In response to my last article, detailing the latest plans of the predatory classes to expedite death (presenting "assisted dying" as the solution to any and every medical and social malady), a friend of mine left the following comment:

"Society appears to be suicidally ideating all on it's own after enough well placed nudges. Free will is a big part of this, that I don't fully understand (karmic consequences not really doing it for me).
Have you written on it? I'd love to know your take on it."

I haven't explicitly addressed this, even though I've thought about it for a long time, and for several years before the pandemic, as many social scientists rang the alarm bell that the Western world seemed to be intentionally making itself extinct.

Collapsing birth rates in every Western country, which have accelerated in every decade after the second world war (with the birthrate declining from an average of nearly 3 children per woman in 1950, to just over 1 today), have left many European countries facing potential extinction, as the overall birth rate needs to be 2.1 children per woman to sustain the population. Italy's birthrate, for a particularly sobering example, has descended so far, it is now at a level demographers call "critically lowest low", meaning that the trend is effectively irreversible, and it is inevitable that native Italians will become extinct.

The rest of the West is not doing much better. Social scientists have been puzzling over this bizarre and historically unprecedented phenomenon for years - why has a largely healthy and comparatively affluent population, collectively decided to condemn itself to extinction?

Of course, there could be many practical reasons, such as, raising children being increasingly expensive, and infertility becoming increasingly common. But these are not the only reasons. Overwhelmingly, the reason people don't have children - or those who have a single child don't have more - is not that they are unable to do so, or that they couldn't make it work financially - it's because they simply do not want to.

Which is fair enough, obviously. But why don't they want to? Career is a major factor, certainly, and those most likely to have no children are white females with advanced degrees.

But again, it's not the only reason, as childlessness and small families are becoming increasingly common amongst all demographic groups in the West. White, black, or Asian, a graduate or not, married or single, rich or poor, childbearing has dramatically declined amongst all groups of people.

So there must be some sort of unifying factor, some common theme, weaving all of this together. If it was just a "career woman" thing, women without careers would typically have lots of children - but they don't. If it was just a "poor people thing", wealthy people would typically have lots of children - but they don't. If it was just a race thing, certain races would be having lots more children than others - but they aren't, at least, not in the West.

So, I will tell you what I think the reason is: in the West, people don't know what the point of having children is.

That's a pretty bold statement, but that is the one and only thing I can see uniting people from such wildly varying and disparate backgrounds: that they look at the huge investment (financial, physical, material, emotional) children require, over such a long period of time, and think, what is the point of that? What am I investing all these resources for?

One may label this a terrible, selfish, cold position, but in reality, it's a valid point. Parents pour huge amounts of resources into their children for at least 18 years (well, the good ones do), and then there is every possibility said children will move to the other side of the country, seeing their parents a handful of times a year, if that (and probably mostly over Zoom), and then stick them in a nursing home when they become elderly. That is not an uncommon trajectory at all, and in fact, these days, is really rather the norm, especially in middle-class circles. Yes, some children are loyal and dutiful and devoted to their elderly parents' care, but it's certainly neither standard, nor something a parent can rely upon as a good reason to have children.

A good reason to have children is if one actively enjoys caring for them, if one relishes childcare and loves the company of little people - and many people do, which is a compelling reason to have some, obviously. But a lot of people don't greatly enjoy "the baby stage" and admit to finding it very tough, enjoying their children much more as they become older and more independent.

So for someone who really does not enjoy caring for babies and small children, the fact that they become more interesting later on, may not serve as a strong enough incentive to have any, or certainly not to have more than one.

Yet did everyone historically who had children, including large families, just love the realities of endless childcare? In a lot of cases, no, but they had large families anyway, and contrary to popular belief, this was not solely because of a lack of reliable contraception. That certainly played a part, yet so-called natural family planning has been around for a long time and works about as well as most synthetic methods (e.g., not perfectly but has a pretty high success rate when used properly).

People had many children in the past, not because there was no other option (there was always the religious life for people who didn't want to become parents, or remaining a bachelor/spinster), but because children were seen as an asset and worth the investment, because, without children, communities and cultures would not survive. The value people placed on their communities and cultures was so high, that they were prepared to undergo repeat childbearing and early years childcare, with all the difficulties and vulnerabilities that entails, because the pay-off was so huge - the maintenance of their culture and community life that meant so much to them.

Obviously, without modern methods of transport such as cars, leaving one's home community was difficult and impractical and so young people generally did not - and were happy to be immersed in the community and culture they had been born into for the rest of their lives - and then to pass it onto their children. Certainly this was no perfect idyll - there were many hardships and challenges, as there always are when human beings are involved - but this way of life deeply mattered to people, and so they were profoundly invested in its continuance.

The modern West has collectively abdicated on having enough children to sustain itself, because we no longer have that incentive: we do not have a strong culture and robust community life - this has been systematically and intentionally decimated by the ruling classes, because they knew what the natural reaction of a people to having their culture dismantled would be: voluntary self-extinction. With nothing coherent and meaningful to pass onto children, people stop having them.

Social engineers have relentlessly chipped away at the sustaining cultural institutions of the West, such as the Church, for many decades. Regardless of one's feelings on Christianity, or religion in general, it remains the case that the Church was a central uniting community feature of Western life for centuries, and where families and communities would congregate once a week, and strategise wider community activities. That unifying feature of Western life has been completely destroyed, and not replaced with anything, leaving many people far more atomised and disconnected from their local communities than they once would have been (please note that comprehensive studies involving millions of people have been carried out in recent years regarding happiness and fulfilment, and the findings are always the same - as society becomes further modernised in the post-war years, its people have become unhappier and less fulfilled, and this is particularly so for women, despite the fact they are the ones who might have been predicted to most benefit from the liberation from having many children).

There are many other such examples of how we have been severed from the things that have traditionally sustained us, such as the fact we have all been exempted from our natural "work". Human beings are built to be able to grow food and hunt; to construct domiciles and heat them ourselves; to build and sew - to create and maintain all the essential facets of human life ourselves, rather than outsourcing them to corporations and strangers. We have been liberated from these requirements by modernity, and therefore, we have created a huge void - if you have to spend zero time doing any of humanity's natural labours, as you can simply click a button on your device to change the temperature, order food, and so on, then you are left with a gaping chasm. The question then becomes: what to fill it with?

Modernity markets itself by telling people those kinds of labours, the natural work most human beings spent their lives doing until the industrial revolution, is somehow lowly and beneath us, and that once we have been liberated from it by technological advances, we can find our "real" purpose.

The problem with that, of course, is that so many people never do find anything more meaningful and sustaining than they would have found doing their natural work. The modern fable goes that we all have some burning passion, that we are uniquely talented at, and once we have established what it is and found a way to get paid for it, our lives will be complete.

This matches the actual lived life experiences of almost nobody, as the reality is that most people aren't Michelangelo or William Shakespeare, and even if they were, might end up not finding that particularly fulfilling, anyway (as the actor Jim Carrey said, "I wish that everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they've ever wanted, so they can see it's not the answer"). We know that enormously talented and successful people are often - routinely, even - besieged by mental health struggles and substance abuse issues, so clearly this isn't "it".

Overwhelmingly, and throughout history, what has sustained people and brought them real meaning, fulfilment, and joy, is not pursuing individual interests in a disconnected vacuum, but being an integral part of a vibrant and active community and culture. We are built to be more than the sum of our parts, and that is only realised through working in concert with others to create and sustain something bigger than ourselves - and to then see the meaning and purpose in passing that onto future generations.

I have mentioned before my admiration for the Amish, and they are one of the only (if not the only) Western group whose birthrates are bucking the general trend. They continue to have many children - the average birthrate per woman is close to seven children. An unfathomably large family size by modern standards, but actually pretty typical worldwide until relatively recently, and still common in other cultures, such as Africa - a continent that has strongly resisted the West's attempts to curtail its fertility - thereby again disproving the argument that the only reason people have large families is when they don't have any other choice.

So why do many Africans, and the Amish in the West, have so many children? It's not because, in the case of the Amish, they couldn't access modern contraception if they wanted to. The Amish live in the middle of super-modern American states, and do sometimes use Western facilities (I used to see them standing outside drug stores when I studied in upstate New York, eating pizza slices and smoking cigarettes!). An Amish woman could easily get herself the Pill if she really wanted to, and nobody would be any the wiser.

They don't do this, though, as they see children as such a fundamental and essential asset in maintaining their way of life - a way of life they actually deeply want to maintain, which, ultimately, is not something most in the West can authentically say. After all, just look at how many people take anti-depressants or self-medicate with alcohol or drugs because they feel so despairing and hopeless about their lives. Why would anyone who feels like that about their life and environment, want to pass it on?

There is a collective spiritual malaise at the heart of Western culture, because we can feel at a primal level - even if many cannot acknowledge or articulate it - that there is something dark and empty at the heart of our way of life. The consumerism, the atomisation, the homogenisation - there's very little robust and unifying, where we can all collectively agree, "yes, this matters. This is meaningful. This must be preserved and passed on to future generations". We may generally value rather loosely defined concepts such as "freedom" and "opportunity", but a real culture has to be more definable than that.

Some cultures - such as the Amish - can clearly and tangibly describe what their culture is and why it matters, and that compels them to want to reproduce, preserve it, and immunise themselves from extinction. We in the modern West, as a general collective, cannot do this, and that is why every post-war generation has had less children than the one before and why certain Western countries are now facing extinction.

Of course, people who do have children love them and would do anything for them, and many say having children was the best thing they've ever done - but I've nevertheless heard many people say, if they'd known how the world was going to become, they would not have had them, or that they feel guilty for "bringing them into this". The ruling classes know this is how many people feel - it's all entirely engineered, because they desire mass depopulation, and a key strategy to ensuring that is to dramatically reduce the birth rate. Demoralised people who can't see a future don't have children, or certainly don't have a lot of them - it's obvious.

This demoralisation doesn't just affect one end of the life cycle, though, it infects all of it, and in my opinion, the reason so many people continue to line up for the death jab in spite of the overwhelming amount of evidence regarding how dangerous it is, is because, at a fundamental and primal level that they could never admit to themselves, they are suicidal. They have nothing meaningful to live for and so they are opting out. The reason so many give for getting the jab has nothing to do with health, but so they can retain access to certain facilities such as their jobs or leisure pursuits such as holidays.

Yet nobody who really, deeply valued their life would so recklessly risk it for a any job (hence why so many refused the injection, even when they were threatened with imminent dismissal as a result), and certainly not for a holiday.

People take this risk because, without their job or their holiday or whatever other distraction or decoration, the true empty abyss of their lives would confront them in a way that would be intolerable, and so - at a deep and fundamental level - they would rather be dead than experience this.

That is what I think is going on, and what differentiates "conspiracy theorists" from (quadruple-jabbed) "normies". That - whether one has children or not - the conspiratorial fundamentally value their lives beyond the "baubles" of one's job or two weeks on the Costa Del Sol, and feel there is "something more" to life than consumerism and careerism.

That sense of "something more" is what social engineers have worked so relentlessly hard to crush for such a long time, for precisely this reason - they know it is what ultimately keeps people going and immunises them from participating in the collective suicide ritual the West is currently undertaking.

The "something more" is the basis for rebuilding a proper culture and integrated community life, which is what human beings really need more than anything else, and then maintaining it apart from the ever more lunatic and dystopian mainstream. All portrayals of corrupt and tyrannical regimes throughout literature and film - from medieval Robin Hood to futuristic Demolition Man - always emphasise that for a counter-culture to survive, it depends on a strong community and cultural traditions (whether sharing mead around the fire, as per Sherwood Forest's outlaws, or dining on rodent burgers in the underground warrens of Demolition Man's dissidents).

The post-war decades have taught us important lessons about how a culture can be destroyed from within. You don't need to drop a single bomb or fire s single shot, you simply need to demoralise the people. A demoralised people with no strong cultural or communal ties have nothing left to fight for, so they don't (that's why there is such widespread inertia about so many key social issues), and without this imperative sustaining lifeblood of human existence, they voluntarily offer themselves up for extinction.

So, the most dissident, rebellious, and life-affirming thing we can do as we move forward (and move forward we will) is rebuild a culture, develop a community, and sustain it. We must build something that matters - and never lose hope, because that is the one thing the ruthless social engineers are trying to extinguish above all other things.

In conclusion, I'm well aware that my analysis could sound a bit depressing or even make some people angry, but I think in order to avoid falling into the same social and cultural traps as we move forward, we have to examine the past and the present honestly, and see why we are where we are, and why native Westerners are dying out. As much as I oppose all the initiatives to limit our travel with the idea of the "15-minute city" and so forth, one thing the social engineers may not have counted on is that this will inevitably galvanise a stronger community spirit, and that is the one thing they detest, and are threatened by, above all else - hence why they are so determined to make us all terrified of each other as filthy disease vectors and sequester ourselves off in the "safety" of our own individual, sanitised SMART pods. Because they know community, and the culture that springs from that, is what really matters to people, and what compels them to keep going and fight back.

So this is no time to be depressed - anger is fine, though: desirable, even. Anger is an excellent and much unfairly maligned, highly catalysing emotion - we SHOULD be angry about what is being done to us. Fake "new age" types pathologise and stigmatise anger as a way to paralyse people. Angry people take action, guilt-tripped people scolded into submission for not being "spiritual" enough, don't.

So, please feel free to get angry. Get incensed. But also get active, and let's rebuild a meaningful culture and sustaining community life that is worth preserving for ourselves, and for many generations to come.

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