Natalism has been going around lately. TRS has linked the problem to affluence, Yuray has made the fairly obvious observation that minor tax incentives are not enough to raise the baby-making rate, while Spandrell has linked the the fertility crisis to kids costing lots and recommends making it profitable with major tax incentives.
I’m actually rather surprised by Spandrell’s answer. He’s the one who’s been pushing Status Points theory the hardest around here and has noted that any kind of insanity can be accomplished when status is on the line. As we’ve seen, people will go to almost any length for status.
It’s obvious that women want to work rather than procreate, but this is not because (most*) women particularly like working or because they prefer work to marriage and family. It’s not because housework is drudgery, most women who work do something similar to housework in their jobs.
The reason women want to work is because working is high status.** The reason women don’t have children is because having children is low status, and the more children the lower the status.
Examples of this abound: When you read about the Duggars or another large family, you will almost assuredly find criticisms along the line of ‘use a condom’ or ‘brood mare’. Women who stay home to care for their family are ‘stepford wives’. Women who spend their lives on home and family are ‘wasting their lives‘. Relationships show a lack of ambition and too much traditionalism (which is negative). Young marriage is discouraged. Etcetera, etcetera. Feminists have been working very hard to destroy any status attached to motherhood.
You’ve no doubt heard the blatant lie that motherhood is the toughest job in the world? Nobody could honestly believe taking care of a child is tougher than working in a coal mine or as an infantryman in Afghanistan, but everybody spreads that lie because it bolsters the low and declining status of women with children.
Having children is low status, but even beyond that status games pervade all of motherhood. The mommy wars aren’t about whether children are better off being raised by their parents or by daycare workers, it’s about who gets good mother status points: stay-at homes or working mothers.
Before you thinks that good mother status contradicts my thesis, know that low status is still some status, while having no children is no status. Have you ever read an article by childfree women? I can almost guarantee you it was complaining about how others expect them to have kids, think them odd that they don’t, or using the status of having kids to one-up them. In other words, their primary complaints are about the status hits they are taking for not having children. These status hits gnaw away at them despite having an ‘exciting, meaningful’ life of travel, work, and leisure. (Notice how they will always status signal other areas in their life to make up for this lack of status).
Having children is lower status than eduction, working, travel, or having status-giving interests. Being a stay-at-home mother is low status compared to being a working mother. Having many children is lower status than having one or two children. Having children young is lower status than having them once infertility hits.
This, more than anything, is why he have such low birth rates.
So, the answer to the fertility crisis is not tax changes, natalism benefits, or motherhood welfare. The way to get women to want to reproduce is to make children the ultimate status symbol.
Read the story of Leah and Rachel in Genesis 29 and 30. Having children was high status, so they did everything they could possibly to produce more children so they could win the status competition against each other.
We need to make it so that instead of the culture lauding whorish celebrities and woman CEO’s, mothers are celebrated. We need news reports to make glowing reports on women having their 6th child, rather than shows idolizing women who adopt foreign children or slutty daring dresses. When Mrs. Duggar has more status than Hillary Clinton, that’s when we will turn this ship around.
Sadly, we don’t control the levers of the culture-industry, so there’s not much we can do for society as a whole, but there are things you can do in your own little circles.
Make a point of praising women who have kids and their mothering skills. If a family is thinking of having another kid, make a positive comment. Praise young men and women you know who are thinking of young marriage, and otherwise encourage young people aroudn you to marry early. Let some disappointment slip out if people say ‘two’s enough for us’. Register some thinly concealed disapproval or contempt if someone says, ‘we don’t want children’. If you can smoothly do backhanded compliments or negs for the self-sterilizing, that would work too. And so on.
You’re working against the combined forces of the media, academy, bureaucracy, and culture, but you might be able to have some influence. Status is mainly an abstraction of a multitude of positive and negative social interactions. If you add to the interactions around you, elevating motherhood and deriding self-sterilization, you might indirectly change a few minds in your local communities. If enough people do it, maybe the trend could be reversed.
One warning, try to keep it subtle enough. Push too hard or too blatantly and you it might backfire if they get defensive or if you look like a jerk. You want to subtly influence their general perception of status, not come off as someone pushing a low status opinion.
****
* Before some idiot brings it up: yes, not all women are alike, yes, there are some women that like their jobs, and yes, some women just don’t like children. A generalization is not an absolute, spare me.
** And yes, because they need cash, but the need for cash came after the desire for status. The drive of women into the workplace was due to status, but once women entered, it drove wages down and costs up, forcing more women into the workplace for monetary reasons.
Everything is about status indeed, but where does status come from?
Thing is, working is not high status for Japanese women. Not at all. Most women want to stay home, and openly say so. Having to work as a married woman is absolutely not something to brag about. It doesn’t make you a social pariah either, but it’s definitely not status.
Yet they don’t want to have children. Having a job is not high status, but having many children isn’t high status either.
Having 3+ children is kinda low status, especially if you don’t spend as much on nice clothes, cram schools and all that, which you are likely to do of course the more children you have. But as long as you can afford it, it isn’t really low status either. Let’s say that controling for income, having children in Japan is status-neutral.
Yet people don’t want children? Why? Because there’s no benefit. No status benefit, sure. But you can’t change that overnight. What you can do is make it profitable. Given that having children is status-neutral, if children were profitable, people would have more.
Is it that different in the West? I don’t think so. As long as you can spend the socially acceptable amount of time and money on your children, having, say, 4 children is not low status at all. Plenty of rich women have lots of children. Having children is not low status. Lowering your standard of living is low status, and having children of course all-else-equal lowers your standard of living because you have to share your income with every additional kid.
At any rate, a government can change the tax rates, but it can’t change the culture. Not just like that. Singapore is the strongest, best managed, most authoritarian government there is; they have been trying to change the culture to promote natalism for decades, with no result at all. Japanese TV lately is full of rich and successful women with 4 lovely kids. It doesn’t change a thing.
Status is a very useful concept which explains a lot; but one needs to explain status itself too. It doesn’t come from a vacuum.
Unless you are in a very tight religious group with a healthy degree of isolation, the media-academia-bureaucracy is going to influence you. Praising mothers isn’t going to change that. Now, if the half-starved hipsters in the media start having children because it’s profitable for them; they’ll take care to justify themselves by saying that having 4 children each is a great, progressive and high-status thing to do.
”Now, if the half-starved hipsters in the media start having children because it’s profitable for them; they’ll take care to justify themselves by saying that having 4 children each is a great, progressive and high-status thing to do.”
Maybe its a bad idea to let those kinds of people reproduce.
Have you read this article?
http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy/
Very insightful essay.
When women want high status for themselves, it’s mostly a matter of projection. She wants a high status man, so she thinks being high status will attract men. It’s like a guy getting breast implants to make himself more attractive to women – fundamentally clueless.
Status on a woman is like tits on a guy.
It’s easy to manipulate women’s perceptions of status via advertising, especially TV advertising. The trouble is: how do we ideologically control advertising?. Well, the obvious answer is to try to get the Jews in advertising on our side, which is tough since they’re often gay – but most of them aren’t. Secular Jews have just about the lowest birthrate on the planet, which will nearly wipe them out in just another couple of generations, so maybe driving a wedge between the het and homo Jews in advertising is the high leverage point for taking back our culture. Also we want to encourage larger families among the superior White and perhaps East Asian folk, not the lower classes and not among the Hispanics, Blacks, Muslims or Indians. TV shows showing big, high-status White families would be good propaganda.
Among the upscale, lots of children (up to fourish let’s say) is higher status. It signals that they have enough money to raise them. I’ve seen it first hand.
Well, I think I may have gotten blocked at “Jim”‘s, as he kept wanting me to engage with this one commenter that he, I think, regards as a woman, though I mostly only threw up rhetorical walls against what that commenter said, confounding him.
But the last discussion I was engaging in over there was indeed about this “Natal” thing, which I generally prefer to describe as simple fertility.
My idea, and it appears to be an adequately powerful one, is that white women are having and should be encourgaed in their apparent sex strike against White Genocide. In situations where one tribe is being conquered, the women often defect. As a consequence, white fertility and marriage among whites is way down. They’re holding back until White Genocide can be stopped.
Another thing, is that this video by “Sargon of Akkad” has come out, and while he describes political competition as basically “S.J.W.”ism from either side, he does give a lot of information about the ongoing White Genocide. Already around 170K views.
the Divorce Industry, the Sexual Grievance Industry, the Domestic Violence Industry and the Child Support Model of Parenting all have contributed to a lack of status associated with marriage, family, man/woman relations and overall birth numbers.
A.J.P – Some of your posts at Jim’s are less than 12 hours old, so I doubt he has banned you.
Your idea that White women are having a pregnancy strike to protest White genocide is just dumb. The low White birthrate is the very mechanism behind declining White demographics. Immigration is secondary to that – immigration would hardly matter if the immigrants were exclusively endogamous and had lower birthrates than whites. But White numbers will fall regardless of immigration if their birthrates are lower than ~2.1 and the White percentage of the population, (world, European or national) will fall if their birthrates are lower than other groups.
E.H.,
You’re screaming. You disagree so you scream. It’s to enforce “screamocracy.” It’s not discussion, it’s a scream. Only noise, though. Not complicated.
You’re screaming, man.
A.J.P.
Well, it’s true that I was not blocked there. I need more of my fans encouraging me more often, apparently! I’m not that hard to find on Twitter or elsewhere on the ‘net.
One reason kids are low status in the west (whereas they were high status in Biblical days) is that they are useless. They are asset drains and yield no material benefits. Not today. Not down the road.
Of course they are useful for SOCIETY as future taxpayers. So yeah, subsidies for baby-making is a good idea.
I don’t know what it is, when I post over there today the comments don’t show either in moderation or whatever.
F.N., I really think that a lot of people are getting concerned about white fertility because subconsciously they’re in breeding competitions with the non-white groups coming into their own country. Think of it like this, when the white lower class has been replaced (a crime no less than genocide), the third-world who has replaced them is having all the babies instead. For as long as history has been recorded, the lower class has had the most children while the middle and upper class had fewer.
When you combine a service “middle class” kind of job availability with lower-class niche being done by all third-worlders who have been poured in by the millions to do it, the birth rate takes a hit. I think that while there are always social climbers, the poor you will always have with you, and as long as they’re your own nationality, then things can carry on without too much catastrophy. The meek shall inherit the earth, be careful about who are the meek ones in your society. Better that they are your race!
A.J.P.
One thing I constantly wonder is why so many people leave out the actual economic aspects of having children. I guess its linkage blindness of a sort, quality people always had kids in the past so they always will or something but in reality a lot of decently smart people do not have steady work where the jobs are (i.e cities mostly) at a rate of pay that allows them the level of comfort they want. Basically no one does with one worker.
Decent people don’t want to raise lots of kids in tiny apartments or when they are beset by lack of job stability. Unlike in the past, people have a choice and they are acting rationally, exactly as society told them to, as Homo Economicus . The idiots are the leaders who don’t push wages up and who bring in immigrants, not the folks who are doing exactly as they should. Most of the chatter out there is attempts to get hacks for the real issue, that old tyme religion, patriarchy top down manipulation of what is status whatever , Well no, won’t work, continue to pay up for years or die off. And yes you will need more patriarchy and such but its not the solution
Apologies for posting again but my system is limiting post size for some reason.re: patriarchy. Its kind of presumptive to assume that men hunger for it . Given how fast they gave it up, I’m not sure that’s the case.
Also technology kind of negates the need for it. Women can in fact use power tools, firearms and a lot of technology well enough they don’t need men to do it to get by. The female psychology is wrong but the technical aspects are not. This will have permanent changes to the way men and women interact and trying to push the clock back to an older model seems futile.
Same as pushing the Christian religion in say Western or Northern Europe. That source of free capital is gone. This will make things harder but if we focus on the now and forward not the past far from insurmountable.
Spandrel, Singapore is near carrying capacity , has no organic culture, no faith to prop up fertility rates and no sense of “we the people of” . Why would any person with a 3 digit IQ and a medium to long term time preference want a large family in that situation? Children after all are a way of continuing ones people and lineage.
The Modern consumer state, rootless, atomized home to Homo Economicus has no higher purpose and leads to no happiness. No wonder decent people don’t want kids, No one wants to condemn people the care about to that.
It occurs to me than the problem is the entire idea of the modern economy is flawed and that we need blood, soil, roots, heritage and faith to thrive very bit as much as patriarchy . All of which are anathema to the consumer state and forbidden to us. Of course given the net results of low fertility, its self correcting, It will end if only by social extinction.
I’ll agree that Singaporean culture (and modern culture in general) makes it pointless to have children. But Singapore is not near carrying capacity. As far as city-states go, Singapore is not even that dense. Singapore imports food, and could import food for millions more people if it had to. If Singapore had a culture which encouraged childbirth, it would have no problem feeding and housing more people for decades.
I just read a good article on the difference between high fertility areas and low fertility areas in China. And indeed, the clannish areas in the Southeast coast where even the government is controlled by the local clans have high fertility, while the atomized rust-belt in the Northeast has a TFR of 0.8! People don’t have children; clans have children, because the clan depends on its numbers to be strong and earn money; while to a nuclear family children are but a cost.
Again, my point is: make it profitable, and people will come with some random excuse to make it high status. This is way easier than making it high status by sheer indoctrination.
“Spandrell”,
White women are participating in a sex strike against White Genocide, which includes being against marriage and fertility. Some men are strong enough to get by in areas where White Genocide is being pushed the hardest, but white women and children aren’t and so now you see the reason for the white women sex strike against White Genocide, which I support. (hashtag: #WWSSAWhiteGenocide)
Whites often move from better paying coastal areas to whiter areas in what is sometimes called “white flight” and so now you may see why stopping White Genocide is necessary here.
“ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY!”
Best regards,
A.J.P.
Still having some issues with post size so this is a two parter for clarity
Spandrell, technical carrying capacity is not the same as social carrying capacity, I mean with good management the Earth could probably provide 3 hots and a cot for 100 billion or more warm bodies. This wouldn’t be a good place to live though. As it is every single industrialized nation is full to the brim with people. A bit of maybe a bunch of population decline would be a very good thing especially if society were made more homogeneous.
There is a cut off point of course, nations that get too low in population for their size even when they aren’t invaded tend to treat the ecology as disposable which is unwise. In any case if you are importing food to survive you are way above carrying capacity and if for example China wanted too, they could starve Singapore out of existence by blockade in a few weeks. Its a bad place to be. Assuming a nation is fairly homogeneous and secure from foreigners there is not a single nation that would be less pleasant with less people in it. I can’t see how a 30% decline especially among the lower classes or mass expulsion of foreigners would be bad for the US in any way. I suppose it means less economic activity but so what? Economics needs to be subordinate to culture. As for clans, I agree but actually creating one where they don’t exists especially for Whites (excluding some Celts and Italians) is going to be difficult and resisted . We’ve been trying to get rid of clans since the Middle Ages. States are terrified of large clans, modern ones especially so since they move power far away from the central authority.
From a futurist perspective, could some human lives be substituted by sufficiently sentient AI. As long as the population is above its replacement point, more people is not necessarily better.
No, no, I definitely think he blocked me… I mean, it’s his loss of course. Powerful memes create a lot of attention and do change a lot of perspectives. Forcing people to take another commenter seriously when one has set out to blow them off at every opportunity is going to force the one who chooses to moderate to pick a side… The best thing to do is kick dust off sandals.
A.J.P.
As one of those women who has no children there are a few reasons why. For one, I have always desired a career more than children. Second, the reason many aren’t having kids is because with the economy even if they wanted to stay home couldn’t do so. Not to mention working moms still do more around the house than the men even if they work more. That isn’t appealing to people. Regarding stay at home moms, I never understood why a woman who worked hard to get an education and a career would give it up. Some might think it makes sense but I have friends who were stay at home moms who then had to return to work after a divorce or the death of their husband. They found they had to be a lower level than if they stayed in the workplace. Employers aren’t crazy about hiring someone who hasn’t worked in years. Here’s a fact many ignore too and that is the more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have kids. There are many ideas why such as she waited too long, she didn’t want kids until she was settled or didn’t want kids at all. However most babies are born on Medicaid and increasingly many are born to single moms and this is going to be an issue in 20 years or less. Incidentally, I am not a radical feminist but believe women should have the right to do as they choose. If kids aren’t for them, good for them for knowing that. Likewise if a woman wants to be a stay at home mom then she has to seek a man desiring the same and keep up her skills in the event she has to work again. If a mom wants a career and children then like the stay at home mom, she needs to choose a mate with believes in equality.
As I read this my thoughts drifted to ‘this guy is a sexist breeder pig,’
Status depending on the number of kids that you have, the more the better? You say ‘people are having more kids because they can afford it.’ This is no where near true. Look at the welfare mothers out there who keep pushing them out because they get to sit on their ass and get more money from the government. They end up with a brood of kids who grow up to have broods of their own thus completing the cycle of poverty. These women usually start young and because of society’s worship of children, expect everything to be handed to them because they have given birth to the almighty baby.
Because we put mothers and babies on pedestals, parents are learning that; because of such worship things can and will be handed to them. Their demands will be given into, thus children will be allowed anywhere and everywhere, even in places that were considered ‘adults only.’ We see this even now, as they run feral in restaurants, knocking into servers with trays of food or drinks. The children are allowed to run amok, bothering other patrons who are paying good money for a night out. Some of them are parents who did the decent thing and hired a sitter so they could have a hot, quiet meal without the presence of their offspring.
If a mother wants to be at home, fine. That’s their choice. If they want to be a working mom, that’s fine too – and the better choice in today’s economy. But they have to stop complaining when they have been at home so long and want to go back to work, employers don’t like long gaps in work history. Or maybe you are well educated and chose to have kids. That was your choice and now you can’t find work because you ‘gave up’ your career. That’s tough, but it was a choice you had to make. A woman should be able to have choice, just like any other human being on this planet – and those choices should be the same as the men get. We are human too, and not all of us have or want children.
Religion also shouldn’t have anything to do with it. The church doesn’t belong in certain places, public healthcare being one of the biggest. If religion wants to go into private healthcare and dictate how a woman should live her life and what she should do with her body, fine. But don’t tell me I can’t have birth control or some type of medicine because it’s ‘against religious values.’ even though I am not religious but yet the doctor involved may be and their personal beliefs factor in; even though they shouldn’t.
Women shouldn’t be put on a pedestal because of reproductive status. It’s something women have been doing for a long time. It’s something that those who chose to do so should just get on with and go about their lives. Idolizing them is only making it harder for women in society to get any sort of commendation and recognition for other things that they do besides childbearing.
By the way, I am a 34 year old childfree woman. Sterilized Dec. 18 2015.