anon_hine said in #5498 24h ago:
At party some months ago, a bachelor friend remarked how charming and rare it was that my wife and I had a traditional marriage with five kids and such. For me, this is just a normal aspect of a life well lived. But for many, it is as out of reach as a cottage in the Hamptons, as weird as being in a Bay Area sex cult, and as niche a hobby as painting minifigures. Has something gone wrong here? It seems wrong to me. My immediate thought was "none of you are going to make it" and then later "some of you guys are alright, don't go to sodom tomorrow".
San Francisco has the lowest fertility among US cities at less than 1.5 children per woman. Vancouver is less than 1.0, the lowest in the western hemisphere. Among people I know in these cities, fertility is even less. Once they actually get and stay married they do alright having 2-3 children, but most people don't get there. It seems we have a "mating crisis".
I could roast all the 'cels endlessly for individually bad values. I think most proximally it is about individual values. If you really want it, you go get it. But values have their own material genealogy and it's not lectures about bootstraps. I suspect the best analysis is at the level of the social fabric that creates and implements the values. What kind of social fabric creates life, and what do we have instead?
My hypothesis is that the key missing piece is social infrastructure visibly dominated by couples and parents. If being a parent is easy, visible, and respected, it will be desirable.
This used to be provided by church and more broadly the social dominance of parents. When everyone checks in with the local parish every week, gets taught the holistic life wisdom, and interacts with functional families who help each other out in the quest for love, and all the institutions and social fabric are dominated by those same values, it's much easier to get the idea that you should overcome practical barriers to have children. Communities who still do this have high fertility, and those who don't do not.
There are a few reasons this is no longer the thing: the first is that few really believe in Jesus "that way" since Nietzsche and Darwin, removing the big intrinsic motivator to keep it all going. The second is that the dominant worldview in most institutions since the post-war revolution of 1945-1975 is anti-western crypto-marxism which is opposed to the traditional family and its infrastructure. I believe all the internet-driven atomization is downstream of these.
In some communities, there is now effectively zero social fabric dominated by heteronormative sexuality. Everything is free love polyamorous dating culture sex work, even when people don't think about it that way. The lasting legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution is that when opinionated parents encounter "that", they just check out and leave. They don't want to associate with it, and they don't feel the social authority or desire to fight it. It's understandable at least; parents just spent the last 100 years getting pushed out of every sexual and social authority, and getting a bayonet in the back when they refuse to go. We're well trained at this point. The result is the mating crisis, with the unmarried singles having zero guidance and the married parents having zero infrastructure.
The one exception is that some schools remain dominated by parents, but this doesn't help young singles who don't interact with them, and schools are also rapidly becoming more expensive and hostile than they already were.
The post-war revolution is now failing at the political level though, so it's a good time to fight it at the sexual level, by rebuilding the social infrastructure of high fertility as a counterculture. Could it be done? What would it take?
San Francisco has the lowest fertility among US cities at less than 1.5 children per woman. Vancouver is less than 1.0, the lowest in the western hemisphere. Among people I know in these cities, fertility is even less. Once they actually get and stay married they do alright having 2-3 children, but most people don't get there. It seems we have a "mating crisis".
I could roast all the 'cels endlessly for individually bad values. I think most proximally it is about individual values. If you really want it, you go get it. But values have their own material genealogy and it's not lectures about bootstraps. I suspect the best analysis is at the level of the social fabric that creates and implements the values. What kind of social fabric creates life, and what do we have instead?
My hypothesis is that the key missing piece is social infrastructure visibly dominated by couples and parents. If being a parent is easy, visible, and respected, it will be desirable.
This used to be provided by church and more broadly the social dominance of parents. When everyone checks in with the local parish every week, gets taught the holistic life wisdom, and interacts with functional families who help each other out in the quest for love, and all the institutions and social fabric are dominated by those same values, it's much easier to get the idea that you should overcome practical barriers to have children. Communities who still do this have high fertility, and those who don't do not.
There are a few reasons this is no longer the thing: the first is that few really believe in Jesus "that way" since Nietzsche and Darwin, removing the big intrinsic motivator to keep it all going. The second is that the dominant worldview in most institutions since the post-war revolution of 1945-1975 is anti-western crypto-marxism which is opposed to the traditional family and its infrastructure. I believe all the internet-driven atomization is downstream of these.
In some communities, there is now effectively zero social fabric dominated by heteronormative sexuality. Everything is free love polyamorous dating culture sex work, even when people don't think about it that way. The lasting legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution is that when opinionated parents encounter "that", they just check out and leave. They don't want to associate with it, and they don't feel the social authority or desire to fight it. It's understandable at least; parents just spent the last 100 years getting pushed out of every sexual and social authority, and getting a bayonet in the back when they refuse to go. We're well trained at this point. The result is the mating crisis, with the unmarried singles having zero guidance and the married parents having zero infrastructure.
The one exception is that some schools remain dominated by parents, but this doesn't help young singles who don't interact with them, and schools are also rapidly becoming more expensive and hostile than they already were.
The post-war revolution is now failing at the political level though, so it's a good time to fight it at the sexual level, by rebuilding the social infrastructure of high fertility as a counterculture. Could it be done? What would it take?
At party some months