Our Duty Is To Survive the Genetic Bottleneck
Modernity as a Thresher
“When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con.”
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
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Now is the winter of our discontent,1 as long-lurking economic issues, the administration’s mind-boggling sloth in dealing with Antifa, and the near-inconceivable and intractible magnitude of the foreigner in America problem become ever more evident. Trump’s tendency toward bathing in the Rubicon rather than crossing it—which has the dual disadvantage of reinvigorating the enemy’s formerly flagging spirit and leaving us without the free hand for fixing things that comes with having crossed it—certainly doesn’t help. So, it’s easy to be depressed, particularly if one is worried about the dire path down which the Occident is headed.
That said, there is one increasingly evident bright spot: young people—to be specific, young white men—are increasingly openly and obviously on the right. Further, that shift is only getting more severe. That’s not to say they are conservatives; they’re not. Rather, quite unlike most other non-race communist groups in America, they actually are on the historical right, meaning the side of order, hierarchy, and (to a much lesser extent) tradition.
It’s easy to see why, in the current cultural and economic milieu. The alliance of the feminists and the DEI supporters means that it is young white guys who get blamed for everything that the Bioleninist coalition does.2 The pairing of disparate impact with anarchotyranny—meaning they will be punished for even standing up to their career criminal contemporaries, much less doing anything even remotely against the rules, good or not—imparts a feeling of helplessness in the fact of evil that turns “anger into a futile and pathetic thing,” as my friend John Carter put it in a good recent article.
When that comes alongside the lack of economic opportunity for those who don’t want to risk it all as an entrepreneur,3 the turning of our military from a chance for adventure into something the Bud Light marketing team would approve of,4 the unaffordability of housing, and the replacement of white men with H-1Bs and diversity hires, it’s easy to see why those who face the hostility of the regime at every step—and have their wings crimped by it constantly—might be less than fully bought in to it.
In short, it is as Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly said: “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” The current generation of white guys who are in their mid-20s or younger grew up with the boot of Obese DEI Commissars on their neck, precluding any path to advancement or adventure other than one that involves being in direct conflict with the regime.
And thus the below, pictorial interpretation of the song “Whitey on the Moon”—something about which I have written before—is likely what comes to mind when any young white men think of “corporate work”, “school”, “government”, or any like term. So it makes sense they would be hostile to it and its notions of egalitarianism, as I am.
But I think there is more to it than just that. Amongst white people, trends in fertility and pair bonding mean that what used to be a roughly equal balance in reproduction amongst “liberals” and “conservatives” (both terms are somewhat imprecise, but still useful because of how they translate into viewing county-level voting and childbirth data) is now very much lopsided. People on the right have kids, progressives don’t. That, in turn, means that the younger the white child, the more likely it is to have whatever genes help make one a conservative.5
Further, as it is the most conservative people who are having kids and the most progressive people who are having no kids,6 the trend is towards children being much more likely to be much more on “the right” than moderates or liberals. In fact, there is a great deal of genetic evidence that being politically “extreme” is connected to increased fertility.7 So, there is a large, positive feedback loop for the right that seems to be playing out in real time in which the furthest right produces the most children and genetically pulls the white population ever further to the right. That loop is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, but is already present and growing in intensity.
Of course, there is more to one’s political beliefs than genetics. The propaganda one imbibes shapes one’s views. So does a recognition of what ideology would be beneficial in practical terms—hence why socialism generally makes more sense to the have-nots than the haves. So too does one’s environment: large cities are so hostile to life at this point, thanks to everything from war zone-tier murder rates to overstimulation, that they are IQ shredders8 for pretty much everyone, regardless of their political views.
But, still, genetics plays a significant role in one’s political disposition.9 It would be no surprise to say that breeding faster racehorses by limiting the slow ones from breeding to about 60% the breeding rate of fast ones would, over time, succeed in producing faster racehorses. It should be no surprise, then, that what amounts to breeding rightist kids would, in the end, result in kids much further to the right on average than past generations. Further, it should be no surprise that those places known for being home to the childless are increasingly places of “genetic suicide,”10 or that the right is looking like it will inherit the Earth by showing up.11
The Duty To Show Up
The good news is that there is nothing new under the sun, and this population implosion through a refusal to reproduce has happened before. Further, there is an example of it working out quite well. The bad news is that it can also go very, very poorly.
This Going Poorly: When in Rome
In the Roman Empire, while the common people more or less continued having kids over the course of the republic and empire, the elites did not. Instead, over the roughly two centuries that saw the optimates and populares fight their civil wars and then the rise and fall of the Julio-Claudian emperors,12 the old ruling and leading families of Rome—the patricians and equites—largely stopped reproducing. Blessed by a great ease granted by Rome’s fortune, the old families disappeared in a haze of decadent dissipation, reclining upon the idol of indolence until their genes disappeared.
This was a major problem for the empire, as those men had long served as the valiant and competent officers in the military and could not be replaced with foreigners. So, Augustus tried correcting the birth rate collapse with a slew of laws that punished those who didn’t have kids or who engaged in dissipated activities. Those who had kids were rewarded, and those who were adulterers or childless were punished with heavy taxes, fines, and the like.13
That didn’t work, the old leaders disappeared, and the freedmen and foreigners who replaced them proved most unsatisfactory, quite to the empire’s detriment. In the end, a lack of an officer corps on whom the emperors could rely helped hasten the end of the empire.
This Going Less Poorly
But it needn’t always go so poorly.
A great example of this comes from England in the late 17th century through the 18th century: the transition into modernity was not kind to the health or spirits of either the commons or the peers. Thus, what had been a rapidly growing society through 1650 began to shrink in the second half of the 17th century, falling by about 10% from 1650 to 1700.14 About 25% of women went unmarried, England’s population size didn’t recover until about 1720, and the nation didn’t start growing at the same rate it once had until the 1790s.15
The drop was particularly severe amongst the ruling gentry and aristocracy, as had happened a millennium and a half before in Rome. Whereas the TFR of the English upper class had been somewhere in the high single digits in the early 1600s, according to Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, it crashed precipitously in the roughly century-long period following 1650,16 only starting to rise again in the 1760s. This was, after all, what set up the situations described in many of Jane Austen’s books: childless17 peers or gentlemen would die, and their entailed estates would go to some distant cousin, descended from a cadet branch of the family that could be traced back to the distant days of high fertility.18
Unlike Rome, however, that didn’t end in disaster. Instead, an amalgamation of estates was paired with an increase in fertility rates amongst the leading families of England in the 1760s. Those trends restored the class, and the next century saw it once again reproduce at a massive scale. With that growth of the leading men and the commons came the explosive imperial impulse that led to Britannia’s ascendance.
So, what happened?
One factor is that, as my friend Johann Kurtz wrote about in a somewhat different context, a great deal of effort went into encouraging the next generation to seek out a spouse, marry, and reproduce at a relatively young age. The London “Season”, dances in the country, social rituals, and much else besides were explicitly meant to encourage the next generation to marry, and promoted tradition as they did so.
Another factor appears to have been that the way wealth was accumulated and passed tended towards improving fertility: the “settlement” process by which estates were entailed somehow improved fertility to a noticeable degree,19 and in the end meant that large estates (and thus large amounts of political power) were in the hands of those who would reproduce.
Thus, by the end of the genetic threshing process, the British landed elite was even more traditionalist, powerful, and committed to propagating a next generation committed to its values. The genetic bottleneck worked to the upside because those who benefited from it did their duty to both the past and posterity, and recovered the situation. They saw their position and estates as Edmund Burke put it, as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”20 Thus, they saw themselves as possessing a duty to ensure that said future generations would be born. Because they were, Britain ruled from atop Olympus in the 19th and early 20th centuries.21
The Duty to Survive the Present Bottleneck
What we face, then, is another such genetic bottleneck: too many women are choosing not to have kids, and too many men are going along with that. As a result, fertility rates have fallen precipitously, and the sort of world that exists on the other side of that decision repeated over a few generations will be very different than the one that currently exists.
And this is happening everywhere. Infamously gender wars-afflicted22 South Korea has seen a drop in fertility so severe that 90% of the country will be gone in a century if the present rate holds steady. Places once known for producing teeming throngs—namely India,23 East Asia, and Latin America24—have seen their fertility rates crash. Europe’s TFR keeps marching relentlessly lower.25 Even the migrants in many Western nations have seen their fertility rates crash like a rock and fall below the fertility rates of the native born.26
The present, in short, is a genetic bottleneck.
Whether that is imposed by the ravages of egalitarian race communism making life so unpleasant that civilized people don’t want to have kids, dissipation and decadence taking us down the road of Roman-style childlessness, the temptations of modernity—particularly pornography and corporate careerism—leading people away from real relationships that produce kids, or some combination thereof, the thresher is here.
The wheat—bloodlines that will be present a thousand years from now, as the Grosvenors and Percys are even today present in England, will be separated from the chaff, which is those who fall by the wayside because of fate, the dire present, and the neuroses of modernity. The same trend is happening all over the world, and even if it feels we live in The Camp of the Saints, the same poison that makes the West increasingly devoid of grandkids is hitting the Rest all the harder.27
What that means is that whoever shows up will win, as the present is, as Dr. Bennett of EXIT put it, “a world-historic selection event.”28
Making it past that selection bottleneck is what matters. It is our duty. In Rome, the elite stopped showing up, and so they disappeared. As a result, Rome became increasingly un-Roman, ruled by perfidious and hostile foreigners. In England, the elite and commons got back on track after decades of dithering, and ended up conquering a quarter of the world’s surface.
We could go either way, and it’d be far better to be the British circa 1760 than the Romans circa 20 AD.
This will have vast implications, beyond just pension systems like Social Security collapsing in the rubble of their Ponzi scheme nature. For example, the trend since the Civil Rights Act (CRA) started destroying America’s cities has been for floods of internal migrants to gradually weaken the right’s hold on political and cultural power in its home bases. The American South was flooded by liberal carpetbaggers, Virginia’s fox country by yuppie vineyards, the West by private equity lemon-squeezers, etc. The left, in producing about as many kids as the right while importing millions upon millions more, could and did use population movement as a weapon.
To some extent, that is still possible. But it is increasingly less so, and will be less and less possible as the Third World refuses to reproduce, blue cities refuse to reproduce, and increasingly more extreme rightists do reproduce. So too will the genetics that lead one choosing national self-suicide over being “mean”29 disappear: they’ll vanish as that population refuses to propagate itself.
It is our duty to take advantage of that by pair-bonding with like-minded people and producing children who inherit the future.
The Challenges of Grasping the Future
There will still be challenges, of course.
As Tom Holland notes in The Forge of Christendom, Christians in Sicily outnumbered their Muslim conquerors 2 to 1, yet were treated as tax cattle by the barbaric Muslim rulers all the same. As this has effectively been the status of whites in America since the CRA, it is a real threat; the fight and fighting spirit must always be kept alive and that dhimmi status30 rejected, whatever the costs of breaking the spell or the numbers involved.
Similarly, there is the challenge of pair-bonding at all: women are increasingly liberal and men increasingly on the right. That matter of propaganda and benefit sometimes outweighing genetics in determining political disposition, mentioned earlier, comes into play here. That will be difficult to fix, though I do think there are a great many salvageable young women who will come around to the beliefs of the men they love in the right conditions, which is to say with a strong, capable, and likable guy.
Then there is the financial problem. The wealthy and poor do better in terms of TFR31 (though generally still not replacement levels of better) because the government subsidizes the poor, and the wealthy can afford the hired help that makes child rearing easier. A state with growing debt obligations and a shrinking population (fewer tax cattle), as every Western nation is, will be increasingly rapacious. Similarly, our markets are premised on broad and infinite growth, which will be unlikely in real terms with shrinking populations. There are similar problems in these veins, from municipal debt to inflation. All in all, that means it will likely be harder to become or stay wealthy, and thus even more difficult to have kids, as earning enough to afford the help that makes it easier will be increasingly difficult.
The Opportunity Still Exists
But while those are challenges to our ascendancy, we still have an advantage: it is we who are growing, and they who are shrinking, and that will have increasingly important consequences down the line.
To take advantage of it—primarily by teaching our aligned next generations to reject the egalitarian brain rot, developing the feudal instinct and bases of wealth to support it so we can help each other through the narrow bottleneck, and most of all in producing the next generation—that is our duty, and it is an inescapable one.
“Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more. You should never wish to do less.” ―Gen. Robert E. Lee
Featured image credit: OpenStax, Rice University, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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This is a point that Black Horse, who I recently had on the podcast, has made repeatedly on X. See, e.g., https://x.com/TheBlackHorse65/status/1994872307190550632
One example of many: https://x.com/NotFarLeftAtAll/status/1903063465222103210
Genes do appear to shape political views: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/09/study-on-twins-suggests-our-political-beliefs-may-be-hard-wired/
A good thread on this: https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1993389977192087600
Read a study on this here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02343/full
These were the emperors descended from Julius and Augustus Caesar, ending with Nero. With his death, so died the blood of the original Caesars
Discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_trium_liberorum
The decline in peerage fertility is noted in this study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00324728.1957.10413228?needAccess=true
And this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0014498375900522
A good paper on aristocratic childlessness: https://www.inet.econ.cam.ac.uk/events-files/2021/growth-mini-conf/2020-03-GOBBI_GONI-childless.pdf
The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 by Beckett and Dukes of Britain by Foss both cover this
This is noted in The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 by Beckett
Charles Emmerson makes the Olympus analogy in his fantastic 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
Only a quarter of South Korean women want to marry: https://x.com/BorealBaron/status/1842375021685010868
Gender polarization in South Korea: https://x.com/LinkofSunshine/status/1801727173554016588
Pointed out here: https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/1996960153828991068
Discussed well in this John Carter article:
Good chart on this: https://x.com/Jason_A_Scharf/status/1780305233303810417
just make sure the "liberals" don't brainwash your children; keep them out of public schools and either send them to trade school or a college like Hillsdale/Ralston where tradition and family values still matter
I think population shrinking is like a planet filter. Corrupt, who lost lost primary virtues, stop reproducing, and only family-oriented, stronger people persist and reform the whole society. If a nation is willing to patiently survive this, like Britain, it will reach new heights. If they try to fix the problem with foreigners, they will go extinct like the Romans. Powerful article!