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Notes -
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.
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:
education
female education
female workplace participation
feminism
urbanization
modernity
excessive parental investment
immigration
irreligiosity
birth control
high house prices/ cost of living generally
quality of available entertainment
socialized pensions
Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.
Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).
A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.
In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.
Define "desirable" because an observation I've made in the past when this topic has come up is that the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.
As for why having kids is a good thing? the future belongs to those show up. The Lord sets before us blessings and curses, life and death. If you want to choose death that is your prerogative, but don't expect me to applaud or praise you for it.
It's possible that the superficial tone of my post lead you to misinterpret my actual views.
We are in complete agreement here. I am the Arch Anti-Utilitarian. I am on a crusade against pleasure-seeking.
The operative sentence of my post was this:
Having children is indeed a Good Thing. As a society, we should encourage more of it. If we really have such a great labor shortage that we're on the verge of economic collapse (I question the facts here, but let's run with it), and the choice is between importing masses of foreigners on the one hand or forcing native women to have more children on the other, then we should absolutely force native women to have more children. Or at least, the state can make it a top priority to remove impediments for couples who already want to have children, and see if that's sufficient to fix the situation.
My post was simply describing the natural state of things, not approving of it. Most people are guided by the pleasure principle, and having kids is not inherently pleasurable, so ceteris paribus most people won't choose to do it. You can't tell people "hey guess what, this really hard thing that takes a ton of work and years of your life? you don't have to do it anymore!" and then act all shocked pikachu face when people go "ok, I won't do that thing anymore". All I did was describe the way that the force of gravity pulls people; I didn't say we shouldn't fight against gravity.
In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to. If you tell me "yeah I just don't feel like having kids because I want to, like, travel to a lot of countries and build a really big stamp collection, or something, idk", then I'm going to look askance at that. Such a person's life would very likely be made more valuable if they were to invest themselves in having children instead - assuming certain reasonable restrictions, we wouldn't want them to have a big dysgenic effect on the population, etc.
There are certain individuals who are engaged in activities that are more valuable than having children, activities that make it impossible or impractical for them to have children and provide an appropriate level of parental investment. Such individuals are excused from the responsibilities that bind more earthly mortals, and have my full blessing to simply continue on with what they're doing. But such individuals are relatively rare, and are of course virtually impossible to identify, so the recognition of such individuals should certainly not factor into any state policy.
its more valuable to you, but why should they do what you want and not what they want to do, theyre not your slaves.
Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery. But at the same time, I didn't mention slavery anywhere in my post, so I'm confused as to why you're bringing it up.
Was it the line about "forcing native women to have children"? I would only recommend more overt methods if the situation is truly dire, and all other methods to enable voluntary childbirth have been exhausted. E.g., there's a lot more currently in our power we could do to make sure that two parent middle class families are able to live on one paycheck, to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and not be dependent on childcare services. Even in a dire situation, I would not recommend rounding women up and taking them to breeding facilities or anything like that, because that's unlikely to end up good for anyone. Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself, because it's not like people are ever going to choose to stop having sex.
its always other people that are best suited for slavery, never the people saying this.
making those illegal would be akin to slavery in that both involve an infringement upon property rights. arguably, slavery is defined by the state of lacking self-ownership, from which property ownership follows. So somebody paying half of their income as taxes to the state is in some sense a half slave to the state.
why do you care so much about other people's reproductive decisions?
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