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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.
That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.
Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.
Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “
Say No To School. Choose Life.
I'll second @Primaprimaprima. It seems to me that although having kids is very rewarding, it also sucks in so many ways that I am not at all surprised that people in the developed world who both do not have an urgent and clear need to have kids as a form of social security and who are not strongly under the influence of pro-natal tradition tend to not have many kids. Why would they?
"Because people have always done it!"
So what?
"For society's sake!"
That's pretty abstract and I have more immediate things on my mind.
"To continue your genes!"
I like the sex part of continuing my genes, but when I imagine the raising a kid part of continuing my genes so far at least it hasn't seemed worth it to me.
I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all. I think that one will not understand this issue properly if one takes people having kids as some kind of natural baseline, "the way that things were and should be", and then gets surprised that it is not happening as much any more in the developed world.
What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids? What if it just seemed like there was because for most of human history humanity has been under the influence of ineffective contraception practices, pro-natal economic pressure, and pro-natal social customs?
This is asinine and ass-backwards. Nobody should be surprised that people are having kids. They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium. Every species on God's green earth has been reproducing to the best of their ability for as long as they can. This is not surprising, so don't make it some noble instead instead of the barest minimum standard just because you don't want to meet the standard.
What if the moon were made of cheese? What if I were god-emperor of all mankind? Why should I think zebras, and not horses, when you say there are hoofbeats in the distance?
Is this an argument? You seem to be just stating that you're correct without providing any justification, and then mocking @Goodguy for his opinion.
What could be a stronger argument than an unbroken trend for thousands of years?
Surely if having children was just a passing fad, we'd not exist.
It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.
Beings that start without well formed motives and worldviews is an ethics of consent issue, and the consequences of that issue has been every "think of the children" argument against personal freedom ever.
Still, people evolved to have kids. They want to. So assuming we don't outlaw it for reasons like those- I wouldn't be too surprised to see bio-conservative reproduction methods numbering in billions of births per year 1000 years from now...
But it's still inefficient. Nine months and a child that starts as a complete dependent? That you have to watch grow through all the pain and suffering of being a new mind? I would expect other methods like forking and spawning new teenage AI minds to be thousands of times more common at least. This is 1000 years we're talking about. We could easily have 10 more AI booms in that time even if this one fizzles.
Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.
Careful, you might be handing the keys to a lunatic like Karl Rove with this sentence. To the point of this conversation: if the transhumanists get their pod babies that will be the reality that you'll have to make sense of.
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