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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Are Pets Replacing Kids?

I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.

Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.

Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).

Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.

I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.

Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:

On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
  • Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.

According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.

What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.

The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

Children, and especially teenagers, are the most discriminated-against group in society today; a utilitarian approach to anti-racism would start with them.

If we believe that parents want to give their children the same kinds of opportunities they grew up with, and literally every parent says this, the generation who needs to decide whether they're having kids right now (1980/1990s-born) grew up after the point where child rights were completely and utterly decimated. No wonder nobody wants to have them! If you have to have them on a leash, and they'll never mature under your watch beyond obeying simple commands... well, you're describing a dog, and dogs are cheaper. And better, because they're physically incapable of saying "no" and even more disposable than even kids in the 1930s were: can't afford them, drop them off at the shelter, and if they were still there you could pick them back up afterwards.

It's literally 2010s-era "I'm not having children because I'm saving the climate" except this time it's "I'm not having children because they'd have to suffer through 25 years of modern society". Same thing in Asian countries (it will eventually become a thing in India for the same reasons)- sure, you can have a kid, but if you do that you've signed your future human being up for 15 years of slavery your neighbors have cargo-culted their way into for no socioeconomic benefit whatsoever. It's honestly surprising to me that reproduction in Japan even exists; I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture with an absolute hellscape with respect to healthy family life also produces the highest-quality pornography in the world.

The only "freedom" these human beings have these days is to stay inside and play video games; forced to exist as 2 arms and a head is enough for a reasonable adult to seek death instead, and as such it's not a surprise that suicide is usually more deadly to the under-18 set than accidents. Which should be the first indication that that demographic really isn't "living" so much as "existing", but that's OK because they haven't lived long enough to know better.

Your right to enjoyment of your own property is non-existent; with CPS being abused by concern trolls to the point where they'll arrest you if you so much dare to play in the front yard. Freedom of movement doesn't exist either; god forbid you walk or bike to your friend's house or the corner store because the State can just show up and arrest you for no reason. Want to go home for lunch? Same deal.

[By contrast, elementary-aged children in the 1920s were more than capable of doing all of these things, in working conditions far worse than school, and far more dangerous than modern life in general, tends to impose. The claim that they're not capable of getting from Point A to Point B just doesn't wash.]

Your right to bear arms is limited so hard that if you exercise it and are caught you'll never be able to do so legally again. Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being subhuman (edit: temperature) while armed; the emphasis on "but 17, therefore he's not a human, and should be charged for daring to act as if he was" was everywhere.

[Contrast Boomers that grew up in rural areas, who have formative experiences hunting rabbits in the woods at 10 with a rifle, and teenagers with gun racks in their trucks to go hunting after school let out. Sure, you had to store your guns in the office, but you can at least argue that's reasonable to reduce theft.]

Taxation without representation; income tax applies to them but voting doesn't.

I could go on. The only justification for this shit is "it's fine, because they're subhuman" (who hold that pop-psych belief that you don't pass the paper-bag test until 25 specifically for that reason), and while we can certainly argue about to what we should take away from subhumans to the extent that we're right about their tendencies for violence, nonsense, and disorder, my argument against this is the Progressive one: offer these people reasons not to do these things and you'll see better results. It's so bad that even the teenagers themselves will accept the rest of society's behavior as justified for this reason, though humorously you might argue that's just a logical consequence of subhumanity.

And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.

  • Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?

  • State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?

  • Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?

  • Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?

  • The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?

  • Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?

  • All of the above?

Even better is that, because abolition and miscegenation are (at least popularly) linked for what should be obvious reasons, anyone who dares attempt improve the standards of the under-18 set in society is clearly doing it just because they secretly want to normalize sex with them or otherwise expose them to danger for selfish reasons rather than actually wanting this class of people to have a life worth living for once.

I like this post, but I think it could do with some more explanation/details (for example, analyzing the Karen phenomenon you've hinted at, data for the "virtually all Amber Alerts are custody disputes" thing), and maybe a cooler temperature (for example, was the hard-r necessary?).

I remember that a history teacher in my college was wanting to put together a lecture about the rise of the teenager category, and I've heard that the idea of the teenager was in part invented/socially constructed by marketers (something he might have mentioned, along with changing conditions).