The only people genuinely worried about low birth rates are the farmers of men who want GDP always to go up. After all, they can’t make much money on only a handful of peasants. Rather, a low birth rate is simply a sign that an ecological limit has been reached.
Maybe humanity in certain places isn’t meant to be stacked on top of each other in cubicles filling 100-floor skyscrapers, the same way pandas aren’t meant to live in a zoo. Once that threshold is reached, birth rates naturally go down and reproduction occurs only among those most adapted to survive in modernity, reducing the population to a more viable density. This is a classic Lotka-Volterra equation.
Slower population growth is never an issue, so long as the country can maintain ethnic and racial homogeneity. A smaller country will still exist. However, if a declining native population finds itself competing with immigrant populations, those self-corrective evolutionary mechanisms for finding a viable population density won’t play out, and the nation will die. The only role of a government during a natural decline in population is not to panic and make stupid decisions (like migration) and perhaps to help the average Joe absorb the initial waves of the financial impact of a smaller population.
The baby boom was an historic anomaly. Not every boomer needs to be replaced. In fact, amazing things can happen when there are fewer people around. After the Black Death, Europe entered the Renaissance because the resulting labour shortage raised workers’ bargaining power, weakened the feudal order and created greater social mobility.
But if you are worried about population decline, you should encourage young people to have children. And that requires understanding how mimetic desire works. Because the children might know what to want, but they don’t know how to want.
Mimetic desire means that people copy what those around them appear to value. You can see this in fashion, social trends and politics. The same is true with having babies. The term “baby fever” exists for a reason. If all the women in a female’s friend group are having babies, she will want a baby, too. But the trick with mimetics is that someone must start the chain reaction. That’s why showing babies on TV is so important for pro-natal policies. Watching it feels like the people around you are having children, which triggers something in your brain to want to have children as well. Mimetic desire through media works on men just as effectively as it does with women.
The sad reality these days is that most women turn 30 without ever holding a baby, never changing a diaper and rarely watching one up close. You can’t want what you’ve never seen. Schools and the media have, for decades, also pushed the message that every girl should have a career and that motherhood is something women do when they have nothing left to live for. The media presented childlessness as freedom. And to top it off, we have been completely divorced from our history. We aren’t allowed to be proud of our ancestors. We are encouraged to become atomic individuals, detached from historical continuity. For people raised in psychological captivity like this, low birth rates are inevitable.
Furthermore, the rituals through which couples meet and form families have also stopped being transmitted. Every species has its unique mating rituals, including humans, and if those rituals aren’t performed, the animals will not breed. In humans, mating rituals are partly instinctive, but many must be learned. If these rituals are not taught, the next generation will have trouble reproducing.
If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls in a room with music, and they don’t dance with each other, the disruption of mating rituals has already happened. Most older people don’t consciously know how these rituals are supposed to work, which is why they can’t teach it to their children. They think that young men are supposed to have the courage to approach girls, and that if they can’t, it shows a failure of character. But if that were how human mating worked, approaching women wouldn’t be scary for young men at all, because the men who were scared by it would have fewer descendants. Natural selection suggests something deeper has been disrupted.
If you’re an observer of old books and movies, you already know what it is. The answer lies in what boys and girls fear. Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward. Boys are afraid of embarrassment when they are rejected. So, girls aren’t supposed to be overt, and boys aren’t supposed to cold approach. The correct mating ritual is always covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. The male then gets the hint and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he doesn’t, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.
But for this mating ritual to begin, young men need to know how to pick up a hint, and young girls need to know how to drop one. Before they can learn to do this, they must learn from their parents that performing a mating ritual is necessary and normal. Instead, parents try to shame young men into cold approaching, which causes girls to complain about being cold approached. She says, “Don’t bother me at the gym, don’t bother me at the coffee shop, don’t stop me on the street.” The problem is that when you ask a woman when she would like to be approached, she can only give nonsense answers such as “at the right place and time,” because the real answer is she only wants to be approached by a man she already likes.
Since young women are never taught by older women how to send a plausibly deniable signal, most are at a loss about what to do when they see a guy they like. Instead, they stand around and hope he comes over. No signal. There are hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos of girls acting in this way. If a girl doesn’t know how to send hints, the young men won’t be able to spot the hints she doesn’t know how to drop. When the most basic mating rituals are disrupted to this extent, it’s no surprise that birth rates are dropping.
The question is, why are these mating rituals disrupted? Is it because of some nefarious government plan to depopulate the nations? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The answer is much closer to home. People aren’t playing their proper role in others’ lives.
Playing a role means being a parent to your child, not their friend. It means being a sister to your brother. It means being a grandmother to your granddaughter. It means being a friend to your friend, not being their parent or sister. If you interact with your daughter like a friend, then you are robbing your daughter of having a father or a mother. If you treat your grandson as any other child, then you are robbing him of having a grandmother or grandfather. Your daughter has plenty of friends, but only one father. If you, as the father, do not play that role, your daughter will not learn certain life lessons because no one else can say the things only a father can say. This is simple maths.
I am convinced that if everyone played their precise role in other people’s lives, most problems would disappear. Media messaging and government incompetence are both factors. But if birth rates are low, I suspect the real reason is that each of us thought someone else would play the role we were supposed to play with others and that our children would magically know how to perform the correct mating rituals. But some things need to be taught, and only certain people can teach certain things.
If you are worried about a declining population, you should first remember that you are not free. You are constrained to play particular roles in this life. If you don’t play those roles, then those roles will not be played, and one of the consequences might be that the playgrounds will be empty.
Nathan Smith is a British-born New Zealand journalist, writer, and editor. This article was sourced HERE
Slower population growth is never an issue, so long as the country can maintain ethnic and racial homogeneity. A smaller country will still exist. However, if a declining native population finds itself competing with immigrant populations, those self-corrective evolutionary mechanisms for finding a viable population density won’t play out, and the nation will die. The only role of a government during a natural decline in population is not to panic and make stupid decisions (like migration) and perhaps to help the average Joe absorb the initial waves of the financial impact of a smaller population.
The baby boom was an historic anomaly. Not every boomer needs to be replaced. In fact, amazing things can happen when there are fewer people around. After the Black Death, Europe entered the Renaissance because the resulting labour shortage raised workers’ bargaining power, weakened the feudal order and created greater social mobility.
But if you are worried about population decline, you should encourage young people to have children. And that requires understanding how mimetic desire works. Because the children might know what to want, but they don’t know how to want.
Mimetic desire means that people copy what those around them appear to value. You can see this in fashion, social trends and politics. The same is true with having babies. The term “baby fever” exists for a reason. If all the women in a female’s friend group are having babies, she will want a baby, too. But the trick with mimetics is that someone must start the chain reaction. That’s why showing babies on TV is so important for pro-natal policies. Watching it feels like the people around you are having children, which triggers something in your brain to want to have children as well. Mimetic desire through media works on men just as effectively as it does with women.
The sad reality these days is that most women turn 30 without ever holding a baby, never changing a diaper and rarely watching one up close. You can’t want what you’ve never seen. Schools and the media have, for decades, also pushed the message that every girl should have a career and that motherhood is something women do when they have nothing left to live for. The media presented childlessness as freedom. And to top it off, we have been completely divorced from our history. We aren’t allowed to be proud of our ancestors. We are encouraged to become atomic individuals, detached from historical continuity. For people raised in psychological captivity like this, low birth rates are inevitable.
Furthermore, the rituals through which couples meet and form families have also stopped being transmitted. Every species has its unique mating rituals, including humans, and if those rituals aren’t performed, the animals will not breed. In humans, mating rituals are partly instinctive, but many must be learned. If these rituals are not taught, the next generation will have trouble reproducing.
If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls in a room with music, and they don’t dance with each other, the disruption of mating rituals has already happened. Most older people don’t consciously know how these rituals are supposed to work, which is why they can’t teach it to their children. They think that young men are supposed to have the courage to approach girls, and that if they can’t, it shows a failure of character. But if that were how human mating worked, approaching women wouldn’t be scary for young men at all, because the men who were scared by it would have fewer descendants. Natural selection suggests something deeper has been disrupted.
If you’re an observer of old books and movies, you already know what it is. The answer lies in what boys and girls fear. Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward. Boys are afraid of embarrassment when they are rejected. So, girls aren’t supposed to be overt, and boys aren’t supposed to cold approach. The correct mating ritual is always covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. The male then gets the hint and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he doesn’t, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.
But for this mating ritual to begin, young men need to know how to pick up a hint, and young girls need to know how to drop one. Before they can learn to do this, they must learn from their parents that performing a mating ritual is necessary and normal. Instead, parents try to shame young men into cold approaching, which causes girls to complain about being cold approached. She says, “Don’t bother me at the gym, don’t bother me at the coffee shop, don’t stop me on the street.” The problem is that when you ask a woman when she would like to be approached, she can only give nonsense answers such as “at the right place and time,” because the real answer is she only wants to be approached by a man she already likes.
Since young women are never taught by older women how to send a plausibly deniable signal, most are at a loss about what to do when they see a guy they like. Instead, they stand around and hope he comes over. No signal. There are hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos of girls acting in this way. If a girl doesn’t know how to send hints, the young men won’t be able to spot the hints she doesn’t know how to drop. When the most basic mating rituals are disrupted to this extent, it’s no surprise that birth rates are dropping.
The question is, why are these mating rituals disrupted? Is it because of some nefarious government plan to depopulate the nations? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The answer is much closer to home. People aren’t playing their proper role in others’ lives.
Playing a role means being a parent to your child, not their friend. It means being a sister to your brother. It means being a grandmother to your granddaughter. It means being a friend to your friend, not being their parent or sister. If you interact with your daughter like a friend, then you are robbing your daughter of having a father or a mother. If you treat your grandson as any other child, then you are robbing him of having a grandmother or grandfather. Your daughter has plenty of friends, but only one father. If you, as the father, do not play that role, your daughter will not learn certain life lessons because no one else can say the things only a father can say. This is simple maths.
I am convinced that if everyone played their precise role in other people’s lives, most problems would disappear. Media messaging and government incompetence are both factors. But if birth rates are low, I suspect the real reason is that each of us thought someone else would play the role we were supposed to play with others and that our children would magically know how to perform the correct mating rituals. But some things need to be taught, and only certain people can teach certain things.
If you are worried about a declining population, you should first remember that you are not free. You are constrained to play particular roles in this life. If you don’t play those roles, then those roles will not be played, and one of the consequences might be that the playgrounds will be empty.
Nathan Smith is a British-born New Zealand journalist, writer, and editor. This article was sourced HERE
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