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April 16, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:31
The Most Pressing Issue of the Future

Someone has to rear the next generation. My Natalcon talk.

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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you so much for having me.
That was a much kinder introduction than I feel I deserved.
My name is Carl Benjamin.
I am a father of four, married for about eight years, nine years.
My wife will probably call me up on that.
And I study philosophy professionally.
This is my job.
I'm currently doing a master's degree in philosophy, and then I'll probably go on to a PhD in philosophy.
And one of the things that you have to read a lot of when you do philosophy is Marxism.
But actually, Marxism is quite an interesting thing, especially their critique of the modern world and the concept of ideology, which is essentially just a Marxist discipline at this point.
If you read it with the yes, but this is a good thing, rather than yes, but this is a bad thing, there's actually a lot in there that you can take out of it.
And one of the things I've become increasingly fascinated by recently is Jack Pasobiak's one man jihad against McDonald's and Peter Hutt.
This is, I think, a fascinating thing, and it really tells us a lot about the concept of ideology and its effect on the modern world.
Because when I was young, fast food restaurants were geared towards children.
This was something that families did on the weekend or wherever.
They'd take their kids there, there'd be a play area, you'd have like McDonald's birthday parties, things like this, and that just simply doesn't happen anymore.
And what we can see is that this is the effect of ideology on the way that the West has changed.
So I thought what it would be worth doing is kind of exploring that and seeing why this has happened and what can be done to reverse it.
Because it used to be that the left completely understood the power of ideology, and they seem to have become completely subsumed in their own mystique with this.
Because, of course, it was one of the primary leftist critiques of the family that it was a form of capitalist oppression.
This was producing the next generation, this was keeping the system going, and that this would continue this state of affairs long into the future.
And so you had people like French Marxist philosopher Louis Althaser, who described the purpose of the West, the ideology of the West, purely as family production and reproduction moving into the future.
Where Marx was concerned about the relations of people to the means of production, Althaser, speaking about 120 odd years after Marx, was like, well, actually, it's the relations to people to the means of the reproduction of the means of production that are actually important.
Because as the chap, not the last one, which is a superb speech, but the one before, pointed out, the more we reproduce, actually, the better things are getting.
And so Althaser pointed out that it was the ideological state apparatus of our civilization that is responsible for transmitting the ideology that commits to this kind of perspective.
And these are things like churches, schools, public spaces, art, literature, pretty much everything around us.
But of course, this includes fast food businesses.
Anything that actually promotes a kind of affirmative value is what he calls an ideological state apparatus, which is in contrast to the what he called repressive state apparatuses of the government, the police, the army, the things that would use affirmative force.
The ideological ones are essentially built around persuasion.
And I think everyone in the room is going to be very, very, very familiar with the phenomenon of pride flags in schools.
This is exactly down his line of thinking.
Yes, the ideological state apparatus, and the schools are one of the most important ones, because children spend such a lot of their time there.
If there's a pride flag on the school, that is a conscious Marxist attempt to subvert the purpose of this state apparatus into reproducing a different kind of ideology.
And of course, we see the effects of this everywhere.
It's not a coincidence that I think it's something like 20% of young people now identify as not straight.
That's not natural.
That's not biological.
There's no way evolutionarily this could be selected for.
This is the consequence of brainwashing by the ideological state apparatus under the control of a bunch of Marxists who looked at the world and said, yeah, how are the capitalists achieving this?
And this is the conclusion that they came to.
Because historically, obviously, our entire civilization was geared around families first, because that is the majority population of the country, or at least it was until very recently.
And so if you wanted to be a democratic country, well, you would have to serve the majority population.
This makes complete and total sense.
It's entirely in line with any sort of political principle we've ever held.
And historically, the feminists are actually very sensitive to this.
You can go back to the sort of very earliest parts of feminism.
We've got someone like Engels who just argues directly for the abolition of the family because it's a system of female subordination and oppression.
And then in the 1970s, you have second-wave feminists who characterized women's labor in the home as unwaged labor.
And in the modern era, the term unpaid labor, I'm sure you've all heard from feminists.
And it's even being used by my government and Joe Biden's government until very recently.
And so this describes the differing kind of effect that men and women have on the world.
And in a way, they kind of had a point, right?
There is something about doing the serving the domestic side of life that is 100% labor, and my wife will never let me forget it, and it doesn't get paid.
And that's true, but it is, as the feminists point out, relied upon at every point in society.
And that is, of course, the rearing of the next generation.
All parents do this without being paid to do it, but our entire society is predicated on the idea that someone rears the next generation of people.
And we've got the modern leftist who expects that everything can be taken care of by the state because everyone can be taxed, everything can be taxed, and the state can then use this money to employ workers to provide whatever positive right that the leftist has conceived of popped into existence this week.
This ignores the underlying issue that if the actual labor of not rearing the next generations is not done, well, what if there aren't any workers?
Now, someone might say, okay, but what about robots?
Okay, so great.
We're looking at a future in which the dwindling human population is going to be just shuffled off this mortal coil and will leave the earth to the machines, will we?
That's not exactly a very optimistic future.
And I think that maybe that's one that we should avoid.
And so the question we need to answer is, well, what if there aren't simply enough bodies to fill the roles that we expect to have filled?
What if people just haven't actually reproduced themselves in order to provide us with any kind of standard of living?
And as that chap pointed out, the fewer people there are, the more expensive things are going to get, and the worse standards of life are going to become until certain things just stop working.
Certain things just won't happen because there just won't be the people with the skills to do those things.
And so we can look around now and say, okay, what if the managerial technocracy under which we live has become so obsessed with an equitable distribution of wealth, power, and prestige that it's failed to account for this most important of unpaid labor, which mothers and fathers, of course, do on a daily basis.
So the feminist response to this has actually been utterly backwards.
I mean, I don't need to tell you guys that, but I appreciate at some point someone who's not exactly on the same page as the people in this room will say, what do you mean?
And the problem is that they decided, yes, no, the Marxist critique of the family is exactly good and true and just, and we should do something about it.
But the Marxist critique of the family is predicated on the idea that there is a workers' revolution.
And the feminists, for some reason, decided, you know what, we're not going to have a workers' revolution.
We are going to have a familial revolution within the capitalist system, though.
Okay, but what sense does that make?
Marx wouldn't have signed off on that because he was like, hang on a second, aren't you just going to turn yourselves into slaves?
And that seems to have been exactly what's happened.
So instead of creating new social privileges for women and children or families, the feminists have decided that the only value a woman has is when she is in direct competition with a man.
And this means that feminism is demanding that any amount of child rearing that a woman is supposed to do has to be offloaded to private institutions or state institutions so women could become professional workers.
And this has rendered our society essentially unisex.
There's no job for men, there's no job for women.
There's just job and anyone can fill this.
And you can see how this has become a successful psyop against women into making them believe that being a corporate wage slave was actually a high status job while relegating their reproductive power, which is the essential and defining characteristic of women, as low status.
So feminism has rendered womanhood itself as undesirable to society by drawing a direct comparison of its economic output against the economic output of men and of course finding it inferior.
Because of course, mothers aren't trying to earn money, that's fine.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on.
But so the question is, well, was this good for the family?
Was this good for children?
Was this good for civilization?
Was it even good for women to do this?
And if antidepressant sales are anything to go by, the answer is no.
Like this seems to have been really difficult for modern women to deal with.
And if there are any women benefiting from this, this is a very small percentage of them.
It seems actually most women are not terribly happy with this state of affairs.
And also, was this even sticking it to the capitalists?
If you're a Marxist and you're young and abolished with the oppressive form of the family, how exactly have you hurt the capitalists here?
Because what you did is double their labor force.
What you did is make it easier for them to keep you in their offices in order to ensure that they make record profits.
I mean, you know, I'm not like communists or anything, but like, from your own perspective, isn't this counterproductive?
And so the Marxists, though, they don't seem to care at all because what they have been is completely bamboozled by a new philosophy called intersectionality, which has been used by the liberal machine to confuse them with these sort of piffling personal issues that have completely masked any of the underlying infrastructural issues that feminism has created.
And so we are now consumed by these minority issues.
And they're just everywhere all the time and they are completely irrelevant.
So rather than our civilization revolving around the health, wealth and happiness of the family unit, our civilization has become focused on these incredibly niche marginal issues, which themselves have no reproductive power at all.
Abortion rights, homosexual rights, transsexual rights, immigrant rights.
They can't reproduce our civilization.
Civilization.
Anyway, animal rights, degrowth, environmentalism, the increase of the welfare state, all of these sorts of things fundamentally revolve around a kind of self-centeredness on the part of the activists who take part in them.
If you dig into them, you'll find that my right to X, whatever that is, is the proposition upon which they are all predicated.
And this would be all well and good if we were living in times of unbounded prosperity and there wasn't financial crises and we didn't have a looming demographic crisis on the horizon that was rapidly approaching.
But at the moment, we have a myopic focus on all things that burn up the social capital that we have accrued and do nothing to build up the stock of this for future generations.
And so Western civilization is actually in a kind of slow-motion collapse.
I mean, if anyone's aware of the sort of demography of Italy at the moment, this is probably the most concerning Western country because the replacement rate in Italy is less than one now.
So for every couple, they have 0.9 children or something like this.
And that means in about 50 years, the population of Italy is going to be halved.
And it's going to keep going down and down and down.
And so this will end up in a kind of death spiral, a kind of doom loop, where there's just no escaping it.
And this is all a consequence of the transformative power of liberal ideology that has reformatted our lives for at least the last 40 years and worked in tandem with the sort of hyper capitalist machine to hollow out the nuclear family and create a social environment that primarily benefits the atomic individual adult laborer,
which is the most wretched of creatures, a depressed person who takes far too many drugs, watches far too much porn, who spends his life deeply ashamed of himself and depressed and sad, wishing he actually didn't live like this as he gets up on a Monday morning, goes to a job he hates, then goes home and sits in his house on his own.
Like the entire world is now geared to him.
And this is why I was using the example of fast food restaurants.
Look at them.
Just look at them.
They are just sterile environments.
They don't want you in there, is the message that they give you.
There's a reason that they look like bleak single-stop waste stations in a neo-Soviet dystopia.
What use does the atomic individual worker have for a children's play area in a fast food restaurant?
Absolutely none.
It doesn't draw any of them to there.
So how does that contribute to the profits of like hyper capitalism?
And so these things have just been reformatted ideologically.
There's no reason to have them there.
And so they're built for efficiency alone now.
They want you in, they want you to make your order, they want you out, get out, let's keep this thing moving.
And so the message there is, you are here for the system's convenience.
The system is not here to serve you.
You serve it.
This means that now all of the things that used to be the kind of pleasant background of our lives, like one of my favorite memories, in Britain we had a fast food chain called Wimpy.
It was crap.
But it sold burgers.
And when I was a kid, that was fine.
And my mum and dad would take us to Wimpy on a Saturday after we'd done the week's shopping and we'd get a burger and it was just one of my favorite things.
And of course, this was, you know, it was very child-friendly as everything was back then.
And it formed the background scenario of our lives as we were growing our roots in our country.
It was we were growing to love our country.
It was part of the thing that we loved.
And this, I think, is what Jack Pesobiak is talking about in his crusade.
And you can only really react to what you can see.
We're very sensuous people, creatures.
All of your information about the world is taken in through your senses.
And so is it any wonder that young women aren't really interested in becoming mothers if the world isn't really geared to helping mothers?
Where do young women see the rewards of motherhood anymore?
I mean, it used to be that you'd see, you know, you go into a McDonald's or something, you'd see a bunch of kids running around playing on a thing.
That's adorable.
You know, for a lot of young women, that sort of like, you know, stirs the heart.
Where's the reminder that children are a good and wholesome part of the human condition?
And this state of affairs is only possible because the people who use the conveniences of daily life have had their minds turned away from the essential importance of their world as a Burkean project that is passed from generation to generation and of which they are in fact a custodian rather than the inheritor.
And if our politics has been inverted away from asking what we can do for our country instead of to what our country can do for us, then it's no wonder that we've become isolated, our world has become desaturated, and the scope of our horizon has been reduced to the immediate moment in which we live.
So what can be done?
The answer to this is actually really straightforward.
But we've got to say it with a lot of confidence and we've got to say it quite unapologetically.
The marginal people need to go back to the margins.
The feminists, the child-free people, gay issues, trans issues, and anything else which relies upon the people who won't have children need to become once again low-status occupations.
People to whom we don't really pay attention.
These people don't reproduce the means of production.
And that, and I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this, but there's a kind of parasitical aspect to this.
Because what you're doing is you're sucking up the work of generations who did do the unpaid labor of reproducing our civilization, and you're taking it for yourself without giving back in return.
If we expect to have a civilization in the future, then there's no choice but to prioritize working families in our ideological decisions.
And so all that is good for their flourishing ought to be considered, and anything that's not just needs to be ignored.
If you don't reproduce the means of reproduction, then you don't really deserve anything other than peripheral political consideration.
If you're not part of the society who marry and have children, then your opinion must necessarily become irrelevant.
Because all your political activism amounts to is an attempt to establish privileges and extract resources for yourself rather than to build them up to pass on to future generations.
Therefore, any kind of pro-natalist ideology, and there will need to be a pro-natalist ideology, it must be diametrically opposed to feminism, LGBT activism, immigrant activism, degrowth activism, or anything else that inhibits its goal.
A natalist ideology will indeed be needed if we wish to reformat the world back to how it used to be into some kind of condition that makes it pro-family and pro-children, and something that makes the world around us warm and welcoming and somewhere where we actually want to spend our time.
The sort of civilization that actually puts in us the desire to fulfill our biological duty to our own civilization.
And you can see that in so many young people now, it's just not even on their minds.
Like, I know loads and loads of young people who just don't think about this.
It's like, no, how can it be possible?
Like, I mean, when I was young, I had my grandparents constantly berating me.
I mean, am I ever going to have children?
Am I having children?
I'm like, Nan, I'm 18.
Give me a break.
Going to university.
But anyway, as Althaza pointed out, the communists had to take control of the ideological state apparatuses.
And we too must do the same.
We have to have an end goal in mind.
And so we have to make sure that the infrastructure of society is so geared that it harmonizes into the same symphony.
Society is not about you.
It is about who comes after you, just as it was before you arrived.
And that's why you get to enjoy it in such a pleasant state.
The churches, the schools, the universities, the law, the political system, the media, the literature, the arts, all of them need to be geared around what is actually important to the continuation of civilization, or else things will become so dire that some of the worst leftist fear-mongering may inevitably come to pass.
We can avoid this, but it means the end of pride flags in school.
I know you're going to be very disappointed to hear this.
But it also means that we don't encourage women to become fungible economic units.
It means we don't sanction sex outside of marriage.
It means that we see ourselves as the bearers of our civilization and people with a duty to it rather than people who have been liberated from it.
And just as a quick note on the sort of child-free people, they're all atheists.
And I'm an atheist for my sins.
So I understand how they think.
And what's remarkable is they think that they can just take four billion years of unbroken life and say, no, it ends in me, which just strikes me as a terribly, terribly callous thing.
Because no point has there been a breaking that chain.
And after four billion years, they're like, no, I'm just going to smoke drugs and just eventually die of old age, lonely and cold.
Which I can't understand it.
But anyway, so natalism has to become an ideology which is capable of terraforming our civilization into the thing that it used to be, or else there will be no coming back.
And if we win, you won't need to have to check the statistics to tell.
You'll know it when you see it.
You'll feel it around you.
The world will in fact feel homely and welcoming again.
It will be focused on families again, and the people who live in it will feel like they belong to it again.
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