Crashing Fertility: Good Times Made Soft Men
Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early.”
He was right.
If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).
Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr—doctor, doctor—Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.
That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.
There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.
Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.
It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.
We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.
It is not only rulers and the elite, though. It is most of us. If it were only a handful of rulers who lost their minds, we could eliminate them with ease. But the exhaustion caused by good times have sapped the strength of many. Tens of thousands, one recent headline truthfully said, rallied in London recently against “the far right”, meaning the old ways. Much is made of the statistic that well over 90% of the people doctor Wiebe and her blood-soaked colleagues put into the ground were white. But that is because it is largely whites, the native population itself, and not the rulers alone, who have lost the thread.
Our rulers, it’s true, still mouth many phrases taken from the old days, because they think it is expected of them. They don’t really mean these things, and have no real principles except to stay alive and live as comfortably, even luxuriously, as possible. But the strangers flooding in do have principles, and strong ones, which are when considered anathema to beliefs rulers hold. How do rulers reconcile this?
You know how it is. We all default to thinking that others think like us. Our rulers hold nothing sacred. That word has been drained of all life. They thus think the people they are inviting in don’t really hold anything sacred, either. Or if these poor foreigners do hold strange ideas, it is only because of circumstance, and that once these foreigners are settled, they too will come to believe in nothing, as is proper. Our rulers are, of course, wrong.
Remember Notre Dame? It was once sacred. A “migrant” did not agree. Nor did rulers, which came to see it as a lucrative tourist attraction. If you’ve forgotten what happened, there are many and continuing fresh examples. The 600-year old Cathedral in Nantes was lately set ablaze by a “migrant”. As were many other churches (in Canada vast numbers were set ablaze because of a false rumor). These buildings are no longer sacred, except to a remnant. The soccer authority UEFA fined the French football club LOSC Lille for displaying (or acting out) a banner of Joan of Arc. This was not the only instance. Our rulers follow the One Way Compassion Fallacy. This says that all sympathy must to be extended to any foreign belief, and all native ones quashed, because it is silly to hold old native beliefs sacred. It is why school kids in England were not allowed snacks during Ramadan (the cafeteria became a “food free” space), lest some person with foreign beliefs feel bad. That the greater number of natives feel bad is of no consequence.
It’s not so much that the beliefs are foreign, but the people deferred to are taken as Official Victims. One must be compassionate to a Victim regardless of circumstance. We see this play out in the States almost daily, with judges letting blacks free after they’ve committed any number of terrible crimes, even murder. Blacks are Victims, and thus not responsible for their actions. Pages could be filled with examples. Indeed, most now see crime as they do bad weather. Unfortunate, but what can you do? You can’t lock up a cloud. What good is punishment? Just forget about it.
“Migrants” are even better Victims than blacks. The story of the girl Spanish doctors slaughtered started with her repeated rape by “migrants”, and with rulers dismissing her pleas lest it make “migrants” feel bad. What good would come of punishing the rapists now? The girl is dead, slain by a doctor. You can’t bring her back. Her organs are already sold (as are the innards of many others killed by doctors).
It’s not always gruesome benevolence: often the motive is the old-fashioned root of all evil. Companies in the USA eschew natives over “migrants” because they can save a buck. The good times and their ease cannot be interrupted. Executives in these companies have grown too used to their opulence. What’s the difference if those “migrants” begin preferentially hiring their compatriots, and also eschew natives? Aren’t I making a profit?
Nations in the East, like China, Japan, and South Korea, aren’t as keen on “migrants”. Not all in the West are, either, but it’s obvious most educated elites and rulers have given up thinking natives hold superior views to “migrants”. These other places might not have as many “migrants” as the West, but they all suffer spiritual dearth, too. The good times caused them to look not outward but inward and work harder to create material, and only material, success.
There is, however, one thread tying all these cultures together: they are all in some way enthralled by Equality.
Equality is the fallacy that all people, men-women old-young normal-abormal native-foreigner whatever, are “really” the same. More or less. Nothing is more destructive to clear thinking than Equality.
The forms of Equality embraced earliest are the strongest, are embedded deepest, hence the vanishing distinction between the sexes. Women must be the Equal of men, and not just in the West. Japan has an ex-rock drummer lady Prime Minister. Even Xi Who Must Be Obeyed announced that more women ought to be involved in the Party. Brazil, we hear, has a new law which makes it illegal to interrupt a woman in a meeting. Offenses punishable by five years in jail. For making a woman feel bad. England imprisons those who pray silently outside abortuaries. Because you cannot make a woman feel bad. There are many, many, great many other examples.
Women now outnumber men in colleges and in businesses in the USA. To these activities, and not to being moms, they are devoted. Women in South Korea are now so powerful that they have all but given up on the idea of having children. They are not alone. Women in all “advanced” nations are closing their wombs. And the men are in no ways pressing them to reopen them. Only “migrants” show any vigor with reproduction, though not always done legally. The good news for them is that they’re largely getting away with it. You already know about the rape gangs in England and elsewhere where large numbers of “migrants” were welcomed. Births would be ticking up because of these rapes, too, a classic strategy (hello, Sabine women), except that many women are “on the pill”, or if they are unlucky enough to fall pregnant, they have the babies killed by people like doctor Wiebe.
Equality is the main cause of the Great Descending Wave in which man is embedded. Soft times allowed Equality to flourish. Equality is creating hard times. Equality is the reason a gynecologist in England who lopped off a baby’s head during a delivery is allowed to return back to work, because the doctor is a Victim (a female foreigner) and “accidents happen”, but another doctor (male) is stricken from the rolls because he insists “gender” is given at birth, a terrible sin against Equality.
I have written often about Equality, and its terrible destructive power. It is the key reason why birth rates are plunging.
The so-called Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) has written an essay on the declining birth rates around the world, and his plan to boost them. It is enlightening reading (at least because he writes so well; I see the article is now paywalled, alas). I think his solution, discussed in a moment, is wrong, and wrong for the same reasons he pegs in other schemes.
But he identifies many of the symptoms of the problem correctly. Women delay childbirth because of education, which is a necessity in the West and East, to have access to good lives. By the time ladies get around to the idea of children, they are well into their thirties, or worse, and even though Reality can be disbelieved, it cannot be denied.
In 2024 in Los Angeles county nonhispanic white college-educated (defined as having any college credits at all) women ages 20-24 produced only 293 births. This is a county of 10 million and the total number of nonhispanic white women in this county ages 20-24 are probably over 80,000-85,000—larger than the population of many American cities. Women who have some college credits of whatever type would be anywhere from 60-70% of that. You’re looking then at a birth rate of about 6 per 1000 in this group, which is essentially zero fertility at prime fertility years.
Similar numbers are found everywhere Equality is embraced.
Many propose a return to religion as a solution. BAP sees the flaw in this, writing as a person touting this idea:
“[Embrace religion to increase births] Because we have sociological correlation studies that tell us that women who have children and are married tend to be religious. So it’s that you can find religion— Why should I be religious? —Because we have studies that show religious people tend to have higher fertility and marriage rates. That could be you.” This isn’t exaggeration.
He sees this, correctly, as “circular absurdity.” Iran, for instance, is highly religious, but low birth (and now perhaps worse). “The current birth rate in Iran is below replacement level, and has been for some time.” Iran is also highly educated, and has its own form of educational Equality.
He also says, I think correctly, too, about plans to increase marriages, and thus babies: “I don’t think marriage is the cause of fertility: this is a social engineering wish and its factual basis is only a correlation…Many white upper middle class and Asian couples have only one child, despite stable ‘bond-pairing,’ and a traditionally conservative lifestyle even when not self-understood as such.”
Correlations, as my regular readers know, do not imply causation:
Therefore you can maybe do things to “encourage” marriage or religion and a higher birth rate will follow. This is a classic case of “make the streets wet to cause rain.” Married couples who buy cribs or child car seats also “tend” to have children. Marriage today functions as a label or brand, not an institutional cause or even support.
Making people wed or insist (as they do in places like Iran) on religion does not make babies. These ideas would anyway be artificial, and thus sterile. You can force people to make a public prayer, but you cannot make them believe it. Simple ideas like paying women token, or really any, sums for having babies does not solve Equality, because it isn’t only money that Equality brings.
BAP notes that fecund cultures were those that celebrated male vigor, especially male sexuality. His description of the mechanics of sexual intercourse cannot be disputed, except by those who profess idiocies like “gender theory” (another creation of Equality).
BAP would institute today a similar cult of male virility as those found in fertile cultures.
But here he has committed the same fallacy as those who would institute or mandate religion or marriage. Those festivals and statues devoted to male sexual power were all real enough, but they were the result of the spiritual strength of those cultures, not their causes. They were outward expressions of life, and the need for more life, the ache for it, the spiritual desire the hard men then had to create good times.
Consider we still have ceremonies today, outward expressions of our desires. We call them “Pride”: parades, costumes, celebrations. Festivities of sexual sterility, despising fecundity. We have things like MAiD to sate our need for quick painless life, and easy death. There is everywhere an absolute denial of the necessity of hardship or suffering. We are soft men, men without chests. The Last Men.
It is surely true that not a few pregnancies resulted from the Dionysian frenzy of a rock concert, as BAP states. And some babies would likely be made were phallic statues installed in downtowns and paid obeisance to, as his solution has it. But it’s also so some youth are recruited into the nonprocreative hobbies of masturbation and homosexuality from Pride parades. Even so, both are largely symptoms of the underlying spiritual state of the populace. They are not the drivers of it.
Seeing a replica on an engorged phallus will not encourage women to abandon education and pursue Equality. Rulers aren’t going to cease loving “migrants” because the natives are having more sex. Besides, even if BAP’s idea were good, they do nothing about “birth control” (contraception) or abortion. These are, in the West and East, women’s little helpers, there to ensure that “mistakes” won’t hold them back from the careers they “deserve.”
What has to go is Equality.
It can’t. No one has any idea how to eliminate it. I certainly don’t. Life is easy. People want more ease. How can you deny women what men have? Nobody has an answer. Many of use joke “Repeal the 19th!” An excellent idea. Which will never happen. Besides, neither South Korea nor China has a “19th”. MacArthur when he ruled Japan put women’s Equality into Japan’s Constitution, do not forget, because why? Because he rightly foresaw it would make men less manly.
There is no solution to good times.There never is. Nobody wants to give up what we have. That is why the ancient litany is true. The hard men looked forward to good times. They muscled those good times into being. We now have our good times. They are making soft men. The gift of hard times is built into the process. It has already been accepted. The hard times which are coming will again make hard men in due time.
I am not seer enough to know what precise form these hard times will take. Will this war (which we were promised would not happen) expand? Does it instead peter out and Equalitarians and utilitarians seize outright control because of the disappointment? Either accelerates the Wave.
Or will there be another short-term improvement here and there, all still caught in the building Wave. I cannot help but quote again from David Stove (from whom we learnt so much against Equality), from his last book What is Wrong With Benevolence? Benevolence, as he uses the word, is the inspiration and implementation of Equality. What can we do to to solve our hard times? Individually, much. Each man is always responsible for his own life and to God. You must never give up. But for the culture as a whole? Stove likens our situation to a solitary Indian in a canoe fishing miles upstream from Niagara Falls.
Despite all his local knowledge, he makes some slight misjudgment of time, or wind, or water, and finds himself surprised by the current. For hours he puts forth all his strength in trying to reach the shore, but long before the fatal event itself, he passes a point at which his diminishing strength, and the increasing strength of the current, make further resistance vain. He then ships his paddle, lights his pipe, and folds his arms.
In the circumstances, those are the actions of a rational man. Similarly, in my opinion, the world-current of Enlightenment benevolence is now so strong, and we have been launched upon it for so many years, that we passed the point of no return a long time ago, and will, if we are rational, emulate the Indian in the story.
Many years ago when I first quoted this I argued to fight against the current. I still do, for each man and his family, and for the future (hence why I do the Class). But for the culture itself now I am starting to see the Indian’s point of view.
source wmbriggs.substack.com