path: root/transcripts/natalism/2023/collins.mdwn

2023-12-01

Malcolm & Simone Collins

We will next hear from Malcolm and Simone Collins who are running pronatalist.org and good friends of ours.

Hello everyone. I am so excited to be here to see this movement that was nothing just a few years ago already being able to put together a conference like this. Usually, if I was doing a speech at a place like this I would be trying to scare people into understanding how big of a deal this is. Just really quickly... here are the big stats.

If you look at the rate of fertility decline in the US from 2010 to 2020 and you project it going forwards, and you assume we have 1 generation every 30 years, then for every 100 people today you will have 4.3 grandchildren. By the UN's own statistics, all the way back to 2019, Latin America collectively, fell below repopulation rate. This year even India fell below repopulation rate. My wife and I send statistics to each other to scare us about fertility rates.

I started carrying about this when I was working in Korea and how they have a desperately low fertility rate. Their fertility rate this quarter has fallen 11.5% year over year. The fertility rate in Seoul now is only 0.54%. It's a chilling number.

Instead of making you well aware of a problem you are all aware of, as we like to remind you, we will share two counterintuitive points about pro-natalism which might not be apparent to you. We will try to be brief.

They don't really like us notifying people that fertility rates are falling, by the way. It's apparently a naughty thing to talk about.

Before going into this field, I saw that within countries the more conservative someone is, then the higher their fertility rate is going to be. This is intuitively obvious to everyone. But there is an interesting thing a friend of ours in the UK- she put this on her substack and I found that this changed a lot of my perspectives on pro-natalism advocacy. It turns out that between countries, if you control for wealth, conservative countries have fewer kids. This is even true when you tie these ideas to childrearing.  If the mother suffers when the mother works, then there's lower fertility rates too. I expected these to be significant correlations in the opposite direction. When we mentioned this on our podcast, someone was teasing us haha what about fertility rates in Iran... You might not know this, but Iran has a massive fertility problem and it has for a while now. A great takeaway from this for me is that pro-natalism as a cause area.. you can look at society and be like, wow, it's going to be really hard to fix the issues in our society to change the Overton window of our society. It turns out that yes, that is hard, but we might not actually need to waste time doing that. It might not actually matter. It might turn out that investing time in that might be counter-productive.

As a cause area, pro-natalism is not about fixing the things external to us. It's about working on ourselves and in our own communities and building them to be stronger. That's how we end up fighting this. This is really unique.

A practical takeaway is that it's not your job to fix society. That's pretty great. First, it's hard to do that, and it involves coercion probably and forcing people which isn't fun. Another point where it is important to engage though is where it comes to defending our collective sovereignty socially speaking. We need to make sure we retain the right to privately homeschool children, to have religious or cultural independence, and without this we are at great risk.

Instead, we get to focus on our own cultures and make them awesome. There's some easy ways to do this. You can make your culture so attractive that it is inter-generationally durable. Not only should your kids love your culture, but the grandkids should do the same thing that love your culture

To do this, you can create a strong educational system that reinforces your own culture and defends your own culture from outside forces. This imparts immense advantages to your own children. Build business empires. Build amazing economic opportunities. Draw in attention and talent. You also need to create dating and marriage markets. Make it easy and possible for members of your culture to start families and find spouses. Often people just can't find the right person.

Defend your right to be different from the other cultures.

In the past, a successful strategy was to concentrate yourselves in a certain geographic region with one culture, one ethnicity, one religion. This doesn't work anymore. If you look across countries and you control for the income of the country, typically the more mono-cultural the country is, like South Korea, which is basically an entho-state, the lower their fertility will be. If you look at a more diverse country like the US, you will see higher fertility rates. Why is the old strategy working so poorly? The core strength of the old strategy was controlling messaging that kids were gaining access to. But now that we live on the internet, you don't have any of these moats and you no longer have cultural groups around you where people of one group can identify how they are different from each other. When everyone around you is like you, and the rules of your culture are being enforced by the state, you have less ability to self-reinforce your own culture and therefore your own culture suffers.

Most successful cultures in the future will have a diversified geographic footprint. This will make people susceptible to States or large mono-cultures around us attempting to stomp us out by outlawing being different or doing different childrearing. This is whily inter-cultural alliances with groups very different from you. That's what this conference does well.

A culture that plays its cards right is really well advantaged by being surrounded even by hostile cultures- cultures that are hostile or disagreeing--- competition should foster a sense of pride and purpose. When you surround yourselves by forces that keep you sharp, you are at an advantage. If you are in a large monoculture, you will not be on your toes. So as long as you are learning about other cultures, you will be able to learn from their mistakes. If you see they are adopting cultural technologies that are causing people problems, then stay away from that. But if you see they learn how to form families at younger ages, then maybe adopt that. It enables you to more quickly than naturally gain an advantage as a cultural and do even greater things.

But if you do live in a pluralist society and you're not airgapped like the Amish--- that is one option, where you cut off all ties and go totally offline... but how do you survive and not hemorrhage people? In modern society, you have to focus rather than sheltering your children you need to annotate things for your children. They will get access to everything you are afraid of. You have to decide when you will introduce things to children. You have to annotate it and tell them what is damaging about it. Children will find out. Every argument against your lifestyle, culture, or heritage, will be presented your children. You need to head them off and make them aware of the weaknesses ahead of time and cut this off.

We're big proponents of the carrot rather than the stick. In the past, it was the stick: stay in our culture or else the stick. But cultural amenities are what keep people in cultures. The Amish is an extreme culture which by our comfortable standards seems asteer. How are they not losing people constantly? They odn't even have youtube, right? Amish youth have the option to sample other cultures but they come back at high rates. Their retention rates are getting higher over time actually. They have a carrot: they have compelling cultural ameniities. People come back after they see what's out there. You can have an amazing life, healthcare, and find a wife easily. It's a good lifestyle. So we really want people to think about that more when they think about what it is that will make their culture inter-generationally durable.

We are fortunate that this has been made an easy sell to our childrens. Just point out suicide rates, mental illness rates, point out what celebrities say about their happiness levels. It's such a strong argument.

Another shocking statistic is that it is the rapid decline in faith that we are seeing. In our podcast, and this matters for fertility rates... Fertility is going to get worse in the future because faith previously applied a large pressure besides just how happy kids would make you, to have kids. We talk with a lot of GenZ conservatives and we notice a new trend and we think this is part of why millenials and GenX do not seen how rapid rates of religioosity are declining. In GenZ, from the perspective of a millenial or GenX will look like conservatives but they have lost their faith. They didn't lose their faith from anger from traditions like not liking the rule, but they lost their faith because they were just not convinced. Their parents don't realize how big this is. They don't tell their parents. The loss of faith and moving out of traditional cultures is beginning to become exponential.

The way that some people are responding worries us. They think they can just do what their ancestors did, but louder and angrier. But this is incredibly ineffective.

When I saw these numbers, I thought this might be liberal nonsense. But I found some conservative produced stats, and it's all broadly aligned. This is a real thing that is happening.

When European colonists were first landing, and people were running at them with spears and they had guns. You see wave after wave and it's a tragedy, right. At this point we are seeing cultural forces that control our sophistication are just more sophisticated than what the old ways can counter on their own without updating themselves to be more resistant to these trends.

This urban mono-culture that is doing this will ultimately die out because it can't motivate fertility itself. Just because it's not a contender in the great game of civilization doesn't mean it's not a threat. Remember in the game Civilization the barbarians are still a threat even though they are not a civilization. They can still wipe out your civilization.

Techno-philic and pro-natal cultures are some of the few cultures that will be able to build the future. They might not be the highest population. They will build the future and take us off-planet. A lot of those people are in this room.

If we can learn from each other and defend our cultural sovereignty from homogenizing mono-culture, then we can benefit from each other. There is a disheartening way to look at the declining fertility: for those who can make our culture inter-generational durable, is that we will make up a large part of the future human condition because the two most successful cultural strategies today for maintaining fertility is... or cultural strategies which discourage members from using technology which makes them less technology capable. Because that was a dominant strategy, then high-engage tech culture plus high fertility will be incredibly rare and they will have a big impact on this stage before humanity goes to the stars.

The two enemies of pro-natalism are something we often talk about. The big one right now is the urban mono-culture. It's not evil or anything. It works by saying if you join us then you can be validated however you want to see yourself and yo ucan do whatever. But it is bad at motivating people to make sacrifices; having a lot of kids, like 5 or 6 kids, can be a big sacrifice. Because this group can't repopulate itself, it can only exist by poaching kids from nearby demographically healthy groups. This of course creates contention. It will probably get worse at doing this, and then it will start to import kids, but those cultures have gotten good at preventing the mono-culture from taking their kids too.

What we are fortifying ourselves from then is the group that thinks that anybody who doesn't think like them needs to go. I liked the book "God Emperor of Dune" where the emperor is so autocratic and so evil that many historical groups that were antagonistic against each other finally had a motivation to inter-generationally work together because they were dealing with such an authoritarian and cruel force. I think that's what's going to happen here on an inter-generational timeline. We have tradcath here, atheists, we have ultra-orthodox here, etc. This makes me so heartened because it shows at the birth of this movement it started with people incredibly different from each other and have different goals for the species but then understood we actually do have common goals and it makes sense to work together.

When we see the trends getting worse each year, then as this event grows year over year, then we are able to maintain this spirit of fertility. Diversity matters because we are actually different and we should be able to maintain what is different about ourselves.

.... I want more people to want to have more kids, rather than trying to sabotage contraceptives. ... fertility blocking technology where, I don't see it as-- I think some cultures use it to get their fertility up higher. But even in regions where this tech is shamed, fertility rates are still taking a pretty big hit. Condoms are like a joke for fertility blocking technology. We are about to enter a world where my kids will be able to marry an AI generated wife and will look perfect to them and always be nice and kind to them. You don't need pills and condoms when you have AI simulated wives. We can try to fight whatever the last generation did that blocked fertility and this is just a constant red queen's race... as fast as you run, it will be running fast enough to keep up. Or you can develop new systems and reasons to want to have kids.

In my family, we have a lot of manosphere types and I always have to hammer home that we have to glorify my wife as the mother in my family. If it doesn't look like an amazing job to my daughters, then they won't want to become a mother. If my sons see me treat her in a less than glorified manner, then they will treat their wives that way and then their daughters won't want to have kids.

We think that the bigger issue first and foremost is motivating people to be excited to have kids and showing how great parenthood is. If you look at contraception in the past, people have always found ways to take great risk to not have kids even dangerous things. The heart shape was originally the shape of a leaf that was a contraceptive-- it is now extinct and we don't know what plant it was. That's where the heart symbol came from.

Women used to die in childbirth at insanely high rates. We talk about a lot of things that disincentivize having children. But in the past, childbirth was extremely dangerous and women were literally killing themselves to have kids. Huge risk and pain. It's all extremely dangerous. It was also heartbreaching because they would also lose kids. The stakes were really high. That's how high the motivation was and how meaningful it was to have kids. That's what we need to focus on. We need to not focus on mistake babies, but how do we get people to be excited about making babies?