Thread by @Tinkzorg

There's a real elephant in the room to texts like this, which is that the world population in 1920 was less than two billion people, and a hundred years later it is approaching eight billion people. A 400% increase in a single century.

theamericanconservative.com/articles/elon-…

If your attitude is "bro, population growth is no big deal", that's okay, but you have to ask: how many more centuries of 400% growth do you find practical? One, for a cool 32 billion people in 2120? Two, for measly 128 billion human souls sharing this vast planet by 2220?

These arguments basically work on a sort of "supply side economics" logic to population growth; if you have more people, the rest will fall into place. Not only does this logic *not* apply to any other organism on God's green Earth, but any medieval peasant would find it absurd.

It's not like people in 1522 found new farmland magically appearing next to them the more kids they had. Agricultural land was the heart and soul of settled humanity's power for ten thousand years up until recently. If you didn't have land to work, you starved.

In industrial civilization, this logic is not gone, just obscured. Instead of the bushel of wheat, you have the barrel of oil. A child of the industrial age without access to cheap energy is about as doomed as a peasant's son without any land to work.

Given that the world is currently in a bit of an energy crisis, with factories in China being shut down due to lack of enough cheap and accessible energy inputs, the *evidence* for energy resources just magically plopping up the more kids people have seems rather thin at present.

At the very least, it's not *guaranteed* that the energy crisis in China would be *less severe* if China had to supply energy to three billion people instead of one billion. Hell, if you wanted to go out on a limb, you might even say the crisis would be a whole lot worse!

In general, a good rule of thumb here is that beyond all ideology, humans are just animals, and like any other animal, we tend to have as many kids as we can reasonably get away with. Even pro-natalist groups like American mormons are seeing family sizes steadily shrink.

If you ask them why this is, it's not such a huge mystery at all. Kids just aren't as affordable as they used to be for a growing number of people, especially seeing as having the kid is not the only role of a parent: making sure the kid doesn't end up a pauper is important too!

Anyway, at the very least, people should just lay their cards out on the table. There's a whole lot of space available between being some satanic anti-natalist and saying that environmental and economic limits have *always* constrained how many kids people have.

The prime example people use to "disprove" Malthus and claim that constraints no longer matter, the green revolution, was us dramatically boosting food outputs per acre by a process of *mining* inputs for fertilizers. Those inputs are now exploding in price due to shortage.

At the end of the day, though it sounds harsh, most of the natalist debate is just cope and barely hidden anxiety on both sides. On the anti-natalist side, a bunch of people whose lifestyle preclude them from affording kids are going "uhhh I totally didn't *want*
kids anyway!!"

Spoiler alert: they wanted those kids.

On the other side, you have people essentially trying to apply "if you will it, it is no dream" to extremely real physical and economical limits. South Korea - the country with the absolute WORST, most apocalyptic nativity situation - *heavily* restricts porn!

The idea that allowing or banning it really matters one jot for the purposes of fertility is bunk. In really conservative muslim societies, like Afghanistan under the Taliban, you aren't exactly gonna find a lot of porn industry lobbyist hanging around in Kabul.

In those societies, getting a wife is simple: pay 10.000$ or whatever the going bride price happens to be at the moment, and have a decent income on top of that. If you can't do that, you're in no position to take responsibility for a family.

The various reasons behind the truly *global* downward demographic pressure currently are varied and quite fascinating, but suffice it to say, if you think you can fight these pressures by banning porn or teaching men how to be men again, good luck.

Your Will, in that scenario, will be about as useful as King Canute's even more impressive Will commanding the waves to stop lapping against his feet as he stood barefoot on the shore. Again, the Will was certainly there alright, but the waves had no ears with which to listen.

In a way, the biggest problem with today's conservatives is that they are in fact far too liberal no matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise. It's not their fault, as truly stepping outside your time is quite impossible, as Spengler very accurately pointed to.

Most pro-nativity people who wish for a return to a less fallen age where people have kids are certainly adept at celebrating *life*, which is great and all. But what they airbrush out of that picture is the fact that in those halcyon days, *death* was incredibly present!

People didn't have tons of kids because they expected all of them to become prosperous farmers or graduate college, they had tons of kids because *most of them died young*. Even if you were an actual king, you still expected some kids to just not make it.

In a way, the idea of a "return" to "conservative tradition" that only talks about the life part and not the death part is completely fake, a liberal Disneyland version of older societies. In those societies, death just automatically culled the excess population.

Have too much population growth without the land to support it? Enjoy the malnutrition while it lasts, as some sort of plague is likely coming down the road to kill much of the now-weakened population. Our forefathers were far, far more used to living with death than we are.

I don't post this to say "kids dying is cool actually and more people should wish for that to happen more often". Quite the opposite, death is pretty uncool, which is why in modern society we do almost whatever to avoid having to pretend it exists.

But at the end of the day, our way of life - where again, we do basically anything to keep death from being a familiar presence we have to live with - is *not* just that old peasant life with 2 kids instead of 10.

From the year 0 to the year 1000, the human population grew from 200 million to 300 million. And not because people didn't have kids. Massive population growth has only happened once in human history. It's not some normal state that has been lost.