Counter-Currents
Ivan Bogdanov, The Apprentice, 1893
1,232 words
Mei Xiang’s week-old Giant Panda cub died earlier this week, delivering another disappointing setback to our attempts to breed these endangered creatures in captivity. We can’t seem to compel pandas to consistently reproduce, despite applying some of our finest minds with veritable blank checks to the project.
More pointedly, we can’t seem to find a policy solution to humanity’s declining birth rate. The natalist campaigns in many European countries have not been successful enough, and even Stoddard’s “rising tide of color” appears to be ebbing.
Many of the familiar canards about human population growth aren’t supported by the data. Race is apparently a secondary factor at best. For example, Black American birth rates have leveled off. While the incoming Hispanics have a high birth rate, that birth rate plummets after the first generation. As Hans Rosling’s popular TED talk demonstrates, even religious confession has apparently very little to do with birth rates. The only strong correlations Rosling can find with lowering birth rates are lowering mortality rates and increasing income levels.
Had Rosling taken a more granular look at the data, he would have identified smaller trends which suggest that income and mortality are themselves secondary. An excellent must-read article in Foreign Policy, “The Return of the Patriarchy,” suggests what I believe to be the cardinal consideration: the iron necessity of male social dominance. Regardless of race, IQ, or religious affiliation, a socio-economic paradigm in which females no longer depend on males for defense and support is one in which women . . . like sullen pandas, simply lose interest in mating . . . or at least in the useful reproductive sort of mating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78
Contrary to what Rosling infers from his bird’s eye comparison of “Christianity” and “Islam,” religion can be a decisive a factor. Fundamentalist Mormon, Amish, and Orthodox Jewish communities are all three from advanced races. All three communities have IQs which are well above the global average. All three are relatively wealthy, as well. While all three belong to one or the other Abrahamic tradition in some way, they’re about as theologically distinct from one another as possible. And yet, what they all have in common is patriarchy. What they all have in common is acute male social dominance, with exclusively male fraternal hierarchies.
Feminist Panda yearns for a worthy mate
The paradox at the heart of the breakdown of sustainable gender relations in industrialized nations is that women strive for as much success as possible while also having a very strong visceral desire for a male partner who’s socially superior to herself. As industrialization and social welfare initiatives have brought women as a group up to parity (and in some senses beyond parity) with males, the individual females are less and less capable of finding individual males who are socially dominant to themselves. Their innate appetites for wealth and power are now in conflict with their innate appetites for mates whose wealth and power exceeds their own, leaving them to thumb longingly through Fifty Shades of Grey on their lunch breaks from their comfortable salaried careers.
In an attempt to thwart this death spiral, Iran shocked the global community this month by imposing widespread bans on women in a variety of degree programs in many of its largest Universities. This is an inconceivable reversal of “progress” as perceived by the contemporary Western minds, unthinkable even among America’s more traditionalist Christians. A defining characteristic of contemporary Western thought is its weak and sentimental (perhaps feminine?) failure to make tough decisions even in the face of calamity. Like Pentti Linkola‘s metaphorical men who continue filling the lifeboat until it sinks, our own ideologues and policymakers would rather just demographically dwindle into the pages of history than do something as extreme and hurtful as tell an ambitious young woman that she’s not allowed to be an engineer.
While the future does indeed belong to groups willing and able to make these sorts of uncomfortable decisions, I believe we should focus first on finding ways to increase the absolute social status of men. Is it a zero-sum gender war with the solution being to harshly and firmly limit the ambitions and horizons of women? Perhaps, but I believe there’s a more constructive solution. To reintroduce the traditional gender dynamic, I propose that we focus more on pulling our males up than on pushing our females down.
The path forward isn’t through discouraging female education and ambition altogether, but through the defense and development of male fraternity in martial vanguards, sacred rites, and mercantile guilds. While the first two are indeed vital and necessary, they’re insufficient in our mercantile age. If we truly wish to raise male status and achievement in a constructive manner, in an era where status and achievement is primarily defined in economic terms, then we must revisit the concept of apprenticeship, of stewardship in identifying young men of the proper potential and inclination, and guiding them in the mastery of a lucrative craft.
The tradition of guild apprenticeship survives in patriarchal communities, but has virtually disappeared in the West’s dominant culture. To the extent that any spirit of apprenticeship remains, it’s almost entirely limited to women and minorities being encouraged to uplift and advance their own. The recent Hollywood film Finding Forrester tells the story of a reclusive White male played by Sean Connery apprenticing a promising Black youth in his craft of writing. The Blind Side, Precious, and an entire genre of movies featuring liberal White (and light) teachers engaging hip inner-city students all encourage us to target the racial and sexual other for stewardship and apprenticeship. The classic play Pygmalion tells the story of a British socialite taking a female street rat under his wings and vaulting her into high society.
What you don’t see often are stories about our own natural leaders targeting and grooming our next generation of young men for success.
Fraternity is vital, but it must be a patriarchal sort of fraternity. I found James O’Meara’s recent article (“Wild Boys vs. ‘Hard Men‘”) enlightening, but I believe he suggests a dichotomy and conflict between family and fraternity which is both inconsistent with the historical record and inconsistent with our social development and reproductive success. As the aforementioned Foreign Policy article suggests, patriarchy, fraternity, and strong traditional families are a veritable sociocultural trinity reinforcing one another. While there will always be brotherhoods which entirely eschew families in pursuit of their prerogatives and there will always be family men unencumbered by meaningful fraternal bonds, robust and ascendent civilizations are found at the intersection of family and fraternity.
The recent decline of the effete urban industrialized male is unsurprising; the recent disinterest of our women in submitting to them is unsurprising; and the demographic consequences of this breakdown in the psychosexual dynamics of the mating process is unsurprising. Some of the manosphere’s “game” tactics can be useful in helping our young men mimic some of the affectations of males with high social status and cast aside many of the feminist and egalitarian tropes they’ve inculcated from our prevailing culture, but the only lasting solution is a return to fraternity. The return on investment in a return to fraternity will be a generation of young men with the skill, status, and discipline necessary to inspire our young women to make the ultimate investment in them.
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26 comments
The world has just turned upside down if this is true.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/09/24/israels-netanyahu-and-the-jewish-neocons-in-america-vow-revenge/
“Like Pentti Linkola‘s metaphorical men who continue filling the lifeboat until it sinks, our own ideologues and policymakers would rather just demographically dwindle into the pages of history than do something as extreme and hurtful as tell an ambitious young woman that she’s not allowed to be an engineer.”
This is SO true. I am convinced that the Left is simply fanatical about “equality.” In other words, faced with iron-clad proof that an egalitarian social experiment has failed or is leading to ruin, they simply disregard the evidence because their principles are more important to them even than civilization itself. There is no reasoning with these people. The best we can do is expose them for the madmen they really are.
The issue of fraternity cannot be addressed separately from the issue of sorority. In post-industrial society, isolated women cannot raise large numbers of children without a great deal of help from her partner. But a connected woman with other women to rely on needs less support from her partner. Therefore, whites need to concentrate on same-sex fellowship for both men and women.
I have heard it said that groups of women functioning without male supervision and authority are proto-feminist and pose a threat to male dominance, but that doesn’t seem to have happened among the Amish.
I’ve read a lot of books about birth rates. The simple conclusion is that in the first world the only way to increase our birth rate is to have a culture that values having lots of children. This is something that Amish, Mormons, first generation catholic mestizos, criminals, and those with lesser education do very well in America. I’d recommend the book “The Religious Shall Inherit the Earth” by Kaufmann about the importance of culture predicting birth rates, and why other variables; income, government incentives, tax levels, are more or less negligible (cannot statistically predict birth rates).
For a book about the particular culture (that values having lots of children) that I’d personally recommend for people is the book “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” by Caplan. The book uses cutting edge behavioral genetic research showing that parents have influence on their kids religious and political beliefs but not much else (there’s a huge list of things tested for)- and that parents overestimate the costs of having children and vastly underestimate the benefits. I’ve made a commitment myself to have at least 5 kids (and I hope to teach my kids the 5 rule too). I’ve tried showing this book to other people explaining its huge significance for our culture but I don’t think they comprehended it (in college I was a statistics minor that had to study behavioral genetics (Arthur Jensen) for economic forecasting so maybe it’s because most people don’t have the proper background to understand the significance).
I think all this- detailing both the significance of culture in predicting birth rates and the type of culture for having big families- would be a good topic for a post on this site.
Ditto Tottori.
I’ve wanted to read both books for some time, but he has adequately distilled the contents.
Prosperity is the problem. The common factor among Orthodox Jews, Anabaptists, poor secular whites, and first-gen Catholic mestizos (in reality these are more indigenous than mixed), is poverty, or an insistence on simulating poverty and being plain, average, ordinary, part of the tribe. Low individualism is the starting point for high birthrate.
‘Tis something to which the majority of memsahibs will never submit — unless forced. The more a woman has invested psychologically in cultivating her “self”, the less she will have left for baby. We’re dealing with a civilization that produces narcissism not only in whites, but in every race that assimilates to it.
This subject has come up lately on MajorityRights, if anyone’s interested. James Bowery’s quirky proposal is rotating parenting in what he is calling a “creche”. Of course, the parents for such an experiment are totally lacking.
If you read Richard Lynn’s book “Eugenics” he shows that even countries with the best economic incentives for having children are not able to increase their birth rate by much- like Singapore, Canada, and some European countries. This point is also talked about in that book “Selfish Reasons to Have More Children” but with citations to studies instead of discussing them.
These low birth rate countries are so worried about their birth rate that they spend millions of dollars on studies to find out EXACTLY how to increase their birth rate (Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was personally interested in enacting Eugenic laws and creating a Eugenics culture in Singapore himself). And their conclusion in these studies is always that the culture is the only major determining factor in first world nations for changing the birth rate NOT economic incentives (which typically increases birth rates only by a small almost negligible amount).
I think that saying prosperity IS THE problem for our birth rate is too simple minded and doesn’t fit well with the data (such as rich Mormons or rich protestant baptists in the American South that have birth rates much higher than other groups).
When governments enact policy trying to economically advantage people having children- like tax breaks, free money per child, all of what Singapore did- it has negligible effects. This is why they spent all this money on these studies. But when Singapore in the early 90’s started an advertisement campaign aimed at creating a culture in their universities and amongst the college educated that values having more children- the birth rate of college educated Singaporeans massively increased. (That example is in Eugenics by Richard Lynn)
I think most people in our movement are totally out of touch with how birth rates change- we often massively overestimate the effects of government economic policy but massively underestimate the effects of a culture that promotes a high birth rate (which could be lead by the government, the religion, or by individuals like me who have read and well understand the books that value having a high birth rate and parenting books). I really like the idea of organic social organizations of men or women that are more traditional and value strong, healthy, big families. This would be the perfect social climate to increase birth rates by directing the culture of those groups in that direction.
I see no mystery here.
“I think that saying prosperity IS THE problem for our birth rate is too simple minded and doesn’t fit well with the data (such as rich Mormons or rich protestant baptists in the American South that have birth rates much higher than other groups).”
Let’s call it simplistic to avoid calling me simple-minded — for now. I have no clue what rich Protestant Baptists in the American South are doing to keep their birth rate up, and have never read about it, so mention whatever resource would enlighten me.
As for rich Mormons: their explicit religious ethos seems to be increase, and they raise their children relatively apart from surrounding society. Salt Lake City ensures a measure of insulation impossible elsewhere. Matt Parrott himself could best opine on this, perhaps.
But the fact that you named two groups known for pronounced religious sentiments, and Parrott mentions three others, very strongly indicates the role of moderately to extremely xenophobic religion in the formation of reproductively self-sustaining subgroups.
Another variable we’ve left out so far is this: all of these subgroups were formed no less than two-hundred years ago. As breeding populations, then, they possess an ongoing historical momentum which cannot be recreated on the spot. It takes some time. Jews have been a distinct breeding population for over two-thousand years. Pre-Columbian populations have been breeding among themselves for much longer, of course, and we their resettlement in America is tantamount to the exploitation of a vast new biosphere offering (artificial) resources quite beyond what European settlers had going on their arrival, and could have imagined. Here, if nowhere else, prosperity certainly is the problem, as recent life expectancy data [poor whites lower, blacks on par, Hispanics higher] make clear.
So with this lens, look again at Singapore: what percentage is “religious”? Almost none, I would guess. I didn’t know about that advertising campaign and am surprised it worked, though not completely: I’m not aware of any psych study measuring narcissism or perceptions of individuality internationally, but I would hazard that if such were done, Europeans and North Americans would come out on top [we might, in the meantime, interpret the higher incidence of neuroticism and suicide in the West (and Japan!) as negative proof of just this]. Given that Singapore is, what, majority Chinese, my guess is they would not place as highly. If I am right, then the success of Singapore’s baby-drive is explicable: less narcissism to get in the way of women sacrificing the ever-receding pursuit of their own egos for the increase of the race.
I know all that appears a little too cut-and-dried for comfort, but I believe narcissism, or excess individuality in white women — encompassing all the usual appurtenances of urban white ‘lifestyle’: Facebook, gadgets, clothing, personalized playlists, drugs, drinking, pets [this one is HUGE with white women], idiosyncratic diets, record collections, books, ‘tastes’ of all kinds, obsession with art / kulchur, etc. ad naus., in a word the SWPL majority — over a foundation of a genetic outbreeding in general, is what prevents prosperous, urbanized whites from replacing themselves. Shit, can you imagine how most would react to the very phrase “replacing themselves”? Individuality, individualism are mere synonyms of narcissism; to a people obsessed with their own private selves, the worst fate of all is to let go of it, to let it be submerged in something greater.
I used to think the whole matter reduces to “urban conditions”. But it isn’t that exactly. Yes, urbanization makes white people feel crowded, anxious, reluctant to take up diminished living space with more bodies; yet what if it isn’t crowding itself, but the personalization of that living space which makes them reluctant to share it with what is, by an honest reckoning, a loud, ravenous little parasite with its own solipsistic mission on earth?
Too little attention is paid to how people actually live to arrive at a full picture of what is depressing birth rates. Sociologists are looking for one magic variable among the same tired set to explain it. What they aren’t doing is looking at popular kulchur, which isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s very risky to hypothesize that “narcissism”, i.e. obsession with the socially constructed self, prevents women from having babies. Yet we see signs of it everywhere — loud bratty girls on television, power-hungry women in the courts, bitchy entitled young women filling universities and pushing out men, in the streets, just everywhere, everywhere one goes. Tribal consciousness has completely departed from these creatures, or worse, has been transferred to surrogates: group feeling is limited to their school peers, maternal feeling is redirected to pets, obedience to authority is given to the state, the narrative, opportunistic alpha males, etc.
I don’t know what Richard Lynn is writing about because I can’t afford his books, but I’ll guess it isn’t any of that. And this is why God has given us Heartiste.
So all right, it isn’t merely prosperity, but prosperity + kulchur that leads women astray. Think about how much choice they have in modern society; a woman meets more strange men on the average weekend than most of her ancestors would have met in their entire lives. She has absolutely every inducement to not do the one thing which could help us out numerically, which by the way is the name of the game in an era of seven-billion mostly non-white people.
“I really like the idea of organic social organizations of men or women that are more traditional and value strong, healthy, big families. This would be the perfect social climate to increase birth rates by directing the culture of those groups in that direction.”
I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, the females are lacking, and they can’t be enticed to act against their most convenient interests in the name of — to their minds — nebulous and heretical ideals.
By the way, at least one serious thinker is in agreement with me. From a review of Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization:
Duchesne’s point here is that out of this unattractive, individualized “military
democracy” a strong sense of personal autonomy gradually grew, which these noble
aristocrats later sought to codify and safeguard in such documents as the famous
Magna Carta. Later, new groups of “aristocrats” (towns, universities, members of
guilds, farmers, and, eventually in modern times, workers’ unions) began to claim
their personal autonomy, extracting from lords and governments their own “charters
of liberty”. To secure their liberties, all of these people eventually connected themselves with each other by a web of contractual relations. Thus, in the course of time
what had originally emerged as the selfish ethos of Indo-European warrior aristocrats
opened doors to the full expression of individual potential, which was channeled into
various economic, scientific, creative, and political pursuits. Duchesne describes
this process by using the Kantian expression “unsocial sociability.”
The book can be downloaded here. For critics of pirating, note that on Amazon it goes for no less than $100.
Libertarian culture = excess individualism + consumer culture + birth control = mass narcissism = sagging birth rate.
Great idea.
It’s an effort that can’t hurt. I think civilization needs to break before we can really fix it (over-regulation is a problem that won’t fix itself as far as I can see) but any efforts to strengthen bonds between groups of men will make them more resilient in the Robb sense of the word.
Thank you for pointing out the need to reconcile brotherhood with family in the application of Traditional values. There seems to be a rather unnecessary split between the ‘family-focused’ element and the ‘mannerbund’-focused areas of the radical Traditional community, which is rather unnecessary. In Traditional societies, the members of the Mannerbund, even those with *very* close brothers-in-arms, would raise families and bring forth the next generation. The kshatriya was also the head of a household. Alain Danielou’s ‘Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation’, is a very useful, I would even say essential, work for those seeking to bring their personal and work lives into a more Traditional sphere.
Thank you also for pointing out the declining birthrates among non-white groups in the western world. This is an essential point often missed by nationalists, both on both sides of the pond. Of course the birthrates present a problem as the first generations of immigration continually arrive, but it is important to note that these decline, and thus it may be that we can solve the problems arising with the already-existing foreign groups in the European world separately from ending mass immigration.
Matt,
Have you ever studied how Hitler was able to get his Germans to increase birth rates? They were having loads of children per family. I know as I had great-aunt who lived In Germany at that time, while her sisters were in America. She bore about 7 or 8 kids in the 1930’s (her sister, my grandma, had 3 kids). At the same time Hitler was also promoting gifted women for certain positions in whatever they were talented/skilled in. He did everything to get the birth rates up. I was told that he promoted free sex – witness all those erotic Arno Brekker’s sculptures during that time. Hitler got the government to support all those unwed mothers in order to have babies. I was told that in some maternity centers at that time, mothers would have contests on who could produce most breast-fed milk.
I’ve been watching the progress of a local highway construction crew near my house the past few months. They have been doing some heavy repaving work and this crew, like so many others, has two women working on it. Over the course of the summer I watched as the younger woman started out with a shovel like everyone else and ended up holding a clipboard and driving around the supervisor’s car. She has stopped doing the heavy work and appears to have only one job and that is holding the clipboard and perhaps overseeing the work. I watched as the older woman, again starting out with a shovel like everyone else, began driving the heavy equipment about mid-summer and then stayed on it until the job ended.
Add this to the slow takeover (almost 2 years) of the landscape crew at the facility where I work by a mafia of 50-ish very heavy set dykes, and what do you have?
Humanity has become Earth’s cancer. Especially non-whites breed like crazy, while whites have become the panda bears of the species.
There are women who do not care about wealth and money. They want a nest and kids and are willing to put up with alot for that. They want to create a home. Men who only care about the money and their status are not wise choices for these women. Women will sacrifice for a man who has a mission in life, even if it is only I will protect. One that she can support and believe in. One who believes in the vows she took in the church on her wedding day or with the marriage commissioner. One who believes that marriage is really sacred and so is sex. That is what we have lost. But those women are mostly denigrated now and are maligned and the pressure to want what you do not really want is on every channel on TV and all those movies. But men want the sexy celebrity look alike trophy wives who puts out on demand and what do they get? Slut walkers and female gamers and women after money. Then each blames the other. The whole thing is a mess and they are miserable and in despair with a resentment and hate on.
In the olden days women used to have quilting bees and church bazaars where they gathered and talked about stuff that would never interest a man. Men had their clubs.
I do believe both were places where alot of learning took place. Nowadays, everyone is in competition with everyone and that intimate friendship is more about networking than just being with people you enjoy being with. The invasion has gone both ways. What were traditional roles for women like nursing and child care, now have men doing it and then women have invaded the traditional male roles. I am supposed to accept that a male nurse is the same as a female one? We live in an inverted world. It is up to us to turn it around.
I also would like to add that maybe one reason why young women are not procreating is that whether consciously or unconsciously, all the news about impending war and environmental catastrophe is having an effect upon the desire to bring a child into that kind of world. Who wants to see their child die in that? At the same time what race is really thinking about these things?
“They want a nest and kids and are willing to put up with alot for that. They want to create a home. Men who only care about the money and their status are not wise choices for these women.”
I agree. The truth is that the kind of super high status, aggressive men that are supposed to be so attractive to women send up a red flag of a calculating shrewdness that suggests unreliability.
These super rich men are notorious for trading in their middle aged wives for a younger model. They are thinking about what kind of status and enjoyment they can get out of the relationship rather than honor and duty to the mother of their children. I think in the past the selfish, calculating hedonism and status-seeking of these men was kept in check by traditional moral values that ensured a loss of status as a sanction for infidelity.
Now that is no more and the Donald Trump characters are to be avoided by women who don’t want to grow old alone.
I just wanted to add that women who have these sorts of husbands, from what I have seen, tend to be miserable despite their material comforts because they live in fear of abandonment in case the husband decides he can do better and its time to move on. I suspect this is a deep, primal fear that is written into our DNA. Even though these women would be able to get child support and therefore would not be in any real physical danger from abandonment, a prerational anxiety grips them and ruins their life anyway.
Jack Donovan wrote about a woman’s need to feel secure in her mate’s commitment in his book and sees it as a threat to male bonding and therefore masculinity. I think that is probably true and I can’t say I have the answer to that dilemma. Perhaps its sufficient to note that women who are particularly susceptible to abandonment anxiety should avoid the super-alphas, while women who crave the alpha type must have the self-awareness to realize that they will have to tolerate more insecurity in their relationship given the state of our culture and society.
I have no problem with men bonding. That is what sport’s clubs and gentlemen’s clubs were all about until they got invaded. I don’t care what goes on there. A woman who demands her husband always attend to her is an idiot. The pioneer women looked after the home and managed the farm animals, homeschooled, etc. She got together with other women and created quilting bees where they socialized and exchanged ideas. The men were too busy to care what went on there. I do think though that in this day and age boys are in need of mentors, whether Dad, other male relatives or trusted friends. Hear that male talk. Identify with it.
What a fantastic & realistic post. Any young couples reading this should seek out areas where other young couples believe in the same as Rhondda, and practice it. Never ever too late.
Agree that a breakdown is probably necessary for change. If the means to wealth are only a high paying middling job, then most men are doomed… and if they pursue it by other means, they will need virtually the dedication of a monk to attain it. Drexler’s story (above) is the same exact thing that happened at one of my former workplaces (factory)… where the women eventually all became the supervisors. There are various reasons, one being their willingness to follow the ‘Boss’s’ orders/no comraderie with workers etc. Similar to plantation owners making the mother hen the highest position.
I happened across a reality show that followed a couple preceding their wedding. The husband came across as a leader for a gay pride parade. He spoke of his love of dancing, fashion, willingness to cry. On his bucks night, ‘he’ dressed as the stripper and later cried because he missed his wife (one night without her). My first thought is that it was all fictional/scripted but it dawned on me that this is reality. Women will be attracted to the highest ‘social strata’, all the time.
In Europe, they considered ‘the last Man’ to be the gunslingers in the wild west. (ie the spaghetti westerns). If a man’s natural drive cannot be turned to power/wealth etc, there is no man unfortunately.
As Father Devlin says, Women should be told what they want. Outrageous? No at all – our Society tells them to be sucessful and that most men are creeps. So they live out that script and end up in misery. The buy it all – more than most men ever did. They think that happiness come from “career” and end up with some miserable job in a cubicle.
We don’t need to moan about not understanding women anymore – we do. The secret is Hypergamy and status display. We just need to gain control and start reprograming. Status will come from early marriage and lots of White children. Simple. And tax breaks for the same. When the children are older these women can complete their education and/or go back to work if they so desire. And a wise White Culture will welcome them with open arms. Unusual women who don’t want to marry and/or have children will not be persecuted of course – they will just not be the lauded ideal.
I just happened to read an excerpt from the neat book “Hitler’s Table Talk” (ostarapublications dot com) – page 31, 19 Oct 1941:
“The essential thing for the future is to have lots of children. Everybody should be persuaded that a family’s life is assured only when it has upwards of four children – I should say, four sons. That’s a principle that should never be forgotten.
When I learn that a family has lost two sons at the front, I intervene immediately. If we had practiced the system of two-children families in the old days, Germany would have been deprived of her greatest geniuses. How does it come about that the exceptional being in a family is often the fifth, seventh, tenth or twelfth in the row?” [end quote]
It is so right, normal and natural to want to have children irrespective of economic circumstances, that a decision to not have any is likely based on personal mental issues. Nothing to do with “individualism”, too many choices, great prosperity, etc. These are the results, not the causes, of childlessness.
From an article on slate:
Most felt their desire not to have children is perfectly normal, and were frustrated by stereotypes about women’s biological clocks and the universal desirability of children. Gayle, age 30, drolly observed, “My ovaries do not stir when I see a baby.” Author and filmmaker Laura Scott, who is working on a larger project examining the lives of the childless by choice has found that “lack of maternal/paternal instinct” rated in the top six reasons that respondents gave for their decision, along with reasons such as we “love our life [or] our relationship, as it is” and we “do not want to take on the responsibility.”
That “lack of maternal/paternal instinct” is a bizarre psychological condition that must have some pretty deep roots.
“It is so right, normal and natural to want to have children irrespective of economic circumstances,”
You must acquaint yourself with r/K selection theory. Am surprised you don’t seem to have done so.
“Nothing to do with “individualism”, too many choices, great prosperity, etc.”
I see you really took the time to weigh the evidence.
“found that “lack of maternal/paternal instinct” rated in the top six reasons that respondents gave for their decision,”
A bizarre psychological condition comes about in some way, and cannot be its own cause, which your statement above together with this quote would imply. Enlighten me then: what is your theory of the etiology of this mental state, and how does it explain the general sag in white and non-white birthrates? Remember: the above was one of six reasons given. White and non-white women who fail to breed are not all without the maternal instinct. Remember too that self-reporting is universally considered indicative at best in psych research.
“That “lack of maternal/paternal instinct” is a bizarre psychological condition that must have some pretty deep roots.”
This condition, if you will, is entirely explicable from the standpoint of the material circumstances of this society. Please look into Durkheim’s definition of ‘anomie’ for more on this process.
I’ve no opinion as to the “etiology of this mental state”. To be so fractured from something as basic as reproduction is like not wanting to eat or sleep, so the reasons are probably lost forever in the mists of time. Only in goofy liberal times like these do we think everything has to have a cut & dried, easy-to-express “cause”. And once we think we know that cause, let’s get the government or at least some psychiatrist to cure it. I like to attribute everything to the Fall of Man without literal interpretation of the bible.
Yes, you are correct – lack of desire to procreate is only one of six reasons, according to that article. I think that some females do have the maternal instinct, but some of them likely think that to act on it would be irresponsible if everything in their lives is not in perfect order first, but then it’s too late. Others are suffering from the effects of abortions; this is something that’s not well known. You have no idea how many women there are running around with abortion-induced infertility.
Re Durkheim. I read one of his books many years ago, it rubbed me the wrong way, and I haven’t gone back. As to r/K selection theory, well, I will have to look that up! And I thank you for reading my comment, too.
“You have no idea how many women there are running around with abortion-induced infertility.”
I have some idea, LOL.
Sorry, I came off as arrogant in my first comment.
An interesting cross-survey might have been to ask those same women who reported no maternal instinct if they have pets, what breeds, their names, etc. Bet you a majority would have well-coddled beasts at home. I’d bet all of them would bite your head off about animal rights or some other pet topic. I would wager that some of them might tell us they are concerned for “all of society” or some such symbolic abstraction for their displaced empathy.
In other words, it isn’t absence of maternal care so much as transference of affect — and this neurosis is found predominantly among white Western females with “a range of lifestyle choices”. Of course there are women who seem to lack a feminine side altogether, but they’re extreme deviants with an endocrine problem.
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