Counter-Currents
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance, 1566.
5,603 words
Die single and thine image dies with thee.
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet III
Half of all millennials are single. They are the loneliest generation ever. They also are on pace to be the most unsuccessful at forming families. According to Pew Research, 45% of US millennials do not live with a spouse or child (see figure 1). Only 24% of the Silent Generation (born 1928 to 1945) had this living arrangement when they were the same age in 1968. Ultimately, 10% of women in the Silent Generation never had kids. It looks like 15% of Gen X women never will. Alarmingly, it looks like about one out of three millennial women will never have a child.
The proportion of childless millennials will be five times the 6% of US whites who miscegenate, meaning a white American millennial woman is five times more likely to be a childless cat lady than to have a frizzy-haired mulatto child.
Figure 1.
As figure 1 shows, 53% of people in North America aged 15 to 49 are married or cohabiting, which is close to the 49% prevailing among American millennials aged 25 to 39. Fewer people in the 15 to 49 demographic are single because it includes a decade’s worth of Generation X, who are much better than millennials at pairing up.
The singles epidemic will hasten white demographic decline. A century ago, Lothrop Stoddard predicted non-whites would multiply relative to whites. A century later, his prediction has come true: whites have gone from 30% of the world’s population to 13%. The singles epidemic will reduce it more still.
Figure 2.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the New World are experiencing a less severe singles epidemic. Despite experiencing a dip in marriage/cohabitation since 1990, their population doubled in the past 28 years, and at the current rate they are reproducing, it will double again 28 years from now and go from 1.1 billion to 2.2 billion. This is disturbing — their predicted IQ based on their gene pools is 82, assuming environmental parity with Western nations. The lower half of their population is mentally retarded by Western standards, and the other half is mostly on par with what psychologists consider to be “low average.” Jordan Peterson claims an IQ of 87 is necessary to perform jobs in modern economies, so it seems they will be forever dependent on lots of subsistence agriculture or aid from Eurasians and North Africans. Even now, African blacks can’t dig their own wells and fend for themselves in many places. The singles epidemic is good insofar as it slows down their rapid increase. The only problem is that it will affect the smartest Africans most, since they are more likely to adopt Western values.
South Asians seem to be doing comparatively well because of arranged marriage. Cohabitation is as high as 90% in India, which houses most of the region’s population. Slightly over half of the non-white world still arranges its marriages, which helps guard against a singles epidemic.
Latin America has a singles epidemic, but they are maintaining replacement level fertility, including in the US, where only 10% of Hispanic women aged 40-44 are childless versus 17% of white women in the same age range.
Low white admixture South Americans are outbreeding high white admixture South Americans. Since 1950, two of the whitest countries in South America, Uruguay and Argentina, increased their population 2.5-fold. Other South American nations outpaced them, growing by a rate of 4.4-fold. White DNA in South America isn’t faring so well.
Figure 3: Average racial admixture in Central and South America taken from 23andme data.
Most East Asian nations aren’t experiencing a singles epidemic. Two-thirds of the region’s population is in China, and China has been rapidly developing since the mid-1980s, going from being a third-world country with income on par with Sub-Saharan Africa to a first-world nation richer than many white nations (see figures 4 and 5). Young Chinese men are richer than the fathers of young women, and young women think they’re getting a status boost by pairing up with them.
Figure 4: from Roser’s “Global Income Inequality.”
Figure 5: from Roser.
Unlike most East Asian ethnic groups, the Japanese are experiencing a bad singles epidemic. About 43% of Japanese millennials are not married. This figure is not as high as the 51% of US millennials who are single, but the demographic impact will be greater; only 2% of Japanese have kids out of wedlock versus 30% of whites in the US.
Unlike China, Japan has had income on par with developed nations since the mid-1980s. Japan has the same problem of underpaid millennials and overpaid gen Xers and boomers that most white nations have. For example, Japanese people in their 50s earn twice as much as Japanese in their 20s on average, and Americans in their 50s earn twice as much as Americans in their 20s on average. This is an obvious market failure — according to Quiñones, the correlation between job performance and experience is only 0.27. What’s more, according to McDaniel, “The highest correlations were obtained . . . for jobs that place low levels of cognitive demands on employees.” The higher the cognitive demand, the less experience matters — yet the biggest differences in income between starting and mid-career salaries tend to be in high cognitive demand jobs in finance, journalism, sales, and law. Moreover, jobs now are more cognitively demanding than when Quiñones did his study in 1995, so the correlation has likely fallen. Being old does not make one more competent, either, because fluid intelligence declines with age.
Figure 6.
Millennials get paid 20% less than boomers did at the same age. Also, the median wage has flatlined since the mid-1970s. Figure 6 shows a speculative lifetime income line for 1987. It is exact and meant only to illustrate the concept. The line for 2019 is based on data from DQYDJ.
The sort of age-based income differences shown in figure 6 are causing millennial women to reject millennial men in the US and Japan. I suspect similar income distributions are to be found in all developed nations and contribute heavily to their singles epidemics.
Figure 7 shows the correlation between a man’s income level and the percentile of messages he receives on the dating site OKCupid. I reverse-engineered the colors in figure 7 for parity with figures showing the actual income of men ages 25-37. [1] I found that women’s interest in men on OKCupid doesn’t match the incomes of millennial men. Instead, it matches men ages 47-59 (see figure 8). This age range is within two years of the average ages of these women’s fathers. Whether intuitively or deliberately, these women are comparing the income of their fathers with their prospective boyfriends and rejecting men who make less than their fathers. In other words, millennial women want a handsome young millennial man with the income of a Generation X man.
Figure 7: Responses men get on the dating site OKCupid, from Tinder Seduction.
Figure 8: The top graph is adapted from OKCupid data. The bottom two are from DQYDJ.
Figure 9: The difference between subtracting corresponding cells in the middle table from the top table in figure 8.
Figure 10: The difference between subtracting corresponding cells in the bottom table from the top table in figure 8.
The column “Total Difference” in figure 10 shows how many percentiles millennial men’s income is behind where women direct their interest on OKCupid. For example, male income is 28 percentiles behind where women direct their attention on average. The difference incrementally decreases until it is only 4 points behind among 35-year-olds. This means a man must wait until he’s 35 before he makes enough to interest women. By that point, the average age of women who go with him will be 33, just two years away from the drop off in fertility that often occurs at 35.
Some may argue that women who use OKCupid are somehow significantly more materialistic than the average woman, but until they can prove this theory, we can only assume the data reflects the attitudes of single American women generally. Older generations are paying young men so little that millennial women think young men are genetically inferior and are uninterested in them. Old men’s greed and young women’s hunger for high-status men are the main factors in the singles epidemic and ultimately white genocide.
This may be part of some civilizational cycle where a society expands trade, outsources labor, impoverishes young men, enriches old men, makes young men look inferior to old men, and causes a singles epidemic that slowly collapses society.
Figure 11: Adapted from Rachael Comte, “The Population of Rome.“
Ancient Rome had a singles epidemic. Romans practiced arranged marriage, but at the start of the Pax Romana around 27 BC, some Roman men became very rich. They must have petitioned the government to permit them to marry slaves, because in 18 BC, Caesar Augustus legalized marriage between freed slaves and citizens. By 9 AD, Rome had a singles epidemic. Caesar Augustus instituted a bachelor’s tax to incentivize Roman men to marry. I suspect Roman men wanted to marry, but low-status women were taking high-status men, and high-status women refused to go with men from lower classes. It was at this time that Rome’s population stopped growing. It flatlined for a century until 100 AD, when it gradually declined until 300 AD, when people began to abandon the city for Constantinople (see figure 11).
There are two ways to avoid a singles epidemic. One is to have ever-expanding economic prospects in the form of new land, markets, technology, or basic economic development. It helps if the jobs are in industry and farming as many are now in China and as many had been in America in the early to mid-20th centuries. With continual growth, women feel as though they are getting a deal because their husband has more than their father had. It also helps if there is a lot of economic equality and a strong middle class.
The other way is to prevent women from marrying men whose income is significantly higher than that of their fathers. India has among the least equality of all nations in the world, but it doesn’t have a singles epidemic because 90% of their marriages are arranged, and people marry only within their caste. There is less inequality within castes than across the whole society, so it helps to prevent income-based hypergamy.
One reason the singles epidemic is hitting white nations hardest is that they don’t arrange marriages, and 61% of non-whites still do.
Arranged marriages have been the norm for a long time. Eurasians began having them at least 100,000 years ago, according to a genetic analysis of their modern descendants. The practice of eugenics springs from the same thinking that inspired arranged marriages.
Hypothetically, a modern white country could use income percentiles as castes. This may not be eugenic, because income doesn’t always correlate with good things, but it would prevent women from practicing hypergamy. Hypergamy is incredibly destructive to any society, because for every Prince Charming and Cinderella who marry, there is a leftover rich woman and poor man. We know this because rich women are more likely to live alone, and men are 10% more likely to live with their parents. A caste system based on percentile income relative to the specific age cohort in question (rather than nominal income, because millennials are paid less) would ensure this doesn’t happen.
Economic forces are the main cause of the singles epidemic, but other factors that didn’t exist in ancient Rome seem to explain why the current one is worse.
I want to use my personal life as an example. I know doing this is unconventional, but it will help us to understand what is going on at the ground level, which, in turn, will help us understand the big picture.
Figure 12
In the columns in figure 12, I list all of the women I can remember whom I rejected or turned me down. I define women whom I “rejected” as women with whom I cut off communication or with whom I ended a relationship. I define women who “turned me down” as women who cut off communication with me. Those who rejected me were more likely to be single most of the time (10/19) than those whom I rejected (5/13). And when I say single “most of the time,” I mean most of them never had a boyfriend, and the few who did didn’t give him much time. They were prettier than those whom I rejected, and I imagine most guys would agree with me on this. If they had gone with someone like me, then 27 of 32 would be in a relationship. That would mean only 5/32, or 16% overall would be single, which is similar to the 18% of the Silent Generation who were unmarried when they were as old as millennials are now. I know this is a small sample and subject to my own memory errors and unique behaviors, but I propose that the problem of the singles epidemic isn’t so much that men are insisting that women be beauty queens but that women are rejecting men.
Plastics
Women often complain there are no good men. Usually, they are no more specific than that, but sometimes they complain men are not manly enough.
Single women aren’t the only ones fed up with men. Married women are nagging their husbands more about cleaning in the home even though studies show men do more housework than they ever have. The subject need not be housework. It can be his diet, religious habits, or video game playing, etc. Women seem to be minding things men do more because they dislike the men themselves.
Figure 13: From Kanta Mishra et al.
It is no secret that women treat high-testosterone men better. Maybe they aren’t being as nice to men because men’s testosterone levels are falling. From 1987 to 2004, they fell 17% among 60-year-olds, and according to the American Urological Association, from 1999 to 2016 they fell in adolescent and adult men, leaving up to 40% with a deficiency. Among the causes they list are “environmental contagions.” The most notorious of these is Bisphenol A, a compound found in many plastic items such as water bottles that acts as estrogen in the body. Interestingly, as can be seen in figure 13, Japan consumes plastic at a rate on par with the US and Western Europe while China consumes far less. The gradual increase in the use of plastics has coincided with the gradual decline in serum testosterone. However, one problem with pinning most of the blame on plastics is that Eastern Europe has had low plastic use rates compared with Japan and other white regions, and as figure 3 shows, Eastern Europeans have experienced among the most severe declines in marriage and cohabitation. Plastics are not solely responsible for most of the singles epidemic, but they probably play some role.
One can see the effects of plastics on testosterone when comparing photos of college-age boomers/gen Xers with millennials/zoomers who are that age now. The boomers and gen X men have thicker eyebrows, heavier beards, darker skin (independent of race), and generally an older look. Unsurprisingly, 65% of boomer men rate themselves as “completely masculine” versus 30% of millennial and zoomer men.
Testosterone not only makes men look more attractive to women. Women need a small amount of the hormone to feel attracted to men. Reducing it would presumably make them like men less — especially the pretty women who would presumably have less of the hormone to begin with. This may explain why the pretty women who turned me down were more likely to be single than the plain women whom I turned down.
Birth control
Birth control makes women like less masculine men, so they may mitigate the effects of men losing testosterone. However, long-term use of the pill shrinks the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates sex hormones. The hypothalamus also regulates mood, and some research shows a smaller one causes episodes of depression and rage. The Karen phenomenon of middle-aged women flipping out at people for no reason may be partly caused by this.
Digital Technology
Around 2008, women stopped being as nice to me. I noticed another decline around 2014. Men peak in attractiveness at age 23, but they stopped liking me before I turned that age. As we saw in figure 2, when the Silent Generation was the same age as millennials, only 18% were single, whereas 50% of millennials are currently single. What could be responsible for 32% more people being single? And why did I experience a decline in attention from women starting in 2008?
It may have something to do with recent technology’s effects on women’s brains — specifically high-speed Internet and smartphones, which became popular from 2005 to 2012. Of course, I’m not a woman, but I can relate to how using that technology feels. I remember when I first got a smartphone. Using it felt like drinking alcohol or watching a sports game. I also remember first getting high-speed Internet and fiendishly opening a million browser windows. So how does this relate to the singles epidemic?
Jim Goad gives us some clues in “The Uncanny Digital Valley”:
A meta-analysis of 41 studies concluded that “engaging in [online] multi‐tasking was associated with significantly poorer overall cognitive performance, with a moderate‐to‐large effect size.”
“High levels of internet usage” are “associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions associated with maintaining goals in face of distraction.”
Among children, “higher frequency of internet use over 3 years is linked with decreased verbal intelligence at follow‐up, along with impeded maturation of both grey and white matter regions.”
White people, women, homosexuals, and young people have more cerebral gray matter on average, whereas non-whites, men, lesbians, and old people have less of it. Reducing it would seem to make people act less white, feminine, and youthful. There is evidence of this. The number of lesbians increased at three times the rate of male homosexuals from 2012 to 2017. Lesbianism may be increasing more because women’s brains are losing gray matter.
Women’s brains are becoming more masculine, yet presumably, plastics are making their bodies lose testosterone, and lowered testosterone levels are hurting their sex drive. The overall effect seems to be women who look more feminine but like men less. This explains why the most attractive women I met were more likely to be single. They had low testosterone, were active on social media, and were most likely to be representative of the singles epidemic.
Some of the negative impacts of Internet use are more psychological than physical. Monthly, 63% of men watch porn versus only 13% of women, so it affects men more. It absorbs their sexual energy and dissuades them from doing the necessary things to attract a woman in real life.
Social media is to women what pornography is to men, wrapping them up in a fantasy world in which they are the star. It is not uncommon to see average-looking girls dialing up the makeup and airbrushing their photos to get likes. They often put profiles on Tinder, never intending to date anyone on there, but just to advertise their Instagram accounts. Not all women who are responsible for the singles epidemic are social media mavens, but it seems like such women are more likely to be single.
Women say posting photos of themselves on social media gives them a sort of high. Men use social media too, but women do it more often and seem to get a bigger rise out of it. They get more “likes” on photos than men because they have an unofficial “like cartel” of friends who develop an informal system of reciprocity in exchanging likes, with the most tending to go to the most sociable ones.
Men orbit women on social media. The Internet calls such men “simps,” the opposite of a “pimp,” who gets all the women. I know one simp who is Facebook friends with every woman in my area who is a 9/10 or higher. For the past decade, he has given them tens of thousands of likes. He recently (and rather uncharacteristically) posted a photo of himself attempting to look like a “Chad.” Of the hundreds of women he orbits, only one liked it. That is a piteous return on investment, but sadly enough, guys like him are willing to take it. Ideally, we could get Facebook to ban likes, but the Jew who runs the company is more interested in banning white nationalists.
There is another layer of connectedness that the Internet has enabled. According to Ed Dutton, it’s normal for younger people to be friends with people of the opposite sex. These relationships usually break down by the time they reach their 30s and have paired up with someone. These relationships are normal. However, some women keep men as text buddies and refuse to meet up with them in real life. They go to such men for attention when they feel depressed or when Chad breaks up with them. These men are caught in a trap. Just one woman can make dozens of them waste time they’ll never get back.
Figure 14: From Flowing Data. Because of overlap, the percentages add up to more than 100.
Social media is an anti-social activity so far as relationships are concerned. According to one study, 16-24-year-olds spend a median of 3 hours a day on social media. Women probably spend 4-5 hours on it. This is frightening when one considers that it is an entirely fruitless endeavor. Despite devoting over half of their free time to it, the Internet is responsible for only 10% of relationships forming. It has a much poorer return on investment than meetings with friends at eateries, workplaces, or school, as can be seen from figure 14.
The more time someone spends online, the less likely he is to form a relationship with someone, and the more time he spends socializing offline, the more likely he is to form one.
Figure 15: From Flowing Data. Because of overlap, the percentages add up to more than 100.
One reason why the Internet does so poorly in uniting men and women is that women are the final arbiters of whether relationships happen, and their brains are not equipped to handle the massive variety of men available on the Internet. This reminds me of a passage from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in which he discusses how peacocks use their feathers to attract peahens. He tells of an account of peahens flocking to the edge of their pen to look at a peacock in another pen. They refused to mate the peacock in their pen because his tail feathers didn’t look as good as those of the male in the nearby pen. Something like this is happening as millennial women ignore men who could be their boyfriends and orbit Chads on social media.
Online dating is a rigged game, which women ensure most men can’t win. There are four times more men on Tinder than women, and 80% of women only swipe right for the top 20% of men. One might argue that on some level, the market is clearing, at least for the top 20% of men. This would be the case if women received four times the matches, which is what one would expect per their smaller population on there, but instead, women receive 20 times more, so even the top 20% of men receive a fifth as many matches as 80% of women. Clearly, the female sex drive cannot handle online dating. Dating apps eliminate natural peer groups and unleash the full effects of women’s choosiness. In any case, online dating makes it obvious that women are far less willing to end the singles epidemic than men.
One may suppose that online subcultures create environments more hospitable to young people getting together. The trouble is that these groups are often skewed toward one gender. What’s more, the more intellectual and narrow the group’s interests, the fewer people will show up. This means only people with basic tastes or who get caught up in mainstream fads will succeed in finding someone.
Digital technology, the pill, and plastics undoubtedly play important roles in the singles epidemic, but they only seem to have a strong effect if something much more fundamental to it is in place.
Machinery
Feminists say hunter-gatherers had a more equal division of labor than agriculturalists. This is not true. Men have always been more physically active. A recent study showed that Hadza hunter-gatherer men covered three times more ground than women. Evolutionarily, this makes sense, because if there were a drought, women would be less likely to starve if they moved around less than men. Women are much more important to passing on genes in hunter-gatherer societies, because one man can impregnate multiple women, but women can only bear one child at a time.
The shift from subsistence agriculture to an economy driven by machines has eliminated most of the male advantage in physical labor. Some jobs are still too physical for most women — at least in the American economy. These include jobs in agriculture (unsurprisingly), law enforcement, transportation, installation, maintenance, mechanical repairs, construction, and raw materials extraction. These jobs are on average 88% male, and the men who do them constitute 14% of all workers in the economy. They pay an average of $40,000 per year.
A select number of non-physical jobs are too difficult for most women to do. They are in tech and engineering, which are collectively 78% male. The men who do these jobs are 4% of all workers in the economy. Their median salary is $84,000 per year, which is enough to make most women satisfied (see figure 8).
Altogether, women won’t do about 18% of jobs in the economy, but they are willing to do the rest. A society made up entirely of women would need to import a quarter to a third of their female population size worth of men in order to survive, but that’s it.
According to the BLS, women are 88% of nurses, 80% of human resources workers, 79% of grade school teachers, 66% of social service workers, 63% of customer service reps, 60% of accountants, 49% of college professors, 44% of financial and business workers, 40% of doctors, 37% of lawyers, 25% of tech workers, and 15% of engineers. Millennial women are likely a higher percentage of these fields since more boomer and Gen X women opted to become stay-at-home moms or higher percentage female jobs and the latter two generations factor into the overall numbers. The threshold for women in some fields is lower too. Women show no signs of stopping their advancement through the professions.
There is a -0.25 correlation between how narrow the pay gap is between men and women and GDP per capita. I can only guess why, but there seems to be causation. Studies show men are more intellectual and less neurotic than women, which would seem to make them more willing to endure adversity and become an expert in something.
Despite this, women stick together more and generally displace men from jobs and recruit their friends to work with them. Men like to be chivalrous (so long as they can have a job), but the number of men and particularly white men who get upper-middle-class jobs in the zoomer generation is dwindling to well below what would be their per capita representation.
Tech and finance companies like to recruit women from India and China who get their bachelor’s degree in their home country and a two-year graduate degree in America. They help compensate for white women choosing non-STEM jobs — at least on paper. And corporations only really care about looking good on paper.
There may be a backlash to affirmative action’s excesses. Events like the purchasing of GameStop stock frighten elites because they show young white men are willing to coordinate activities that can undermine their control. In the near future, however, the equation is simple. By permitting women to marry men richer than they are while promoting equal pay with men, there will be leftover rich women and poor men, and the singles epidemic will persist.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
Divorce
A woman is more likely to divorce her husband after she receives a promotion. Women seem to view jobs like they are another man in a polyandrous union and decide to cut one of them loose if he is markedly inferior to the other. For example, if a woman is a cashier who works for minimum wage and marries a surgeon who makes $300,000 per year, she may decide to be a housewife. Similarly, if she is promoted to financial manager and starts earning six figures while her husband is stuck making $50,000 per year as a teacher, she may decide to cut him loose to devote her time to her high-status job.
Such divorces are a problem because they hurt children. According to Marripedia:
Parental divorce horrifies young adults’ heterosexual relationship experiences though the connection is more evident for women than for men, according to one study. These effects carry into adulthood. When compared with women from intact families, women from divorced families also reported less trust and satisfaction in romantic relationships. Children of divorced parents fear being rejected, and a lack of trust frequently hinders a deepening of their relationship. One study showed that individuals whose parents divorced were more likely than individuals whose parents remained married to believe that . . . relationships should be approached with caution.
Some single women have emotional trauma from family instability. Ed Dutton cites studies showing this may impair their ability to form lasting relationships. He also notes that they inherit genes associated with being uncooperative, which in turn make them a lot more likely to divorce.
Delayed Childbearing
Women delaying getting married or dating for careers has several outcomes. One is that men and women must date when they are older and less physically and behaviorally attractive than the traditional ages of marriage which were 20 and 23 for women and men respectively. The second outcome is passing on more genetic mutations to children, especially via the father, since his genome undergoes more mutations on average than a woman’s eggs. This may result in more widespread genetically induced problems in the population such as autism which greatly impede social function necessary to courtship behaviors.
Modern Medicine and Improved Nutrition
Modern medicine has reduced child mortality from being 46.2% to virtually nil. Some hypothesize that this permits people with genetic mutations that would have killed them in the past to pass them on and increase the burden of bad genes in the white gene pool. People believing this may view the singles epidemic as a good thing, because it is rendering nearly that percentage of people unable to procreate. In the long run, they may be right, as the buildup of harmful genes may cripple a population, but as Lothrop Stoddard has said, the loss of high IQ heredity is more of a threat to the future of whites and humanity than illnesses building up. Though the two are correlated, they are not perfectly so, and many intelligent people have mutations that cause health issues, like allergies. The character Piggy in Lord of the Flies is an example of such a person, and his death represents the loss of intellectuals crucial to civilization.
Closing
The final thing is to remember that it is normal for 10% of people to be single in any generation. The reasons include not being attracted to the opposite sex, having very high or very low IQ that doesn’t fit in with society, and having a religious devotion to celibacy. This article is not aimed at such people, and we need to respect their decision to refrain from relationships with the opposite sex.
This article is aimed at people who wouldn’t have been single in previous generations. It’s worth noting that they are not exactly perfect people. They exhibit more dark triad traits on average, are harder to talk to, and seem more likely to suffer from mental illness. However, a lot of them are creative, intelligent, and altruistic. Some of them are the sorts of people who are right about things when everyone else is wrong. Genetic mutations make people stand out, but good mutations make people stand out for a good reason.
Writing about this subject feels like staring into the abyss into which half of whites and Western civilization are falling. It is liberating to confront it, though, because the only way to solve such a problem is to confront it. I vote yes on the people who are losing out in the singles epidemic — especially those who care about their race. They should know that we aren’t living in normal times and exhaust all moral and lawful ideas in solving their own personal singles epidemic.
Passing on genes is like voting. No individual vote matters, but collections of them do. Hopefully, whites will win the genetic election for existence. It would help if older men could help younger ones make more money and better attract women. It is a big responsibility to direct the life of a young man. One has the power to either make him part of the race’s story or not, and decent pay — as shallow as it seems — is a crucial step.
If you want to support Counter-Currents, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend on DLive.
Don’t forget to sign up for the twice-monthly email Counter-Currents Newsletter for exclusive content, offers, and news.
Note
[1] I started the range at 25 because men in the US tend to date and marry women who are 2-3 years younger than they are, and women who are 22 or 23 are often still in college and not thinking as much about status and money. I ended the range at 37 because corresponding women at age 35 would be in the last year before most experience a precipitous drop off in fertility, and for those concerned with perpetuating the white race, marriages after this age are not of as much interest.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
89 comments
I’m a single millennial man. I don’t think the effects of divorce can be overstated. I saw what happened to my dad and have absolutely zero interest in going through that myself. Add to that, the fact that most women I encounter of my generation or younger are utterly vapid, hypergamous, adult children and the idea of marriage and procreation becomes that much less appealing.
No. Be brave. Talk to women you you find attractive. There are many good single girls out there. Half are still getting married you know.
If in the future you want to get married to someone then demand a prenup so that lawyers will never get rich on either of you.
If in the future you want to get married to someone then demand a prenup so that lawyers will never get rich on either of you.
If you have a prenup that waters down the marriage contract and allows the wealthier spouse to walk away Scot-free, you’re not really married. You’re just pretending. You took your vows with your fingers crossed behind your back. If you’re Catholic, you will rightly be considered to be living in sin and denied communion if the priest knows about it. Any woman woman who signs one of those is a fool.
Half are still getting married you know.
This is dishonest. More than half are getting married. Sixty percent are married by age 29, with another ~15% cohabiting.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/109402/age-24-marriage-wins.aspx
So a woman signing a prenup is a fool? What would that make a man signing a marriage contract?
So a woman signing a prenup is a fool? What would that make a man signing a marriage contract?
An honest, decent man who recognizes that a wife is not an at-will prostitute/domestic servant but a human being with a legitimate need for dignity and security. Next question.
As the great Judge Robert Gardner said, no-fault divorce…
may not be used as a handy vehicle for the summary disposal of old and used wives. A woman is not a breeding cow to be nurtured during her years of fecundity, then conveniently and economically converted to cheap steaks when past her prime.
Uh huh. Well, looking at which gender is filing for divorce 3/4’s of the time and the suicide rates after said divorce it’s pretty clear one gender is being taken to the butcher, just not the one you pretend it is. It’s pretty clear you don’t have a man’s best interests at heart so I’ll just have to keep looking for myself. Good day to you ma’am.
Uh huh. Well, looking at which gender is filing for divorce 3/4’s of the time
Repeating the same point over and over again doesn’t make it any more relevant than it was the first five times. The share of divorces filed by women is totally beside the point. By your silly reasoning, it wouldn’t matter if only 1% of marriages ended in divorce if 90% of those divorces were filed by women. It’s a lame excuse that is intended to distract from the low absolute risk of divorce for those who follow a few simple guidelines, chiefly, marrying someone your own age as a mature adult, not cheating on your wife, etc.
Is there a level of risk that you’re willing to accept? And if you’re not willing to accept any risk, on what basis do you claim that women are obligated to do so?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-the-age-gap-the-shorter-the-marriage-2014-11-11
And the suicide rates after said divorce it’s pretty clear one gender is being taken to the butcher, just not the one you pretend it is.
If I cheated on my spouse and lost my home and family, I’d kill myself, too.
Bad outcomes do not prove unequal treatment.
If divorce is so hard on men, why are divorced men more likely to remarry than women? And if they’re so broke, how are they getting “hypergamous” younger women to marry them?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/04/tying-the-knot-again-chances-are-theres-a-bigger-age-gap-than-the-first-time-around/
It’s pretty clear you don’t have a man’s best interests at heart so I’ll just have to keep looking for myself.
It appears that way to you because you think that men are entitled to a risk-free life women’s expense.
I appreciate your open and honest misandry. It’s the sneaky ones that ruin men’s lives so I applaud you for that, at least. I’m curious though, do you think your utter contempt for men in pretty much one of your comments is going to convince any of us to go out get married? The more of your vitriol that pours out, that more convinced I am that I’ve made the right decision.
The more of your vitriol that pours out, that more convinced I am that I’ve made the right decision.
Do as you like.
You don’t seem like you’d be a good husband/father anyway, but to any who would consider following in your footsteps: I offer this.
If you marry and have kids, there is about a 25% chance you’ll divorce.
If you don’t marry and have kids, there is a 100% chance you will grow old and die alone.
How anyone sees this as a difficult choice is quite beside me.
Viper like cunning.
Lexi, the gallup poll you linked is from 2008. My data is mostly from 2019 and 2020.
If you permit no fault divorce, you need a prenup. If you don’t permit no fault divorce and almost no one divorces, like in the 19th century, then you don’t need a prenup. You can’t have no fault divorce without a prenup because it enables parasitic lawyers to get rich on ruining families.
Lexi, the gallup poll you linked is from 2008. My data is mostly from 2019 and 2020.
The problem with your data is that 15 is too young of a cutoff age for measuring this. The end of shotgun marriage, all by itself would account for this drop. You have to measure from the mid-twenties up, as in the Gallup poll I provided. You said that only 49% of the 25-39 age group are in a union, but you didn’t provide any evidence for this assertion, and if it exists, I have never been able to find it.
You can’t have no fault divorce without a prenup because it enables parasitic lawyers to get rich on ruining families.
A prenup will not save you from having to pay lawyers. It’s just another thing to litigate. Depending on the terms, it may not be enforceable. Even if it does save money, there are better ways (alternative dispute resolution) than eviscerating the marriage contract and leaving lower-earning spouses (usually mothers) with no rights.
There are a handful of scenarios where a prenup is justified:
(1) To protect the inheritance rights of children from a deceased spouse.
(2) To clarify that an expected inheritance is not marital property.
I suppose if a person comes into a marriage with substantial assets, but no children, a prenup may be justified on the grounds that these assets were accumulated before the beginning of the partnership, but this should be rare. People who have substantial assets should already have been married. You can’t accumulate assets until you’ve had a decent income for some time, and if you have a decent income, and are not married, then I presume you’ve been (ahem) playing the field. Noone should be rewarded for that.
I get the impression that men often see women as something like a house or a car. If you work hard for a few or ten years and save up for a good down-payment, you can afford a “better” one. Assuming they will be better off in ten years, they roll the dice and come up snake eyes. Now, the nice college girls whom you excluded from your analysis because they’re less status-conscious are all taken, Mr. Millennial is fat and balding, and he’s bitter that girls aren’t interested in a 30-year-old man with no prospects.
I will be honest and admit that I have no evidence besides personal observations for this, but this is nonetheless how it appears to us.
According to Pew, 42% of millennials are married and 12% are cohabiting. This means 46% are neither married nor cohabiting. It doesn’t mean 46% are single as we normally think of the term because many could be in relationships, so I should have stated half of millennials were not married or cohabiting.
Also, the article I cited for half of all millennials being single covered people ages 18-35, which is about 4 years younger than millennials were at the time, so it wasn’t the best choice to refer to that age cohort as millennials. Still, about 46% of millennials are not married or cohabiting and thus not in a position to have kids. White nationalists care about relationships because they can lead to children and thus perpetuation of the race, so if 46% are not in a position to do that, they might as well be single.
What is certain is that an unprecedented number of young people are single as we would normally understand the term. According to Pew, 10% fewer millennials are married or cohabiting than were Gen Xers at the same age in 2003. The rate of cohabitation since 2003 has only gone up from 9% to 12%, so there has been a 7% decrease in the number who are married or cohabiting. This 7% decline can be seen in figure 1 of my article as well.
According to the US Census Bureau, the average age at first marriage is not 26 in 2008 win the year of the Gallup poll you cited. It is 28. The average age of marriage used to be 20 for women and 23 for men until it began to change in the boomer generation. What hasn’t changed is women’s biological clocks. Most women still experience a precipitous fall in fertility starting at age 35. Pushing things two years deeper toward this fall off will result in many fewer white children being born.
I agree that more than 54% of millennials will be married or cohabiting ten years from now. I would guess it would be around 70%, so I am not trying to claim half of them will be single forever. However, because they are staying single so long, I predict a full 33% will be childless forever. 57% of millennials were childless as of 2020. Because millennial women are marrying two years later on average than gen X women, many will run out of time to have kids.
I commend women who are married and cohabiting and commend even further the few who have married a millennial man who earns at a percentile which is within 10 points of their father’s income percentile. I encourage men to find single women who are the most like them. This is what I meant when I told Corey half of all millennial women were getting married. (Actually, it is more like 43%.)
Men’s failure to commit has nothing to do with the Singles Epidemic because men who won’t commit are not single. Failure to commit is a problem however because it delays women having kids. However, failure to commit isn’t entirely men’s fault. This takes some “mansplaining,” and you will probably think it’s offensive, and normie’s eyes may glaze over if they start reading it, but it is the truth, and while it may anger some, getting it out there benefits society.
For the sake of simplicity we will assume that men choose women for looks alone and women choose men for money alone. The OKCupid data cross-referenced with men’s actual income percentiles reveal millennial women choose men with income slightly above but basically on par with their gen X fathers. Now suppose we have six people–three 25 year old men who we’ll call Moe, Larry and Curly and three 23 year old women, who we’ll call Sabrina, Jill, and Kelly. Suppose also that looks-wise and income-wise, Moe and Sabrina are 8/10, Larry and Jill are 6/10, and Curly and Kelly are 4/10. Suppose also that their fathers earn the same percentile level that they do. One would think that the 8/10s would marry each other, the 6/10s would marry each other, and the 4/10s would marry each other, but to a large extent that isn’t happening under the Singles Epidemic.
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/
You see, Moe’s income is in the 80th percentile for 25 year olds, which according to the website above this paragraph is $55k per year. Moe got his job because he’s smart and has connections. Sabrina’s 48 year old father also earns in the 80th percentile, but he earns $103k per year because people in his age bracket earn more. Sabrina likes Moe but thinks he’s not motivated enough to be as high status as her dad, so she rejects him. She keeps trying to get a 25 year old man who earns as much as her gen X father, but such men are in the 96th percentile or higher in the millennial generation and hard to find let alone get into a relationship with.
Meanwhile, 6/10 Jill doesn’t want 6/10 Larry because although he is in the same income percentile as her father, (60th), he earns only $40k a year, and her 49 year old father in the same percentile earns $62k per year. She “settles” for 8/10 Moe, who earns $55k per year, which is much closer to the amount her gen X father does. Moe is really the one settling for her. He’s not exactly in love because she doesn’t set his heart aflame like 8/10 Sabrina does, but at least she’s above average, and after several years he finally agrees to marry her. He never lets her know how he really feels because he wants the relationship to succeed.
4/10 Kellly is repulsed by 4/10 Curly. Curly is smart and has a good degree but has no connections. Although he is in the same income percentile as her father (40th), he makes only $25k per year working retail because that’s all he can get. Her gen X father makes a respectable $40k per year, which coupled with her salary of $25k per year is enough to afford a few luxuries. Curly lives with his parents too, which Kelly finds this to be despicable. She meets Larry one day and is really attracted to him. She puts herself in a place where he can’t help but talk to her and she warms up to him quickly. Larry makes as much as her father, and he’s better-looking to boot. She asks for his number. Larry is hesitant but gives in and the two become a couple, but Larry doesn’t want to commit to the relationship. Kelly gets mad at Larry for this. She blames male privilege for Larry not appreciating her. Meanwhile, Larry would be willing to settle for a girl who was at least average (5/10), but he has no one else, so he maintains his uncomfortable relationship with Kelly, a 4/10.
Curly, meanwhile, can’t get a woman. He develops a pornography addiction but of course he still feels unfulfilled. He decides to orbit some women on Instagram and Facebook. This one girl, Sabrina, is pretty hot. He sends her likes, hearts, etc. Sabrina, meanwhile, secretly hates simps like Curly. She is in a competition with other women on these sites to attract as many simps like Curly as possible. Curly to her is just a number.
These examples are simplified, but to some they reflect much of the past ten years dating in the millennial generation. They also capture the main forces that are destroying the white race.
If you want to solve this problem, either help millennial men get better pay or start judging them by income percentile relative to their age. The linked website below has the income percentile amounts I used for my example.
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/
Oh, I don’t struggle talking to women. I’ve got a good job, own my house, car, motorcycle, etc. I stay fit and I’m not ugly. They come to me a lot of times. They’re just an outright liability at this point. If things ever go south, there is pretty much a zero percent chance that I win in court and any kids I have will simply be weaponized against me.
I disagree. Writing this article showed me that women aren’t the problem per se. It is the system women and men must live in. The two main things making the system bad are a civilizational cycle where wealth accrues to the old and technologies which impede normal conditions for men and women getting together.
We should not give up because we could be living under a genetic bottleneck during which getting married is tough and if we persevere maybe our kids will have it better. Having said this, if I have kids, I don’t want sons because the pressure on them to earn lots of money at an early age despite the system making it nearly impossible will mean they will require a lot more parental investment than girls. For saying this Ed Dutton would say to some extent I am a “fast life history strategist.” Nevermind what that is.
I do think we shouldn’t be naive about women though. They don’t prioritize looks like men do–though they have a looks threshold. They prioritize money. They don’t just want enough to survive either. They want as much as their dad has. People tend to be attracted to people who resemble their opposite sex parent but in the case of women they like a guy with their dad’s salary or higher.
Of course not, women are the same as they’ve always been. The problem is that now there is a financial incentive for them to act on their worst instincts and they have the full backing of the state. Reminds me of the saying, “Feminism didn’t change women, it unmasked them”.
That’s possible. Again, though, looking at the situation when you’re knee deep in this mess, I just can’t see how wifing up a modern American womyn is an any way a positive. And yeah, I know “they aren’t all like that”. But thanks to the laws we currently have, any of them CAN become that, at any time they like. My parents made it 17 years before mom decided to blow up the family. You’re really never out of the crosshairs.
This money cope needs to die, it used to be primary, now its just looks looks looks, looks can be monetized, looks can get you clout which can be monetized and unmarried childless women now on average make more than men in the key category of 18 – 25 so they have their own money, this applies to over 50% of women now. Also women have pushed marriage probably on average now to 32, i believe in 2015 it was already 29 on average age for women, so they dont want to get married so their are no large expenditures like buying a house, or a $30K wedding or anything that is capital heavy so money matters less. Vacations, fine dining, bar hops, and trips are very affordable compared to 20% mortgage down payments.
Money starts to matter for LTR’s or marraige which has been waning for a while, talk to some 25 or even 28 year olds women, and you will find it very common that they have never been in a LTR or even in a relationship, EVER.
The OKCupid data show women start caring about money when men turn 25, but instead of expecting a typical 25 year old’s salary, they want one on par with their father who on average is 48.
Sad numbers.
Modern high-tech warfare is dysgenic. One weakling with a machine-gun or a drone can kill a hundred fit and brave men.
Modern medicine and vaccination are also dysgenic. Weaklings who would have been swept away by childhood disease are today enabled to live and reproduce. Likewise genetic mutants and lunatics, who previously were shut away in asylums.
Modern communication and global travel have vastly facilitated miscegenation, mass-migration and labor-outsourcing.
The data on mass-poisoning via plastics and chemical additives is important. I wonder if the Western populations have indeed experienced some sort of modern-day equivalent of Roman lead-poisoning. So many massive and long-term exposures to exotic chemicals and RF radiation have been placed in our environment within the last 150 years. Could one of these be the biochemical source of 20th century Western self-hatred?
All of these dysgenic horrors have a common source – technologies spawned from the World Wars. Had the West won these wars, we today would be employing technology eugenically.
But we LOST those wars. And now, like a weapon, Western technology has been captured by the enemies of the West and employed by them toward the West’s destruction.
Make no mistake: the Left looks gleefully forward to using facial recognition, thought-reading, tech-hacked elections and search-engine data mining, to locate and “smash” us permanently.
Only a global techno-crash will thwart this outcome.
yes, only the elimination of electric transmission infrastructure will turn this around, it is actually the easiest way and is also the most fair. Fantasy option of rivers and rivers of flow will never happen.
There is also the problem of birth control they are in the water supply and girls are put on them as early as 12 years old these days to regularize cycles and prevent cramps. Most are also active very very early on and by highschool graduation already have partners in double digits.
Most think this problem has occurred due to 5 or 50 vectors, but actually its probably multi thousand separate points that have resulted in this situation. Elimination of electricity will reduce this to probably less than 20 and it will than get fixed automatically in one generation or 20 years.
you are actually suggesting the solution is to eliminate electricity?
if the problem is birth rates simply create a tax credit for children birthed and a reduction in mortgage rates for plus 4 kids. beyond that you could remove alimony laws. those are far more realistic than the fantastical notion of removing electricity
beyond that you could remove alimony laws.
If the problem is “female hypergamy” rather than men’s selfish refusal to commit, how would getting rid of alimony help?
It appears you’ve spoken out of turn.
We’ve been living in an electrical world for over a century, yet the current problems with young people and relationships are new. Social Media is probably the bigger culprit.
I think a huge factor in young men not marrying has to be the promiscuousness of modern women. In the past, many men would marry for a steady sex partner, that’s no longer necessary. Then we have the fact that these modern women very often have had a huge number of prior sex partners, which is a turn off to most men who don’t want a whore as the mother of their children. Only a return to the Christian values of our ancestors will change that.
In the past, many men would marry for a steady sex partner, that’s no longer necessary. Then we have the fact that these modern women very often have had a huge number of prior sex partners, which is a turn off to most men who don’t want a whore as the mother of their children.
By the same token, I can’t imagine why any woman would want a degenerate hedonist who marries for a “steady sex partner” as the father of her children. You’ll be lucky to get one child before he’s off to the clinic for a vasectomy, no spousal consent required.
typical liberal equality/ egalitarianism thinking, that flipping the sex automatically validates their arguments. Your points are completely incorrect when applying male sexual strategies and necessities to female and vice versa.
It would be more easier if you think of men and women as different species in a zero sum game related to sexual strategies in the modern world. This would not be valid in pre industial societies as they required both sexes doing different work from dawn till dusk including all the children to have a functional family that can survive, which no longer is the case.
By the same token, I can’t imagine why any woman would want a degenerate hedonist who marries for a “steady sex partner” as the father of her children. You’ll be lucky to get one child before he’s off to the clinic for a vasectomy, no spousal consent required.
1) Men create bonding (love) through sex and release of vasopressin, women create bonding through cuddling, etc through release of oxytocin
2 Men’s binding does not get damaged over time or # of partners in the same rate as women, its not even close, by the time women hit 10 partners , its practically over especially if they were all chads/ chad lites with lots of dark triad traits.
3 only the top 5% of men are degenerates, while more than 50% of women partake in the CC, the 80/20 rule no longer applies on most hookup / dating platforms its now top 10% and even less in some cities. I bet in most cities by the age of 20 there are less virgins than there are # of people with 10 million in assets. Soon it will hit even lower. most men barely get any play while most women even in the bottom 10% get hit up, even women missing limbs, extra chromosomes, deformities, burn victims, its gotten so bad, that even trans women get more hits which is why M to F is such a large trans segment instead of the opposite. The sexual inflation and imbalance is so large that its not describable.
4) women limit children options, it has been proven that as men make more money, they want more children, positive income has a positive affect on the # of kids for men, for women, its the exact opposite more money equals less children, that number falls off a cliff if the women is very beautiful and narcissistic about her body and figure.
5) please look up percentage of males with vasectomies compared to % of women on birth control.
Men are from mars and women are from venus might have applied pre 1900, that is no longer the case, now its men are from alpha centauri and women are from sol, the gap is in millions of light years. Its more apt to compare men to some kind of reptile species while women being mammalian, its a whole entire different genus at this point.
Men’s binding does not get damaged over time or # of partners in the same rate as women, its not even close, by the time women hit 10 partners , its practically over especially if they were all chads/ chad lites with lots of dark triad traits.
I hear this all the time, but I don’t see the relevance. First of all, I don’t think it’s true. I have seen the data that show a correlation between number of partners and likelihood of divorce, but I’ve seen no evidence of a causal connection. I suspect other mechanisms are at play, to wit:
Women who have more sexual partners are more likely to have other issues to begin with. Besides that, I also suspect that higher partner counts are associated with lower sexual market value. More attractive women are able to secure an earlier commitment to marriage, so they don’t go through as many sexual partners by the time they’re married. It is that higher SMV that is protective from divorce. Their husbands treat them better.
https://www.psypost.org/2010/04/happy-marriage-attractive-husband-562
All that said, even if it is true that premarital sex is more damaging for women, then pump and dumps are effectively a form of femicide in that they ruin a woman who would otherwise have been someone’s wife. In that case, we should reenact fornication statutes. This is not wanted, of course, because that would control men’s behavior as well as women’s, and that is not the point here. Rather, a reactionary demonization of women is what is wanted. When reactionaries say they want to go back to the old ways, they just mean the ones they find convenient.
the 80/20 rule no longer applies on most hookup / dating platforms its now top 10%
The 80/20 rule is a misogynist fabrication.
https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
most men barely get any play while most women even in the bottom 10% get hit up, even women missing limbs, extra chromosomes, deformities, burn victims, its gotten so bad, that even trans women get more hits which is why M to F is such a large trans segment instead of the opposite. The sexual inflation and imbalance is so large that its not describable.
Yes, it is easier for women to get what we don’t want: casual sex. That tells us nothing about the marriage market.
women limit children options, it has been proven that as men make more money, they want more children, positive income has a positive affect on the # of kids for men, for women, its the exact opposite more money equals less children
I don’t know if it’s true or not that men want more children is they have more money, but I do know that it doesn’t follow that “women limit children options.” The question is not how many children would men want if they had more money. The question is how many they actually want, and I have seen no evidence whatsoever that wives rather than husbands control marital fertility decisions, and of course, wives being on the pill doesn’t answer the question either.
But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to call your bluff. Since you think men don’t want less birth control and more children, how about we just ban contraception and abortion? Would that suit you?
Now, if “female hypergamy” is a thing, why are the most educated women also the most likely to both get married and stay married? Shouldn’t we expect the opposite?
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/19/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/
I used to be on your side and defend the honor of white women but then I realized that these men, these hedonistic joe rogan wannabes only acted that way because it worked, women rewarded that behavior. Now I am more in his camp, especially after the advent of tinder, instagram and tik tok. gen x women are like another entire organism to the “future mothers” of today. for example, during lockdown a younger woman from my work began contacting me regularly talking about how lonely she was. instead of it progressing to something a bit more respectful to me, her coworker. she immediately wanted physical relations with a co-worker because she had lost access to attention because of lockdown. It was so crass and vulgar and so terrifying because one wrong thing I said could have been used against me by a completely morally vacant being that is something of a cross between an oversized 1990s disney princess and a cretacious super predator operating in perfect hind brained ruthlessness.
What poison. The broad majority of women ought to be chattel. The dark ages got some things right in that regard.
It’s very true. When a man encounters a woman with a higher notch count so to speak it will eventually eat at him and he will leave. A chaste woman is far more likely to keep a guy around. Biology is hypocritical like that.
Roughly a quarter of Japanese millenniala are virgins, and 43% are not married. Their virginity isn’t saving then from the Singles Epidemic. Redistributing status from old fathers to young men just might though.
What does that “redistributing status” mean, pragmatically?
Redistributing jobs and income for the most part.
In nature the young murder the old.
In my view the easiest path to fixing these problems is with one simple law – force women under age 35 out of the workforce. If young women can’t earn money, they are at the mercy of men for financial support, which drives them into forming healthy relationships rather than being entitled, irrational, cheating, etc. Obviously not all women are like this, but we are talking about imperfect humans. And even imperfect people deserve a shot in life.
In my view the easiest path to fixing these problems is with one simple law – force women under age 35 out of the workforce.
Thank you for this. I’m often accused of exaggerating when I say that Dissident right men want to force women into de facto prostitution, and would rather watch their race perish than accept a future with dignity and freedom for White women.
Of course, a much less radical and hateful solution would be to ban birth control and abortion and watch nature take its course. The reason previous generations of Whites got married younger on average was because of shotgun marriages. I hear very little about this, though, because solving the problem isn’t the point. The point is to provide pliant sex slaves for vicious, degenerate men who can’t bear to live with women in comity and friendship.
The case of India suggests that
sex slaveryarranged marriage without a birth control ban wouldn’t help much with demographics anyway, as their fertility rates are trending downward as well, and very rapidly. Children are an economic burden in post-agricultural societies, and married couples will limit their fertility if they have the means to do so.A further point about the article: It’s interesting that women are more likely to get divorced if they get a promotion. Of course, the misogynist playing the dispassionate scholar who wrote this article jumps to the worst conclusion about women: that they abandon good husbands for no reason. I suspect they had wanted to leave for some time, but couldn’t afford it. Or they may be frustrated that their spouse still isn’t doing enough around the house. Men may be doing more than they ever have, as the author claims, but then that’s not saying much.
Of course, this fact, assuming it’s true, would seem to undermine the notion that child support incentivizes divorce, since women who make more money are less likely to get any child support.
OK, OK, here’s the solution: if we trads here all think that the domestic work of the home-maker is so vitally important to the health of the nuclear family, nation, race and culture, then the NATION should recognize this and PAY every qualified domestic home-maker (woman OR man) a salary, a salary.
Yes, elevate the work of maintaining the household to the respected status of socially-necessary labor, and pay people for it.
The greatest benefit of this innovation, would be to provide women with economic independence without having them come into the “male” trades/professions. It would also reward and incentivize the nuclear family, and respect the vital and numerous labors of child-rearing and domestic maintenance.
AND give the lie to the Left-falsehood that men on the Right are women-subjugators.
PAY every qualified domestic home-maker (woman OR man) a salary
We used to earn a salary: an equal share of our husbands’. Moreover, in case of abandonment, her right to his earnings continued in the form of alimony. Alimony is now being phased out by the liberal, antifamily individualists of radical feminism and the allied “men’s rights movement.”
Phyllis Schlaffly warned us that we would lose our right to alimony. Of course, she led a heroic and ultimately successful battle to “Stop ERA,” but it doesn’t matter because we’re losing our right to alimony anyway. Once alimony is in the history books, I have no doubt that radfems and “men’s rights advocates” will move on to abolishing the concept of marital property so that tradwives get nothing in a divorce.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmajohnson/2014/10/27/are-you-a-stay-at-home-mom-facing-divorce-dont-expect-alimony/?sh=3ea35f5467a9
Ever see one of those time lapse videos of an animal dying, then scavengers coming to pick the bones clean of meat, vermin, insects, and maggots taking care of the rest, and finally, fungus consuming the rotting and decaying leftovers?
This is western civilization. The last 50 years (or so) was the scavenger phase and at this point, the maggots and vermin have taken over. It’s just a matter of a decade or so before nothing is left but rot.
Of all the issues that highlight this fact, the state of gender relations and our inability to form lasting pair bonds is the most glaring. Say what you want about the backwards Indian subcontinent, their society is not much different than it was when the Indus couture sprang up, and it has a much better chance of surviving the next few decades than this rotting corpse has.
agreed memebro, I think you are probably of my generation as well. you really have to have gallows humor about this whole mess. the thing that really bit into me was for all the big talk of the older men, they had absolutely no ground game or any organizational structure to counter the complete conquest of society by the hard left. it was really all this impotent bluster from men who had been reduced to ATM machines. that betrayal by the older men is what hurt the most, I have gotten over the whole “women” issue. for me, its the fact that the older generations never once stopped and thought about where this was all going until we got to this point where an a decent amount of an entire generation of girls are never going to be mothers.
at some point though you have to take a step back from the dispair porn and return to your epictetus.
Good comment, but I take the same criticism in a different direction. I was very aware of Western Civ survival issues even during the Cold War. I still recall my euphoria on the day the Berlin Wall fell. My (incredibly naive) thought (I was still in my 20s) was that the Republicans (most of them, anyway) really were Far Rightists who had just evaded the hard issues due to a need to maintain high levels of defense spending to counter the communists. To do so, they had to leave domestic policy for the most part to the less foreign-confrontational Democrats. With the Cold War’s imminent end, I thought for sure the GOP would get on with really cleaning up the country internally, beginning with sealing the Mexican border, deporting the illegals, and reducing or halting legal immigration from the Third World. Obviously, I was very wrong.
The real failure of the older generation was not in capitulating to feminism. I suspect very few could perceive the longer term racial threat that this would pose – and those who did did not to my knowledge foresee collapsing birthrates as the main threatening outcome (it was Christian traditionalists who were more insightful about this than racial nationalists – though the former’s concern was more about the health of the family, seen as a good in itself, than that of the race). They thought feminism was weakening (effeminizing) the character of white men, which I believe to be true, but, as this essay persuasively argues, not feminism’s worst racial result.
No, the real failure of earlier postwar generations was in not halting the immigration invasion when it became obvious, as it had by the end of the 80s. Today’s white patriots can complain about biased media/universities/corporations, then as now, as much as they want, but that’s still no excuse. Starting in 1992, a great conservative named Pat Buchanan started running for the Presidency in part with calls for serious reductions in immigration, along with securing the border. He did OK in the 1992 primary, but was never expected to unseat a sitting President of his own party. In 1996, he did even better. Still, he never came close to winning even the GOP nomination. Why not? Let’s face it: the (GOP) people then were vaguely against immigration, but not intensely enough. The same is true across the West. Not enough whites were concerned about stopping the passive invasions of their homelands when such invasions could in fact have been relatively easily halted. That postwar failure of nerve and even concern will be a source of both bewilderment and imprecation for centuries to come – if our race still has that much time.
I agree that the promiscuousness of women contributes to it, many of them have been corupted by pop culture as well. I sometimes wonder if America’s obesity epidemic contributes to this. Obesity causes testosterone levelels to drop as well. Amercans aren’t excersing like they should, watching TV to excess, and spending large amounts of time on social media all contribute to this. I sometimes wonder if people know they aren’t attractive because they are to overweight and don’t bother to date and at the same time don’t find a lot of the opposite sex attractive because they are overwieght as well. One other thing about social media and being online, it’s the phenomenom of being catfished. There have been shows about this. These people went online and met someone who used a fake image and persona to entice someone into what they thought was a relationship. These people never met in person, yet they thought they were in a relationship. Another thing I read recently is that women are suprised when they meet a man they consider dating and they find out he doesn’t have a facebook account. It completely throws them off according to some articles. I believe the old ways of going out, meeting someone, making a connection, and forming a relationship are best.
A few years ago, I read an article somewhere about young men pretending to be homosexual in order to try and meet women as they thought that somehow, they would stand more of a chance in gaining some sort of attention – ANY attention. Talk about desperation!
I’m so depressed reading this article, though it is immensely important and well-written and researched, but it just reminds me about how depressed I’ve been, in the background, about third-world overpopulation my whole life. Anyone with a brain can see how it is at the base of most all of our problems. I was born in 1943, and looked up the population then: 2.3 Billion. It has more than TRIPLED in my lifetime, to 2.3 + 2.3 + 2.3 = 6.9 BILLION. And it is now pushing 8 billion. This is so overwhelming in just 77 years. I can hardly read about it anymore without weeping.
And I’ve been no help to the White race, since I missed a good chance at about 20, and then stumbled around until 30, when a medical problem stopped all chance of having children. I wasn’t brought up in a large family, so I had no experience of children. I think that’s a huge problem in America today. Single mothers have a really tough life. I wonder if there is some way that Whites can help out only White mothers, but I’m pretty sure it would be against some damned civil rights law dreamed up by the Left or Black Civil Rights lawyers. I don’t mean for this to be such a downer, and the subject desperately needs to be discussed far and wide, but I’ve been wrestling with it for some time, while working as an office drone for 53 years. Two of my three husbands couldn’t support me because they wanted ‘to follow their dreams’ of art or writing and expected me to support them. It’s depressing to even discuss it, but it is — I’m sure — what is part of the problem today.
As for the ‘plastics’ role in lowering libido, I’d never heard of that before, but I use an empty whiskey bottle to store my drinking water in (which arrives in plastic), and try to drink an entire bottle of such water — 750 ml — every day. I’m sure I have become healthier in my old age due to drinking out of glass bottles. It takes me three or four weeks to finish a bottle of whiskey. Word to the wise.
You are one of my favorite commenters here on CC. Thank you for all of your insight and wisdom from an older woman’s perspective.
You were 20 in 1963
You were 30 in 1973
You mentioned you had 3 husbands was that all after 1973
Hypergamy may benefit individual Cinderellas who find a prince charming, but it hurts women overall because women such as yourself get stuck with the men Cinderella should have gone with. If women didn’t marry up so much in terms of going with guys who made a lot more than they or their fathers did, then there would have been more guys available who contributed close to what you did. The thing is that unlike your generation millennial women make as much money as millennial men, so if millennial women marry up, the effect will be worse because the gap between high earning women and poor men will be greater, and many more women will be in your situation than before. Hypergamy is more deceptive now because if a girl marries a 23 year old guy who makes $40k and her father makes $50k it looks like she’s not practicing hypergamy, but percentile-wise she is practicing hypergamy because her 23 year old husband is in the 77th percentile relative to his age group and her 48 year old father is in the 47th percentile relative to his age group. When the income differences are so stark between entry level and mid career people, it disrupts income’s social signal in how it affects perception of status.
Also, I’m sorry that you missed the opportunity to have kids, but in the long run passing on genes is like voting. No individual vote matters but collections of them do. Basically all of your genes have been passed on–just in a more dispersed manner by other people. Treating a few young people who share your race and ethnicity like your kids is sensible because they are like your extended family.
You are 100% correct about non-whites multiplying in the past century. The world was 30% white a century ago and a lot less crowded. It will be 8% white or less in a few decades and non-whites will have grown by 6 to 7 billion since 1900.
Hypergamy may benefit individual Cinderellas who find a prince charming,
Why are you still speaking of “hypergamy” as if it is a real thing? The term is like “racism.” It is intended, and does, pathologize women and only women. Would it not be just as logical to say that the problem is “male hypogamy”? If men didn’t prioritize physical appearance over social class, education, and other status markers, we wouldn’t have this problem that you still haven’t proven exists. You very pointedly suggest in your article that women shouldn’t “marry up.” This, of course, implies that men shouldn’t “marry down” to get a better-looking wife, does it not? You are very transparently focusing on women because it is your desire to cast us as the problem.
More and more women are marrying men who are less educated than themselves. Women are thus showing a responsiveness to realities on the ground that belies your implicit claims about some supposedly fixed and immutable hypergamous female nature. For now, less educated husbands earn more money than their wives, but we have no way of knowing whether that too will change with the times. You just assume, without reason, that it will not.
Even when men admit to you point blank that they could get married if they wanted to, but are unwilling to risk their pocketbooks, your attacks on women continue. You effectively advise men to go through the charade of a wedding, the legal significance of which is totally eviscerated by a “prenuptial agreement.” I find this particularly bizarre, because a prenup effectively says to a woman, in no uncertain terms: “You’re on your own. Don’t depend on me.” Why would a woman compromise her career to have more children in such a scenario? How would you advise your daughter or sister?
It’s not our fault the plutocrats outsourced your jobs to foreign sweatshops, and you have nothing whatsoever to gain by alienating women as you do here. You can keep ignoring my criticisms, but that will not cure the logical and empirical problems in your claims.
I agree that men should not marry down, and that’s why I noted how the Roman policy of letting slaves marry citizens led to a singles epidemic. Also, I noted how gen Xers are taking double what entry level workers get despite income correlating with experience by only 0.27. Middle aged men’s greed and their daughter’s failure to account for age-based income differences are the two main drivers of the Singles Epidemic. Dating app info show that millennial men want to end it way more than millennial women do.
You are 100% correct about non-whites multiplying in the past century. The world was 30% white a century ago and a lot less crowded. It will be 8% white or less in a few decades and non-whites will have grown by 6 to 7 billion since 1900
We can thank Dow chemical and the creation of mustard gas for WW1 for this one, it created nitrogen fixing in soil leading to the modern agriculture movement which increased the efficiency of agriculture several 1000% and all that invented by whites directly exploded only the third world population, infact, it had the opposite affect on the white population by decreasing not just the percentages but overall birth rates as well. Its all about electricity, getting rid of it wont just fix dating, it will fix government, wars, banking, wealth distribution, hedonism, religiosity, health and almost every problem there is and it will increase overall happiness and life satisfaction.
hopefully the amount of spinsters in coming years will serve as empirical proof of the folly of “feminism” (i.e. abandoning traditional female roles in favor of playing pretend as a man with none of the consequences of being a man) to wider society and women of the future. I feel slightly downcast that I was selected to be the male counterpart to this great lisa simpson starring adaptation of the assemblywomen. perhaps there is still a fools hope for us millennial men, all I can say is I am glad I am not stuck in an apartment with a cellphone and its legs.
The trend you are describing is true for western society, but not for Hungary
.https://rmx.news/article/article/hungary-s-pro-family-policies-are-leading-to-increase-in-births-and-marriages-report.
Therefore, pro-family government policies work, but globalists politicians won’t implement them: that’s the problem.
And here’s a video about it:
https://youtu.be/DHFk0weGot8
I think it is very significant that Hungary under Mr Orban has pulled this off. His avowed intention to bolster his nation’s demographics by means of simple incentives to having children in wedlock is giving the global immigrationist lobby the vapours.
Doubtless their acolytes, such as Professor Jonathan Portes, will scaremonger by detecting shades of Lebensborn, but what could be more evident than the onrushing catastrophe of dysgenic orc-breeding in bastardy subsidised by unlimited welfare?
if you look back in history, no civilization has reversed the trend once it falls under 1.7 replacement rate, EVER. If you look at the statistics of white non hispanic births, US and all of western Europe and alot of Eastern Europe are already done. The modern European culture ranges from 1350 – 1950, so it might take several decades to multiple centuries, but its done, it all depends of the largess of the immigrants on how quick they dispose of natives while simultaneously fighting the disease of affluenza which also plagues them as soon as they “assimilate”
Thanks for mentioning this. I knew about the Hungary marriage policy but I am waiting to see the long term impact. So far it looks good. It certainly better than nothing. I would prefer instead a way of changing laws so that the age-based income curve can return to speculated 1987 levels in figure 6. Ideally, people starting out should make 75% of what mid career people do rather than half as they do now in the US. Governments could set price targets or give a youth friendly score to institutions so people could boycott ones where wealth (and status) accrues to sexually sterile people in the 50s and 60s.
Just curious: do you understand how free markets work? The US is far from a true free market, but we are somewhat more so in terms of labor mobility than, say, heavily regulated manufacturing enterprises. Older people make more on average than younger ones because our experience makes us worth more. This might not be true under coercive conditions (such as obtain in university tenure decisions, labor union “seniority”, police forces, government bureaucracy), nor for manual laborers. But it is true for unregulated enterprises. Of course, Big Tech is mostly unregulated, and there vast fortunes have been made by utter (Millennial) jackasses who happened to have the right ideas at the right times.
The real problem, which your otherwise excellent post didn’t emphasize enough, is the role that media of all kinds have played in dramatically raising women’s expectations as to the kind of man they might be able to get. I don’t know all that much about this issue, but I’ve seen this for a very long time. Far too many women, especially in urban environments, don’t even try to settle down until they hit age 30, or later. They keep overestimating their own attractiveness, hypergamously assuming that a Prince Charming will be there for them eventually. Once they hit around 35, they start getting desperate, and often end up making very poor marriages which don’t last long, even if they produce a child.
Unfortunately, I don’t think America, even just white America, has the internal mental resources to overcome this. To reverse the marriage decline and reproductive die-off would require a completely reconceptualized nation, and probably political order. There’s no way to get there except via massive male coercion, which is unlikely to arise in a multiracial democracy. Thus, we need to keep the focus on white Awakening, and the push for the Ethnostate. Without territory firmly under our racial control, we’re lost anyway. With such racial sovereignty, we just might have a chance at reversing white fertility decline. But even if we didn’t, our race, if we possessed a sufficient commitment to hi-tech defense (as, eg, Israel has), could still endure. And gradually, we would, even without coercion, change the genetics of female propensity to reproduction, as those white females who are pro-natality would pass on more of their genes than those who prefer spinsterdom. I’ve know at least two women who married anti-hypergamously simply because they really wanted children and their options were narrowing.
“Once they hit around 35, they start getting desperate, and often end up making very poor marriages which don’t last long, even if they produce a child.”
This is a good point because figure 7 shows women start easing up on their judgement of men who make under $50k (ie, median income) among 40 and older, who correspond to women in their late 30s as you have mentioned.
I am saying women should ease up on 25 year old men instead and look at each one for his income percentile rather than his income as compared with their overpaid fathers.
Regarding the free market, it is inherently parasitic. IQ correlates with GDP per capita by 0.62 between nations but with income in the US by only 0.30. This means intelligence benefits the group more than individuals in it. Hence the belief that IQ developed to help groups against other groups, ie, group selection theory. I believe we need to make income correlate with IQ by a figure closer to 0.62 by regulating income and job distribution. I call this neo-aristocracy. The current free market or whatever you want to call what we have now benefits moron socialites and people with connections too much over smart people. Leftists want to go in the opposite direction from what I propose by giving incompetent blacks jobs in the government and by putting them on welfare. I want to shift things in the opposite direction but only insofar as it benefits productivity. I don’t want money given to Ivy Tower midwits to study unimportant things. I want the market to be better by forcing it to reward intelligence and competence more.
White men will either relearn the art of the bitchslap or perish.
Ask Jim Goad how that worked out. All it gets you is a jail sentence. I’ll bet it feels great though.
I’ve known quite a few White men that hit women. It’s a temporary solution at best.
Arranged marriages have an awful effect on female morphology, as can be seen in the artistic depictions of women in every era prior to the 20th century. The reduction in testosterone is probably the most significant factor in our women today being hyper-feminine. High testosterone males are significantly more likely to produce ugly daughters, and this is a bitter pill for the Dissident Right to swallow, as they are obsessed with extolling the virtues of masculinity, largely an attempt to signal their opposition to femininity and overcompensate for its influence. As usual, they are clueless regarding the catastrophic effect of hyper-masculine men pairing with feminine women. Pairings between men and women should always be formed on the basis of morphological compatibility.
While I recognise that an informed eugenics policy is better than leaving everything up to chance, it is still a distant second best option. I largely left the Dissident Right and politics in general behind after I embraced anti-natalism, the best solution to the human predicament. Ed Dutton has made references to anti-natalism, usually when he’s talking about the manifestations of high mutational load in spiteful mutants. I have a high mutational load and I am persuaded by anti-natalism, although I am certainly not a liberal progressive. He seems to use anti-natalism as a generic label to refer to the childfree, and the term childfree often carries with it certain hedonistic connotations. He appears to be unaware that, while anti-natalist sentiments have always been expressed by a miniscule minority of people throughout recorded history, in more recent years it has become a fully-fledged philosophy. An exceptionally robust framework for it has been exquisitely crafted by one man, Professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town. He is very elusive and has only given a handful of interviews over the years, most of them to youtubers who have requested to have him as a guest on their podcasts. His reasons for guarding his private life and not allowing any images of himself to be seen are apparently due to threats that have been made against his life. These threats arise because some people become so incensed by Benatar’s books, which arguably represent the most spectacularly provocative worldview that has ever been conceived.
His books are Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence and The Human Predicament. The first was published in 2006 and the second in 2017. In terms of personal information, not much is known about the man. He is not a liberal progressive, as he opposes affirmative action and has written a book about misandry (The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys). He has made no overt mention of race in any of his work, at least not that I’ve seen. Most people in the Dissident Right who encounter him are dismissive, based solely on the fact that he has a Jewish name. I understand this reaction perfectly well, having been a great admirer of Kevin MacDonald’s work, but Benatar is one of the rare exceptions to the Jew rule. I see nothing subversive in any of his work, and the only time he makes any reference to his heritage is in his first book, where in the introduction he reflects on an old Jewish proverb about the misfortune of being born. Benatar is not the only person who has come to deeply pessimistic (realistic) conclusions about the poor quality of human life and the ultimate futility of existence. Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark by Colin Feltham, and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti are other such tomes.
Benatar’s thesis rests upon several asymmetries between the good things and the bad things in life. One is an empirical asymmetry between pleasure and pain, that the worst suffering is more intense than the best pleasure. Some have opposed this because he doesn’t explain exactly how the measurements are being done. “What metrics does Benatar use? He begins with the conclusion that maximum pain is more intense than maximum pleasure and that negativity is overwhelmingly more prevalent in our lives, but even if that is true, it does not follow that a being would prefer non-existence.” He responds by asking these people to consider the following wager: would you endure an hour of the worst tortures imaginable in exchange for an hour, or even a whole day, of the most sublime pleasures imaginable? People reject the offer, indicating that suffering is indeed more intense than happiness, even of shorter duration. One might interject that pain only *seems* more intense than pleasure because avoidance of injury is a higher priority for an organism than acquiring benefit. I doubt this, because why would the qualia of pain, at least physical pain, be contingent upon one’s priorities? I see no connection between the two. Furthermore, if we specify in the wager that you will survive the torture, that you will only experience the pain but will not be permanently disfigured, people still decline the offer.
Some have raised the objection that anti-natalism is divorced from the Darwinian origins of morality. They have claimed that it is built on an inverted morality, that it takes the evolutionary mechanisms we use to survive (compassion, empathy, and aversion to suffering), both as individuals and as a species, and uses them as the basis to advocate for our self-imposed extinction, which is what these mechanisms evolved to prevent in the first place. I respond that the focus of anti-natalism is on the qualia of pain, which is inherently negative, rather than the instrumental value it has in some circumstances. The function of pain is communicative in some sense, alerting you that something is wrong and encouraging you to desist from whatever harmful behaviour, or escape from whatever thing, is causing the pain stimuli, thereby preserving your life and potential lineage. But does the fact that I recoil when I put my hand on a hot surface mean that I am life-affirming? Of course not. It’s an involuntary reaction, one which I have no choice in. Pain will always be bad, with or without instrumental value, since even when it has instrumental value, the intensity of it is often horrendously disproportionate. Its fundamental essence is negative. Suffering is also rendered gratuitous when nothing can be done about the pain, as is often the case among wild animals and has been the case for humans for the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet.
Another asymmetry is an axiological one. Positive self-testimony about the quality of one’s life is tainted by the optimism bias, which is evolutionarily hardwired. Benatar goes into a lot of detail about this phenomenon. A rose-tinted worldview is evolutionarily selected for, but it remains a deception. We value the truth for its own sake, or at least I do. I wouldn’t want to be under an illusion, even if it gave me a sense of meaning and purpose, as the illusion of God does for billions of people around the world. I value authenticity and honesty, even if it shines the light on an unbearable truth. As such, somebody’s testimony that they enjoy their own life has no bearing on the creation of new lives. People who already exist usually have an interest in continuing that existence, but a potential person has not yet acquired any such interest, and therefore the good things in life (which are merely palliatives) do not have the same value for the pre-exister as they do for the exister. For this reason, positive self-assessments cannot serve as a justification for creating new lives. It’s really not that difficult to understand, but so many people struggle to grasp that there is a fundamental distinction between *before* existence and *after* coming into it. The criteria undergoes a major shift between scenarios, and what counts as good for something in the existence scenario counts for nothing in the pre-existence scenario. Many people, even when they claim to have finally understood, will often relapse and have to be reminded. The grasp they manage to get on this is ephemeral, so repetition is warranted.
Because the optimism bias is so deeply embedded in our primitive hindbrain, the reflexive response when most people encounter Benatar’s arguments is the spiteful non-sequitur “why don’t you just kill yourself?” This indignation is a programmed response, as their hindbrain enters defence mode whenever it encounters anything it perceives as nihilistic. As such, they will come out with all sorts of flippant remarks which are not rationally informed. This was discussed at length during a podcast session with Sam Harris in 2018, which I think is Benatar’s best recorded debate. Sam is very soft spoken and although he may be a liberal, I have applauded his attempt to defeat postmodernist relativism in his book The Moral Landscape. I believe Sam is correct and that his book represents a truly noble effort, in spite of whatever flaws it may have. Despite the sharp distinction Benatar draws between *coming into* existence and *continuing* to exist, Sam ruminated on whether the anti-natalist philosophy implies that we should all end our lives, and he coined the term “pro-mortalism” to describe this dilemma. Benatar rejected this with intricate reasoning, but I still feel that Sam added a new dimension to what is already a phenomenally provocative subject.
Regarding the distinction, Benatar uses the following analogy to help people understand the major difference between *coming into* existence, *continuing* that existence, and *ceasing* to exist. Suppose you buy a ticket to a movie, you spend a good deal of money and have invested a lot in the experience, but after a relatively short time in the cinema, it becomes apparent that the film is a huge disappointment. It might not be so terrible that you choose to leave, given that you have invested a lot in this (the problem of sunk costs), but if you had known that it was going to fall short of your expectations, you never would have bought a ticket in the first place. It’s a very helpful analogy, since a lot of people confuse the question of a life worth continuing (of which there are many) with that of a life worth starting (of which there are none). It’s a very important distinction to understand. The central premise is that there’s no net benefit to being born, as encapsulated in Benatar’s maxim “there is no need to create need.” Since the world as it exists is not optimally calibrated for our wellbeing, creating a new life can only ever entail degradation. To have an adequate appreciation of this, I think it is essential to also understand the Problem of Non-God Objects, which is the most ironclad argument that atheists have against the existence of a benevolent deity. Both arguments draw upon the same perfectionist expectations, and I personally believe perfectionism is a prerequisite for being drawn to anti-natalism.
Benatar makes use of a concept in negative utilitarianism known as the pinprick argument, which states that, due to the axiological asymmetry between pleasure and pain, an idyllic and eternal life of endless pleasure marred by the negativity of only a single pinprick is a comparatively worse option than the neutrality of never coming into existence. In order for coming into existence to be ethically permissible, life would have to be perfect in every conceivable way, and even then it could only ever achieve *neutrality* in comparison to never coming into existence. There is no conceivable way for coming into existence to be a *better* option than never coming into existence, since pleasure in a world that contains pain merely serves an ameliorative function, while a world consisting of only pleasurable experiences would be something that one could not have been deprived of if one had never come into existence.
The mitigatory function of the good things in life adds a further dimension to the axiological asymmetry. Pleasure is invariably a palliative in that it relieves a discomfort or deprivation, rather than being a good in itself. Since the positive experiences in life only have value in alleviating the default negativity, a satisfied desire is equivalent to the desire having never existed in the first place, as illustrated by the anti-frustrationist moral theory developed by Christoph Fehige and Peter Singer. Many pleasures also come at great cost, either to oneself or to others. Schopenhauer famously juxtaposed the satiety of a feasting lion with the suffering of its prey being eaten alive. Pleasure is fleeting and requires sacrifice, while suffering is prolonged and intense. Similarly, creation is hard while destruction is easy. Knowledge requires learning and dedication, but ignorance is effortless. In light of this, it cannot plausibly be denied that negativity has a serious and inherent advantage in our world. There can be no transcending the duality of negativity and positivity, as they are fundamentally irreconcilable. Our agonising predicament as sentient creatures is born of these two incongruent forces existing simultaneously, and not in equal proportion. Why there is something rather than nothing is the ultimate question. That the something happens to be so disproportionately awful is the ultimate tragedy.
In a rare moment of levity, Benatar has humorously described his position on abortion as pro-death, stating his conviction that the moral imperative should in fact be to prevent new lives rather than create them. This would preferably be done at the earliest stages of gestation, when the developing cells cannot yet be considered a person in the morally relevant sense. This also helps make the procedure less emotionally traumatic for the prospective parents and the physician. Many people have questioned Benatar as to *who* benefits from not being brought into existence, a barrier in their thought process which he refers to as the non-identity problem. To illustrate how ridiculous this objection is, consider the case of a deformed fetus. Nobody questions whether the fetus gains some experiential benefit from its termination. Obviously it does not, but it remains the ethical thing to do, in a default sense, since we acknowledge that the alternative scenario is undesirable.
I think it’s worth reflecting on some examples of the terrible price that is paid in order to continue the human experiment. There was a time, until relatively recently in the grand scheme of things, when people could find themselves buried alive. Medical historians prefer to downplay this, but there are reliable accounts which prove beyond any doubt that this nightmarish fate did indeed occur more often than is comfortable to admit, and would even befall children. One case I recall concerned a teenage girl in the 1880s who was buried and then exhumed a few days later. Her burial shroud was torn to shreds, there was significant damage to the interior of the casket, her fingernails had ripped away, chunks of her hair had been torn out, and her face was contorted into an expression of unimaginable terror. Although rare, there are also accounts concerning pregnant women being exhumed, wherein they were discovered to have apparently given birth in the confines of the coffin after waking from suspended animation.
Now, one might say that our medical knowledge has improved to the extent that such horrific occurrences are practically inconceivable today, but all who affirm life and partake in its veneration are implicitly endorsing the suffering of prior generations, the unspoken assumption being that what they went through was somehow worth it in order to have reached the point we are at now. As such, the security and improved living conditions of future generations will always be contingent upon the suffering of intermediate generations, and this is never an acceptable price to pay, as there is no need to create those future generations. That girl’s life in the 1880s and my life today are among countless stepping stones that have been laid down to reach a mirage of utopia that lies forever on the horizon. Future generations are perched atop a pyramid of prior generations who suffered indescribably, and the suffering of one generation is not an acceptable price to ensure the existence of the next generation, because the next generation does not yet exist and has no interest in coming into existence. It is, as Benatar has said, a procreational Ponzi scheme. For this reason, sacrifices made for the attainment of a better future, let alone a perfect one, can never be justified. Furthermore, the world that we live in is imperfect and imperfectable, since for a world to be truly perfect it would have to be flawless from its inception. Any intermediary process of improvement would be incompatible with the definition of perfection.
Many people like to argue that suffering is not inherently bad and can create positive value in one’s life. Benatar uses extreme examples of people living in chronic pain, which, in the view of some, is not intellectually honest. His opponents claim that most of the suffering which people experience is temporary, and that the subsequent decisions that come from suffering are entirely subjective to the person who undergoes the suffering. “Some people rise above it, while others sink deeper, and it all depends on their outlook after the suffering has abated.” I call this the “struggle is the glory” argument, and it’s not only pitiful and desperate, but downright indecent. In a pathetic attempt to minimise, or perhaps even trivialise the tragedy of suffering, his opponents are effectively condoning it, by ascribing it meaning. But as he says, it would still be better if those bad things were not necessary for character development and personal growth, or whatever contrived nonsense the people espousing this view are driving at. Incidentally, these are the same sort of people who make the appalling “life is a test” argument in religious apologetics, which I always relish the opportunity to refute.
Chip Smith, philosophical pessimist and founder of Nine Banded Books, has described anti-natalism as “the accidental outing of humanity’s closet, all the visceral opposition to it being nothing more than the exposed psyche’s dread at having its secrets revealed.” It therefore comes as no surprise that anti-natalism is so spectacularly provocative. I’ve observed countless times how people who regard the topic as merely silly become increasingly hostile and vituperative as the discussion progresses. When the mere fact that the anti-natalist position exists is brought to their attention, their brains react instinctively. They undergo a fundamental shift in their cognition, from brain structures that facilitate logic to the older structures that are emotionally charged. At that point, they are absorbing everything the anti-natalist says through the lens of their offence, and nothing is more offensive to society than pessimism.
Pessimism is by far the most reviled philosophy, and pessimists are by far the most discriminated against group in society. Anyone who identifies consciousness as the source of all horror will be encouraged to throw themselves off a cliff with alacrity by all those still running enthusiastically on the evolutionary treadmill. I used to consider myself a white nationalist, but having seen the sick game of life on earth for what it is, a grotesque carnival of suffering and death, I have embraced anti-natalism and left politics behind. All of our problems are deep and intractable features of life itself, and in any case, a problem solved is a problem caused, as solutions invariably lead to new dilemmas. As I say, it would be better if everything were perfect from the beginning, then nobody would have to suffer the intermediary stages on the path to a hypothetical and ultimately illusory “better world” that never arrives. On the rare occasions when there is improvement, it is incremental and insufficient, arriving too late and at such a cost in human suffering as to disgrace the entire enterprise.
Nihilism is a word often used in the Dissident Right to describe just about anything that conflicts with their ethno-political goals, and much like the overused “degeneracy” condemnation, it becomes meaningless when used so liberally. Meaninglessness is what nihilism is concerned with, of course. From a cosmic perspective, mankind is indeed insignificant and ephemeral, but I don’t feel this is something we can nonchalantly brush aside like some YOLO-ing millennial. For those of us who are constantly mired in deep thought, it is a source of tremendous angst. Our situation is an appalling one, that we have come to exist in a universe which does not acknowledge, validate or reciprocate us in any way. In this sense, we are all orphans. Our most heartfelt questions and pleas are directed in vain to the entropic churn of a vast abyss. We are alone, as a species and as individuals. We are all locked inside the confines of a mind and body we did not choose, had no say in, and which will inevitably fail us, sometimes in the most horrific ways imaginable.
A blind and unconditional reverence for one’s culture and ancestors, many of whom lived horrendous lives while obliviously creating more people to share in their misery, is an aspect of this movement which is hard to ignore. Due to this, I would classify the movement as a fertility cult. Those content to remain on the evolutionary treadmill will either turn a blind eye to nature’s gratuitous evils or will try to excuse the inexcusable by appealing to the “eternal wisdom” of nature’s laws. Despite the initial appearance of concern for our people, the white nationalist reverses principle when he encounters anti-natalism, and casually accepts the suffering of his people as inevitable collateral damage in the great quest to fulfil Faustian Man’s destiny, securing dominion over the earth and seeding space with his Hyperborean progeny. Such intergalactic lebensraum fantasies are fundamentally driven by an egocentric desire to achieve vicarious immortality, a delusion of grandeur if ever there was one.
I no longer partake in the sycophantic veneration of our ancestors and the sacralization of life implicit in it. We seldom consider that we are all descended from a rapist at some point in our lineage. For those of us who suffer indescribably, our ancestors are worthy of the fiercest contempt. The imperative to pass on one’s “cultural heritage” is just one of many egotistical baubles that serve as bait to keep us running on the evolutionary treadmill. It can never be sufficient justification for gambling with another’s fate. It could be said that procreators worship nature by offering her a child sacrifice. I defy her by denying her this. I am not imposing a harm, nor am I withholding a benefit.
Non-existence is not scary as a starting point, because we are never aware of it. Our suffering arises in being woken from it and knowing we must inevitably return to it. “Nothingness” is a paradox, a word to describe a “something” which is in fact not a thing at all. We are constrained by our linguistic limitations and the conceptual boundaries of the mind. We cannot conceive of nothingness, any more than we can imagine a colour we’ve never seen. We are all ultimately destined to go back to the void of nothingness, and our awareness of this is the source of our anguish. It would therefore have been better to never have been woken from the nothingness, as we would not then be condemned to the absurdity of living in fear of it. Contrary to what many say, the finality of death does indeed nullify any purpose we might otherwise convince ourselves that our lives have. It is a very grim state of affairs, and our curse is to know it. Once we accept the accuracy of pessimism and the validity of depressive realism, it can only lead to the conclusion that we have a moral imperative to not create more human beings to suffer the pain and existential angst of consciousness. Once we realise that this whole thing is ultimately pointless, which is arguably the endgame of all knowledge, the sensible decision is to stop feeding the meat grinder. Do not disturb the unborn from their eternal sleep in the blessed calm of non-existence. Only then will this ridiculous Sisyphean nightmare be brought to an end.
This was a very long comment…not a bad thing mind you…but might I suggest reformatting it and writing an article submission? Most people have difficulties with long commentary that meanders a bit…but a well written essay on the topic would likely be well received, even if only for the debate that ensues.
I could do that, but do you think it would be accepted? I doubt the Dissident Right could handle this much introspection and internal criticism, least of all from a deserter. I couldn’t help but notice that you neglected to engage with anything I wrote. Do you not have any opinion on this at all? In my experience, most people struggle to contain their indignation.
Get your own blog. TLDR
“Do not disturb the unborn from their eternal sleep in the blessed calm of non-existence. Only then will this ridiculous Sisyphean nightmare be brought to an end.”
Your pain and dissatisfaction are fully understood. To paraphrase the title of the famous Beatles song – “Your Mother Should Know”. We are currently living in a world of shit. PLEASE don’t give up. Our enemies are cowards and weaklings. You are far superior to them. You are part of that which is Greater and Noble. They will pay for what they have done to you and me and all the others that support this website, along with just regular folks who somehow are trying to get through life. These bastards are on the ropes, with their fake pandemics that somehow develop endless drug-resistant mutations and lockdown restrictions etc, etc, etc, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. Only the guilty flee when no-one pursues. And the day of reckoning for the guilty is coming!
With all due respect, I think you may have missed his point. He’s thinking at a much more fundamental level, one at which all ideologies are rendered pointless because life itself is not only pointless but not worth it, a net-negative. It’s an endpoint of atheism. Is it definitive? Not really. First, it’s not clear that atheism is correct. Atheism has not defeated theism (in the sense that no person past a certain IQ threshold can any longer be theistic). Neither has theism defeated atheism. The debate goes on.
Even if atheism is correct, anti-natalism is simply beside its own point. Autisticus Spasticus repeatedly makes moral claims. But what – in “The Void” {shades of Lovecraft!} – is the basis for ascribing meaning to moral judgments? The Void just *is*. Is there a moral claim to be made about a rock, tree or fish? Then why can such claims be made about our actions? From this metaphysical perspective, they can’t. Yet anti-natalism is fundamentally a moral theory, in effect saying it’s better not to have been than to be, and that we the living have a correlative duty not to inflict life (and its inevitable miseries) on others.
A.S. also seems to misunderstand procreation, thinking it happens because people ascribe moral worth to natality, and the human enterprise more broadly. Most do so, I think, but people usually have children for self-interested reasons, or else accidentally. In the meaninglessness of The Void, why should I care about the fact that my children might end up suffering more than they compensatingly experience joy or happiness? I’m having children for MY happiness, not theirs.
A.S.’s position paradoxically only becomes meaningful where morality is meaningful, and that I hold is under a theistic reality. All the major religions of which I know anything obviously oppose the idea that non-birth is better than life. With God (especially in the Christian understanding), children are a blessing, and a moral duty if one is able to procreate. OTOH, without God, there are no moral duties, so people are free to procreate or not. Theistic white nationalists probably believe in a moral duty to preserve our race; that is, that they are serving God in part (the realm of moral duty is vast …) by helping to ensure white perpetuity. Atheistic white nationalists have no reason to care about morality, but encourage (white) natalism merely because their personal neurological makeup is such that they arationally care about white preservation: ie, it gives them present pleasure to imagine future generations of whites, and present pain to contemplate our racial extinction.
A brilliant comment, evincing high intelligence and considerable reflection. As with many average people, I have certainly thought, in serious rebellion to my Christian upbringing, that there is something deeply wrong about bringing a terribly deformed fetus to term. But I cannot agree with your comment otherwise. Even if more of life is miserable than wonderful, it doesn’t follow that people still don’t want to live. Most do. Is this merely because most are too philosophically stupid to understand their true situation? I don’t think so. People generally want to live for two reasons: either they still enjoy certain things that make life worth living, or they expect to achieve greater happiness in some ill-defined future. I think these facts alone are sufficient to nullify the claim that it is immoral to inflict life on others merely because some wish to enjoy the experience of producing and raising children. (See also my comment to Liam K.)
In candidly admitting that it’s all about you and your happiness at the expense of the children’s welfare, you have proved my point entirely. I would also advise you to read what I wrote again, as the distinction between lives worth continuing and lives worth starting doesn’t seem to have sunk in.
My main interest is in the broader debate between realism and relativism. I think mankind will face its penultimate challenge in the 21st century, where we must address a triad of fundamental issues, all interrelated and interconnected with each other, each one necessitating a consecutive confrontation with the other. In chronological order, they are 1) the problem of realism vs relativism, 2) the problem of religion vs atheism, and finally 3) the problem of natalism vs anti-natalism. Only by the vindication of realism and the triumph of atheism can we address the most important issue of all: is this existence good enough? I have always believed deep down that the answer is no. It’s abysmal. But if the world we leave behind is to be truly silent, these steps must be taken in the order I’ve laid out, or else the book on humanity will never be fully closed. If non-white, non-western peoples become the custodians of earth in our absence, anti-natalism will never see the light of day.
I say religion vs atheism, but what I really mean is a definitive conclusion as to the existence of god, which I feel has already been provided on both an empirical front and a philosophical front. On the empirical side of things, you need an anthropocentric universe in order to seriously entertain the notion of God and/or an afterlife, and we don’t live in one. Dinosaurs were here much longer than we were. If the history of our planet were represented in the form of a 24 hour clock, the first signs of organic life would not have appeared until around 8:30 pm. For perspective, humans have existed for the equivalent of a nanosecond. On the philosophical side of things, the Problem of Non-God Objects is insurmountable. In its simplest form, this boils down to the obvious question “why would a perfect being create an imperfect world?” And the answer is equally obvious: they wouldn’t. It astounds me how so many people bought into the idea of a benevolent god for so long, when everything around us tells us he must be a complete Jekyll and Hyde. And even if this was a perfect world, the question would still arise as to why he even created anything at all, though we, in our state of perpetual satisfaction, would be less inclined to ask such a question. If god had a desire to create, then that means he was lacking something. He was incomplete in some way, and something that is incomplete cannot meet the definition of perfection.
None of the atheist’s observations ever really present a problem for the true believer, since the injustices of the world, a product either of god’s irrationality, mediocrity or malevolence, can be excused for them by the mere fact that he is god. The rule maker can do whatever he likes, he answers to nobody, and the insinuation that he be held accountable offends them. They would rather have a malevolent god than no god at all, such is the extent of their dependency. They argue from the perspective, and the value system, of one who already believes and has a vested interest in a particular outcome. They try to solve the dilemmas we point out from *within* their theological framework. The Problem of Non-God Objects, while certainly applicable to the Abrahamic god, is not tailor made for him. Adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are incapable of discussing the possible motivations of *a* god, rather than *the* god who they already happen to believe in. They would have to step outside their insular worldview in order to have that discussion, which would leave them vulnerable to external criticisms of the concept of deities in general, which they are not equipped to deal with. They can only ever respond to these questions from an internal perspective, which is constrained by all manner of esoteric values and nonsensical rules that are particular to the Abrahamic conception of god and do not apply to a more general conception. Perhaps this insularity is best illustrated by their cliched response to the problem of evil, that it originates from man’s sin rather than god’s malice. Ascribing the root of all evil to sin is a prime example of the inability of organised religions to grapple with problems externally, from beyond the internal framework that binds them. People who don’t subscribe to the Abrahamic faiths are free to apply unrestrained scrutiny and see that the stories in the Bible, like the Fall and the Flood, are ridiculous, and that no supreme being would behave as illogically as the Abrahamic god does.
Some theists have responded with indignation that we dare to expect perfection from god. They have said that god is not a servant here to dote on us, and have invoked the analogy of a parent and a demanding child. This analogy, as predictable as it is absurd, fails miserably. The child does not owe the parent anything, but the parent is morally obligated to care for the child, as the child did not ask to be created. They were created by the parent, for gratuitous and ultimately self-serving reasons, and so the parent cannot claim the moral high ground, nor can they accuse the child of not fulfilling their expectations. The child’s failings are those of the parent’s. The parent does not have carte blanche to emotionally or physically abuse the child in any way simply because they begat the child. The burden of responsibility always lies with the parent. These points apply to the relationship between the creator and the created, whether we be talking about parent and child or god and mankind. The theist is ultimately arguing that god has a divine right to be a sadist, much as the slave owner has the legal right to abuse his property.
Theists also like to argue that logic and reason are forms of faith. This is a very desperate tu quoque to pull out of the hat, but it is to be expected. Rational inference is our default faculty, at least for those of us who aren’t insane, and as any sane man would, I always value and expect the very best. This world is decidedly *not* the best, as it is only too easy to imagine a better world, in innumerable ways and to innumerable degrees, although still bound within the conceptual limitations of the mind. The theist highlights these limitations and argues that god and his motivations lie beyond them. To illustrate how absurd this is, consider Schieber’s fridge analogy. If we go to the fridge and it is empty, and someone repeatedly tells us that we aren’t looking hard enough, and we take the entire fridge apart, down to the last screw, and still find no food, then we can safely conclude that there is no food to be found. If that person still insists we are not looking hard enough, that we don’t have the requisite senses or level of knowledge to find the food, then we have every right to brand them a lunatic. This analogy is not alluding to the location of god, but to the exhaustion of all possible explanations as to why a supreme being would create a world that contained even a single minute imperfection, let alone the staggering degree of imperfection and injustice we perceive. It would not be tolerated in any other arena of debate to appeal to the unfalsifiable “beyond mortal comprehension” excuse that the theist inevitably falls back on.
The theist thinks we have no right to expect perfection from god, even though it is a logical expectation to have of a supreme being who is not constrained by any logistical or external factors. If you were god, would you create anything less than perfect? I know that I certainly would not. But for the theist, moonstruck at the supposed majesty of his infallible god’s creation, the mere fact that we exist at all is proof of god, and that’s more than enough to be singing his praises. I am not so easily impressed. I won’t be satisfied with the pathetic spectacle we see on display all around us, which oscillates between mediocrity at best and evil at worst. I really don’t ask much of god. If I can imagine better, then he’s out of a job.
The theist objects that my idyllic world is incompatible with free will, but I disagree. We could simply posit that in the world of my design, much like Tolkien’s angelic elves, committing evil acts simply wouldn’t be in man’s nature, a nature which would ultimately be attributable to my benevolent, flawless design. In this sense, man’s inability to do evil would be nomological in origin, rather than the result of any divine intrusion upon free will. While there would be no childbirth in the idyllic world, men and women would still exist, and the most intimate expression of love would still exist for the purpose of bonding. However, since our bodies in my world do not function as organic machines, instead of the crude act of penetration and the fleeting pleasure of orgasm, a much more intense and enduring experience of ecstasy would be felt by embracing, kissing, or merely looking at one’s lover. The spectrum of possible scenarios we can imagine, while not infinite, is still vast and unexplored. Just because things *are* a certain way in our world, this is by no means the way any god would have *had* to make them, especially if it is within our humble ability to imagine preferable scenarios.
The theist further objects that my idyllic world is incompatible with the law of cause and effect, but again, I disagree. If everything had been optimally designed in the first place, there would be no need for change. Any kind of incremental improvement, where there are imperfect intermediary stages, is inexcusable. A perfect world would, by definition, be flawless from its inception and require no maintenance, so god would not have to micromanage everything. It is ludicrous to think that such a world would be impossible for god to create. In saying that god is bound by certain rules, the theist is admitting that there are forces at work that precede god, and to suggest that anything exists outside of god’s jurisdiction creates considerable problems for the theist. The old conundrum of whether god could create an object so heavy he couldn’t lift it is a prime example of the bind that the theist finds himself in, since he is going to end up conceding god’s limitations either way he answers.
I shall describe three possible scenarios for existence. In scenario one, the world exists in a state of continuous perfection. No component can be altered or degraded in any way, nor can it be improved, as all of the attributes of this creation are intrinsically positive and are calibrated to their maximum possible degree. In scenario two, the world is built on the opposing forces of negativity and positivity, which are locked in an eternal struggle. The balance of power is constantly in flux; sometimes things may be very bad and then improve, while other times they may be very good but inevitably fall victim to entropy. This power struggle continues indefinitely. In scenario three, existence begins at the worst possible level in every respect. Arbitrary suffering is the norm, but gradually, over an infinite amount of time, the state of affairs becomes less bad until eventually the duality of scenario two is reached, but it keeps going until eventually reaching a state wherein the positive outweighs the negative. Now, which of these scenarios would you say is the best, the least wasteful, and the least painful? Obviously it’s the first proposed scenario, in which there are no intermediary negative states, which were never necessary in the first place. A problem solved is a problem caused, as solutions invariably create new dilemmas. What is better than a problem overcome? The problem never having existed in the first place, of course. So, if a god were to create a world, I would argue that he would be logically and ethically obliged to generate scenario number one. I think it’s obvious that the world in which we are currently living is a hybrid of scenarios two and three. Ergo, god does not exist and the world is both imperfect and incapable of being perfected.
People only believe in god because the alternative is terrifying, and because it seems implausible to them that such a universe, seemingly fine tuned for life, could have originated from nothingness. It seems improbable to me too, but still not as improbable as a perfect being creating an imperfect world. Evolution is an absolutely horrific system, and the notion of a benevolent god acting through a process as horrendously cruel and inefficient as evolution is absurd. If the universe is fine tuned for life, the quality of those lifeforms and the lives they lead allows us to gauge this experiment. I for one find it woefully devoid of merit, and for the work of an omnipotent being it is absolutely abysmal. Unless god creates a world that is equal to himself in all its aspects, he is degrading the state of affairs, which in turn would imply that he cannot be a maximally great being. The theist says that we analyse, critique and attempt to improve the world from a limited mortal perspective and this screws things up, but I imagine we would achieve flawless results if we had god’s powers, and that’s the position from which I am speaking. If any of us were in god’s position at the beginning, when the slate was completely clean, what possible motivation could we have for creating the world as it currently exists rather than the idyllic world I have described? This is the point where the theist once again invokes the limitations of mortal comprehension and appeals to epistemic humility, and I in turn direct them back to Schieber’s fridge analogy. Because of the theist’s obstinate refusal to concede defeat and part with his illusion, this exchange will continue indefinitely.
It never ceases to amaze and disgust me how many people use the “life is a test” excuse. God is omniscient, so he doesn’t need to test us. Why would he create souls that he knows will fail the test? The afterlife is paradise, so what good would the “knowledge” gained from suffering and torment do us there? What does a child dying of cancer “learn” that would be valuable in heaven? It’s desperate, contrived nonsense. What use does an immortal soul have for a mortal body, in which it is susceptible to all manner of indignity and degradation? None at all. As I say, all imperfect intermediary states are unnecessary. The suffering that living organisms endure, on a scale that defies comprehension, is not justifiable under any circumstances. God inflicting suffering would always be gratuitous and malicious, as it is not necessitated. There is no reason he had to create a world with suffering in it, since the slate was clean before creation and nothing was at stake. God fails my test, the test of making any sense.
In conclusion, everything that is wrong with the world can ultimately be blamed on god, because he has ontological primacy over all things. If intimidation is the best tool he has for encouraging us to believe in him, that tells us a lot about his character. Quite frankly, an eternity of paradise would not atone for my mortal years of misery. A paradise awaiting us after we die would only prove that our mortal life had been utterly gratuitous. For the sake of argument, I shall acknowledge the possibility that god exists, but he would be a malevolent god and would therefore be no use to me. For all intents and purposes, a malevolent creator is interchangeable with a non-existent creator. What use is an evil god? About as much use as one who doesn’t exist. Neither are worthy of acknowledgment, let alone worship. God may have my tortured soul, but he will never have my love, my respect, or my forgiveness. If he does exist, I look forward to confronting him on his own turf. I am resolute in my conviction that my will is stronger than his.
At this point, you should be writing a subscription based blog on Substack.
I don’t know what that is. Do you think anything I wrote is interesting at all? No one is giving me much feedback.
I’ve had that experience, too, many times. I would second the suggestions of others that you write up your thoughts in a formal post. I think you would generate a fair number of responses, as, to reiterate, philosophical nihilism forces people to justify their passions in more reasoned ways, and that’s a task necessary here, as saving the white race, like being a Soviet era Russian dissident, entails high personal costs for what seems like a very future oriented and impersonal benefit. After all, in the 15-35 years I have left (if I’m reasonably lucky; in fact, I’m probably on the low end of that range), I’m fairly certain the white race won’t go extinct. And insofar as I myself am childless and all but certain to remain so, as well as nieceless and nephewless, what care I about about the race’s far future (or about anything at all after I’m dead)? Of course, this is merely a subset of the larger question, what is the justification for selfless altruism (esp in the racial context)?
I think these issues would generate a lot of feedback, if such is what you desire.
This lengthy second comment of yours is basically a long paean to atheism. I’m simply unequipped to answer effectively. I have a decent grounding in political philosophy and to some extent ethics, but I have little in metaphysics, nor have I seriously studied the philosophy of religion (something I’d like to do). I’m an agnostic. I don’t think the question of God can be definitively decided; or, at the least, that I would be able to understand and thus recognize a correct answer (which, whether theist or atheist, would be, as with higher logic or math, too analytically complex for me to follow).
But this second comment of yours is also irrelevant to my own response to your first comment arguing for anti-natalism. I was not arguing for or against God. I was arguing against the contention that anti-natalism is the “last word”. Here is my comment (which you may not have seen, given that it was addressed to someone else who had responded to your original comment):
Even if atheism is correct, anti-natalism is simply beside its own point. Autisticus Spasticus repeatedly makes moral claims. But what – in “The Void” {shades of Lovecraft!} – is the basis for ascribing meaning to moral judgments? The Void just *is*. Is there a moral claim to be made about a rock, tree or fish? Then why can such claims be made about our actions? From this metaphysical perspective, they can’t. Yet anti-natalism is fundamentally a moral theory, in effect saying it’s better not to have been than to be, and that we the living have a correlative duty not to inflict life (and its inevitable miseries) on others.
A.S. also seems to misunderstand procreation, thinking it happens because people ascribe moral worth to natality, and the human enterprise more broadly. Most do so, I think, but people usually have children for self-interested reasons, or else accidentally. In the meaninglessness of The Void, why should I care about the fact that my children might end up suffering more than they compensatingly experience joy or happiness? I’m having children for MY happiness, not theirs.
A.S.’s position paradoxically only becomes meaningful where morality is meaningful, and that I hold is under a theistic reality. All the major religions of which I know anything obviously oppose the idea that non-birth is better than life. With God (especially in the Christian understanding), children are a blessing, and a moral duty if one is able to procreate. OTOH, without God, there are no moral duties, so people are free to procreate or not. Theistic white nationalists probably believe in a moral duty to preserve our race; that is, that they are serving God in part (the realm of moral duty is vast …) by helping to ensure white perpetuity. Atheistic white nationalists have no reason to care about morality, but encourage (white) natalism merely because their personal neurological makeup is such that they arationally care about white preservation: ie, it gives them present pleasure to imagine future generations of whites, and present pain to contemplate our racial extinction.
Although I believe that ethics, like math or logic, is independent of God or God’s will, functionally it is meaningless in the absence of a superior being who interprets our actions and applies penalties for wrongdoing. No God, no ethics. Is there ethics among non-human animals? A certain type of liberal atheist is desperate to believe so (they rhapsodize about dogs, dolphins, bonobos), but that fact says more about that type of person than anything truthful. Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky among others recognized this. All “morals talk” are mere psychological residues from more pious ages.
My point above is that your anti-natalist first comment is saturated with such language. But if you really are an atheist, then what should matter is only your own happiness. Now perhaps the supreme personal happiness for you is the thought that the world is “de-natalizing” itself, or that you’re helping it along that path. If so, I would say you need to overcome yourself, to recognize your own unclear thinking. Because even if being an anti-natalist activist is what brings you supreme happiness, it shouldn’t. It w0uld be a form of false consciousness. For the truly philosophically aware person will shed any commitment external to himself. After all, without personal immortality being real, as well as dependent upon moral behavior and character, or at least, without something like divine judgment or even just plain “karma”, any form of selflessness is derivative of confusion about ultimate reality and its meaninglessness. If children make me happy, either because I want a family, or a woman I want to marry has made marriage conditional on agreeing to have children, why shouldn’t I go ahead and have them? Who will punish me for having done so? Each individual is embodied and has control over only his own will, and as such, why should I care about other bodies, including my children’s? Now I might be genetically oriented towards in fact caring about my children as an unchosen biological response to having children, but before the fact of their existence, why should I care about the future happiness of their as yet non-existent selves more than the present happiness of my own existent self? Remember, even if the ethical thing to do is NOT to have children, such a dictate only appears as long as ethics itself is meaningful, which I argue requires the existence of the God in whom you do not believe.
Yes I saw that comment. I was responding to both of them. Ethics is a product of evolution and rational contemplation. The two do not always go hand in hand, but sometimes they coincide. Empathy is a very large, possibly the largest, factor in ethics as we practice it today. Anyone who behaves ethically only because they expect reward or fear punishment is not a genuinely moral person. You think that a divinely ordained morality is the only way to achieve an infallible and unquestionable code of ethics, but the Euthyphro dilemma suggests otherwise. More to the point, any god who creates a world as obscene as this one would be an appalling source of moral instruction.
As I did say at the very beginning of my last reply, you are very candid and shameless in admitting that it’s all about you. Your potential children are merely a means to an end for you. Indeed, technically that is all they can ever be for anyone, since no child can be created for its own sake. Why should you care about the suffering and death you would inflict upon potential persons? Well, do you go around torturing animals for your own gratification? I expect not, but why not? It’s an equally flippant and preposterous question. It is profoundly indecent to rope other people into this mess in order to make ourselves feel better. I can so testify, as that’s what my mother did. Her life was empty. She wanted a child. She regrets it bitterly now, of course, but she’ll never regret her choice more than I do. Speaking as the victim of a poorly informed decision, my testimony carries by far the most weight. I’m sure you already understand this, but you feign ignorance.
Did you want to continue this discussion elsewhere? This thread is getting long and I don’t know how long we can keeping talking in the comments section of a piece that is already over a week old. Things move fast on this site.
Not to be evasive, but I’ve basically made my points. I’m not sure where to continue this conversation, as I don’t have any type of site myself. Are there sites devoted to anti-natalism? I did second your idea about amassing your ideas and putting them into a formal essay on the other post about the movie American History X.
The problem with debating anti-natalism is that it’s a bit like debating free will with a hard universal determinist – the kind who alleges that, because there cannot be uncaused effects, every human action must already be “baked in”, have been predetermined from the first nanosecond of the Big Bang. It appears to me that I have a some degree of free will – that, eg, I can write more or not – but the universal determinist will say, no, it’s an illusion, because everything has been determined. It’s a philosophical “acid” which eats away all philosophy, and certainly purpose. And it doesn’t get us anywhere, as I still have to go about, say, eating, even if it was determined billions of years ago that I should do so. Universal determinism is the last nihilism.
Anti-natalism is a similar “acid”, and similarly beside the point, any point. Anti-natalism is another way of bringing philosophy, and finally all dispute about human ‘ends’, choices, politics, etc, to an abrupt halt (at least theoretically). Why pursue wisdom if it’s already been decided that all pursuits are finally pointless? The only real value to anti-natalism that I can see is in perhaps forcing natalists – human preservationists (and thus obviously lesser racial preservationists) – to reflect upon why they believe life is meaningful at all (which for CC’s purposes might then lead them to reflect on why white life is meaningful and worthy of sacrifices to ensure its perpetuity).
So my answer to you would be that I would only be interested in continuing this conversation here or someplace like this (although … it would be interesting to me, if you published your views on a philosophy of religion site, to see what a different batch of commenters might argue). I would not be interested in doing so via private email exchange.
I have no idea about free will. I don’t know enough about that subject, so I can’t really comment on it. I had known about David Benatar’s books for several years prior, but what finally cemented my commitment to it was reading Hellstorm by Thomas Goodrich.
I don’t know of any other site where we could continue this, but I do have a Disqus account and a Discord account, both under this name. It’s a shame that Greg seemed so uninterested in my comments.
I admit that I am going to have to “tl;dr” you here since I am on break and you wrote quite a lot. First of all, just an observation about the anti-natalists (more fundamentally those who view non-existence as a superior state to existence) is that they seem to take pride in the fact that their views typically garner a negative reaction. As though staking out the most recondite, pessimistic, antisocial ethical prescription were some sort of accomplishment. I would like to think most of the WNs here are not in this for the social approbation, we just have values that happen to contradict regime dogma at this point in history. Perhaps your motivations were different.
Since we do not understand the nature of “non-existence” ie the void since we have no “memory” of it, we really cannot comment on whether it is better than life and its infinitely manifold sense-experiences. The “cradle of the void”, like a long sleep, seems to me to still rely on a metaphor which relates to the soothing experience of relaxation which is pleasant. Metaphysical questions about the nature of the soul or the self are equally mysterious—we have no definite answers likewise about the afterlife, or whether there is some essential part of us that survives for example through reincarnation. If reincarnation or eternal return were the law of the universe, then anti-natalism as a prescribed ethical doctrine would be futile since we would never really extinguish ourselves.
“This passage in the Majjhima Nikāya (1.1) says that whoever believes that extinction is extinction, understands extinction as extinction, thinks of extinction, truly believes extinction to be extinction and rejoices in extinction, that person does not know extinction.”
If your contention is that the world is “too cruel” toward life and that the existence of suffering and it’s potential extremes is too unbearable to conceive of, I would challenge you to imagine a world that would be worth living in, in which anti-natalism would not be a tenable moral position. Would it just be “pure eternal bliss” if such a thing can exist—like a man hooked up to a morphine drip forever? I am not sure how Christians conceive of heaven, but it kind of sounds like a twisted prison in its own way. Or could there be suffering—just a little less of it, but still enough “shade” to create variation of experience, as though living in a novel? I think in the end it is difficult to say that life could be anything more or less than what it is without detracting from its depth of experience.
Those are just some off the cuff thoughts on anti-natalism from an agnostic. I for one think positing an eternal void, never changing, as preferable to a life-emergent universe is the most terrifying thought in a Lovecraftian sort of way.
*I meant “reprobation” not “approbation”. lol
only a fool who doesn’t understand whats happened since the advent of smart phones, would use studies from 2010 or 2009, how about from 2018 or even the latest i would go back is 2016. After tinder and iphone circa 2012, everything has changed, not that it was already changed in 1990’s but that change accelerated into a hyperbolic curve.
“Female hypergamy” is your theory to prove, not mine. You and the rest of your sort have failed to prove it with the evidence thus far adduced.
But let me go ahead and assume, arguendo, that tinder is the problem. What you’re saying, then, is that “women’s nature” as such is not in fact the problem, except to the extent that tinder brings out the worst in women. Go ahead and rail against tinder, then. When you demand remedies that are unnecessarily punitive, you show yourself to be a misogynist who really just wants to polarize, disrupt, and ultimately commandeer White nationalism to further your own reactionary agenda.
Also getting married and staying married are completely different things, i believe the rate of women to initiate divorce goes to 90% for college educated women as opposed to the general trend which is 70%+ of women on average when a divorce is filed.
It makes no difference whatsoever who initiates divorce. Because men usually control the money, it is often in their interests to remain married on paper even when they have constructively abandoned their wives. The question of who ended the marriage is quite different from the question of who broke the marriage.
Now, as far as I know, you are correct that college educated women are more likely to initiate divorce if indeed there will be a divorce, but college educated women are less likely to get divorced at all.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/
So, as usual, “female hypergamy” theory fails to account for the facts. If women are hypergamous, higher-status college-educated women should be more likely to divorce, not less. A college-educated woman who marries for the first time has a 78% chance of still being married 20 years later. Why might this be? Better husbands, I suspect. Social ills like drug addiction, crime, and gambling disproportionately affect the working-class men whom women without a college degree are likely to marry.
Of course, of the 22% who divorce, the majority divorce without children, so there is no risk of child support, and your scaremongering is completely unjustified, as two-thirds of divorced couples have no children. How about that birth control ban?
You are simply copy pasting studies without understanding even basic methodologies
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/
this study is making a projection based on past data, this paper was publishing in 2012, collecting data from 2006 till 2010 from 23k people ages 15 – 44,
They are projecting 20 year average marraige based on past heuristical data which has also been skewing towards a declining average marraige term already, as they dont have actual data, they would have to collect data from 2006 till atleast 2026 and then make statistical analyses and mean regression and that would be presumptive even but atleast a good projection, this research paper doesnt even account for the acceleration of the internet dating and smart phone and social media which actually blew up after 2010 making it complete trash and laughable at the projecting 20 year age. You can lie very easily with statistics because most normies are dumb and their god is science, they will accept it as faith hile confusing it as knowedge, atleast religion makes more sense as its based on what is observable human nature.
Also, tinder is not the problem, it is just a tool for gathering data analyses of what is actually occurring already in some fashion in the 1990’s if not earlier. The dating game has been broken for 3 decades atleast, its just that majority of men were not aware of the drastic change until the explosion of the manosphere with the internet between 2005 and 2010, and now any fool with even an 85 iq can observe daily without even ever logging on to the internet. Its just the knowledge has become more wide spread. This has nothing to do with women’s hyper-gamy, they were hypergamous 5000 years ago too, its just the pool of men they had access to was restricted to their local village and also strictly for marriage or secret trysts which had life ending consequences if discovered, now they can court saudi billionaires from kansas with a insta profile and get “sponsored” into becoming porta potties. That didn’t happen 5000 years ago.
You can lie very easily with statistics
The last refuge of a prevaricator. You continue to confuse finding fault with someone else’s data with actually proving your own case. Where is your evidence that college-educated women are particularly (or even equally) likely to divorce?
The dating game has been broken for 3 decades atleast
Hmmm. I don’t know about that. When I was young, the “dating game” consisted of repeated pump and dumps after which a great many women concluded that men are unreliable at best and psychopathic at worst, being able to lie shamelessly lie to a person to get what they want. Perhaps that dating market would have been more to your liking.
https://www.rd.com/article/why-psychopaths-lie-so-well/
Anyway, you seem to be unable to make up your mind whether tinder is the problem or not. You say:
This has nothing to do with women’s hyper-gamy, they were hypergamous 5000 years ago too, its just the pool of men they had access to was restricted to their local village and also strictly for marriage or secret trysts which had life ending consequences if discovered, now they can court saudi billionaires from kansas with a insta profile and get “sponsored” into becoming porta potties. That didn’t happen 5000 years ago.
Make up your mind, and while you’re at it, consider that the vast majority of women do not sell themselves to the highest bidder on the internet, at least not yet. Though, Third-world style sugar daddy arrangements will become more common if old men continue to monopolize all the wealth. If and when that happens, it won’t be because women are “hypergamous.” It will be because men are polygynous, and as such, instinctually driven to lock out their rivals.
i am not here to defend dating, you are still not getting it, dating is just a transitory step between what will eventually happen, in Logan’s run, which was just a superior version of tinder. Boyfriend girls friend and all these pseudo transitory relationships are not based on normative heterosexual practices, they are all homosexual, dating is homosexual, FWB is homosexual, bar and clubs are homosexual, trance is homosexual, Pump and dumps are homosexual. i am also not defending marriage , or child support or family courts or prenups they are all completely broken by design to lead to the eventual end, which is a horror show. The true system was courting based on permission of patriarch chaperoned and marriage after the couple were deemed a good fit, which was decided by the extended family, (like in Godfather 1 or 2) any deviation, will take between 5 to 500 years to end up with a far advanced version of tinder, you are still not getting it, Tinder is low tech transitory phase, eventually it will be sexless with lots of drugs. Before that, we will see common rutting in the streets with animals, adults, and children, that phase hasn’t happened yet, that will happen as well, cause this has all happened before multiple times. Go look at Sin Cities especially the Weimar Germany, it will shock you. Not only are you a rad feminist from all your writings, but you are one of those IYD’s i believe nassim talib talks about that, they are even worst than illiterate people who have a very firm grasp on reality because they learn by observation and experience, not from 15 or even 50 year old skewed white paper links that they dont comprehend fully and use to justify single points instead of looking at the tapestry of the past in a holistical manner.
I haven’t read all the comments, esp the one from dickens, in case this has been said, but I think it has to do with the availability of internet porn. Guys are more visual and the ability to, ahem, self stimulate to pictures of Scandinavian super models is enough for most “millennial guys.” It’s cheaper than a real relationship and sets an unmeetable standard for all but one or two girls around them. Girls and guys don’t have much in common unfortunately. I’m not a misogynist, but I seldom find females with similar interests to mine. Not all are like this, but most in my experience. Now that women are not cooking and cleaning, but competitive career persons, what use are they to men? Just saying what I think is going on.
On the other hand, marriage and traditional families are much more common in places closer to religion, ie the Bible belt and the Mormon diaspora as well. I went to med school in a large decadent city, and only a few students in my relatively large class were married, and those were mostly Mormon, come to think of it. I later changed to a small school in a Bible Belt region and the majority of the students were married with children being born! Orthodox Jews are increasing in numbers while secular are decreasing. There is a definitive power in religion, say what you will.
t’s cheaper than a real relationship and sets an unmeetable standard for all but one or two girls around them.
Indeed.
I’m not a misogynist, but I seldom find females with similar interests to mine.
That can’t possibly be true. Half of medical school matriculants are women, are they not?
Now that women are not cooking and cleaning, but competitive career persons, what use are they to men? Just saying what I think is going on.
Career women earn money and help pay the bills. They either (still) do most of the cleaning themselves or use part of their earnings to pay someone else to do it. Stay-at-home moms like me add value in other ways. You can argue about which is better, but in neither case is it fair to say that women are no use.
I don’t mean to say that women are no use, but that those things which might incentivize guys to get married aren’t there as much.
Quite an interesting article. Actually I’m in the middle of a divorce now AND my wife 1 yr ago started a new job at a major company that pays a lot more than my engineering job. She initiated the divorce. We have 1 child who is young and he is very attached to me.
It’s been amiciable so far: she’s an excellent cook and I’m good at fixing household problems (having an advanced engineering degree). One good point is that I’ll be able to get more involved in white identity issues.
My wife is very much in tune with the MSM and believes that these issues are ‘white supremacy’. As an engineer I’ve found it exceptionally to meet women when I was younger. Basically they were all looking for lawyers or doctors or those with extremely high incomes. We’re not desparately poor: we have 2 houses: the main one at ~6,000 sqft and the vacation home about the same. We go on weeks long vacations to Europe & Asia and eat out frequently. But I’m not in the rich class where I can afford private planes or yachts or all that stuff that ‘defines success’ these days.
Another thing to consider is the fact that both men and women have been burnt in relationships and many may have gotten to the point that they have just given up somewhat on dating and marriage. Another thing I think may be contributing to this is the chaos many of these singles experinced as children. Now I know people have always had bad childhoods, however since divorce has dramatically increased since the 1970s, I believe it’s gotten worse. The reasons are the breakdown of the nuclear family. What has taken it’s place is single working mothers who are stressed out from work and find it difficult to run a household and discipline children by themselves. Also, blended families, most of which are disfunctional. There are some decent step parents, but they are in the minority. This chaos gets even worse if a single mother brings in a shack up to live with her and her children. Now I know that no family is perfect, but the white traditonal nuclear family was by far the most stable. I would be willing to bet many of these singles haven’t had anything close to a normal childhood. The African village model of a woman having children with diffrent men being raised by diffrent people with loose boundaries doesn’t work in western society. It’s been a disaster for our society as a whole.
One major factor the author neglected to mention is the normalization of casual sex and serial monogamy, and the severely corrosive effects those behaviors have upon one’s ability to pair bond, especially for the female.
IIRC, all it takes is two prior sexual partners to crater the success rate of a marriage.
The catastrophic level of irreligiosity also contributes by way of marriage’s association with the church.
I agree that casual sex doesn’t help things, but zoomers, the generation after millennials, are having less of it, yet their Singles Epidemic looks like it is going to be just as bad as that of Millennials. Casual sex probably has more of an indirect effect on the Singles Epidemic by weakening the tendency to form strong psychological bonds with partners, making parents less attracted to each other and more prone to divorce, which in turn negatively affects kids’ view of sexual relations. Casual sex at this point seems to be more of an indirect cause of the Singles Epidemic.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment