In case that gets deleted, he basically says that the rise of capitalism and feminism, combined with the decline of culture-defining religious institutions, has led to "sterility," which is leading to mass migration into Europe.Capitalism+atheism+feminism = sterility = migration. EU birthrate = 1.6. Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni all childless. pic.twitter.com/mkqowTABWx— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) September 2, 2017
Let's get out of the way that Julian Assange is going nuts. I think his original doctrine opposing the secret exercise of state power was commendable, if jejune. Unfortunately for him, it was given an audition by the world, waived due to lack of interest, and has now morphed into something more "red pill" in an attempt to find a premise that will really blow our minds. At the same time, I always appreciate intelligent nutjobs like Assange, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and an increasingly ugly Sam Harris for taking the conversation to places I generally try to avoid as someone hoping to have friends in New York.
On this question of European birth rates, Assange produces an odd formulation. ("Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration.") None of his factors include the centuries-old pivot away from labor-intensive agriculture to a service economy, or the technological origins of productivity growth, or urbanization, or the Middle Eastern conflicts and African depredations that send migrants to Europe. (Or, for that matter, the outdated European laws written to welcome them.) But there is some truth to his tweet. I started to think about the cause of a cultural decision to, essentially, stop procreating.
The best I can figure—and this is based on only what I can figure—is that two capitalism-adjacent factors entwine. The first is the predisposition for wealthy people to have fewer children. The second is the demand for low-skill workers created by decades of successful marketism.
To the first point: while "capitalism" is too broad a culprit, I bet that a rising standard of living has encouraged broad swathes of Europe to have fewer children. After all, isn't it true that poor people across the world have more children than wealthy people?
My supposition is that, in addition to lower access to contraceptives and education, poor people view and use children differently than rich people. If you are indigent in a Calcutta slum, having more children means more are likely to survive, and more importantly, that your family will have more economic inputs. In an all-hands-on-deck subsistence living, creating more hands is a worthwhile investment. At a certain point up the socioeconomic ladder, however, children invert from being investments to pets. They are expected to earn and care for the parents in old age, but until that point, rich parents spend purely for the children's enrichment. Poor children add to familial wealth, whereas rich children represent a denominator for familial wealth. Hence, fewer rich children.
My second reason for European migration is the rising tide conundrum. Now, I reject the idea that capitalism is a discrete economic movement. Capitalism, in my mind, is the codification of naturally-occurring behavior that helps us exploit and optimize the outcomes of that behavior. (And socialism is a branch of capitalist theory that prefers to optimize it for society over individuals.) Capitalism is closer to the field of nutrition than to an ideology. (Which is why it's so frustrating to watch today's Aspergers logicians treat it like a viable ideology.) Capitalism is allowed to happen more than it is imposed the way the Catholic Church was.
What capitalism does engineer is a market system that, over the course of decades, lifts many of society's boats and leaves many others behind. Most insidiously, it lifts some and then retreats them. And that's where you get real problems.
Automation may be coming for low-skill jobs, but it's not here yet. Which means that the economy still has a low-skill class of work that needs to be done. As social prosperity grows, the percentage of people content with a career at the very bottom of the workforce dwindles. The "native-born" Europeans whose grandparents used to do those jobs are now able to go to college and wear turtlenecks. Their prosperity clears out the bottom layer of the economy, which creates demand for people willing to come in and fill those roles. Conveniently, that suction towards Europe has found matching outflows of desperate people from from the Middle East and Europe's ravaged African ex-colonies.
All of which is to say that native-born people ought to see immigrants as an affirming byproduct of their own success. (Notably absent is the idea of competing for jobs at the bottom of the ladder. I wonder if that actually happens. I tend to think it doesn't when immigrants share physical proximity with native-borns, because most employers would prefer to employ the native-borns. In cases of outsourcing it undoubtedly does. But that's not immigration.)
Anyway, fast-forward to this article in the Washington Post about the origins of America's white supremacy. The lonely chuds profiled therein exemplify the dangers of identity politics based on victimization. George Will was lambasted a few years ago for his column on the "coveted status" of "victimhood," but he was absolutely right on the central concept. We live in a pop culture that prefers victim status to achievement or momentum. Call it the NFL Draft mode of social legitimacy. And increasingly, we are living in the backlash of that preference. Now we have even white boys in college trying to claim victimization. It has gone this far. From the article:
The same alienation and purposelessness that once defined his life had come to characterize that of so many others. An economy capsized, a job market contracted, a student-loan crisis erupted, and feelings of resentment and victimization took hold among some members of Parrott’s generation.
“This is not some hypothetical thing,” said Parrott, who soon established the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network and started recruiting. “This is, ‘I’m stuck working at McDonald’s where there are no factory jobs and the boomer economy is gone and we have got this humiliating degrading service economy. . . . They feel the ladder has been kicked away from them.”A few paragraphs later:
Peyton Oubre, 21, of Metairie, La., perceived [bias against whites] after graduating from high school when he was looking for a job. “Where I live, go to any McDonald's or Walmart, and most of the employees are black,” said Oubre, who is unemployed. “And I could put in 500 applications and receive one call. Every time I walked into Walmart, there were no white people, and how come they are getting hired and I can’t?”
Surely these two kids have no idea they are directly contradicting one another, blind as they are by their own eagerness to explain the ravages of unequal distribution with their inbred racism. But it's interesting that they're arguing the same deprivation from opposite vectors.
Whether forced to work at McDonald's or unable to work at McDonald's, both of these guys are furious that they have to fucking think about working at McDonald's. To be Buddhist about it, the only problem they could have with that job is the assumption that it's beneath them. They're complaining, implicitly, about the expectations that a prosperous society has established for them.
These kids have been part of a rising tide so sustained it has turned into a blood myth. I theorize this entitlement stems from the same prosperity behind the immigration boom in Europe. It indicates that economic prosperity always cuts as a double-edged sword. Either it works really well and you vacate the bottom rung of society, leaving it for immigrants you will soon resent, or it doesn't work and you need to retreat to that bottom rung, sharing space with the people you cannot see as equals. The rising tide conundrum sucks either way.
No comments:
Post a Comment