One area where the political left has experienced almost total success since the 1960s has been in successfully imposing by force and persuasion a new fertility pattern on the Western world. Historians commonly attribute many of the changes to oral birth control, but changing mores also had quite a lot to do with it as well.
While women have been encouraged to delay child birth, be promiscuous, take contraception, and perform the roles of men in the working world, other forces have rushed in to supplant the missing mothers and home-makers.
In the domestic roles, we have some minor improvements in automation, but perhaps the larger change has been in things like food and dress — people now tend to buy ready-made meals (at greater expense to the household, health, and quality of life), wear simplistic, clownish clothing, and outsource most child-rearing responsibilities to the state.
The last is perhaps the most important part — because the family has been broken down as an independent, decentralized set of mini-institutions, most of its roles have been subsumed by corporations and the central state. None of those gains would be possible without the new morals around gender, sexuality, and contraception.
Further, the lack of issue from the native stock increases demand (at least temporarily) from corporations to increase skilled immigration to the country. Because the best of the natives are curbing their fertility to make time for husband-and-wife careers, they have no time to raise their own children adequately to become highly productive. Instead, the hope has been to skim the best of the foreigners, educating them in the United States, and using global trade to make up for domestic deficits in quality of governance and corporate management.
As we’re seeing in Europe especially — but the United States as well — this complex isn’t properly sustainable. It’s not even sustainable in the corporations that tend to push for greater immigration — too much cultural diversity in any institution increases communication costs, which reduces competitiveness and effectiveness without any proof of compensatory benefits.
The solutions aren’t apt to be all that simple, in part because most of the culture has adopted this new family pattern with gusto. It’s become awkward to behave in the best interests of the broader community, and socially adroit to bend to the needs of the state and its partners. This is a pressure that young women in particular tend to feel from their peers — to conform to what the state wants from them, rather than other sources of influence — even real interests of their own families for perpetuation.
Just in terms of what’s socially acceptable for the better quarter of Americans — it’s embarrassing to even think about having children before the early to mid-30s, like admitting to being a bumpkin who loves monster truck rallies. To have more than two children is to appear to be like you belong in a trailer park. The fashion is to be suicidal, hard-working, pill-popping, and eager to divorce.
But some temporary awkwardness in that department is likely to be what’s necessary to keep the show going in the West, despite all the difficulties which are likely to arise.
As you have pointed out, it’s supposed to be *common sense* for women to not worry about marriage and children possibilities until 30, albeit the fact that female fertility starts declining at the oh-so-inconvenient-for-my-career age of 27…
“It’s important for women and men to understand their reproductive potential declines with age,” said Dr. Victor Y. Fujimoto, IVF program director at UCSF, adding that the problem “probably starts a little earlier” than most people realize.
http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Study-speeds-up-biological-clocks-Fertility-2843352.php
Common sense for the upper middle class and better, which has some pretty terrible consequences for the society at large
To me it’s the sex ratio, reproductive age women vs men. In a falling birthrate, there will be fewer younger women vs older men. And compound that with the shorter window for women vs that of men. Then toss in obesity. And you have this ratio that is extremely favorable to the bargaining position of women.
There was a drop in teen pregnancies which “confounded” researchers. They assumed some flat level that was unavoidable. And it was obvious to me. The value of being a single reproductive age female, both socially/sexually and economically is now so high that young girls, even those less attractive girls that might have seen pregnancy as “desirable” in the past, are now refusing to lose that value and damage those goods via childbirth.
It has less to with cultural programming and listening to messages then sheer sexual economics. When there is line waiting to buy what you are selling, then raise the price. And keep raising it until the line dwindles. Sexual capital is what you buy with other capital that you may possess, social, economic, and cultural. And when you born with it in spades then you maintain it and capitalize on it as long as you can.
And the reality of a bad sex ratio is that it further reduces the birthrate which further harms the sex ratio. This is a cycle that began in 1962, began to manifest in 1983 in the form of a negative sex bias for men and has been getting worse every since. To me this is the basis for the male angst that drives the manosphere.
But I analyzed the birthrate, marriage rate, age at marriage of both men and women during the 20th century. During the late 20s birthrate fell, and then plummeted to a historical low in 1932. From 1932 onward there was an increasing birthrate. And the slope of the increase was highest from 1932 until 1955. The women that formed the thrust of second wave feminism are those women born during the 40s. Those women suffered the most extreme sex ratio. The men their age and slightly older encountered a flood of younger women. During the 50s and into the 70s, the rate of marriage was highest, the age of marriage dropped for 26 for men and 22 for women down to 22 and 20 respectively.
When women were faced with competition, they locked in a mate early both via marriage and via children. And that low age at marriage and the marriage rate remained high through the early adult years of the baby boomers. It only began to fade when after the birth control pill came into existence in 1962, the birth rate fell. The age at marriage began to increase in 1983, when those women that were born in 1962 and later reached adulthood. It was at that time that I began to feel it, to see the ratio of men to women in nightclubs begin to skew towards men. I was 28. Up until that time, the ratios in clubs were easily 50:50. Attractive girls were everywhere. After 1983, at that began to slowly change. Roosh posted photo of a DC bar last year and the odds were easily 8 to 1. It is as horrible now as it ever has been. But it will get worse.
Pity the poor men born in the latter part of the 90s and later. Two serious dips in birthrate occurred during the 2002-2003 recession and then an even worse dip in 2008-2011. Class size for 8th graders next year are significantly smaller than this year, about 20% at our local school. And the later dip is even worse. And my eye test over the past five years says that most of what I have seen is obese fat women pushing strollers.
To me the solution for this is to import women. I think some fast track K-2 visa program could be implemented. An American citizen could pay $5000 and complete the application for the k-2 visa online, then go and personally get and bring back his “fiancee”. No waiting for processing. If she fucks him over, so what. It’s another female body in country. But the reality is that it would take about 20 million imported women to break the stranglehold that the current sex ratio has on this culture.
Diversity is not the goal. Isolated groups are the goal. Democracy fails when the population is divided and no group has a majority. That’s the norm in Africa and we probably saw the best example with Iraq. The Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds were three groups that refused to mix and started making decisions to further the groups instead of their own interests. The goal is to build similar proportions with Europeans and Hispanics corresponding to Shiites and Sunnis. Then Africans or Muslims can be the third party. Which ever one resorts to violence to the degree necessary. The goal is to make us abandon democracy.
The pattern of women waiting to a later age to marry and having a smaller amount of children than they could is not new, and goes back a lot further than the 60s. See: Albion’s Seed. This was the pattern in those areas of England where the Pilgrims came from. Since the Pilgrims’ descendants have intellectually colonized most of the world except for the parts where the inhabitants are too stupid to be susceptible to Pilgrim religion, we see this pattern globally today, in a more extreme version.
Another perspective is that this is just the natural extension of Fabian Socialism, where the State consolidates power by breaking down the bonds of which social institutions are composed, like an exothermic chemical reaction. Through integration of cities, the family has been decoupled from community. Through the co-option of churches, community has been decoupled from religion.Through compulsory public schooling, childbearing has been decoupled from parenting. Through the reform of the marriage system and public morality, marriage has been decoupled from childbearing. Through birth control and reform of mores, sex has been decoupled from childbearing. Etc. Every step released massive amounts of energy, and some of that energy was absorbed by the State, in what De Jouvenel describes as the progressive consolidation of power. Most of the energy, of course, was turned into social waste heat. The natural end outcome is that each individual, naked and powerless, stands alone, facing the featureless obelisk of the State, even those involved in its functioning, with no family, community, religion to stand between them, and with no internal moral anchor to lend him strength. He is completely subject to the State’s will.
This is more or less what the Fabians and other socialists wanted (the Fabians preferred the soft sell.) They saw the organic order as wasteful and inefficient, the relic of ancient processes. By breaking those bonds, they would rebuild in an efficient way to make society better from a Utilitarian point of view (minimizing suffering and unhappiness.) This is Carlyle’s Pig Philosophy, the reduction of man to a sort of talking, upright swine. From a religious point of view, it’s an affront to G-d. But even from a secular point of view, the problem with such a system, which requires the conscious and purposeful breaking, alienation and enstupidation of 99% so that they can efficiently be led and managed by the 1%, is that it inevitably ends up breaking, alienating and enstupidating the 1% as well, leading to total dysfunction as the leaders end up believing their own Noble Lie and making up new, more destructive ones. This is the difference between American leadership in the 1950s and today-today’s guys drink their own Kool-Aid.
The only way out is for individuals to form/adhere to communities which have proven resilient to the consolidation of Power.
I did think a little of the older institutions of delayed child rearing. They were of a different character than today’s, but you could make an argument that one transmuted into the other.
It’s easier to understand Puritan-rooted feminism when you read how brilliant many of their women were up until the early 20th century. The more progress that the feminists made, the less plausible the claims to possible female equality.
Mattress Girl is a great example of elite stupefaction. Is she the future of Judaism in America?
Mattress girl is not Jewish. Judaism is matrilineal. She’s half Asian, her last name is Ashkenazi, therefore, her mother is not Jewish. Judging by her behavior, dress and demeanor, her mother did not convert, so she’s not Jewish. And her behavior is pretty typical of American elites, but very atypical of the behavior of Torah Jews.
So, no, she’s not the future of Judaism in American, but she might be the future of non-Torah Jews.
Rabbi Kahane pointed out that if you didn’t take the Torah seriously, there was absolutely no reason to avoid assimilating, and she’s living proof. Both the victim and perpetrator of the Cathedral’s insanity.
Have you read the Secret History of American Education?
You mean “Underground History…” — yes, read it twice back to back in 2005. It shook my world view.
Right, underground history.
I also thought it was very good-until then, I assumed what I’d experienced was the result of general incompetence, not a thorough plan (executed with increasing incompetence as it was.)
I did find the author’s insistence that NYC Puerto Ricans would be creative geniuses if not for the school system funny.
I’m sure that they would be much better, but not geniuses. That line of argument was quite misleading to me for some years.