The issue of depopulation is not one that I have spent much time broadcasting about on UK Column but I thought that I would continue a trend I set last year when I asked Yurie as the convener of this event what he would like me to speak on, and that seemed to work well and this year Yurie said I think we need to hear something about who really is to blame for depopulation.
I've heard the idea of depopulation in various ways woven like a golden thread through much of what's been said through the whole of this forum so far. What kind of depopulation are we talking about here? Well, Makia Freeman was just talking about one kind which is just conventional warfare on a global scale and thinning out the population but there's many others besides.
Most of us have heard of DEAGEL, D-E-A-G-E-L. Many claims about this among independent researchers and the free media. Was it a wind-up? Was it a genuine website? What kind of contractors and investors were behind it? But it was particularly focused on some of the leading countries in the current international rules-based order, notably the United States and above all my own United Kingdom, that they would have a huge loss of population in just a few years time. That's one way in which we think about population reduction or depopulation.
Replacement rate in Europe
There're many others besides. On my telegram channel Eastern Approaches [1] , I have recently shared a few graphics [2] based on census results and surveys and questionnaires focusing particularly on Europe to make it manageable in the comparison. One of the ways that we see the problem cropping up of depopulation is that large swathes of Europe are now coloured red or orange in that their replacement rate per couple, or if you want to phrase it that way, per woman of childbearing age, is well below, or the rate of birth is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. I could, we're not showing graphics today, but I could have, if we were, shown the usual slide of look at all these countries.
All different parts of Europe are affected. Scotland in the north, Italy in the south, Poland in the east, Spain and Portugal in the west, they're all notably below replacement rate. But it's better sometimes to take a sideways look at these things.
So, I've got a graphic here just embedded in my speaking notes which represents the findings of this particular survey question. Do you agree with the following statement? It is a child's duty to take care of an ill parent [3] . So, you see the relevance of that to depopulation.
We are asking the next generation, if their parents have deigned to have them at all, whether they should be giving anything back to the current social fabric. The highest response in Europe was actually not from a Muslim country. Normally you see the higher birth rates and filial piety in Islamic societies, but it's actually the Eastern Orthodox nation of Georgia, where I've just spent nearly three weeks, that gave the highest response in greater Europe to that 93%.
Is it child's duty to take care of ill parrent survey map
Georgia usually comes out top to this day, by the way, in greater Europe to the question, do you believe in God? Right at the other end of the scale, the country I now live in, the Netherlands, and I'm not going to do them down unduly, it's just that they tend to be a bit more honest than other nations in responding to such things. They only had one in six, 16% of the Dutch surveyed said that they would regard it as their problem to take care of an ill parent.
I stress this does not mean that the Dutch are meaner to their parents than others, in my experience quite the opposite, but they have been perhaps taken furthest along the route of thinking it's not my job to care. And if you tally that a bit further, it is to the best of my memory exactly the same percentage of the Dutch, 16%, possibly even 15 and 16 in Germany next door, who answered yes when they were asked, would you die for your country? Again, I'm not making a moral point one way or the other, but these things correlate well.
Well, I've got some triads for you to bring us through this material. There are two triads, or well six in total, I've made two triads of them, ways in which people think that depopulation is happening, that tends to be spoken about on UK Column and other free or new media channels. And I'll read them out as two triads.
One is war, abortion, euthanasia. Euthanasia is a particularly misappropriated term. It used to mean dying a good death and was the title of a whole genre of literature and pastoral care, which prepared people to die when God had determined their time would come and prepared to meet him. It didn't mean them ending their lives when they thought their time had come.
Again, with reference to the Netherlands, Dutch politics has brought in a phrase for this, “voltoid leven”, which is, you know, the idea that my time is up, I won't enjoy life anymore. You get people in their 20s who are induced to say that their life is “voltoid”, that it's over and done with now in the Netherlands.
So, war we've just been hearing about. [4]
Abortion, extended in scope and in ferocity. I could go on about that for a long time, but I think it's well known that's a factor. And as I say, euthanasia, shockingly led now by Canadian practice, where if anyone is showing any signs of being poor or mentally damaged, they're told, have you considered medically assisted dying? You know, if you combine that with the Scandinavian model, you could say that the society is to blame.
I'm already tending a little towards an answer to because the Nordic model seen in Scandinavian countries and Canada in particular does lean on people to do their duty for wider society. For example, you know, why are you staying at home as a mother? You've got a duty to go back to work. And that correlates pretty closely with the societies where people are susceptible to being told it's time to top yourself because you're going to cost money.
So, the second half of that six, my second triad, you know, that we're still on ways in which people think about depopulation is medical killing. And I keep that separate from euthanasia because this is more of the COVID angle, isn't it? And the equivalent medical emergencies where if you look at what's come out now from the Scottish inquiry into COVID-19, there were agreements among hospitals ― I remember UK Columbine derided at the time for mentioning this with particular reference to one hospital in East Kilbride, I think it was. But it has now come out that people over 70, then 60 and potentially 50, even 45 in some cases, would routinely be put on do not resuscitate if doctors and public health officials collectively thought that the situation in public health, as it's thought of, had deteriorated to that point.
Immiseration is the second of that triad, you know, making people too poor really to survive and then toxicity. So, foods, chemicals, radiation in the environment. I don't want to make it a list of problems, but I thought I'd get that out of the way first.
I'm going to add a triad now of other ways in which we're being depopulated, which people don't perhaps naturally think of so much, but which we at outlets such as UK Column see. And my triad is fatal passivism, intergenerational cynicism and fear of speaking up. You know, they have FOMO, fear of missing out, that's a buzzword among the young, and I would say FOSU, fear of speaking up, is one that affects many generations now.
So, what do I mean by this triad? Fatal passivism is the idea that this will be the last generation anyway. There will be nothing after me. It's a close cousin to nihilism. There is no point in me taking any care of either my own or other people's children to any great extent. They will have to sink or swim, much less that I will try to mend the broken fabric of society.
This is particularly and sadly common in certain Christian circles, where the idea is that the Lord is about to come back, so hey-ho, or our citizenship isn't here, so we needn't care. You know, taking a truth out of scripture and twisting it horribly and culpably.
What do I mean by intergenerational cynicism? I mean that there's people who are perhaps not quite at that level of thinking the world is about to burn up, or I'm going to kid myself on that it's about to, so that I don't have to do anything, but they're a bit below that and they say, well, there's no point in telling people around me that it's worth having children or that it is worth spending time mentoring in any sense, forming the minds of the next generation, because this lot are a bad generation. You know, wisdom would be wasted on the young, etc.
Fear of speaking up, I think that's self-explicit, what that is.
And beyond these, I have written down in my notes that we have a wider problem of, I would call it, indolence, dressed up as something more sophisticated than that. It's a barely disguised contempt which we see, certainly in countries like Britain, a barely disguised contempt for the upbringing of children, one's own or other people, and for the forming of minds.
The book of Proverbs, next door to Psalms in scripture, we've heard from James Delingpole about Psalms [5] , has a very useful verse on this. Proverbs 22 verse 6: “train up a child in the way that he should go and when he's old he will not depart from it”. And the verb used there for train up actually also means dedicate, it's used of temples and other buildings being dedicated in scripture.
This, I think, is at the heart of what's being lost by people who do have faith in God or anyone who is just concerned with the course of society. Even if they do have children and even if they are strong in mind and body and spirit enough to bring them up properly, this attitude of dedicating their children, saying this son or daughter of mine is going that way and I'm going to help them, that is being lost. And the Hebrew phrase for, which is translated in the way that the child should go, is very interesting, it can also be translated at the start of his journey.
So, you see where your son or daughter or any young person for whom you have responsibility as a mentor, which tendencies they have and you bring them out. And you don't just twiddle your thumbs and say experts will do it for me. You might be thinking, well why is he getting on to education and child rearing? Well, I'm not claiming any expertise in it, but I do think that this is what is lurking behind in the broadest possible sense depopulation, because population and procreation are peopling the world. And that doesn't just mean with bodies, does it? It means with minds and souls inside bodies and if we're not filling those minds, you can see what's going to happen.
What is this training up a child in the way it should go? Well, I think that we could re-appropriate the word nudging that we were hearing about this morning, notably from John [6] . Nudging we were hearing about is operant conditioning, skinnerian and many other things that you heard from him.
There are other forms of nudging that we see at UK Column. Cass Sunstein and Evald Mauis talking about you know pushing society like the pinball flippers in this particular direction. Well, giving a gentle nudge before it was a sinister term appropriated by the other side as nudging is something that anyone of goodwill did, particularly towards young people but the feeble-minded too of any age.
Giving them a gentle suggestion the right way and that's that I can certainly say from a lot of correspondence we get at UK Column is something that fills people with delight when they actually rediscover it or try it for the first time because it is so alien to the way that we are now being told to live. This idea of nudging is even going down to your local municipal level now. We've had a clutch of people writing in from different parts of Britain to us saying that they've discovered to their horror that around the time of Covid their local councils decided to have nudge units of their own based on the international and national level ones that use the mad science that John ably outlined for us.
Now how did we get to this point? What is the root of the problem? Because I've been you know picking out little threads of what depopulation is and as you'll have sensed I mean much more by it than you know simply think that the things that we all know are happening such as ensuring that fewer people are fertile and ensuring fewer people think they can afford to have children. The root of the problem to my mind with depopulation ― and you're seeing here that I'm shifting the blame back from globalism to ourselves ― is it's a surrender of our duty to form the mind.
Why the mind? Well people who don't know who they are as a people as a family as an individual will have no particular desire to do the hard work of reproduction child rearing or whatever else that it is that is they're their lot in life their duty to mentor anyone that they come into contact with and to pass on what is best. We heard the term perception management a moment ago from Makia Freeman, that if we don't frame the perception of the next generation others will step in to do it. Sir Julian Rose used his new term Madkind [7] to describe this lack of perception management.
At a Christian basic level what's going on here is that the enemy, Satan, is only really interested in our bodies he wants to clear out our minds he regards himself as having a vastly superior mind and so we've been hearing this morning about the internet of bodies we've been hearing about hatred for the body being inculcated anti-corporealism we've been hearing from Dr. Meryl Nass [8] about the one health approach and I can attest this as an interpreter at international organizations that she is spot on when she says that one health in practice as a buzz phrase means let us not let humans think that they are anything special let us bring them back to the level of cattle.
This I think addresses the core of the problem of depopulation, because if you're nothing that special if you're not an immortal soul in a body then why would you bother to step beyond nihilism and actually bring up another generation in whatever capacity is given to you to do so.
We also very tellingly heard from Sylvain Durain [9] that the current revolution demands the severing of our biological ties. I would suggest that depopulation as an agenda has already succeeded at the level of a mind virus. If we think, if we have it talked into us, that our biological ties are not the most important there are ― that blood is not thicker than water, and that there is a huge amount of individualism now going on in the minds of even the most well-informed and the ablest contributors and viewers and subscribers to channels like UK column. People have the attitude that they've already given up trying to persuade their children or anyone who's dear to them who's younger of the wrongness of globalism in its many forms, they think well that's their business and I will just see to myself see so that they don't leave them to sink or swim.
Well here's another triad for you, as I close off, a little things that really have struck me as being part of the problem ― grumbling. So much grumbling going on among those who understand these things better it's a waste of energy, living in a fantasy, which again Sylvain Durand gave us a great phrase for before lunch, he said that it was a refusal to submit to the basics of natural law ― that's one worth considering in detail.
And also Sylvain Durand spoke very usefully about mimetic desire, well that's a phrase I haven't heard much before, but it addresses the point I was going to make anyway, which is people wanting fashionably to copy themselves, for themselves, what they see around them if society is saying have fewer children it's your duty either physically they will they will copy that or they will at a cultural level belittle the value of the next generation or of even if caring for their own bodies and minds that well because if we're just a predator species and the blight on the planet then why bother. You see how far this thinking has got into us.
And then the particular relevance of the church's failures brought out this morning already by Alex Newman [10] and by Dr. Daniel Bobinski [11] . One of them, Alex Newman, rightly pointed to Matthew 28 the great commission given specifically to the church to go out into the world ― hard difficult work as it were thrashing your way through undergrowth, literal and metaphorical ― in order to make disciples of all nations. And the normative way to make disciples is, of course, to procreate and or mentor children, or to shape a culture. And this is just simply not happening and I think we have to look for ourselves as the as the cause and the culprits here.
What can we do about it then? We righten our desires. We realize that we've been wanting the wrong things. We look to our practical environment as well. Depopulation, we're often told, in many of its manifestations such as the notably the peak in suicides around the west or people caring for themselves so badly that they waste away and are malnourished. Many of these start with loneliness. We hear western governments, they don't get everything wrong sometimes, they get a thing or two right.
They identify now an epidemic of loneliness and one of the best ways to tackle this ― which my father put into my mind some time ago ― is as he said “if people are struggling because of the poverty that they have now being forced to deal with, even in the world's supposedly most advanced countries, is it necessary for them to try to eat all their meals themselves? to do all that, spend all that time and money finding the ingredients and complaining that they can't get the best ones and failing to get economies of scale because they're in a household of one two three people? or, without doing any injustice to the independence of their own households, could it not be better arranged that they would get some kind of rota going so that even if they do you know live in their own places they go and eat communally among a group of people who actually love and support each other”.
I would suggest that would be tastier healthier and would actually enliven the mood. You can't just fight depopulation by shouting that we're being killed you actually have to give people things to live for, and certainly most of those have to do with communal experiences particularly around meals.
So, my solution triad for you is one which alliterates on the letter N. It's nurture, natalism and nudging. We can all be involved in nurturing and respecting others who nurture the young. We can all in some sense or other be natalist. If only it is that when we hear other people talk about how awful it is having children or how wretched humanity is that we actually rebut that and say I'm jolly glad that God created people and I want to see more of them in the world. And nudging as I mentioned you know to pointing people towards what's good.
So a closing quote from that same biblical book the book of proverbs chapter 8 verse 36 wisdom is speaking in that chapter and she says “he that sins against me wrongs his own soul, all they that hate me, love death”. Or in dr. Nass's terms we could say only a majority of society is able to tighten that noose around our necks so if we appropriate that for the question of depopulation we can say that it will only be possible to drain the will to live from a society if most people go along with that too. So, I would say show up for the future one day you may just about see the corpse of your enemy's float past you.
Thank you.
Depopulation, who's to blame?