[Above is my keynote address at NatalCon 2025 this weekend. Full recordings of the event soon to come — please be patient as we get them edited. Below is my response to getting DESTROYED with facts and logic by Lomez later that evening.]

I’m very proud of the people we brought together and the conversation they generated this weekend at NatalCon 2025.

I’m deeply grateful to our speakers, our sponsors, our volunteers, our attendees, and our crew, and I’m excited to do it again.

But — to be honest — the speech that resonated most deeply with me was Jonathan Keeperman’s dinner toast, “Why the Natal Conference should be disbanded as soon as possible, why you need to care less about your kids, and why I am not a Pro-Natalist”.

It was such a well-argued speech that I felt it deserved a response — and that I could use that response to explain why this issue is worth raising, and why we will continue to organize around it.

I agreed with Keeperman, violently, that building your life and identity and ambitions solely around being a parent is a mistake — because it’s an unhappy way to live, because it’s recursive, and because it burdens your children with the responsibility to justify your existence. It’s rarely aspirational, and young people generally opt out.

“The truth is that most parents who give up on their ambitions once they have a family, do so not because they have to but because they want to. They may not tell themselves this, but it’s true.

Do not use your kids as an excuse to give up on the things you want to do with your life. This, more than anything, is the best lesson you can teach them.”

In addition to being exhausting and boring and miserable for your kids, helicopter parenting militates against having grandchildren, which I would argue is the real finish line for a family-oriented individual — a full turn of the wheel.

Each additional child means that you have less individual emotional and educational energy to give them — but it also means that each child is less freighted with Mom and Dad’s expectations and neuroses, less pressured to fulfill everything their parents wanted from their children.

And this bias toward endless surveillance and steering of children is discouraging exactly the kind of people who are best-equipped to raise healthy, happy, excellent, admirable families.

I disagree with the hard determinism implied by Lomez and many other speakers (“everything is genetics, so don’t worry about nurture”). Even from inside their perspective, if nurture didn’t matter, it would be odd to receive so much social and neurochemical reward from doing it.

Probably the synthesis is that you should do nurture as much as you feel moved to do, and not more — but given that genetic determinism assumes that you’re already doing that anyway, in every domain of your life (and can’t help it), it’s hard to see the point of talking about it.

But yes, directionally: relax, have more babies, and embody excellence rather than trying to wring it out of your children.

As for the second half of Keeperman’s speech: I of course agree with him that raising families is pre-political, and even pre-rational. If you find yourself justifying it or selling it as one way of life among many, or as a vehicle for some other good, you’ve already lost.

I also agree very strongly that children cannot be instrumentalized toward political ends. You don’t have kids to fix the economy — you fix the economy because you have kids.

Like all political issues, the goal is to remove your position from the domain of the political — to make it the moral and procedural default.

But politics is the realm of social conflict — and we don’t actually get to decide whether the things we care about are under attack. People who have and want children have, in fact, become a political constituency, with identifiable (and substantially disfavored) political interests. Family life should be the moral and procedural default, but it isn’t.

We may consider that unfortunate. We may consider it insulting, and distasteful, and maybe even spiritually corrosive to have to defend something as basic as the continuation of human life — but the conflict is here. We can either defend those interests, or give them up.

“There were slogans, and incentives, and art created to glorify motherhood, and even ‘maternity capital’ programs to properly incentive would-be parents. The results weren’t increased family flourishing, but cynicism, resentment, and ultimately demographic stagnation.

Why? Because Soviet life was miserable, and when politics colonizes biology, it corrupts biology’s essential spontaneity, its intuitive, often irrational authenticity. People feel this, and they rightly reject it. They feel they are being manipulated and they do not like it.

This was by far the most powerful passage of Keeperman’s talk for me.

And if that’s what he opposes — deploying pro-fertility rhetoric to prop up the ugly, unhappy, empty apparatus of Western liberalism — then of course I oppose it too.

But I view natalism in exactly the opposite terms.

Natalism is by far the deepest, the most broadly-comprehensible, and the most unanswerable critique of Western liberalism.

Drawing the public’s attention to fertility collapse is the easiest and most intuitive way to show them that these managerial systems are fundamentally anti-human and must be destroyed, before they destroy humanity.

We don’t have to persuade anyone of our tastes in morality or cosmology or aesthetics. We can simply point to the hard fact that this ideology sterilizes everything it touches — that it is literally, technically, demonstrably incompatible with human life.

Liberalism is a centuries-long project to strip human beings of all the competing passions that make them illegible, irrational, immovable, and therefore dangerous to each other and the state.

Modern Western(ized) people are nearing the completion of this project. Every “hill to die on” has been taken. They are fully rational, utility-maximizing consumers, all their preferences fungible and negotiable — except when it comes to their kids.

For their children, parents remain unapologetically moralistic, hierarchical, partial, particular. They explicitly prefer their children over other children. They expect to decide what is best for their children, above the objections of the state (or, indeed, the children themselves.)

In other words, the family is the last natural, pre-liberal human institution — and natalism is the last battle.

If we sever this final unmediated, uncommodified connection to one another, human civilization will sleepwalk to extinction for lack of any reason to continue.

The same particular loves that make people intransigent and dangerous are also what inspire them to fight instead of fleeing, to build instead of consuming, and to sacrifice to raise families. This is why societies that abolish these particular loves are inherently self-consuming.

Humans will not live without love.

The reason to host NatalCon next year is not to cajole lifeless people into breeding with treats, or to wring a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system. The reason to host NatalCon again is to build and maintain a rally point for people whose children’s future is non-negotiable.

natalism.org

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Family is the last human institution — and natalism is the last battle.

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