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I asked Tanner Guzy to talk to us about his book, The Appearance of Power, and the role of aesthetics in leadership. That conversation took me down the following rabbithole:

“If your kids don’t want to grow up to look like you, you have not set the right example”.

If everybody grew up wanting to be like their parents, The Libs would be extinct already — the most secular and progressive Millennials have ~0 fertility, and the most religious and conservative decile have about half the babies.

The secular-progressive/gay-race-communist memeplex is essentially a psychological sterility plague — which means, almost by definition, that it should be harshly selecting against whatever traits make a person susceptible to it.

In the long run that’s probably happening — but in the short run, religious people are producing atheist children much faster than atheists are dying out.

Taking those long- and short-term trends together: the people who make it through the depopulation bottleneck will almost certainly be some flavor of dissenting religion and ideology — but for any given dissenting religious individual or family living today, the odds are not good.

Conservatives and religious people are having plenty of children, but not nearly enough grandchildren.

There are a few possible explanations for this, but the most compelling one (to me, anyway) is that most young people simply don’t find their parents’ lives aspirational.

They don’t want the job, the social life, the recreation, the routine of a conservative suburban family.

It isn’t that it’s “too expensive” to raise a family — virtually everyone who has ever had kids has been poorer than the average young American. They simply don’t believe it’s worth it.

Some pro-family pundits chalk this up to decadence and ease and selfishness, but I don’t think people were really that much more altruistic 100 years ago — and anyway, things stopped getting easier for ordinary people two generations ago, but the fertility rate is still plummeting.

I believe reproduction is genuinely less attractive for young people today than it was for our grandparents when they were young — and for much the same reason reproduction is less attractive to zoo animals.

As we are increasingly monitored and constrained, within increasingly controlled and unnatural environments, the appeal of life itself — and especially the appeal to perpetuate it through heroic effort and sacrifice — is weaker.

The problem isn’t that young people are being brainwashed by the Liberal Media against having children. Liberalism isn’t directly making people sterile — liberalism and sterility are both psychological adaptations to life in captivity.

Liberalism — essentially naive conflict avoidance, egalitarianism, harm avoidance, and pleasure seeking — is the ideology of the zoo animal. It’s what you live for when there’s nothing to live for.

Under those conditions, why would you go through the expense and hassle of having children?

So they can work a job and pay bills and watch TV too? Maybe if they work really hard they’ll get to justify their life’s suffering (and yours) with a week at a resort with a poolside bar.

Of course, there will always be people who are willing to brave the risk and sacrifice of parenthood purely for the sentimental enjoyments of domestic life as such — but, empirically, not most people.

This is roughly what is offered to young people by conservative pundits and politicians: the promise that dedicating yourself to domestic life is so intrinsically fulfilling that it needs no justification — that, in fact, you should be willing to bear any cost for the privilege.

But the problem with subsuming yourself into the vicarious experience of your children (essentially just pleasure-seeking and harm-avoidance in the third person) is that it offers them nothing to emulate. It fails its own implied standard as a model of a life well-lived.

Spending your best consuming years raising kids so that they can be consumers is a prototypical self-licking ice cream cone, and young people are right to reject it.

If all you want for your kids is to “have it better than you had it”, the straightforward solution is to make sure they have abundant access to contraception and abortion.

If you want your kids to have kids, you have to offer them something better.

Manosphere guys used to talk a lot about “initiation rituals”, and they would go into the woods to chant, bang drums, do drugs, sit in buckets of ice, etc.

But the reason all that stuff was lame is that there was no world with real danger or adventure on the other side — nothing for which you would need masculinity to be credibly prepared, and therefore no meaningful “manhood” into which to be initiated.

There is no way to make such experiences “real” when the rest of your life is fake.

The Baby Boom in the US is often attributed to the exuberance of victory and material abundance of the postwar era — but the truth is almost the opposite.

The Baby Boom mostly took place in the middle of the war, all over Europe (both sides) — and the most dramatic increases took place under rationing regimes, bombings, &/or active military occupation.

It wasn’t about availability of housing, or the cost of diapers, or modern medicine, or labor-saving domestic technologies.

It was apparently about throwing humans back into simpler and more familiar and more natural conditions of danger and decision — conditions to which their natural temperaments were suited and mutually complementary, so that they could admire and desire one another.

People will have children again when they are free again — and that’s the throughline between EXIT and Natalism.

If we want our kids to want to perpetuate our culture, we have to live admirable and excellent lives, and surround ourselves with admirable and excellent people. We have to build something sovereign — a society that is really ours, so that it can be really theirs.

Fortunately, the present state of universal captivity and domesticity is self-destructing — so our task is to cultivate the resources, skills, virtues, and freedom of action that will prepare our families for the coming turbulence, and equip us to exercise sovereignty on the other side.

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EXIT News

* On last week’s group call, one of the guys discussed his veterans’ mental health nonprofit, Sterker showcased the fitness call, and we had an extended conversation of EXIT & the Trump Regime.

* Tonight (11/19) we will be running a book club on Xenophon’s Anabasis, joined by Alex Petkas from Cost of Glory, and Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World.

* Working groups are back — two-hour blocks to knock out small projects together. Bring something you’ve been putting off, and lets get it done. (Members can check the group calendar or the #announcements channel for the weekly schedule.)

* RSVP link for Dallas EXIT Cocktail Hour (12/7) below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

Breeding in Captivity (+Tanner Guzy Q&A)

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe.substack@hootman.org)