A New Start: What Follows The Coming Demographic Collapse

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I have been tinkering with this piece for a couple of months.  The thesis is (1) that depopulation is real and (2) it may present opportunities for my children.  Most pundits are still working to convince you of the who, why and hows of (1).  You will all have opinions – please share them in the comments.

Graham

Optimism for the rising generation can be found growing out of the current profound pessimism. Things have become so bad they have to get better.  We have taken the Enlightenment to its rational extreme, making it clear that logic alone cannot ameliorate the human condition, and the supposition that it can leads to chaos.

The birth rate is falling precipitously in all developed countries. This trend has been underway for more than a century. Logic alone does not lead one to want children.  Moreover, there appears to be a conscious effort afoot to decrease the human population. It will benefit the survivors – they will enjoy more resources, and their labor will be in demand.

Although diversity has demanded a jihad to silence people who would argue the point, Europeans have long been at the forefront of scientific investigation and critical thought. As the need to rethink our a prioris becomes more evident, Europeans such as my children must again be in the vanguard.

The first section of this article addresses the relationship of the individual to society, neglected in this era of the individual.  The second addresses a number of the reasons for the current pessimism. Though it is somewhat grounded in the material realities of modern life, the most significant factors are social. The third offers observations on the opportunities that will be available after the detritus of the current epoch has been swept away, as my children's cohort comes of age.

A civilization perpetuates itself through generations, each accepting, appreciating and embellishing the wisdom and practices of the preceding and doing its best to pass them down to the next.

In this epoch atomized individuals reject the wisdom of their elders with regard to what it means to be men and women.  They see no obligations to society. They deny the uniqueness of race and culture, their own in particular.  People have hitherto known who they were: Eskimo, Hindu, Navajo, Japanese, Chinese, Arab.  We don’t. The woke generation embraces all humanity while sanctimoniously disavowing its own ancestors. 

People who see themselves as individuals rather than members of a collective find no point in investing in children. Children are a boon for the tribe but a drain on individual time and resources. When people no longer feel that the collective matters, they don’t bother with kids.

The atomized individuals of today’s humanity are rightly fearful of the trends they see about them. Society’s institutions are failing. Police do not protect citizens or preserve order. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of self-interest is no longer improving the common weal. The institutions– government, education, and business – have been perverted to serve those who control them at the expense of the citizenry.

Those in power impose agendas to strip us of our privacy. They monitor our movement through biometric identification: fingerprints, voice recognition, facial recognition, chip implants and DNA databases. They capture communications via telephone, Internet, eavesdropping and social media. They monitor our finances through credit and debit cards, and soon central bank digital currencies.  They form databases of information about our education, employment, association memberships, hobbies, friendships and political leanings.

Comprehensive knowledge about us gives the elites commensurate control.  There were many rights enjoyed by citizens because governments didn’t have the tools to take them away. Now that they can, natural rights have morphed into privileges, which the elites temporarily indulge us.

Steamrolling opposing views as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, they coerce people to inject their bodies with unproven biological products, wear masks, social distance and remain home under lockdowns. They have forcibly deprived people of work, professional licenses, association memberships, the right to travel, and even their liberty for expressing unfavorable ideas.

Government and complicit corporations constrain our ability to inform ourselves. Though the Internet could put mankind’s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, we must access it through channels they control. They have unprecedented power to color, slant, filter, block, alter and fabricate the information we receive.

The fact that we have not been reproducing ourselves is a reflection of the current pessimism. People feel a general anomie - a lack of meaning in life. If life makes no sense, why should they pass it on to somebody else?

Religious belief and observance have fallen. We feel no obligation to serve God by raising new believers. Choosing human over divine logic, we concluded that children are a great responsibility and expense that bring nothing in the way of financial benefit and often little in the way of psychic rewards.

Sexual liberation has freed women to enter the workforce and compete with men. Their earnings give them the power to acquire material goods, creature comforts and pleasures such as spas and vacations. Many find being unencumbered by family simply more attractive.

Men and women throughout the centuries were defined by their economic roles. To be a man meant mastering the skills that male work required, and to be a woman meant at least appearing to possess maternal instincts. As sex-specific skills have become devalued, what it means to be a man or a woman has likewise become confused.

The change has been unidirectional. Men did not want what women had, but women at least thought that they wanted what men had. They narrowed the social roles open to men. Fewer men are attracted to marriage, and fewer women find the willing men marriageable.

Half our children are raised by mothers alone. Those intelligent enough to appreciate the difficulty are least likely to have children.  The children lack not only resources but a model of normal family life.

The influx of immigrants and related increase in crime has forced people to move from longtime neighborhoods to more expensive suburbs or simply choose not to have children. Promising to improve them, government bit by bit took control of public safety, public health and education, leaving the people was little control over these facets of their lives. The promises proved hollow, and the resulting environment is not conducive to raising children.

Leaders of society have driven changes in law, and law in turn has driven the changes in society. Ideologues have imposed changes in divorce, child custody, sexual harassment law, and equal opportunity laws.  The socially conservative common people simply had to adapt.   

Is this by design?  Are we merely reacting rationally to conditions imposed on us by a controlling elite?

The Covid injections decrease sperm count by 20%.  Spontaneous abortions and stillbirths are much more common among Covid vaccinated women. IVF clinics report having difficulty getting surrogate mothers pregnant. Vital statistics show decreased births all over the world.

The so-called vaccinations are associated worldwide with excess mortality. The higher the uptake, the greater the percentage increase in deaths over those observed in the five years prior to coronavirus. The causes are highly varied: heart disease, recurrences of cancers, autoimmune disease, prion disease, dementia and many more. Lincoln National Life Insurance paid out 263% as much in 2021 as 2020 for working-age deaths.

The fundamental reason appears to be that the injections weaken a person’s immune system, from 30% with the first dose to 100% after boosters, and that the immune system is involved in suppressing almost all diseases, not just those caused by microbes.

Assuming that the evidence of excess deaths is valid begs the question of who will die disproportionately? Who will not be having many kids? Who got the jabs? 

Countries and states differ in vaccine uptake. Among the trusting citizens of Japan and South Korea it was high. Authoritarian China compelled most of its population to accept its homegrown vaccines.  In the Anglosphere, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand exceed the United States.  In the USA, blue states exceeded the red states.

Who got vaccinated within populations? Those who travel on business or work for government or large corporations have been required to be jabbed.  Unvaccinated are more likely to be unemployed, self-employed or blue-collar. Those who trust government in general were likely to trust them in this particular – typically people of the left. 

Physical and environmental factors also diminish fertility.  Pesticides such as RoundUp are ubiquitous. Many researchers suspect that the radiation produced by microwaves, telephones, computers, and power lines is dangerous. 5G wireless is especially suspect. Sperm counts had inexplicably dropped about 50% even before the Covid jabs.

The depression that has been hanging fire for more than a decade, that the central banks printed absurd amounts of money to forestall, appears to be upon us. Severe binges invariably bring severe hangovers. Without a significant cohort of educated young workers to pull us out, this one is likely to be deep and long.

Families in the developed world have about one and a half children versus the two children required to sustain the population. Assuming 25 years to a generation, a population shrinks by 25% in 30 years and 45% in 60. The rate has accelerated since 2019, when we were already dying out. Demographic pyramids will continue to be top-heavy, with fewer working people supporting more oldsters for years to come.

Factors discouraging children are mostly under government control.  Is this by design?

The smartest strata of society interpret the trends and employ appropriate caution. The ones still having children are the least inclined to invest in them. The more intelligent, wealthier segments push for immigration, out of altruism or the need for cheap labor. Whatever the case, developed country populations will become both dumber and less homogeneous.

The promise of globalism – cheap goods for everybody – does not offset the need to eat.  Chinese-made household appliances, kitchen utensils, children's toys and so on are mostly superfluous. We will get back to basics. National economies will have to provide for national needs.  If it is less efficient, negating Adam Smith’s invisible hand and David Ricardo’s competitive advantage, so be it.

Back to basics will impact the job market. The people with what the recent book titles Bullshit Jobs will find their services no longer needed. Putting food on the table trumps engaging a lifestyle coach. Diversity, gender and drug counselors will be expendable.  

Mattias Desmet observes that society has been rich enough to afford the proliferation of meaningless jobs.  It takes little labor to produce the necessities of food and shelter.  Competition has been throttled via government intervention in markets. Comfortable corporate cartels could afford to be inefficient.  Societal collapse will bring it back to basics: less productivity, but more meaningful work.

Baby Boomers, the greatest travelers in history, with generous pensions to support the habit, are getting too old to go. Gen X will have neither the money nor perhaps the appetite. A European vacation may well become once more the exotic luxury it was in the 1950s.

The structure of the reduced population of my children’s cohort will be skewed toward the offspring of parents who avoided the Covid vaccines and people who ignore the disincentives to having families. These will be educated conservatives and less educated people of all backgrounds, and, especially, in the West, minorities.  As government largesse dries up, its clients - disproportionately poor, unintelligent, unemployed, addicted and mentally unstable - will have fewer children.

Pundits had been saying for a long time that the earth was overpopulated. It is clear that populations will continue to fall. That has negative implications for civilization, but perhaps positive for my family.  The world will make room for those who want to have children.  It needs our kids. Somebody has to do the work.

While children will never offer their parents enough financial reward to repay the cost and effort of raising them, governments at least show gratitude in small ways, such as income tax deductions, reduced fares on public transportation and large family bonuses.  Still, we who avoided the jab more often have children mostly to fulfill the felt obligation to our own parents and grandparents, our church and our society.

Skepticism is a primary reason that science evolved in the West. Eastern cultures revered their ancestors and developed systems of education to propagate classical knowledge. Science flourished in the Muslim world a millennium ago, but since that time ideas that are contrary to the teachings of the Koran have been suppressed, as they were by the Christian church in Galileo’s time.  With the Enlightenment, Kant challenged us to “dare to think”.  Though fewer of us are taking Kant’s challenge, we do well in comparison with other world populations.

Skepticism goes hand-in-hand with individualism, classical liberalism and the scientific method. Western thought has been reluctant to accept theories until they were proven. Or more precisely, until they have long stood up against attempts by skeptics trying to disprove them.

Darwin’s idea of evolution, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s theory of relativity and the theory of plate tectonics were all greeted with skepticism before the relevant scientific communities first accepted that they were serious, then allowed them to pass into the realm of settled science.

European skepticism makes us less inclined to succumb to groupthink, to do as we are told.  Even where Covid vaccination was difficult to avoid, significant numbers dodged the bullet. Desmet’s “Mass Formation” theory holds that 30% of Westerners fully believe the pharmaceutical companies and their governments with regard to the disease and the mandatory preventative measures – masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and of course the injectable biological products. Another 40% go along with the program because the authorities have made resistance difficult.

Nonetheless, a hard-core cadre of confirmed skeptics have refused the jabs. All agree that the number of fully vaccinated and boosted people is significantly less than the merely fully vaccinated, and that number is smaller than the number who have received one jab. Skepticism apparently remains alive in the West. The unvaccinated may form the foundation of society in the coming generation.

Going back to Malthus two centuries ago, many thinkers have advocated reducing the world population. The problem is that nobody could find a morally acceptable way to accomplish it. Moral or immoral, it is happening.  There are some powerful hands behind it, and the results may not be all bad.

Fewer people means less pressure on the world’s resources. Humans have put most of the world’s most productive land area to use for crops and forage. It is only through the use of fertilizers and pesticides, combined with higher-yielding hybrids and GMO crops that we have been able to support the world’s current population. Fewer people will lessen the pressure to boost yields via unsustainable techniques.  Global warming due to greenhouse gases appears to be a fraud designed to push money to green entrepeneurs, but pollution and resource depletion are real.

Depression and a shrinking population will pop the housing price bubble. The existing housing stock will be more than enough to put a roof over everybody’s head.

Throughout human history technology has made us more productive. Tribes had specialists in herbal medicines and making weapons. Occupational surnames such as Baker, Smith, Thatcher, and Weaver reflect the specialization of past centuries.

Technology and specialization go hand in hand. The smith could be more productive because he had the technology of a forge, bellows, tongs and so on. The weaver had a loom.

The pace of technology and thus productivity has accelerated. Scanners made grocery clerks more productive. Self-checkout now improves store productivity by eliminating those clerks. Machine tools are controlled by computers instead of skilled operators.

The upshot has been, and will continue to be, that the more highly skilled people who are able to program and control the machines are at a premium. Lacking special skills, members of entire classes of people who perform repetitive tasks using low technology tools become superfluous. These have included reapers using scythes, printers hand-setting type, and secretaries transcribing handwriting.

Technology will decrease the amount of stuff my children have to own. No cars for personal transportation, hard-copy books, vacation homes and so on.  Owning their homes and businesses, they will find it cheaper to satisfy other needs by renting.  People are rightly horrified that the WEF is attempting to achieve these objectives by compulsion, but if these were to become the most attractive free choices it might not be so bad.

As Russia is discovering, industrial war is an anachronism. Its urban population is not enthusiastic about the war. My children will see less war.  No country need covet its neighbor’s resources, and no country will have enough cannon fodder.

The 19th-century notion of a classical education is out of fashion.  Today’s education attempts to form people who are employable. In manual arts such as plumbing and electrical work this means apprenticeships.  It is unfortunately similar in academia. Not without reason do aspirants call their Ph.D. a "union card." The theory remains that a specific skills inventory can prepare person for life.  It is a bad theory, and most aren’t mastering the skills in any case.

Credentialing supports this theory. An individual emerges after a unit measure of education with a credential, be it as a journeyman electrician, kindergarten teacher or infectious disease specialist.

As has been dramatically evident throughout the Covid crisis, highly credentialed mediocrities clutter positions of power. Schools of education do not even attempt to teach teachers how to teach. Instead, the focus is on the orthodoxies of the day, so-called cultural Marxism.

The paradigm is collapsing. The bureaucrats’ dogmas straitjacket the productive members of society. They no longer allow one group to be perceived as more productive than another. Orthodoxies force us to discard the most productive technologies, such as fossil fuels and atomic energy, in favor of those favored by the self-appointed guardians of our environment.

The coming collapse may bring a scramble to identify people who see the world clearly and can implement real-world solutions to real-world problems, regardless of their nationality, gender or color.   My objective as a parent is to produce children with real-world practicality.

Part of the genius of Western civilization has been our generosity in sharing wisdom. Edward Dutton, Ricardo Duchesne and Kevin MacDonald point out that the genius of us individualists is collective. Whereas Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are on the average smarter than Europeans, we have been better at sharing our ideas. Isaac Newton said “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” The institutions we invented, such as universities, corporations and the church, made us uniquely collaborative.

Public school systems in developed countries are freighted with dogma and lax about teaching useful skills. Los Angeles child psychiatrist Mark McDonald describes his slow realization that the public schools could never be adequate in this video.  We parents whose distrust of the government saved us from the jabs should plan on setting up our own private schools and home school.

Our grandparents – and for that matter the Greeks thousands of years ago – recognized the essentials of education. “Reading, wRiting and ‘Rithmetic.”  Following the Greeks, they need as well Rhetoric, the ability to convince others, and Reason, the ability to figure things out.

A teacher should be sufficiently expert to command the respect of the students. He or she should use proper grammar and a wide vocabulary, have the ability to solve math problems without looking in the back of the book, and know the software tools of our age well enough to teach students how to use them. This includes word processors, spreadsheets and graphics packages, and as appropriate dictation, translation and presentation software.

The list is not extensive, but it would exclude most K-12 teachers... and most parents as well. The difference is that a motivated homeschooling parent will recognize the need and either learn what needs to be taught or find somebody else who can teach it.

Children are almost all possessed of curiosity, the most essential quality required for learning. They come up with an endless number of questions about radioactive lakes in Russia, the trajectory of artillery shells, the mating habits of hedgehogs and so on. They also come up with theories, some well-founded, some not. Why don't they make hot air dirigibles? Could you make a jet-powered helicopter? A homeschooling parent can encourage the student to frame the question so he can search for an answer himself. Idle curiosity can be a valuable impetus to reading and writing.

Governmental organizations are fond of setting standards. A homeschooling teacher has to have the wisdom to recognize that whereas a wide vocabulary, a general knowledge of history and an acquaintance with literature are valuable, teaching prescribed lists of words, historical facts, and fictional figures is counterproductive.  It gives the child a distorted sense of values. Education is learning how to learn, not amassing facts to pass a test to acquire some credential.

Inefficient as higher education has become, the economic downturn is bound to change it significantly. In the United States it is underwritten by massive student loans and, as a result, unsupportable debt.  In Europe children spend years in government-supported universities as a means of avoiding real life.  Though educations there are often equally unuseful, Europeans do not emerge as debt slaves.

Today’s education paradigm assumes that children need a credential and they must spend time in the presence of educators to get it.  This is changing. MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology pioneered massive online open courses (MOOC) through which students can study cheaply via the Internet.

A decade ago books entitled “Hacking Your Education” and “The Nearly Free University” encouraged students to take charge of their own education.  They advocate seeking out experts from whom students could acquire knowledge by doing real work. Children should develop earning power in their mid-teens and learn to value their own time enough not to waste it on the standard college experience.

College education in Europe, especially Ukraine, is inexpensive and there are good instructors. When the time comes, a parent needs to help the child assess whether or not they need to attend a university in order to achieve their life’s goals.  Mortimer Adler, Eric Hoffer, and more recently Bill Gates and Steve Jobs succeeded without obtaining the credential.

The case is made that the New World Order, and in particular the Covid vaccination scheme, central bank digital currencies, social credit systems and so on are totalitarian.  Mattias Desmet draws a distinction between dictatorships and totalitarian governments. A dictatorship is run by one person with a singular focus: staying in power. It thus has a cruel logic. Among them are the regimes that still call themselves communist –North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Citizens do what they must, but out of compulsion, not conviction.

The true totalitarian governments of the 20th century, notably the Nazis and the Communists, were supported by masses of people who bought the propaganda. A significant minority truly believed they were making a new social order, and the rest were smart enough to keep their mouths shut.

Though initiated by individuals, once the masses have been convinced of the story, totalitarianism takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of any individual or group. The Covid saga may have exposed a number of evil people , but it is beyond the control of any. 

To keep their adherents focused, totalitarian movements forever need new enemies. Desmet points to the virus itself and the terrors visited on the unvaxxed, unmasked, un-locked down and so on in the recent coronavirus episode. The monkeypox business is a totally artificial but necessary invention to keep the game going. So are the transgender panic, the insane money printing by central banks, and efforts to stoke the very long-in-the-tooth climate change scare. Just as with China's Cultural Revolution, the Jews in Germany and the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, innocents are being crucified in the name of all of these causes.

It cannot last. The absurdity is getting out of hand. If not us, certainly our children will live to see the collapse.  As Desmet says, dictatorships can last forever but totalitarian systems wind up eating their own children. We are at that stage now. The question is, what comes after that?

The darkest hour is just before dawn. The levels of fear, oppression and especially uncertainty in the developed world far exceed any experience in even long lifetimes. The feelings of anomie, loneliness, uselessness and anger are at all-time highs. The signs are all around: drug abuse, antidepressants, alcohol abuse, withdrawal from society, media-induced hatreds and childlessness.

Enlightenment thinking has run its course. The absurdity of the notion that we can fully understand ourselves and can apply logic to create a perfect world is on full display. The illusion that we are autonomous, independent individuals has led us to downplay the connections that make life meaningful: family, religion, community, tribe and nation. As our human souls crave connection, the void has been filled by propagandists who would unite us in the quest of imaginary foes such as global warming, racial and gender prejudice, and a not-so-virulent, man-made virus.

It is time to recognize that the bonds that make our lives meaningful transcend logic. The most important of these is having children.  They make no financial sense, they take our time away from other interests, and yet they are absolutely essential to giving meaning to our lives and to perpetuating our civilization. Children bind families together across generations, and common heritage unites tribes and nations.

When the constructs wrought by logic - law, the economy, our educational systems and our governments – complete their collapse, they will bring down the civilization they characterize. Unlike previous collapses, there are no young and vital civilizations waiting to rush in and fill the void. This time it must be filled by survivors. Our children, provided we have endowed them with a sense of their own humanity, the limits of logic and the appreciation of the unknown and unknowable that our ancestors took for granted.  They will inherit a much emptier world, and with it a vast library of information about how it works and a fairly complete complement of resources.  They will be positioned to pioneer a new civilization.