by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-25 23:16:49+00:00
Yes and no.

The elephant in the room that is getting some attention is demographic collapse. It’s been politicized, unfortunately, and seized on by strange people, but the fact remains that we’ve stuck our heads in the sand here. The seriousness of demographic collapse cannot be overstated. Social and economic collapse are inevitable unless something (morally licit, of course) is done to boost birth rates to above replacement rates, or kept at replacement levels. Once we reach a point of no return, it will be impossible to reverse course.

There’s a lot working against healthy demographics. We have decades of alarmist, misanthropic, Malthusian propaganda from types like Paul Ehrlich. We have now a hyperindividualistic culture - politically, socially, and economically - that is hostile both functionally as well as in sentiment toward the healthy function of family, and secondarily the community life it produces, as well as mental health). The logic of consumerism does not sit well with family life, because family life is not something that can be monetized. Consumerism relies on maximizing spending of the atomized individual, and in order for that to work, one must maximize the work done by that individual. Family life interferes with the regime of constant spending and the reign of total work. (Ironically, this makes the celebrated careerism of feminism an expression of this all consuming capitalist drive. It stigmatizes motherhood with demeaning labels like “stay-at-home mom” and celebrates the very office jobs that are the stuff of comedies.) Today, we understand everything with reference to the individual, even anachronistically reinterpreting history according to its alienating categories. Some governments have enacted pro-natalist policies, but they’re typically weak, superficial, and ineffective. We’re addicted to patterns of life formed over the last 70 years that we don’t want to let go of. Governments need to take much more serious measures that drastically favor, prioritize, and protect the family, through and through. Good luck doing that in our democratic societies. Addicts typically change only after they’ve experienced a crisis and hit rock bottom, and by then, it may be too late.

Immigration, of course, is no solution. The belief that immigration can fix the problem is itself rooted in the logic of hyperindividualism, where atomized individuals can be replaced by other atomized individuals to achieve net conservation or even gain according to the numbers. Cultural realities are totally ignored. The rate of immigration that a country can successfully absorb is not enough to outpace demographic decline. Exceeding that rate undermines the whole point of using immigration to compensate for demographic decline in the first place, since mass migrations are always harmful to host populations. You’re basically talking the collapse of the host populace and the formation of new ones in its place. Furthermore, immigration drains the populations of other countries, ones that are likely also facing demographic issues, which basically makes richer countries parasitic and callous about the continuity and futures of other peoples, until there are no more populations to drain of people anymore.