What Is Causing the Great Withering of Humankind?

The human species is electing for voluntary self-extinction, just like the anti-human left demands.

Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe. Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task. Meanwhile, there aren't enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring. Sadly, this is just the beginning. As I discuss in my new book entitled "Chaos", if fertility rates continue to drop we could potentially be facing an unprecedented global population collapse in the decades ahead. This has become so evident that even the mainstream media is starting to do stories about this. In fact, an economist that was just interviewed by the Wall Street Journal is warning that "demographic winter is coming"...

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world's superpowers.

In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It's dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.

"The demographic winter is coming," said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here in the United States, if we want to maintain a stable population we need the fertility rate to be at 2.1 or above.

Unfortunately, our fertility rate dropped to just 1.62 last year, which was an all-time record low...

In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.

Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since, according to Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Our native-born population has been in decline for quite some time.

The only reason why the U.S. population as a whole has not been shrinking is because of the tremendous amount of immigration that has been happening.

But even though it is not shrinking, the U.S. population has been rapidly getting older, and it is being projected that just six years from now seniors will actually outnumber children for the first time in our entire history...

He recounts various other grim milestones of human decline, and then asks what's causing this.

As I have warned my readers for many years, sperm counts have dropped to catastrophically low levels all over the planet.

If sperm counts continue to decline at the rate they have been, eventually most males will be infertile.

Infertility is also at frightening levels among our young women. I am sure that most of you know couples that desperately want to have children but have been unable to do so.

Meanwhile, our culture has become rabidly anti-child and rabidly anti-family, and as a result there are vast hordes of young people that have decided that they never want to be parents.

...

Humanity has become incredibly selfish and self-centered, and as a result we have stopped caring about the future.

All throughout human history, successful societies have always greatly valued marriage, family and children.

But now we have embraced "new values", and we are rapidly destroying the bright future that we could have had.

Coincidentally, my friend Dave Reaboi suggested the video linked below, which may offer insight into what's going on with the human population.

An ethnologist named John Calhoun sought to study the effects of "utopia" on rodents -- from 1958 to 1962, he experimented on rats, and then from 1968 to 1972 he experimented on rats. These were long experiments, charting the rise and fall of populations over many generations.

His "mouse utopia" (called "universe 25") had space for over three thousand mice, plenty of food for all, plenty of fresh water for all. The habitat was cleaned daily to make sure that the mice lived in clean and relative disease-free conditions. Obviously there were no predators.

The mouse colony increased rapidly in numbers -- at first. After Phase A, the introductory phase, the mice began doubling in population every 55 days in what Calhoun called Phase B.

In Phase C, the population growth slowed drastically, doubling every 315 days. Male mice grew frustrated at constant challenge from other male mice, and many gave up. Many females began living as hermits, nesting in high places and never interacting with other mice.

He also observed what he called "autistic" behavior in the mice. And this was before the word "autistic" was thrown around willy-nilly.

From his paper: He developed a term called "behavioral sink" to describe the fall of the mice.

Many [female rats] were unable to carry the pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption.

The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.

In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.

In Phase D, which Calhoun called "the Death Phase," more and more mice began becoming asexual or homosexual. Fertility dropped even among the mice who were still interested in sex. There was much more violence among the mice, including cannibalism and even females killing and eating their own young.

A strange phenomenon was observed in Phase D -- a new caste of male mice called "the beautiful ones" showed no interest in mating with females, and also no interest in fighting other males for the right to mate with females. He called them "the beautiful ones" because their only interest, apart from eating and sleeping, was grooming their own fur.

Some mice began antisocial super-predators -- attacking other mice, biting them and marking them and maiming those mice to make them physically identifiable as "outcasts."

Calhoun said the mice died two deaths -- first of their spirit, then their physical bodies withered.

Eventually all the mice died. He has various theories about why this happened. Maybe it was just a consequence of the stress of overpopulation. The mice's needs were all cared for, but maybe the stress of bumping into so many mice throughout the day changed their behavior.

This was certainly the conclusion seized upon by Malthusians in the 1970s, who began demanding population control to keep the earth from going the way of "universe 25."

Calhoun also speculated that young mice were born into a world in which all the usual social functions (leadership, second-in-command, etc.) were all occupied and, having no place to aspire to in the hierarchy, either checked out of "mouse society" altogether, or else became aggressively antisocial mice.

Another possibility, discussed by the video below, is that external pressures force a pattern of behavior that humans have wound up calling "morality" on a population, and when those pressures are removed, and this pattern of behavior called "morality" is no longer a useful survival skill, a population sinks into degeneracy, conflict, and self-imposed extinction.

Alarming stuff. It's pretty hard not to read that and think, "Oh, we're in Phase C and running fast towards Phase Death."

You know I'm always looking to blame crap on the internet. I'm going to offer my own speculation that while we have not hit (outside of major cities) levels of overpopulation that would case mass insanity, we have created virtual overpopulation via the internet.

In universe 25, the mice had all the food and water they wanted. They even had enough space for over 3000 mice (the population grew to only 2,200 before stagnation and then die-off). So while the mice had enough room to live, they may have been stressed by all the disagreeable interactions they had with so many mice in a day.

Most people, in their real lives, will only have negative interactions with people maybe 10 or 15 times a week. And those will mostly be with bosses and coworkers and family members. Rare will be confrontations with strangers.

But social media gives us the opportunity for 20 or 30 negative interactions with strangers per day.

So maybe humanity, while not in actual overpopulation mode, feels the stress of virtual overpopulation, and reacts like the mice in the "mouse utopia."

I guess that is the most optimistic assessment, because it suggests a relatively easy fix.

The video's pretty depressing so maybe save it for later and watch it Sunday evening. Mondays are always down days anyway.

Thanks to Dave Reaboi for that.

If you want to know more, search "mouse utopia" or "universe 25." There's a lot of stuff about it.

With most real external stresses relieved by relative prosperity and relative security (though a little diminished since the Summer of Love), do people search for new stresses?

Without natural predators to occupy their time, do people go searching for human prey?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:30 PM

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