A kind reader has sent me a note stating that he is irritated with the above post, but that he is unable to engage in detail right now as real life has him swamped. His gripe is "too many unsupported assertions."
It is very important to me to get this analysis as correct as possible, so if any of you reading this have similar feelings, please comment with your gripes or send me an email. It will allow me to either better support, or to correct and alter, my analysis going forward. The next few posts are going to start tying it all together and exploring possible futures, and the shape of those possible futures depends on the foundation I'm laying here.
Thanks again for reading, and thank you especially to my off-the-record commenter who respects me and my work enough to register his displeasure with this article.
I suspect that this lack of children was by design. Look at the Gates Cabal and their plans to create a future with a much smaller footprint by humanity. Given his track record globally. I wouldn't put genocide past him and his ilk.
Coincidence is not proof of power. Birthrates in India and in Brazil started to drop the moment television became widespread. Just as the soap opera Dallas had as much to do with the downfall of the Soviet Union as did any diplomatic or geostrategic program, so too have soap operas changed the notion of how life should be in traditional and rural areas around the globe. Seeing women who had agency and control over their lives doing insanely crazy things and NOT getting smacked down for it has a powerful effect on women who bond over shared stories. There are a number of studies out there on this--a great book that deals with a similar mechanism but with books instead of television is "Reading Lolita in Tehran."
Not just media, but simply not have to scrape by on a hand-to-mouth existence & having the time & the intelligence to engage in long-term planning encourages people to look out for themselves & their own on a level that would be positively selfish back when they didn't have that luxury.
A medium sized farm can always grow to be a large farm. What stopped me from doing that was that even this wasn't manageable & the neighbours were good people who helped me from time to time & we needed each other. The moment that interdependence ended, we became competitors with two farms side by side & we can think about trying to buy each other out or dream up ways to grab the other's land to increase income.
We notice the same tendency in our children & decide to have fewer kids so that they don't split the family property into smaller pieces after we're all dead or too old & undo all our life's work (this is the case in India for example after they enacted a "land to the tiller" scheme that disenfranchised capitalist debt-trap-money-lending landlords & fractured ownership to the point that now the majority of land holders are only marginal subsistence farmers with smaller & smaller fields coz it gets divided again in every generation with more than one child). Note that the only functional polyandrous society is in Tibet where they have very little arable land. We all want our children to have the best & we prefer it stays with them so there's only one kid who gets everything.
Now that it's illegal in many countries to cut daughters out of the inheritance where it would otherwise directly only pass to sons, often that means giving everything for free to whatever schmuck the only daughter marries. Then he can potentially get rid of her if he wants & keep it all for himself & whatever new hussy he'll bring over coz he only married her for her daddy's money. So she keeps waiting for the Right Man who won't do that & she becomes an old maid because there is no way to guarantee that anyone is the right man. Or she goes through 3 to 5 men & has more than one kid with them & will split the property in her Will.
But if it's a son, he's usually too spoiled & educated to give a fig about farming & he wants to go to the city & do some kind of job that wouldn't have existed 30 years ago coz it's fancy & shiny & attractive. And he can't compete with the city slickers so he gets washed back home so he can drink away the property. He can choose to be a good boy & take over too, but eventually there will be someone who wants to leave the business & the property falls apart.
In both cases, what happens is that ultimately it gets taken over by the State or some company & they bulldoze it & build a sweatshop on it.
The Price of Progress is that everyone gets to progress. For ever. People are diverse, so we cannot eliminate comparison & competition so there will always be winners & losers. And the more we progress, the more we feel that there SHOULDN'T be any losers so we've been trying to "fix" that problem forever. Humans do not understand the concept of infinity, nor does the planet have infinite resources. It is instructive that most other animals that have similar social systems to us are those we have already domesticated & we've been spaying & neutering them every chance we got for centuries coz there's literally no easier way to deal with living beings that function that way.
We really need that colony on the moon or mars if our current trajectory is to continue.
I want to see if this parenthetical means what I think it means: "the decline of Fraternal Orders, neighborhood associations, and mutual benefit and benevolent societies whose financial functions were being rapidly subsumed by the State)". Does this mean that before the government started redistributing wealth, communities voluntarily took care of each other financially?
Yup. Fraternal lrders, unions, neighborhood associations, benevolent societies, etc. provided welfare, unemployment insurance, old age pension funds, accident and injury insurance, medical insurance, community support and indigent meal plans, etc.
Many people belonoto as many as they could manage and afford. The resilt was not just a financial safety net, but an actrao ial safety net.
Restrictions on this activity ce in during WW2, as a bargaining concession from the FDR administration to the big corps who were threatening to revilt against wage controls. The Fed, in response, made it much more difficult for anyone but employers to offer benefits. This in turn generated a LOT of political momentum for the all-encompassing welfare state over the next couple generations.
“Second, these forces also turn children from an economic asset into a luxury good, and luxury goods are not something to be parented, they are something to be curated—not for the sake of the children, or the continuation of a family legacy, but as a marker of the social achievement of the parents. “
To say you nailed it does no justice to your assessment nor to the skills of journeyman carpenters everywhere, but I digress. I’ve been of this opinion for more than a decade now, with an ever increasing number of anecdotal experiences to support it.
Usually it’s in conversation with a local when they realize we are actually neighbors and IDGAF about the hive mind politic.
For example, when I mocked a persons failed attempt to regulate or correct my speech over something as mundane as my using the term ‘houseboat’ in reference to a community of, well, houseboats. I was instructed to use the term ‘floating home’ to which I immediately chuckled and asked if it was okay for me to instead refer to the marina as a floating trailer park. They blinked repeatedly and blanked into space for a couple seconds while their subconscious processed the reality they sought to suppress.…
A kind reader has sent me a note stating that he is irritated with the above post, but that he is unable to engage in detail right now as real life has him swamped. His gripe is "too many unsupported assertions."
It is very important to me to get this analysis as correct as possible, so if any of you reading this have similar feelings, please comment with your gripes or send me an email. It will allow me to either better support, or to correct and alter, my analysis going forward. The next few posts are going to start tying it all together and exploring possible futures, and the shape of those possible futures depends on the foundation I'm laying here.
Thanks again for reading, and thank you especially to my off-the-record commenter who respects me and my work enough to register his displeasure with this article.
I suspect that this lack of children was by design. Look at the Gates Cabal and their plans to create a future with a much smaller footprint by humanity. Given his track record globally. I wouldn't put genocide past him and his ilk.
Coincidence is not proof of power. Birthrates in India and in Brazil started to drop the moment television became widespread. Just as the soap opera Dallas had as much to do with the downfall of the Soviet Union as did any diplomatic or geostrategic program, so too have soap operas changed the notion of how life should be in traditional and rural areas around the globe. Seeing women who had agency and control over their lives doing insanely crazy things and NOT getting smacked down for it has a powerful effect on women who bond over shared stories. There are a number of studies out there on this--a great book that deals with a similar mechanism but with books instead of television is "Reading Lolita in Tehran."
Not just media, but simply not have to scrape by on a hand-to-mouth existence & having the time & the intelligence to engage in long-term planning encourages people to look out for themselves & their own on a level that would be positively selfish back when they didn't have that luxury.
A medium sized farm can always grow to be a large farm. What stopped me from doing that was that even this wasn't manageable & the neighbours were good people who helped me from time to time & we needed each other. The moment that interdependence ended, we became competitors with two farms side by side & we can think about trying to buy each other out or dream up ways to grab the other's land to increase income.
We notice the same tendency in our children & decide to have fewer kids so that they don't split the family property into smaller pieces after we're all dead or too old & undo all our life's work (this is the case in India for example after they enacted a "land to the tiller" scheme that disenfranchised capitalist debt-trap-money-lending landlords & fractured ownership to the point that now the majority of land holders are only marginal subsistence farmers with smaller & smaller fields coz it gets divided again in every generation with more than one child). Note that the only functional polyandrous society is in Tibet where they have very little arable land. We all want our children to have the best & we prefer it stays with them so there's only one kid who gets everything.
Now that it's illegal in many countries to cut daughters out of the inheritance where it would otherwise directly only pass to sons, often that means giving everything for free to whatever schmuck the only daughter marries. Then he can potentially get rid of her if he wants & keep it all for himself & whatever new hussy he'll bring over coz he only married her for her daddy's money. So she keeps waiting for the Right Man who won't do that & she becomes an old maid because there is no way to guarantee that anyone is the right man. Or she goes through 3 to 5 men & has more than one kid with them & will split the property in her Will.
But if it's a son, he's usually too spoiled & educated to give a fig about farming & he wants to go to the city & do some kind of job that wouldn't have existed 30 years ago coz it's fancy & shiny & attractive. And he can't compete with the city slickers so he gets washed back home so he can drink away the property. He can choose to be a good boy & take over too, but eventually there will be someone who wants to leave the business & the property falls apart.
In both cases, what happens is that ultimately it gets taken over by the State or some company & they bulldoze it & build a sweatshop on it.
The Price of Progress is that everyone gets to progress. For ever. People are diverse, so we cannot eliminate comparison & competition so there will always be winners & losers. And the more we progress, the more we feel that there SHOULDN'T be any losers so we've been trying to "fix" that problem forever. Humans do not understand the concept of infinity, nor does the planet have infinite resources. It is instructive that most other animals that have similar social systems to us are those we have already domesticated & we've been spaying & neutering them every chance we got for centuries coz there's literally no easier way to deal with living beings that function that way.
We really need that colony on the moon or mars if our current trajectory is to continue.
True, but sometimes where there's smoke there is indeed fire.
I want to see if this parenthetical means what I think it means: "the decline of Fraternal Orders, neighborhood associations, and mutual benefit and benevolent societies whose financial functions were being rapidly subsumed by the State)". Does this mean that before the government started redistributing wealth, communities voluntarily took care of each other financially?
Yup. Fraternal lrders, unions, neighborhood associations, benevolent societies, etc. provided welfare, unemployment insurance, old age pension funds, accident and injury insurance, medical insurance, community support and indigent meal plans, etc.
Many people belonoto as many as they could manage and afford. The resilt was not just a financial safety net, but an actrao ial safety net.
Restrictions on this activity ce in during WW2, as a bargaining concession from the FDR administration to the big corps who were threatening to revilt against wage controls. The Fed, in response, made it much more difficult for anyone but employers to offer benefits. This in turn generated a LOT of political momentum for the all-encompassing welfare state over the next couple generations.
Well thought out, thanks for sharing!
“Second, these forces also turn children from an economic asset into a luxury good, and luxury goods are not something to be parented, they are something to be curated—not for the sake of the children, or the continuation of a family legacy, but as a marker of the social achievement of the parents. “
To say you nailed it does no justice to your assessment nor to the skills of journeyman carpenters everywhere, but I digress. I’ve been of this opinion for more than a decade now, with an ever increasing number of anecdotal experiences to support it.
Usually it’s in conversation with a local when they realize we are actually neighbors and IDGAF about the hive mind politic.
For example, when I mocked a persons failed attempt to regulate or correct my speech over something as mundane as my using the term ‘houseboat’ in reference to a community of, well, houseboats. I was instructed to use the term ‘floating home’ to which I immediately chuckled and asked if it was okay for me to instead refer to the marina as a floating trailer park. They blinked repeatedly and blanked into space for a couple seconds while their subconscious processed the reality they sought to suppress.…
“So how many children do have?”
"Floating trailer park"
*dies laughing*
Brilliant flourish, sir--hat's off!