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Last week, we discussed the Lindsay Clancy hysteria as a political perpetual-motion machine.

Today, we’ll discuss why the dysfunctions revealed in this controversy are structural and terminal.

For both ideological and practical reasons, liberal mass democracies have to treat all Voter Units as if they were interchangeable and equivalent. Women want and expect an equal “seat at the table” in democratic politics — but they can’t (and don’t want to) have their words and actions interpreted the same way that men’s words and actions are interpreted.

You might guess that contradictions like these would make trouble for liberal democratic systems — but paradoxically, at least in the short run, they appear to strengthen them: women can be permanently politically mobilized precisely because the aims are self-contradictory, and therefore eternally out of reach.

The Revolution has achieved a stable superposition: both perpetually marching from victory to victory, and perpetually betrayed by our inadequate public commitment to it. The work is never done. This is a feature, not a bug.

The phenomenon is best illustrated by the aftermath of Obergefell v. Hodges.

Prior to 2015, the goal of the gαy Rights Movement was gαy Rights: a discrete minority demanding a discrete set of accommodations. There were various paraphilic subtribes, of course, but these were largely a concern for leftoid academics or pornographers.

In Obergefell, the Supreme Court basically accepted this framing of who “gαys” were as a political bloc, and what they wanted, and gave them everything: full legal parity, on every axis of comparison that had ever been publicly discussed.

But the gαy Rights Movement was/is a multibillion-dollar industry, with armies of lawyers, organizers, fundraisers, lobbyists, etc. These people were not just going to give themselves a pat on the back, pack up the political machine, and sign up for a JavaScript boot camp.

Fortunately for them, there are infinite ways to define an interest group, and an infinite number of axes of possible comparison.

That’s why you saw such an explosive profusion of sɛҳuąƖ “identities” in the wake of Obergefell.

Unlike the gαy Rights Movement, these new blocs no longer made concrete demands of the political system: the game was now Visibility and Normalization. (In other words, the deconstruction of ordinary people’s default intuitions about perverts.)

Instead of being a discrete minority for whom accommodations could be made within the “heteronormative” frame, this swarm of blocs was now irreconcilably at odds with sɛҳuąƖ normalcy as such.

This was probably not a conscious decision made by the Big gαy Steering Committee: there was simply nowhere else to take The Movement.

Trans identity became the vanguard of the Omnicause precisely because it creates a radical, vague, and unanswerable social demand right along a natural male/female fault line:

It produces a group of people who obviously look and act like male perverts, who demand to be treated as if they were women (and receive sɛҳuąƖ access to women, particularly young women), while taking advantage of moral and theoretical frameworks that protect more popular and entrenched constituencies.

Trans identity cannot be “interrogated” without attacking load-bearing pillars of both queer and feminist theory. You’d have to settle on some notion of “how a Real Woman thinks/feels/behaves” — in other words, some standard of behavior to which women might be held — which neither of these larger blocs can tolerate. (This is one reason the “TERF war” is so vicious.)

So the trans movement created an army of men, many of whom are intelligent, whose self-concept and destiny are irreversibly linked with their political program (especially if they have mutilated themselves) — and whose political demands are not merely “unrealistic” but actually self-contradictory and impossible to fulfill, even in theory.

Their appetite for the sɛҳuąƖ performance of femininity is fundamentally male. They cannot simultaneously experience “acceptance” and the sɛҳuąƖ frisson of transgression. You can’t make them happy, and you also can’t dismiss their demands within the logic of liberal egalitarianism.

All liberal causes celebres are like this now, because they have to be. There is nowhere else for The Movement to go.

It isn’t just this or that NGO that faces an incentive to persist beyond its usefulness. The permanent revolution for equality is the fuel of the postwar liberal order itself.

All prior societies had some notion of “us” which assumed a hostile “them”: the house of Islam, and the house of War.

Having conquered the planet, subdued and domesticated every credible “them”, the state now exists to protect its citizens from each other: to interpose itself against the strong on behalf of the weak (in order to take the strong party’s stuff, and convert the weak party into a dependent.)

In other words, liberal managerial states now exist to deconstruct and dismantle hierarchical human relationships, and convert them into legible transactions mediated by the state — and all human relationships are irreducibly hierarchical.

Having eaten all the low-hanging fruit (explicit, formal, constructed hierarchies), it now reaches down into the biological substrate: the relationship between man and woman, mother and child.

The Lindsay Clancy case demonstrates the extent to which this process of deconstruction has already unfolded: millions of women now understand not only their husbands, but their children as oppressors — even when largely liberated from the complaints of prior generations of feminists (domestic chores, legal and financial subordination, etc.)

The inequalities that remain to be deconstructed are irreducible and biological: which, again, makes the potential energy for political mobilization stronger, not weaker.

That is the sense in which this dysfunction is structural to managerial liberalism. Now, let’s discuss why this process is terminal: why managerial liberal societies aren’t going to fix it, and can’t survive it — at least, not as managerial liberal societies.

The Wall Street Journal says that families are rapidly evacuating America’s cities.

The New York Times notes (with barely suppressed glee) that Utah’s birth rate is collapsing faster than any other state, moving from the most fertile state in the Union to sixth place.

We’ve discussed in other places the consequences that birth rate collapse will have if left unaddressed by advanced societies — even those, like China and Japan, that have avoided many of liberalism’s other dysfunctions.

Suffice to say: the Global Financial System — the Money Printer, the Carrier Strike Groups, the S&P500, the Bipartisan Consensus, the value of your money, and almost every asset you might buy with money — is all existentially dependent on the assumption of long-term economic growth.

It doesn’t have to be radical growth: a society with a flat population — experiencing modest growth through capital investment and technological progress — could keep these systems from going upside down. (Assuming their political system was capable of controlling spending and landing the plane, which ours is not.)

But nations with radical population decline cannot make up the gap through those investments — so the logic that drives long-term investment decisions inverts, and planners’ assumptions break catastrophically.

This is the reason that liberal technocrats care (or ought to care) about fertility collapse.

It is not necessarily anything you and I should care about — except insofar as we want to be on the right side of the volatility it will create.

The point is that it’s happening, and they’re powerless to stop it — which means that the endless march of nihilism and neurosis and self-mutilation has a terminus, which is good news.

But it’s worth talking through the mechanism. Why can’t the organs of liberal narrative generation bring themselves to care about this issue?

You will notice from the mainstream articles on fertility collapse — in order to broach this topic at all, the journalists have to present it through the eyes of various Raheims and Feiloakitaus and Guzmans and Escobedos (you know — people who shouldn’t go extinct, people whose difficulties actually matter).

For these families, birth rate decline is framed as a “cost-of-living crunch”, and a “threat to the tax base”.

In other words: the fertility crisis is endangering Money For Dem Programz, and the only prescription is More Money For Dem Programz.

What we really need is for men to do more housework (like in Denmark, TFR 1.47), or to institute free universal daycare (like in Lithuania, TFR 1.17) or cash incentives (like in South Korea, TFR 0.72).

Conservative outlets like the Deseret News, meanwhile, scratch their heads. What can be done about this colossal, existential, civilizational crisis? Has anyone tried repainting the monkey bars? What about “relaxing zoning restrictions” (so we can build more Soviet barracks for immigrants?)

Joe Rogan predictably argues that we just need open minds and open borders, man.

The Manhattan Institute says we should deregulate childcare and Let the Free Market Work: optimistic projections in the most heavily regulated states suggest we could bring TFR from 1.27 to as high as 1.37. (Wow!)

In M.I.’s defense, you could maybe imagine a suite of interventions with little impacts like this that add up to something meaningful: the problem is that when you add up the other side of the ledger — the political (and upstream cultural) changes that would have to occur for all of those interventions to be attempted at the same time — demographic decline starts to look like yet another Coup Complete Problem.

And that’s roughly the shape of Birth Rate Discourse: mostly ideologues, cynically deploying the issue to stump for whatever they already wanted — with a handful of honest, flummoxed conservatives throwing spaghetti at the wall, promising earnestly that their quest for a solution need not trouble any load-bearing liberal priors.

But of course, the failure of family formation in the West threatens virtually all load-bearing liberal priors.

First, it’s a spiritual and aesthetic critique of the world liberalism has created. A civilization that fails to create healthy families — in which people are so constrained and unhappy that they don’t want to create families — is not worth conserving.

But second, even if you dismiss that spiritual critique and insist on propping up a system that is demonstrably hostile to human life, demographic decline will destroy the managerial liberal system as a straightforward matter of arithmetic. (Life, uh, finds a way.)

Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to live as psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way. This is good news.

But that’s why Birth Rate Discourse is so completely retarded, when it is not actively sinister.

All these commentators know, if they’ve thought about it for more than ten minutes, that demographic collapse is going to break structures to which they are deeply psychologically committed, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Since they cannot confront that reality, they have no choice but to keep spraying squid ink and hope the discourse remains shallow — lying at least to you, and probably also to themselves.

And that strategy works, even if not all of them are doing it consciously: if you can’t make the problem go away, you can at least pollute the topic with obvious stupidity and get intelligent people to tune out.

(We ran two conferences on birth rate decline — and even we, when we see the words “birth rate” in a headline, invariably think, “Well, here comes a load of horseshit”.)

So here goes — here’s why this topic is so difficult to talk about intelligently in public:

The biggest predictor of fertility decline appears to be the education and employment of women.

In my experience, only the hard-left and hard-right are really willing to say this out loud, and both throw it in your face as if it ends the conversation — as if it either provides an obvious solution, or renders the whole subject unspeakable.

Of course, it does neither.

The only societies that are not in terminal, existential demographic decline are in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Islamic world. (The lone exception, Israel, is a national socialist state on a permanent war footing: the Israelis still have a very clear “us” and “them”.) Even these are merely 10-50 years behind the global trend, and declining at far greater speed than nations that started sooner.

The (unserious) implication from the Right is that if society could just get back to Putting These Broads in Their Place, then everything could get back to normal.

But positive-TFR countries aren’t modestly poorer, or modestly more conservative.

Our hyper-modern barrenness is not a function of “too many lady CEOs” or “too many lady PhDs”.

When we say that demographic collapse correlates with women’s education and employment, we mean that it correlates at the level of “escaping subsistence agriculture” and “having indoor plumbing” and “being taught to read”.

And maybe this should go without saying, but nobody — not even the Basedest truecel MGTOW — has any serious interest in maintaining Cameroonian sɛҳuąƖ norms. Nor could they, even if they wanted to. (Nor can the Cameroonians, apparently.)

Besides being impractical and unserious, framing the problem of birth rate decline this way hands feminists the easiest possible straw man: If civilization is going to end unless I submit to life as a toothless illiterate slave gumming taro paste, then I guess civilization is just gonna have to end, man.

“I choose the bear,” and so forth.

Cards on the table: I am enough of a cucked, henpecked, longhoused Wife Guy that I don’t want my wife and my daughters to be toothless illiterate slaves gumming taro paste.

But if we take this correlation between women’s autonomy and fertility at face value — if we simply ask, “What is life like in countries with a sustainable TFR” — that really is, ballpark, the kind of world we would have to create in order to right the demographic ship.

Besides which, a naive interpretation of the correlation between women’s education/employment and fertility implies an absurdity: that if you give women any practical or legal autonomy whatsoever, having children is (almost literally) the very last thing they will willingly choose to do.

Does that make sense historically, or biologically — or even just intuitively, if you’ve had any passing personal contact with women?

Historically, women who were substantially wealthier and more literate and more autonomous than Afghan or Namibian women have managed to raise children in large numbers — not just psychologically exotic “trad wives”, but at scale, and as a rule.

Colonial New England was one of the most literate and educated societies in world history up to that point (Puritan women were not as educated as Puritan men, but better and more broadly educated than men anywhere else in the world) and also one of the most hyperfecund, with births per woman approaching biological limits.

Intuitively, I’ve known a lot of modern women who feel conflicted about the demands of family life — but they overwhelmingly like and want children.

In the feminist interpretation of the Birth Rate Crisis, raising and nurturing children is a thing that some women, we must admit, seem to sincerely desire; but it’s this vaguely embarrassing and vulgar “biological urge”: something that you want, if at all, against your will, and against your better judgment. (It is frequently expressed, in so many words, as something that the body wants. Not me — my dumb body, my Heckin’ Meat Suit.)

Motherhood is generally described as if the most difficult parts of the first three years were the whole experience — the discomfort of the third trimester, the pains of childbirth, sleepless nights, diaper changes — essentially just physical toil, domestic servitude. The only reason anyone would “want” that is a kind of animal “false consciousness”.

Anyway, it’s definitely a different and less-legitimate category of desire than, say, the instinct to solve problems, or the craving for novel experience, or the hunger for status and recognition (the kinds of itches that a job scratches.)

These are somehow “non-biological” urges. These are the Real You — and the moment you let a woman do those higher, deeper, more meaningful things, she loses all interest in family life.

Of course, all of that is silly.

Professional aspirations are just as easy to explain in evolutionary biology terms — just as reducible to “hormones” and “primate psychology” — as family-forming instincts are.

Besides which, every job — but especially the classically meaningful and desirable “childhood dream” job — is frontloaded with drudgery and shit tests, and usually for much longer than three years. (Ask a doctor, or architect, or professor, or marine biologist.)

And that’s the fun jobs. The vast majority of jobs put you through the shit tests and then don’t culminate in any thrills, let alone ecstatic transcendent meaning. They’re just jobs, the whole way through.

I knew a woman in the wage cage who was making a little bit more money than me — maybe $90K.

She would come into the office crying after dropping her two kids off at the (expensive, snooty) daycare, and then picking them up with unexplained bruising and various novel behavioral issues. She was pregnant with her third.

It wasn’t worth my job to ask too many questions, but on the basis of some napkin math, she was making a poverty wage after the cost of daycare, and kid #3 was practically going to zero her out.

And she wasn’t jumping out of airplanes or curing cancer or creating beauty — she was doing some narrow, arcane, defense-industry finance thing that would take ten minutes to explain to you. She didn’t seem inordinately happy to be doing it. She talked a lot about missing her kids.

In my travels since, I have learned that this woman’s situation is on the more “privileged” end. For the average woman, the job is less cozy, and the ratio of daycare-expense-to-salary stops penciling out at two kids instead of three.

That would be enough to explain the Birth Rate Crisis all by itself.

In a two-income paradigm, the average American family can afford something like 1.4 kids — so that’s how many kids they have.

Of course, Mom working also imposes all kinds of stressors on the family, not the least of which is her Biological Urge™ to be with a man who brings home the bacon.

Some families have fewer children than they otherwise would; many fall apart under the strain — but increasingly, in dread of these seemingly irreducible problems, the family simply does not form at all.

The question is: why is Mom working?

The feminist answer is that “narrow arcane defense-finance whatever” is actually a higher, nobler, more fundamentally human vocation than raising a family, and all women everywhere can feel this to be true in their bones, and choose it whenever the choice is offered to them.

The rightist answer, basically, is that women are stupid and wicked.

I don’t think my co-worker was stupid or wicked — but the way she was living obviously did not reflect her preferences and aspirations.

My answer is that Mom is working for Moloch.

In his 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander uses the name “Moloch” to personify “collective action problems”, or “multipolar traps”: situations in which all actors behave rationally as individuals, but reach an outcome that none of them wants.

I won’t recapitulate the whole essay, but just go read it if you haven’t, because he basically lays the intellectual groundwork for our whole thing (insofar as our thing is a critique of headless procedural liberalism.)

A collective action problem exists when some collective good depends on all participants choosing to forgo some short-term individual interest — to “cooperate” rather than “defect”.

Alexander personifies these problems as “Moloch” (a bloodthirsty child-murdering Carthaginian demon) because in high-stakes collective action problems, mass defection can produce outcomes that are literally inhuman — that even the most vicious and stupid tyrant would recognize as contrary to his own interest, even if he didn’t care about anyone else’s.

The solution is to get people thinking like human beings again: to think about the long-term, to internalize the consequences of their behavior.

This suite of problems can only be solved by a human decision-maker with a “God’s eye view”, above and outside the system, not subject to its incentives or accountable to its internal controls.

He leaves the conclusion up to the reader, but he really walks you right up to it. (“Yes, this category of problem appears to be eating everything that makes human life worth living — but on the other hand, What If You Get a Bad King?”)

Anyway, the Birth Rate Crisis is one of these Molochian problems.

The work that women performed in pre-modern societies — and the power and status and compensation they received in return — was largely informal, personal, and illegible. In raising their own children and maintaining the weft of their communities, they contributed enormously to a common reserve of “social capital”.

Feminists now call this kind of thing “uncompensated emotional labor” — but of course pre-modern women were neither slaves nor martyrs. They fully expected to be compensated: in loyalty, in reciprocal obligation, in status, in honors, in protections.

This kind of thing may sound ephemeral now because it is ephemeral now, for reasons we’ll examine — but in pre-modern societies all of these things were real assets with observable material consequences. They just weren’t cleanly commodified — pegged to a dollar value or a written legal obligation.

Your mother generally could not call an attorney and a policeman to extract your obligations to her in a discrete sum from your checking account — but that doesn’t mean that you did not have a material obligation, or that your obligation to her was not enforceable.

Her work, her compensation, and her assurance of receiving that compensation, all existed in the human domain of relationships, reputation, and trust.

In other words, they existed in the world that managerialism is eating — which it has already eaten, almost entirely.

The overwhelming majority of all pre-modern human activity — not just “women’s work” — was illegible and informal in this way.

Even the most cleanly transactional behaviors — selling vegetables, or paying for labor — were multilateral iterated games with people you had known your whole life, and would know your whole life.

Whatever cash or barter changed hands was not separable from (and may have been unimportant in comparison with) the relationship and reputational consequences of the interaction.

This doesn’t mean that pre-modern societies were “fair”, but they were deeply attentive to reciprocal obligation. A naive analysis of explicit legal rights and responsibilities, or flows of hard currency, will provide a radically misleading picture of who had what power, what people expected from each other, and what they actually got.

In particular, women got (and continue to get) a much greater proportion of what they want via illegible social means — so examining only explicit, legible power exaggerates (and in some cases even inverts) the power differential in historical gender relations.

But Moloch is in the business of eradicating all these relational assets — converting them into explicit transactions that can be booked as revenue, analyzed, and taxed.

There is enormous wealth and political power in market-making and price discovery — finding ways to convert unmet needs and unused resources into legible economic and political value.

On its face, connecting people is good — buyers want to find sellers, sellers want to find buyers.

But at global scale, this process of market-making has two consequences:

• It requires us to chop various complex human desires and goods into their constituent parts, and talk about them like merchants — and many things that we care about (especially in relations between men and women) do not survive that kind of cold vivisection.
• It connects us to an effectively infinite marketplace — not just for work and goods, but for friends and lovers. We now play far fewer iterated games in which it is costly to defect.

In other words, everything we want from each other is (or can, at any moment, become) a commodity and a one-off transaction.

There’s always another buyer or seller; Plenty of Fish in the Sea.

The personal, reputational, human consequences of defection are no longer enforceable: the only way to make your counterparty behave is with explicit economic, or contractual, or statutory power — so whichever party has more of that kind of power gets what he or she wants.

Under those circuмstances, it is individually rational for women (and increasingly men) to commodify every aspect of their “sɛҳuąƖ market value”, and drive a hard bargain on every axis.

It is rational to convert whatever illegible (social/reputational/sɛҳuąƖ) power you have into explicit (economic and political) power any way you can, since that’s the only kind of power that matters.

It is also rational for public institutions to encourage this kind of cynicism about love and family, since they are in direct competition with it.

A woman who works in a high-trust social milieu for the people she cares about does not generate GDP, or taxable income, or consumer demand.

If I’m a manager at Globohomocorp and one of my employees gets married or pregnant, it may be better for her and better for society in the long run, but right here and now in Q3, it’s a pain in my ass.

If I’m the CEO of Globohomocorp, I like the fact that there’s twice as many workers competing for my job openings. I also like the fact that there’s twice as many earners to buy what we sell — and they need to buy more, because all kinds of services that the informal “human economy” used to provide are no longer available, so inferior commodity equivalents must now be bought with money.

If I’m a real estate developer, I like that the market-clearing price for a house assumes two incomes. I like that families compete savagely for “nice neighborhoods” with “good schools”, because two-income families are unworkable without state daycares, and they don’t want to drop their kids off at a gladiator school.

If I’m a leftist ideologue, I like that 90% of American kids have to attend government schools where I get to set the curriculum. (Homeschooling is legally very straightforward in the US — these schools are “compulsory” only as a matter of family economics.)

If I’m the IRS, I like that this enormous bolus of payroll and income and spending and capital gains is now legible and taxable.

If I’m a political operative (left or right), I love the energy unleashed by the collapse of informal human institutions, and people’s sense that they are adrift in a sea of insuperable political forces. I am strongly incentivized to wave the bloody shirt and shriek about Who Is To Blame for all this, buying votes and attention at the cost of accelerating the cycle of defection and betrayal.

There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy to make the world worse: all of these institutions, just by “doing their job”, eat the civilizational seed-corn stored up over millennia and convert it into Shareholder Value.

The problem is that families (and therefore human life and civilization) cannot work like that. Families have to be a personal, high-trust, iterated game.

The rewards and protections that justify the effort of raising a family do not survive vivisection and commodification — they are irreducibly human and relational.

If you don’t believe that your spouse, your children, and the community to which they will contribute, are in a meaningful sense yours — that you have some claim on them, some right to them — it is difficult to understand why anyone would go to the trouble.

And in managerial societies, in the name of individual autonomy and non-discrimination, all such arrangements are explicitly illegal. Everyone must play the game as an individual buyer and seller, in the infinite market in which they have no leverage and the costs of defection are zero.

Women’s education and employment is a proxy for induction into the Global Massively Multiplayer Defect/Defect Equilibrium.

Women in the developing world are not discovering PowerPoint with ecstatic religious awe, and losing all interest in family life. They are leaving the human milieu in which the covenant of family life makes sense, and entering a managerial milieu in which it does not.

The traditional value of “women’s work” was generated in the domain of local, human, interpersonal obligation. But that realm has become a commons in which no one is able to impose any binding obligations on anyone else — so effort invested in that domain no longer pays off — so women (quickly followed by men) stop investing.

This is the rational move for them: that’s why it’s a collective action problem.

Accordingly, we get rising GDP and household income, alongside collapsing social cohesion, rampant mental illness, badly socialized and miseducated children, and fertility collapse.

Johann Kurtz’s recent essay observes that young people endure a kind of “dark poverty”:

Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale.

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[P]revious generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.
The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

(I am again tempted to restate the whole article, it’s excellent.)

Your great-grandparents could make it work in a 1000 square foot starter home because they knew their children would have the run of the whole neighborhood, and come home for dinner and bed.

Young families now pay a $300K mortgage premium to live in the Good School District to ensure that their children won’t be the victim of a violent crime. That used to come free with your American citizenship.

TVs are cheaper, and you may have more dollars to spend — even, arguably, in “real terms”. But all the things you need — especially if you want to raise a family — are either many multiples more expensive, or simply not available at any price.

And every step of this liquidation of the commons has registered to our sociological sense organs as “growth”: rising wages, cheaper flatscreens, ever more bachelor’s degrees.

When you liquidate the illegible social capital of a community and try to repurchase it at retail, you get the Clancy house: a small army of enormously expensive “caregivers”, powerless to prevent a psychospiritual catastrophe.

Young people simply will not breed under these conditions, and the sense organs of managerial society are not even capable of parsing this as a problem.

This is not an incidental policy problem for which the right technocrat could provide the right data-driven solution. It is a problem with data-driven solutions as such.

Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair.

What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church.

The moment these ideals enter the “real world” of money and power, they can only be understood as “prejudice” or “corruption”: not only a bad thing, but the bad thing — the enemy that the system exists to eradicate.

But the family is an inherently covenantal relationship, and it inherently involves the real world. Human beings will not raise families as a transaction — so a society that cannot honor covenants cannot have families, and very rapidly will cease to be a society at all.

Quote

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
Malachi 4:5-6

One way or another, human institutions are coming back.

It’s unclear how long this deconstruction will continue: but in secular terms, the only societies that make it to the other side will be those who make it possible to find trustworthy counterparties and play iterated, cooperative games.

Put in spiritual terms: the societies that make it to the other side will be those that restore honor and loyalty as social realities, so that it is possible for ordinary people to make and keep covenants again.

It’s not clear what mature institutions of this kind will look like, but it seems like it has to start with like-minded people getting together at human scale, to build things with stakes that matter, and place bets on each other. On the strength of a shared history between human beings with names and faces, we have to restore the primal human circuits of patronage and fraternity for our children to inherit.

The biggest predictor of fertility decline appears to be the education and employment of women.

Alright I finished reading it. Overall a useful read. Though he doesn't mention birth control/abortion at all.