The Fertility Crisis Is The Omni-Crisis: Part 1

Introducing a new series exploring why Rat Utopia isn't working

Fertility has already been in free fall across the developed world for decades. Now that same decline is also seen in the third-world — meaning that of course the United Nations finally cares. Population decline is a particularly polarizing and confusing topic for people over age 20 who can remember that for about fifty years from the 1970s until 2010, everyone was very concerned about over-population, and billions of dollars of public money (including charity dollars which are in effect just billionaires deciding how tax money gets spent) were funneled into anti-natalist causes and messaging.

So what happened? Did those efforts work? Well, maybe partly. But mostly, fertility collapse is a perfect confluence of several different factors, and in this piece I am going to briefly discuss as many of those factors as I can speak informedly about. Hopefully, by laying out a broad picture, it will then be possible to find the factors most deserving of depth and most amenable to intervention.

But Who Cares?

The first question, and actually the question hardest to answer, is: Why does it matter? Many people hear that the population is declining and see no problem with it. The world feels cramped and crowded, a feeling exacerbated by constant, easy air travel. Perhaps a much better question than “why is fertility collapse bad” is actually “who is fertility collapse bad for.”

The answer to that question is that it is mostly bad for the global plutocracy, whose power is inseparable from the ponzi scheme nature of our markets. Our financial markets are based on a few assumptions: The first is that the currency will be perpetually getting more and more debased, which we call “inflation.” Thus any investment must provide a return that beats the rate of debasement. The second assumption is that the actual physical capital the market abstracts and leverages itself from — energy, land, and labor — are functionally unlimited resources and that their costs will always roughly stay in line with the rate of currency debasement.

The masters of our market-centric economy are playing a game in which the objective is to consume more of the commons each year than your competitors can, and any suggestion that the commons are limited and that growth must be controlled threatens the whole house of cards; if growth is not perpetual and if abstract capital does not reliably appreciate more rapidly than physical capital, the world as we know it is over.

Now, to be fair, these masters are in fact not in denial about the limited nature of land and they are certainly not ignorant of the logistical realities that keep energy limited. They have, however, grown up and built their empires in a world for which constant rapid population growth seemed like a reliable constant. This is the very reason that, relative to the real value of the currency, property prices have exploded while wages have plummeted. Labor was the renewable and consistently deflating resource used to subsidize the cost of energy and land for industry.

Should You care?

So if the party most worried about population decline is also the party that has not really shown anything but malice and avarice towards normal people and has taken every chance to make their lives more complicated, more suffocated, and more dependent, shouldn’t it follow that you yourself shouldn’t worry about the issue?

Unfortunately this question is made more complicated by the fact that many of the conditions driving population collapse are also conditions that are harming our health and happiness in other ways. My hope is that with a more refined map of the many issues that combine to form the fertility crisis, we will be able to clearly articulate our case against many of the existing positions, positions such as degrowth, Musk-ite IVF-maxxing, and, especially, mass migration.

As we examine the major parts of the demographic crisis, we will gain more insight into what solutions might look like and which areas of intervention would have the highest return on investment. But doing so would be futile without having a north star to guide our idea of what human flourishing looks like, and so the final piece of this short introductory entry will be a simple exercise in articulating the most basic level of what we should be aiming for when we address demographics.

Dunbar Man

One characteristic of industrial and post-industrial society is that it carries an internal logic and incentive-structure which is alien to our biological nature and drives. You could describe the whole rest of this series as an exploration of the more particular ways it does that. But for now, it is sufficient just to declare that this state of affairs exists, and that the preservation of human happiness depends on understanding our own nature and asserting that our lived environment must accord with that nature if we are to have not just happiness, but even just biological normalcy.

One obstacle is that mankind is so able to adapt to different circumstances that we can fool ourselves into thinking our constitution is more malleable than it really is. We see that mankind lives in hot and cold climates, on coasts and in deserts, eats plant-based diets, dairy-based diets, fish-based diets — we are not specialists like lions or gibbons, who are confined to specific ecological niches.

All our dietary variety and ability to cope with varying climates obscures one way in which our species is extremely specialized, and therefore fragile. There is one thing upon which every member of Homo Sapiens is completely biologically reliant, one thing which we are utterly unable to adapt to lacking: Social coregulation.

The strength of one’s relationships are one of the biggest predictors of all-cause mortality, making them an excellent proxy for overall health. The directionality of influence may be complicated, but the tightness of correlation suggests at the very leas that there is a strong feedback loop involved, both in promoting health and in damaging it. Any proposal for how humans ought to live must wrestle with these facts.

And just as our health and our bonds are sensitive to each other, the quality of all of our bonds is also sensitive to the health and happiness of everyone else around us. Sick, angry, stressed out people do not form healthy communities. They form wastelands of enmity and alienation, or prisons of codependent abuse.

At the same time, if something causes otherwise healthy members of a community to drift apart, lose touch with each other, or participate in toxic power dynamics like purity spirals or cult-like behavior, then we can expect members of such a society to develop more health issues, less vitality, and less care and grace for each other in yet another destructive feedback loop.

Of course fluctuations in group health are very routine evolutionarily, and humans possess incredible powers of reconciliation as a result. In our natural environment we have need of healing and maintaining social bonds much more often than we have need of establishing new ones, and we see that we are actually much better adapted to reconciliation than to meeting new people. This gives us one hint as to what our social environment is supposed to look like: A human society is supposed to be both small enough (i.e. within Dunbar’s Number) and change members slowly enough that from birth to death most of your social bonds will remain consistent and easily manageable with basic things like exchanging gifts and spending time together.

In summary, we can say that the most basic level of well-being we should strive for with our demographic policy is that people should be kept healthy and kept in stable and small social spheres. As we advance to examine all the possible specific culprits for demographic collapse, bear that basic principle in mind and you will see that every single deleterious factor interferes with some portion “being healthy in a stable social circle.”