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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I've mentioned before that the solution is to get women to have sex with men they consider low status. If this was possible, peace in our time would be achievable and we'd have orbital elevators and be well on our way to harnessing the sun by now. (Alternatively, men lose the desire to achieve anything without women to compete for on a macro scale, we become happier unga bunga apes, but we never make it off this damn planet.)

The old adage "it takes a village to raise a child" is probably more true than anyone gives it credit for. It gives support, social structure, trusted neighbors you can safely leave the children with when mom and dad need some time to themselves, a whole network of mothers for advice and help, other parents who understand the difficulties, peers and other children that can help socialize the child and beat some unfortunate life lessons into it from an early age. Most importantly, a sense of community to belong to, draw help from, and contribute to in turn. Honor and shame cultures may differ in mechanisms, but there is a structure in place, with both benefits and disadvantages.

Churches are very good at building this kind of support network and social structure because it comes baked into the edifice. What we are seeing now is the extreme tail end result of the separation of church and state - the state would never allow any other alternative power structure to itself, and is worried about the ability of people to congregate, organize, and assemble in groups. Compounding this is the sharp increase in individual wealth, often at the expense of one's immediate environment.

Our current society is hyper-atomized, hyper-individualistic. Community values are alien to the modern professional working thirteen-hour days to make six figure salaries. Worse, as crime patterns shift and cultures clash and mix, the community becomes ever lower-trust and engaging with it confers no tangible benefits. Globalism lets the wealthy enough detach entirely from the community by moving anywhere with SWIFT access, so why would they invest in it other than guilt or a genuine sense of charity?

We can't reverse this: fix the society, fix the birth rate. If it were easy then burning it all down wouldn't look so attractive. Alternatively, take the wonk route and try to fix the men or women. Just try to keep attention away from all the stuff you fuck up along the way in your experiments.

But how to explain higher birth rates in places with low social trust like Nigeria? Or low birth rates in places like Spain, where many children have 4 grandparents doting over them exclusively.

I think you've identified many social ills but I think we can fix fertility without fixing them.

I've mentioned before that the solution is to get women to have sex with men they consider low status.

The status of men does seem to be key, as women are often dissatisfied with lower status partners.