Fertility Collapse: Winners and Losers

A Guide to Who Will Inherit the Earth

If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.

Fertility decline is back in the news now since Andrew Tate put his foot in his mouth over supposed white infertility. Twitter’s Community Notes then pointed out that non-white fertility is falling much faster globally, whereas white fertility is actually stabilizing. 

The fertility decline issue feels old to Imperium readers because we brought it to light back in 2022. But the mainstream is getting around to it now, as evidenced by Tate’s public mogging. You are only going to be hearing about it more, because it is the topic of the next century. We have a lot of new readers since then though, so if the issue is new to you, here is the original article.

So let us stay a step ahead of the game. In this article we will explain not just what’s happening, but why, and to whom—we will explain the mechanisms behind the differential fertility outcomes between whites, blacks, Asians, and others.

Introduction 

A summary of the issue runs something like this: 

In all human societies historically—and in fact, throughout the animal kingdom—high status has been linked to high fertility. As a result, we are evolved to seek status as a proxy to fertility. Liberalism decouples status from fertility, and as it turns out, we seek the status irrespective of the fertility. By thus short-circuiting our evolved psychology, it acts as a fertility shredder. In only 200 years, England’s birth rate dropped by about 70%.¹ 

Liberalism is a “selection event” that is culling those who are not genetically predisposed to high fertility. As a result, those societies that have had liberalism longest have adapted to it and are now comparatively immune to its fertility-suppressing effects. 

In the meantime, liberalism has matured and become stronger, as have its fertility-suppressing effects. It is now being exported to non-Europeans in concentrated form, and they are experiencing it for the first time. The result has been much like Europeans exporting smallpox to the New World natives—with no evolved defenses, non-Europeans are experiencing fertility collapse on a scale unprecedented in human history, and there is no end in sight. 

So goes the original analysis. Good as far as it goes, but that analysis mainly considers the viral effects of liberalism itself, with little concern for the character of the host people it was infecting. In the couple of years since the original analysis, it has become clear that the liberalism fertility shredder does not affect all non-Europeans in the same way, just as it has not affected the different European peoples in the same way. A more nuanced analysis is required in order to make serious predictions about the future.

We have identified eight variables which impact to what degree liberalism, and more broadly modernity, suppresses fertility in a people. In this article we will focus on just two of those variables, both for reasons of space, and also because this analysis is a powerful tool with far-reaching policy implications. There has been a slow trickle of talking points from this Substack into mainstream, especially centre-right spaces, and we are not going to circulate the full analysis publicly until the mainstream acknowledges where those talking points are coming from. But anyone who implements the 2-variable analysis in this article will be miles ahead of anyone else anyway.

Variable 1: Deep Ancestry

The first variable we will consider is Deep Ancestry. It has for its object peoples, and breaks down into a typology of priestly vs. knightly peoples. This maps roughly on to the Odinic-Tyrrhic distinction, but let us leave that more nuanced (and also more useful) typology aside and use more common terminology.

A priestly people is ancestrally urban, bureaucratic, and bred to live under central government. It is a traditionalist people, rule-oriented, orderly, typically somewhat uncreative, and with a strong connection to the soil. Examples of priestly peoples include Mesoamerican, Egyptian, and Mediterranean peoples. Most Chinese fall here,² and some Indian peoples fall here as well.³ A knightly people is ancestrally rural, warlike, and tribal. It is a wild and unstable people who is not afraid to transgress boundaries, whether physical or metaphysical, and who are born revolutionaries. Examples of knightly peoples include Arabs, Northwestern Europeans, Native Americans, Japanese, and Africans.

Qualitative typologies like the above are often a weakness, because they’re somewhat subjective. However, there is a clear genetic component to these categories, which moves the priestly/knightly distinction into the quantitative realm. Priestly peoples have a substantial farmer genetic component, often reaching back to the Neolithic, whereas knightly peoples have proportionately more hunter-gatherer DNA. One look at a series of archaeogenetic maps confirms this:

The reasons why more hunter-gatherer vs. farmer DNA should result in the different baskets of cultural and psychological traits, will have to await a separate article. For now, we can simply observe that they are different.

Variable 2: Liberal Ontology

The second variable we will consider is what we could call Liberal Ontology, since it concerns the ontological standing of what is being imported to these populations. It has for its object liberalism itself, and breaks down into a typology of material vs. immaterial liberalism.

Material liberalism is anything to do with the material well being of a people, such as caloric surplus, life span, health outcomes, and living conditions. It may seem odd to concede to liberalism that it brings what all our ancestors strove for, but let us put aside for now that liberalism does not exclusively or even inherently secure these things. It is enough to observe that being on the good side of the “international community” brings prosperity.

Immaterial liberalism is the ideological component of liberalism. Such normative ideas as feminism, equality, universalism, and propositionality fall under this category. We can add to this any technical means by which these values are reproduced, such as public education, social media, pornography, and legal structures that reinforce them such as ESG.

So we now have an axis along which liberalism can colonize a host population. Let us look at some examples that make this framework useful.