the coming demographic collapse

Civilisations have died before and in many cases these deaths could be described as being at least in part suicides but what we’re seeing today is something much more frightening – our species is committing suicide. We are simply no longer reproducing. There’s a name for species that stop reproducing – we call them extinct species.

The catastrophic falls in birth rates in the West are certainly old news. Fertility in the West has been slowly declining for well over a century. But it’s not just the West now. Some of the lowest fertility rates on the planet are found in highly developed east Asian societies. South Korea and Taiwan are almost certainly past the point of no return.

Fertility rates have plummeted everywhere, except sub-Saharan Africa. Europe, Latin America, east Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Islamic world, North America – wherever you look it’s the same story. There are fewer and fewer babies.

No-one can be entirely certain why this has happened. It is possible that physiological factors may be involved, with unhealthy hormone balances being one suspect. It does seem more likely though that the disaster is mostly cultural in nature.

Undoubtedly urbanisation has played a part. The demoralising effects of capitalism and consumerism. The collapse of organised religion. Feminism, the glorification of homosexuality, the trans nonsense, the ubiquity of pornography – these are certainly factors. It has to be said that as American culture has been spread more and more aggressively across the planet it has been followed by the social hollowing-out that leads to further declines in fertility. 

Foolish western governments have allowed themselves to be persuaded that the economic consequences of population collapse can be avoided by mass immigration. That’s not going to work for various reasons, but in the long term the main reason it isn’t going to work is that all human populations are collapsing, and they’re collapsing fastest in the more “advanced” countries. The immigrants are also going to stop reproducing.

Of course it can be argued that declining populations are not necessarily a bad thing. The trouble is that we are not dealing with a slow decline in healthy populations. We’re dealing with populations that are failing to reproduce because society is diseased. We don’t know if such declines can ever be reversed. It might well be that once a certain point is reached an equilibrium will start to establish itself, or alternatively it might be that the collapse will begin to accelerate until self-extinction is achieved.

In any case while the economic problems of declining populations might be solvable we certainly are not close to finding such a solution.

And then of course there’s the added difficulty that the one place that population collapse is not happening is sub-Saharan Africa. If our leaders our determined to arrest declining population by bringing in immigrants then sub-Saharan Africa is going to be the only long-term source of unlimited numbers of immigrants. Does anyone seriously think that’s going to end well?

We also need to ask ourselves if we really want to live in a society in which people are too selfish and too stuck in permanent adolescence to want to raise families. It’s not likely to turn out to be a very healthy society.