wants to end the idea of Australia, that may be terrible for all kids of reasons, but it would be hard to make one Anglosphere country invading another into a genocide simply because they’re ethnically the same. If you took DNA from random individuals from both countries, telling them apart is probably difficult. At least in Gaza, you can likely find enough difference between a Palestinian and Israeli to bolster the claim that it’s at least plausible as a genocide.
In the current year, there is a Ukrainian nation. If Putin succeeds in his political goal, there will not be. That is the meaning of the word "genocide". That you think there shouldn't be a Ukrainian nation is irrelevant, given that there clearly is - people don't fight this well for non-existent nations.
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There is no evidence that the west wants to fill Ukraine with Africans. Indeed, western European countries might quite reasonably believe that dumping Africans in Ukraine will just cause them to migrate from Ukraine to western European countries that are actually wealthier than Africa.
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We are supposed to treat seriously claims of "white genocide" because white people in the west can't breed. However, when Russia deports ukranian children and bans the ukranian language the G-word is totally unfitting.
Very few wars are fought with the explicit aim of putting a bullet in the head of every citizen. Nevertheless, wars short of that can be existential for the state.
Interesting. And Ukraine was being filled with Africans between 2013 and 2022, right? And e.g. Poland (also a nato puppet if there ever was one) is also filled with Africans?
South Asians, and at a somewhat slower pace than the wokest countries in NATO, but yes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Indian population of Poland is around 0.09%. Perhaps some sophistry can turn this into "filled", but I'm not impressed.
When responding, please keep in mind that Russia is 10%-15% Muslim.
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Do you apply that kind of thinking to all areas of life, including yours? That your enemies are blameless if they carry out the threats you did not submit to?
For an example with a very different valence, if somebody doesn't pay their taxes and they eventually end up in court and they refuse to settle in court, they eventually end up in prison. It wouldn't be usual to cheer them on and say, "Keep fighting! Don't let the bastards get you! Never give in to pressure!".
EDIT: since people are taking this to be an enthusiastic support of Russia's behaviour, my point was that "if you refuse to tap out under pressure, you're going to get hurt" and "you're not at fault for refusing to give into threats" are both pretty context-dependent. I should probably have been less gnomic but I have other things on my mind.
What if the person you're discussing has paid all their taxes? Do you still encourage them to pay again and again and again or do you encourage them to fight the case? That is Ukraine.
People are taking my example far too literally. I wasn't saying 'Ukraine trying to fight the Russians is like refusing to pay your taxes', I was trying to demonstrate to @sun_the_second that whether you should tap out in response to pressure, and whether you should blame people for forcefully subjugating resistance, can't be a universal principle you can decide once-and-for-all and base your entire life around.
Of course, one is expected to pay one's taxes every year :P
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Likening the invasion of a sovereign nation to ordinary law enforcement seems incredibly bad faith. It is more like if a gang was trying to force you to join it under threat of stealing your belongings and killing you if you refuse. Depending on how you expect them to treat you should you accept, "Keep fighting!" is not unreasonable here. Especially if you have already managed to keep them at a stalemate for four years and the terms for surrender boil down to "give us all your stuff".
My point is that, as the libertarians like to say, there is not a huge difference between the government saying 'we will lock you in a box if you don't give us the money we've decided you owe us, even if you disagree' and a gang saying they want your stuff and they'll hurt you if you refuse.
It can simultaneously be the case that:
And the result is therefore some mixture of:
which varies case by case.
Ultimately context and viewpoint are doing 90% of the work here. Neither 'be reasonable!' nor 'always stick to your guns (metaphorically), son' are reliable ways of thinking that you can apply to all areas of life.
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An MMA match consists of two willing participants. Ukraine never wanted war with Russia.
It depends on exactly who you mean by "Ukraine." There is literally footage of Zelensky telling Azov commanders to stop shelling Donbass before the war, and they basically laugh in his face and tell him to go jump in a lake.
The Ukrainian people voted for peace, yes, but their vote doesn’t really matter: what matters is whether the US State Department decides to pipeline weapons to the subgroups that do, and they did.
Please link me to this footage.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oBMnDfT3ozE
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You're definitely right its a bad analogy.
But that just makes the realpolitik of the situation much clearer. No ref stoppage is imminent.
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I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem. It's not that people would naturally see it as a problem but a memetic parasite is blinding them. It's that people generally don't see it as a problem unless something brings it to their attention. The vast majority of people have never have paid any attention to social-level fertility rates at all. People 1000 years ago had large numbers of kids because of very local and immediate factors: basically, the poor needed kids for labor and as a form of welfare in old age, the rich could afford to have a bunch of kids and then not work much to take care of them (servants could do it), contraception was primitive, women viewed having kids as more central to their identity than they do now, and so on. People were having many kids because of these immediate local factors, not out of a personal interest in their society's overall fertility. When you take people's basic disinterest in overall fertility rates and then remove the factors that previously kept fertility high, the fertility rate drops. The removal of the factors that had previously kept fertility rates high was not caused by some singular memetic parasite. It was caused by several separate things: technological change that reduced the importance of physical human labor, improvements in contraception, the feminist movement. Now of course, these things are related: the technological changes also helped to enable feminism to begin with, improvements in contraception were partly motivated by a feminist-leaning desire to help women, and so on. But to think of them all as being part of one social contagion is, I think, going too far. It overly compresses the actual complexity of the historical phenomena into one supposed dimension.
Now, one could certainly argue that there exists a widespread ideology that helps to make it harder for people to tackle the problem even once they begin to think of it as a problem. One can call it "leftism", or whatever. But even if one removed this ideology, that does not mean that people would automatically start to think of falling fertility rates as a problem. That's a separate thing. The "survival instinct" that you mention does not activate until and unless the problem becomes very visible. And we are not yet at that point. So falling fertility rates fall into the same class of problems as climate change: the vast majority of people do not have any sort of inherent tendency to pay attention to the problem. They only begin to pay attention to it either after individuals and groups put significant efforts, on a massive scale, into "raising awareness" of the problem, or after the problem has begun to create such obvious negative consequences that even the average person notices it.
Or rather: the parasite is not on us, but on the egregore we call "self-perpetuating stable society". Not even a parasite, really, but rather a failure of a few super-human memetic organs.
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It isn't sufficient either, if the parasite is anything to do with the culture wars. Fertility in first-world Asia crashes long before the western culture wars reach them. The parasite has to be something that existed in 1970s Japan.
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I think there was a lot more emphasis on children by the entire culture in the past. Businesses and public places were designed to be much friendlier to children. Restaurants would have coloring sheets and crayons and little table puzzles for the kids. Sporting events were cheap enough that it wasn’t weird to see lots of kids running around the ballpark with parents. Parks had playgrounds. For that matter, people in general were much more okay with kids around in public, understanding of kids perhaps being mischievous or crabby in public without blaming parents for not having their kids behaving like little adults. Kids are now a burden, they cannot be allowed out of sight — even in their own yards. They are only allowed in public if they’re behaving perfectly, not being curious, not being bored, definitely not being crabby. Going on to entertainment, you really don’t have music and TV outside of specific streaming services that are geared to kids.
This is not my experience of my (recently gentrified, ethnically mixed) neighbourhood of London. Cheap chain restaurants absolutely have kids' menus with puzzles and colouring sheets on the back. Parks have more playgrounds than they used to. (I am aware that London is exceptional among top-tier cities in terms of the number and quality of our modern playgrounds). And the solidarity among parents that people with prestigious platforms talk about in the past tense still exists on the ground. When my autistic sons sperg out in public, I get sympathetic responses rather than judgemental ones.
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Is that how things are where you live? I haven't noticed any of those things, for the most part.
Not that there aren't ways the culture is less child friendly than in some other times and places. The lack of friends within walking distance is a genuine concern.
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has anyone quantified this? What is "make even" age for a child, and how does it count considering that more than half of them die before 10 years? I think non-existing contraception is most factor here.
It used to be conventional wisdom that a child growing up on a farm and doing a usual share of the work had repaid their parents by the time they turned 15.
assuming zero mortality?
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Breakeven age for child labor is quite low if your first one or two children are daughters, they become mini maids with household chores and help raise more children. My own mother raised her four brothers while my grandmother worked to supplement my grandfathers income.
It was a bit unfair for my mother though, she was and is highly domestic without much education. She took care of my grandparents in their old age. My uncles all had their post graduate professional education paid for and have highly lucrative careers. But it's not as if they contribute to my mother's financial security despite her partial parental role.
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