The global fertility rate is crashing. Today, more than half the world’s people live in countries below replacement fertility.
Many factors are playing into this predicament, but “managerial liberalism” — institutions like HR, academia, NGOs, agencies, and media pushing liberal social rules — is the main culprit according to BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
It’s what rewards women for delaying marriage and motherhood in favor of careers and independence. It’s what treats children as a lifestyle accessory instead of the point of a people. And it’s what sells immigration as the substitute for babies.
To dive into this subject, MacIntyre speaks with his friend Kevin Dolan, founder of the EXIT Group and host of the Natal Conference.
MacIntyre begins by highlighting Dolan’s recent article, “Mom Is working for Moloch,” which argues that babies are being sacrificed — not at temples, but to a “Moloch” machine that runs on women’s long years of school and career.
“The strongest correlation between fertility and any other sort of social science variable is educating and employing women,” says Dolan.
A lot of people on the political right, he argues, view this problem “unseriously” — throwing shade at girlbosses when the problem isn’t women getting PhDs and being C-suite executives.
The correlation between declining birth rates and educating/employing women, Dolan says, begins long before higher education or career ladders come into the picture. “This correlation exists at the level of like being taught to read and escaping subsistence agriculture,” he tells MacIntyre.
But the only countries where this lifestyle of illiteracy and rugged farm life is the reality for women are “places where none of us want to live,” he adds.
The right often tries quick-fix solutions, like cash incentives for having kids and cheaper day care, but they’re just “polishing-the-brass-on-the-Titanic-type solutions,” Dolan argues.
“The sacrifice that you're asking of people to have these kids is enormous, and the kind of person who would have a kid for 1,000 bucks is not necessarily the person that you want raising kids,” he adds.
The reality is people aren’t going to have families, regardless of government incentive, “unless they can do it in this deeply high-trust, relational, contextual frame,” says Dolan, “and if you try to make them do it as a transaction, they will just not do it.”
The problem, however, is that managerial liberalism is designed to dissolve that world.
“We've created a world that humans don't want to raise families in. Like, that's just a fundamental, like a spiritual indictment of the world that we live in,” says Dolan. “We got to fix that.”
To hear Dolan and MacIntyre on what they think has to give if families are going to form again, watch the full episode above.
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