Depopulation Solutions

Addressing the Demographic Cliff

John Carter published an article entitled Depopulocalypse III – From SINK to FLOAT. In it, he was talking about solutions for the depopulation crisis. It was behind a paywall but has since come out. I recommend you read the article and the entire series. His solutions are interesting and cover a wide range of issues.

In proposing the following solutions I do not even dream of pretending that there is a shred of political hope that these will be implemented. But I do say that if they were implemented they would work. And I doubt anyone will deny that.

I don't think I will surprise too many of my readers when I say that I think that the actual crisis is a cultural, indeed theological, crisis. So each of the following solutions includes legal elements, but the underlying thrust is cultural, even theological. I'm also not saying that I believe the government does have the power to implement these. But I am saying that if they were implemented they would work.

Toward a fertile society

No number of small tweaks around the edges will change an infertile society, a deliberately barren society, into a fertile one. The entire cultural mentalities underlying fertile societies stand in blatant contradiction to the culture of infertile societies. Luckily (although it is not luck but providence) we are designed to instinctively be fertile, and so even in a blatantly anti-natalist society, there will still be those who persist and breed.

But in order to change Western cultures into cultures that support high fertility rates, there will have to be some fundamental changes. Indeed we will have to change our current pleasure-seeking society root and branch. 

Here are some particular issues that would have to be changed as part of this seismic cultural shift.

Breastfeeding vs  Formula

Legal: Make the routine use of formula illegal. By routine, I mean people going to the store and picking up formula, instead of the mother nursing or (where that is not possible) using a wetnurse.

Cultural: Make open, casual, routine breastfeeding natural and normative. Make wetnursing common and acceptable, although only acceptable for mothers who have a medical problem breastfeeding. Make it boring for the average teenage boy to see a naked breast, since they see them all the time while the women all around them breastfeed. Like in Africa. And in all of history. Until, like, ten minutes ago.

Discussion: Our society has pushed pretty much everything about children into a corner or into another room. There are fewer  ‘in your face’ ways to push the importance of children than to see a woman openly breastfeeding. If we are going to change our culture, we have to do it with a slap in the face, not a whine.

There is nothing wrong with the female breasts being seen as sexual. Indeed there is nothing wrong with the entire female being seen as sexual. God created us as sexual beings. But it is a perversion to see the human female breasts as somehow obscene when they are performing the act that they are created to do!

Abortion vs Not Literally Murdering Children

Legal: Make child murder illegal. Execute everyone involved in the practice, every time. The ‘doctor’, the ‘nurse’, the receptionist, the security guard… the father who pressured it, the grandmother who pressured it… and the mother.

Cultural: Make child murder unthinkable. Our society needs to become one where no one can possibly imagine how anyone could ever have done such a thing. And the mother least of all. The mother (and the father) should be the ones who would give their lives for their children, not the first in line to murder them.

Discussion: It isn’t rocket science to say that a society that is suffering a dearth of children shouldn’t be murdering thousands of them every day. But when we go deeper than that, we realise that a society that promotes or even allows you to murder your child is a society that is sending massive signals to its members about the lack of value of children. Small wonder that we aren’t having any.

Contraception vs Reproduction

Legal: Make contraception illegal. And by contraception I mean all methods of attempting to make sure that the sex act does not produce the child it is designed to produce

Cultural: Make contraception unthinkable. Make it so even the youngest child is rooting for the babies every time they go to a wedding.

Discussion: Many forms of ‘contraception’ are actually part of child murder, but even the ones that don’t are part of a general culture of  ‘children are bad’. Remember Obama saying he didn’t want his daughters ‘punished with a child’?

And in the longer view, the availability and promotion of contraception is obviously completely backwards to the idea that our society should value life and having children, not trying to ‘protect themselves’. You don’t protect yourself from winning the lottery.

SILK vs DINK

Legal: Change the tax code to reflect our priorities. Change the medical laws to support midwives and at-home birth.

Cultural: Make ‘DINK’ing unthinkable. We need to change our language and entire point of view so that we elevate the mother and father of lots of children to the pinnacle of our society, well above movie stars and football players.

Discussion: Our current society makes having and moving around with children difficult and expensive. It promotes the ‘Double Income No Kids’ lifestyle, and punishes the ‘Single Income Lots of Kids’ lifestyle. Do you know that it used to be not only legal but normal for a company to pay a married man more than a single man? And both more than a woman?

Fornication vs marriage

Legal: Make fornication illegal. The punishment should be marriage, with no divorce.

Cultural: Make fornication unthinkable. Like the entire society would recoil in horror at the very idea of a young man and a young woman getting caught in the bushes.

Discussion: It might seem odd to say that having less sex will produce more children, but I think we all know that fornication (sex outside of marriage) is part of the general culture of ‘child-free sex’. It is a simple fact that societies where young people marry young tend to have more children. And given the power of the sex drive, if they can’t fornicate, they will want to marry.

Adultery vs marriage

Legal: Make adultery illegal. Witnessed adultery should mandate the death penalty. For both persons.

Culture: Make it unthinkable

Discussion: The stability of the marriage vow is one of the prime indicators of how many children a society will have. And, which is also important, how well those children do.

No-fault divorce vs End of Life as you Knew It

Legal: Make divorce an arduous and painful process in which everyone loses. Make the person instituting the divorce lose child custody. End alimony and child support.

Culture: Make divorce unthinkable.

Discussion: Along with adultery, the instability of easy-divorcism tears marriages apart right and left. And it takes a society with stable marriages to produce lots of children.

Sodomy vs reproduction

Legal: Make male-on-male sexual activity illegal.

Culture: Make it unthinkable.

Discussion: There is only one kind of sexual activity that produces children. The widespread acceptance of deviant forms of sexuality is a good indicator of how few children a society will have.

Pornography vs Morality

Legal: Make the production of porn illegal under the fornication and adultery statutes. 

Culture: Make it unthinkable.

Discussion: The goal is to focus the sexual urge into marriage, and to focus marriage into having children. You want to see a naked woman? Get married.

Transgender vs Sanity

Legal: Make crossdressing, gender drugs, and gender surgery illegal.

Cultural: Make transgender unthinkable.

Discussion: Our goal should be to reinforce and build sex/gender roles, to encourage everyone into the idea of husband + wife -> children.

Patriarchy vs Feminism

Legal: Eliminate women’s voting, the death tax, Social Security, and other family-busting policies.

Culture: Make the family the centre of society.

Discussion: A full exposition of what ‘patriarchy’ actually means would take several posts. One of which I have written.  But the entire focus of a patriarchal society (correctly defined and as we see throughout history) is the production of lots of children, and the support of those children culturally. A man who sees his purpose in life as raising honourable and successful children. A woman who sees her purpose in supporting her husband, and in bearing, nursing, and raising honourable and successful children. And in patriarchy, the entire extended family/clan is focused on those same goals.

Time does not permit us to fully discuss all of the issues. To talk of ending girl and women’s sports, and promoting ‘home ec’. To speak of ending government schools. To talk of re-introducing chaperones. Of eliminating women politicians. The discussion is endless.

Language

Before we wrap up this discussion, which is really just getting started, let us mention the subject of language for a second. Everyone knows that one of the biggest fights in the culture war is language. He who controls the language controls the debate and all that.

Well, so if we are going to move our society to a pro-natalist society we need to work on our language. Here are some suggestions:

a) Stop speaking of ‘abortion’ and say ‘child-murder’. Stop using the Latin word for ‘baby’ (fetus) and start using the clear English one.

b) Stop speaking of ‘teen pregnancies’ and start speaking of ‘unwed mothers’ again.

c) The good old English word ‘bastard’ still exists, but we need to limit its use to its actual meaning and as a castigation of the mother and father.

d) We need to speak of a ‘patriarch’ in a positive way again.

e) Get rid of ‘fed is best’. Breast is best. That’s what they were designed for.

f) One doesn’t ‘have an affair’ or ‘live together’, one commits adultery or fornication.

g) It is the sin of Sodomy, not any of those other words.

h) We need to not worry about how unmarried people will ‘meet each other’ or ‘date each other’ and skip straight to the problem: How they will marry each other.

i) We need to stop saying ‘single’ and start saying ‘unmarried’.

j) Stop talking about ‘safe sex’ and other euphemisms for contraception.

Honour before success, success before pleasure

If you wish to have more children, you have to change society. You have to change the goals of society. A fertile society teaches that honor comes before success, and success before pleasure. A fertile society is one where the parents find honour not only in their own actions but in the actions of their children, indeed their extended family. And honour comes before success… the success of a dishonourable man is to be despised.

And success itself must come before pleasure. The man who lives for the moment, for his temporary gratification, is not a man, and cannot be a man, who is producing the next thousand generations. A fertile society is one that builds. It must be so since it has generations of children to build for.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but a fertile society, one that seeks honour and builds toward the future, must be a religious society. A truly religious society, by which I mean Christian and Theonomic. A society which sees this life as a flash in the pan, and which builds toward eternal values. Cause when they say ‘you can’t take it with you’… they don’t mean children. Children, family… those will all be in heaven, or hell, forever. They will live beyond this earth; your flat-screen TV and big house won’t.

Links

John Carter has written three posts on the subject, Depopulocalypse, Depopulocalypse II - Solutions that don’t or won’t work, and Depopulocalypse III – From SINK to FLOAT that directly inspired this post.

He also mentioned some other articles on the subject:

The Rules of the Gamete, by Raw Egg Nationalist

Industrial Civilization Needs a Biological Future by Adam Van Buskirk,

Robin Hanson has dealt with the fertility issue in several of his articles.

Several commentators of the ‘liberals-mugged-by-reality’ variety have also mentioned either the marriage crisis, the demographic crisis, or, more usually, both in their articles and podcasts. These include Tim Pool, Triggernometry, and Jordan Peterson.

Even outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times have been speaking of the issue.