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Absolutely spot on. This 100% matches my observations.
If it's as accurate as I think it is, we're fucked. Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.
If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, with no prospects of a better future or any chance at reproduction, you are an evolutionary dead end. Alternatively, you pick up a rifle...
If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, I'm sure you're actually less likely to be an evolutionary dead end than those of your countrymen who got into college.
Probably not.
In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.
Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.
That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.
Here's how I see it: if you're a college-educated Korean man with a girlfriend/wife, who presumably is also college-educated and middle-class like you, your social circle will put enormous pressure on you to have exactly one child, preferably a boy, and make every conceivable sacrifice to try getting him into one of the top 5 or so universities because there's like a 5% chance that he'll succeed and that's more than zero. Of course, this all seems rather daunting to the average man in such a situation, and even more so to the woman, so they reject this idea in many cases. After all, there's a reason why the South Korean TFR is not even 1 but 0.8 or so.
However, if "you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die", no such pressure exists. Even if we don't categorize it strictly as underclass, it's still rather close. It certainly counts as the precariat, and when you belong to that social class as a woman, everyone in your environment implicitly understands that having children is the single most important thing you'll ever do in your life, and the only thing you'll ever be respected for, if that.
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You might be understanding something different by "from above" than I do, but this seems flatly wrong. Wokeness didn't become high-status from the bottom-up, and for that matter neither did motherhood become low-status this way. I might I agree if what you mean is something like "you can't legislate status".
I agree. No human society could even exist in the first place without the ability to confer status from above. My guess is that the OP means that status in a liberal Western country cannot be sacramental - as opposed to Georgia, for example - and that it cannot stem from fertility under the current conditions.
Yep, what I was referring to.
When the western liberal government tries to advocate for something it nearly 100% of the time ends up doing the opposite. Nobody believes it, and nobody buys it. The only way they can conceivably transfer status is through transfer of power and resources within the Cathedral, which they generally try not to do for fear of power dilution.
Breeding propaganda in the liberal west will go over about as well as a lead balloon. Unlike OP I don't think culture can be improved in this direction, because we're too far down this route. If society devolves a bit, I think we'll get TFR back quite quickly - but I'm quite attached to society, and I'd rather it not get worse.
Alternatively we find a way to grow productive, state-compliant pod people who pay taxes, at a sustainable rate, as has been the remit of every government.
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My takeaway from the discussion a year ago you linked is not that we're fucked. It's that things are bad, but bad in a way that's contingent on cultural factors that could absolutely change, even if it's hard.
I particularly liked @SpoonOfSugar's comment:
This checks out to me. The most successful relationships in my life have been ones where explicitly, repeatedly, both my partner and I demonstrated that we thought higher of the other than we thought of ourselves. In other words, we both thought we were punching above our weight. But I question whether this not happening very often is a permanent fixture of human mating or whether there's something going on specifically in the 21st century. It used to be that people could see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."
I also liked @Forgotpassword's comment:
I genuinely believe the core of the problem is the prevalence of online dating, which transforms dating from a personal test of compatibility into a meat market where women are overloaded by offers of cheap sex. This distorts people's perceptions of their actual attractiveness while also incentivizing sociopathic behavior. Women are incentivized to offer early sex to high-quality men (because they won't give them the time of day otherwise), and high-quality men are incentivized to avoid commitment (because they already got the milk(shake) for free) and proceed to avoid committing to them.
So then these unfortunate women's barometers for men's attractiveness are set on 'high' and they don't find more average partners attractive or interesting, which means, like a pornsick man, they can't bring themselves to find happiness with a suitable partner and they become disgusted and revolted by how "all men [who I am still capable of seeing as a sexual being] are like that."
And these are the women the unfortunate men on online dating have to try and woo, and because they don't see the men as attractive or valuable they make excessive, deranged, and unrealistic demands of them, and the men find themselves unable to find happiness with a suitable partner and become disgusted and revolted by how "all women [who haven't already found a suitable partner and are still on online dating after years] are like that."
With online dating taking over, we've also eliminated the other cultural opportunities where people meet spouses by labeling them sexual harrassment or stigmatizing them. The decline in voluntary associations has also played a role.
I can't tell you how many stories I have in my family of the average guy marrying the girl next door. When your dating circle is limited, and tied to your fixed community, you connect with people, and consider your potential partners part of your sphere of concern. You care about even the people you reject.
To fix dating, we need to rebuild communities. I realize that's basically the "draw the rest of the owl" argument. But we need to draw the rest of the freaking owl. I don't know how we do that, I don't know how we get people to talk to each other again, I don't know how we make people see others as part of their sphere of concern, I don't know how we do it. But we have to do it. Deus vult, deus vult, deus vult.
I don't think this is the entire picture, since there's also an incentive on the part of a man who 'knows how to play the game' to pose as a viable longterm prospect and then dip and/or incompatibilities are found during the trial period and it's donezo. I've seen in my friendgroup both men and women in their late twenties join dating apps with 0 meaningful relationship experience prior.
For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.
Well… yeah? I’m not completely sure where you’re disagreeing, that’s my point… many women get played and conclude “all men are like that” and many men are left with either women in PvP mode or no traction at all, and they conclude that “all women are like that.”
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Maybe I'm just surrounded by giga-chads but that has not been the issue for any of the men around me IRL, whether they found their partner the old fashioned way or through online dating, but it's a complaint I hear repeatedly online. Then again, people in places like the ww threads here and elsewhere frequently have bizarre stories of their issues dating which suggest to me that they are not just slightly below the median in mate attractiveness but very much so.
I think the issue here is that the internet amplifes the voice of the bitter losers that always have had issues, but were just invisible before. People like to trot out the graph of recently increasing sexlessness among young men but that has since rebounded.
As for why people don't have kids, I always come back to historic fertility trends and note that urbanism killed fertility a hundred years before feminism or modern dating markets, and it's remained remarkably consistent throughout time and place and the primary thing that has changed is the rate of urbanisation.
It seems to me that some combination of children being a major economic drain rather than a boon, delayed pair bonding, higher cost of living (particularly sufficiently large housing in safe areas with jobs), access to entertainment and maybe female labour force participation (lots of evidence against this being a major factor though) are the real culprits.
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