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I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:
One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.
Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:
Anecdote: I was recently at a dinner with a family and their early 20s daughter... the level of bitchiness was off the charts. Bitchiness directed towards her own parents mostly, which was unbecoming. Seemingly every second sentence she spoke was some kind of expression of above-it-allness, disinterest, disdain for explaining some topic further. Very unattractive. Even allowing for the fact that she probably didn't want to be there, that's not at all how you're supposed to behave at dinner even if you don't want to be there.
They aren't making women like they used to. Nor men for that matter.
Women learning more cute anime-girl mannerisms would likely raise fertility and supercharge pair bonding. Probably we need more anime-boy mannerisms too, which means a good deal more fighting and high stakes competition. Women like handsome, confident 'the greatest of all time' characters like Gojo Satoru.
But we do all this social engineering for what? Children? Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously. From Jim:
OK, that's kind of true.
But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour. Employers are acting like the pickiest hot-girls on dating apps with all the bullshit they're pulling because they simply do not want or need more people. If they actually had a labour shortage, they'd act like it and scrap the 'we interview you 5 different times and make you pass 3 tests' approach. The modern dysfunction in dating markets and the workplace reflects a breakdown in the core assumptions of our civilization, rooted in the technologies we have available and how that affects the social system. The combination of mobile phones, social media, mass automation, deindustrialization, microplastic/chemical pollution would surely be disruptive to whatever we had 70 years ago, just from first principles?
Whatever gross dysfunction going on with our civilization's inability to reproduce or pair up properly doesn't really matter at all, it'll be blown out of the water by AI.
Imagine if we set up anime battle schools to turn out legions of super attractive, cute couples. Men are men again. Women are women. Korea has TFR 5. Even if that was somehow possible, so what? Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal. I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces. It's like spaghettification when one gets close to a black hole. How could ASI not disintegrate our society at minimum, when it nukes all the basic assumptions we have about the role of people, labour, economies, even what it means to be human?
Or imagine even that I'm wrong about AI. Even if AI is a nothingburger, there are still way more people than there are jobs for them. There's this gigantic disability/welfare architecture built up for this very purpose, ever expanding layers of education to keep young people out of the labour market, ridiculous regulations requiring employment of useless people that necessitate even more to fix up their mess and still huge oversupply. As time passes, we get more machinery that can do more work in agriculture, manufacturing, more robots and so fewer people are needed. I think the root cause of the dating market dysfunction is driven by technology destabilizing all old equilibriums simultaneously. A mere social fix isn't going to work, it's like building a castle on the sand in an hourglass. And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!
I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.
It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.
What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.
Even China can't find enough work for all their young people, they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people and intense capitalist pressure.
If the economy is primarily acting like a network effect, then why don't we see the network effect in action? Why can't Johnny walk in with a firm handshake and get a good job with all these opportunities being made? The US has a pretty free market and a pretty large population. I don't deny that there are some aspects of a network effect, certainly with elite talent there are. But adding merely able-bodied workers is not helping much at all.
This is the mass-immigration school of economic thought. Adding 10 million able bodied Haitians or Hondurans isn't going to make America much richer at all. All the Arabs and Africans going to Europe aren't bolstering the eurozone economies, largely because they don't work. Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour. Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.
I agree but it's a lot easier to handle that later. There will be all the time in the world to fix that up.
So why isn't it being practiced, then? Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today. Even these remaining nominal Christians are mostly not acting like it's 1950 either, they're largely feminists and progressives who show up for a sermon about progressivism from a priest. They don't act like Christians used to act with regards to divorce, marital roles or the things that Jim is calling for.
It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?
Sorry for the delayed reply; I was traveling.
You can't get domestic births without good fertility to begin with, and the US is adding jobs, not losing them, right now. Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.
What's your source for this? "Church attendance rates" is very vague, but only somewhere around 40% of Americans never attend church (as of 2022), whereas "past seven days" attendance in 2020 or so dropped to 30 percent from...40 percent in 1940 and a high of nearly 50 percent in the 1950s. I suspect you're indexing on non-American data. There's definitely been a real religiosity shift in America, but a lot of that was "vibes" as the not-very-engaged shifted from being nominal to nones.
This doesn't really describe America at all (it certainly may describe other nations; my recollection is that you're an Aussie.) In the US, the conservative religious (which are a large fraction of the population - evangelicals alone are >20% of the population, and there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR, and they are basically "normies" - they use modern technology, go into the armed forces, work at Lockheed and Boeing, serve as cops and judges and legislators, go to grad school (in the US, higher education is correlated with religiosity) and generally take on roles that fill the "full stack" that a modern civilization needs to function, from farming to forging to fighting to filming. (Mormons in particular are very valued by the intelligence services because they often know a second language and have been abroad for mission work; as a result, the FBI, NSA, military etc. is swarming with them.) And they're not isolated; the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism, and Mormonism basically prevent the isolation you might seem from the Amish or some Jews.
The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
It says three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%). I confess that it doesn't show the 70% figure, I don't know where I found that, it does seem wrong. Probably not comparable statistics anyway, adding in almost every week would push it up to 55% or so. But let's say 50-55% down to 30%, that's a pretty big drop. Christians trend older than other groups too:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
See also: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/
You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.
More generally, my point is that if Christianity worked, then we wouldn't see that drop in religiosity in the first place. Losing the commanding heights of the social landscape is a pretty serious blow. I recall the 1990s Simpsons, it was notably more religious than most shows today.
I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale? Why are there any danger-hair goblins at all? Why are there Pride Parades at all? Why aren't there hate crimes being prosecuted for anti-Christianism, like there are for anti-black, anti-feminist, Islamophobia? Once the first couple of Baphomet statues go up in state legislatures, then I think that's a pretty good sign that Christianity is in steep decline.
It's not like the US lost a war to the Soviet Union and the Soviets imposed this. Christianity as a system (the old kind of Christian system that Jim talks about in the OP link, considerably more conservative than any conservative Catholic accepted in the mainstream) was a good systemic solution a few hundred years ago but why should we expect it to work today? We wouldn't imagine that a liberal democracy could work in Bronze Age Greece or that Japanese Shogunate-era samurai Shinto society would fit Japan today, so why should Christianity be any different? Why should it be appropriate for an even more radically different post-ASI society?
Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal. Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture. We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much. Or more commonly, we see perfectly well-brought-up respectable men and women switch their ethos to unaffiliated and do as they please.
Correct.
Some of these (particularly electricians) will be very hard to automate, even if AI pays off. I do not think electricians will be 100% automated in 25 years.
Certainly.
It's entirely possible that "doing the right thing" is a good thing to do and also not the systematic solution to anything because it cannot be forced - even if it would solve systematic problems if a critical mass of people did it.
Well, as I said, because it does! It's one of the very few things that does (as you seem to agree). And one of the neat ways in which it works is that it works regardless of systematic solutions. The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off (and more importantly grow to know and love their Creator).
I don't think this is true.
Just an illustrative anecdote: this summer I went to a legal conference and rubbed elbows with people on both sides. One of the things that was interesting was the degree to which the progressives were interested in compromise.
Now, I think there was some selection bias at play here on multiple levels. But generally speaking, you don't pursue compromise when you think you are crushing the opposition (which in the United States includes but of course is not limited to conservative Christians).
Except the unaffiliates aren't hardcore progressives - people often miss this. Unaffiliates tend not to be engaged. People who are engaged religiously vote; peeling people out of their religious engagement doesn't make them vote (D) it makes them not vote at all. (In the United States, voting is not mandatory). From a raw political angle (which, frankly, is a horrible way to view religion) the disengagement of religion is potentially in fact very for the left because the churches that are increasingly fragmenting are left-wing organization hubs. We could see a future where the conservative religious right shrinks but loses little if any political power simply because they still turn out to vote.
Well, it's funny you should say that. Recent polling in the US is very interesting - youth identification as LGBTQ (and positive sentiment towards LGBTQ) is going down and interest in religion is rising.
I think the former was a fad and so it makes sense that it will regress towards the mean. I'm not sure about the latter. I think there's a good chance that automation increases interest in religion, for fairly obvious reasons, but it also might hollow it out, for equally obvious ones.
I don't think that the future is set in stone, though. I tend to think the trend lines for the conservative right in the US are actually looking better now than during COVID. But it's unclear to me which way those trend lines will go.
The main goal is not to have the West go to hell in a handbasket, in my mind. That's what Jim was writing about I think. I'm sure there were plenty of people having a normal one in Nicholas II's Russia and that was fine but it wasn't sufficient to avoid disaster.
So far as I can see here, there's a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx
This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.
Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.
On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.
I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.
The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.
I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.
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