What Motivated Us to Craft a Novel Culture for Our Kids
If a culture has a low birth rate—no matter how good it is at converting people—it will either eventually use up the existing supply of non-adherents or become parasitic, essentially using other cultures as breeding pits of livestock from which it expects to harvest members to keep its Goa’uld-like subculture alive.
We could be just amoral enough to sympathize with this cultural strategy, if not for the fact that the few cultures that still have a high birth rate are seeing that rate fall. Vampires might be sexy and cool when they are in the minority, but we are well past that stage and will soon be entering one in which, bereft of life to suck from the world, vampires will turn on each other.
Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant societal narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below replacement rate (2.1 babies per woman) in 2021.[[12]](#_ftn12) India will achieve that status in 2022.[[13]](#_ftn13) China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066.[[14]](#_ftn14) First-generation immigrants in the U.S. fell below repopulation rate in 2019.[[15]](#_ftn15) Already 115 countries, representing about half the world’s population, are below replacement rate. By the end of the century, nearly every African country is projected to have a rapidly declining population.[[16]](#_ftn16)
Even strict religious fundamentalism does not protect against this decline. “Between the 1980s and the 2010s Iranian women reduced the rate at which they had children from 6.5 to 2.5, faster than the pace of the one child policy in China.”[[17]](#_ftn17) Consider even that since 2014, Iran has been doing everything it can imagine to restore an above-replacement-rate birth rate to no avail.[[18]](#_ftn18) (Overall, Muslim majority countries are not as resistant to demographic collapse as some would have you believe and are projected to fall below replacement rate on average in the 2030s.)[[19]](#_ftn19)
In 2021, the Mormon population in Utah almost fell below replacement rate.[[20]](#_ftn20) This is not a “canary in the coal mine” moment; we’ve reached the metaphorical point at which miners’ skin is bubbling and sloughing off—all while many claim this dramatic drop is a “minor inconvenience.”
People don’t seem to “get” how quickly this effect will be felt. South Korea has a birth rate of 0.81.[[21]](#_ftn21) For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids (at the 0.7 fertility rate predicted in South Korea by 2024, this amounts to 4.3 great-grandkids.).[[22]](#_ftn22) Imagine if we knew a disease would kill 94% of South Koreans in the next century. We are not far from Korea’s present predicament, as recently as the mid-90s, South Korea had a birth rate close to the present birth rate in the U.S. (1.7 in 2022). (For information on why this is happening, see: “Why Are Birth Rates Falling?” in the Appendix on page 671.)
Many media narratives suggesting demographic collapse is not a big deal point to unexpected spikes in birth rates, distracting from the larger picture. For example, there was a slight uptick in birth rates for one year during the pandemic in the U.S. While conservative press made a big deal about this, the phenomenon was illusory and irrelevant from a statistical perspective.[[23]](#_ftn23)
Across the world we see a similar phenomenon: Countries explode in population as resources expand, then drop off (and begin to collapse) once citizens gain wealth and adopt greater gender equality. While many countries have yet to reach this crescendo, most are well on their way—and we want them to be. Gender-egalitarian societies with low levels of poverty are awesome.
Imagine someone arguing in favor of female disempowerment and poverty for a nation just so we can rely on it for a steady supply of human capital. Horrible!
On a societal level, we must figure out how to have our cake and eat it too. We believe it is possible for a society to maintain a stable population, empower women, and keep poverty low. The catch is that nobody has successfully achieved this.[[24]](#_ftn24) That’s a big deal because our entire economic system—heck, our entire civilization—runs on the assumption of aggregate growth.
The economy = productivity per worker × number of workers
Historically, both productivity per worker and the number of workers have increased. Stocks have consistently increased over time, in aggregate, because these two factors have consistently increased.[[25]](#_ftn25)
We can no longer take these increases for granted. While productivity per person only increases linearly,[[26]](#_ftn26) most of the developed world is about to see populations decrease at exponential rates (this is an inevitability when places like the EU have a fertility rate of 1.5). When this happens, the stock market, on average, will begin to shrink. When that happens, people will stop putting their money there—we will stop investing in the future.[[27]](#_ftn27) The civilization we have built is about to undergo a massive and permanent change. The world in which our grandkids will grow up will not resemble our own.
As our stock in the world has risen, so has our pessimism. We don’t think anyone can stop what is coming. Through our privileged educational backgrounds at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Cambridge, we have seen what society’s “best of the best” are doing. This is also in conjunction with our work in venture capital and private equity, Simone’s year-long stint as Managing Director at Dialog (a secret society founded by Peter Thiel with membership limited to the best-in-class players from any given field), and work as consultants helping high-profile organizations like Schmidt Futures build their own invitation-only societies for leaders across the private and public sectors. There is no secret back-up plan among the elites.[[28]](#_ftn28)
We no longer believe that it is possible to avert most of the severe economic, governmental, and social consequences associated with a “hard landing” from population collapse. However, we offer one caveat: Artificial intelligence may act as a literal Deus ex machina. If AI does sweep in to save the day, the nature of society will change dramatically. See our exploration of AI Apocalypticism on page 640 for more detail on possible implications.
Fortunately, humanity’s present quagmire presents opportunity and a path for further consolidation of power by groups that think like us—the new Sea Peoples. Rapidly dropping birth rates among the increasingly sterile and decaying “elite” circles in our society mean anyone who can craft a self-sustaining new cultivar that produces competent, highly educated, technophilic individuals gets the chance to write the future of human civilization.
A population collapse will produce a systems-level collapse of today’s dominant civilization. This means cultivars crafted to survive this period must be able to withstand hard times, though perhaps not the sorts of “hard times” you’re presently envisioning. When presented with the concept of “civilizational collapse,” people often visualize society descending into a Road-Warrior-like dystopia, when in reality, it is rarely very obvious to people on the ground when a civilization collapses, be it Rome, the Mayan civilization, or our own (to an average person in Roman Gaul during the collapse of the Western Empire, the change would have been only lightly perceptible in their daily routines—a certain food becomes impossible to find, certain roads become more dangerous to travel, etc.).
Civilizational collapses appear more like:
- An exodus of the elite from major population centers
- A rapid decline in infrastructure quality in densely populated areas
- A breakdown of supply chains (e.g., some stuff you used to be able to get at grocery stores permanently disappears from the shelves)
- Growing hostility toward ideas that deviate from orthodoxy
Our society relies heavily on one presumed truth: That the wealth of the world will always grow. Cities and countries fob off huge amounts of their payroll to the next generation through unfunded pension programs and debt with the presumption that said generation will have more money than they did. What if the next generation doesn’t? Debt payments and pension spending will assume a larger portion of the money needed to keep things running.
This isn’t exclusively happening at the level of cities. We saddle every level of the economic system, from our land to businesses, states, and nations, with debt. We have essentially leveraged our entire civilization. This provides enormous wealth in times of population growth, but …
Imagine that 50% of a city’s budget goes to pensions, social security-like programs, and debt payments (this was the case in Detroit[[29]](#_ftn29))[[30]](#_ftn30). This is fine if the population grows by half, as that 50% of the budget becomes 33% and is quite manageable. But what if the tax base shrinks? If the city’s population and tax base shrink by just 30%, its usable money does not decrease by 30% but rather by 60%. If the tax base were to shrink by 40%, the usable portion of the city’s budget would drop to 10%. This is not unrealistic when you consider that in New York City, just the wealthiest 38,700 residents, 0.5% of the city’s population, pay 42.5% of taxes.
Ironically, progressive tax policy, which has led to the elite paying most of the taxes, has turned cities into business units that need to primarily serve the needs of the ultra-elite, or risk losing their primary funding sources and going bankrupt as a result. In a post-COVID world, where remote work is a possibility, the value proposition of cities to the ultra-elite is quickly eroding.
As cities try to operate on smaller portions of their budgets, they will become less attractive places to live, further reducing the proportion of wealthy people who want to live in them (who pay the majority of taxes). As expenditures like police budgets are cut, wealthy people leave cities.[[31]](#_ftn31) As fewer wealthy people opt to live in cities, we’ll see a snowball effect of worsening conditions for those who remain economically trapped in urban areas.
The above scenario is largely what happened in Detroit (with a 60% population drop over the last half-century). While the headwinds that led to the population collapse were different, Detroit presents a sobering case study demonstrating how our existing infrastructure starts to break when a tax base rapidly disappears. (See: “Detroit as a Model for Collapse” in the Appendix on page 678 for more detail.)
Suffice to say when a population starts declining, it does not mean everyone gets to live in bigger, shinier apartments. As population declines, real estate values plummet. Plummeting real estate values drive people to stop investing in building maintenance, causing homes and buildings to rot and fall apart, leading to an endless sea of urban blight.
What about increased lifespan? That should offset things, right? Increased lifespans might help if they were actually increasing. In practice, some developed countries like the USA have actually seen lifespans contract over the last half decade or so.[[32]](#_ftn32) Even when lifespans were growing, they did so linearly (recall that fertility is declining exponentially).
Outside of a dark horse artificial intelligence changing the game, the future described above is inevitable at this point. It is too late to not hit this iceberg. All that is left for us to do is ensure future generations get on a lifeboat. This book aims to give our kids a fighting chance while acting as a signal light to like-minded families.
Humanity’s Genetic Shift
When a person gets severe radiation poisoning, some time passes before they feel the adverse effects. Their DNA has functionally been scrambled; their cells can’t divide; the person is dead—they just don’t know it yet. Many wildly popular cultural movements are currently in this state. It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.
Given what large meta-studies like Genetic and Environmental influences on Human Psychological Differences[[33]](#_ftn33) show about the heritability of political ideology,[[34]](#_ftn34) we should expect some shift in how the average person reacts to these sterilizing political memes. (Note: Studies show even specific traits like altruism[[35]](#_ftn35) and prosociality[[36]](#_ftn36) have an approximately 30% to 50% genetic component.)
But surely this change will be slow … right? Actually, it is already measurable. One group of researchers quantitatively demonstrated how differential fertility rates can substantially impact attitudes around social issues.[[37]](#_ftn37) From 2004 to 2018, differential fertility (more conservative people having more kids) increased the number of U.S. adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.
Note: Support for LGBT issues among the youth is rising over time but not as much as it would if birth rates were equal among all cultures. Given the current severe and rising difference in birth rates between families who support these issues and those who do not, we should see a flip, with support steadily decreasing within a generation or two.
Because unmarried and childless people vote more liberally, this change makes a population more liberal within a generation[[38]](#_ftn38) but more conservative between generations.[[39]](#_ftn39)
Our nonprofit, Pronatalist.org, paid Mohammed Ali Alvi, a researcher at Mayo Clinic, to go over data collected by Spencer Greenberg’s organization Clearer Thinking to get a rough picture of the likely sociological and cultural profile of future Americans by searching for common traits among those having more children.
To summarize: Our original hypothesis was wrong. We assumed that only a propensity toward religious extremism would be associated with a high birth rate. While we expected the overall “tone” of humanity would change, we didn’t think there was much to worry about because our own family falls pretty far on the religiously extreme spectrum and we know firsthand that religious extremism can lead to positive outcomes. It should have been obvious to us that hardcore progressives have just as much genetic religious extremism backing their beliefs as the most steadfast Swartzentruber.
Contrary to our hypothesis, the data suggests that we should expect future generations of Americans to hail from cultures that feature genetic correlates associated with being:
- Significantly more tribalistic (hesitant to interact with outsiders, such as different ethnic and religious groups)
- More drawn to strictly hierarchical power structures (fascist leaning)
- More dogmatic
It is not fervency of beliefs that protects a member of a traditional cultivar from the influence of sterilizing memetic packages but their unwillingness to listen to or consider the perspectives of people not within the “in group,” as well as their readiness to dehumanize those individuals. This is called the right-wing authoritarian personality cluster[[40]](#_ftn40) (though it can present on both sides of the political spectrum, it is more a measure of authoritarian inclination)[[41]](#_ftn41) and it is known to have genetic correlates.[[42]](#_ftn42) We are not the only ones to find that this group is outcompeting the religious cluster.[[43]](#_ftn43)
These are the traits for which our current society selects. Political ideologies that thrive on them should be expected to grow. Edgelords were afraid of an “Idiocracy” world in which only people they considered “stupid” had super large families when the data instead suggests we are heading towards an “ISIS-ocracy”. (Note: We don’t mean ISIS to represent Islam. Groups like ISIS exist across religious branches—we just refer to ISIS as a culturally evocative group that fits the above criteria associated with high birth rates.)
If you want to read about the possibility of an “Idiocracy Scenario,” see: “Is an Idiocracy-Style Future Possible?” on page 681 of the Appendix. This scenario can be useful to review if you think the process of human mental traits adapting to evolutionary pressures is slow. However, if you want to run the math yourself, check out Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Response to Selection on Quantitative Traits.[[44]](#_ftn44) Suffice to say current rates of IQ change suggest that the human sociological profile should shift around one standard deviation about every 75 years where strong selective pressures exist.
Genocide through Inaction
Is there a moral responsibility to save a culture or ethnic group going extinct due to a low birth rate? Entire cultures and ways of life don’t just quietly disappear because of low birth rates—do they?
People often imagine cultures and ways of life conquering each other through wars, genocide, and violent conquest, but reality is rarely so dramatic. Our family has Calvinist roots (you might be more familiar with the tradition under its sub-branch of Puritans). Historically, Calvinist culture shaped almost every aspect of the modern United States (and, to an extent, the current world order). Calvinists made up two-thirds of Declaration of Independence signers,[[45]](#_ftn45) many of the founding fathers (Simone is actually the closest relative of her generation to George Washington)[[46]](#_ftn46), around a third of prominent abolitionists, and are often credited with the invention of capitalism.[[47]](#_ftn47) Yet today, Calvinists make up less than 0.5% of the U.S. population, and most of those individuals are only theologically Calvinist rather than culturally so.
Calvinist culture went from crafting an entire world order, making up between 55% and 75% of Americans around the time of the revolution,[[48]](#_ftn48) to virtual extinction in a single century without anyone noticing. For reasons we will explore the next chapter, Calvinism secularized[[49]](#_ftn49) about a century earlier than other religious traditions. As such, their birth rates dropped earlier. Essentially, Calvinist culture demonstrates just how quickly your own culture can disappear and how no one will even miss you (kids today read about the Calvinist Puritans and don’t think to ask, “What ever happened to those people?”).
Just as a culture can collapse in a single century, one can rise to dominance in the same time frame. For example, a single family with eight children per generation would have over a billion descendants in just ten generations. Suppose the family is also able to effectively recruit new members, they could achieve the same feat in a quarter of that time. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the Hutterites, a group of anabaptists related to the Amish that grew from a population of 443 people to over 50,000 in just 140 years with virtually no external conversions. There will be 5.6M Hutterites within the next 140 years at this growth rate.[[50]](#_ftn50)
The crazy thing about all this is that population collapse could be solved by just one family. One family having eight kids for just 11 generations produces more descendants than there are humans on Earth today. Such success, however, would be hollow. A homogenous society, even if it mirrors our personal values, is fragile. Anyone familiar with the Irish potato famine knows the risk accompanying any literal monoculture. We only win if we succeed in stabilizing human population levels and ensuring that the resulting stable state is heterogeneous, saving as many cultures on the edge of extinction as possible. For example, if we do nothing, some of the oldest and most unique human cultures, such as the Parsi and the Jains, will be virtually extinct by the time our great-grandchildren are growing up (not everyone in a culture needs to die for it to collapse, just enough for it to lose its internal network).
We will do what we can to ensure our family achieves the above feat. We furthermore aim to equip you to do the same with yours. Our goal is to create a “cultural reactor” we’ll call the Index: A collection of groups capable of accelerating natural cultural evolution through the incorporation of families with different traditions and perspectives.
The Index is meant to serve as a self-contained cultural ecosystem strong enough to carry the torch of civilization through the encroaching darkness. We invite other Pragmatists to join us in trying to create a unified network of cultures inspired by a variety of backgrounds and life experiences. Together, we can create a network of cultures capable of shouldering the burden of civilization as so many others shrug the burden of procreation.
**We wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Religion not to create followers but to establish a network of friendly competitors with a shared nervous system.**