The postwar American middle class life pattern looks like this:
- Child begins attending a daycare or preschool outside the home at around 3 to allow both parents to work full time.
- The child attends a K-12 curriculum shaped by the needs of the state
- After graduation, almost all of the middle class students will go to an undergraduate college
- Those students are not likely to marry until they have both graduated and attained some level of career stability to avoid social awkwardness.
The trend didn’t really solidify until the GI Bill went into effect, and it’s only fading now that the expense of attending university is so high, and the status it buys no longer goes as far as it once did in a hollowed out and over-regulated society.
This is the life pattern that creates what some others have called the demographic shredder. It becomes worse when the most high-achieving segments of society delay having children even longer than they might have, otherwise, in order to attend graduate school, which further expends money on tuition that could be going to feeding and caring for children.
Even if the US government were capable of righting its fiscal ship without causing even more political instability, it has the more severe problem of a middle class that has been acculturated into abolishing itself. This is often obviously the case when teachers paid for by the parents of middle class children tell those children that their entire race is evil and needs to be destroyed.
It’s a little less obvious when the same institutions that parents think will give their children a leg up in life actually make them less disciplined as employees, less capable of becoming good wives and husbands, and less dynamic as creative people. They pay to have their children hobbled in order to make them and their issue acceptable to the egalitarian state.
Competing ideals of middle class attainment, coming out of regions like Silicon Valley, say that most of those ‘mandatory’ life stages can be bypassed given hard work and talent. But, given the institutional inertia of generations of education mania, it’s not likely that it’ll have much of a direct impact. The larger impact is likely to be from that the remnants of the middle class just exhausts its resources, and is no longer capable of paying the enormous fees demanded by the gatekeepers to officially recognized status.
Obviously, not everyone is going to make it out of this one alive or even particularly OK or sane. But clarifying the errors of the past at least may help the people in the present and the near future who do find a way to recognize a thing or two about why everything went so catastrophically wrong.
I think that the people most susceptible to this lifestyle are the ones whose fertility is most affected, so it will wipe itself out. In the process, something worse may take its place, like Islam.
Yes, they will annihilate themselves and their families, at least financially, and then their runt offspring (my generation) will be further diminished.
I’m sure that most of our people would rather go out with a whimper, but whimpering animals tend to attract some swift bangs, so not so likely.
Better be ready to bang back (so to speak…)
Homo Sapiens is the only species wherein reproductive success *inversely* correlates to material abundance. This is because the upper class in any society spares no expense buying (and bidding up the prices of) status symbols to keep their children the upper class. They try to concentrate their wealth and power by having fewer kids, which ultimately leads to their extinction.
The upper class magnanimously strives to pass this attitude down to the middle and lower classes via mass media and public education, thinking it a cause rather than an effect of their own high status.
Jim Donald cites female emancipation as the root cause. I doubt this, for since ancient times, every society that achieved two or three generations of physical and nutritional security emancipated its women. Even Islam didn’t stop the Abbasid Caliphate from liberating women in the 800s, with disastrous results.
Only in societies where the upper class makes status its main priority.
I think this is already happening in some places – New Zealand’s South Island, for example. University intake of locals is way down, substituted for international students, nearly everyone has a home garden even in the 2 largish cities. Young people staying in their region and joining the family business / farm. The majority of my high school class (2004) have kids already, have managed to buy property (especially since the Christchurch earthquakes) and this year is set to be the first in which more Kiwis repatriate than emigrate to Australia. The old path to success is mostly closed, and people are reacting.
Sunshine Mary has written a bit about this trend in her area on her blog: http://thesunshinethiryblog.com/
I see a little of it here further south in the Midwest, but not as much. Enrollment in the local university is definitely down, and they are trying to bring in more foreign suckers.
Isn’t that the very definition of “upper class”?
Are you suggesting that the system is utterly unstable and is not fated for long in this world?
I see the USG going the opposite way of the Ottomans. No Ups and downs and slow, almost endless, decay. I envision a horrific systems collapse and hellish misery world wide, but nowhere more than the post-industrial and multicultural West.
Reducing population is a good idea in places like India and Nigeria. But in the USA, you are right that we need more middle class people giving birth to middle class people. As a democracy it lacks the will to do anything that displeases the majority i.e. women who would vote for becoming 3D printers of human resources again.
Years ago, I still believed in the old Hanlon’s Razor — today, while it still holds true that most of our elected are stupid, the grand scheme is no coincidence. And for that, I think it is wise to attribute the destruction of western life to malice instead of stupidity, while we can give a few courtesy points to those useful idiots who run the errands.
Short of revolution, what options does one have? As long as you don’t have the media, you are not going to be able to influence culture enough to make a change that sticks. It’s such a dirty strategy; covert actors acting behind the veil of democracy to dismantle the very host they are parasites of.
Not a good generation to wake up to, but I figure the previous ones have felt similar issues. Was there ever a golden age? Perhaps before the great wars, when we still had leaders who could be held accountable for their actions, instead of the sham we call democracy now. I guess that’s why they had to go.
Oh, but I digress. I only came here to say good work, I enjoy reading what you write.
Like many who come to this excellent blog, I am one of the active producers who help pay to keep the whole mess going. Self-employed, highly taxed, no gubmint benefits of any sort. One of the things that has always peaked my curiosity is – to quote Barbossa from the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” (and in my book the only one worth watching): “I’m curious. After killing me what is it you’re planning on doing next?”.
It looks like by all measures they are trying to destroy the productive classes. Once they are successful with that, who are they expecting to pay for all those lavish public sector pensions and benefits; SS/Medicare/Medicaid, etc? At some point they either have to get off the backs of the productive classes (unlikely), or there are going to have to be significant purges of the ranks of the parasitical classes by the head parasites.
It would be easier if they were rational. Don’t seem to be.