Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Terminus of Civilisation

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Aug. 13, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

10:18

The Terminus of Civilisation

Elon Musk is right to highlight population collapse as the core issue of our time.

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	Elon Musk regularly speaks about how low birth rates will cause a population collapse in the West, and he is doing us a service by regularly highlighting this.
	I think that the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.
	Collapse.
	I want to emphasise this.
	The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse.
	Not explosion, collapse.
	Birth rates in the West are precipitously low, and it is something we really need to think about addressing sooner rather than later, not just on a personal level, but on a civilizational level.
	To maintain a stable population, a country requires a fertility rate of 2.1 children to be born per woman.
	Two months ago, it was revealed that the UK's current birth rate is 1.53, which is significantly below this replacement rate.
	And the UK is far from the worst affected by this slow-motion civilizational collapse.
	Across Europe, the average fertility rate is currently 1.46 children per woman, with Poland and Italy dropping to 1.29 and 1.24 respectively, and Spain at the very bottom of the list with only 1.16.
	There are, however, places with a worse fertility rate than Europe.
	East Asia is seeing a dramatic population decline.
	Japan has a fertility rate of 1.2 children per woman, China has 1.18, and the lowest fertility rate in the world is currently South Korea, which has an unprecedented 0.78 children per woman.
	What a low fertility rate means is that over time, the population of a country will decline, as previous and larger generations grow old and pass away, and there is a smaller and smaller cohort of younger generations to replace them.
	The lower the rate, the bigger the population shrinkage will be.
	In 50 years, the populations of countries with a fertility rate of one will have halved.
	This would probably not be such a problem if we lived in a ruthless free market world, which was not overburdened by cradle-to-grave social welfare systems.
	But we have, as post-industrial societies, decreed that everyone must be taken care of in their infirmity, and therefore we have very substantive and expensive healthcare and welfare systems to provide people with a reasonable quality of life as they grow old.
	While from a humanistic perspective, it is noble that more people are living longer and in better conditions, there is a practical price that must be paid and will not be ignored.
	The economic cost of this state of affairs is unsustainable because the number of people earning money and paying for the upkeep of the social systems is diminishing, while the number of dependents on them is growing.
	The ideal population pyramid of a country looks something like this.
	Far higher numbers of young, healthy, working-age people who provide the tax base to provide social care systems that we expect for our elderly and infirm.
	However, Britain's population pyramid is narrowed so that it is a population pillar, and South Korea's population pyramid is inverted.
	So in a generation's time, the elderly will outnumber those of working age.
	The fundamental issue with the welfare systems that we have in place is that they are what is known as a pyramid scheme, in which we would need an ever-expanding population to provide sufficient funding for the levels of care that have been guaranteed by the state.
	Since we as a society have failed to generate the required levels of population, these systems are doomed to fail, and there is no other way of looking at it.
	Put simply, promises have been made that we are unable to keep.
	These social commitments are also the justification used by our governments for mass immigration.
	We must have the workers to pay for and man the systems we promised to upkeep in the middle of the 20th century, and these are apparently now beyond negotiation at this point, and so we will have to find the funding and manpower from somewhere.
	Our governments draw this excess population from those parts of the world which are not suffering from a birth rate collapse.
	To put it bluntly, these places are generally pre-industrial and have what we would consider to be socially backward views, low educational standards, and high crime rates.
	They are not prosperous places in and of themselves, which is why people from them are so ready and willing to migrate to the developed world.
	They, understandably, see it as the key to a more safe and prosperous life.
	Immigration becomes a crutch our managerial political class uses to fill the gaps.
	We are told that we must have mass immigration to solve the problem of low birth rates, but that is to change the focus of the problem from the cause to the symptoms.
	The actual problem of low birth rates is more pronounced than ever.
	Importing millions of strangers didn't actually do anything to the fertility rate, but that isn't the problem the managers were talking about.
	The problem immigration ostensibly solves is the labour shortages that the system of post-industrial production and welfare spending is encountering, but it doesn't change the fact that our own population is not replacing itself at a sufficient rate to maintain its commitments.
	The continuum of our civilizations is still withering on the vine.
	The post-industrial system of welfare has just become more important than the people it is meant to serve.
	The consequence of these policy decisions amounts to the giving away of our countries to foreigners who are expected to service the dying remnants of our civilizations as we dwindle into nothingness.
	For us it will be the end of history, because we will simply have ceased to exist, because we permitted young people now to think only of themselves and not the kind of future that this solipsism will bring about.
	Put simply, if we are the inheritors and beneficiaries of a good country, then we have an obligation to maintain it for future generations, not burn up all of these accumulated social goods for our own benefit.
	There is only one way that this can be done, which is for us to actually produce these future generations, but through technological and social interventions, we have interrupted this process.
	In the UK, more than half of women reach the age of thirty without any children.
	It is an unprecedented thing to consider children a luxury when they are a necessity and heralds the death knell of our own civilization.
	Instead of women taking their responsibility as adults, citizens, and bearers of a great tradition seriously, we are instead treated to innumerable childless twenty and thirty-something women making frivolous, juvenile tick-tocks about themselves as our collective future burns up before our very eyes.
	One might object that I'm not placing equal blame on men in this situation, but it seems to me that this is a problem which is just outside of men's control.
	It isn't that modern women can't have children, it is that they are able to choose not to have children.
	Birth control and abortion may have liberated women from the form and function with which Mother Nature has imbued them, but the consequences of this freedom means that women must accept this natural function existed for a purpose.
	Without it, what was lovingly bestowed upon us by our ancestors will perish, and all of the good things you selfishly consumed in your youth will be denied to you in your dotage.
	What I am saying with all of this is that women have a duty to have children.
	This duty extends above and beyond themselves.
	They are not the pinnacle of civilization.
	Their freedom to be selfish was not the purpose of the West.
	Women are as much a part of the great chain of being as men are, and they must perform that incomparable labour of which only women are capable.
	They must produce the next generations.
	Without this most essential and unique labour, which is done only by women, as was done since time immemorial, they represent the terminus of our civilization and will bring it to an end.
	We will be replaced, forgotten, and everything that we have accomplished will collapse into nothingness.
	One day in the distant future, other civilizations may discover a statue of Millicent Fawcett or Emmeline Pankhurst, who, like Ozymandius, lies broken in the dust, with only an archaic phrase written on a plaque that means nothing to the travellers who pass it.
	Courage calls to courage everywhere.
	Nothing besides remains.
	Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
	Genesye Barcelona!
	Genesye Barcelona!
	EDVTs in a bomb!
	EDVTs in a bar!
	Five for three in an attitude!

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