This is a very interesting hypothesis which I am pleased you have put into words for me.
My wife and I are typical northwestern Europeans (resident in NZ). When we married it never occurred to me to expect support from relatives. Indeed, the closest relatives lived multiple hours drive away from us. However, our families have supported us in times of need.
Our "shared commitment to a moral system" (your words) is a belief in the utility of the scientific method practiced within a framework of somewhat impersonal liberal values. I say 'somewhat impersonal' because we care most about our kids, then about those people we interact with directly (actual friends), then with those we associate with, and proceed with declining emotional intensity to relatives, fellow citizens, westerners, and finally to people of the world (I guess).
We have 4 kids. We had them thoughtlessly. By that I mean without precondition. When we married we both had the intention of having several kids, though without knowing how we would afford them. This is different from the (middle class) people around us whose mindset seems more 'zero sum', more backward looking and more directed to individual hedonism (exotic vacations, personal comforts and status signalling).
Characterising our "moral community", rather than being religious, it's liberal, pragmatic, and resource conservative.
I wish we had a secular equivalent of religion. Many people are social conservatives while having no religion, either because they've had bad experiences or because they feel that science has superseded religion.
There are actually atheist churches, like the Sunday Assembly, where people regularly meet without having to be religious.
We have family rituals and to a lesser extent community ones, which satisfy whatever communal need I have. Others (not my wife and kids) are more spiritual or religiously inclined and do seek out more formalised expressions of faith.
Yes, I think so. Automation--ie, new labor-saving technologies--argues for shorter workdays and workweeks to rebalance the supply and demand for labor, not the elimination of labor altogether. There will always be a place for a human worker, possessed as he is with two hands with opposable thumbs, two eyes, arms and legs thast allow him to move around in all kinds of ways (guided be his eyes and his sense of touch), plus a brain, education, culture, and best of all the ability to take verbal instruction in real time. Human beings are the ultimate robot in that sense.
As for what their hourly pay should be in a market economy, should it fall below, say, a living wage, there is a lot of room for subsidizing wages in our new hightech world. See these two linked papers for example: https://shorturl.at/MiZIf
One big difference between robots and humans is that humans use their wages to buy things, whereas robots only make a return on investment, i.e, it is all about capital with no labor in sight (to adopt the extreme "vision" of a world without labor). Meanwhile what about all the living human beings: are they expected to passively sit around, spending their guaranteed income for which they do absolutely nothing?
Granted, these are just stray thoughtf off the top of my 83 year old brain, but I think they hint at the absurdity of the idea of a world without labor;
P.S. As for those fully automated factories we see being demonstrated in China, they are just a case of China showing off her excellent engineering talent with no thought for the welfare of her working population--something that is only possible in a centrally planned economy. It represents a major maldistribution of capital and will lead to tragedy when the Chinese working people gradually come to realize that their hard earned life savings, on which they are depending for support in old age, have been squandered on all kinds of highly impressive boondoggles.
In theory, any savings through robotization would be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices and to workers in the form of higher wages.
Neither is really happening. Economic inequality has increased considerably over the past half-century, and the resulting concentration of wealth is distorting not only the economy but also the political process. I'm less optimistic than you are about the future.
For all its faults, communism helped to keep capitalism honest. Today, capitalism is supposed to be kept honest by politicians who depend on business lobbies for most of their campaign financing.
I'm willing to learn more about China, but it seems to me that China's government cares more about its working people than do most Western governments.
I think it's brutal for both sexes. All our kids (of both sexes) feel rather oppressed and threatened by a need to do well economically for themselves if they are to ever afford to buy a house and have a family. I watch them switching between reckless despair and obsessive saving. They are also rather oppressed by threats of climate change.
However, I felt exactly the same in my 20's during the 1980's so it maybe an inherited behaviour. However, it was hard for me to get a job that paid well. Then in my mid to late 20's the economy collapsed and I lost pretty much everything I had accumulated. And this was still a time of looming nuclear winter, over population and fossil fuel exhaustion. None of which came to pass.
By 30 or so I was concluding it was all some psychop to suppress me being run by people who would now be called 'influencers'. These are simply people with a platform who are good at talking but believe in dumb ideas.
The fertility figures for China (as for all countries I know of) include out-of-wedlock births.
China's fertility rate may be even lower than the official figure, since a "fudge factor" is added to account for unregistered births. Unfortunately, there is good evidence that unregistered births are almost nonexistent in China. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/03/autumn-in-china.html
There’s a difference between saying we’ve been dealing with it longer and we’re “adapted” to it. The modern technological world has enabled individualism, so it’s been here longer. The west has held tenets of individualism for centuries and inculcated personal guilt in the lead up to the modern world. We also have tools to blunt the lack of connection, like therapy culture and social safety nets. It’s still bad here, it’s just slow, it took generations for the emotional attachments to be overcome by the incentives of raw self interest. other cultures are benchmarking us, so they move faster in the moment.
This is a flux period. We’re just long term residents of the halfway house. Don’t be surprised is Asian societies formulate an effective equilibrium before we do.
Maybe. But what will the west do? Shouldn’t a proper definition of adaptation include coming to some kind of functional equilibrium? Because we haven’t.
Humans haven't been in adaptive equilibrium for a long time. This is why we have gene-culture coevolution: a cultural change disrupts the equilibrium between humans and their environment, thus favoring a genetic change to set things right. Then more cultural change happens, often because the genetic change has increased the capacity for cultural change.
Of course, the mismatch between humans and their environment has grown wider over the past century. This is partly because the sharp decline in mortality, especially infant mortality, has weakened the pressure of natural selection.
As for your first question, I have little confidence in the ability of Western governments to deal with the fertility crisis, for several reasons:
- they see immigration as an adequate solution
- they see concern about this issue as "far right"
- fertile subcultures do exist within the West, like the Amish and the Mormons, but their values are seen as being too conservative
- monetary incentives for childbearing have little effect, at least independently of other incentives
- other solutions, like animal surrogacy, are yucky.
Western governments should fulfill their responsibilities which means taking necessary grand risks to prevent extreme future consequences. My vision beyond pro-family policies is a shift in media messaging to incentivize community building, venerating motherhood and fatherhood, social cohesion, etc. That's just one thing, I have a few more in mind.
However, such changes would not be feasible under left-leaning liberal cultural dominance. Politicians will endlessly kick the can down the road until society reforms or collapses.
Without the need and concern to care for your nation and its people, you'll feel detached. Even if that detachment is "justified" from a purist liberal perspective, it represents a self-defeating ideology that must be swiftly purged or reformed before extreme moral consequences arise.
It might be a good idea to avoid terms like "left" and "right." If you present yourself as a "conservative" who hates "liberals" and "leftists," you're automatically limiting your audience to a third of the population. Perhaps 40% ... at most.
And don't kid yourself. Many people in that 40% will hate you just as much as you hate "liberals" and "leftists."
Try to treat everyone as a potential friend and ally. Forget the labels and forget preconceptions. You might be surprised by the kind of people who will listen if you simply stick to your talking points.
I get your point about labels. Still, I think they serve a purpose in describing ideas, though I understand your argument isn’t about their utility but about the rhetorical approach many political figures take.
I share some progressive views myself, but ignoring the left/right divide entirely risks muddying the conversation. There’s a sweet spot in rhetoric, and finding it is just about being composed, principled, and charismatic.
We’d agree that politics shouldn’t be black and white. The real goal is to engage, persuade, and reveal hypocrisies or double standards, weighing each ideology on its merits. Some on the right already do this, like Nick Fuentes and a few European commentators.
Good rhetoric is essential for attracting and converting people. Overall, you’re right.
"The same pattern appears among population groups in the United States. In 2024, Euro Americans surpassed African Americans in terms of fertility, after having already surpassed Asian Americans and Amerindian Americans (Frost, 2024; Hamilton et al., 2025). They are now set to overtake Hispanic Americans — not because their fertility rate is rising but because it is falling more slowly."
If we're trying to look at NW Euro American culture/demography specifically, we can't just look at official published TFR data as that only gives data on the mothers. We have to "correct" for the official TFR by considering out-breeding.
The blogger "Hail" has tried correcting for this and has estimated the "true" or "effective" Euro American TFR recently as being around 1.4, which would make it below the black and Hispanic TFR and closer to the Asian level.
The effective full-White TFR, in which both parents are of White non-Hispanic origin, fell in 2022 below 1.4.
By “full-White TFR,” I of course mean the TFR calculable based on births to full-White mothers whose babies’ fathers are also of full-White personal origin, that is, babies of full-European ancestry (excluding negligible-and-distant partial ancestries).
We are primarily interested in babies born who are of fully White-Christian origin, who both basically identify with the Christian-West (and most of the core being the of the Protestant tradition). Some of the births coded as ‘White’ will not be to White-Christians; some of the “White non-Hispanic-mother, Hispanic-father” births will be to genuinely fully-European Hispanic fathers. These two effects may approximately cancel each other out.
The full-White TFR metric is a way of estimating the demographic strength and relative-position of the core culture-conveying population, and not the legions of foreigners, dual-citizens (actual and effective), confused postmodern identityless cosmopolitans, and other such people able to be found so readily in the 2020s in the bloated political entity known as the USA.
(Method of calculation of the full-White TFR: TFR is 1.55 for all White-mothers; throughout the 2010s, the White Non-Hispanic Mother TFR was 0.1 points below the USA’s all-race total TFR (1.65). We then subtract the portion of those White-mother births whose babies were fathered by Nonwhite males. The out-breeding rate has been at or above 10% since the 2000s but has not risen appreciably since then. The full-White (two-White-parents) TFR is therefore calculated to be 1.35 TFR to 1.4 TFR. (1.55*.9 +/-)."
This is like the doctor who asks "How are we feeling today?" It appears that "we" are making different arguments.
My argument is that northwest Europeans have a higher tolerance for individualism. This has led them to embark on a trajectory of cultural evolution that emphasizes the individual at the expense of the web of kinship ties that surrounds the individual.
In terms of family formation and childbearing, modern Western culture has become toxic to everyone, but it seems to be even more toxic non-Westerners. That's all I was trying to say.
Another consideration is that different ethnies and racial groups likely have different "natural" levels of fertility driven by more fundamental physiological drives or deeper evolutionary reasons. Something like what J.P. Rushton theorized about.
Rushton's particular explanation for fundamental fertility differences among the races e.g. "r/K selection theory" may have been incorrect or incomplete, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis that the races, just as they differ in say average height, would differ in natural fertility rates that can be manipulated to certain degrees phenotypically but have a fundamental genotypic baseline or level, just as phenotypic height can be manipulated to a degree with nutrition.
I don't know if groups like the Amish would support the point. The nature of their lifestyle leads to them having extended family networks around, so there are confounding variables there.
"Networks of extended families provide a strong sense of identity in Amish society. The family provides a dense web of social support from cradle to grave. Adult sisters may gather once a month for a “sisters’ day,” a frolic that mixes work and fun while harvesting vegetables, cleaning house, or making quilts. Family members help one other during emergencies, fires or floods, and, of course, when a death occurs.
The Amish do not have retirement homes. The elderly normally live in an apartment in the home of one of their children or in a Grossdawdy Haus, a small adjacent house. Esteemed for their wisdom, the elderly find meaning and dignity as they assist their adult children. Surrounded by droves of grandchildren, they pass on the wisdom, joys, and secrets of Amish life to the rising generation."
As for religious Jews, the Haredim have high TFR and will soon be a majority of Israeli births. The Haredim are mostly Ashkenazi, but the Ashkenazi aren't NW European but a hybrid group of southern Italian and Levantine genetics. And they tend to have tight and clannish extended family networks. Culturally, they're quite different from NW Euro religious communities. Secular Ashkenazi Israelis, who are the most culturally similar to Europeans among Israelis, have below replacement TFR, roughly similar to parts of the Balkans/SE Europe/the Caucasus today such as Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia, etc.
I don't know if groups like the Amish would support the point. The nature of their lifestyle leads to them having extended family networks around, so there are confounding variables there.
"Networks of extended families provide a strong sense of identity in Amish society. The family provides a dense web of social support from cradle to grave. Adult sisters may gather once a month for a “sisters’ day,” a frolic that mixes work and fun while harvesting vegetables, cleaning house, or making quilts. Family members help one other during emergencies, fires or floods, and, of course, when a death occurs.
The Amish do not have retirement homes. The elderly normally live in an apartment in the home of one of their children or in a Grossdawdy Haus, a small adjacent house. Esteemed for their wisdom, the elderly find meaning and dignity as they assist their adult children. Surrounded by droves of grandchildren, they pass on the wisdom, joys, and secrets of Amish life to the rising generation."
As for religious Jews, the Haredim have high TFR and will soon be a majority of Israeli births. The Haredim are mostly Ashkenazi, but the Ashkenazi aren't NW European but a hybrid group of southern Italian and Levantine genetics. And they tend to have tight and clannish extended family networks. Culturally, they're quite different from NW Euro religious communities. Secular Ashkenazi Israelis, who are the most culturally similar to Europeans among Israelis, have below replacement TFR, roughly similar to parts of the Balkans/SE Europe/the Caucasus today such as Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia, etc.
WEIRDs have also historically relied far less on family for finding a mate. The courtship ritual between individualistic men and women is fully developed.
Compare this to somewhere like East Asia where arranged marriages have collapsed but simultaneously they also don't know how to effectively "date" as such.
In human biodiversity circles, a lot of talk is given to the evolutionary impact of IQ being negatively correlated with reproductive success these days. I wonder though if the biggest evolutionary change humans are about to experience is the evolution of a greater drive to reproduce. Not to have sex, but specifically to strongly desire to have children. Depending on how heritable this urge is and the degree to which contraception is adopted globally, this seems plausible to me.
Are there any data out there on which heritable personality traits are most strongly associated with fertility? This might help illuminate the future evolutionary trajectory of our species.
Bro, I know this is off-topic—I have a habit of doing that—but on a personal level, I’ve realized how evil denying hereditarianism is. IQ differences between races are real. It sucks, but denying it causes real-world harm. People with an 85 IQ—even among whites—suffer massively. They are slower to learn, employers don’t want them, and with AI taking over, they’re basically cooked.
Then there’s height. 80 percent of women won’t even look at a short guy. Bro, I’ve literally seen women on TikTok—reinforced by the data—saying, “Women don’t care about height,” and on the next page saying, “My husband is 6 foot.” Yeah, accepting the reality sucks: women mainly care about height. But denying it causes real-world harm. What does denying it lead to? Cosmic gaslighting. You’re led to believe it’s your fault instead of asking the critical question: is it a genetic problem—yes or no?
And this one is more my main interest as a blackpiller: physical attractiveness. Denying it harms individuals. Yeah, the statistical reality sucks: women want Chads and are much more selective. This is their biological algorithm in play; their ventral striatum causes the feeling of reward, and the nucleus accumbens drives them to seek that behavior. When you strip reality down, it’s a cosmic case of the haves vs. have-nots. But instead of helping the next generation through embryo selection, we’re told it’s just “environment.” We're gaslighted into believing it's our fault, instead of asking the opposite question: If environment has basically no meaningful impact in real life, how about we target the real factors? Because these are things we can fix with government funding.
Height is already highly predictable with PGS (polygenic scores). Cognitive ability is less predictable—especially across ethnic groups—but it just needs more funding, which I know those soy cucks won’t support. But my main interest is physical attractiveness. Above all else being equal, it’s the most important factor. Statistically speaking, certain groups may be more attractive on average than others. But what surprises people is the top end of the distribution curve. If you have enough embryos, there's a 1-in-a-million shot at hitting the genetic lottery.
I know I’m rambling, but I feel cheated, man. Life sucks balls—and we could fix it for the next generation. But instead of doing that, we're being gaslighted into thinking it's all just environment and mindset.
I’ve realized on a deeper, fundamental level: reality is your genes. Your genes produce the information for ribosomes to create tissues, which form into cartilage, and those tissues develop into more complex structures over a lifetime. But what develops is ultimately a response to evolutionary wiring set by our ancestors over millions of generations. So you could even say what you see—your reality—is written into your genes. People underestimate this, but genetics is like a cheat code to eliminate suffering.
Traditionally, men attracted women by getting a good education and a good job. But that's no longer the case, at least not by itself. Single men have to invest much more effort in looking attractive, in being good conversationists, and in radiating "personality."
This is largely due to changes in the operational sex ratio. Until the 1980s, there were more women than men on the mate market. This was partly because of the higher male death rate (especially during the two world wars) and partly because of the legal, social, and religious barriers to polygyny. Today, the male and female death rates are almost equal—the male-biased sex ratio at birth is now lasting until the sixth decade of life. Also, polygyny is much more common.
So, more and more men are competing for fewer and fewer women. Inevitably, some men will fail to find mates, and the entire dating experience will become less enjoyable for men in general.
This seems not to be the case . Data shows majority of Women in US live very closeby their mother ~ something like 40 miles . They give up jobs and career advancement in some cases to prioritise it . Your theory doesn't stand up to empirical data.
Kinship ties exist in all human populations. The argument is not that they don't exist in northwest Europeans (which is clearly untrue) but rather that they have been weaker in northwest Europeans than in other populations. Moreover, this seems to have been the case for over a millennium, perhaps several millennia.
Thus, people have adapted to this weak kinship environment by developing a different behavioral package, notably impersonal prosociality and behavioral norms that are perceived in absolute and universal terms.
Taiwan has a a moderate rate of urbanization, much less than the US or places like Gabon, Jordan, or Iceland. Thailand is even less urbanized, yet its fertility rate is only 1.4
France has benefitted from a longer history of family allowances, going back to the interwar period.
Taiwan and Singapore never adopted the one-child policy, yet their fertility rates are even lower than China's.
Here are the latest 2025 estimates for the total fertility rate in jurisdictions that are wholly or partially Chinese in culture. Only one of them had the one-child policy:
Macau - -0.59
Hong Kong - 0.75
Taiwan - 0.86
Singapore - 0.97
Malaysia - 1.6
China - 1.6 (excluding Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong)
We see the same low fertility in overseas Chinese.
It's easy to blame the one-child policy, but the truth seems to lie elsewhere. In fact, I would argue that this policy and the ultra-low fertility of Chinese people everywhere share a common cause, i.e., an obsessive desire to plan the future. Chinese couples postpone having children because they are spooked by the costs of childcare.
As for Western Europe, its total fertility rate is still higher even if you exclude immigrants.
"Immigrant mothers account for 19% of all births in France today. The total fertility rate of immigrant women is higher than that of native-born French women (2.6 children versus 1.8 in 2017), but as only a minority of women are concerned, their births increase the French fertility rate by just 0.1 children, from 1.8 to 1.9 children per woman in 2017.
... French fertility rates top the rankings in Europe not so much for reasons of immigration, but rather because fertility among native-born women is high."
I initially intended to write a longer post. For example, I was going to discuss Israel and how the fertility rate has fallen among the Mizrahi Jews and risen among the Ashkenazi Jews. This is because the ultra-orthodox are much more present among the latter than among the former. But that begs the question. Why are Ashkenazim much more likely to organize themselves along ideological lines, i.e., as "moral communities"?
In the end, I dropped that example. The discussion in the comments section would have wandered off-topic and the original topic would have been forgotten. This is one thing that drove me bananas when I had a column at The Unz Review.
This is a very interesting hypothesis which I am pleased you have put into words for me.
My wife and I are typical northwestern Europeans (resident in NZ). When we married it never occurred to me to expect support from relatives. Indeed, the closest relatives lived multiple hours drive away from us. However, our families have supported us in times of need.
Our "shared commitment to a moral system" (your words) is a belief in the utility of the scientific method practiced within a framework of somewhat impersonal liberal values. I say 'somewhat impersonal' because we care most about our kids, then about those people we interact with directly (actual friends), then with those we associate with, and proceed with declining emotional intensity to relatives, fellow citizens, westerners, and finally to people of the world (I guess).
We have 4 kids. We had them thoughtlessly. By that I mean without precondition. When we married we both had the intention of having several kids, though without knowing how we would afford them. This is different from the (middle class) people around us whose mindset seems more 'zero sum', more backward looking and more directed to individual hedonism (exotic vacations, personal comforts and status signalling).
Characterising our "moral community", rather than being religious, it's liberal, pragmatic, and resource conservative.
I wish we had a secular equivalent of religion. Many people are social conservatives while having no religion, either because they've had bad experiences or because they feel that science has superseded religion.
There are actually atheist churches, like the Sunday Assembly, where people regularly meet without having to be religious.
Peter Frost: "I wish we had a secular equivalent of religion"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Is it still possible to have labor-intensive factories? The trend is toward robotization and automation, even in relatively low-wage countries.
We have family rituals and to a lesser extent community ones, which satisfy whatever communal need I have. Others (not my wife and kids) are more spiritual or religiously inclined and do seek out more formalised expressions of faith.
Religion is a disease.
Yes, I think so. Automation--ie, new labor-saving technologies--argues for shorter workdays and workweeks to rebalance the supply and demand for labor, not the elimination of labor altogether. There will always be a place for a human worker, possessed as he is with two hands with opposable thumbs, two eyes, arms and legs thast allow him to move around in all kinds of ways (guided be his eyes and his sense of touch), plus a brain, education, culture, and best of all the ability to take verbal instruction in real time. Human beings are the ultimate robot in that sense.
As for what their hourly pay should be in a market economy, should it fall below, say, a living wage, there is a lot of room for subsidizing wages in our new hightech world. See these two linked papers for example: https://shorturl.at/MiZIf
One big difference between robots and humans is that humans use their wages to buy things, whereas robots only make a return on investment, i.e, it is all about capital with no labor in sight (to adopt the extreme "vision" of a world without labor). Meanwhile what about all the living human beings: are they expected to passively sit around, spending their guaranteed income for which they do absolutely nothing?
Granted, these are just stray thoughtf off the top of my 83 year old brain, but I think they hint at the absurdity of the idea of a world without labor;
P.S. As for those fully automated factories we see being demonstrated in China, they are just a case of China showing off her excellent engineering talent with no thought for the welfare of her working population--something that is only possible in a centrally planned economy. It represents a major maldistribution of capital and will lead to tragedy when the Chinese working people gradually come to realize that their hard earned life savings, on which they are depending for support in old age, have been squandered on all kinds of highly impressive boondoggles.
In theory, any savings through robotization would be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices and to workers in the form of higher wages.
Neither is really happening. Economic inequality has increased considerably over the past half-century, and the resulting concentration of wealth is distorting not only the economy but also the political process. I'm less optimistic than you are about the future.
For all its faults, communism helped to keep capitalism honest. Today, capitalism is supposed to be kept honest by politicians who depend on business lobbies for most of their campaign financing.
I'm willing to learn more about China, but it seems to me that China's government cares more about its working people than do most Western governments.
You did maybe but today good luck as an average man not being a beta bux holy hell it's brutal out there
I think it's brutal for both sexes. All our kids (of both sexes) feel rather oppressed and threatened by a need to do well economically for themselves if they are to ever afford to buy a house and have a family. I watch them switching between reckless despair and obsessive saving. They are also rather oppressed by threats of climate change.
However, I felt exactly the same in my 20's during the 1980's so it maybe an inherited behaviour. However, it was hard for me to get a job that paid well. Then in my mid to late 20's the economy collapsed and I lost pretty much everything I had accumulated. And this was still a time of looming nuclear winter, over population and fossil fuel exhaustion. None of which came to pass.
By 30 or so I was concluding it was all some psychop to suppress me being run by people who would now be called 'influencers'. These are simply people with a platform who are good at talking but believe in dumb ideas.
Control for out of wedlock births and E Asia is higher than the West.
The fertility figures for China (as for all countries I know of) include out-of-wedlock births.
China's fertility rate may be even lower than the official figure, since a "fudge factor" is added to account for unregistered births. Unfortunately, there is good evidence that unregistered births are almost nonexistent in China. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/03/autumn-in-china.html
Peter is a wonderfully lucid writer.
There’s a difference between saying we’ve been dealing with it longer and we’re “adapted” to it. The modern technological world has enabled individualism, so it’s been here longer. The west has held tenets of individualism for centuries and inculcated personal guilt in the lead up to the modern world. We also have tools to blunt the lack of connection, like therapy culture and social safety nets. It’s still bad here, it’s just slow, it took generations for the emotional attachments to be overcome by the incentives of raw self interest. other cultures are benchmarking us, so they move faster in the moment.
This is a flux period. We’re just long term residents of the halfway house. Don’t be surprised is Asian societies formulate an effective equilibrium before we do.
Adaptation is what happens when a population has to deal with certain circumstances over a long enough period, usually 10 generations or more.
I suspect that China will do nothing about the fertility crisis and then suddenly implement radical measures.
Maybe. But what will the west do? Shouldn’t a proper definition of adaptation include coming to some kind of functional equilibrium? Because we haven’t.
Humans haven't been in adaptive equilibrium for a long time. This is why we have gene-culture coevolution: a cultural change disrupts the equilibrium between humans and their environment, thus favoring a genetic change to set things right. Then more cultural change happens, often because the genetic change has increased the capacity for cultural change.
Of course, the mismatch between humans and their environment has grown wider over the past century. This is partly because the sharp decline in mortality, especially infant mortality, has weakened the pressure of natural selection.
As for your first question, I have little confidence in the ability of Western governments to deal with the fertility crisis, for several reasons:
- they see immigration as an adequate solution
- they see concern about this issue as "far right"
- fertile subcultures do exist within the West, like the Amish and the Mormons, but their values are seen as being too conservative
- monetary incentives for childbearing have little effect, at least independently of other incentives
- other solutions, like animal surrogacy, are yucky.
Just adding more on what I think should be done:
Western governments should fulfill their responsibilities which means taking necessary grand risks to prevent extreme future consequences. My vision beyond pro-family policies is a shift in media messaging to incentivize community building, venerating motherhood and fatherhood, social cohesion, etc. That's just one thing, I have a few more in mind.
However, such changes would not be feasible under left-leaning liberal cultural dominance. Politicians will endlessly kick the can down the road until society reforms or collapses.
Without the need and concern to care for your nation and its people, you'll feel detached. Even if that detachment is "justified" from a purist liberal perspective, it represents a self-defeating ideology that must be swiftly purged or reformed before extreme moral consequences arise.
It might be a good idea to avoid terms like "left" and "right." If you present yourself as a "conservative" who hates "liberals" and "leftists," you're automatically limiting your audience to a third of the population. Perhaps 40% ... at most.
And don't kid yourself. Many people in that 40% will hate you just as much as you hate "liberals" and "leftists."
Try to treat everyone as a potential friend and ally. Forget the labels and forget preconceptions. You might be surprised by the kind of people who will listen if you simply stick to your talking points.
I get your point about labels. Still, I think they serve a purpose in describing ideas, though I understand your argument isn’t about their utility but about the rhetorical approach many political figures take.
I share some progressive views myself, but ignoring the left/right divide entirely risks muddying the conversation. There’s a sweet spot in rhetoric, and finding it is just about being composed, principled, and charismatic.
We’d agree that politics shouldn’t be black and white. The real goal is to engage, persuade, and reveal hypocrisies or double standards, weighing each ideology on its merits. Some on the right already do this, like Nick Fuentes and a few European commentators.
Good rhetoric is essential for attracting and converting people. Overall, you’re right.
Western Civilization has pretty much destroyed the world
"The same pattern appears among population groups in the United States. In 2024, Euro Americans surpassed African Americans in terms of fertility, after having already surpassed Asian Americans and Amerindian Americans (Frost, 2024; Hamilton et al., 2025). They are now set to overtake Hispanic Americans — not because their fertility rate is rising but because it is falling more slowly."
If we're trying to look at NW Euro American culture/demography specifically, we can't just look at official published TFR data as that only gives data on the mothers. We have to "correct" for the official TFR by considering out-breeding.
The blogger "Hail" has tried correcting for this and has estimated the "true" or "effective" Euro American TFR recently as being around 1.4, which would make it below the black and Hispanic TFR and closer to the Asian level.
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/07/11/americas-demographic-crisis-on-developments-in-births-in-the-usa-in-the-early-2020s-and-1920s-to-2022/
"The “effective White TFR” is now 1.4
The effective full-White TFR, in which both parents are of White non-Hispanic origin, fell in 2022 below 1.4.
By “full-White TFR,” I of course mean the TFR calculable based on births to full-White mothers whose babies’ fathers are also of full-White personal origin, that is, babies of full-European ancestry (excluding negligible-and-distant partial ancestries).
We are primarily interested in babies born who are of fully White-Christian origin, who both basically identify with the Christian-West (and most of the core being the of the Protestant tradition). Some of the births coded as ‘White’ will not be to White-Christians; some of the “White non-Hispanic-mother, Hispanic-father” births will be to genuinely fully-European Hispanic fathers. These two effects may approximately cancel each other out.
The full-White TFR metric is a way of estimating the demographic strength and relative-position of the core culture-conveying population, and not the legions of foreigners, dual-citizens (actual and effective), confused postmodern identityless cosmopolitans, and other such people able to be found so readily in the 2020s in the bloated political entity known as the USA.
(Method of calculation of the full-White TFR: TFR is 1.55 for all White-mothers; throughout the 2010s, the White Non-Hispanic Mother TFR was 0.1 points below the USA’s all-race total TFR (1.65). We then subtract the portion of those White-mother births whose babies were fathered by Nonwhite males. The out-breeding rate has been at or above 10% since the 2000s but has not risen appreciably since then. The full-White (two-White-parents) TFR is therefore calculated to be 1.35 TFR to 1.4 TFR. (1.55*.9 +/-)."
"We are primarily interested ..."
This is like the doctor who asks "How are we feeling today?" It appears that "we" are making different arguments.
My argument is that northwest Europeans have a higher tolerance for individualism. This has led them to embark on a trajectory of cultural evolution that emphasizes the individual at the expense of the web of kinship ties that surrounds the individual.
In terms of family formation and childbearing, modern Western culture has become toxic to everyone, but it seems to be even more toxic non-Westerners. That's all I was trying to say.
Another consideration is that different ethnies and racial groups likely have different "natural" levels of fertility driven by more fundamental physiological drives or deeper evolutionary reasons. Something like what J.P. Rushton theorized about.
Rushton's particular explanation for fundamental fertility differences among the races e.g. "r/K selection theory" may have been incorrect or incomplete, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis that the races, just as they differ in say average height, would differ in natural fertility rates that can be manipulated to certain degrees phenotypically but have a fundamental genotypic baseline or level, just as phenotypic height can be manipulated to a degree with nutrition.
I don't know if groups like the Amish would support the point. The nature of their lifestyle leads to them having extended family networks around, so there are confounding variables there.
https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/social-organization/family/
"Networks of extended families provide a strong sense of identity in Amish society. The family provides a dense web of social support from cradle to grave. Adult sisters may gather once a month for a “sisters’ day,” a frolic that mixes work and fun while harvesting vegetables, cleaning house, or making quilts. Family members help one other during emergencies, fires or floods, and, of course, when a death occurs.
The Amish do not have retirement homes. The elderly normally live in an apartment in the home of one of their children or in a Grossdawdy Haus, a small adjacent house. Esteemed for their wisdom, the elderly find meaning and dignity as they assist their adult children. Surrounded by droves of grandchildren, they pass on the wisdom, joys, and secrets of Amish life to the rising generation."
As for religious Jews, the Haredim have high TFR and will soon be a majority of Israeli births. The Haredim are mostly Ashkenazi, but the Ashkenazi aren't NW European but a hybrid group of southern Italian and Levantine genetics. And they tend to have tight and clannish extended family networks. Culturally, they're quite different from NW Euro religious communities. Secular Ashkenazi Israelis, who are the most culturally similar to Europeans among Israelis, have below replacement TFR, roughly similar to parts of the Balkans/SE Europe/the Caucasus today such as Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia, etc.
I don't know if groups like the Amish would support the point. The nature of their lifestyle leads to them having extended family networks around, so there are confounding variables there.
https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/social-organization/family/
"Networks of extended families provide a strong sense of identity in Amish society. The family provides a dense web of social support from cradle to grave. Adult sisters may gather once a month for a “sisters’ day,” a frolic that mixes work and fun while harvesting vegetables, cleaning house, or making quilts. Family members help one other during emergencies, fires or floods, and, of course, when a death occurs.
The Amish do not have retirement homes. The elderly normally live in an apartment in the home of one of their children or in a Grossdawdy Haus, a small adjacent house. Esteemed for their wisdom, the elderly find meaning and dignity as they assist their adult children. Surrounded by droves of grandchildren, they pass on the wisdom, joys, and secrets of Amish life to the rising generation."
As for religious Jews, the Haredim have high TFR and will soon be a majority of Israeli births. The Haredim are mostly Ashkenazi, but the Ashkenazi aren't NW European but a hybrid group of southern Italian and Levantine genetics. And they tend to have tight and clannish extended family networks. Culturally, they're quite different from NW Euro religious communities. Secular Ashkenazi Israelis, who are the most culturally similar to Europeans among Israelis, have below replacement TFR, roughly similar to parts of the Balkans/SE Europe/the Caucasus today such as Kosovo, Moldova, Georgia, etc.
WEIRDs have also historically relied far less on family for finding a mate. The courtship ritual between individualistic men and women is fully developed.
Compare this to somewhere like East Asia where arranged marriages have collapsed but simultaneously they also don't know how to effectively "date" as such.
In human biodiversity circles, a lot of talk is given to the evolutionary impact of IQ being negatively correlated with reproductive success these days. I wonder though if the biggest evolutionary change humans are about to experience is the evolution of a greater drive to reproduce. Not to have sex, but specifically to strongly desire to have children. Depending on how heritable this urge is and the degree to which contraception is adopted globally, this seems plausible to me.
Are there any data out there on which heritable personality traits are most strongly associated with fertility? This might help illuminate the future evolutionary trajectory of our species.
Extraversion used to be associated with fertility, see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0059325
Today, extraversion translates into more babes, but not necessarily more babies. Prince had lots of girlfriends, but apparently no progeny.
Bro, I know this is off-topic—I have a habit of doing that—but on a personal level, I’ve realized how evil denying hereditarianism is. IQ differences between races are real. It sucks, but denying it causes real-world harm. People with an 85 IQ—even among whites—suffer massively. They are slower to learn, employers don’t want them, and with AI taking over, they’re basically cooked.
Then there’s height. 80 percent of women won’t even look at a short guy. Bro, I’ve literally seen women on TikTok—reinforced by the data—saying, “Women don’t care about height,” and on the next page saying, “My husband is 6 foot.” Yeah, accepting the reality sucks: women mainly care about height. But denying it causes real-world harm. What does denying it lead to? Cosmic gaslighting. You’re led to believe it’s your fault instead of asking the critical question: is it a genetic problem—yes or no?
And this one is more my main interest as a blackpiller: physical attractiveness. Denying it harms individuals. Yeah, the statistical reality sucks: women want Chads and are much more selective. This is their biological algorithm in play; their ventral striatum causes the feeling of reward, and the nucleus accumbens drives them to seek that behavior. When you strip reality down, it’s a cosmic case of the haves vs. have-nots. But instead of helping the next generation through embryo selection, we’re told it’s just “environment.” We're gaslighted into believing it's our fault, instead of asking the opposite question: If environment has basically no meaningful impact in real life, how about we target the real factors? Because these are things we can fix with government funding.
Height is already highly predictable with PGS (polygenic scores). Cognitive ability is less predictable—especially across ethnic groups—but it just needs more funding, which I know those soy cucks won’t support. But my main interest is physical attractiveness. Above all else being equal, it’s the most important factor. Statistically speaking, certain groups may be more attractive on average than others. But what surprises people is the top end of the distribution curve. If you have enough embryos, there's a 1-in-a-million shot at hitting the genetic lottery.
I know I’m rambling, but I feel cheated, man. Life sucks balls—and we could fix it for the next generation. But instead of doing that, we're being gaslighted into thinking it's all just environment and mindset.
I’ve realized on a deeper, fundamental level: reality is your genes. Your genes produce the information for ribosomes to create tissues, which form into cartilage, and those tissues develop into more complex structures over a lifetime. But what develops is ultimately a response to evolutionary wiring set by our ancestors over millions of generations. So you could even say what you see—your reality—is written into your genes. People underestimate this, but genetics is like a cheat code to eliminate suffering.
Traditionally, men attracted women by getting a good education and a good job. But that's no longer the case, at least not by itself. Single men have to invest much more effort in looking attractive, in being good conversationists, and in radiating "personality."
This is largely due to changes in the operational sex ratio. Until the 1980s, there were more women than men on the mate market. This was partly because of the higher male death rate (especially during the two world wars) and partly because of the legal, social, and religious barriers to polygyny. Today, the male and female death rates are almost equal—the male-biased sex ratio at birth is now lasting until the sixth decade of life. Also, polygyny is much more common.
So, more and more men are competing for fewer and fewer women. Inevitably, some men will fail to find mates, and the entire dating experience will become less enjoyable for men in general.
Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel or are we cooked forever
This seems not to be the case . Data shows majority of Women in US live very closeby their mother ~ something like 40 miles . They give up jobs and career advancement in some cases to prioritise it . Your theory doesn't stand up to empirical data.
Kinship ties exist in all human populations. The argument is not that they don't exist in northwest Europeans (which is clearly untrue) but rather that they have been weaker in northwest Europeans than in other populations. Moreover, this seems to have been the case for over a millennium, perhaps several millennia.
Thus, people have adapted to this weak kinship environment by developing a different behavioral package, notably impersonal prosociality and behavioral norms that are perceived in absolute and universal terms.
Tsiwand and HK are highly distopic cities with condutions that are are un other parties. Urban cities are difficult for kids.
France is a rare exception, not lead by feminists policies but pro natalies one.
Taiwan has a a moderate rate of urbanization, much less than the US or places like Gabon, Jordan, or Iceland. Thailand is even less urbanized, yet its fertility rate is only 1.4
France has benefitted from a longer history of family allowances, going back to the interwar period.
China is not a reference. It has promoted low fertility on purpose.
Wealth is a key point in fertility.
With the welfere of North Europe, you should expect a 3x fertility rate. But they have only 1.2 in local women in Findland...
Much ofnthe fertility rate is coming from inmigrant women Who live in Patriarchal cultures within the Nordics
So, no, tehhy are not resistint fertility rate
Taiwan and Singapore never adopted the one-child policy, yet their fertility rates are even lower than China's.
Here are the latest 2025 estimates for the total fertility rate in jurisdictions that are wholly or partially Chinese in culture. Only one of them had the one-child policy:
Macau - -0.59
Hong Kong - 0.75
Taiwan - 0.86
Singapore - 0.97
Malaysia - 1.6
China - 1.6 (excluding Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
We see the same low fertility in overseas Chinese.
It's easy to blame the one-child policy, but the truth seems to lie elsewhere. In fact, I would argue that this policy and the ultra-low fertility of Chinese people everywhere share a common cause, i.e., an obsessive desire to plan the future. Chinese couples postpone having children because they are spooked by the costs of childcare.
As for Western Europe, its total fertility rate is still higher even if you exclude immigrants.
"Immigrant mothers account for 19% of all births in France today. The total fertility rate of immigrant women is higher than that of native-born French women (2.6 children versus 1.8 in 2017), but as only a minority of women are concerned, their births increase the French fertility rate by just 0.1 children, from 1.8 to 1.9 children per woman in 2017.
... French fertility rates top the rankings in Europe not so much for reasons of immigration, but rather because fertility among native-born women is high."
https://www.ined.fr/en/news/press/french-fertility-is-the-highest-in-europe-because-of-its-immigrants/
I'd like the 10,000+ word version please.
I initially intended to write a longer post. For example, I was going to discuss Israel and how the fertility rate has fallen among the Mizrahi Jews and risen among the Ashkenazi Jews. This is because the ultra-orthodox are much more present among the latter than among the former. But that begs the question. Why are Ashkenazim much more likely to organize themselves along ideological lines, i.e., as "moral communities"?
In the end, I dropped that example. The discussion in the comments section would have wandered off-topic and the original topic would have been forgotten. This is one thing that drove me bananas when I had a column at The Unz Review.