Wednesday 2 January 2019

Sheer, blind craziness and murderous evil: factual implications of demography

 The obscene vision that is Germany's population structure

 The nemesis that is Nigeria's population (note the numbers on the horizontal axis, five-fold larger than Germany)

We of The West live in societies that are much older than any that have existed in the history of our species; and getting older by every passing year. The cause is that all atheist societies without any exceptions are always grossly subfertile; as well as pessimistic, despairing and functionally suicidal in their attitudes, behaviours and policies (to the point of denying the facts of their own actually existing situation).

From Infogalactic, a sample of Median Ages for nations:

Germany - 46
Japan - 46
Italy - 45
Finland - 43
Canada - 42
UK - 41
France - 41
Russia - 39
Australia 38
US - 38
China - 37
...
Brazil - 31
Turkey - 30
Indonesia - 29
Iran - 28
India - 27
...
Egypt - 25
Bangladesh - 24
Kenya - 19
Nigeria - 18
DR Congo - 18
Afghanistan - 18
Somalia - 18
Ethiopia - 18
South Sudan - 17
Uganda - 16

To see the significance of these numbers, see the population sizes bearing in mind that the youngest countries will have grown and the native populations of the oldest countries will have shrunk since 2010. 

The crude numbers are very bad indeed - but underestimate the problem, firstly because things are still getting worse and secondly because they are distorted by the presence of massive and increasing numbers of much younger recent arrivals of migrants and immigrants in The West (for example, in the UK an excess of 10 million - about 15% of the population? (not accurately measured by our 'government') - has been replaced in the past couple of decades - at a rate of between 0.5-1% p/a).

The dupes and demons who govern us say that these recent arrivals are necessary for our future survival - but clearly this is false, since (obviously) a large majority never do productive work and are indeed a colossal resource drain; but mainly because they have zero interest (quite the reverse) in supporting the aged natives.

The extremes occur because-of the developed world; since development is associated both with population decline in The West and population growth in the third world. e.g. Population growth in Africa is wholly-dependent on decades of Western medicine and 'aid'. Until the past few generations, sub-Saharan Africa was thinly populated due to its level of disease. It was essentially hostile to human survival. Consequently, among disease-survivors, pre-modern Africa had a much higher standard of living per person than pre-modern Europe or Asia.

Sometimes people will speculate, albeit dishonestly, about the economic consequences of these massive and unprecedented extremes of old and young populations. However, the psychological consequences are more fundamental than the effect on the economy. A society in which half the population are in their late forties or older is something new under the sun; and a very different thing from a society when more than half the population are children.

Considering The West; the most important question is how we got here. The simple answer is atheism - the secular society. This demonstrably leads to an existential despair manifest across the board but most objective in sub-replacement fertility (a sign of terminal environmental stress in captive animals).

The second most important question concerns the implications of being so very, very old; of having so grossly distorted a 'population pyramid'.

If our Western populations contained the historically-usual proportion of youth and vigour, perhaps sheer biological self-interest would provide sufficient drive to do something about our desperate situation. But the massive, inertial, top-heaviness of our disaffected, despairing, secularised, materialistic, burnt-out hedonistic elderly population has paralysed us.

However, as a society we don't just do 'nothing' - instead, we actively work to hide the truth and make matters worse even more rapidly

When you start thinking about this, and assuming your head does not explode, you will soon realise that (spiritual questions aside, which underpin all-the-above) demography is the single most important material fact of the world today.

The fact that this fact is merely ignored or lied-about, is evidence of a degree of mental malaise that amounts to insanity. And this is not really a matter of opinion. So that insanity is the single most important material fact of our world: sheer, blind craziness.

Unless the single most important fact is that this whole subject is made taboo, with severe sanctions for broaching it. That goes beyond insanity into the realms of murderous evil.

So, the most important spiritual fact is that we in The West are ruled by purposive, deliberate, strategic evil

Happy New Year!

24 comments:

Andrew said...

What about the idea that population growth is slowing because we're approaching the total number of pre-mortal spirits who were destined to be incarnated into this world and it's soon time to move to the next phase of Creation?

-Andrew E.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Andrew - I've never heard of it, nor do I understand what it is supposed to explain - considering that the world population is growing incredibly fast: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-modern-world-is-selecting-for-pure.html. But anyway, this is a materialist post; so spiritual explanations are excluded a priori!

Francis Berger said...

Dear Bruce, This response may be too long for the comments section. Feel free to treat is an email and not publish it if you choose. In any case, I wanted to share my thoughts on this subject with you, and I could not express my thoughts more succinctly than what I offer below.

This post really struck a chord with me, both at the materialist and spiritual level and I would like to offer a crumb of hope that meagerly counters these apocalyptic circumstances if I may.

In March, 2015, I moved with my family to Sopron, Hungary because I felt a strong need to return to my ancestral homeland (my parents left the country in 1970 to escape communism and I grew up in North America). In any event, a few months after arriving to Hungary, the “refugee crisis” was in full swing, and Hungary was overwhelmed by a tsunami of migrants. I watched dumbfounded as nearly 500,000 people, mostly males between 14 -35 year of age, aggressively pushed through the country on their way to the richer welfare states in Europe. I cannot describe what I felt at the time. Tens of thousands of unidentifiable people from a slew of pre-modern countries poured over the border every single day. Naturally, I questioned my decision to move my family to Europe; for months I was mired in uneasiness and quiet rage, made all the more bitter by the realization that the events veritably were, as you so aptly described, “purposive, deliberate, strategic evil.” Though I am not prone to bouts of despair, I truly believed I was living through the final days of the end times back then.

When I was on the verge of surrendering all hope, an amazing development came about. The Hungarian government, which had been vociferously objecting to the migrant wave for months, built a two-hundred-kilometer-long fence on the southern border against a backdrop of vicious media and political attacks from the global establishment. The fence essentially put a stop to the so-called refugee wave almost immediately. Since then, the Hungarian government has continued to oppose mass migration both in word and deed; most recently, it withdrew the country from the UN Global Pact for Migration. Orbán continues to unapologetically state that he refuses to allow the country to become a country of immigrants and that he wishes to keep Hungary a Christian country (to what degree Hungary is actively Christian is debatable, but it is, at least, a country of Christian traditions). Recognizing the demographic catastrophe within its borders, the Hungarian government has also embarked upon efforts to increase the birth rate of the native population through a series social welfare schemes aimed at making easier for couples to afford housing and children.

I am by nature optimistic and trusting and have been disappointed and fooled far more times than I care to admit. Though I do not trust governments in general and recognize that Orbán’s government is certainly not without its shortcomings and flaws, the actions it has taken in past three years regarding migration and demographic decline do, in my mind at the very least, offer a sliver of hope. Whether these initiatives will prove sustainable or successful in the mid-to-long term remains to be seen, but for now it is good to know that there at least seem to be some countries/governments that are openly opposed to the strategic evil.

Unfortunately, I think governments like the current one in Hungary will ultimately fail because they will fall into the trap of believing they will be able to change the system from the inside. Regardless of the opposition they display, they are still actively cooperating with the system in some manner now. Of course, these governments could actually be fully cooperating with the evil behind closed doors and merely providing a smokescreen to delay the inevitable, but I find I must give them the benefit of the doubt for now, and hold out hope that maybe, just maybe . . .

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

There's no way to win with demographics. If countries like Japan had higher fertility, they would be even more severely overcrowded than they are now. Low fertility leads to one kind of disaster, high fertility to another. The only way high birthrates can be sustainable is if death rates are correspondingly high (as in premodern Africa), but obviously no one wants to raise death rates.

People avoid thinking about this issue because it induces despair -- because there is no possible solution.

Bruce Charlton said...

Roddie Piper has left a new comment on your post "Sheer, blind craziness and murderous evil: factual...":

There are uncountably many ways the next 200 years could play out, but none of them allow for the continued existence of white liberals; their birthrate is just too low.

(...)

White liberals won't admit this, but they can't deny it either, so they say it doesn't matter because the world will be boiling hot in a few decades anyway thanks to man-made climate change.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Francis - Thanks for that - well worth quoting in full.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Wm Jas - What the solution might be is not a question that can arise. All kinds of problems have potential solutions, which we may not know about, which may be imposed rather than chosen, and which may be harsh.

But there is no solution to extinction, and subfertility is the *certainty* of self-willed extinction (plus secondary superadded problems, such as the possibility of accelerated extinction due to mutational meltdown).

"no one wants to raise death rates"

But rise they will, want it or not; and rise a great deal (one way or another). Overall deaths have been greater than births in England since the 1970s - even more so for the native population.

On the way to extinction it seems almost sure that there will be a great rise in death rates, from reducing production and functionality, increasing dependence ratios, increased violence (especially in nations subject to mass immigration), consequently increased disease and starvation.

Furthermore this mass subfertility in conditions of abundance is a *symptom*; a symptom of something extremely severe - something that is lethal to the human spirit. This is my main concern.

There is something profoundly, terribly, wrong with the modern world. Especially the women, and especially the most intelligent, conscientous and educated women - who choose en masse (amidst abundance and in peace time) to have only 25% or less of replacement rate - about half a child each on average - i.e. less than half of such have even one child.

This stark reality ought to be regarded with horror and urgency; ought to be regarded as an intolerable indictment of our way of life.

So, we are currently so far from a solution as not even to acknowledge a problem that needs solving, or ought to be solved - quite the contrary: people (and governments) treat subfertility as if it was itself a solution! This is like solving a humanitarian crisis by annihilating the suffering population and proclaiming this a triumph of humanitarian intervention.

The 'solution' at the back of most modern people's minds is suicide when things get too bad. But at present modern people are too cowardly to kill themselves if it entails any significant suffering; and hope that it will be done painlessly for them by agents of the state, on request. If they are granted this wish, and we ask 'what will happen next', it is clear that those granted the authority to kill 'humanely' will not exercise it under instruction from clients and as those clients wish; but instead in response to their internal bureaucratic protocols, which serve the bureaucracy (and those who control it), not the client. So, again, death rates will rise.

Nicholas Fulford said...

What a cheery topic.

Overall worldwide birth rates need to decrease since there are 7.7 billion of us, and we are a rapacious lot as witnessed by extinction rates, and climate change. We are gluttons of the first order, and our various forms of toxic excrement multiplied by our numbers are taking us towards a mass extinction event. Since we are either unwilling or unable to grapple with our primary instincts (fight, flee, feed, fornicate), respect no natural constraints, and treat every other species as instrumental - and many of our own that way also, the writing is on the wall.

Could we turn it around? Perhaps, but we won't, and so the appropriate epitaph for our species is a belch and a fart, because we would rather do the Mr. Creosote and explode than curtail our appetites and do the hard work to bring our species into balance with nature.

To break Mother Nature,
Mankind is so intent.
Now I'm afraid that nature may
return the compliment.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Nicholas - The difficulty is your use of 'we' in 'we must'. And I disagree with the reduction of child bearing to become a part of economics and ecology. We are (or ought to be) talking about family - something that ought to be the focus of life for most people.

We need to decide what is primary and what is not. My point (I'll make it again) is that moderns are materialists, and yet we reject basic material facts - because we are made mad by our materialism. I am urging that we cease to be materialists, and again put the spiritual and religious reality at the centre of life; only *after* we have done this can we even recognise the reality of our situation.

In particular, we cannot - from our current materialism - solve our primary problems (or make plans to solve them), on the casual assumpton that we have already experienced a spiritual awakening. The awakening must come first.

We - as individuals - do not, could not, never have, never will have responsibility at a level of nations or the world. That is manipulative nonsense.

But when so many modern people decide to forgo their own contribution to family sustenance for reasons of pleasure, comfort, convenience etc; and while withdrawing from their already-existing families... well this is just bad.

Chosen self-extinction, en masse, is consistent with vast numbers of people rejecting their personal destinies; and is a major triumph for the dark side - one that keeps on negatively-multiplying and yielding evil fruits.

John Fitzgerald said...

Great comment Francis. Good to read an 'inside view' of life in Hungary, especially from the perspective of a parent.

Matthew T said...

Accurate summation, Bruce. I imagine that many of us with children think about this a lot, with a view to figuring out what to "do" or how to "prepare". I admit to being disappointed that you didn't offer any insights about how you, personally, are preparing for this future, but perhaps that's too personal to share, or perhaps you plain don't know.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Matthew - In line with what I said above, preparation is entirely spiritual; primarily aimed at confronting whatever reality comes without fear.

Matthew T said...

Thank you. On my last read-through, I found that one of the most inspiring lines in The Last Battle is Tirian's courageous determination to "take the adventure that is sent to us."

Seijio Arakawa said...

> If they are granted this wish, and we ask 'what will happen next', it is clear that those granted the authority to kill 'humanely' will not exercise it under instruction from clients and as those clients wish; but instead in response to their internal bureaucratic protocols, which serve the bureaucracy (and those who control it), not the client.

This has essentially happened in many American jurisdictions where older adults can be put under the authority of a court-appointed guardian, their property liquidated, and themselves put under a medical 'care' regime (nutritional restriction and lots and lots of antipsychotics show up as reccuring themes) which accelerates decline and death. On-paper, this is described as a system for humanely taking care of people who are not competent to make their own decisions and do not have trustworthy family members. Both competence and trustworthiness are decided by bureaucracy.

I am trying to figure out if this also happens in other Anglosphere countries -- whether the United States is uniquely 'advanced' in this regard or whether the United States simply has clearer documentation of the 'issue'.

Avro G said...

In the so called Middle Ages European time was structured by the Church calendar, the landscape was defined by churches and sacred sites ( many of them built on top of pre-Christian ritual centers) and people’s minds were preoccupied with the spiritual to a degree we can hardly conceive of. At the same time most people’s lives were utterly wretched and even the nobility were not immune to plague, death in child-birth and so on. The Enlightenment and Modernity saved us from all that. And yet...didn’t our medieval forbearers’ faith keep them from continually lusting after new junk, and didn’t the plague and poverty ruthlessly select for vigor and cleverness. Was Christendom in danger of demographic collapse in, say, the year 1500, after 1,000 years of “ignorance” and “superstition” as it is today after relatively few centuries of increasingly hard and grasping materialism? The “ Age of Faith,” whatever else one might say about it, was largely self-regulating, or pay-as-you-go and therefore, perhaps oddly, more resilient.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Avro - Yes, that's true. There was an abandonment of faith at the same times as the industrial revolution grew - the causes were similar, but the abandonment of faith was a choice, and the wrong choice. However, by my understanding of the developmental evolution of human consciousness there were many faults on both sides. Those who abandoned Christianity were the wrongest - but the churches were also wrong; both sides focused on the material, and the group, the mass.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - It is a situaion with no good answers, partly created by treating very old people (approx over seventy, but somewhat varied between individuals) with life saving/ life extending treatments such as antibiotics, and other things too. Many seventy year olds are thus kept alive to mid eighties - and at least half of that age are significantly demented, and a lot are physically disabled.

Seijio Arakawa said...

@BC

Life extension allowing elders to spend more time with more debilitating ailments is part of the problem, but the dehumanizing/Kafkaesque treatment a minority of these older people and their families experience is not being caused by antibiotics....

(In the long run of course, whether a person dies painlessly and pleasantly, or over a long time and demented, or even in a concentration camp, makes little difference... except that it may cause that person, or people around them, to hate life and to refuse Life when it is offered. Even moreso the perpetrators of the system will have a hard time acknowledging that they did Evil of their own free will... and it's striking to me that many bureaucracies employ very many perpetrators to engage in time-consuming victimization of a fairly small number of people.)

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - Naturally I deplore all cruelty etc. But it is an insoluble social problem in the sense that it is immensely expensive of resources to treat *all* dependent people physically well when there are so many and ever-more, and ever more dependent; and the resources of good, competent, well-motivated people to do this are probably even more limited (it takes a special kind of person). If this were done optimally, other important things (like care of children) would be done less well. I just think it can't be done - and, given other priorities, perhaps should not - in a sense?

Ugh said...

Fascinating comment section today. I come from a part of the U.S. that is smack dab in the middle of the North American continent. A hardy stock of people - traditionally and primarily white - that live by the take care of yourself and family and don't be a burden on anyone mentality. From that arose a fairly compassionate welfare state because few needed welfare due the formally mentioned mentality.

I hardly recognize the place anymore. I'm not some irrational bigot, it's just amazing to me how quickly things changed, it does not seem natural. It seems clear that the traditional population is being replaced and it seems quite intentional.

I only point it out because this harsh climate geographic location is not near any 'entry point' so the welcome mat has been put out deliberately by way of a so-called compassionate welfare system and lax border control, not unlike Europe.

America has the expectation of assimilation so my new neighbors are fitting in so to speak, but that too can change quickly.

Seijio Arakawa said...

@BC "Naturally I deplore all cruelty etc. But it is an insoluble social problem in the sense that it is immensely expensive of resources to treat *all* dependent people physically well when there are so many and ever-more, and ever more dependent; "

Well, it's not even that the problem is not being solved that bothers me as that the medical system is actively making it worse -- e.g. the example of mass statin prescribing actively rendering people much more decrepit and dependent than they otherwise would be....

So the problem becomes much worse than just the increased burden of a disproportionately grey population of long-lived people requiring more (high quality) medical and personal care due to naturally-occurring decrepitude.

I may be belaboring an obvious point that's even explored in your own prior blog articles, but these iatrogenic treatments (and the subsequent dehumanization of those made dependent in such an obviously-avoidable fashion) are the kind of thing I was referring to as 'cruelty' -- I wasn't referring to the (inevitable) withdrawal of effective treatments when there are no longer resources to provide them.

(And there are appalling cases (as with the court-appointed guardianship scandals in the USA) where iatrogenic treaments appear to have been used with known malicious intent to render people dependent, taking advantage of the medical system's unwillingness to testify that certain drugs can cause a problem. That is also 'cruelty' beyond mere inability to care for everyone.)

Without actively working to make everything worse, can we be sure the medical profession couldn't figure out the right thing to do to use dwindling resources to care for this kind of population... if people were Honest about what's happening?

But of course we already know where the motivation towards real Honesty comes from.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - I completely agree - but doctors lack *courage*.

(Mainly due to lack of faith, secondarily because of being selected for high conscientiousness, thirdly due to the feminisation of the profession, fourthly due to being controlled by managers... there are other reasons too...)

Mind you, compared with university academics, doctors are like honey badgers.

Seijio Arakawa said...

It's worth noting that the original Hippocratic Oath seems to have been a reaction to a similar "crisis of confidence" in ancient medicine -- e.g. besides the general platitudes to do no harm and care for the patient's well-being, there is a specific prohibition on surgery, a practice with particularly egregious risks at the time. Today, the introduction of a similar Oath targeting the most egregious areas of modern medicine would require immense courage in the face of bureaucratic pushback, denunciations of being "anti-science" in contradiction to official findings calling for more drugs for everyone all the time.....

As far as I can tell, the crisis of confidence is giving a strong boost to the popularity of alternative medicines that might not have been as popular otherwise -- but in the current situation, they benefit from well-defined 'red lines' that separate them from some of the most egregious areas of conventional medicine, not just the effective areas. If I grant the 'official' premise that alternative medicine is a 'quackery' that does not work at all, that would mean alternative practitioners are able to compete with conventional medicine purely on bedside manner -- which makes for a rather damning indictment of the state of conventional medicine already, in an area where problems cannot be acknowledged (because an honest discussion of bedside manner would be very near identifying Bureaucracy as a primary evil in itself). After I realized this, I was no longer surprised that alternative medicine is increasingly talked about with such an off-putting (and, in the case of doctors who write such screeds, unprofessional) tone of incandescent hatred by official media. The open display of hatred only makes people quietly suspect official medicine more, which leads to more hatred, which....

Well, I cannot be happy about this situation, because here my analysis runs into the fact that while the system of official bureaucratic medicine may very plausibly self-destruct at this rate and cease to present any problems (or solutions), that would not be spiritually healthy for anyone involved in the process.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - The problem is a generalised lack of will... I wrote a heartfelt piece 12 years ago trying to enable people to self-treat in psychiatry, without need for prescription drugs:

https://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/psychiatric-self-treatment-with-drugs.html

wrt Alt Med - I studied it for a while, culminating in a chapter for a book called 'Healing, Hype or Harm -

https://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/alternative-therapies.html

I concluded that it was mainly about lifestyle, and a part of the New Age movement (self-engineering of gratification), rather than a competitor for 'medicine'.