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A World Without Babies Martin Gurri

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Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

This piece has been republished with permission from Discourse:

When future historians look back on the last half century, I suspect they will pass over war, terror, and populism to settle on infertility as the decisive event of the age. For the first time since the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, the world’s human population is about to shrink—a process that has already begun in many countries. The correlates to the decline are well known: affluence, urbanization, women’s education, abortion, and easy access to contraceptives. But identifying hard causes is difficult. Gigantic trends touching on the survival of ancient cultures—and even of our species—get entangled with social pressures and moral ideals. At the same time, one must reckon with the secret dreams and expectations of solitary individuals of every class. The result is uncertainty.

People stopped having children when life has gotten good. Switzerland is possibly the wealthiest nation on Earth, with a high-trust, homogeneous population ranked near the top of the happiness index. There are no obvious material or psychological barriers to reproduction, but the Swiss birth rate, at 1.5 children per woman, falls short of the 2.1 needed to replenish the country’s human stock. Italy has the third-largest economy in the European Union as well as a sunny climate and delightful lifeways. Yet Italy is a leader in the global depopulation race—by 2050, 6 million fewer Italians will be enjoying that magnificent weather. Japan, another rich, tightly knit society, may lose 20 million inhabitants by 2050—that’s 45 times the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out in one generation.

But this isn’t only a question of rich societies going off on a hedonistic binge. People have also stopped having children when life is terrible. Cuba is a political and economic basket case; the birth rate there has plummeted. The same holds true for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and Ukraine, poor nations all. The Covid-19 pandemic, despite the cozy lockdowns, led to a “baby bust.” It may seem intuitive that hard times should reduce the birth rate, but now we are also saying that the causes of infertility are too much wealth and too much poverty—which, though not really a contradiction, feels a little like having it both ways. Historically, poverty never stopped the human race from making babies. South Korea ranked among the poorest countries in 1950, when the birth rate per woman was over 5; today, with a powerhouse economy, the South Koreans are virtually going extinct.

Here in the U.S., we tended to place the burden of reproduction on God and faith. When we came upon a large family two generations ago, we would remark, “They must be Catholics.” A generation later the same was said of Mormons. Today, however, both Catholics and Mormons have slipped below the critical 2.1 threshold. In a narcissistic age, we have refashioned deity after our own image and likeness: his/her/their commandments sound suspiciously like the pleasures we hope—with any luck—to indulge in. We have come to worship a shimmering spirit called “happiness,” defined as equal parts sensuality and smugness. And since studies tell us that “spouses who raise children appear less happy than childless spouses,” we have no choice but to sacrifice our offspring on the altar of this jealous god.

Consequences of a Barren World

Sporadic attempts have been made to understand what life will look like under the conditions of a population crash: see, for example, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, or alternately, Decline and Prosper!: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children. These are futile exercises. We have never been there before. While we can guess where most of the pieces will be positioned at the start, we have no clue how the game will play out. All that follows, therefore, is speculation—and from where I stand, speculatively, things look grim.

For instance, the welfare state requires an endless supply of young people to produce more, consume more, and generate ever more taxes for bureaucrats to distribute. A prolonged shortage of young bodies will stress the social safety net to the breaking point. Expensive retirement and health insurance schemes are likely to collapse. The marginal will slip into poverty—the poor will grow desperate—but government will lack the funds to do much about it. The political consequences are unfathomable. My guess is that crime and turbulence will be a constant background noise but not revolution, since the minimum levels of testosterone needed for that kind of venture will be lacking.

Economically, a world dominated by the old will be less innovative, less dynamic, and more risk averse. The only way to compensate for a shriveled workforce will be through technology—but that’s just what you won’t get from the geezers in charge. Ingenious walkers and hospital beds may be devised, but productivity will at best stay flat. Given fewer workers and stagnant productivity rates, living standards will inevitably decline, and wealth will be distributed unevenly between age cohorts. This may suit the puritanical killjoys who advocate a less consumerist lifestyle, but even a gentle decline in consumption will throw a vast number of manufacturers, stores, and restaurants out of business. Recession, a temporary evil, will at some point become a permanent condition—and a traumatic economic convulsion will by no means be unthinkable.

But the most wrenching aspect of the transition will be social and psychological. Absent the binding power of children, the extended family will disappear, and the nuclear family will disintegrate. There will be few mothers and fathers, no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles; whole lineages will flicker out. If family is the audience to the drama of life, each individual will perform in the chill of an empty theater. Isolation will leave the young, as a class, powerless and dependent. Loneliness will fill them with psychotic dread. There can be no exit, no escape to a better future. Repopulating the world will be a tough mathematical proposition. For generations, the old will smother the young the way one does with a precious possession, like a rare breed of dog.

Humanity Against Itself

These processes are already at work. The decline of the birth rate parallels the crisis of all institutions—from government to marriage—that once provided the handrails and signposts needed to successfully navigate social life. A society abandoned to its own devices has fractured into sectarian warbands, leaving the public increasingly divorced from ancestral culture.

The causes of institutional ruin, about which I have written at length, need not concern us here. What’s strange and unprecedented is the mood behind the wreckage. There are many legitimate reasons not to have children. And there are many who wish to have children and can’t. But as a form of cultural negation, in the aggregate, the spirit of the age that inspires childlessness feels antihuman in a very literal sense: fewer humans are being produced, suggesting a slump in the value of new human life. Those leading the parade, curiously, tend to share a humanist education and profess humanitarian values. They love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh. Members of this tribe stand, as it were, on a geometric point, above the world of mere objects, and from that privileged space look on their kind with unaccountable loathing and contempt.

The youngest generation to reach breeding age, the Zoomers, has been infected with this grudge against humanity. From every corner of a broken culture, with monotonous repetition, the Zoomers hear their species characterized as sadistically cruel, “senseless and suicidal,” locked in “a spiral of self-destruction.” If they somehow survive school shooting massacres, viral pandemics, and Donald Trump, they’ll be annihilated, along with the planet, by climate change.

Not surprisingly, the Zoomers are a psychological mess. With regards to sexuality, they are stuck at the threshold of adulthood, too terrified to move forward. Compared to previous generations, they have less sex, fewer marriages, lower levels of testosterone, and, since “science proves kids are bad for Earth,” a greater unwillingness to reproduce. Potential mothers have no wish “to birth children into a dying world.” That’s the antihuman temper at its purest. According to the ethics of a future apocalypse, but amid actual tranquility and abundance, we must condemn the entire race, with all its unrealized dreams and adventures, to a death sentence.

In defiance of the studies, childlessness hasn’t made the Zoomers happier. In fact, they may be the most wretched generation ever raised under conditions of peace and plenty: robbed of the usual youthful excitement in exploration, their lives are darkened by spiking rates of anxiety, clinical depression, eating disorders, feelings of guilt and shame, and suicide. The Zoomer indictment of humanity translates easily into self-loathing. Accordingly, they often engage in fantastic attempts to escape their own skins, for example, by denying the iron dictates of biological sex in favor of invented genders. Such revolts against reality may entail self-mutilation—digital or real—but leave little room for parenting and family life.

A Matter of Choice, Not Destiny

None of this is fated. Childlessness hasn’t been ordained by obscure impersonal forces. It’s a choice. I can say this with total confidence because a counterfactual exists: consider the case of Israel, a hypermodern country that teems with children. Israeli women “of all educational classes and levels of religiosity” embrace “strong pronatalist norms,” delivering (so to speak) a birth rate of 3-plus—highest by far among wealthy nations.

So what makes Israel special? Parents there receive generous benefits, but the same holds true for many countries in decline. Some suggest that Israelis multiply because they face an existential threat—but the Zoomers have reacted to feelings of threat by abdicating their sexuality. Israel is different, let me suggest, because at the micro scale, one individual and one couple at a time, Israelis have chosen to bring another generation into the world. We should be thankful they did so, if only to demonstrate it can be done. But the reasons behind the choice are private and subjective, and probably as varied as the number of Israelis who are capable of procreating.

Precisely because the choice is personal, it would be presumptuous of me to pass some cosmic analytical judgment on the question of childlessness. I can only fall back on my own experience. Indulge me, good reader, as I reflect on a life that may bear little resemblance to yours.

My wife and I came from three-sibling families. We thought that was the perfect number of children to have; in the fullness of time, overcoming trials and troubles, that’s exactly what we got. The birth of my kids clarified a great mystery. The human race is unique in that every individual craves to live for something bigger and more important than himself. Many fulfill this sense of mission in religion, others in careers or in service. I knew from the first I had been put in the world to protect those three helpless creatures. Was I happy? The question doesn’t even make sense in this context. Parents are hostages to their kids. They can make you miserable in a million ways. But you’re not paying much attention to yourself; you’re looking after them. And watching my children strive and struggle, succeed and fail, love and bicker, what I felt made the word happiness seem shallow and lame.

I am now a grandfather and that feeling has only intensified. The persons involved are largely responsible: I have been fortunate in the character of my kids. But I also know myself to be a link in a chain winding back to the beginning of all things. I walk arm in arm with a host of ancestors and descendants as fellow travelers in the extraordinary progression of organic life: of the human story. The feeling isn’t mystical in the least. It’s as solid and real as the family room of my home—and for all I know, it’s biochemically induced by selfish genes eager to replicate.

Who cares? I belong to the most boring and least exclusive club on earth, and every day it feels like an amazing privilege.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst, author of The Revolt of the Public, and a columnist at Discourse, where this article first appeared. Read his Free Press piece “The Problem of Abundance” and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @mgurri

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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors

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The Trump Bible, Kamala’s coconut tree, and J.D. Vance’s couch. The Free Press nominates symbols that sum up this insane race.

(All images via Getty, illustration by The Free Press)

The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.

In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.

(Evan Vucci via AP)

The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.

But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —Kat Rosenfield


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The Politics of Cultural Despair Chris Hedges

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The Morning After – by Mr. Fish

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In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power. 

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next. 

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base –  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

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This is America Judd Legum

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Former President Trump has recaptured the presidency. He is poised to win all seven swing states and, for the first time in three tries, a narrow victory in the popular vote. 

For tens of millions of Americans, the result is distressing and confounding. How did a man who incited a violent insurrection, was convicted with dozens of felonies, and based his campaign around a collection of lies win a majority of votes?

There will be plenty of debate about this question. But there is one thing we already know for sure: This is America. 

Right now. 

What will America look like in the future? What kind of country will it be in 2029 or 2039? That will depend on how we react to this moment.

This was a long campaign; many people will need time to process what happened on Tuesday. That is more than reasonable. 

But, whenever you are ready, Popular Information will be right here — digging up the facts, rooting out corruption, and holding the powerful accountable. We do not do this work because progress is linear, reliable, and guaranteed. We do this work because it is not.

Today, I’d like to hear from you. How are you feeling? What are your hopes and fears for the future? I’ll be reading your responses in the comment section below.

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