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I mean, you'll get engagement from me, at least.
But you won't quite get what you're expecting; I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.
The active anti-adult memes are part of this, but they don't entirely explain it among the children; the typical failing of the wise parent is that they refuse to delegate and make time for delegation, because they're too busy believing the meme about their kids not becoming fully human until way later than it actually happens. I've seen this first hand from parents I consider to be pretty wise, but at the same time they're failing their children because they didn't grow up in a memetic/economic environment that's far more blatantly hostile to human development (and no, it's not 'social media' or 'video games' or other purely reactionary Boomer cope; if anything, they're more popular than they otherwise would be because every other avenue of "actually doing something" has been shuttered for safety or cost reasons- it's not a surprise they spend every waking hour in the only free space they're allowed [for now] to participate in).
So's a 10 year old walking down the street or riding his bike unsupervised. He screams that his parents don't put an absurd value on safety and hiding under the bed from all risk whatsoever.
The PMC, and people with that mindset, respond in kind; the fact they're allowed to is kind of the central issue there. Safety arrests development; and kids are inherently a very unsafe thing to do. Hence fur-babies, where you're [for now] allowed to kill them or otherwise dispose of them if they turn out wrong, can send them to multi-day daycare whenever you want, can keep them in a cage to prevent them from wrecking the house, and their purpose [to us] generally matches their intellectual capabilities quite well- something that it's a meme for parents to bemoan without end the minute this stops being true for their children ('teenagers').
Sure, you can always blame the parents but that's also part of what I'm talking about when I say that "the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families". You see, I actually agree with you that having kids is inherently "unsafe", and therein lies the rub. Because if there's anything in the world that the modal secular blue/grey-tribemember seems desperate to avoid, it is personal risk, or more pointedly blame.
I believe this aversion is at the root of many modern pathologies including the seeming death of the adult. That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.
Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.
Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.
You're not wrong.
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Isn't this death of the adult the same as described downthread here https://www.themotte.org/post/1199/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/257235?context=8#context
By
@jeroboam as
And
@Capital_Room as
And
@The_Nybbler as
All describe the same aversion to agency and personal responsibility.
I would say that what @WhiningCoil, @jeroboam, @Capital_Room, @The_Nybbler, Et Al. are describing is the downstream effects of what I am describing. IE the afore mentioned "modern pathologies"
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It's Capital_Room, with "capital" as in letters, city, or punishment, not "capitol" as in legislative building.
And I'd agree that, yes, these do all point toward the same thing.
I've fixed it.
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Well, and in fairness that's not the complaint I'm answering (or rather, it's the far more complicated version of "protect your kids from hostile social memes" that, unless you have time [and most parents don't], you won't have neither the presence, energy, or finances to combat it correctly- which is part of why parental rights are a dead letter these days, but I digress).
Humorously, the people blue tribe love to import have a much healthier relationship with risk than the natives do (risk-taking is obviously selected for when immigration is illegal). And then blues are shocked when their imports won't vote for the party of risk-aversity.
2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing):
First, when blame (and failure) becomes rare, the ability to assign it (or threaten such) becomes a far more powerful force than it otherwise should be relative to the objective risk.
Perhaps, in economic booms, there are very few ways to truly fail, so the ability to properly weight failure is diluted; then, when that boom ends and more ways to fail appear, the people who grew up in the 'too much opportunity to fail' times can't handle weighting risk correctly. After that, if the bust continues for long enough, you'd get another generation passing on that problem, and the negative feedback loop of "too scared to do anything" continues until the next generation has more opportunity than the last.
Second, we did such a good job (in that boom time) engineering all risk (and the human factor in general- WEIRD people automate everything, it's just how we are) out of our systems that when something does blow up, now it's a big deal.
It is, quite literally (on a social level) an allergy to risk; then, when kids are born into a society that has such an allergy that metastasizes into an allergy to blame.
These are legit points that I l will have to bring up if/when i get around to writing said effort post.
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