The recent decision against birth rates means disaster – 10/27/2024 – Luiz Felipe Bondi

“Journalism has too much repetition,” one of my dear colleagues told me. Bound. Ideas, phrases and arguments should be repeated. Since the reader is ephemeral, repetition is necessary for him to retain the content.

Today I will return to two questions that seem important to me. The first is that our species is psychotic, it cannot be cured, and within this psychosis, modernity is an extraordinary outbreak, which is still active today.

The second, which is a corollary of the first, is the following: The modern rational decision against the birth rate, which is the obvious right of modern individuals, entails a catastrophe on the demographic level, which could lead species to a slow and silent extinction, according to Henry Gee, the British paleontologist, He’s editor-in-chief of Nature, and author of A Very Short History of Life on Earth, which in Portuguese would be a very brief history of life on Earth.

The hypothesis that this type is structurally psychotic may seem strange at first glance, but it becomes plausible if you abandon the idea that it is a symptom of psychosis, and that we are constantly making progress and that one day we will overcome the tragedies that befall us. One of the interesting elements of this particular show is that it, the very idea of ​​progress, carries the same shadow of destruction.

Just look at the hypothesis that current global warming is a result of industrial progress, which in turn is necessary to avoid any global economic, social, political and other catastrophe you want to list. Modern symptoms of psychosis have become absolutely necessary for the temporary maintenance of human life.

The fundamental deficiency in this species’ behavior means it is unable to survive in the long term. Aside from the clever and childish marketing professionals, anyone can notice this deficiency in broad daylight, and even under the shadows of the night.

This psychosis can be seen in absurd and less dramatic symptoms. All ridiculous displays of people who supposedly have the ability to not act like idiots on social media, but do it for the money, status and engagement.

This is a corny show.

The corollary of this first hypothesis referred to above is visible under the eyes of statistics and precise mathematics: the species, if it had any awareness of itself, in fact, of the long-term consequences of its actions, would know that a sustained decline in birth rates due to a long period refers to the thesis of the paleontologist Henry ing mentioned here.

In the whole of prehistory, and in the vast majority of historical epochs – that is, in its long duration – in which we have evolved, we have never, at any time, had such an ability to escape the “constraints” imposed by the environment. He has always imposed it on us. Our ability to influence our future has never come close to the resources we have today to “make our desires come true.”

I suspect that desire is precisely the entropic element of this type. Schopenhauer, in the nineteenth century, was right, regarding his irrational will as the absolute essence of reality. Since reason is subject to desire in its most diverse forms, I do not see how to contain the desire of liberated adults, the “owners” of their destiny, in connection with the recent discovery that children are a burden and not a reward.

These individuals, who have their rights to choose within the moral and political spectrum of liberal democracies – and even outside of it, as in Russia or China – will not change their minds just because someone points out this connection between the refusal to give birth and the future of the world. Species.

The fact that recognizing this phenomenon generates contradictory reactions such as “the fault of companies that do not value motherhood,” “the fault of the patriarchal system that burdens women,” “this is nothing more than the arguments of reactionaries” indicates the cognitive limit in understanding the problem.

All of these examples of arguments mentioned in the previous paragraph may be valid, but they are not the effective cause of low birth rates. The reason is a combination of the social choices available to women and men today – when they were not available to them in the past – and the rational and considered conclusion that almost no one wants to suffer the headaches of long-term investments and risks. Strong legal claims.

This is not a religious argument, but rather a demographic argument.

Evolutionarily speaking, refusing to reproduce is suicidal in the long run. However, no one is forced to have children, after all. This is entropy. To deny this fact is “denial,” which is a buzzword, right?

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