BirthGap: Unaddressed, it is the End of Us.
Not the fictional End of Us, either. The end of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Jordan Peterson’s face morphed through a series of changes as he realized that nine out of ten women who don’t have children, wanted them. Ready to blame the culture of narcissism, he stalled confused, wrestling his face to neutral. I knew that fact from experience. For the many women I know who don’t have children, it is an abiding sorrow. From country to country, class to class, race to race, the sorrow is coruscating and it is ignored or diminished.
Only one in ten women actually don’t want children. One in ten is infertile, but the rest who don’t have children and that is one-third of us and counting, wanted them. By the time they are in their 40’s and incapable, badly.
Steven F Shaw searches for answers in Birth Gap, his masterwork documentary, the first part of which you can watch here. The most obvious is that they waited too long, thinking it was possible, their ‘career’ taking precedence. He interviews two prominent women in their late 30’s, both journalists. One of whom has a child, and having had one, wanted more but it was too late. “No one told us,” she said. Throughout her childhood and education, no one told her that the hammer would come down, that fertility drops off a cliff in your 30’s. That if you are 30 and childless, there is a 50% chance you won’t have children. The other, Megan McArdle, who writes for the Washington Post, left it too late. McArdle is a brilliant woman. If she didn’t know she was playing with fire, who could?
The catastrophic statistics run across all cultures but sub-Saharan Africa. Every industrialized country is racing to the bottom, which is to say extinction within four or five generations. Cities left to ruin, old people without help, decaying schools, hospitals, and no employees to be found. The unretrievable extinction of the culture and its people. I’ll leave it to you to follow Shaw’s math, but it is convincing. And he is by no means, alone in his analysis.
Europe, Japan and especially South Korea are by far the most in trouble. But Spain, Italy, the Scandis, are not far behind. America’s massive migration is masking the effect now, but, as Shaw doesn’t point out, but others have, immigrants quickly default to the current zeitgeist. Even in Muslim countries, pace Mark Steyn, women are choosing to not have children until too late. And forget multiples, even for the devout, it’s no longer on the cards.
To me, one underlying reason is the firehose of overpopulation propaganda that we have endured for the past fifty years. Women, in general, as kids, are good girls, accepting of authority, and compassionate. When told their desire for children is stressing the earth, they are more likely to accept that nonsense without question if it is coming from every authority figure in every sector of the culture. Today from kindergarten on, we are taught that we are a virus, a plague on the earth. Who among us, at the age of 15 or 25, can contravene that level of brainwashing? Contrast Peterson saying this week, “we can make the deserts bloom”. When was the last time you heard that sentiment from anyone in authority?
Contrast this dire picture with Jordan Peterson saying this week, “we can make the deserts bloom.”
The over-population myth is, in fact, entirely false. Leaving aside the preposterous idea that .2% carbon dioxide rising to .4% carbon dioxide is going to overturn nature, especially given that most of earth’s history shows CO2 to have been higher, that mostly the earth has been warmer and that we are still coming out of an ice age. Humans create magic, not putrefaction or a furnace. Almost no intellectual rigor has been applied to this nonsense, yet every ten year old thinks he or she is a burden.
Most of us know this thinking came out of the Club of Rome in the very early 70’s, an outfit formed by the richest families who ever lived, whose fortunes outclass that of Gates or Bezos or Musk by an order of magnitude. In their vaults and houses lie the real wealth of the world; they have hoarded, stripped and exploited the earth for hundreds of years. Piles of gold, art, precious stones, every hard asset has been taken and hidden. They can ruin anyone they choose, invisibly. From that position, they say jump, and everyone, Obama, Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, jumps.
In the late 60’s they decided that there were too many people, and with the founding of the Club of Rome, methodically brought in and bought off every susceptible thinker and politician, from Kissinger on. And their most enthusiastic capture, Paul Ehrlich, has to be the prophet whose predictions have failed more than any other on earth including Nostradamus or the ultra-repellent Aleister Crowley. Nothing Ehrlich said has proved out, nor has anything Al Gore has said. From what we know to be true, because most of their activity is hidden, these people have gathered together very powerful representatives from every culture or race, including the Jews, Saudis, the Chinese and so on. The Club of Rome may be run by old Europe, but its power encircles the world.
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Shaw discovered that, indeed, across the world, the sharp decrease in births happened at the same time as the founding of the Club of Rome. The oil shock of the early 70’s collapsed the birth rate. As William Fogel pointed out in the Fourth Great Awakening, and the Future of Egalitarianism, fifty percent of American women who graduated from college from 1968-1974 are childless. They were the first attacked. Erhlich’s hysterical cry of alarm shot through the culture, and was inexorably adopted by the “smartest”, most credentialed among us. Willing and compassionate, that cohort of women, coming of age during cresting prosperity and second wave feminism, deliberately destroyed their own happiness.
Did the Club of Rome engineer the oil shock? Given their history of malfeasance they certainly could have. And in point of fact, with every ‘recession’ and price shock of the past fifty years, more men and women de-emphasized childbearing and families. The charts are unassailable, and you can read about his research at birthgap.org.
Cruising TikTok for BirthGap reviews by young women, you run across a host of cross girls saying, essentially, “pay me”. And that’s the rub. Asking around friends with kids in their 20’s who claim they will not breed, you find two things. First of all, the parents are not allowed to bring it up, and secondly, when pressed, parents think it’s the throb of doom that runs through everything. If the kids have good jobs, and the ones I talk to, do, they don’t believe in a good future.
There is no growth. I know GDP sometimes goes over 3%, but it’s gamed. I studied economics at the graduate level, and if I can game the GDP, the people actually working those figures can do it. Any growth you notice is financed entirely by debt, by private-public-partnerships that lever government debt for profit.
Inflation is a flat out lie, since it doesn’t count food or energy. Since the Club of Rome, energy, which is the source of all growth has been curtailed, withdrawn and priced out of reach. Sure, there is digital growth, but growth grounded in community, beautiful, effulgent, green, radiating civic peace, harmony and hope? Not since the 50’s baby. Not since the Kennedy assassination have families had real hope, unless they were highly educated and privileged via IQs a couple standard deviations above normal. Nor can intelligence save everyone in that class. The rest are left fighting over scraps. And when the ‘polis’, the people aren’t seeing growth, other than debt, they lose hope.
One of the ways of drawing down the population is to attack men, and there has been an unrestrained war on men for three generations now. My closest family is almost all men, and I can see it in their lives, promise unfulfilled, and not, this is the sadder part, not for want of trying, education, ambition.
Of course, faced with hopelessness, men sheered off into self-indulgence and promiscuity. If women hated them, the culture hated them, then why not enjoy the little time they had? They were not invested in the future after all. Because for every childless woman, there is a childless man. One day, driving through the capital city near me around lunchtime, I was struck by the number of solitary older men, aimlessly walking the streets.
What do the 20-somethings on TikTok want? A husband who isn’t weak and “in search of himself”, a solid community. Men with initiative and integrity. Security. Civic peace. Safety. We don’t even have ordinary safety anymore. They want what our mothers wanted, and expected, they want everything that our elites have deliberately broken and blamed on us.
The sorrow of men is, in the face of cultural conditioning, unexpressed.
The rest of us, a full two-thirds, went on to marry and have children as before, two, three, four and more. There was no universal pulling back, it was just the vulnerable third that responded.
But even the lucky doubt themselves. At a reunion, my oldest friend, Tassy, stated, “the only thing that matters is work you have achieved on your own out in the world.” “Absolute nonsense,” I said, “have you lost your mind?” Tassy has three sons, and was known in her neighborhood as “the perfect woman”. When you visited, you were greeted by her mocking, smiling face, scotch in one hand, cigarette in the other, wonderful food and laughter. The upholstery and rugs in her house were worn through every few years because so many friends passed through that house. She created an oasis from “the real world”. She was well read, well travelled, a volunteer librarian at her sons’ school. I would put that up against being an accountant for UniLever any day.
Killing the feminine is easy. It is deliberately weak, accommodating, gentle, an easy murder for a technocrat. Are we going to lose that connection, those uproarious homes where dozens are made comfortable, fed, made to laugh, play games, across generations and colors and races? It's almost if we are shedding the inconvenient aspects of being human. The messiness of birth, the restrictions on self, the accommodations of marriage, the discipline it takes to build a home, a family are hard. The missed brunches and shopping hauls, the trips to Vegas, the endless search for “self” is finally, solitary, lonely. And this has all been directed and instigated deliberately.
Now femininity is defined as the arch grotesqueries of the Kardashians and black female singers with their anaconda taming and WAPs. Or the whiny narcissism, the garish made up faces, the self-castrated men wanting to be women because why? They want to be taken care of? They want what? As someone pointed out there are exactly NO women over 40 who have had children, who want to be men.
Equally men have been conditioned in the opposite direction, the skeezy round-heeled Mick Jagger who goes around impregnating and subsequently immiserating women, in one case to the point of suicide. I am just as susceptible to that music as anyone else, but let’s not kid ourselves that this ‘role model’ has been thoroughly malignant for men. I have friends who are friends of the Stones – they describe wizened little creatures, ancient far before their time. Like prunes, like shrunken heads with bodies still attached, every pleasure indulged, every prideful thought and feeling affirmed resulted in a kind of alien being, demonic, not human. Not healthy, effulgent and strong. Their appetites have gutted their humanness.
Here's some basic stats on “over-population”.
Arable land covers 31 million square kilometers.
If every person on earth were given 1,000 square meters to grow food, we would all fit into Brazil.
If every family of four were given 700 square meters to grow food for itself, the entire world would fit into Iran.
Vegetables for a family of four can be grown on 200 square meters
If every human stood next to each other, four people per one square meter, we would all fit into the Istrian peninsula in Spain.
For millennia, human life was about the protection of the female while she had children, and protection afterwards for what she had given us. With that made selfish and anti-human, we have lost our moorings.
Carrying a child and giving birth is the most human, body-centered act we experience. It is both mystical and mind-blowingly difficult and painful.
The human ability to create life, biological life, while carrying around a great big brain capable of exploring the universe is one of the most unhackable aspects of being human. Most AI people think that within three generations we will be half human, half machine, the human part no doubt, shorn of difficulty, appetite, probably even lust. But depending on your status, with sharply enhanced intelligence. One need only spend time with the highly educated, force-grown in elite schools to realize how bloodless and detached humans can become. Human culture, our arts rise from our biological experience, our sensate experience, our ‘feelings’, which are only strengthened by our humanness.No doubt there will be artificial wombs creating people who are exploring their precious selves, but like test tube chlldren, like sperm donor children, are they not unhooking themselves from the long sweep of human history that defines them? Erasing heritage, skipping the biological adaptations that mean genuine human development? Moving straight to hackable animals of WEFer dreams. Sooner or later, we will lose what’s left of our fertility.
We are losing women like my friend, Tassy, and those women make life livable, their presence meant mercy, kindness, gentleness, no matter who you were, you were enclosed, encircled, loved.
Jordan Peterson articulated another path this week. “We can make the deserts bloom….imagine a future where your life can be abundant and the lives of your children abundant. Where human beings acted ethically and courageously and aimed upwards…. there isn’t a problem we couldn’t solve.” We must get out from under the yoke of the damned, and many of our leaders are the damned. We recognize them by their fruits of war, plague, famine, lack, anger and division. One day soon, they will farm us for profit no more.
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